When I first came to London there were things I believed the English did better than anyone else. I still do, even the irritating customs. Some of these habits are long-standing: driving on the left (that’s from reigns in the left hand, lance in the right), others are newer: the English proclivity for queuing left over from the war. Most are almost holdovers from the days of Empire. The English can make noblesse oblige look as natural as breathing.
For instance, when a workman comes to your home, the plumber, carpenter, painter (here called decorator, imagine the picture I had–guy in a puffy shirt, all fabric samples and fountain pens, not the case at all), electrician, you are expected to provide a cup of tea and a biscuit–like in the delivery room when Emma was born. The tea was for my husband, by the way, who was deemed to be “peckish” by the midwife. Anyway, workmen stop at least twice a day for a tea break. How civilized, unless you are on a deadline and a budget. The Post Office is still a center of social and business activity. The postman is not likely to lose his mind and shoot up the joint. He is more likely to remember that you’ve moved (again) and bring your post from the old house personally. In fact, for the first few years we got two mail deliveries a day! Even today, if you post something early in the day–first class, of course–it might get to its recipient by afternoon. There is an army of street cleaners in London, pushing carts, armed with brooms and dustpans. They are mostly Eastern European, courtly in their manner and dignified even, as they pick up dog mess. I always wave at mine and say thank you, especially when he is chasing cherry blossom petals or chestnut leaves down the street.
Fine, those are the niceties of English life, those and the way, rain, snow, sun or fog, so many Londoners make a mad dash for the countryside on the weekends. Oh, not to weekend houses (although there are lots of those), just to the open air of Wimbledon Common, say, or Wandsworth, or Richmond. Our first June here we took the kids out to the South Downs to pick strawberries. Oh, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, get a pen/quill, stub of chalk! We bent low over the bushes, brushing aside the leaves to find the sweetest berries. I filled my skirt with them, James ate more than he picked and William thought his pockets were a good storage choice. There is something deep inside the English psyche that calls “Hie thee to the country good folk, pick and play and sup until the sun goes down. Then, go to your pub and drink until you barf on the curb.”
But, here’s what I will miss, too. There are vignettes of such quintessential English-ness that I catch my breath. One morning, early, I ran to the cafe for coffee and bread. We were on our way to a rugby match and I needed fortification. At the corner, a tall, handsome man stepped out of his mud-spattered Range Rover. He was dressed for polo: tight breeches, numbered shirt, crop stuck in his boot. It was as if his car was a time machine from before the war. I pulled up short to watch where he was going–and to adjust my damn bifocals, why didn’t I put in my contacts? Another time I was in the supermarket. There was a woman pushing her trolley down the aisle, like me. She was about my age and had a list, like me. She was wearing gauzy, sparkly, three-foot wide fairy wings over her sweater. Not at all like me. Shame, I thought, she’s clearly deranged. At the checkout the clerk asked her about the wings. “Good Heavens,” the woman said turning in a circle, trying to see the wings, “It was Fairy Day at my daughter’s school. I forgot I was wearing these.” Well, then.
We have lived on a communal garden for the last six years. Nearly three acres of beautifully-tended lawn and roses and apple trees, lilacs, peonies, flox and chamomile, lavender, rosemary and thyme. Our kitchen door opens onto the garden and Emma has spent nearly all her time out there. On the long summer evenings when the light clings to the treetops until nearly ten, Emma and the Lost Boys drift through the gloaming, their voices like birds in the air. They climb trees, kick balls, dance in the ‘fairy circle’, play hide and run and other arcane invented games that involve much giggling and mud and sometimes blood. Emma is thirteen now, and in her last summer in the garden. I would like to say nothing has changed. All right, I’ll say it: Nothing has changed. She still comes in at the last moment, breathless, scraped and dirty, trailing magic and fresh mint leaves. And we sit, wine glasses in hand, listening to who found who under the hydrangeas.
There is a party every year in our garden. It involves a tent, silly games, finger food and champagne, lots of champagne. As the boys grew they joined the others with their thin glasses tilting precariously on the grass. They played cricket and talked, longs legs crossed as they leaned against a tree. Girls in floaty summer dresses flitted around them, laughing and bowing their heads as the boys pulled them into a game. It’s as if time stops, rewinds for a night and everyone is gay and careless under a clear sky.
We are leaving this now, all of it. It has been sixteen years, a lifetime for Emma, nearly one for the boys. The ocean pulls me back to America like the tide. The scent of salt will replace the roses climbing our gate. A new lifetime waits, as foreign and slightly terrifying as London once was. Emma will have to watch for poison ivy, not stinging nettles. She’ll find another circle to dance in, weightless and fleeting as dandelion fluff. The boys will come home again, not to a garden party or champagne spilled on the lawn, but home nonetheless. I will make sure of that.