(The is the sixth in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

First of all, Beaulieu is pronounced “Bew-ly.”  Again I had been saying it as though I was in French class.  Sue said “Bew-ly” from the start.

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“That’s just the way we’d say it.”

“You mean the English?”

“It would have a Norman pronunciation.”

Beaulieu is a lot of things: a stately home, gardens, an abbey, and a motor museum among them.  But I wanted to go for the spy museum.  One of the houses on the estate was the “finishing school” and last port of call for the agents of the Special Operation Executive before they were dropped into occupied Europe during the Second World War.  I’ve been more or less obsessed with this subject for several years and I wanted to go to Beaulieu so badly that I tried to figure out how I could do it in a day from London.  It would have involved a train, a bus, and either $80 for a taxi or a seven mile bicycle ride through the New Forest on a hired bicycle. I was thrilled when Wendy and Sue said they would take me.

We looked up Beaulieu in the guide book.

“I’m not interested in the spy museum,” Wendy said.

“I’m not interested in either the spy or motor museum,” Sue said.

“I’m not interested in the motor museum,” I said.

There is something for everyone at Beaulieu. And as it turned out we all enjoyed the motor museum.

It’s a large estate and they provide a little toy monorail to get you from one end to the other.  It’s a perfectly walk-able area but you don’t realize that when you look at the map.  We queued up for the train and waited while six tiny cars emptied themselves of their passengers and took on about a third of the people standing in the queue.  We didn’t make the cut and there was to be a fifteen minute wait.  I am so amazed at the patience of the British.  I was ready to walk.  I was so close to the spies I could hardly stand it.

I stayed with Sue and Wendy.  We were next to a family of five that included an unhappy and unapologetic whiner (or whinger) of a five year old.  It was classic whining at the precise pitch of maximum irritation.

“We’re not getting in their car,” Sue said darkly.

We waited.  The child whined. And waited. The child whinged. We talked about childhood games we played to pass the time in car trips.

“I spy with my little eye,” I said. “Something that begins with ‘b.’”

Sue looked around, bored. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Brat.”

We got the giggles.

“I’m used to it,” Wendy, the headmistress, said as she placidly read her guidebook.

Amongst her other splendid qualities, Wendy also has what Sue called “teacher’s bladder.”  Sue and I need to pee (or wee) every couple hours.

The monorail came round again.  It squeaked and rocked and inched us along through the top of the motor museum.  This operated on me like a well-targeted commercial.  The motor museum might be fun after all.

Wendy and Sue on the toy monorail

At the far end we separated and I went to see the SOE exhibit.  “I’ve got my gas mask right here,” I said indicating the beige colored raincoat bag that was slung over my shoulder.

Earlier when I was waxing large about the significance of the spies on this very estate, Sue had had a glazed look in her eyes.  Now Wendy smiled benevolently.

I thought, “Oh god, I’m acting like someone who talks non-stop about the insides of a car or a computer or about how apps work, not noticing that the other person doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of it.”

The Special Operations Executive museum, Beaulieu

I decided to thrill to my private obsessive experience but to shut up about it. It was a very small exhibit but it was satisfying.  All day as I walked around Beaulieu, I thought, “They were here. Christine Granville, Francis Cammaerts, Nancy Wake, Odette Sansome.  They all trained here and they all left from here.  In the Abbey cloisters is a plaque that reads:

“Remember before God those men and women of the European Resistance Movement who were secretly trained in Beaulieu to fight their lonely battle against Hitler’s Germany and who before entering Nazi-occupied territory here found some measure of the peace for which they fought.”

The Abbey was peaceful. There was some sort of presence there. That wasn’t just my imagination because Wendy felt it, too.

On the Abbey wall, Beaulieu

Wendy at Beaulieu.

We had lunch at the Brabazon Café.  It was one of those confusing buffet lines where I need to jump the queue to see everything before I can make up my mind and then I have to go back and start over.  Wendy and Sue got lasagna with heaps of greens on the side, which they gave to me because though I ordered the 3-salad special, there was nothing green in any of them.  There was a tasteless beetroot salad, a potato salad with mustard seeds all over the potatoes and coleslaw, which had enough dressing to give the beetroot and potatoes some flavor. Sue’s lasagna was all dried up. Wendy placidly ate her juicier lasagna, Sue kvetched about hers and I tried to imagine the machine that would shred beetroot so thin. The last mark against the Brabazon was that if they had had any decaffeinated hot drinks, we would have had to drink them in paper cups.

When we left, we headed for Burnham-on-Sea where I would trade places with Wendy.  She could go home to her bed and I would stay in Pamela’s house for the next 5 days. Near Longleat, another stately home with benefits, we got stuck in a congestion of creeping cars. We inched along for over an hour. Signs along the road read: “Elton John Concert. Turn off your Sat Navs and follow directions.” (Satellite Navigators are what we call Global Positioning Systems.  Much more fun to say “Sat Nav” than “GPS.”)

“What’s he doing at Longleat?” Sue asked. “This area can’t manage this kind of traffic.”

The concert had started at 6:00. At 7:30 we were still crawling.  Again I was amazed at how patient Wendy was.  “It’s all part of the rich tapestry of life,” she said. She says this a lot. I think it’s a coping mechanism. Sue is more like me: we complain. I would have joined her in this case but I was acutely aware that they were taking me 40 minutes out of their way home where five annoyed cats were waiting for their tea.

Wendy was finally able to turn away from the stream of cars and take a different route, one that went through Cheddar Gorge.  I was delighted to see it again and to come through the whole of it. It brought back good memories of being here when Mervyn was alive and Pamela was herself and they had been so good to me.

Cottages at Cheddar Gorge

I woke up the next morning in my old room at the house on Love Lane ready for the second week of my trip.

