A Trip to England

When I was fourteen, I was sent to visit part of my family in London, England. It was in the summer of 1988 and I do not know why I was sent at that particular time. We had just moved into a new house (this would be our last move after years of changing apartments and houses around the same city). Perhaps my mother felt that I would be used to another change in my location and had enough experience travelling to take such a trip. I had already seen parts of the Caribbean on different plane trips with my family and we had taken part in a long trip by car from our home to a friend’s place in California. The trip to England would be another stamp on my passport.
It was my mother’s decision, but she was not the only one who wanted a member of the family to travel and make contact with relatives that were known only from letters and phone calls. One of her close friends from work would be sending along her daughter, a girl only one year older than me. I had known her for about a year and was told that she would be staying with a different family once we arrived. So, she would not be keeping watch over me. Perhaps it was just practical for our mothers to be freed from us for that one summer. There must have been some sort of plan that they did not want to share with us until school let us out for a few months.
We travelled by ourselves. This is significant. I had never been on a plane without a member of my family and the trauma must have been quite pronounced in me. But what I remember most is what I wore on the flight. My mother had decided that I would have to look presentable before landing in England, so I wore grey pants, a pink dress shirt, and a pink and grey tie with paisley patterns on it. The colours matched but refused to please the eye. Any fear I had about being alone with the daughter of a family friend, or with an unknown relative in England was soon replaced by my annoyance at having to wear such clothing. I was overweight and itchy in that unflattering outfit. And the summer heat also played a predictable role in my discomfort. It seems more important now to think about how I was presented to people who were called family and had never met me before than to worry about the fear of being alone. My look set up a false impression that I could not match. I was happier in t-shirts and jeans. And I never wore that outfit again once during my stay.
I don’t remember much about the flight. The plane left from my hometown, Hamilton, Ontario. This seemed very strange to me; the airport on the city’s escarpment was known for air shows and its museum commemorating aircraft from the Second World War. It was not known for flights to other countries, and it was striking that there was no changeover in Toronto or New York. This saved time and money, not something that was on my mind. I only thought about how small my part of the world was and how happy I felt to be travelling. It would be six weeks – from early July to mid-August – and there would be no talk of summer school or day camp (they both seemed to be some sort of punishment). I would be living in London, the centre of the literature that I loved and the culture I knew from imports like Coronation Street, Doctor Who, numerous rock groups, and the general knowledge of a language that we mimic well in Canada, right down to the quirks of spelling and pronunciation. I thought I was well-prepared.
We landed at Heathrow Airport and I was quickly separated from my travelling companion by a group of women (we did not meet again during my stay). I met G. and her two identical brothers, K. and D., and D’s wife. We then made our way to the car as they asked questions about my flight. And then came the speeches. As we drove from the airport, and survived several near-accidents with the traffic and other obstacles (i.e. pedestrians), they began to tell me about their lives in London.
I should preface this next section by mentioning my and their West Indian backgrounds. England gave my ancestors a very difficult history, from slavery to certain political parties to bills in Parliament meant to strip them of the few rights they still had left. From the airport to the first stop – to drop off K., D. and D’s wife, I was told about how difficult it was to be black in that country. I will always remember one particular story about a friend who worked as a driver and ended up working in one of the many large offices we drove past. In case I thought that this was simply due to perseverance and hard work, they explained that this man only made it because the person he chauffeured liked his face.
I would be staying in G.’s apartment. She asked me if I wanted something to eat and we stopped at a small store to buy some food. I told her that I would like to make a submarine sandwich. I ended up with hard French bread (a baguette) and coleslaw. We then went to her place. This all took place in the east end of London in an area called Plaistow. She lived in a tall apartment complex near the area’s London Underground station. Her floor was dimly lit in the outer hallway and her apartment was needlessly cramped. There was her main bedroom, which I never entered; a bathroom; a very small wedge of balcony, the front room (where I would sleep on a fold-out couch); and a narrow kitchen. This was where I attempted to put together my sandwich as she looked on with wonder at my construction. It was during this meal that I made the mistake of looking around that kitchen. She had a gas stove, a small fridge and some of the dishes drying on a rack near a large window. The main cupboard was open and when I peered inside, I noticed several half-eaten packages of cookies, biscuits, breads, crackers, and chocolate bars. She apparently ate part of what she bought, forgot about it in that space, and then went out to buy a new package. I felt nauseous but I could not share this with G. She was allowing me to stay in her place for six weeks and I had no other available options.
Later that night, I woke up to G. yelling from her bedroom window at a man and a woman on the street. The couple had just left a pub and was now engaged in a drunken fight on the pavement. G. encouraged the woman to “knee him in the groin, dear” and the man responded by calling G. a bitch.
And that was my first day in England.

