I don’t remember the date. Not to the day. I don’t remember the date, but it was spring, thirty-one years ago, 1986. I was nine years old, riding on a British Airways 747 with my mom and dad, on final approach to Heathrow. We had crossed the Atlantic overnight. The cabin was roomy, the seats reclined comfortably, and the stewardesses – air hostesses? – had handed out small pillows and blankets. I hadn’t slept much, I was too excited to be out of the country for the first time, but I feel sure I slept some. The in-flight movie was “Young Sherlock Holmes.”
Window shades were going up around the cabin, and I plugged a pair of white plastic airline headphones into the jack in the arm of my chair, futzing with the ridged wheel until the hums and clicks gave way to British voices, giving a weather report. That was the moment it became real. England. The big airliner bellied down out of the golden sunrise, into the cloud cover, and the misty overcast of a London dawn. Parents reminding me to keep swallowing so my ears will pop during the pressure change.
Heathrow is a blur in my memory, people scrambling about, in jackets and ties, flashing yellow lights, locked doors to maintenance areas, being hauled around by the arm through a massive airport in a foreign land. I think we took one of the big red buses from the airport to the hotel where the government had arranged for us to stay. We rode on the upper deck of the bus, open-air, clutching the bare metal handrail in front of us, an old bald man in a tweed coat sitting across the aisle. See, although it was an adventure for the family, for my dad it was also a business trip. As a civilian employee of the United States Navy, my father had been sent to London, if my memory serves me for two weeks to work on a project with some people from the British government.
A couple of years before a man named Ian Melville had been sent from England to work with our people on base, an assignment that lasted maybe two years, and had necessitated the relocation of his wife and three daughters to our small town in Virginia. The middle daughter, Melanie, was in my class. This was a short visit for us, but we were to meet up with the Melvilles for dinner one night when we were in London. It happened somewhere deep into the trip. Dinner turned out to be a large group of us seated around a long, narrow wooden table in the upstairs dining room of a dark, atmospheric pub where old bottles doubled as candlesticks, covered with many years worth of colorful wax drippings. I remember I sat across the table from Ian’s wife, Jane, somewhat disappointed that Melanie and her sisters wouldn’t be joining us. Melanie was a friend, we’d had some good times.
That first morning, though, our bus ride to our hotel ended at what turned out to be a monolithic, glassy modern box called the London Tara Hotel (now the Copthorne Tara Kensington, I believe). I remember the lobby contained the first digital LED scrolling message board I had ever seen, high on the wall behind the check-in counter. It bears repeating that I was nine years old, bucktoothed and mop-headed, tortoise-frame glasses, corduroys, grey sneakers, and a red VMI zip-front hoodie with white stripes around the biceps. Everything I knew about England I’d seen on TV or in movies, Dickens and Conan-Doyle. I didn’t know what had happened to London over the course of its existence. The fires, the Blitz. I had no idea the old city was like a phoenix, rising endlessly from its own ashes.
It bears mentioning as well that as an American, I’m used to a country where the greatest threat to historical buildings is mere progress; where whole swaths of our past are dutifully registered and preserved and have never been bombed by enemy aircraft in times of war. Founded in 43 AD, London is old, to be sure; the wagon-wheel layout of its streets tells the tale of its Roman origins. But precious little of antiquity remains. So, that first morning as we walked to a small café for breakfast, in spite of the red buses and iconic black cabs running to and fro, my nine year-old brain could not accept that I was really in London, for real, until the sidewalk at long last took us past a cast iron fence like a rack of spears, outlining the garden front of a Victorian townhouse. I’m pretty sure I made a big deal of it to my parents, and they probably wondered what the hell was wrong was me.
And then we were in the café, little round table with a frilly tablecloth, cups of coffee for the adults, and scones all around. I remember being disappointed with scones. I also remember my dad, who takes his coffee black, being instructed that English coffee is made to be taken with cream and would probably be fairly insufferable black. I’m pretty sure he tried it anyway. I would have. Black is the correct way to drink coffee.
