A Trip to England (Part II)

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 traveled 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 custom). I mentioned the British Toy Museum earlier. This was in a very high-class area of the city and I felt under-dressed 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.

All that in six weeks...