Motor Museum, Beaulieu

Motor museum, Beaulieu

(This is the fifth in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

Saturday, June 11 arrived.  This was the day I had planned my entire trip around.  The day of the St Leonard’s Church village fete.  We’ve all seen fetes on PBS mini-series: the big hats, the tea tent, local musicians, crying children, a murder or two.

Nobody slept well the night before. It was a muggy night and I was tired from the day in Bristol.  I went up to the church in the morning to have a look at the set up and to meet Raquel, the fete organizer, who had given me a job selling raffle tickets.  She showed me the ticket booth and several people came over to get a look at this specimen of humanity who had enthusiastically volunteered to help.

I went home and fell asleep for two hours, waking to find Sue in her bed with a migraine and three cats.  She said she would come up at 3:00 and do her bit at the book stall.  I left her in bed and went down the drain to the village fete.  (It’s pronounced “fate.”  I’ve been pronouncing it as though I was in French class and have been putting the ostentatious circumflex over the first “e” at great expense to my computer skills.)

Raquel suggested I hit up people in the refreshment tent because they were sitting ducks.  I sat at table after table chatting with people.  Everyone cheerfully bought one, two, ten tickets at a pound each.  Everyone asked me what the big attraction the village fete was to me.

“Was this what you expected?”

“Actually it is although I hadn’t expected the rain”

“It wouldn’t be a proper English fete without rain.”

It wouldn’t be a proper English anything without someone making reference to “a proper” something.

Over and over I explained that we do much the same thing in the States but it’s usually just a bake sale or a book sale or a rummage sale.  We don’t have “tombola.”  I had never heard of a “bottle stall” but I thought it was a brilliant idea: people clean out their cupboards and donate bottles of what they want to get rid of, anything as long as it’s in a bottle: spirits, wine, vinegar, fizzy water.  It has to be at least two thirds full.

Bottle stall

The coconut shy

Then there was the “coconut shy.”  There had been a flap on at the shop earlier because the coconuts hadn’t arrived until the last minute.

We don’t have clay pigeon shooting that I know of.  And we certainly don’t have tours of the church’s 300 year old bell tower.

In the bell tower

I climbed all the way to the top of the tower spurred on by two men who said appreciatively, “Ooh it’s nice to see a woman up here.” They encouraged me to climb right into the bell scaffolding where I took a photo, then promptly dropped my camera.  The battery case flew open and one of the batteries dropped through a bell hole onto the level below.

“Why, it’s a battery,” I heard someone say.

“It’s mine,” I cried in my crass American accent.  “I’m just coming.”  As though I thought someone would pounce on it and not give it back.

I was more or less on the run from my appointed duties because I had muddled the tickets and thought a break was in order.  I’d sold all my tickets and was set to go back for more when I realized I had a book of blank stubs that should have had someone’s name and phone number on it. And I had a set of five coupons that someone else should have had on their person.

“They’re going to fire me,” I moaned to the couple I had been sitting with.

“Oh no, let’s just get this sorted,” the woman—Marilyn—said.

We lined up the numbers on the coupons and I scanned the tent for people who looked familiar.

“I guess I’ll have to go around and try to find people,” I said

Marilyn’s husband waved his hand. “Oh don’t bother,” he said philosophically. “They weren’t going to win anyway!”

That made me laugh.  When I told Wendy and Sue later, Wendy said that whoever didn’t win would probably want to thank me as the first prize was a chance to go glamping five miles down the road.

So I was up in the bell tower in shameful retreat. When I got my camera sorted, I climbed down and went back to the fete in time to hear the village choir. It could have been The OK Chorale at a farmer’s market except they were all women and they had memorized their music.  I enjoyed watching the director.  I knew how she was feeling and what she was thinking.

The all important director

Butleigh women’s choir

Sue and Wendy were there when I got home.  Sue was feeling better and the three of us met Wendy’s sister Joy in Street for a meal at Pizza Express.  It wasn’t what I expected.  When it comes to pizza I am still back in the 70s when pizzas were three inches of  mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce, and oregano.  I got a Caesar salad but when I saw the pizzas, I wish I had gotten one of them instead: thin crust heaped with good looking vegetables.

I have to say something about the food: it’s fabulous.  Vegetables and fruits are fresh and taste like what they are.  Carrots taste like carrots, not like cardboard with a layer of pesticide the way they often do in the States, even the organic ones.  Gluten free is everywhere.  And I can’t say enough about the cakes.  The British really know how to make a cake. Another thing they know how to do is grow strawberries.  I am eating peas from Zimbabwe, tomatoes from Poland and grapes from Egypt. This seems exotic to me.  As well they are all tasty.  But the strawberries are British and there isn’t a dud among them.  Sweet strawberry-tasting strawberries.  I could eat them all day.

On our way back to the car park in Street, Sue and I both got cash from the cash machine in the High street. There were a bunch of noisy males in the street when I was typing in my pin. It rattled me because I hadn’t gotten a fix on why they were being noisy.

“It made me nervous to be getting money with hooligans behind me,” I said as we walked to the car.

“We weren’t going to hurt you,” Sue said wickedly.

Sue and I stayed up talking about British and American holidays and food.   Tomorrow we were driving to Beaulieu in the New Forest in Hampshire.  It’s going to be another big day so get some sleep.

(This is the fourth in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

One of the features of the day I spent in Bristol was that I didn’t have to know anything.  I didn’t have to look at timetables or figure out where stops and stations were.  I didn’t even have to know what time it was.  Sue did it all.

Neighbors David and Marian gave Sue and me a ride to Wells, knocking hours off our travel time.  From Wells we traveled up green hill and down atop a bus to Bristol Temple Meads station.  We followed signposts to a ferry dock for the ferries that run back and forth through the Floating Harbor, a diversion of the River Avon that runs through Bristol. We had just missed a ferry and had a 40 minute wait for the next one, a situation that called for tea.  Feeling peckish, Sue had a snack and I had a meal.

