Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  ‘Here, have this!’ He passed Paul a new map. This one was hand-drawn. Ron had made it himself in case the others didn’t live up to expectation. I steered us out of the neighbourhood and headed for the 95, the freeway down the road.

  ‘What’s the route?’ I asked Paul, manly bearer of all maps.

  ‘You get on the 95 and you stay on it till Boston,’ he replied evenly. ‘Then if you want to go somewhere else you get back on the 95. Everywhere we want to go is on the 95. It is the road to all New England Gladyses. Never go anywhere except the 95.’ Paul put the maps in the glove compartment and never mentioned directions again.

  I took us up the 95. We moved quickly away from Westchester. After that there seemed to be miles and miles of road with just trees and no people. It gave the most incredible sense of space. Although we had missed the true glory of the fall colours there was enough left for it to be wonderful. Many of the trees were still on fire with red and gold leaves. My driving wasn’t going all that well. I found it odd in America. I didn’t mind being on the right-hand side of the road: that was fine. So much American travel is done on freeways that it seems all the traffic in the country is only going in one direction anyway. The tough thing is the free-for-all attitude of everyone on the road. To use an indicator was clearly a sissy thing to do and there seemed to be a presumption that I only got in the wrong lane to annoy others. I refused to get caught up in the tension, so occasionally I drifted off the 95 just for the devil of it and then took my time to drift back. It was a bad idea. Rita was getting very annoyed in the back of the car.

  ‘Is it like an English thing that you don’t ask directions?’ she asked irritably. I didn’t like to tell her how we had got to Sue’s using the sun and finding magnetic north with my underwear. We located Boston without ever looking at a single map.

  Boston is what I would like the whole United States to be.

  Charles Dickens, English tourist

  I am heartily ashamed to have been born in Boston.

  Edgar Allan Poe, Bostonian poet

  Edgar Allan Poe always referred to his home town of Boston as ‘Frogpondium’. He thought the place ghastly and provincial. Others will tell you that Boston is the one place in America where you can truly find civilisation and culture. As far as Ron had predicted we would be lucky to find anything at all. We entered the city with some trepidation. Ron had been very clear.

  ‘Boston is a nightmare to drive in. You will never find anything.’

  We were looking for the Harborside Inn. I take things at face value and figured it would either be an inn on the side of the harbour or we would find a landlord with a perverse sense of humour. I headed confidently for a confluence of water and boats with buildings built alongside. We found it straight away. Actually, I quite liked driving there. Boston has no grid system and winds and twists about rather like London.

  We checked into the Harborside Inn. When Lady Frankland went to Boston in 1768 she carried with her ‘six trunks, one chest, three beds and bedding for the same, six sheep, two pigs, one keg of pickled tongues, some hay, three bags of corn and other such goods as one should think proper to carry thither’. I had a wheelie bag with a dodgy wheel and a laptop with a broken strap. The glamour of travel was beginning to pall on me. Our accommodation, apart from being an inn down near the harbour, was also part of the heart and thrust of ‘The Big Dig’.

  Above the unplanned pattern of the city, a freeway on gigantic green metal struts roars past. The plan now is to put the whole thing underground and an incomprehensibly large engineering programme is digging out the very bowels of the town. This is not a project with one or two Irishmen and a shared spade. Night and day, the city is consumed with the sound of earth moving. It is huge and involves a great deal of digging. It is called The Big Dig. I have no idea how they thought of the name. So far, the cultural side of Boston was eluding us. Outside the Harborside Inn there was much labouring behind movable chain-link fencing. So much earth was being shifted that you could go out in the morning and not be able to find your way back to the hotel entrance by the afternoon.

  It was late and after trying to watch yet another baseball battle on TV, everyone went to bed. I slept soundly till about 4 a.m. and then I pinged awake. It is an hour I have become used to in my travels in the States. It is the hour when my body decides that whatever my brain may say, it is time to be up and at ‘em. Actually, I think my body is right. It is quite a good time to look around. Devoid of people and hustle and bustle you see a place stripped back to its architecture and the ghosts who linger about in the early hours.