*

It is hard for me to accept how naïve I was about life in London, even at the age of fourteen. I unpacked my bags and filled up her front room with my collection of music tapes. This was my first mistake and a sign that I did not know the culture I was in. I was listening to mostly progressive or light rock (Genesis and Supertramp were personal favourites). My mistake was sharing this so publicly. I had a Walkman, but I sometimes insisted on playing these records on her stereo. What I mean by saying this is that I did not understand the culture I was in and that I was out of step with what I thought I knew from those exports I mentioned (most of my recordings were made by British groups and record companies).
Even my sense of comedy was a problem. The British have mastered this particular type of entertainment and should be proud of their skills in self-parody and finding the humour in their worst moments. But most of my relatives, including G., could not fathom my love of Monty Python’s Flying Circus or the routines of Dave Allen. The former, now as much an institution as any of the other British programs I watched in Canada, was too difficult for them to follow; and the latter was just a dirty old man who had managed to have a career through his seediness. I was alone in my interests.
There was something very fortunate in being forced to become self-reliant. G. had to work for most of my stay, and since we did not see eye-to-eye on most issues – food, music, other entertainment, etc – I learned to be alone. She made sure that I had a pass for the Underground and I learned to travel around London by myself. We never travelled together on this public transport. I was a solitary tourist with my maps and some blind luck. I saw Hyde Park, Paddington Road, Baker Street, Piccadilly Circus and the Royal Albert Hall. And I can now admit that most of those names did not mean anything to me at the time. I knew a little about those places as landmarks; my information came to me second-hand and indirectly. Paddington Bear was a cartoon that mentioned Piccadilly Circus; the Beatles name-dropping during their A Day in the Life mentioned the great Hall. I could approach these places without feeling the sense of awe that may have been common to other tourists as inexperienced as I was. Hyde Park was either dirty or filled with rich kids who laughed at my clothes and general appearance; Baker Street was often crowded because of problems with bomb threats on the Underground (there were no Holmes or Watson there); Piccadilly Circus had its pigeons, overwrought advertising, stone lions and postcard punks. I still have a photo of one of these punks with a homemade guitar plugged into an amp made out of a red plastic gasoline container. The city had its definite charms.
I did like that performance. I also liked the red double-decker buses (I only took them in the main city centre and managed to fall out of one when I ran down the steps for my stop and the driver continued to move away from the curb). I liked the canned meat pies, the Daily Mirror (not an important newspaper, but not as scandalous as the infamous Sun), the bookstore I discovered that was arranged by publishers, the British Toy Museum (a very happy and serendipitous discovery) and the British Museum. I do not remember much about the Houses of Parliament or Buckingham Palace, although I must have passed them on the bus (on a tour, a guide pointed them out to us).
Of course, I got lost. This happened to me a few times when I was trying to find my way on the roads and sidewalks. I only became lost once on the Underground; this still surprises me. The trains of the Underground are connected at certain changeovers that are as difficult for a tourist to follow as any of the various systems that I have seen in New York or Tokyo. You have to be patient and understand the particular feeling of a city before you can travel in it. It was only right that I got lost once as a commuter. As a pedestrian, the confusion of roads and areas in the city was attractive. I left Madame Tussaud's wax museum and travelled in a different direction than the one recommended by the guide I carried. I was soon surrounded by buildings that reminded me of some of the very well-designed homes I had seen in Canada made from former factories. I was certain that if I kept walking in the same direction, I would discover wharfs and the life of a seaport (I could smell and feel the sea water in the warm air). On another unguided walk, I entered a bookstore with windows covered indoors with silver foil. Yes, it was pornographic; the old clerk smoking cigarettes behind the counter and another old man seated in a corner looked at me with polite boredom and went back to their reading material (they did not get my business). I mentioned the British Toy Museum earlier. This was in a very high-class area of the city and I felt underdressed as I looked at the glass cases filled with Daleks (a Doctor Who nemesis), trains, ships, rockets, cars and the other distractions of a British childhood (or my Canadian one).
However, this was not the most surprising discovery made during my stay. That would arrive on an early morning trip to the home of another relative. G. took me to visit another unknown member of my family. The man invited us inside, made his pleasant conversation with us, and then told me that he was my father’s brother (he never said uncle, and I am sure that he meant to say half-brother, since they had different surnames). That was a pleasant enough surprise. What bothered me was what happened next. We went into the bedroom where most of the curtains were closed (even now, the grey darkness of the room stays in my memory). And in that dim light, he took out a photograph from a drawer. It was a picture of a young woman on a summer day. She was leaning forward on a lawn chair and laughing in her bright dress and jean jacket. This was my half-sister, a woman that I would not meet for almost twenty years. I must note that in the bedroom where we spoke, there was a woman sleeping in the bed (my father’s brother was no longer married, so I made a guess as to the relationship). G. pronounced all men to be pigs and I could not contradict her. It seemed the height of insensitivity to introduce me to the product of an affair my father had while in a room with a woman that my father’s brother had sex with the previous night.
