ASPIRATION: 7 The England That Was

Trans Canada Air Lines DC8

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world.

– Socrates

At Heathrow Airport in London my Aunt and Uncle were waiting to meet me and McClain's were there to meet him. Thus we parted after a flight of just seven hours, he, bound for West Wickham in Kent, and me, for Morden in Surrey.

As I scanned the passing streets of London from a window in the back of my uncle's car in the thin morning sunlight, I was struck by the cramped aspect of the place, its restricted dimensions and its seemingly changeless forms. In Canada, houses, buildings, boundaries – all things made by man in fact – looked more or less recently erected and would in short course be demolished to make way for something newer. But here, the long brick terraces and stone buildings gave the impression that they’d been there long before I'd seen the light of day and would yet be there long after I was gone from the world.

The roof lines to either side of the roadway bordered just a strip of open sky, viewed as if from the bottom of a trench. How could I, product of the vast and lonely prairies, be happy in this dismal-looking place, heavy with the weight of the past, and peopled with innumerable beings? Only a few minutes into my first journey in England, I wondered if I had made a dreadful mistake.

Piccadilly Circus, London, 1964

I wondered about that in the following days, as I wandered about Morden gaping at the shops, the pubs, the park and the quiet little streets lined with their rows of terraced houses behind their moist little plots of shrubs and flowers. I wondered about it as I gazed at the faded paper patterns on the walls of my gloomy bedroom in my grandparents' house where I was offered a room; at the dark wardrobe and dresser fabricated during the last world war; at the dull lampshade suspended from the ceiling by a twist of black wire; and at the ancient bed with its quilted counterpane and sheets that felt clammy when you crawled between them.

I wondered about it too as I watched my grandmother in a room hung with washing, slapping at some article of clothing with an iron she'd heated on a stove, or as I watched my grandfather sunk in his paper by a coal fire that hissed in the grate. And especially did I wonder about it in the evenings when the damp windows gleamed in their frame of thick curtains, and the clock ticked loudly on the mantelpiece.

Morden, Surrey, about 1963

My cousin Terry and I had been in the habit of writing to each other from the age of about twelve or thirteen, and now we became good friends. When he asked what I wanted to do on that first day in England, I said I'd like to go for a walk. Naturally I wished to familiarise myself with my new surroundings, but I also wanted to lay a ghost or two to rest, for I had grown up with several images in my brain that could not have had their origin in Canada.

They were either emanations from dreams or vestigial memories of my early childhood, for I was just three years old when I left England in 1946 with my mother, a war bride, and my brother to join my father in Canada. I asked Terry whether there was a park nearby, for in one of those faded scenes I am in a green open space looking through a tall mesh fence down into a great 'ditch' (I called it), where there is a green train running along a track.

The park proved to be very near, and part of it was situated alongside a railway cutting.

St. Helier to Morden rail line at Green Lane Bridge

In another indistinct image I am on a bridge peering down on the long black roofs of several red-coloured trains. But whenever I had asked my mother to confirm this impression as an infant memory rather than a dream, she’d always replied that trains in England were green, although the Underground ones were red. Well, at length I got down to Morden Underground Station. As Morden was the terminus of the Northern Line, the spare trains were kept there above ground in a large yard – spanned by a footbridge. The trains were red.

End of the Underground Line, Morden

Old houses, old ways, and memories of times past. These were my first impressions. But I soon saw another side of England. After all, this was the era of the 'swinging sixties'. If the air of a spring evening could be heavy and damp in old peoples' homes, it could ring with the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the pubs and clubs. Terry showed me around. On weekends we often set off to visit places of historical interest like Windsor Castle or of scenic attraction like Box Hill.

Box Hill, Surry

And in the evenings we'd frequent a pub or a dance hall. I loved the English pubs right from the very start. They were so intimate and relaxed compared to the noisy, impersonal 'beverage rooms' I had known at home. In England every man who liked a drink, it seemed, had his own 'local', where he was known by the landlord, the staff behind the bar and other patrons of the place, and where he could be found on one or two evenings a week sipping several pints of mild or bitter beer, chatting with his 'mates' and maybe playing a game of darts. It was a sort of home away from home, a kind of workingmen's club. And you never saw any drunkenness or rowdiness there.

The country pubs were the best. Most were very old, sometimes hundreds of years old, with vines clinging to their old stones. They were warm and intimate inside, with floors carpeted in flowery patterns and with low, cream-coloured ceilings trussed with rough beams. In cool weather a fire would throw darting shadows on a stone hearth and reflections of its flames would dance in pans and plates of brass and copper.

In the evenings the most popular pubs would be packed to the rafters with a great crowd of people chatting, laughing, drinking, smoking, and it was with a touch of pride that I learned to stand comfortably shoulder to shoulder among a multitude of others clutching my glass in my left hand and extract my matches and cigarettes from my jacket pockets and light up with my right hand.