  Boston is not huge. It is a walking city quite reminiscent of European towns. It is a must for the student of the revolution and a seeker of anything vaguely cultural confined to the American shores. The ‘Athens of America’, the ‘Cradle of Liberty’ and the ‘City on a Hill’. Here the Pledge of Allegiance was written and here hoop petticoats were once condemned as being against God’s law.

  The name, as with so many others, has an English connection. The story goes that in the seventh century there was a tiny fishing village on the River Witham in Lincolnshire, where a Benedictine monk lived. They also say he was the bastard son of King Ethelmund but this isn’t that sort of book, so I won’t go into detail. Anyway, the monk used to get up early every morning and pop down to give the fishermen a bit of a blessing to set them up for the day. They named him Bot meaning boat and ulph meaning helper — Botulph. The place became known as Bot Ulph’s Town then Bottleston and finally, because people are fundamentally lazy with pronunciation, Boston.

  Then on 7 September 1630 John Winthrop and his merry band of Puritans arrived from Boston, England and named their new home after the one they had just left. The local tribe called it ‘Shawmut’, which loosely translated from the Wampanoag language means ‘the place you go to find the boats’. Which only goes to show that people are universal in not having a wide-ranging imagination. The brethren who escaped England to seek religious freedom founded a town where you were free to practise whatever they said you could practise. Boston has always had a religious image and often a repressive one. The city had the first official censor in the country and did so till 1975. From the 1920s to the 1970s the words ‘Banned in Boston’ printed on the front cover of a book could guarantee millions of sales for an author.

  I wandered out, happy to get lost. The guidebooks will tell you that the streets were laid down on top of old cow paths. I think this is unlikely unless they had cows wandering at will all over the place. This is not the home of the Brahman heifer and I suspect it is more likely that they simply tarmacked over the places where the original footpaths had once meandered. I think you can sense this as you walk around. There is Purchase Street, once the property of a man called John Harrison. It was an important byway in the past, as people used his property as a short cut to get to the sea. Harrison, however, was a bad-tempered soul. He plied his trade as a rope-maker and used to hang his ropes to dry across the path to stop people and their carts getting through. This annoyed everyone. Finally, officials bought the land from him and gave it over to the city. The tradition was to name such a thoroughfare after the original owner but there had been too many rows and everyone just called it Purchase Street. There was a John Harrison connected with Purchase, New York, where Lori lives. I don’t know if it was the same one or just something about the name.

  Finding one’s way around Boston isn’t easy and that’s George Washington’s fault. He made his last visit to the city in 1789. Everyone in America was fighting to honour the old general and most cities did this by naming something after him. Boston, too, wanted to get in on the act so they created a Washington Street but one with a difference. Their Washington Street (of which there are hundreds across the country) ran right across the city. Then to mark it out, every street (with a handful of exceptions) that crossed the tribute road had to change its name as it crossed. Thus when Court Street crosses over Washington it becomes State Street, Winter becomes
Summer, Boylston turns into Essex and so on. It is a curious bend of the knee to an old leader which confuses the tourist and, perhaps, even to the resident is lost in the mist of time.

  I walked up Beacon Hill to look out over the park and admire the statues around the Senate House. Boston is a great place to stroll if you love words. It was here that bloomers were invented by the Boston lady Amelia Bloomer. On Beacon Hill you can pay tribute to the statue of Major-General ‘Fighting Joe’ Hooker. Fighting Joe was not the greatest general who ever lived. He was defeated by General Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville in 1863, even though he had double the number of troops. But it is not for his army manoeuvres that he has gone down in history; he went down for rather more. During the Civil War he allowed women to follow his troops in their own tent encampments and they became known as Hooker’s Ladies or Hookers. Hookers, happy to take down their bloomers.