*
There are moments in your life that cloud things; that make things seem so difficult to comprehend that you just do not deal with them in a way that would seem proper. I was given that photograph of my half-sister and kept it hidden in a drawer from any curious eyes in my house. I did not mention it or even hint at it until my mother confessed that she knew all about her and we both realised that two lies were living in the same house. As I think about that scene between us, I realize that I would not believe it if I had heard about it from a friend (not even the film studios of Hollywood could have imagined such things). But it was too real and made me more aware of what was true and what was imaginary. I paid more attention to the racist graffiti I saw on an embankment wall as we travelled to a cricket match (contrast with a wheat field that appeared like liquid gold, it was startling to see an attitude so honest). I noted that fruit sold in the markets came from South Africa. This was during apartheid and I made a point of buying a t-shirt that recommended that one Boycott South African Goods. I then looked carefully around that neighbourhood. Cramped homes, grey weather, narrow and mugger-friendly lanes and walls, appalling programs on TV (comedy specials seemed to have to volume of the audience turned way up for the weakest jokes) and I have already commented on the food.
What did this add up to? I pronounced England – to myself alone – as a culture with its own frustrations and unseen turmoil. There were problems specific to the nation that I just could not understand (political, sexual, aesthetic) and I felt hemmed in by them. A Canadian living in England experiences many of the same problems that other continentals feel. Many years later, I read an interview with Germaine Greer where she described her difficulties with the English. She mentioned how her gestures were too large for them and how she felt unimpressed by their titles and sense of deference towards people who held such things. I mentioned how I was unimpressed by most of the famous places and names I encountered and it was through that interview that I understood why that was the way I felt. I needed to see more than just cramped apartments and a one-day trip to the only field outside of the dirty public parks in the city that seemed presentable.
There was some luck in having relatives in Kent (near Wimbledon). I stayed in a home in Kent for the last two weeks of my stay and it was near perfect. Milk was delivered in bottles door-to-door; I met well-off West Indians who did not complain about how difficult things were for them because they had overcome the obstacles in their society. Added to this, they were not pretentious. I thought that this would be a problem with upper-middle class people, even the relatives from a community that I was learning to understand.
One relative, a man with a very bad stutter, enjoyed making up his own rhymes as a rapper (his manner of speaking did not have much of an effect on his rapping); I stayed in a room filled with journals written in a particular coded language (I now apologize for being so nosy). I once tried to cook some food in their microwave, setting off the fire alarm with the smoke that soon appeared. This was laughed off and I had a long laugh with the father of the home. I could not imagine this happening at the first home I stayed in. I felt free and comfortable enough to move through the neighbourhood without feeling a vague threat that I could not have named.
I did not stay long in this middle-class home. I felt that I had to go back to Plaistow for that final week and stay with the family that took me in first. This was a serious mistake on my part. If I had stayed with my relatives in Kent, I would have had a pleasant conclusion to my stay in London. Instead, I went back. This led to a fight over a gift for my mother. G. wanted me to bring home a ceramic sculpture in my luggage; I argued – very sensibly, I thought – that it would be reduced to shards by the time I got it home (even if it were wrapped in paper). The argument took place on the street near her sister’s home and she never forgave me for this. It was a very ugly attitude that accompanied me to the airport.
*
Did I learn anything during my stay? Did the time I spent in another country change me or how I saw myself, my family and friends, my world? I would answer “Yes”, if I now think about the way I behaved – my sense of things – after the return home. There were types of art – music, painting, literature, etc – that I learned to appreciate more than I could have been expected; I respected the amount of space I had around my home and the sense that I was not enclosed in an environment that drew boundaries around various neighbourhoods; and I saw that a life of complaining and whining was not enough (a significant thing to discover as a teenager). Apart from the general, there was also the specific: London was the first place where I travelled alone on a subway (this was also significant – a new form of travelling and seeing the world). This taught me that I had strengths and weaknesses that I did not know I possessed. It was the moment when I learned I could travel by myself and that I would not need to be with anyone in order to enjoy whatever journeys I found myself on. I was alone and saw that as an appropriate way of living and being. This has stayed with me since this trip and has never gone away.
Do I regret anything? Very little comes to mind. I have not spoken to G. since staying in her home. I wrote her a letter once and received one response that seemed forced to me (I had tried to apologize with my letter). I did not pursue a relationship with her, although my mother has mentioned how she wants to know all about my life now. I wonder why.
There is also the half-uncle who introduced me to my half-sister. I wrote a letter to him long after I had met her and was finally given an address that was reliable. He has never responded to me and I do wish that he would send me some sort of message. There is a history there that I do not know and wish to learn. This I regret. I should have gone to Kent first before staying in the cramped apartment in Plaistow with G. As a newly-arrived guest in London, it would have been easier for me to step down than to step up from the home I stayed in (my temperament would have allowed it). But this is not a serious regret. London opened my eyes to a lot of information about an important capital city; its people and habits; specifically, my own family. Most important to me, of course, was the half-sister. From a photograph to a real relationship, this provided the greatest gift I would ever receive in my entire life.