England to Me: A Memoir

by Emily Hahn

  “No, of course not. I’d better go and tell Mary about Patricia’s bump. That poor baby. Pretty good, not telling on Carola, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe she forgot,” said Lorraine, the cynic. “I’d better go and see what there is for their tea.”

  The clamor from the lawn had become so regular that it was almost the same in one’s ears as silence. It was as if this silence had been broken when Carola appeared at my elbow.

  “Hello,” I said, startled. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

  She looked pale and angry. “The brown-eyed one drank nearly all Nellie’s baby’s milk,” she said accusingly.

  “What was that, dear? Patricia?”

  “Patricia, the brown-eyed one. She drank all Nellie’s baby’s milk, and she didn’t put the bottle back in his mouth, and she felt his head where the hole is. I told her not to, but she did anyway. And she drank all his milk. She’s much naughtier than the other one.”

  “Well, I—”

  “She felt the hole in his head. You can hurt a baby that way. I’m not saying I know who did it, but some things in my doll’s house are broken. For all I know, some other things are lost. I’m sure I don’t know who did it. She drank all Nellie’s baby’s milk—”

  “So you said. You’d better go and tell Nellie, and then ask Lorraine to give Nellie some of our milk to make up for it.”

  Carola hesitated. “I don’t want to talk to Lorraine,” she said. “She’s making secrets about me. She and Vincent were whispering secrets against me. Lorraine doesn’t like me any more.”

  I pulled Carola down on my lap, and she lay there unresisting and then began to cry. “I’m not crying about that,” she said. “I’m crying about a story I remember.” She peered up at me and repeated fiercely, “I’m not crying about that, Mummy.”

  “Of course you aren’t,” I said. “That wouldn’t be anything to cry over.”

  Carola cried quietly for several minutes. She almost never cries, I reflected. She must be ill. A yelp from one of the twins on the lawn reminded me of something.

  “By the way, Lorraine told me about Patricia’s bump,” I said.

  Carola stopped sobbing for a second and then went at it again, harder than ever. “I didn’t mean to,” she said.

  “Well, I know that. Lorraine told me all about it. It was an accident, of course. You can tell Patricia’s mummy yourself, if you like.”

  The sobs stopped.

  “I should think you’d want to play with Vincent on a nice day like this,” I said. “Daddy wants you to go outside.”

  I heard her shouting Vincent’s name long before she got out of the house. Her shoes clattered on the staircase like clogs. It’s a good thing, I said to myself as I picked up my book, that Carola isn’t one of those difficult, sensitive children.

  23. HOME: AMERICA

  The Major read the telegram over twice. “I couldn’t get away from here in time to make it,” he said. He had said this before, but the note of regret in his voice deepened with each repetition.

  I, too, repeated myself. “You’d be able to get permission to go early, I’m sure. It’s not as if you wouldn’t have finished your lectures.”

  “I’d be late for the beginning of the Michaelmas term.”

  “Only just a couple of weeks.… Why not ask Sir William? I’m sure he couldn’t care less. And you know how you love America; you ought to see the Middle West, Charles. You’ve never seen the States really. Only Halloran Hospital after the war, and a few night clubs after the hospital.”

  I could tell from his expression that he had made up his mind at last, but he completed the ritual anyway. “I don’t see why they want me. They must be mad.”

  “Maybe all their professors are tired out and want to rest in the summer.”

  “Well.… It certainly simplifies the currency question, aside from the fact that they have an excellent library. Besides, it’s about time you saw your mother, and took Carola home for a visit, I suppose.”

  “Sure.”

  A new idea suddenly struck him. “This means you’ll be having the baby in the States, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. That’s the only bad part of the whole thing.”

  “Why? Aren’t the hospitals better equipped over there and everything?”

  “Oh, that isn’t important,” I said. I looked at him with a horrified expression. “Do you realize,” I said, “that in the States I’ll probably have to take care of it myself?”

