Francie: Off to London

by Emily Hahn

  Francie went down to the salon for breakfast. All around her she heard travelers making the same joking remarks about austerity, and talking about how much they were going to eat for the last meal: eggs, and waffles, and plenty of butter and sugar. She found Pop at their table, already halfway through his breakfast.

  “Sit down, honey, and be sure you eat enough,” he said. “Your last chance, remember.”

  Francie sat down opposite him and stared at the menu without reading it. “I don’t think I could eat a thing,” she said.

  It was all a queer mixture. Francie found she couldn’t put it down neatly arranged in a descriptive letter, though she had promised Ruth and Glenn to tell them every single thing she thought about England as soon as she’d looked it over. How could one describe the jumble England was? Many things were exactly like what she’d expected, but they didn’t separate themselves from the rest. A modern tobacco store was housed in an eighteenth-century bow-windowed cottage, right bang in the middle of a wide thoroughfare in the middle of London. An old woman wearing a peasant’s broad-brimmed sort of hat sold flowers at the door of the American-looking department store called Selfridge’s. Francie was always being reminded of movies or plays she had seen about England’s history, and of Dickens’ books where there were lots of illustrations, but between these moments there were other glimpses of an ugly industrial country she’d never expected to find.

  The first time she saw a policeman in a helmet she clapped her hands and cried to Pop, “Look, just like the pictures!” A moment later their taxi swept them into the district of Camden Town where they rode past long dreary streets of depressing sooty little houses all joined together. “Is this London?” she demanded in disgust and disappointment. “Oh, it’s horrid. So dull!”

  “No worse than some of our slums, in fact not as bad, but you’ve just not bothered to look around in New York,” said Pop. “Now then, it’s not so bad, is it?”

  Looking at the terraces at Regent’s Park, Francie was appeased. Those gracious curves and crescents and the lake winding through the Park were better than any pictures or movies. Suddenly they came to a great gap in the buildings, where a bomb had done terrific damage. Half-destroyed walls and smoke-blackened empty window frames marred the lovely picture.

  “It will be a long time before they can rebuild that,” said Pop, shaking his head. Francie was too appalled to speak.

  Before Pop dived into his work he spared a few days to go sightseeing with his daughter. They visited St. Paul’s and Kew Gardens, and found their way to Rye.

  “You’d think we were living in some other century,” said Francie as they walked down a twisting, hilly, cobbled street between black-and-white cottages. “Queer, to think people just go on living in these museum pieces.”

  The weather behaved itself during the first days, but one morning they found the street swirling with thick white mist, and Francie thought it might be the famous London fog. “No,” said Pop, “this isn’t a real old-fashioned pea-souper. I was just asking the clerk. He says you don’t get many of those any more, where you can’t see where to put your foot next. Once in a while it happens, but not so much. This damp gets into your bones, doesn’t it, chicken?”

  Walking with Pop down Bond Street, Francie agreed absently, and turned to stare after two women who had just passed them in that famous district where everyone was supposed to be smartly dressed. The women, she reflected, looked simply weird in their old-fashioned tweed coats and their hats like Boy Scout headgear, trimmed with birds’ wings. Yet they seemed quite satisfied with themselves. They were obviously confident they looked nice. “I wonder what it feels like,” thought Francie for the first time, “not to be an American.”

  The fleeting wonder came back to her now and again. She marveled when she saw crowds gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace, patiently standing for hours, hoping for a glimpse of some member of the royal family. The Palace itself seemed imposing enough; it resembled a great central public library. But the simple, eager curiosity of the people puzzled her. “I’d like to see them myself,” she thought, “but not enough to wait all those hours.”

  And life in England was so quiet! She was told that the streets had been busier before petrol was rationed, and before the lights had to be dimmed at night to save coal. But it wasn’t only that, she knew. The strange stubby taxis weren’t fitted out with radios, that was one thing; music didn’t blare out as she walked past shop doorways. Even the hotel lounge had no radio or other musical device.