Then we boarded the Matilda ferry and drifted calmly past the city.  It was overcast, warm and muggy but with a cooling breeze.  There was no loud music, no guide yakking at us. We could have been floating on a cloud.  It was heavenly.

Bristol Floating Harbor ferry boat

We disembarked at the SS Great Britain, a 19^th century vessel that sailed all over the world as a passenger and then a cargo ship.  It was built by a man with the unlikely name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  Sue and I wandered through the ship trying to keep ahead of a class of school children.  Neither of us likes to read and inspect everything so we travel well together.  Sue is a photographer; she took photos. I did all the interactive stuff for children.

It really is a beautiful museum with lively information and unusual features such as the rats in the kitchen.  I saw them running back and forth behind a screen and jumped back in alarm.  I stared for a long time trying to fix whether they were actually real.  Even when I saw and heard the mechanical cat poised to catch one, I wasn’t convinced.

“They even have rats in the kitchen,” I said to Sue.

“Well, they would do, wouldn’t they?”

Another snack (me) and meal (Sue) at the SS Great Britain café and we were back on the ferry, this time the Independence, which wasn’t as nice as the Matilda. One of the operators, standing upwind, had quite ripe armpits. Sue called them pongy.

We were both highly entertained by an older woman sitting with her very English-looking husband.  I can’t explain what I mean by that other than to say he looked like someone out of P.G. Wodehouse.  He wore a hearing aide, which I imagine he turns off quite a lot.

“Warehouse apartments,” the woman read off the side of a building. “Now I wonder what that can mean.  I know what warehouses are and I know what apartments are but I wonder what warehouse apartments are.”

I looked idly at the sign.  It did indeed advertise Warehouse Apartments. I closed my eyes and breathed in the freshwater smell.  Like a lake in summer.  A flock of seagulls had congregated over something (probably) disgusting in the water ahead of us.  When our boat interrupted them, they whooshed up and filled the sky over our heads.  I watched their paths as they swirled above us like giant noisy snowflakes.

A small voice interrupted my reverie.

“I don’t imagine I’d want to live in one.  I expect they’re quite small and very expensive.  But how could they be warehouses?  That’s the part I don’t understand.”

I looked at the husband.  He seemed in his own world.  The ferry made a stop.  New people got on.  I asked Sue where we were.  The armpit moved away.  The boat carried on.

“You store things in warehouses.  How would you get an apartment out of that?  I’m sure they’re expensive whatever else they are.”

When we got to Temple Meads, Sue whispered to not let the pongy armpit hand us out of the boat. “We should go to the chemists and get him some deodorant,” she added.

“Give it to him in lieu of a tip.”

Sue asked, “Do you think people find our conversation as boring as that woman who kept going on about the warehouse apartments?”

“Did you hear her, too?” I asked. “First of all, no. I think people find our conversation scintillating.”

“Yes, we raise it to the level of armpits.

“But seriously, what was that about anyway, the business with the warehouse apartments?”

“She obviously couldn’t get her mind around anything other than they were going to be expensive.  Maybe she thought they’d still be full of cartons and boxes!”

“Wherever would she put her teapot?”

We both got the giggles and the warehouse apartments became the joke of the day. As we waited for the bus home, another verbal wanderer was having trouble getting her mind around a sign with the words Expats on the side of a bus.

“If they’re Australians, they can all go home, I says.”

“Ask her if she has a sister,” I whispered to Sue.

Snort.

We missed the last bus home from Street.  Whereas other people might need to call a taxi, we had Wendy who always stops to see Pamela in Glastonbury before she comes home.  We took the bus to Glastonbury.  This contingency plan had been arranged ahead of time and I didn’t have to know anything or be responsible for anything.  It was lovely.

Sue and I went down the road between the two cafes to the Glastonbury Care Home.  Pam had gotten her hair cut the day before and she looked adorable.  When she saw us, she grabbed our hands and wouldn’t let go.

Again her sentences began in English and petered out into something only Pam could understand and even that might be locked away from her. She was fixed on something about England and Monday.  Then Margaret showed up in the verbiage.  Nobody knows who Margaret is.

“It was beautiful!” she enthused.  “And if hick mere mean England she alt pore Monday for Margaret.”

When there was a break, I leaned in and said slowly, “Pam, what’s a warehouse apartment?”

The long day ended when Wendy showed up and we all went to Wirral Plaice for fish and chips.

Warehouse Apartments

(This is the third in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

Glastonbury is a mere 3 ½ miles from Butleigh but it takes two buses to get there. The main road is too dangerous to walk and even if one were to brave it, it would be unpleasant what with cars whizzing around corners and one having to throw oneself into the hedgerows because there is really only one lane and no shoulders.  I needed more than a few days to find the circuitous route of footpaths that might make it possible to walk.  I never got over the frustration of this and as I recall never let go of mentioning it.

So getting to Glastonbury without a car entailed taking a Nippy Bus from Butleigh and changing at Street, which was two miles away.  There are only a few buses that go in and out of Butleigh every day. Prominently on the bus time table is information about the last bus out of Street, critical if one wants to get home the same day.  Sue was much more interested in my making it home by the last bus than she was in finding the footpath scheme to Glastonbury.

So I caught my Nippy bus on Thursday morning and five minutes later I was in Street.  (Before you ask, nobody could explain to me why a town was called Street.) I could have immediately hopped a bus to Glastonbury but I was side-tracked by a county market that was going on at Crispin Hall.  I had to have a wander through and look at everything: jam, vegetables, crafts.

Then I had to wait a good half hour for the next bus. I spent a lot of time staring across the High Street at a bakery called Burns the Bread, thinking how clever the name was and what a shame I didn’t eat wheat.  I chatted with a young mother who deftly changed a diaper and organized formula with one arm holding the baby. I listened to a loquacious woman going on and on about her “hiatus hernia” to a smiling old guy who responded with “Yesyesyesyesyes” just like Trevor Peacock in The Vicar of Dibley.