  There was plenty of time to rest aboard the ship, when we weren’t eating. We did eat a lot. We ate too much for a few days, and said all the things English people do say when they get out of England, about food. After a couple of days we all had spots on our faces, and then the novelty of our meals subsided, and we resumed old habits. Carola went to the ship’s playroom and drew pictures; the Major took out his books and papers and established a claim on a certain table in the smoking room; I lay in a deck chair.

  Occasionally I thought about things; more often I thought about my family, wondering what the readjustment would be like for them. Carola, I decided, would simply be spoiled to death. The Major—well, he’s adaptable. At least he’s adaptable in Holland or Japan or Portugal, I mused, where men are men and women lead clean, sweet, womanly lives. But English husbands are, to say the least, un-American. Would he be adaptable enough even to knuckle down to our traditions? I felt definitely uneasy at the prospect, remembering how horrified one of my old friends had been after meeting us accidentally in London.

  “Mickey’s completely changed,” she reported later, to acquaintances in New York. “Her spirit’s broken. You wouldn’t know her. That man has got her completely under his thumb.”

  Oh well, I said to myself, trying to drum up courage, it was only that Charles didn’t like her and she guessed it. Nevertheless, they won’t understand him at home.…

  Carola stood in the middle of the kitchenette floor, looking at the window. I thought she was staring at New York’s skyscrapers, and I said, “Come along, Skeezix, you can look at them from the other room.”

  She still stood there, and now she pointed at the vegetable rack under the window. “Mummy, look at that,” she whispered, sounding awed. “Banana!”

  “Oh, so it is. Would you like to have it? Go ahead, take it.”

  “Shouldn’t we ask first?”

  We had been off the ship only two hours, but already I felt startled that she should have said “ask” with a broad English a. It sounded, suddenly, rather odd.

  “No, you don’t have to ask here,” I said, using the flat American a. I always do, but I now became aware of it as if for the first time. “You can have it,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  Still she hesitated, so I called out to my sister in the next room, “Dot, can Carola have this banana? She insists I ask you first. You see, they’re very rare in England and eating one is rather a ceremony.”

  “Of course you can have it, sweetheart!” Dot swooped into the kitchen. “You can have anything you want in this house. It’s just like Mummy’s own house, don’t you see? I’m Mummy’s sister. Really, she is a good girl,” she added to me. “Almost inhumanly good.”

  “Well, even in our own house in England she’d be expected to ask, that’s what it is.… Listen, can’t we go out shopping, and can’t you come too? Carola needs a couple of sun suits for Michigan, but don’t let me buy anything else. I’ll be hard to hold this first day, once I’m loose in a shop that doesn’t ask for’ coupons.”

  “Oh yes, you poor thing. Is it perfectly awful in England?”

  “Not so bad really, but this does make a nice break. Finished with your banana, Carola?”

  “Can I have another?”

  “Not just now. Remember what happened on the ship.”

  We bought shorts and a shirt, a raincoat, a sunsuit.… “Here’s a dear little dress, just reduced,” said the salesgirl.

  I went into raptures over it. It looked wonderful, though probably it was just a
dress. “Oh, we’ll have to have that!”

  Carola, too, eyed it with timid longing. “But you’re spending all your money,” she said cautiously. My sister’s eyes widened; she stared at this six-year-old paragon.

  “No, darling,” I said, “Mummy doesn’t need such a lot of money for dresses now. We’re in America now.… She’s thinking about London, Dot. In London a dress like this costs nearly twenty dollars. Yes, I know,” I said when Dot moaned. “It’s purchase tax and the export drive. But the biggest headache is the coupons. No coupons in America, Carola; isn’t it heaven?”

  Carola, patting and smoothing her new dress, did not reply.

  We had been a few days in Michigan, and they were strangely silent days.

  “That child has stopped speaking altogether,” said the Major one morning. He must have been really worried, to have noticed anything in the flurry of his first week’s work. “Have you heard her say anything lately? Whenever people speak to her she won’t reply; simply hangs her head and simpers. What’s the matter with her? Is she ill?”

