‘July 1954: The city is big, bigger than New York but left-handed, much quieter. London has innate dignity. I like this city. I want to come back.’
Not long before setting out for the Isle of Wight, on a subsequent reconnoitre of mother’s many stores of a lifetime’s sweepings, I had come upon a box full of letters and postcards from different people and in no particular order. In the jumble was a postcard of London Bridge, dated July 1954: ‘London is a wonderful city!’ I had written. ‘But somehow it feels weary. Only the flowers in the park are bright and velvety. It would be sad to live here.’ An illustration of to what a great degree prophecy is based on experience and why the young for all their gifts cannot be trusted as oracles, for in time the fact turned out to be that I could live happily nowhere but in London.
I put a drop of gooey salad cream on my finger, tasted it, and instantly a misplaced memory fluttered back where it belonged. I was no stranger to the Isle of Wight. How could I have forgotten? In 1962 I gave up my wretched job at the Berlitz School in Paris and my poky room on the Left Bank, and came to live in Cowes for ten days aboard a twelve-metre yacht, Stormsvalla. Eight of us friends and crew provisioned her there, preparing to sail the Bay of Biscay to Gibraltar. On 11 June of that year we made a quick unscheduled sortie out of port, perhaps far enough to take us past the Needles, I don’t remember. We were following an ocean liner westbound for New York. My parents were on board, though not on deck to watch us bravely tacking in their wake. Probably they were below in their cabin blaming each other for their only daughter’s defection from all that was established and proper. Ostensibly on a European tour, they had in fact come to check up on me after more than four years. I am sure of the date because I also found a thin blue sixpenny air letter from me to them postmarked ‘Cowes, Isle of Wight, 12 June 1962’, the return address: care of Yacht Stormsvalla, Poste Restante, Gibraltar. ‘If only you had been on deck yesterday, you would have seen me aboard Stormy waving goodbye. Tell me of your adventures after we parted in Paris. I am sorry I had to leave you there and go on to London. London is a nice place to visit.’
There is a reason beyond wear and tear for the blank space the Isle of Wight left in my memory. I was in love. Being in love changes the nature of an adventure; love on the road is like staying in five-star hotels, it irons out impressions and puts recollection to sleep on lavish cushions. What I remembered suddenly with the scampi salad was a threat made a few miles down the road and a few decades earlier by one of Stormsvalla’s crew, Martin W-T. The lean, likeable, daft Englishman swore he would mutiny if I, as chief galley slave, did not stow enough bottles of salad cream to see us to Gibraltar. Tinned milk, it turns out, is not the only great white corrupter.
‘13 July 1954: Yesterday it was Blenheim, Oxford and Stratford. Blenheim was nice. Stratford was ghastly. And Oxford was divine. We met some charming Oxford boys, friends of Tony, who joined us to see a not awfully good Troilus and Cressida at horrible Stratford. Shakespeare’s glory is not in his birthplace, that’s for sure. Tony snoozed next to me on the way back and woke to chat to me. To me! We all went to eat out in of all places a Chinese restaurant! The same menu as at the China Clipper in Jersey City! Is there any city on earth without a Chinese restaurant? Is China really a place or a world-dominating cuisine? Tony called me “My dear Irma”! I love him. And I love London. I do so hope I return some day. This is where the language comes from. This is where the books were written. We arrived in Holland yesterday. Holland is sweet.’
A few years before my grand tour with Study Abroad, when I was just turning fourteen, I was yanked out of my expensive private school and plunked into a third-rate state school. Ostensibly, it was because I had used a profanity at the dinner table. But the deeper truth was that my brother was just finishing his own elementary education and I was transferred to Henry Snyder Public School in Jersey City in order to spare the family two sets of crippling fees, one of them, in the opinion of that time and place, wasted on a girl. The four subsequent years would have been a dead loss intellectually were it not for one beautiful and discerning woman, my English teacher, Sybilla Farrell. Not only was Miss Farrell alert, vibrant and in love with her subject; she was also rumoured to be conducting an affair with a married naval officer. And she drank sherry. And she smoked like a chimney. I continued to see her after I entered university. She died of throat cancer two years after my return from the Study Abroad tour. On my shelves now, and always, I have a copy of Frank Swinnerton’s The Bookman’s London. Miss Farrell was not one to scribble on flyleaves; tucked into the book is a yellowing card, printed in raised letters, ‘Miss Sybilla Farrell’, and inside is her message dated June 1954.
Dear Irma [she wrote],
I saw this in my browsing and I couldn’t resist sending it to you. Hardly a ‘travel book’ yet since you will soon be going to London some of its ‘lit’ry’ background may stand you in good stead and give you a bowing acquaintance with that great nation’s most important past. I envy you your maiden voyage. May it be a très bon voyage.
Sincerely,
Sybilla Farrell
I must agree with you, young Irma, about Stratford. I have been there a few times in the course of my London life and like you I prefer Shakespeare on a stage, not in souvenir shops. As for Blenheim, and Hampton Court, the Tower, and all the other distinguished attractions you toured with Study Abroad, they are too near home, too familiar now; I have seen them too often with visiting Americans; after so many years in residence, I have no desire to see them again as a tourist. Forgive me, I don’t care to try. In any case it is not among those courtly splendours I will find your trail. To this day, however, I still feel exactly as you did, moved and awestruck, whenever I glance up on a London street and discover a blue plaque in honour of Dickens, Blake, Hazlitt, H. G. Wells. You and I can thank Miss Farrell for that meeting of our minds.
The first school I attended from kindergarten through the sixth grade was the Demonstration School of New Jersey State Teachers’ College. Commonly known as the ‘Normal School’ to protect us white, bright, middle-class kids from being considered or considering ourselves in any way out of the ordinary or so it generally believed. We were guinea-pigs for elementary-school teachers in training, nine out of ten of them young women. In those days, when teaching the under-twelves was a profession for women, the most embarrassing gaffe a child could commit in the classroom was accidentally to call a teacher ‘mommy’. The trainees turned up regularly in groups of twenty or thirty to audit our classes from a platform that encircled the room, and occasionally one of them would be called upon to perform nervously a turn of her own in our little theatre-in-the-round under the critical eye of our teacher, Miss Carnes.
Miss Carnes embodied the very word ‘spinster’, its angularity and clump of sensible shoes, its suggestion of muddy colours, its industry, and selflessness, too, and purity, and devotion hardly seen these days; of course, she was also reactionary, and rigid of opinions. Decades later, when I learned that Miss Carnes, close to one hundred years old, was in a nursing home in California, I took my three-year-old son to visit the ancient teacher, who was drifting in and out of terminal fuddle. I must have turned away for a moment, for I did not see her slip him five crisp ten-dollar bills. He showed them to me later on the road home. ‘The old lady told me’, he said, ‘that five times ten is fifty and I must count on that.’
Every Christmas Miss