  One afternoon Francie, left alone, went into a moving-picture house in Oxford Street. The picture was one she had seen in Jefferson, but then it had not had much effect on her. Now, the sound of American speech and a familiar tune sent a wave of nostalgia over her and she nearly wept. After a little, however, she forgot where she was. Everything in the picture seemed natural, and when she stepped out into the dim quiet underlit street afterwards it was as if she had herself walked off the screen, suddenly coming from a normal world into this.

  “A lady asking for you,” said the desk clerk on the telephone. “Mrs. Tennison.”

  “Oh yes.” Francie was doubtful, but she didn’t want him to know she was not sure she had understood him correctly. The English accent was difficult. “A lady, did you say? Waiting for me?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “Tell her I’ll be right down, will you?”

  “I beg your pardon, miss?” Evidently the clerk had just as much trouble understanding Francie as Francie had understanding the clerk.

  “I’m—coming—down—now.”

  “Oh, right you are. Coming now, madam,” she heard over the telephone before she hung up.

  Let’s see now, she thought. Mrs. Tennison—that would be the lady Pop had spoken of as his British associate’s wife. Pop had said at breakfast, “I’ll have to leave you on your own today, Francie, but Mrs. Tennison seems to be a nice woman. She’s very kindly asked me if she couldn’t give me a hand and show you around while Bob and I are going over the general picture, and I said I was sure you’d be tickled to death.”

  “I would like it,” said Francie. “It would be nice to have a native guide.” Pop raised his eyebrows and she grinned at him. “Well—you know what I mean. I get tired of just going around looking in windows, and I feel shy, too. It isn’t as if I could buy anything. Why, I tried to buy some candy yesterday. The man had it all wrapped up, and then I found out I needed candy coupons or something, only he said ‘sweet’ coupons. Was my face red!”

  “But honey, why didn’t you buy candy if you wanted? You could have. You’ve got all your coupons,” said Pop. “I gave you the book yesterday morning.”

  “Was that what you gave me? How was I to know? I had it in my bag the whole time.”

  “I told you,” said Pop, giving his daughter an impatient look. “You’re just dreaming half the time and don’t listen. It’s a sort of laziness … Well, you just ask Mrs. Tennison about all that. She said she’d come around about eleven.”

  Now, Francie hurried to put on her hat, and paused for a last look in the rather bad mirror, in the definitely bad light. She had her coat on already. She always wore her coat. She complained each morning to her father that a coat was a regular part of indoor clothing in this country: even when she had it on she didn’t feel warm. Fred Nelson always said, “You’d better get some regular long underwear, then,” and Francie retorted that she’d die before she wore long underwear. Today she wondered if she really would prefer death!

  Her lipstick needed repair, she noted; she carefully applied more, and surveyed the result. There, that was all right. She straightened the seams of her nylons, pulled on beige capeskin gloves and stepped out of the room to the elevator.

  She rang the bell and waited, looking around with simple, fresh curiosity at the corridor, all upholstered in dusty heavy dark red plush and velvet. The English interiors she’d seen were all awfully dark, she reflected. In America, especially if they had so many c
loudy days, the houses would be painted and decorated in bright light colors which would give a sunny effect. Nobody in Jefferson went in for dark red curtains or carpets. And the brown colors one saw here; the depressing paneled walls, the—

  Francie realized suddenly that the elevator wasn’t showing any signs of life. She rang again, peremptorily. Another long wait produced nothing, not so much as a twitching rope, so at last she decided to walk down the staircase she saw at the end of the hall, spaciously carpeted and very gloomy.

  Downstairs near the information desk a lady stood waiting. She was solid-looking, dressed in a sensible, rather bunchy green tweed suit and a brown felt hat that would have been much better if it had not been trimmed with a big green velvet flower. Francie observed these details absently, because she always summed up feminine costumes instinctively; but it didn’t occur to her for a moment or two that the lady might be her Mrs. Tennison. The lady didn’t think of the connection either. She looked at Francie and then glanced toward the stationary, empty elevator with the shabby stool that stood beside it. The elevator man was apparently off duty. At last the clerk behind the desk saw Francie, recognized her as she stood looking around, and said something to the lady in tweeds. The lady raised her eyebrows and walked over purposefully.

