England Vacation - St. Anne's and sub-street shenanigans

Vacation, continued...

St. Anne's Church, Limehouse

Although I didn’t go back to the Isle of Dogs, where I once lived, we did visit Limehouse, because I wanted to visit St. Anne’s, the Hawksmoor church that is a companion to Christ Church Spitalfields. We took the legendary 277 bus, proudly tapping our Oystercards to the ticket reader as if to the manor born.

When I lived on the Island, I used to catch the 277 at Mile End. There were two kinds: one that went all the way around the Isle of Dogs and one that used to terminate half-way there, at Limehouse. I was sitting on a wall minding my own business one day when a bus came along. I got up to get on and the woman in front of me said, with extreme disdain, "Fack! Loim Arse!"

I was so taken with this inscrutable outburst that I rolled it around in my mind for a while and it wasn't until the bus terminated at Limehouse and threw us all off that I realized she had said, in East London-ese, "Oh, dear! This one only goes to Limehouse!"

St. Anne's Church, Limehouse

The bus we took this day was going around the Island, but we only went as far as Limehouse. 

I hadn’t realized St. Anne’s Church had been derelict for so long. There’s a movement to repair the roof and otherwise patch it up but it looks like it needs much more money than the few visitors a day it might get. The organ has been restored, along with the stained glass of the east window. An enthusiastic volunteer told us that there are more repairs in the works. I find it hard to believe that a country would let Hawksmoor churches melt away for lack of upkeep, but it does. (Today I heard that the government is reducing the money it spends on church upkeep, which sounds like it makes sense – the Church of England has plenty of money – but in the case of these architectural treasures, it seems churlish to let them decay.

Restored Stained Glass

Damp and water damage inside St. Anne's

St. Anne’s, Limehouse is famous – at least to me – for a mysterious monument in the churchyard. For no adequately explained reason, there’s a stone pyramid sitting in the graveyard. It’s tall and thin, the sides at the wrong angle for an Egyptian pyramid. It bears a carving, now eaten away, and the words “The Wisdom of Solomon.”  Theories abound – was it built by the Freemasons? Placed here by the Illuminati? Is there treasure underneath it? The enthusiastic guide told us it was probably part of the roof decoration that just never got hauled up there and was left dumped in the yard. He sounded like he’d had to fend off quite a few “Is it Satanist? Occult paraphernalia?” questions over the years.  I told him I remembered hearing the peacocks calling in the churchyard when I lived nearby and he looked startled, which made me doubt my own memory.

Three views of St. Anne's Pyramid

Charing Cross Road - the grate

We paid special attention to Soho. I’d always wanted to visit a particular grate in the middle of Charing Cross Road, where you can lie down and peer at a road sign several feet below ground. Little Compton Street. And so you can. I attempted to photograph it, but unlike an old-fashioned phone lens, a cellphone doesn’t fit between the bars of the grate, so the snaps are not impressive. Still, I’ve seen it now – it does exist.

Little Compton Street sign visible below street level, Charing Cross Road

 We were delighted to see that one place we remembered well was neither closed nor demolished. The Wong Kei.  It was the same as we remembered, though the waiters were at least 79% less rude than they used to be. And it didn’t take credit cards, the only place in England that didn’t. There was a cashpoint nearby, but Soho seems to have only one and this meant there was at least three hundred people in line, none of whom read English, or had brought the correct card, or remembered their password. I got fifty pounds out, realized it would not be enough and queued up again. Eventually we started our first Wong Kei meal in thirty five years. Mmm proper British (Chinese) duck! However, I’d forgotten that tax is included in the UK and tips are optional so it actually came to forty eight pounds, so hello bank I’d like my $7 in transaction fees for the second withdrawal returned, please and thank you.

Vacation to be continued...

