Memories part two

Beth asked "what did YOU do in the summers, when you were, say ten?"

Growning up in Toronto, we divided our summers between home and visiting our distant relatives. In even-numbered years we would spend a month with my mother's family on various farms in Saskatchewan, and in odd-numbered years with my father's family in London (England); the other month we spent at home "relaxing" = working in the garden under Mom's direction, moving trees and relaying faux-cobblestoned walkways (you probably think I'm joking).

[I'm updating this piece by piece, adding links.]

England meant air travel, obviously: how else to get there? One could go by ship, of course, and many people still did even in the early Sixties; but we always flew. We travelled at first in propeller-driven Vickers Viscount airplanes, I remember seeing sparks shooting from the exhaust pipes at night. The planes had to refuel twice on the way to London: in Gander, on the coast of Labrador, and again in Paisley, outside Glasgow. The trip took a whole day, 23 hours door-to-door if I remember correctly. It must have been horrifically dull as there were of course no films or headsets in those days, but I cannot remember being bored (nor can I remember not being bored: Tout c'est vrai, mais rien c'est la verité to quote Albert Camus (from memory, feel free to correct me)).

England meant train travel. We were based in London with my grandmother in her three-storey six-room house (now long gone of course; the very street is gone, ploughed under and resown to use a metaphor from Saskatchewan) but we travelled far and often during the month we were there. We visited the great cathedrals (Winchester, Ely, Salisbury, Canterbury, York, Wells, Lincoln) and the sites of monasteries (Ripon, Rievaulx, Fountains Abbey), the university cities (Cambridge, Oxford and for that matter London itself), castles and palaces (Hampton Court, Windsor Castle, Hardwick Hall, Tintagel); all of them centuries old as Columbus set sail.

England meant being immersed in history, both formal antiquity and the lesser histories of family and "what happened next," being constantly in the presence of the past (to coin a phrase). History is a strange and intoxicating thing to a young and thoughtful North American, moving from the factory-fresh pastlessness of the West to an England that sometimes seemed to be nothing but past was akin to suddenly discovering a seventh sense or a previously unnoticed fifth limb; as when someone who grew up beside a small lake sees the Atlantic for the first time, it changes one's understanding of something (what water is like, how change happens) that had seemed so simple as to be not worth thinking on.

England meant smells, primarily the smells of combustion: coal fires, peat fires, wood fires, roasting chestnuts, diesel exhaust, jet fuel, incense. (A particular memory: walking down the hill from Auntie Maud's house to town to buy her groceries, we would pass a factory of some kind, where I would always stoop to look through a tiny barred window into a basement room where a man shovelled coal into the mouth of a glowing furnace. At the time (and in my defence I was about five years old) I found it fascinating to watch, but I was utterly detached from the scene: I watched him like an animal in the zoo, it didn't occur to me that the shoveller was a man just like my father, much less that with worse luck my father might have been that man. I was excited by the roar of the flames and the rattle of the coal flying off his shovel, and probably thought it a romantic and adventurous job.)

England meant fish, so many fish of so many kinds: sole, skate, plaice, flounder, zander, cod, eel, salmon, rock cod (aka dogfish), haddock, herring, sardines, whelks, winkles, mussels, cockles, crabs, trout, shrimp, crayfish; and of course the original takeaway fast food: fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper and dosed with salt and vinegar, best eaten with your fingers on the way home; the horror of gourmets and dieticians alike. We ate fish and chips in every city and town in England, and kept notes. Fish and chips is one of the few things I miss about England.

England meant colours: the red of brick walls and buses and telephone booths and Guardsmen, the yellow of crumbling stones, the deep inky blue of local trains, the glossy black of taxis, the matte black and startling sparkling white of Portland stone under the generations of sooty filth when St. Paul's Cathedral was cleaned, the many different greens, so lush and vibrant and intense, and of course the sea. What colour is the sea? it is all colours, all at once. There is no colour that you will not see in the sea at some time, under some condition of light and weather. Nowhere in England are you more than two hours' easy drive from the ocean, so one is constantly surprised by glimpses of the sea between buildings or from the crest of a hill. From the landing of the second stair of my grandmother's house, we could see the ships in the docks at Greenwich.

England meant family, my grandmother, my uncles and aunts; there were cousins in England too, my father's middle brother's children, but somehow we never really clicked. I could write a long post on Nanny (my grandmother) alone, she is the centre of a knot, a maze, a spiderweb of memories and associations. Because I associated with the generation(s) above mine, my English relatives seemed older than my Canadian ones, there were many great-aunts and -uncles (my grandmother's generation, she was one of eleven children) and their offspring (my father's cousins) and their offspring to be visited or met unexpectedly in train stations. I became aware of time as flow (and the paradox of rivers) in England, through living with this multi-generational family of long and overlapping generations. Generations in Saskatchewan were simple and discreet (in the sense of clearly separate), it was a surprise to learn that my grandmother's youngest brother was hardly older than my father; that made me reassess my relationship to my Canadian relatives.

England meant people, masses of people, more strangers than I had thought the world contained. We went to markets to buy fruit and vegetables and books and clothes (our parents) and to look at the people buying and selling (us kids). The concept of a market, of an individual person putting twenty-five apples and thirty pears on a table and going home when they were sold, was almost incomprehensible to kids raised in supermarkets.

England meant the War, which in those times and that generation actually meant the Great War, 1914-18. Every village had a War Memorial listing the names of the dead and the campaigns where the local regiment had fought; the officers had plaques or statues in the local church to their honour. Our family was scarred by the loss of Nip and Jack (my grandmother's older brothers) who simply disappeared in northern France in late 1917, just two among the millions who died there. (My father researched the regiment and recently found "the boys," both of whom lie in marked graves near Amiens, unfortunately long after Nanny's death.)

England meant the ready availability and casual consumption of alcohol (though not by us, God forbid). There were pubs everywhere, and though they were in fact always closed when you wanted a drink, they were nonetheless a significant social and cultural marker. Neighbourhoods were defined by the kind of pub they supported, whether sawdust floors and wooden stools, or panelled walls and sofas by the open fire. We stayed in many post house-type pubs; most of them were delightful to a child, with small stone-framed lancet windows, low broad doorways, odd half-staircases and back wings, and fireplaces that in midsummer were still redolent of coal.

England meant culture, we saw at least one play and heard at least one concert on every trip. We visited every museum and art gallery and historical building that we could find. If Saskatchewan was a place without books, England was founded on books, built of books. What struck me most about Oxford was not the river or the beautiful architecture, but the notion that there were so many books in the world that one needed to create special buildings just to keep them in. So many books! My older uncle and aunt had a newsagents and a bookstore in a small town by the Thames near Hampton Court, we used to read all the magazines they had and take a dozen books each home with us. God bless Penguin paperbacks with their cheerful orange spines, just to look at them makes me happy now, forty years on.