A word of
explanation. I am reading a wonderful
book entitled “How to Craft the Personal Essay,” by essayist Dinty W.
Moore. It has writing exercises, so I’ve
been writing different sorts of things than my usual religious reflections and
poetry. Of course, part of being a
writer is wanting to rush out and push the fresh pages of a new manuscript into
the hands of any possible reader, and then going home to cower in one’s room,
terrified that the chosen victim might actually read what you’ve given her and,
worse, tell you what she thinks of it. A
blog is the perfect solution. You don’t
have to read the “pages,” and I don’t have to watch you do it. So the fruits of some of these exercises,
including this one, will appear now and again in this blog.
Once my family lived in paradise, for about six weeks.
My parents probably didn’t recognize it as paradise. Its name was not Eden but the Berystede. It boasted many trees, but none of them bore
apples. We never saw a snake in one
either. The Berystede was a small
British hotel inhabited largely by English stereotypes, staffed by men and
women from Wodehouse, and planted inconspicuously along a quiet road in the
village of Sunninghill in Berkshire. The
year was 1955.
My parents’ view of it was likely colored by jetlag. We moved in straight from endless days of
fighting off mosquitoes in Texas (me), looking in vain for famous tennis
players at the Forest Hills Inn in New York (my mother), getting locked in a
restroom on an eternal flight to Paris (me again), touring Paris in a
French-speaking taxi to the accompaniment of drunken warbling (my baby sister,
to whom they had given red wine for lunch at the Pan Am commissary for want of
drinkable water or milk), and being driven in a stupor from the London airport
(all of us).
My parents also likely failed to recognize the heavenly
aspects of the day-to-day management of
three small children, ages 1, 8 and 10, in a hotel normally undisturbed by the small
boisterousness of that species. Actually, most of the boisterousness emanated
from my eight-year-old brother, John,
who born a fearless explorer of a fascinating universe. He talked to everyone. He asked questions about everything. He investigated anything he could reach with
his fingers, and sometimes with other appurtenances. (He distinguished himself in later life by getting
his knee stuck in the gutter that rimmed a public swimming pool, requiring rescue
by a bemused life guard.) The elevator operator became his special friend. The man wore a dark uniform and had magic
powers. He could make the elevator doors
open and close. He could drive the
little box at will up and down the three floors of the hotel. He could call out the number of the floor as
we arrived there. (It can’t have been too difficult. There were only three.) We had never seen an
elevator before, that I recall. Unlike my brother, I , hobbled and starched by shyness, did my usual best to make myself invisible. (I’m
sure J.K Rowling got the idea for Harry’s cloak from me, or would have if she
had known me as a child.) I confined my boisterousness to our rooms,
where I whined that I was bored, socked my brother just for the heck of it, and
generally exhibited the restlessness of a child confined by her mother’s fear
of seeing disapproval on all those staid British faces if her children did not
obey the rules.
We mostly didn’t know the rules, of course. To us, it was England, not our homeland, that
was the New World. We had just been
plucked out of our northern California home and dropped there by my father’s
decision to use his seniority with Pan American Airways to bid for an open spot
at the London station. We had put in
weary months of expectation, preparation and trepidation. The preparation consisted mostly of my parents’
teaching us British vocabulary gleaned, I suspect, from novels, and of breaking it to us that they didn’t
celebrate the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving in England. John was found in tears one day, sobbing that
he didn’t want to go to England, because he didn’t know how to speak English.
And we wondered nervously if the English celebrated Christmas.
Once arrived, we quickly learned that this place did indeed
have a whole new set of rules, besides the familiar ones like saying “Please”
and “Thank you.” We learned that we were
not supposed to ask loudly and suspiciously “What is that?” in the dining room, wonder where they kept the comics, or
run down the carpeted halls and staircases and into other hotel guests, most of
them at least middle aged. I don’t
remember if John ever tried to slide down the bannisters, but I’m sure he
thought of it. His only previous
experience of bannisters had been catching his head in one when he was
three. We lived in a two-story house
then. He had poked his head
experimentally between the railings and then discovered he could not remove
it. It had taken quite some time and a
lot of loud noise for him to grow tired of standing and sit down to rest. His head then popped out of its trap. He had inserted it while sitting down and
then stood up. The opening was wider at
the bottom than the top. My mother had
never noticed that. One had to notice
things, with John.
Indoors—and this was England in early
spring, so we were often indoors—we soon tired of the two or three rooms we
lived in, the unfamiliar board and card and paper games my desperate parents
supplied us with, and the confinement.
My recollection of those hazy weeks is tinged with pinkish walls, heavy
carpets, thick air, and inactivity.