Moving on: Southern Californians brave London's Mean Streets

 Holiday part III:

We went into London proper to recap the true London tourist experience. Both of us lived there for a decade or so in the seventies and eighties and got into that rut where you -could- go to the theater or a club or a museum every day, but since you live there you just -don’t-. We had about 24 hours over three days to rectify this situation. Luckily, they’ve invented the Oystercard, which is a credit-card sized ticket that you fill with skrilla at a machine and then rub it against ticket turnstiles on just about any form of transport. I bought fifty pounds worth of Oysters and by the end of the trip had just about spent it all. (The remainder stays in the card for the next visit, however long that may be.)

Speaking of moolah, I was very keen to find a bank or Cambio to get my hands on British money, but I was told I didn’t need it, because everyone takes credit cards from everywhere, even if you’re buying a newspaper or a bar of chocolate. This last part turned out to be true. (In the US, there’s often a ≥$5 limit on credit transactions, as no one wants to pay the fees if you’re just buying a pack of gum. Not the case in England, with only one exception on this trip.)

Our first trip took us to Central London, which was exactly the same as when we lived there thirty years ago. Oxford Street, Regent Street, Lions in Trafalgar Square, all the business. Christmas lights, conmen, fake Rolexes and people drawing huge crowds by doing “magic tricks” which had ten-minute build ups and unimpressive finales. It was absolutely rammed with people, all of whom trod on the back of my heel at one point or another. I'm short but in this crowd I was completely invisible. 

Oddly, Trafalgar Square was the least packed part of London.

We went to Foyle’s, the giant bookstore. Stephen predicted that they’d still have the same Edwardian payment system they had in our college years. In the olden days, you would find a book somewhere in the acres of dim, unmarked aisles, and take it to a counter where a young man in a three-piece suit wrote you an invoice. You then went up several floors in an elephant-powered brass birdcage elevator to a musty room in the attic where a Gringott’s Goblin behind three-inch thick bullet-proof glass read your invoice disapprovingly through tiny pince-nez, took your money in Gold Doubloons, sent the coins through pneumatic tubes to a Safe Place Elsewhere and issued a hand-written pink and yellow two-part receipt. You would then walk around for a few hours attempting to find your selected book again. On locating it, you would swap the pink receipt for the physical book. You could then take the book outside the store along with the goldenrod part of the receipt. At least, I think that’s how it went.

But Stephen was wrong. Nowadays they take credit cards at several cash registers, and you can pick up a book from a shelf that is not in semi-darkness and actually buy it. Oddly, we didn’t buy any books on our visit.  Business probably dropped off precipitously when they dismantled the old Diagon Alley system.

We visited our old university, now known as Queen Mary University of London. It is a great deal bigger than it was in our day, but since it was closed, there was no way to know if there was anything inside the new buildings. I assume there is. The People’s Palace, an entertainment venue built in Victorian Times, remains unchanged. I saw a number of terrific bands there when I was a student and I hope that tradition is continuing.

On emerging from the complex, we were startled to see that the City of London, at least the gigantic towers thereof, were far closer to Mile End than they used to be. Looming in the winter mist, they looked like a mirage of some Gernsback Continuum future, just out of reach. Mile End itself was the same – doss houses and pubs.

View of City from Mile End sidewalk

As the city has crept closer, it brought with it a little variety in the eateries, so we had handmade noodles at Biang Biang one lunchtime. Just a few yards from once-derelict Christ Church, Spitalfields and the garment sweatshops of the olden times (both still here) the eatery is in the shadow of the Gherkin.  We also climbed the Monument (to the Great Fire of London), another thing I hadn’t done while I lived there, and spent an afternoon in the Tate Modern. The Millenium footbridge was new to me, as was its startling view of St. Paul’s Cathedral (closed).

The Monument to the Great Fire of London

The Shard as seen from the Millennium Bridge

St. Paul's seen from the Millennium Bridge

The front of Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields.
Those blasted coin-operated bicycles are everywhere.

View of Christ Church's side from the gardens,
showing the window arrangement

Two grave markers in Christ Church gardens,
now moved against a new building

I wrote a story recently that included a lot of Spitalfields' history, and has some details about Christ Church's garden and the removed graves. I was very privileged to get a chance to verify the details 'on the ground' so to speak. I did get 'creative' about the trees in the yard, but was pleased to see that they more or less correspond with what I wrote.  I used Google Street View when writing the story, an incredible resource but no match for being able to check sight lines yourself. 