  “Miss Nelson?”

  “I’m Miss Nelson … Oh, are you Mrs. Tennison?”

  They shook hands. “But I was expecting a little girl, not a young woman,” said Mrs. Tennison in a nice full voice. “Sorry to have been so stupid. I understood—”

  “Did Pop tell you I was a little girl?” Francie was indignant.

  “No, he didn’t. He told me your age, that’s all.” As she spoke Mrs. Tennison glanced at Francie’s clothes, her stockings, her carefully made-up mouth. “I suppose I’ve forgotten what pretty clothes look like,” she said soothingly. “You mustn’t mind me; I’m hopelessly provincial. We all are nowadays, you know. Now you must tell me, Frances, what you’d like to do. This isn’t the best time in history to visit London, but we’ll do what we can for you. I had thought of a visit to the Park before we have luncheon—Stewart’s is most convenient for that, I always think—and then perhaps we might do the Tower or Madame Tussaud’s. It’s for you to say; perhaps you’d prefer to look around the shops?”

  Francie hesitated. She wasn’t daunted by the necessity of making a choice; it was only that she couldn’t recognize what sort of amusement she was being offered.

  “Such a pity my little girl Jennifer isn’t here to help us out,” continued Mrs. Tennison kindly, “but she’s at school until the end of term, of course. She’d put me right in no time. She’d know what you would like.”

  Francie had a sudden vision of a child in a short dress, piloting her by hand through the confusing wrong-way traffic. She nearly giggled aloud.

  “But you’ll have to meet her as soon as ever she gets back,” Mrs. Tennison was saying as she led the way through the front door and into the street. “In the meantime—have you any idea at all of what you’d care to do on your first outing? No doubt you’ve already looked around a bit for yourself?”

  Francie confessed that she had been afraid of going too far afield. “I’ve just walked around near the hotel when Pop wasn’t with me, and looked in store windows. You know how it is.”

  Mrs. Tennison laughed a little and said, “We’ll take the bus to Westminster Abbey, then, and look at the Houses of Parliament from outside and after that we can decide about lunch. Most Americans seem to enjoy looking at the Abbey, and I’d rather like to see it again myself. One never does go, somehow.”

  Meekly Francie trotted after her guide, who strode along in flat-heeled shoes at a pace which left the American girl breathless. A tall narrow red bus swooped toward them in the narrow street. Francie started straight for the door, but Mrs. Tennison held her back.

  “We must take our places in the queue, my dear,” she said, and led her charge to the rear of a line of would-be bus-riders who stood quietly on the pavement, stepping up one by one in a manner strangely polite.

  “Move along, please. Move along, please,” the conductor kept saying in a courteous voice, and the people did move along. Francie stared at their calm faces. She nearly told Mrs. Tennison how different it all was from home, but at the thought of describing it—the rushing people in American streets, the happy-go-lucky, furious, catch-as-catch-can of the crowds getting into buses or onto trains, the cheerful insults exchanged between bus-drivers and taxi-drivers—she remained silent. It would have been impossible. These people were a different race, she told herself. She sat quietly at Mrs. Tennison’s side, shivering in the damp dank air, and felt miserably out of place, violently homesick.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Aren’t you feeling well?” asked Pop. He couldn’t see Francie very clearly. Though every light in the dining room was lit, the lamps hung very high over the tables, most of which were empty. A dispirited, spectacled waitress lingered near the door, obviously wishing the Nelsons would finish their dinner and go away.

  “I feel all right,” said Francie, surprised. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Maybe you’re tired from your day out, but you sound unusually quiet to me.”

  “Tired?” Francie opened her eyes wide and began to laugh. She took a small bite of boiled potato. “Why would I be tired? Mrs. Tennison and I just went to see that Abbey, and after lunch to the Zoo. I’ll tell you what’s the matter, Pop; Mrs. Tennison made me nervous and I was thinking about that, I guess. She treats me like—I don’t know how to describe it. She’s very slow and patient and kind, and talks to me carefully, as if I were a dumbbell or an immigrant.”