  I was thinking about a conversation I had had with Rita which had disturbed me. I had been reading Karen Armstrong’s book about Islam and, for want of other subject matter, had brought up the topic of religious fundamentalism with Rita and Paul as we drove. I was keen to consider those young men who were so addicted to their religion that they were willing to die for it.

  They’re crazy,’ Rita said, dismissing them. ‘Fanatics.’

  ‘But don’t you want to know why there are people in the world who hate America so much? Wouldn’t you want to talk to one and find out?’

  ‘There’s no talking to those people. They don’t believe in anything.’

  This seemed an odd stance to me. It was the very deep nature of their beliefs which seemed to be causing the trouble. No one ever became a suicide bomber because they simply had a hunch about something. But Rita’s view was one I heard expressed everywhere I went. It was on the television, on the radio and in the newspapers. There was no talking to the enemy. There was no point. Walking the streets of Boston before the blessing of the sun was an interesting place to dwell on the matter. Apart from perhaps Salt Lake City in Utah it would be hard to find an American city more steeped in past religious extremism than Boston.

  Boston was founded by the Puritans who were altogether different from the pilgrims. Both lots wore the funny black hats but the Puritans were strict in body and soul beyond belief. If there was one thing they couldn’t stand it was a Quaker. Those people, so called because they trembled before the Lord, were most unpopular in Puritanical Boston in the 1650s. To be fair to the Puritans, the Quakers, although a lovely peaceful people, did have some strange practices in the early days. They never cut their hair and were apparently quite keen on blackening their faces with charcoal before dancing naked in the street. There are also countless stories of them urinating in public and shrieking. I don’t know how much of that is true. I expect a lot of it is rather extreme propaganda. Yet another example of how difficult it is for people to get along.

  The Puritans did what they could to get rid of the Quakers. They were jailed, their books were burnt and finally they were sent to Barbados which I don’t think sounds too bad. But the Quakers were an ornery bunch and they kept coming back. So the Puritans started whipping them, cutting their ears off and piercing their tongues with a red-hot poker. Now presumably they couldn’t even say their irritating ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ or indeed hear when told to leave but even this didn’t seem to do the trick. Finally, in 1658, the Puritans passed a law saying that any banished Quaker who returned would be put to death. Four Quakers were subsequently hanged for returning, including Mary Dyer whose statue stands up near Hooker’s.

  It wasn’t until the Toleration Act was passed in 1689 in the British Parliament that things calmed down. After that the Quakers were allowed to own land, build churches and, people being what they are, their numbers immediately began to dwindle. By 1744 there were only eleven members of the Society of Friends left and by 1808 they had all packed up and gone. Proof, if proof were needed, that it is better just to let irritating people get on by themselves and eventually they will go away.

  I had this image of America being founded for religious freedom. Of people escaping in leaking boats to eat beef jerky for months so they could call their God when and where they wanted but it isn’t the whole story. The American past, as in so many other countries, is littered with intolerance and extremism and endless misunderstanding. Nothing really has changed.

  At about 6 a.m. I was outside one of the oldest buildings in the heart of the town, the Customs House. A plaque on the side proclaimed it as having been host to the scene of the Boston Massacre. Many a time as an American schoolchild I had been shown a reproduction of the famous engraving by Paul Revere depicting that cold March eve in 1770 when the British redcoats had shot down unarmed Bostonians. It was only as an adult that I had learned the story was actually rather more interesting than that and had more to do with alcohol than freedom fighting.

  That cold March evening, one poor schmuck redcoat had drawn the short straw for the night and was standing sentry at the Customs House. At closing time, a group of Bostonians spilled out of the Bunch of Grapes Tavern on King Street (now appropriately renamed State Street). They were probably pretty jolly and started mocking the lone sentry. Brit-baiting was a popular pastime following various acts of taxation, run-ins with customs officials and many public meetings at Faneuil Hall across the way. A crowd grew and the sentry couldn’t get away. The captain of the guard pitched up with some soldiers to try to calm things down but by now there were several hundred in the mob and, as the tabloids would say, ‘It was getting ugly’. News spread and someone went to ring the bell in the Old Brick Church behind the State House.