Finally I was in Glastonbury and I set off with the excellent directions Sue and Wendy had given me to see Pamela in the Glastonbury Care Home.  Get off the bus at the Abbey, turn around, walk down the road between the two cafes.  (Halfway down the road I stopped at the Tea and Chi for a restorative cup.)  Turn right on Garvens Road, cross a highway, turn left on Drum Ave, wind through a little housing estate ending at Pikes Close and there is the care home.

I found Pam.  I was prepared to be shocked but I wasn’t. She has shrunk to about 100 pounds and she’s bed-ridden because her body isn’t cooperating after the stroke. But her energy and her essence are sparkling.  She was astonished to see me, then delighted and affectionate. She grabbed my hand and her grip was strong.

There’s been brain damage but she is slowly making brain connections and getting language back.  We had comical exchanges.  Pam tended to begin every sentence in English and to end in some other language.

“Hi Pamela.  It’s Elena. From America.”

“We went to France and iffen da shento.”

“Yes, you and Mervyn came to Seattle.  The Space Needle. The ferry.”

“The war. My grandmother is foken da hoosh.”

“Yes, there was a war. Tell me about the war.”

“Margaret my grandmother whoosh saken chee.”

“Pamela, remember when I came and we went to Looe?”

“I remember.  I remember what fee ashen.”

The only really lucid thing she said –and she said it three times while clutching my arm—was, “Can you stay all day?” It nearly broke my heart.  I stayed for an hour, promising to come back.

On the walk back into town I stepped into the Glastonbury Music Shop and met the proprietor, Hywel Jenkins. In our first exchange we became mates.

“I’m a music teacher from America and wanted to see what a British music store was like.”

“Where do you live in America?”

“Seattle.”

“Frasier Crane Country.”

We chatted for a long time about teaching music.  It’s a little known fact that the English don’t have quarter notes, half notes and whole notes.  They have crochets, minims and breves. Wouldn’t they just? But it doesn’t end there.  The eighth note is a quaver, a 16^th is a semi-quaver, a 32^nd is a semi-hemi quaver and a 64^th is a semi-hemi-demi-quaver.  I am not making this up.

The conservatories have begun introducing the American terminology because as Hywel said, the English terms may be more imaginative but the American ones actually identify the notes mathematically.   I was sorry to hear that.  I bought a couple of books and Hywel gave me the teacher discount.

I walked to Magdalene Street and found the shop Earth Fare.  I had been charged with buying gluten free pasta if I expected to eat dinner that night.  Later I learned that the English are all over the gluten free thing and there are aisles in chain supermarkets with rows of GF food.  The cakes are especially good; I did an exhaustive study.  Sue bought me a loaf of the best GF bread I’ve ever had; it came from Burns the Bread.

I visited the Abbey ruins. I took my shoes off and walked on the grass.  I was here once before, in 1980.  I have a photo I took of the grave of Arthur.  Glastonbury is one of the many, many places King Arthur is buried in the United Kingdom.

Glastonbury Abbey ruins. The chained area near the center is Arthur’s grave

I got a tarot reading from Katie Player of the Goddess Temple. Tarot readings usually leave me feeling depressed or scared but this was centering and inspiring.   I left feeling glad I had seen Katie but also thinking, “Goodness, money does slip through my fingers.”

I had tea in the Abbey Tea Rooms where Pam, Mervyn, Sue, Wendy and I had a meal last time I was in England.  It was Wendy’s choice.  She has a nose for the best tea rooms. I remember there had been some rowdy football players there and Sue said they were probably “from the north.”  As I was paying I saw my bus pull up across the street and I rushed out, avoided being hit by a car and ran across the street to hop on.

Abbey Tea Rooms

Glastonbury is a tourist’s town.  It draws a lot of wanderers in every sense of the word: drifters, but also seekers.  I think there are posers as well as sincere spiritual pilgrims there.  It’s a maze to negotiate the real from the fake and who even knows where that line is? Street is a regular people’s town.  You can find a laundry, a florist, a chemists, supermarkets, and outlet stores.  Still it was in Glastonbury that I found the music store and visited my cousin in a nursing home.

Both towns really ought to have a clearly marked footpath to Butleigh.

(This is the second in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.)

Butleigh is a small village in Somerset, a county west of London, north of Cornwall.  In previous trips to England I have spent most of my time in Cornwall because that is where I, in a sense, came from.  My great grandfather emigrated from Cornwall and ended up in Walla Walla, Washington where my father was eventually born.

My connection with the now distant relations from Cornwall began for me when my great aunt Ann died in the mid-seventies and I got a hold of her address book.  I found someone called Hazel White who lived in Harrowbarrow, Cornwall.  I wrote to Hazel, then in her mid-70s.  We had been corresponding for several years when I went to visit in 1980 and stayed with her in the little made-over miners’ cottages she had lived in all her life.

During that first visit I met Hazel’s niece Pamela, Pamela’s husband, Mervyn, and their youngest daughter, Wendy, then 16, who lived next door. Fast forward ten years, everyone was still alive and I spent Christmas with them. By the time I visited again twelve years’ later, Hazel had died, Wendy was deputy head of a school and I stayed with Pamela and Mervyn.   Next visit Pamela and Mervyn had moved to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset near Wendy’s school.  When I stayed with them in Somerset I got a better acquainted with Wendy and her longtime chum, Sue. The three of us in this younger generation began to correspond, principally Sue and I.  Mervyn died unexpectedly a few years’ later: Bittersweet.  After all the plans for my trip were settled, Pamela had a stroke and is now ensconced in a nursing home in Glastonbury a few miles from Butleigh.

