England to Me: A Memoir

by Emily Hahn

  He looked harassed. “I haven’t examined the case carefully, but—”

  “Well, what do you mean? If she’s got something she shouldn’t have, they’ll know, won’t they? They’re bound to have made a test. Either she has it, in which case of course she must be treated, or she hasn’t, in which case I can’t see why they’re keeping her out of the ward. I’ll have her tested myself,” I said, working up to an angry pitch. “I’ll—”

  “Yes, yes, wait a minute. I’ll go into the matter myself, Mrs. Boxer; I’ll look it up and telephone you this afternoon.”

  He did telephone. “She’s quite all right,” he said, “and the bed is reserved.”

  At the clinic, Miss Tanner was particularly unpleasant that day to Alice. “You should have gone to the home at Parkstone,” she snapped.

  “Ay, there’s the rub,” I said when Alice told me.

  “Oh, dear, it’s too awful in the kitchen at mealtimes, according to Alice,” said tender-hearted Lorraine. “According to Nellie too. Alice just sits there and won’t speak when she’s spoken to. Nellie would like to be friends, but Alice just won’t.”

  “Well, tell her it’ll be all right in a few weeks. Alice is just in a sensitive state.”

  “I did tell her, but you’ll have to too.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Boxer,” said Nellie. “That’s what my mother said too. I’ll keep trying to be friendly.”

  “Do. It won’t be long.”

  Alice’s baby was born just in time for her to be back before Christmas. He was a fine baby boy, and as it turned out we need not have worried about her at all, nor bought her the wedding ring. There were four other unmarried mothers in the ward, and everybody was very nice to her.

  “I had a letter from Alice’s boy this morning,” I said to the Major rather timidly.

  “Oh. When’s he coming?”

  “In a month or two. He says, thanks for taking care of Alice. He says, please will we go on taking care of Alice for a bit.”

  “Why? Not that I’m not willing to take care of her indefinitely, or vice versa, just look at this room since she’s been back at work— wonderful! But what’s his trouble?”

  “Why, as a matter of fact, he seems to be married already. You’ll admit that’s rather a snag. She was ashamed to tell me, I guess, so she told him to write.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I don’t know. People often tell fibs instead of the truth, I don’t know why; it doesn’t really make things easier. Anyway there it is.”

  “Well, it’s nothing to do with us.”

  “That’s what I think. I suppose he’ll be coming to see her.”

  “I suppose he will,” said the Major, turning back to his desk. “It seems likely. It’s okay by me. It’s all very wrong, but it’s nothing to do with us. She certainly is a good housemaid.”

  It is probably all very wrong, but it’s pleasant. Alice and Nellie are now the best of friends, and romp and play while the cook’s away.

  “She really is a treasure,” I say to Trivett. “She keeps that child beautifully.”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt of that,” says Trivett, and we chant together, “That’s the type that does.”

  19. CINDERELLA’S MILK

  The winter of ’47 we resolved to do the holidays properly, the way other people in England do. At least, I resolved this, and the Major acquiesced. He can hardly be expected to share in the simple explorative pleasures of an American-born wife. For his part, he grows enthusiastic about tiresome American songs, such as “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and chuckles over quite ordinary American phrases.

  “We’ll take Carola to a Christmas pantomime,” I announced.

  “Why not?” he said amiably.

  Carola said, “Oh, goody,” and jumped up and down, clapping her hands.

  “Well, we’ll have to take her to London to do it,” I said, and watched him warily. As I had expected, he winced.

  “Surely it’s not necessary to drag the child all that way? Traveling nowadays—”

  “I know, but all the other mothers around here seem to think it’s the only thing to do,” I said. “The pantomimes that come to these small towns are never any good, or so I hear.” As he looked unconvinced, I produced the one sure-fire argument I keep for such occasions: “You always went to London during the holidays when you were small. Your mother used to take the whole family. You told me so yourself.”

  He nodded, accepting defeat.

  Carola rushed out of the room to boast about the coming expedition to somebody, anybody, the first person she should encounter.