  “Just overwhelmed, maybe,” I said, though I, too, was worried. “It might be the American accent; perhaps she doesn’t understand what they’re saying.”

  “Nonsense; if I understand them, why shouldn’t she? She’s grown up with you, and she understands you all right.”

  “Well, it might be her own accent then. Every time she does open her mouth somebody’s bound to pounce on her and say she sounds cute. It probably puts her off.”

  “Well, I wish she weren’t so unnaturally quiet.… Where is she now, by the way?”

  “In there on her bed, reading her comic books.”

  Carola had suddenly discovered the comics, and could evidently think of nothing else. She asked me every morning to go with her down to the corner and buy some more of them. For the rest of the day she stayed quietly in our rooms, reading to herself the adventures of Mutt and Jeff, Mickey Mouse, and the others. Now and then I would hear a shrill giggle, but otherwise she was silent.

  Carola’s father, once embarked on his paternal duty, had evidently decided to take care of it properly before going out to the library. He frowned when I spoke of the comics.

  “Isn’t this a new development?” he asked.

  “Well, naturally, Charles, considering that we don’t have comics in England. Only something rather insipid called Teddy Tail, and that penguin who’s been going on for donkey’s years.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good thing,” he said flatly. “They seem to be sensational stuff, some of them. Oughtn’t you discriminate? I realize it’s a temptation when they keep her so quiet, but it does seem rather the easy way out.”

  “Uh, yes. The thing is, she rather discriminates for herself, I’m afraid. She’s taken a violent dislike to Walt Disney. It’s unfortunate, but there it is. I think she identifies herself with one of the others, a character called Wonder Woman, who throws motorcars around and breaks iron cables.”

  The Major grunted doubtfully and went off to a lecture. As for me, I took Carola out for a walk, after a short argument on the subject.

  It was difficult, I reflected as she walked sulkily beside me, to deal with a child in this small university town. If we had known other children to begin with, it might have been easier. As it was, my own suggestions of American delights always seemed somehow inadequate.

  “Should we have an ice-cream soda?” I said as we passed a drugstore.

  “No, thank you,” said Carola in clipped tones.

  “Don’t you really want a soda or a sundae or something? A nice strawberry sundae?”

  “No, thank you. I don’t like ice cream. It’s cold,” said Carola.

  “But, darling, it’s awfully good. We’d never get such good ice cream in England. Anyway, I want some, so come on in.”

  Sitting next to me on a red-leather stool, Carola resignedly drank a part of her Coca-Cola. By accident, she discovered the stool was a revolving one, and for a little while she woke up and acted like a natural child, swinging it around and back again. Then, catching sight of an unlimited supply of drinking straws, she gathered about six of them and tried to drink her Coca-Cola with all of them at once. The soda-fountain clerk, having nothing else to do, became intrigued by this game and tried to join in.

  “Sure you’ve got enough there?” he asked anxiously. “Come on, try a couple more.”

  Carola’s vivacity suddenly ebbed. She hung her head over her glass and said nothing. I sighed.

  “Come on if you’re finished,” I said, and walked over to the cash register. “Oh Carola, look at those marshmallows.” I was really delighted with them. “Do look at all the different colors. I never saw that before. Want some?”

  “Whatever is it, Mummy?”

  That’s quite natural, I reminded myself. Carola knows only ration chocolate and acid drops. “Why, it’s candy.”

  “What’s candy?”

  “I mean sweets. Do you want them?”

  “No, thank you.”

  We resumed our walk up the street. “Mummy,” said Carola in a small voice, “let’s go back to our rooms. I want to read my comics.”

  “No, darling, we’ve got to get your hair cut first; it needs it.”

  “Is there a hairdresser in this town?”

  “I don’t want a hairdresser; we’re looking for a barbershop. Mummy always used to get her hair cut in barbershops when she was a little girl. It’s lots of fun.”