And then there were three (plus five cats.) But there were only two bedrooms in Butleigh.  The unbelievably gracious arrangement that Sue and Wendy made was for Wendy to sleep at Pamela’s house in Burnham, five minutes from her school, but forty minutes away from her home while I slept in her bedroom in Butleigh.  Sue and Wendy picked me up at the train station at Castle Cary and I slept-walked through that first evening, slept nearly 12 hours that night and awoke to birdsong, tea, and five cats.

Let me get all the introductions out of the way.  Three black cats are Lizzy, Izzy and Seamus.  Tabsy is a tabby and Misty is a long-haired black and white cat.  Seamus remained cautious of me for the duration, Lizzy not quite so much.  Izzy was fearless when she was around at all. Misty got comfortable enough with me to nap on my bed and Tabsy was my great pal probably because he knew I was always good for a salmon cat treat.

That first morning Sue took me on a tour of the village beginning with “going down the drain.”  My expression.  The Drain is the name given to a footpath that gets Sue from the cottage to her job at the village shop.  So down the drain, past the tree on the triangle, turn right, village green and bus stop on the right, Post Office shop on the left.

Going down the Drain

Butleigh Post Office Shop

Carrying on up the street and there’s St Leonard’s, the parish church.  Currently there is a sign on the heavy hardwood studded door that says to keep the door shut because baby birds are nesting in the portico and they might fly into the church and get into mischief.  Actually I added that last bit.

St. Leonard’s Church, Butleigh

Inside the church smells damp (they all do) and is cool and dark (they all are.)  The pews are martyr friendly with their short seats and straight backs.  The seats in the choir stall are more comfortable, which is ironic because singers would sing better with the martyr’s posture.  The pipe organ has been replaced with a loo. I’m a bit torn about that.

Outside the church Sue and I ran into a woman called Jane who was lugging bags of books destined for the book stall at the upcoming fete. She halloed Sue.  Everyone knows Sue except the movie folk who weekend in the manor house up the road and don’t mix with the village.

Jane looked at me but addressed Sue.  “Who’s this then?”

There was a pause. I wasn’t sure if I or Sue was meant to fill it.

Sue said, “You know Wendy who you always call Barbara? This is her relation from America.”

Jane looked at me. “Do you like Alice Munro?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I read her stories and then I can’t remember any of them.”

“Oh.”

And she went on her way.

Sue looked at me. “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?”

I went to work with Sue at noon.  There had been a big delivery the night before (Tuesday) and I flatter myself that I helped unpack it.  I stacked frozen chips and Kelly’s clotted cream ice cream.  I collapsed boxes and put on price stamps.  I mugged behind the register. I bought 35 of the single postcard of Butleigh and 35 stamps. Everyone will get the same card.  It saves me looking through the racks. I discovered Princess brand marshmallows and really wish I hadn’t.  I like the pink ones best.

Sue working at the shop

Elena posing at the shop

When I got hungry, I bought some Mary Beary salad dressing (it’s the best dressing I have ever tasted) and went home to make a salad.  Tabsy was mauling a huge worm next to the rabbit hitch as I unlocked the outer and then the inner door with skeleton keys.   The rabbit hutch used to be used for rabbits but now it’s a little sunroom for storing wood and garden supplies and for drying clothes, much like my own sun room except now I have rabbit hutch envy.

The rabbit hutch

The next morning (Thursday)Seamus scratched relentlessly on my door beginning around 4:00.  I almost got up to let him in. It felt like home.

“He may have jumped into bed with you,” Sue said later. “Or he may have had a pad around and weed on something so it’s just as well you didn’t let him in.”

“A pad around.”  “Weed.” There is something so charming about the way the English use the language.  I am utterly infatuated.

Tabsy had not been mauling a worm, rather a type of lizard called a slow worm.  It looks like a garter snake and it can shed its tail to escape a predator and grow another one. Tabsy had pretty much shipped this slow worm south. When I left for the bus stop on Thursday morning, Lizzy was throwing the head of the now stiff slow worm around the garden.

Next stop, Glastonbury.

Izzy (photo by Sue Cooke)

Lizzy (photo by Sue Cooke)

Misty

Seamus

Tabsy (photo by Sue Cooke)

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I just returned from three weeks in England.  The plan was never to write blog posts while I was there because it takes me four hours to do a decent one and quite frankly I was too busy having fun.  But here is the first installment with many more to come as I attempt to make a wonderful trip last even longer:

The plane from Seattle to London was a dreadful nine hours. What used to be coach is now business class and they have obviously added a lower class called steerage.  That’s where I was.  It was impossible to get comfortable.  I wanted to throw everything I owned off the plane just to make a little room to move.  Every time I reached down to get something–my water, my book, a tissue– it seemed as though some indeterminate bulk of possessions shifted in such a way as to make it impossible to just return to my position without more or less repacking everything.

My back ached the entire nine hours.  There was no pillow propping that helped.  Gwen had loaned me a blow-up foot ottoman and Nancy had loaned me a roll up and scrunch head pillow.  They conspired against me in ruthless ways.

On the plus side I sat next to a dead ringer for Jean Marsh who was just as uncomfortable as I and who expressed her discomfort in her understated British way.  I watched two movies because my pillows would not let me get my book once I had dropped it on the floor.  I only slept three hours because I had forgotten to pack Xanax in my flight bag.  So I had a Scotch.

I was spit though passport control and finally was walking down a corridor.  I passed a currency exchange counter with two idle tellers and a cash machine.  When I put my debit card into the machine, a dial pad of numbers appeared.  I only knew my pin in letters.  I asked the woman at the currency exchange if she could help me but she was decidedly uninterested. It was apparently too much trouble for her to even raise her head and meet my eyes.