  “Only one more thing,” I said, “and then I’ll let you alone. Just what is a Christmas pantomime?”

  The Major seemed puzzled by the question, and impatient. He said that Christmas pantomimes are theatrical productions, that’s all, like any other theatrical productions. “For children,” he said, elucidating. “Surely, darling, you must have them in America. Everyone has them.”

  “Honestly, I don’t think we do,” I told him. “What are they, Charles? Anything like ‘Punch and Judy’?”

  “No, no, they’re simply pantomimes. Shows. Plays.”

  “But are they in dumb show, like Charlie Chaplin before the talkies?”

  “Certainly not in dumb show,” he said. “The actors sing and dance, just as they do in any musical revue, or whatever they’re called in the States. Like Oklahoma!”

  “Then why are they called pantomimes?” I persisted. “Doesn’t that mean acting without talking?”

  The Major started to reply, hesitated, and then lost confidence. He turned away, muttering that I ought to look it up in an encyclopedia. “At any rate, they’re always called pantomimes,” he said, “and that’s all I know about it, but you have the same sort of thing in the States. Of course you have. They’re always produced during the Christmas holidays.”

  In England, holidays seem to go on forever and ever. Carola’s school remained closed for a month after Christmas, and it was well into January when we set out on our venture. To keep Carola busy, I took along a set of paper dolls, a pair of scissors, and a large storybook. She had a doll, and the doll had a suitcase, packed, bafflingly, with a disproportionate bedroom set, a birthday card from last year, one slipper, and the angel from the top of the Christmas tree. Like all travelers in England, we were armed with emergency ration cards, and in my bag were a tin of jam, a few buns, three fresh eggs done up in corrugated cardboard, and a bottle of concentrated orange juice.

  We arrived in London at last, and that afternoon we went to tea at the home of some friends who, as it happened, had a guest for the holidays, a Portuguese gentleman. As foreigner to foreigner, he and I had a good, long talk about the sights in London—the art galleries, the concerts, and the theater.

  “Oh, yes, the theater,” I said. “Tell me, do you have things called Christmas pantomimes in Portugal? My husband says all countries have pantomimes, but I don’t think we do in America. At least I don’t know yet. We’re taking our daughter to one this evening. It’ll be my first experience.”

  The Portuguese gentleman seemed startled, and looked at Carola. “She’s very young,” he said.

  “But they’re for children especially, aren’t they?”

  “I attended a pantomime last week with my host and his kind family,” said the Portuguese. “I am sure I don’t understand the customs here very well, but if I had a child, I would think twice. There were scenes of terror on the stage, you understand. Flares of fire, and spirits dressed in sheets—even the figure of the devil himself.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. We’re taking her to a pantomime—a children’s play, from the fairy tales. Ours is called Cinderella. You must be thinking of the opera.”

  “No,” he insisted. “I am certain they called it a pantomime, though the people in the play all talked and sang. It was—let me see—it was called Dick Whittington.”

  Privately, I decided that the Portuguese had got hopeles
sly muddled with all his sightseeing, but I didn’t like to say so. Anyway, he was talking some more about the pantomime; he told me blushingly that Dick Whittington was even slightly indecent in places. Later, I asked our host to untangle the matter, but he shied like a frightened horse when I mentioned it.

  “Don’t talk about that,” he begged me. “I’ve made a vow never again to take a foreigner to the theater. He asked me to translate the jokes for him whenever the audience laughed. Have you ever tried to explain a pantomime joke to a Latin? … No? Well, don’t. To make it worse, there were the local allusions. You know about those, I suppose? If the company’s acting at Hammersmith, for example, someone says, ‘As rare as busses in Hammersmith,’ or something like that—feeble, of course, but the Hammersmith people simply roar with laughter—and how can you explain that to a Portuguese?”

  I agreed it must have been difficult. “What’s more,” I said, “he seems to have got it into his head that Dick Whittington was risqué or something. The poor fellow obviously was way out of his depth.”

