Lemonade Skies and Bluebell Woods 5
Chapter 5 — Those First Few Difficult Months — The B’s and B’s.
Britain is a foreign country. The United States of America does not share a philosophy, much of a language or ways of being in the world with Britain. Despite what you may have heard. The first few months of living in Britain made many of those fundamental differences abundantly clear in both jarring and pleasant ways. It wasn’t just the language, though yes, we are divided by a common tongue. It was also so many things that I don’t think I can just lump in all in and call it ‘culture’. Besides, Britain is a multi-cultural nation and has always taken in immigrants. As has the United States. But the mix is different, how it’s done, what it’s made of is different.
I came to Britain alone. I wasn’t particularly bothered by that at first. I thought, well, I’ll go to work and make friends at work and maybe some will overflow into after work friends. It had happened before, many times. I’m not a lonely sort of person. I like my own company and I have myriad worlds in my brain. I’m never desperate for company. But being alone in a foreign country poses its own sort of loneliness problems. I didn’t understand their meta-language and they didn’t understand mine.
I liked my Mongolian hostesses in the cobbled together B&B I first landed in. They were kind. They let me sleep my jet-lag away. The walls, windows and bed covered with diaphanous red cloth in the womb-like room where they installed me soothed and made me feel safe.
The music that filled the next room was unfamiliar but the beat was like a heart permeating the walls. When I finally awoke from that first dead sleep I was fed wonderful food by people with smiling faces. We often failed to make ourselves understood across double language barriers but the smiles and laughter made it fun. But too soon, the same driver that collected me at the airport arrived to remove me.
“You aw-right?” He asked.
My answer should have been “Yeah, aw-right. You?” But I didn’t know that then.
“I’m fine. Slept okay. Why am I leaving here? Where am I going?”
He ignored me while he negotiated roads that were so narrow I marvelled that two opposing cars were allowed. As we weaved in and out of traffic he threw me back and forth across the bench seat in the back, making me scramble to connect the crunched up seatbelt I’d had to fish for.
“I’m taking you to your accommodations. That,” he threw his head back toward where we’d been, “wasn’t where you are going to be staying. But you got here a day early.”
This was a lie. I got here on the day I was supposed to be expected. I had the letter to prove it. I sputtered but didn’t bother trying to correct him. I was just annoyed and beginning to question things a bit.
The driver unceremoniously dropped me off at the Mayflower Hotel. He shoved a piece of paper in my hand after he’d brought my luggage up the stairs growling something like “Cor! What’s in here? Bricks?” On the paper, he informed me was my appointment with my agent, see that I got there and off he went.
The Mayflower Hotel was straight out of Fawlty Towers. Old Edwardian frontage including one of those heavy wooden doors with a stained glass round window, pillars on either side of a tiny stoop, gingerbread trim and a knob in the middle of the door. Inside was a wide hall with a tiny ‘front desk’ that carried a number of pamphlets probably about the local area and a large, pick-it-up-and-ring-it bell with a long black handle.
Beside me, just inside the front door, stood a tiny, older woman with curly, light brown hair. I hadn’t noticed her until the driver left. I must have jumped a bit because she put a hand under my elbow and chattering, she led me away, beckoning me up some very narrow, burgundy carpeted stairs. I must have looked back at my luggage with longing because she made dismissive gestures and seemed to inform me that someone would bring them up.
I was having trouble with my ears. I could barely understand two words together. It was clear that this little lady was speaking English. But the inflection, the connection of one word to another, the musicality of her language, didn’t resonate in anything like the time I needed to fully understand her. I wasn’t just a beat behind, I was whole sentences late. It was as if I was in one of those badly dubbed movies where the characters speak and the sound comes slow seconds behind. Only it was me that was left in the previous scene. Maybe it was the jet-lag and my brain was still somewhere over the Atlantic. I decided just to nod and smile and hope that was enough.
My new Landlady showed me into a pleasantly clean if very beige room. The walls were beige, the flowered bedspread was faded, flowered beige and the curtains were a different pattern also faded to beige. I learned later they don’t call this colour beige. It is magnolia and I hated the colour immediately with utter permanency.
“He’ll be up soon,” I heard and understood! Maybe my ears were adapting.