Someone who looked American stepped up to the cash machine.  When he got his cash, I asked him if he could help.  Together we figured out what my pin was in letters.  I got my cash and wish I had yelled “THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR HELP” to the currency exchange woman who was picking her nose behind the counter.  I had only just arrived and my sassiness didn’t fully activate until I had been around my friend Sue for 24 hours.

I found my way to the Heathrow Express and got to Paddington station where I took advantage of my first class rail pass to collapse in the first class lounge and get a decent cup of tea.  That lounge has been my first and last port of call to England the last four trips and I appreciate it more and more as I get older.  It’s comfortable and provides water, juices, coffee, tea, fruit, and whatever nibbles the British regard as appropriate to the time of day.  By mid afternoon the choice was between two enormous cakes under glass domes to be cut with a silver cake slicer.

Mike, the attendant to the nobs, was a lovely man who helped me figure out that the train I was planning to take to Castle Cary would not actually get me to Castle Cary.  He found me an earlier one. It was the same train an elderly woman was taking.  Her daughter had brought her to the station and was fussing all over her.  She was worried her mother would get on the wrong train, obviously out of a sense of guilt that she wouldn’t be staying to put her on the correct one.

When we found I was to be on the mother’s train, I said I’d make sure she got the correct train since by now I was reasonably certain I knew what I was doing.  Mike put us both on a buggy and I got a ride to the train platform.  It turned out that Mum needed absolutely no help from anyone and could have done without her daughter treating her like she was a half wit.  She was cheerful about sharing her tumbril with me, though.

“This is really the way to go,” she twinkled.

As soon as I got off the train in Castle Cary, I smelled Cow.  I was in Somerset.  The station master–David–let me use his cell phone to call my cousin Wendy and her longtime friend, Sue who I also think of as my cousin.

“Is it a local call?” he asked.

“I assume so,” I said.  “It’s to Butleigh.”

“That sounds like one of ours,” he said.

I settled in to wait.  So should you.

Great Western Railway Train at Castle Cary

Memorial Day Weekend: a signpost to vacation like pausing my library holds, arranging on-line bill pay, another storm of cottonwood pollen and another Northwest Folk Life Festival for the annals of The OK Chorale.  Our first official appearance at Folk Life, fifteen years ago, was on the Intiman Stage under dramatic lighting and it gave us a rush.

I remember sitting quietly in the green room and feeling assaulted by one of the altos who was on some sort of nervous talking jag.  I remember thinking that as the director, I had a responsibility to stay calm and focused—especially since the last time we sang, a physician in our group suggested I look into getting beta-blockers for myself.  I was floating on a beta-blocker there in the green room and considered offering my second one to the chatty alto.  Instead I told her, “I need some uninterrupted quiet,” a bold, even rude statement for me at the time.

How things have changed.  We never got to sing on the Intiman (now the Cornish) Stage again.  The last statement I ever made to the alto who has now thankfully left our group was, “You could have taken some responsibility for yourself.”  (Pretty good story here)  I no longer need beta-blockers. I don’t get nervous anymore; I get excited.

We’ve sung at the Charlotte Martin Theater where they said they had a piano and it turned out to be an old upright pushed to the edge of the stage apron and impractical for what I needed.  There was a flurry to get to my car, drive to the loading area, and get my keyboard out of the truck. I wafted on like nothing had happened.  That was in the beta-blocker days.

After Intiman, my favorite venue is the stage below what we –back in the 60s–called the “Food Circus” but which now is referred to as the “Center House.”  The stage is officially called “The Armory Theater,” but I call it the Black Box under the Food Circus and no one knows what I mean but I say it anyway because I think they should know by now.  It’s the home of the Seattle Shakespeare Company.  I love seeing Shakespeare performed there and I loved singing there.  The acoustics are exquisite.

The past several years we have sung in the Cornish Courtyard in the open air and the emphasis has been on audience participation.  I love being at the keyboard as I was yesterday with the Chorale on risers above me because I can see their faces and watch them sing.  Another thing that has changed over the years is that we have somehow acquired Pitch and can go a cappella without a downward slide.  I stopped the accompaniment many times and enjoyed what we all created together this quarter.

All Present spring quarter has also ended:  I’m about to begin three weeks in England; something I have looked forward to for six years, ever since I got back the last time. At our last song circle I wished I could take our little group of singers with me.

It’s more than sentiment.  Part of the richness of All Present—to me–is the hovering presence of death.  I get to know the singers who come to All Present and they get into my heart.  It reminds me a little of teaching pre-school.  The folks in All Present have a joie de vivre and an openness that enchant me the way my preschoolers did many years ago.  But little children leave for the great adventure of their lives.

In All Present we watch them decline and then we lose them to hospitals, to memory units, to death.  It can happen so fast. One day they are there, vibrant and smiling and then they don’t come back.  They take something of me when they go and I never know what that will be until they’re gone.

Bob in All Present has dementia.  Two years ago he and his wife Ilana danced at one of our concerts when The OK Chorale and All Present combined to sing “Shall We Dance?”  It was one of the highlights of the show.  Then Ilana’s body almost folded in two from M.S.  She came with Bob using a walker, and then a wheelchair. The two of them propped each other up at home, struggling with their health.

Months passed and Ilana came out of the wheelchair, and then she moved without a walker.  This past week she was steady and light on her feet.  As we sang our way through our songbook we got to “Shall We Dance?” Our last song circle for spring quarter ended with Bob and Ilana dancing together again.

“Shall we then say good night but mean goodbye? .  .  .

On the clear understanding that this kind of thing can happen,

Shall we dance, shall we dance, shall we dance ?

On Intiman Stage, Seattle

Julia, Violet, Midge

Susan with Vivian

Helene, Dennis, Jim, Bill

Gwen (my neighbor who knows something about just about everything) and I went to Costco last week.  We go twice a year and the spring trip is the most important one to me because it’s when I get my cheap vodka to make my raspberry liqueur. I’ll get to that in a moment but first I have to say that I love these excursions with Gwen.