  “Well, you are an immigrant, in a way,” said Fred Nelson.

  “Yes, but I’m not a baby immigrant, and I’m not half-witted. Though before lunch was finished I began to wonder about that. Honestly, I did try to be good. I tried not to be dreamy, the way you and Aunt Norah get so mad at.”

  “Was she rude? I can’t imagine Bob Tennison’s wife—”

  “No, no, Pop, nothing like that. She was terribly kind. Only she obviously thought I was, well, a minor. She has ideas about young girls. Young girls are children, she thinks. She thinks my clothes are all wrong. No, of course she didn’t say so, but she does. She’s tactful, but she underrates my intelligence. I knew what she was thinking.” Francie paused, somewhat abashed by her long speech, but her father wasn’t reacting as she feared he would. He only looked thoughtful.

  “There’ll be a good deal of that kind of thing, I guess. You’ll have to get used to it,” he said. “Something of the sort happens to me too.”

  This was a new idea, that the all-conquering Pop might ever feel inadequate. Francie’s heart warmed to him. She wanted to offer reassurance.

  “She’s awfully nice, really, Pop; she took the whole day off just to help me out, and that was very kind. Oh, by the way, it’s a funny coincidence; you know Penelope?”

  “Penelope? Oh yes, the girl on the boat. Nice girl.”

  “Well, Penny’s going back to her old school for one more year. You must remember; I told you all about it days ago. It’s called Fairfields School. Well, Jennifer Tennison—that’s Mrs. Tennison’s daughter, and Mrs. Tennison calls her a little girl though she’s as old as I am—well, Jennifer Tennison is at Fairfields.”

  “That’s a coincidence,” Pop agreed.

  “So Mrs. Tennison thinks I ought to try to get in, too. I told her I hadn’t quite made up my mind about school, and that made her laugh. She says I’m lucky if you let me make up my mind about things like that. She was that way about lots of things I said—amused and surprised, but more surprised than amused,” ended Francie with mild resentment.

  “Just the same, I think school’s the only answer. We ought not to put it off any longer, I guess,” said her father. “How about our making up our minds right now?”

  “Oh gosh. All right.” Francie sighed deeply.

  “You’ve got to do something with your time
, you know,” continued Pop.

  “I guess so, but—well, okay. I know I can’t go on fooling around by myself here in London. I might get into bad habits and the wrong crowd, going to the Zoo.” Francie looked slyly at her father.

  “You shouldn’t mind the Zoo so much. A lot of sensible people drop in there, the same way we go for a walk in the Park; it isn’t strictly for kids, honey. If I only knew more young people,” he said uncertainly. “It seems to me there must be some young people around, for you to meet, somewhere.”

  “I haven’t heard Mrs. Tennison say anything about boys, all day,” said Francie in glum tones. The wilting waitress had mournfully removed their plates of fish and potatoes, and brought them small single caramel eclairs. Francie eyed hers with distrust. “The food in this place is terrible, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be too hard on the food,” Pop said. “The English probably don’t like it any better than you do. But they’ve got the spunk to put up with it.”

  Hastily Francie veered away from the subject of food. “I don’t think there are any boys in a girl’s life, here in England, Pop. I don’t know how the girls get around to dances or movies, but I didn’t like to ask. It might look as if I wanted to know, and Mrs. Tennison might not like that.”

  “Probably the boys are all away at boarding school too,” suggested Pop.

  “It does sound awful, having to go to boarding school. Oh, Mrs. Tennison says to tell you she’s asked the Fairfields people to send you a prospectus, you know, like a pamphlet, all about the school. And she says we’re supposed to go to this town where it is and look at it first, and talk to the woman who runs it, before we sign up. And she says I’ve got to get special clothes for it; she called the outfit a uniform. I thought only orphan asylums and armies had uniforms, didn’t you?” She giggled. “I hope I have to wear a lot of gold braid with it. I’ll have my picture taken and send it to Ruth to show around at the Chocolate Shoppe.”