Sure enough a not young man wrestled up my huge suitcase, my overstuffed backpack and my carry-on and distributed them around the small room. He nodded at me, placed a hand against his back and stood still catching his breath. “Breakfast is from 7 to 9 in the dining room downstairs,” He said in a completely clear Italian accent. He waved his hand behind his back as he left my room.
“My husband,” said the Landlady with obvious fondness.
I learned they were retired but had taken on the hotel from the building’s owners for free rent and board. They’d met at a restaurant where eventually he became head chef. They’d been married for nearly 50 years and adored each other as much as the day they met. She was from East London and they both loved Croydon because it was the ‘country’. Well, it might have been when they first moved out of the city but no longer. It was the most ‘city’ I’d ever lived in. But then I hadn’t seen London proper yet.
I began to settle in to my new room, unpacking some of my suitcase and hanging my clothes in the tiny standing closet. It was late afternoon and I was already yawning. My stomach growled but I ignored it. I hadn’t a clue where a shop might be and didn’t want to leave the safety of the hotel when the sun was rushing out of the sky. The agency that had recruited me was paying for my ‘accommodations’ as they called it. The room was spacious by English standards and had a bow window that overlooked the tiny parking lot. There were three cars parked there which made me assume that there were other guests but I didn’t see or hear anyone. Just over the top of the row of houses across the street I could glimpse a railroad track and a few fields going away from there before multiple rows of more houses made their appearance. I guessed that was the ‘country’. Then I turned and landed, hard, on the bed.
I don’t think I have ever sat on anything harder unless it was a solid park bench. There was no bouncing on this bed. ‘Well,’ I thought. ‘I’m tired enough it should make no difference.’
I turned on the 12” TV that hung precariously from the corner above the whisper of a desk. There was no chair for this desk. There wasn’t room between the end of the bed and where the narrow desk began. I looked around and found what looked like a child’s chair tucked to one side of the standing closet. Which, by the way, is called a ‘wardrobe’ in Britain. I figured that I could put my purse, called a bag in Britain, on the chair. There wasn’t much room for anything else.
The theme music for BBC News, that pulsing tone on tone, reverberated through the air and Moira Stewart’s mellifluous voice filled the room. I had no trouble understanding her. I sighed deeply and caught up with the happenings that BBC considered important.
Every night thereafter I made this my routine; drop my bag on the chair, take off my coat and hang it up, turn on the TV, climb up to the pillows against the back board and get ready to listen. The sound of the BBC News theme still evokes a feeling of loneliness that pinches my heart but also familiarity and finally home.
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That first night at the Mayflower, I tossed and turned, first lying on this side until I was numb and then lying on the other side until it was numb, then flipping again. This was worse than sleeping on the hard, cold ground. It took me a while to even get into bed. I couldn’t find the flat sheet. There was one folded around the mattress but when I pulled it up it was clear that it wasn’t meant to be moved. Underneath it was not another fitted sheet as expected but a mattress cover. I was missing a sheet. There were two covers over the top. One, was that padded, flower patterned bedspread described earlier and the other was a lumpy polyester comforter encased in a gigantic pillow slip. I didn’t remember what I’d slept in at the Mongolian Sisters B & B. I just remembered unconsciousness, warmth and safety. Here I was perched atop a hard, flat, unwelcoming surface. There was no sinking into anything here.
I was so miserable, I often cried myself to sleep. I told myself it wasn’t loneliness. It was just the awful bed. Later I learned the perfect British word to add to that sentence. ‘It was just the bloody awful bed.’ But I called my friend back in the US, fully 8 hours behind in time, to complain and receive commiseration. I think I slept a little better after that.
About a week later my friend showed up at the Hotel’s front desk! In her arms was a rolled up, foam egg-crate mattress! I nearly turned inside out with joy.
We pulled the bed apart and put the egg-crate mattress cover down, tucking it in with the flat sheet. She informed me that the giant pillowcase was a duvet cover and that I was meant to sleep under it as it took the place of a sheet. It was the first time I’d seen a bed situation like that. We slipped between the sheet and the duvet cover with the bedspread warming our feet and I slept well for the first time since landing. My friend left the next day. She had connections with an airline so her travel was easy but to me it seemed like my fairy godmother had flitted in, fitted me out and left with a wave of her wand. I am eternally grateful.