Though I probably repeated loudly and often my mantra, “Mommy, there’s
nothing to do!”, what I really
yearned for was something to read. Story
books. I’m not sure anyone yet
understood that about me. I’m not sure I
understood it myself, that deep, unquenchable hunger and thirst for anything
narrative. My father certainly grasped
it soon and kept me well supplied once we had moved out of the Berystede into
the house on Coombe Lane and he had discovered the cheap English-language
bookstores in Beirut.
However, when I was five, my
grandmother’s radio and the enchanting novelty of our first television had
taught me that if you run out stories
around you, you can just make up your own in the space behind your eyes. This was where the Berystede became our Eden,
John’s and mine. We had grown up in the
pocket handkerchief yards of San Francisco Bay Area suburbia. Here we were surrounded by acres of green
mystery where no one saw or scolded us.
We could hide in the clusters of bushes, run across the expanses of
lawn, long to climb trees we were as yet too small to aspire to. Mostly we used this heaven as a backdrop for
the stories we made up and acted. I did
most of the inventing and directing then.
Look for me in Jo March.
Although I think we created it on
Coombe Lane rather than at the Berystede, the longest playing story we shared
in our English years was called “Jim and Mary,” as in, “Let’s play Jim and
Mary.” The choice of Jim and Mary was
dictated by the size of the cast at our disposal. Our little sister still too small to be usefully
conscripted into any of our dramas. Jim
and Mary were a married couple because we didn’t know of any other way for a
male and female character to go adventuring together. We had never read any stories of brothers and
sisters taking to the jungle (where I distinctly remember riding down the river
on the African Queen, though I can’t have seen that movie till years later) the forest (Sherwood, where we sometimes
became Robin and Maid Marian once we had heard those stories), desert islands
(where we sometimes played the Swiss Family Robinson or Robinson
Crusoe and Friday), and any other venues that captured our fancy.
We did add other stories to our
collection of scripts later. Indoors, we
often played house under a blanked spread over the card table, or we played
pilot and air traffic controller amid a spread of papers. My father regularly had to update his heavy
flight manuals, whereupon he donated all the outdated pages to our prop
collection. He also taught us to read
them, after a manner of speaking. I remember
specially how tricky was the approach to
the Hong Kong airport—which couldn’t have appeared in those manuals, now that I
think of it, because Daddy flew through Europe and the Middle East from
London. Hong Kong had been on his San
Francisco route. I was always the air traffic controller in our various scenarios,
routine or emergency, and John was always the pilot. When my father taught me the principles of
aerodynamics, I told him I wanted to be a pilot when I grew up. I meant, of course, a commercial airline
pilot just like him. He broke it to me
then that girls could not be pilots. When I was older, he added to this
conversation, “You can’t even learn to drive a car. (which was true—I was a
terrified flop at Driver’s Ed) How could
you possibly learn to fly an airplane?” So I learned when I was ten to settle for the
role of air traffic controller instead.
I doubt there were any women air traffic controllers either, but Daddy
was kind enough not to tell me that.
To my surprise, Google informs me
that the Berystede is still alive and well and
living in Sunninghill these nearly sixty years later. The staid and stuffy comfort it offered us is long gone. It has become the “Macdonald Berystede Hotel
and Spa, Sunninghill, Ascot, near Windsor.”
The new Berystede boasts “contemporary design, secluded gardens and
gated entry, 126 individually-styled luxury bedrooms, AA Rosette Restaurant with roof terrace” and
“luxury spa with outdoor hydro pool.” In
England? The only warm summer I remember
there was in 1955.
Even the address has changed,
though the building seems not to have moved.
Sunninghill is not and never has been in Ascot, but whoever heard of
Sunninghill? Even in 1955, the official
mailing address of the house on Coombe Lane was “Sunninghill, nr. South Ascot.” The postal service felt no need to mention
Windsor. Ascot was famous enough in its own right as the home of the Ascot race
course, scene of the famous Royal Ascot Week, when Royalty and Society gathered
in flowered dresses and morning coats to gossip, sip tea (or, I suspect,
something stronger) and occasionally watch the horses run.
Neither Sunninghill nor Ascot was anywhere
near Windsor in those days. Windsor was
six miles away. Driving there from
Sunninghill for shopping was a major expedition undertaken only for the most
important items. The local population of
Sunninghill was horrified when my mother took her laundry to the laundromat in
far away Camberley until we got a washing machine, and Camberley was only five
miles from Sunninghill.
According to the web, the years
have banished the flavor and the character and the children from the Berystede.
The gates have slammed shut behind us,
and we can never now go back. I don’t really want to. Sometimes Eden is better remembered than
inhabited. In the paradises of the mind,
there are neither apple trees nor serpents but only faded daguerreotypes of
innocence playing Jim and Mary among the trees in forests long ago and far
away.
Copyright 2012, Abbey of St.
Walburga
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