Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  We are both seriously tired by this point, and take a cab to the Gaylord Indian restaurant, recommended by my Michelin Red Guide, which, however, turns out to be closed. We wander around the neighborhood, and end up eating at an outdoor table in a Greek restaurant called Andrea’s, which pleases me because it is on Charlotte Street, which is where the spy has his offices in Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin, and The Billion-Dollar Brain, four of my favorite novels . . . and because you can see the strange edifice of the Telecom Tower from here, like an immense surreal ice-cream-cone wrapped in winking lights, which I recall nostalgically from my first trip to London, when it was known as the Post Office Tower. While we eat, we are entertained by street buskers playing “Over the Rainbow” and a selection of old Beatles songs on the guitar and accordion. Walk slowly back past Tottenham Court Road, through Bedford Square, past the back of the British Museum under the sleeping stone gaze of the lions, through Russell Square. Have dessert in a little outdoor Italian cafe in an alleyway a few blocks down, just off Southampton Row, very Left Bank and bohemian in its English way. Then back to the Russell.

  Tuesday, August 8th—Greenwich Observatory & London

  Up early, about 6 A.M. (much earlier than I usually rise at home, but this was to become the pattern of the trip for me). Sit and catch up with this diary while Susan sleeps. We go downstairs about 8 A.M. and have the usual Trusthouse Forte breakfast, which we had every morning on our last trip here; I have sausages, toast, croissants. Meet Walter Jon Williams and his wife Kathy Hedges in the lobby of the Russell, by prearrangement. We buy theater tickets for that night’s performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, then cab to the Tower of London, where we catch a boat down the Thames to Greenwich. We all tour the Cutty Sark, a famous sailing ship now sunk in concrete, which is adorned with a masthead of a bare-breasted woman clenching a horse’s tail in her hand (she’s supposedly a witch who was trying to catch a passing rider but missed and got only the horse’s tail, but she does get to go bare-breasted in public in London, proving once again that only Evil Women are permitted to have nipples . . . or show them, anyway), and which features, up on deck, a box of fake chickens, complete with a continuously playing tape-loop of chickens clucking. Seeing the sailor’s bunk-room, it strikes me once again, as it did when I was here before in 1968, how small the bunks are—I’d have to sleep in them almost doubled in half. There’s also a fake plastic pig, with a tape loop of it grunting, and the tour-guide, talking about the livestock they kept aboard for long cruises, is saying, “On British ships, the pig was always called Dennis.”

  Have a quick lunch in a pub called The Gypsy Moth, which features an electronic Monopoly game; wonder how it works, but don’t play it. We walk up through Greenwich toward the Royal Observatory, Walter amused at the number of Mexican and even “Tex-Mex” restaurants in town; why in Greenwich, of all places? (We don’t see another Mexican restaurant for the entire trip, by the way). Walk into and across Greenwich Park, Susan and I stopping to rest at the foot of the very steep climb up to the Royal Observatory itself, while the hardy Walter and Kathy press on ahead. Spend a pleasant five minutes looking out across the park, which falls away from our bench in a long rolling hill, watching a man playing with a small child in a stroller by letting the stroller go racing away down the hill; looks kind of dangerous, but when the stroller gets to the bottom, the child eagerly pushes it back up the hill so that his father can send him careening down the slope in it again. Long steep climb up the hill to the Old Royal Observatory. See the Prime Meridian in Meridian Courtyard, take the obligatory tourist photos of us standing with our feet straddling the Meridian, then tour Flamsteed House. In the Octagon Room, a peak through a long telescope there gives you a look at “Pluto”—the Disney character, that is, whose likeness they have pasted over the end of the tube. Also find the “Dog Watch” idea interesting, a proposed sympathetic-magic system for telling time at sea, from before the days of precision timepieces—the idea was that at noon a knife would be plunged into a pile of magic chemicals in London, making the dogs aboard ship, who had previously been pricked with it, all howl at the same time, thus telling the sailors asea what time it was in London. Also interesting, although a bit gruesome, was a time-lapse film of a dead rat rotting. We finish first, and wait for Walter and Kathy outside, while crows squabble and fight and call harshly down through the tangled trees of the hillside. Outside the Observatory, I point out the holes in the statue there; when I was here in 1968, with a group of fans that included Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein and Steve Stiles, I remember Atom Thompson, the old British fan artist, pointing out the same holes and telling us, with his voice quivering with passion and indignation, that the damage to the statues had been caused by Luftwaffe planes strafing the Observatory during the war.