  Now here’s the thing — the church bell in those days was only rung to call people to service, for special occasions or because there was a fire. Lots of people in the crowd heard the bell and thought there must be fire. So they shouted ‘Fire’ and indeed that’s what the soldiers did. Funnily enough, one of the lawyers who defended the redcoats was John Adams, later to be the second president of the US. He got them all off, leaving only two to be found guilty of manslaughter. (This wasn’t so bad in those days. You just pleaded ‘benefit of clergy’ — recited a verse of scripture and had an M branded on your thumb so you wouldn’t do it again.) It was a misunderstanding. It was about people not talking to each other.

  The more I read about the past the more I realised what a skewed picture I had been presented with as a child. I didn’t know that just as many Americans joined the British in the fight as joined the Sons of Liberty and that an equal number remained neutral. Only half of the nearly four million people in America at the time were of British descent. The rest had drifted from other parts of the world or were there in bondage.

  Across the way at Quincy Market, even at that early hour, breakfast was being served. Quincy has been the central market of the city since 1826 and sits inside brick buildings where you could once have heard the boom of Founding Fathers banging on about independence in Faneuil Hall. Today it consists of endless fast-food opportunities, only some of whom seize the opportunity to serve before the cock crows. We were about half a dozen gathered to break the fast under what I hoped were newly hung Christmas decorations. The Pizzeria Regina was just kicking into action. A positively historic food provider, they were proud to be celebrating seventy-five years of pizza production with a competition .to send someone to Italy, which I thought was sweet. They were also suggesting pizza as a ‘stocking stuffer’ for your mailman, which I was less sure of. It had never occurred to me to present a postal employee with a stocking of any kind, least of all one that oozed garlic.

  Around me everything was about choice. There was none of that British approach to catering where you can ‘have our breakfast or go hungry’. I stood in front of the Bagel Bite and mentally tried to compose my request. It wasn’t easy. There were at least eighteen different types of bagel, which could be prepared in myriad ways with innumerable toppings, and several dozen coffee options. After some minutes I thought
I was ready. I joined the small queue. I knew that I did not want the ‘healthy option’. I tried to look the small Mexican woman behind the counter in the eye and declared boldly, ‘Could I get’ — No ‘pleases’ or ‘may I have’, I was practically a native — ‘Could I get a sesame-seed bagel, toasted on both sides, with cream cheese and smoked salmon, red onion, chopped not rings, with no lettuce, a little cracked pepper and lemon and a tall American coffee with no sugar?’

  I drew breath and smiled. She never even looked up.

  ‘What kind of cream cheese?’

  I don’t know what I chose. The first one on the list I think. I felt deflated as I took my paper bag of purchases to the small rotunda in the centre of the market and sat down. Here wooden square blocks to sit on at wooden square blocks to eat at had been laid out. Grown-up pre-school furniture. I realised I was thinking like an American. No European ever even heard of preschool. I pulled out my breakfast. Coffee, one hot sandwich, a plastic tub of melon and orange, a small fork (plastic) and twenty-eight napkins. Twenty-eight napkins. I counted them. Enough napkins to imagine that the world would never run out of paper.

  I don’t know what the tub of orange and melon was for. I took it as a reminder that really I should have had the healthy option. I didn’t want it but it had been free. A pigeon entered and joined the early morning throng. I tried him on some of the violently coloured fruit. He didn’t want it either so I put it in my rucksack out of guilt, thinking I might offer it to the others later.

  When I met up with them at a more civilised hour, Paul was wide awake and keen to do the whole American Revolution experience.