More vacation to come...

After Christmas in England, peacocks in Tring

England vacation part II: 

After leaving our families and their Christmas cheer, I was treated to a return match for Batley, its Beck and its Zion Chapel: a visit to the places Stephen grew up. We stayed at Pendley Manor in Tring, Herts.

I’ve always wanted to revisit Tring. Its sheer commuter-beltiness has called to me ever since a trip in the early seventies. My parents had friends called Elsie and Somebody-or-other, who, on leaving the Peak-climbing, folk-singing clique Up North that my parents frequented, settled in Tring. 

I was a kid, and didn’t remember any of the town. I did remember that it had a pub, and that in the evening, my parents prepared to vanish into it with Elsie and Somebody-or-other.

“Will you be okay by yourself?” Somebody-or-other asked me.

“Of course. I’ve found a book to read in your bookcase,” I piped in my pre-teen voice.

“What have you got?” Elsie asked.

I showed her the cover. “The History of Bondage,” I replied.

Looks were exchanged, but no one took it off me, and by the time they returned, pissed, I was fully up to speed on the history of bondage.

This was the same visit when Elsie put a tune on the gramophone. “Air on a G String,” she declared.

“Hair on a G-string?” I inquired.

“Oh, you’ll never know what a funny thing you’ve just said,” Somebody-or-other laughed. 

I do though, and you’d think my picking "History of Bondage" for an evening’s reading would have clued them in on that.

I’m more than fifty years older now, and on arriving in Tring found that there was little in the way of overt bondage, though Stephen did inform me that Hertfordshire was the English capital of wife-swapping. (I did notice more than one garden with pampas grass on the lawn, as it happens.) It was frightfully cold. We don't know how cold because the natives in England use a different set of units for measuring temperature. Pretty darn cold, though.

Pendley Manor

Pendley Manor is a redbrick manor house converted to a business retreat, and the ghosts of PowerPoint Presentations Past were observed haunting the corridors and trying to obtain massages at the spa. Apart from the businessman-shaped voids which no doubt would be occupied again in the high season, the most interesting part of Pendley Manor was the flock of peacocks. As well as hanging about on the lawn showing off their tails, they sat on the wall overlooking the kitchen/bar yard waiting for food scraps or perhaps for someone to spill a keg of beer.

Pendley Manor Peacocks

From the manor, we drove the tiny, paper-thin roads of Southern England to Tring Natural History Museum, which is world famous for its incredible collection of stuffed animals. And beetles, wasps, ants etc. which are not, I’m told, stuffed, just mounted as is. Collected by the sort of person earnest young women write sepia-covered paperbacks about, Walter Rothschild, it truly is an outstanding collection of things, from sharks to champion greyhounds to my favorite animal, the Greater Bilby.

A Greater Bilby (deceased)

Stuffed Dodo, Natural History Museum, Tring

Another view of a Dodo

Then it was back on the road to visit Stephen’s childhood places in Chorleywood, Croxley Green, Watford and Rickmansworth, of which I had heard so much.  We had breakfast at Watford's best breakfast point inside Oxhey activity park alongside the river Colne – a full English. 

I don’t know why English people call English breakfasts an English Breakfast. It reminds me of a conversation I had with an American about the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Kinks, Gerry and the Pacemakers und so weiter... I called them "British Invasion" bands and he said, "Do you really call it that in England?" I asked what else we'd call it and it transpired he thought they would just be "Invasion" bands. I understand why he thought that, but he was clearly no marketing genius. 

At day’s end, we stayed at a hotel in Harrow-on-the-Hill, though neither of us could remember why we’d picked that one. I have no photos of Harrow-on-the-Hill and that wasn't an oversight on my part.

More vacation to come...

M62 Memories: A Southern Californian’s Christmas in Yorkshire

 I spent Christmas in England and Wales and the next week in Paris and Amsterdam, so the next few entries are memories and photos. 

