It was early September and summer in England does not linger like it does back home. My travel companion was nearing his thirtieth birthday and I was twenty eight. Neither of us had ever been outside of North America, so we were really not unlike babes in the wood, albeit a very civilized one in which all inhabitants spoke English, even if with a "funny" accent. We rented a Ford Cortina, spiffy looking and red with its unfamiliar, outsized yellow license plate, another one of the small reminders that we were not dreaming and that a huge silver bird had indeed transported us to this new and exotic realm. Before we could drive the diminutive sedan from the agency, the "underground" ride from Heathrow to our basement lodgings in Bloomsbury had been the first order of business. The rail link felt more like our suburban trains in metropolitan New York than the seedy N.Y.C. transit system of the economically stressed "Big Apple" of the late '70s. But we knew rather speedily that we were not paralleling the Hudson or zipping along the flatness of Long Island. Visually, mile after mile revealed that we were in a foreign land. Neat brick houses were the chief housing stock that mutely greeted us, with their endless chimneys and dainty window boxes of flowers festooned religiously with beautiful bouquets of all kinds of poesies, some recognizable, some strange, but all novel treats for the eyes as the train rumbled eastward. This was Brittania in the twenty-sixth year of the reign of Elizabeth II and during the exceedingly brief papacy of John Paul I, and we were happily drinking it in as we soon descended to glide along, literally underground now, as we approached St. Pancras station, hard by the British Museum. Yes, we were green in many ways, especially as travelers. Ponderous suitcases were unnecessary challenges that youth and determination gamely met while arthritis and hernias were maladies three decades into the future. More curious sights, sounds and smells: a store proclaiming its produce and services with a sign that read "Fishmonger", a public phone that instructed us to wait for the "rapid pips", the competing aromas that wrinkled our brows as well as our noses: the exhaust of burned diesel fuel from double decker buses and large boxy black vehicles we came to know as the equivalent of our yellow taxicabs and the airborne greasy molecules from the meat pies sold by many a street vendor corresponding to Manhattan's hot dog carts. The jet lag typically took its toll and we rested on our beds in our modest quarters for several hours, intrigued by the lower legs and feet that trod (as the natives would say) past the partly recessed windows of the room of our hotel in Cartwright Gardens. It was years later that I learned that a parachute mine landed very near this site during The Blitz and that other more conventional ordnance from the Luftwaffe had peppered the immediate area resulting in the once circular street's present configuration of a semi-circle.
Well, our repose was brief and our excitement overcame any inertia. The afore mentioned Cortina, its steering wheel on the "wrong"side, was our magic carpet ride to explore this "sceptered isle" and we eagerly scooted into London's controlled chaos of traffic, a milieu both familiar and strange at the same time. We intellectually knew that the United Kingdom was a land small in size, like most on the European continent. But we also learned, like most Americans, that the emotional or "gut" knowledge of the compactness of the country only comes when one has driven from point A to point B. In the particular, while softly singing "The White Cliffs of Dover" (taught to me as a child by my parents) we motored towards them with still much of the afternoon remaining when we arrived. There they were, unmistakably chalky. We saw no bluebirds, but what did circle overhead gave one a quiet thrill and a chance to remember again what our English cousins, along with our fathers and forefathers, fought and died for in two world wars.
We motored on. Folkstone, Worthing,
To Be Continued
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