We take Gwen’s Murano.  My Toyota is 21 years old: the driver’s side door handle is broken and in order to unlock the driver’s door I have to crawl in from the rider’s side—so I only lock it in dodgy neighborhoods.  The seat belt recently got so frayed that it got itself permanently stuck so I cut out one of the back seat belts and rigged it up to the front. The trunk leaks. The electric system is screwy and the brake lights come on when I turn on the headlights so until I get that fixed, I can’t drive at night.

None of those things especially affect a trip to Costco on a weekday morning but you can probably imagine that Gwen’s Murano is more comfortable.  Costco opens at 10:00; we leave at 9:45 and get there shortly after it opens.  So do a hundred other people.  We each grab a cart.  We’ve already had the following conversation:

“How much time do you need?”

“Half an hour.  Forty-five minutes at the most. You?”

“Twenty. But you take the time you need.  Did you bring your cell phone this time?”

Once, before I had a cell phone, I asked Gwen if Costco didn’t have a clock.

“A clock,” she said. “How quaint.”

We both take off.  I try to be as single-minded as possible because I can get into a lot of trouble at Costco.  Forty-five minutes is really too long for me.  It gives me time to linger in the candy, liquor, and seasonal aisles.  I get my vodka, toilet paper, jar of avocado oil and bags of frozen chicken. Gwen and I meet at the registers. Gwen pays and while she grinds her coffee beans, I write her a check (A check, how quaint) for the amount of my purchases.

The reason for bringing all this up is that I have a small window–raspberry season—to start my liqueur and this year that season will most likely begin the day I leave and finish the day I get back from my trip to England.  Two of the things on my To Do list involved getting the vodka and then finding someone to strip my raspberry bushes twice, rinse off the berries and plunk them into the alcohol.

It feels like no less than three dozen people need to get into my house while I’m gone. I’ve had to get keys made for everyone. There’s Tim who takes care of the garden.  He’ll be over to water, to stir the compost, and to mulch everything within an inch of its life. Sue will be over to clean the house. Madelaine, who is storing most of her worldly possessions in my back cabin, is moving to her new place when I’m gone and will need to get to her furniture.  The raspberry ladies need access: the aforementioned Sue and my friend Andrea who I go out “drinking” with once a month.  Drinking is in quotes because Andrea has a Rusty Nail and I drink a Scotch.  That’s it.  We call it Drinking.  Or to indicate that we might this time get really wild, we say “Drinky-Poo.”

In addition to supplying my friends with keys, I have concerns about the permanent residents in my house, the cats.  So far I don’t think they know anything is up.  I brought the suitcase down weeks ago and it’s been standing innocuously in the bedroom.  I brought it down mostly for me.  Even when I was a little girl I packed and unpacked and packed again for weeks before the departure date.  But this weekend I think I might open it.  It’s gotten to that point in preparations when it makes more sense to toss something in the suitcase than to write it down on the list of what to pack.  The cats aren’t going to like this phase.

The big trade-off for my cats when I’m away is that they get their cat flap back. When they were younger and could come and go as they liked, they liked to bring wild things into the house.  Inside my house I have caught many birds in my bare hands and set them free.  I have also trapped many a rat, picked it up with a hand covered with two gloves and two plastic bags and deposited it still in the trap into the garbage –all the while screaming.

The deal-breaking incident was the night Winston brought in a huge rat that the cats played with until it was exhausted and wounded but still managed to crawl up the shower curtain and fall into the bathtub where I found it the next morning looking very dead.  I suited up to dispose of it but when I pulled the shower curtain away, it jumped up in fright and ran down the length of the tub.  My scream opened the skylight above my head. Read my full Rodent Incident Report.

After that incident, the cat door was permanently closed and the cats were forced to go through security before they were allowed in the house.  When I am out of town, I re-open their old door so they have some recompense for losing my services as doorman.  My biggest concern about the cats is not that they will bring in wildlife.  For one, they are too old.  Secondly, if we go with the theory that the rodents are gifts to their owners, I’m not going to be around.  My biggest concern is that Winston who is something of a Costco size cat will not be able to get through the cat flap in which case he will drive the house sitter to distraction with his whining, not to mention his leaving Costco size deposits in the litter boxes for her to clean up.

All this cuts into the anticipation of a trip.  Give me enough of this kind of stuff and I start to think, “Well maybe I just won’t go.”  Then I say to myself,  “One of these mornings you’ll wake up and it will be the day you leave for England.  You’ll get on the plane and settle in with your book, your writing, your knitting, your snacks, and all your paraphernalia and if you’re lucky, drive your seat mate to ask for another seat.  You’ll fuss around, eat dinner, take a xanax and pass out until the plane lands at Heathrow.  All this will be behind you.”  Then I take a deep breath and carry on.

Winston, the Costco Cat

I leave for England in less than a month.  I am in the most delicious phase of anticipating the trip, the one where departure is actually in sight.   The next most delicious phase is after you’ve come home and slept a few nights in your own bed. The actual travel is arguably the least fun part. One of the souvenirs of my last visit was sciatica.

It’s not just my age and train wreck of a back.  My former voice and piano student, the young, brilliant, beautiful, and in-shape Anna Ellermeier (remember that name for future world events) who is now in law school at William and Mary has a riff about the glamor of travel. She described to me her trip to England and France after she graduated from high school.  I paraphrase:

“We spent most of the day trying to find something to eat, my stomach bothered me, I didn’t sleep well and when we got to whatever we came to see, I could only stare at it in a sleep fog.  The further away you get from a trip, the better it is.  After six months at home, it’s the most idyllic vacation you’ve ever had.”