  My host was much amused. “Of course he couldn’t understand half of it,” he said. “The special humor of it was completely lost on him, and it’s not surprising. I didn’t have time to interpret all the anecdotes, let alone keep up with things myself and remember the right words and all that. I got into deep water, I assure you. There was one bit in the comic turn—it seems there was a man who asked a girl to marry him, and she said yes, and just before the wedding he said, ‘Darling, there’s one thing I must tell you before we’re married. I suffer from a severe physical disability.’ ‘Oh, in that case,’ says the girl, ‘the whole thing’s off. I won’t marry you.’ Then, twenty years later, the same chap becomes engaged Jo another girl, and just before the wedding he says, ‘Darling, there’s something—’ ”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I was talking about the pantomime.”

  “This is the pantomime I’m telling you about,” said my host. “Dick Whittington.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  After one uneasy glance around the theater, the Major seemed reassured, and I could understand why. The whole place was littered with fathers. All over the stalls sat men with little boys and girls, and sometimes with wives too. Most of the men were awfully busy, in a fussy way, hailing the ushers and arranging, according to British custom, for tea to be served them in the interval between acts. Fathers do fidget, I reflected. Carola, like nearly all the other small children in the audience, was comparatively calm. She immediately settled herself high up on the closed seat, instead of pulling it open, and she perched there for the duration, uncomfortable but stubbornly immovable.

  The curtain went up.

  We had not been watching the performance very long before I leaned over behind Carola to whisper to the Major. “Look here,” I said. “Those ugly sisters—”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re men, aren’t they?”

  “Certainly they are. They always are.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” asked the Major, exasperated. He was showing a surprisingly rapt interest in what was going on, as was Carola. Yet he had seen dozens of these pantomimes in his time, he had told me, and he had said they never change.

  “Why are they always men?” I persisted.

  “I don’t know,” he said impatiently. “Because they’ve always been, I suppose. Like the first Shakespeare plays.”

  “But—”

  “Sh-h-h!” said a little boy just behind me, who was also perched on his closed seat.

  I settled back and tried to follow the performance, but I found it very confusing. I could scarcely recognize a thing in the whole setup. For instance, in this version, Cinderella’s father, a figure unfamiliar to me to begin with, employed on his staff a pageboy in the uniform of a modern bellboy. His name was Buttons and he was in love with Cinderella. Buttons was entirely new to me; I couldn’t place him at all, though my knowledge of the story ought to be fairly accurate, what with my bedtime reading in the nursery. There was something else, too, that bothered me. I leaned over again behind Carola and prodded the Major in the ribs.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “That Prince Charming. He’s a girl.”

  “Yes, of course he is. He always is.”

  “But why?”

  “In pantomimes, the hero’s always a girl. She’s the Principal Boy. Now shut up.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, do keep quiet, please, Mummy,” said Carola.

  Baffled, I settled back and tried once more to keep track of things. Only one definite impression formed in my mind: Cinderella was not in the least like Oklahoma! It was more like early Minsky, really. The laughs it got were the same. There was a scene where one of the ugly sisters wanted to get into the ball but didn’t have a ticket. He reached down and pulled up his skirt, revealing a length of striped cotton stocking, and shyly bade the doorkeeper turn away while he found some money. Then, when the doorkeeper’s back was turned, he slipped through the door. A second later he bounced out again, to a roll of drums, and in a sitting position, his skirt over his head. Did those unseemly guffaws of delight come from my daughter or from my husband? From both, I realized.

  To be sure, I said to myself, some of it was really charming and well within the conventions of the original story. The fairy godmother was beautiful in her hollow-cheeked, Tatler-style way; so was Cinderella, dressed for the ball. Her coach, with electric-light bulbs all over it, was drawn by real Shetland ponies, dog size. There was also a Ziegfeld chorus of ladies in marvelous hoop skirts and high, splendid headdresses, and there was a pony ballet of little girls about Carola’s age, in swansdown-trimmed tights. “Local dancing schools,” explained the Major briefly when I spoke of child-labor laws. “Christmas holidays.”