This was a long time ago, before The Shard, before the Millennium Wheel. I remember walking across Westminster Bridge one evening, excited to see Big Ben, and picking up off the sidewalk a smiley face button. Somewhere I still have it. We did a lot of sightseeing. The Tower of London. The Tower Bridge. Kensington Gardens, Marble Arch, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, The Houses of Parliament. The Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. There were numerous parks and gardens. In one park, standing on a footbridge over a stream, an old man was feeding sparrows out of hand. He showed us how to do it, though I had trouble holding still long enough for the birds to come. Finally they did. I think my affection for birds may be that old guy’s fault, and I am eternally grateful.
If you’ve ever seen “An American Werewolf in London,” that is exactly London as I remember it. Minus the werewolf, of course, but the proliferation of punk rockers in engineer boots and black leather jackets, all zippers and snaps and buckles, with brightly-colored spiked mohawk haircuts and creatively pierced faces is something I remember seeing everywhere I looked, all of them toting guitar cases and trying to look bad. London in the 80’s.
Silly string was also a fad; I had never encountered it before but the sidewalks and street signs were lousy with the stuff, everywhere you looked some would-be Spiderman had pissed silly string out of a can across the totality of London.
The back half of our trip was mainly spent in Bath, which city we arrived in by train, prehistoric hill figures (perhaps the Uffington White Horse?) visible from the windows on the way by. One of my dad’s colleagues had his luggage stolen off that train. This fellow and his wife were well-dressed and she had brought all her good jewelry. My mom, being somewhat more practical, or perhaps paranoid, had not brought much in the way of jewelry and she and I toured London and Bath wearing hoodies. She wasn’t taking any chances, and I think that day on the train she felt as vindicated as anyone ever has in the history of human civilization.
All I remember from Bath is Bath Abbey, with the Jacob’s Ladder motif up the front of the building, and the actual Roman baths from which the city gets its name. I remember the hotel we stayed in there being a much older, statelier affair, a suite of rooms this time rather than a modern two-bed hotel room. I remember I had my own room there, and a desk at which I remember doing math homework – yes my teachers had sent along a lesson plan for me while I was traveling abroad. At this particular hotel in bath, every morning when housekeeping made up the room they would leave chocolate bars on the pillows. One day I took a bus with mom and some of the other ladies to another nearby city – Bristol, perhaps? – to do some shopping. I remember wet cobblestones and a large record store, the largest I’ve ever seen, possibly an HMV. I remember browing KISS records. Yes, records, 33’s. Thinking how cool it would be to come home with a copy of ALIVE II I’d bought in England. Of course, I didn’t have any money. I was nine.
I remember one day, towards the end of our stay in England, Mom was in a small urban dress shop looking at a kilt, which she did buy, and I was playing with a car or something and stupidly ended up by the front door, when a customer pushed in and scraped two of my fingers somewhat nastily with the bottom of the door. She kept apologizing, and mom rightly pointed out that it was my fault because I was in front of the door. I was mad, but I was also nine, and it was absolutely my fault. Couple of band-aids later I was over it. One of the last days I got, in a card shop, a set of little ceramic figures of the characters from Disney’s The Fox and the Hound – my favorite Disney movie – in fact the only one I have any attachment to. I came home with those, and two other souvenirs: die cast replicas of a London taxi and a red double-decker bus, which were available at pretty much any souvenir shop throughout London. I wanted to get the police car to complete the set, but I never did. The police cars weren’t that great anyway; small white hatchbacks with bright orange stripes down the side and little blue bubble lights.
Why did I choose now to recount all of this? I don’t know, really, it was on my mind Wednesday and I thought maybe, at 40, I should write all of this down while I still remember a good amount of it. Maybe, too, it’s because I keep thinking about how much I miss traveling and how much I’d love to get a lot more of it in, if only I had the money and a lady friend to share the experiences with. A little piece of my heart has been there in London, staring at that one little bit of iron fence for thirty-one years.
Maybe also it’s something more. Maybe it’s because of the jackass who attacked people outside the parliament building on Wednesday. Maybe I just wanted to say, hey, London: I love you.