This will be my sixth visit to England.  I thought I would never again be able to go.  For one thing, I never thought I’d be able to afford it—and it remains to be seen if I can afford it.  I’ve also wondered how much longer it would be physically feasible.  However  last year I was practically eaten away by envy when two of my closest friends went to England.  I decided that I would somehow make it work: I would go to England.

I remembered a very funny e-mail my cousin in England sent me about her village fête a few years back —something about one of the organizers acting like she was  Queen of the May.  I smelled BBC mini-series.  I was also reminded of a block-watch captain in my neighborhood who took herself way too seriously.

When I found out the Butleigh village fête is in June, I immediately decided I would make my visit in June so I could be part of it.  On June 11 I’ll be selling raffle tickets at the fête and I hope to God that America doesn’t do something so spectacularly stupid on the world stage that the fête organizers won’t let me participate because my American accent would be a deterrent to revenue.

I’ll be in Butleigh for the first week and in Burnham-on-Sea for the second week, where another cousin and a friend from a previous visit live. I’ll fly home after the third week spent in London.  Those first two weeks are mostly about being part of village life although we going to do some touring around on the weekends.  The last week I’ll be a tourist at large in London.  There will be lots to write about when I get home, but currently I am in anticipation of things to come.

The other day I was in my pajamas till noon, absorbed in figuring out how to get from my London hotel to the places I wanted to visit.  I want to stay off the tube this time because I want to see the city as I go along.  It’s disorienting be thrust underground from one end to the other and it seems a waste of a great city.  This means I have to learn the buses and I am doing as much homework as I can.

In all the time I’ve spent in London I have never visited The Tower.  After reading all of Shakespeare’s plays a few summers ago as well as Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (by Hilary Mantel in case you’ve not been on earth recently,) I feel hungry to see this famous place.  I want to approach it from the Thames, though.  I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out if one can just ride a boat on the Thames like a water taxi.  It turns out one can and one might want to look into getting an Oyster card if one wants to be able to afford it.

Before all this was clear to me I had emailed the folks at The Clipper to ask how I could go to the tower the way people did who were to be be-headed.  They wrote back promptly indicating the embarkation stop closest to my hotel. There was no comment about whether or not I could also be be-headed.

I alternate between whirls of activity and paralysis over all there is to think about.  I have a cat/house-sitter and I need to condense all the things I think are important for her to know into a manageable few.  She needs to know the odd way the front room light turns on but she doesn’t need to know where to get a hot water heater in the unlikely event that mine would need replacing while I’m gone. Paralysis has set in even as I write this—because I am writing this– so I am going stop and call my house sitter to make sure I didn’t just imagine her.

Then I need to make the critical decision of what book to take on the plane.

“I’m Wonder Woman!” Susan held out her arms and we hugged.

“Yes, you are!” I enthused.  “What are we talking about?”

I hadn’t seen Susan in three weeks. She’s a longtime friend, indispensable assistant and librarian for All Present; copy editor of my memoir and occasionally of something particularly egregious in one of my blog posts.  And now she’s Wonder Woman.

Susan and her husband Mike had been in Connecticut to move Susan’s 102 year old mother into an assisted living facility.  Cecile had refused to leave her home where she had lived alone—and blind– for the 15 years since her husband died.  Militantly refused.  And she didn’t want anyone living with her either; the aides that managed to visit for more than two days before they were fired are an exclusive lot.  Cecile would have welcomed Susan, but that was a bit of a problem since Susan lives on the other side of the country.  The biannual trips Susan and Mike made to Connecticut were becoming harder for everyone including those of us who had to hear about them.

Susan could have been put up for Daughter of the Year just for getting Cecile moved to a place where she was tentatively content.  But in ten days’ time she also managed to clean out Cecile’s house and sell it!  Let’s all take a moment so those of us with experience with elderly parents can bow our heads in awe at this amazing accomplishment.  And then spend a minute reflecting on the iron will of a redoubtable 102 year old blind woman who could take care of herself, thank you very much.

I know a lot of Susans.  I distinguish the Susan of this essay as the wittiest woman I know.  She’s full of throwaway lines that leave me snickering for weeks.

The oldest of my stories goes back to when Susan was living on Bainbridge Island in a townhouse her kids bought her so she would babysit for them.  They also gave her a cell phone so they could call her when they needed her but she only turned it on when she wanted to use it.  Anyway a bunch of us went over for a house warming.  When I used the bathroom, I spent a little time looking at things in there, you know how you do.  OK, snooping.

When I came out of the bathroom and for no other reason than that I thought I was being funny I said to Susan, “I hope you don’t mind but I used your rubber tip to get something out of my teeth.”

“Oh that’s OK,” she shot back.  “I just use it to clean toe jam.”

Next oldest favorite story:  a bunch of us were talking about yoga.  I had just started a class in Viniyoga as distinguished from Hatha yoga, from Bikram yoga, from hot Bikram yoga.

“Bikram yoga?” Susan interjected.  “It would be faster and cheaper to just lie down in the parking lot and let a truck run over you.”

Susan has a striking pair of earrings: elongated silver leaves that dangle from her ears.  She was wearing them one day when a man came toward her pointing and saying, “Those would make great fish lures!”

“I tried it once,” Susan said. “But I couldn’t hold my breath long enough.”

Since I am posting this on Mothers’ Day weekend it seems appropriate to tell you about a Mothers’ Day card Susan received from her son who I will call Tim.  It read:

“Thank you for letting me push my bulbous head through your lady parts.”

He signed his brothers’ names to it.  I’ll call them Jeff and Brian.  When Jeff saw the card with his name attached, he was appalled.

The next year, in spirit of not fixing what’s not broken, Tim signed his brothers’ names to a Mothers’ Day card that read:

“Thank you for excreting me.”

Susan is a good friend and a fun person to know.  But oh, what I wouldn’t give to have had a mother I could talk to like that!