My British Summer

I love Food For Life's flourless, sprouted Ezekiel breads (especially the green one with sesame). They don't make you feel as full and heavy as regular bread can do, and they are very tasty with some almond butter, apple slices, cinnamon, and seeds.

In my 18^th summer, I decided to visit England. It was high time. I was traveling alone by train with an InterRail card and had seen most of southern Europe, and traveled through much of the northern parts. But I had never been to England.

Back then you had to take a ferry to Dover in England, if you were in France (which I was). On the train from Copenhagen to Berlin I had kissed a boy from Switzerland and unfortunately contracted strep throat, and the medicine they gave me in Paris contained sulfa, which I found out I was allergic to. The result was that by the time I set foot on the British Isles, my skin was red and pimply and my throat was still raw. Not a good start.

Compared to the extravagant avenues and seductive buildings of Paris, London was a bit of a letdown. It was small and disappointing and there was something uptight and nasal about Victoria Station, where my train pulled in. When I stepped off, I thought I was in a movie from the 1940’s.

I was hustled out to some suburb where there were still rooms available in a hostel, but after I unloaded my backpack, I immediately took the “tube” into the heart of London again.

“Piccadilly Circus,” I thought. “That’s where I should go.”

I think I believed some sort of grandeur would cure my ills.

But Piccadilly Circus was not Champs de Mars and the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, where some pale, freckled British schoolboys were loitering, was hardly the Eiffel Tower.

Another day I was sitting in a park – it might very well have been Hyde Park – writing post-cards when I noticed two young men circling.

“Excuse us,” said one of them. “My friend and I were just arguing where you might come from. I said Germany and he said Holland. Might I ask if we were right?”

That was the intro to the longest, most exciting conversation I had in England. These boys, they were visiting from Ireland and staying nearby, made me laugh. But when they asked me to come home with them (they said they were staying with a family member, a sister), I got scared. It always seemed to me that when people disappear in England, they aren’t just found floating belly up in rivers or shot dead in a forest or something like that, no, in England they are found chopped up in pieces in someone’s suitcase at a train station, or with a head in the Tower, two hands in St Paul’s, and a foot in some dresser in someone's house in Hampstead. I suppose the word for it is macabre. I always felt there was something macabre hiding under all that supposedly civilized stuff, the bowler hats and the deerstalkers and the academic scarves. Anyway, the boys said they’d take a stroll through the park while I finished up writing those post-cards, and then we’d all go to the sister and watch the “telly”. It was when they’d left; that I started to worry and think about all the Agatha Christie novels I had read. And when I saw them coming back, I started running.

“Eva!” one of them called and started running after me.

I ran and I ran and I ran as fast as I could. I was not going to end up with a chopped-off head in someone’s suitcase.

In Cambridge, I stayed at a proper bed-and-breakfast and had eggs and bacon for breakfast. The host was a single man who drove around in a black car and was very kind, but one day I decided to investigate the chest in my room and found a stash of hard-core porn magazines. That was the end of Cambridge for me.

In Brighton I fed the seagulls.

At the end of my British sojourn, I decided to go to Exeter and Devonshire. In a final attempt, I thought perhaps the sun would take care of my sulfa-induced acne, so I somehow got access to a beach. What a cruel joke that was. There I sat, on an old red blanket that had turned coral by years of use. And instead of sprawling white sandy dunes, I looked over a gray and rain-muddy patch and swam in the cold water. That water was healing though; when I later had cream tea at the Royal Clarence hotel, I noticed that my face had cleared up.

Have a good weekend, and see you again on Monday!