English Country Pub

And there was a freedom here I had never known at home. Not only were you allowed to stand in a pub with a drink, as you were most certainly not allowed to do in Manitoba, but you could even walk out the door with it and sip it on the grass beside a neighbouring stream or canal. You might even wander down the road with it without fear of the law! That never ceased to amaze me. After all, hadn't we all been taught at home that Canadians were freer than other peoples? But if you tried to drink beer on public property in Canada, the police or the Mounties would nab you!

Orchid Ballroom, Purley

On a Saturday evening we would often visit a dance hall. There were several of them situated in and around London, but our favourite was the Orchid Ballroom at Purley in Surrey. Well, when I saw that place, I felt I'd been brought up in the back of beyond, far from the delights of civilisation. There was nothing remotely like it in Winnipeg. The dance floor was a polished hardwood arena the size of a hockey rink and suspended above was a false ceiling set with myriads of tiny, coloured lights that glowed like stars in the semi-darkness.

On the periphery there were no less than six bars, done up in different styles. Four of them offered beer and spirits, while a fifth, done up in stained wood, dispensed glasses of wine. There was also a milk bar - which we never entered - styled like a cavern and lit up with a blue glow inside.

Music for the dancing issued from an orchestra seated on a semi-circular stage against a wall, and when the players had finished a stint of half an hour or so, the whole stage – which was in truth circular – revolved like a large wedding cake, and the orchestra swirled out of sight still pounding out their last number, while another company of white jackets and black bow ties whirled into view, horns blaring to beat Jesus.

The Stage at the Orchid was something like this one

Below is a genuine picture of the stage at the Orchid Ballroom, but it must have been taken before the revolving stage was installed.

In later years Jimi Hendrix played here at least once.

On weekends Terry and I sometimes took off for the day in his Ford Anglia, for I had immediately conceived a great love of the English countryside. A great peace seemed settled upon it. The hard, level horizon of Manitoba, its glassy skies, its sweltering heat in summer - not to mention its swarming evening mosquitoes! - and its aching cold in winter were invasive. But the climate of England was kinder, and the rounded contours of the countryside and its soft misty skies seemed to close you in and enfold you and breathe upon you a warm easy peace recalling scenes in children's storybooks.

I liked the courtesy and good manners commonly shown by English people. You would witness this at shop counters, in pubs or at bus stops where people always formed themselves into orderly queues to go about their business. Getting served in a Winnipeg store was largely a matter of attracting the assistant's notice, but boarding a bus in rush hour was to be swept through its doorway like a leaf in a stream.

It seemed that the little niceties that grease the grooves of social intercourse were given greater emphasis here, like saying 'Sorry!' when you collided with someone. I was astonished once in a pub when I accidentally trod on someone's toe. In Winnipeg you would have got a dirty look at the very least, but here the victim merely said 'Sorry!' to me!

Of course I had to learn these little courtesies if I wished to be accepted, and I had to learn too the thousand and one other little signs and gestures used to avoid embarrassment and conflict in any region of the earth where numbers are large and space is small. Terry proved an avid and able teacher to his cousin from the backwoods, often correcting unEnglish-like behaviour on my part – all very courteously of course – whenever I offended against the social canon.

I'm sure he thought me very ignorant at the time, which surely I was, for I had no way of knowing about English niceties before arriving in the country. It is probable too that I resisted his efforts somewhat, perhaps seeing in some of them a misguided attempt to tame a free and independent spirit. But in the end I came to view all the little civilities of English life as a kind of safety mechanism devised by social evolution to lessen the inevitable friction engendered between people compelled to live and work so closely together.

Another appealing feature of English life was the widespread probity shown by people in everyday affairs. There was a widely-shared premise that, on the whole, people could be trusted to behave decently. On a bus, for instance, it was up to you to make sure you paid a fare, and not the 'conductor', who merely sold tickets to people who signalled their need for one. To be sure, there was always the chance that a ticket inspector might come aboard, but how likely was that on, say, a six-penny ride? People were trusted to pay and they did.

It seemed to me too that English people had a greater respect for the law than did their Canadian counterparts. Canadians obeyed laws because they were compelled to do so, but the English seemed to have a real reverence for the laws of the land, though some laws, I may say, were more honoured in the breach than in the observance. In Canada there were far fewer laws to obey, but all were strictly enforced, whereas in England some laws were just too impractical to be generally enforced. It is, for example, against the law to park a vehicle wholly or in part upon a public footway in England, but show me a street in the land where that law is not broken on every single day of the year!

One thing I disliked about the country was the grip that bureaucracy had on the national life. It seemed impossible to conduct any kind of official business without considerable form-filling and applications for approval in duplicate. Allied to that was the poor service and sheer inefficiency that one came to expect from both public and private bodies. This irritated me at first, until I saw an unexpected benefit even there. When I eventually got a job in England, nobody expected me to be particularly efficient either! You were not owned by your employer like you were in Canada.

These observations took many months to accumulate, and it was not really until I had become settled in a job and was established in my own 'bedsitter' that these kinds of perspectives began to crystallise from the ceaseless flow of new and sometimes puzzling images. However, my most constant thoughts at the time were for Suzanne, who was now just about 400 miles away from me instead of more than 4000!