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January 03, 2008
Going Back in Time, My Own History of England
There are not photographs for this entry. Sorry. This is a trip down memory lane. Those pictures are in a scrapbook in storage, and not even for you people will I drive to Pullman before six in the morning to dig them out (I'm still adjusting to the time change.)
As I believe I've metioned here before, I spent a semester in London as an exchange student my junior year of college. It was life-changing. I arrived at Heathrow in January, 1988, a tired, scared, rather lost American girl. I left in June a young woman in love with the city and herself, someone who had a better idea of her possibilities. It was in London that I began to discover the joys of being lost and of finding your own way out. During my time there I learned to take care of myself in a more practical sense than I ever had before. I made my own decisions about where I was traveling and with whom, I took responsibility for my time and my education. I finally started to grow up there.
I also picked up enough of the London dialect and speech patterns that not only did I amuse my parents for three-four days when I got back to the states as I settled back into 'Murrican, but while I was a resident, people I met in other British cities thought I was from London. They would ask me what part of the city I grew up in.
So a big chunk of this trip for me was about going back, about rediscovering the places that affected and influenced me. And showing them to Dave.
Wow has the city changed.
On Sunday, I dragged Dave out to Golders Green, the burb where I lived. As an exchange student, I had shared a room that took up half the third floor of a neat row house about 3/4 of a mile from Brent Cross Station. My host father was a professor of geology at the University of London. He was slightly deaf, absent minded, and had hair that stuck out all over his head in the manner of Einstein. My host mother was German. Boy, could that woman cook.
Their house was fourth in a long row of houses. Though it wasn't an issue in our room, sometimes you could hear people on either side of you going up and down the stairs. But it was a nice neighborhood. The houses were all cared for, the gardens were tidy. It was a nice place.
It isn't really so much that way now. That neighborhood has not weathered the last 20 years very well. The houses are slumping into decay, the gardens are messy and littered, there are battered cars along the streets. I never had an issue walking home late at night from the tube stop there. Now? No way in hell would I risk it. Parts of the walk between station and house look like junkie heaven. I was glad I was there with Dave.
Given how expensive real estate is in London, I'm rather surprised the neighborhood has gone downhill in the way it seems to have done. It really looks beat up. The difference between past and present made me want to cry. I had to keep reassuring Dave that it was indeed a much safer place when I was living there.
One of the really funny things about the journey out to the house was that I found the it without a map. We walked out of the station and I knew I needed to turn right. We headed down a dirty street for three blocks and I said, "Turn left here." We did, and came upon the end of the street I lived on, the only place we could have accessed it from that end. And yet, I didn't recognize a thing except the underpass wall where the street went under the train tracks and the house once we got to it. And the shops once we came back to the station.
The place I recognized most on the entire trip? The platforms at the Golders Green and Brent Cross tube stations. They're both above ground, so it's not like just walking into any station. The Brent Cross platform was one of the most familar locations of the entire trip. Apparently I was paying more attention there than I did anywhere else in the city.
Because when we went looking for the building where my classes were held, I had the whole thing exactly backwards.
One of the things that consistently surprised me this trip was how weirdly I had remembered distances. The street I lived on seemed much longer than I remembered it being, and the various sites that we visited were so much closer together than they ever seemed to be at the time I was living in London. The entire city felt much smaller in general than I recalled. And journeys I remember as being blocks and blocks of very confusing twists and turns were actually very direct 2-3 block walks.
We spent part of Boxing Day wandering around Bloomsbury, which is very near where I went to school. And since we were there already, I asked Dave if we could try to find the place. Here's what I remembered: I remembered that we were near-ish Russell Square Station (which I never managed to find on my own except by lucky accident when I was a student) and that there had been a park to the northwest of the building. A park lined with very old grave stones. And that it was near the University of London School of Pharmacy because they'd rented the space to us.
I had been trying to find the location on a map ever since my A-Z came in the mail, with no luck. None of the street names looked right. That's quite possibly because in the mid-90's, several blocks were demolished and re-built, with brand new street layouts. We figured that out when we wandered around the neighborhood for a while.
Anyway, we walked along Bernard Street and what should we come across but a very distinctive RED building labelled Russel Square Station. I have no idea how I could have missed it when I lived there. And then, directly across the street, Brunswick Centre, a big cement shopping centre which I recognized immediately because I often bought lunch in a store there. We walked around it and right across the street was the School of Pharmacy. And around the corner from that...
A park, to the southeast of a familiar looking building. But it couldn't have been that park, because it was on the wrong end of the building.
We wandered around that neighborhood for twenty minutes at least. Dave was very patient with me. Far more patient than any person should have to be. I had finally decided that I was either in the wrong place or that the building had been torn down in the 90's, when we walked into that park. And again, I was overwhelmed with a sense of "I know this place!" It was the right park. The familiar building on the wrong side of the park is, I am convinced, the place I went to school. Everything looked right (except for their locations in relation to each other), I'm sure we were in the right spot.
I just can't understand how it was so big and confusing when I lived there and so simple now.
Or how I never realized my classes were literally within walking distance of the British Museum.
But then, I spent more time riding trains than I did walking when I lived in London. I had the map of the underground memorized, and would orient myself based on which station things were nearest. I guess that to cope with so much that was so new, I desperately needed one familiar thing. For me as a student and a baby adult, that became the London Underground. This trip was wonderful for bringing together for me all of the disparate parts of London and showing me how close they really all are. It's no longer a huge, unwieldy mass of separate places in my head. Thanks to Dave, the city of London is now a complete entity for me.
And so, in his honor, I give you Camden, Bloomsbury, bits of the West End and The British Museum with Starbucks.
Posted by sally at January 3, 2008 05:15 AM
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