Stephen and I landed at Manchester airport after an uneventful flight – except for hours of searing agony in my restless leg – and immediately picked up a car, attempted to determine what side of the road to drive on and set off for York.

The M62 to York took us to the outskirts of Batley, my home town, so we turned off the motorway and pulled in for a bite at Tesco’s (only the very best for us). I had long wanted to a look at Batley Beck where it runs above ground near Iceland. (Not the country, the superstore.) I found that several short stretches of the beck, inside high walls, ran between the Bus Station and Branch Road where it meets Bradford Road. If I’d been twenty years younger, I would have jumped down into the stream bed to follow it into the tunnels, but I’m not and I didn’t. Much more about Batley Beck to come, I assure you!

Batley Beck behind Bus Station

It was half-past freezing in England. We are both used to the temperate Southern California weather. We knew that Batley, at 53.7 degrees north, would be a little colder but the glacier-like grinding cold dropping down my collar was unprecedented. I’d brought an ancient wool overcoat and a thick scarf. S. had brought a gaberdine and a Russian-style hat with ear flaps and a Tuva badge.

We quickly toured the site of the now-demolished maternity home on Bradford Road, the now demolished Boston House Flat on Zion Street and council house on Wilton Street), and the maisonette on Commercial Street, still there. We passed where my parents’ short-lived businesses were, on the corner of Henrietta Street, now demolished.

My drawing of (now demolished) corner of Henrietta Street
and Commercial Street

Stephen took everything in good humor, even when I insisted on going to Howie’s Fish and Chip shop, which was undemolished but closed. I have had many a fish and chips twice with bits from Howie's, but we were not able to reprise the event this trip. (And possibly never - there is a tiny 'for sale' sign in the window.) We had pastries from Charnock’s, not only undemolished but also not closed for the holidays. English pastries were a feature of this vacation. Having grown used to American ones, I’d forgotten what hand-made, reasonably-sweet pastries could be like.

Howie's, December 2024

We took the car back out on the minuscule one-car-wide roads and drove on to York. We parked in a Park and Ride (and downloaded our first parking app of about thirty), then walked to our creatively hidden hotel in Judges Court (which, once located, was great). We spent the next day in York, which was closed, the Christmas Market having packed up the day before and everything else being just averagely closed.

York guardians

York Minster Angel

York Minster Angel

York Minster Queen Elizabeth in stone

We did all the outside things, though. We went to the city wall and walked around it, to York Minster (closed), took a photo op with Paddington Bear (not sure why he was in York), the various ruins, Cliffords Tower (closed), lunch at a tiny hipster joint whose name I’ve forgotten where we two stout people and our food were allocated four square feet that teetered a few inches from the top of a flight of stairs. We finished with a jolly good walk around the place. We were further fueled by coffee from Caffe Nero, because Stephen warned me off Gregg’s. (Apparently just because it’s ubiquitous, it isn’t always the best…but this means I’ve still never been to a Gregg’s.)

York Wall Walk

I think this map of York walls has been here since
my last visit in 1965

We then hared off to my brother’s near Middlesbrough, a few more miles on the M62 and then on the A19. Or could have been the A1(M). British people memorize strings of road numbers and reel them off at the slightest provocation, but I got out of the habit in the US and it didn’t really come back to me on this trip.

Me and Paddington Bear observe York Minster

It was nice to have a warm bed and be with family for Christmas. And boy, was there a lot of family there! I’m not sure how our host and hostess managed to keep up with everyone, but a great couple of days was had by all.

More holiday to come...

Interzone #300 - Don’t you want to buy this issue immediately?

 A lovely write-up of Interzone #300 from Jonathan Laidlaw on The Supernova Short Fiction Review

including these kind words about my story, "Swim With the Space Whales." 

Lyle Hopwood’s story is a fun twisty-turny future noir, and it has talking whales. Don’t you want to buy this issue immediately? It strikes just the right note of absurdity, and sticks to the rules of the genre except when it chooses to break them in entertaining ways. 

As he says later, the best way to encourage short fiction is to subscribe and read.