  Just as I was beginning to feel reassured by these reasonable fairy-tale scenes the curtain went down on them and Buttons came out front. He sang a song—a modern sort of song about a man going into a dairy and wanting to buy some milk, but there wasn’t any milk. (Milk rations have recently been cut.) The refrain of this song was “Wot? No milk? Oh, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear!”

  “Now, you must all join in on the chorus,” said Buttons to the audience. “When I sing ‘Wot? No milk?’ I want you to come out strong on the ‘No milk’ Come on, everybody!”

  I felt too sulky and bewildered to help Buttons out, but everybody except me came out strong, especially Carola. There I sat, all alone, silent, in an agony of embarrassment, while all around me those self-conscious Britishers sang at the tops of their voices, “Wot? No milk? Oh, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear!”

  “Well, Carola, how do you like it?” asked the Major as the curtain came down for the interval.

  Carola said she loved it.

  “Sure?” he asked. “Better than anything? Better than Swan Lake?”

  “Much better,” said Carola. “The Prince is nice. I love Buttons, but the Prince is nicer.”

  “Do you like it better than Peter and the Wolf?” The Major avoided my eye but spoke with, I suspected, malicious emphasis.

  “I hate old Peter and that old wolf,” said Carola.

  “That’s not fair,” I said hotly, over her head. “It doesn’t prove anything. Children always do have the most appalling taste.”

  Suddenly a memory thirty-five years old swept over me, fresh after all that time. I was a small child again, at my first play, Little Lord Fauntleroy. I couldn’t remember anything of the play itself, except for a Shetland pony that was led across the stage; what I did remember was the curtain. It had advertisements all over it in little squares. I had just learned to read, and I spelled them out, one by one. In the middle of the array of notices was a terrifyingly big picture of a little girl and a little boy in sunbonnets, their backs to me, standing hand in hand on a lonely, wind-swept beach, looking at a great rolling wave that was coming up to break at their feet. They seemed very much alone and too young to be alone on that intermina
ble beach under the lowering sky. Beneath the picture were these grimly significant words, which were fated to go on with me through life, indelibly printed on my heart:

  What are the wild waves saying, sister dear, to me?

  Eat (Something Something) chocolates, and happy you will be.

  I murmured this poem to myself as the curtain went up again and Cinderella continued on its gay, unorthodox way. I grew sad. What part of this evening was Carola destined to carry in her heart through the coming years as the tide washed up the beach toward her? A fixed idea that all princes are really girls in silk tights? The radiant hope of Wearing to her first ball a towering white eighteenth-century wig? “Wot? No milk? Oh, dear, dear, dear …”

  Now the two ugly sisters were in Cinderella’s kitchen, riotously preparing a steak-and-kidney pudding, “If we had a steak, if we had a kidney, if we had a pudding,” they said in their deep male voices.

  “Here’s a steak,” said one, triumphantly putting it down on the table.

  “Beefsteak or whale steak?” said the other. (Whale steak, being unrationed, is a popular item on the housekeeper’s shopping list these days.)

  “Beef, of course,” said the first ugly sister, leaning over the steak. Promptly, it spouted water in her face. Carola screamed with laughter and almost fell off her perch.

  There you are, I said to myself; that’s what she’ll remember. I sat there in the dark, glooming. What a memory to bequeath to my only child! Whale steak. Bitter jokes about rations. “Wot? No milk?”

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” There was her father, laughing like a six- year-old. How could he? How could he bear to laugh?

  The sisters thumped the pudding dough, stamped on the dough, sat on the dough, scraped it off their bottoms with the bread knife, collected it into a ball, and threw it spang into the audience. It almost hit me on the head, but I ducked. Then I laughed too. I laughed even louder than Carola.

  When the scene was over, Buttons came out again, this time with the Prince. “Come on, now,” he said. “Sing with me, you on this side of the house, and those on that side can sing with the Prince. Let’s see which side sings the louder. All together now: ‘I’m always chasing rainbows.’”