  For a moment Carola’s attention was caught by a toy in a window. We lingered there, and a fat lady with a big knitting-bag passing by, patted her on the head. Carola shied like a skittish pony, and I was embarrassed. I barked at her, and smiled deprecatingly at the fat lady. It was no use trying to explain to her that Carola was just out of England, where people never pat children’s heads unless they have been introduced. Even then there is never very much head-patting going on in England.

  The thing is, I mused as we walked on toward the barbershop, people take children more for granted in England; in fact, they even try to ignore them altogether. The English don’t actually dislike their young, I said to myself charitably, but they pretend not to like them too much, for fear of softening the race, perhaps. Only a very occasional stranger, a jovial policeman or one of the old Beefeaters at the Tower of London, has ever gone out of his way to joke with Carola. Even among our acquaintances, among people who have been introduced to her, the head-patters are very few and far between.

  I recalled an Englishwoman I know, laughing heartily over a railway advertisement in an American magazine, and showing it to me with a good-natured jeer.

  “That sums up the way you all behave over there,” she said. “No wonder your children think they’re kings and queens.”

  It was an advertisement which is widespread in the States, I believe. It depicts a porter helping a little girl climb into a Pullman car and bowing with an exaggerated flourish as she steps up. She is dressed to the nines and looks thrilled to death at being handed up like a lady. Back of her, smirking adoringly, are her parents. Back of them, in turn, stand another man and woman, also registering fatuous joy at the very sight of innocent childhood. In England, breathing English air, I had been silenced by the thing; I had admitted it was rather silly.… “Well, uh, yes,” I had said sheepishly. “I, uh, see what you mean.”

  Yet now in State Street I couldn’t see anything so outlandish about that picture, after all. Why shouldn’t people be nice to children, damn it, if that’s the way they like to be? I’m a very adaptable woman; one might almost call me chameleonic. The air of my native heath had gone so to my head that I felt when we found the barbershop that I had indeed come home. It was a four-chair place. Two barbers were busy, one giving a crew cut to a young man, the other shaving a fat man’s neck. There was a long-lost, familiar smell in the place, of soap, eau de cologne, shoe polish, and the powder they dust on the back of your neck. I sniffed, and felt a rush of joyful nostalgia. Indeed I almost burst into tears. I wante
d to tell everyone, emotionally, that it had been fifteen years since I was last in an American barbershop, but Carola was tugging at my hand.

  “Is this the dentist’s, Mummy? The chairs are the same as the dentist’s at Weymouth.”

  “Something for the little girl?” asked the nearest barber, flapping a white coat temptingly.

  “Yes, please. Here, Carola, get up here and get your hair cut.”

  The barber put a black plank affair across the chair arms to make her higher, and lifted her up to it. She stiffened a moment, an affronted expression on her face, then relaxed as she had done on the drugstore stool. We elders talked it over, while she stared expressionless into the mirror and kept her lips closed, in case a bit of English accent should creep out.

  “Just the tip of the ear showing. Yes, I know,” said the barber.

  “And trim the fringe, too, please,” I said. I corrected myself hastily when he looked blank. “The bangs, I mean. Shampoo afterward.”

  Conscientiously he cut away at Carola’s hair, trying now and then, unavailingly, to lure her into speech. She maintained a poker face, deeply silent. The other customers were finished and departed, each cracking old jokes with the barbers to the end. Carola’s man suddenly twirled her chair a little, making her gasp.

  “Did you like that?” he said.

  “Mmm,” said Carola, her tone less curmudgeonly than I might have expected.

  The electric clipper at her neck had a stronger effect. Her face twisted and I thought she was going to laugh outright, but she suddenly pulled in the corners of her mouth and glanced sideways at me, very prim and proper again.

  The barber rubbed her hair with a stiff lather, poured water over it, and rubbed in more soap. He pulled all her short hair into a peak at the top of her head, where it stayed like an African headdress. I well remember that sensation. He ran water into a basin in the middle of the floor, and lifted her off her high chair.

  “Now then, young lady, sit here and put this over your eyes. That’s right. Now, then, lean over.”