  Walk down the long hill and across the park to the National Maritime Museum, where we go to see the Titanic exhibit, which is quite engrossing. Strange to see the restored items, plates, glassware, uniforms, that had been sitting on the bottom of the ocean under two miles of cold water for seventy years, including tobacco in good enough condition to smoke—which made me fantasize that a cigarette made from tobacco brought up from the Titanic would be a nicely decadent luxury item for some future multimillionaire to buy. Stop for scones, then back to the pier and catch the boat back to the Tower of London. As we cruise down the Thames, it strikes me that almost all of the industry is gone from this stretch of the river, which once bustled with commerce. The river is now lined with former warehouses that have been turned into luxury condominiums—which makes me imagine sardonically that a hundred years from now the tour guide will be pointing out all the buildings that used to be luxury condominiums, but which have now been transformed into warehouses.

  We get off the boat at St. Cathrine’s Dock, one stop shy of the Tower, because one of the boat crew has recommended an Indian restaurant there, and we are running out of time for dinner if we want to get to the theater. Have a hurried so-so dinner there, literally opening the place up, going in a step behind the man with the keys, and then cab to the Old Vic, where Susan and I, still jetlagged, nod out and jerk awake fitfully through an excellent performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. Have a quick drink afterward, and then say goodbye to Walter and Kathy, and take the tube from Waterloo to Russell Square, with one transfer; the only time we use the Underground this trip. It’s a lovely night, and the streets around Russell Square are thick with students heading for one sort of party or another. Ah, to be young in Russell Square at night, pushing through the excited crowds with the eager darkness all around you, with the air like velvet and a yellow moon overhead, and all time and possibility opening before you! But instead we are old, and go upstairs and watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in German. Go to sleep to Captain Picard barking something guttural in German in a voice that makes him sound as though he has a bad head-cold.

  Wednesday, August 9th—London

  Up at six, work on my trip diary. Susan, who had a fitful night, sleeps until about ten. Too late for breakfast, we go out of the Russell and walk down to the British Museum, having coffee and scones at a little sidewalk place on a side street near the Museum. Later, we look through the Scottish Woolens place across from the Museum, buying some inexpensive gifts, mostly Celtic jewelry, for people back home. Then we catch a cab to Harrods department store. Long bout of shopping there, then an awful lunch that neither of us is able to finish, then another long bout of shopping, during which Susan comes very close to buying a stuffed Obelix doll, but decides not to; we also admire a stuffed plush alligator which is too large to fit comfortably into our living room, and which costs more than a thousand pounds; must be very rich parents indeed who can afford to buy that toy.

  We buy a bag of assorted kinds of bread to feed to the birds, and walk over to Hyde Park. Cross Rotten Row, covering our shoes in dust, and walk up the Serpentine in bright sunlight, almost the brightest of the trip
so far, looking in vain for someplace to sit in the shade. There seem to be fewer water-birds in the Serpentine this year, and we see two or three dead fish washed up on the bank. This and several large “NO SWIMMING” signs make me wonder just how bad the water-quality is, and if the relative sparseness of water-birds this trip is another effect of the prolonged drought. Finally get tired enough to settle for a bench not in the shade, and we sit there feeding bread to Canada geese and pigeons. A father comes strolling up with a little girl, a toddler, who is completely naked. We lend her some bread, and the little naked girl feeds it solemnly to the geese, who are almost as big as she is. I think that this would be a good photo, but hesitate to take it for fear of offending the father. They walk off without a word having been spoken, and I end up wondering if they were French; the little girl’s nudity was a little too casual for the English, I think—in the States, they probably would have been arrested. We walk on to another bench, in front of the Peter Pan statue, and feed bread to coots and ducks, wondering sentimentally if one of the ducks could be the duckling we’d seen there in ‘87, all grown up.

  Susan gets tired, and wants to go back to the room for a nap, so we walk up past the Italian Fountain to the Lancaster Gate. At the last moment, I decide that I don’t want to go back to the room, so I put Susan in a cab on the Bayswater Road about 4 P.M., and then go sit on a bench in Kensington Gardens. The smell of burning leaves is heavy, and there are lots of dogs, some being walked on leashes, some running free across the park, some barking in the distance, too far away to see. Small groups of tourists go by, speaking in French or Spanish or German. Try with indifferent success to feed bread to ravens, who keep hopping nervously away (although they do want the bread, and come sneaking back as soon as I get far enough away), then walk on. Settle the great controversy over whether there are squirrels in England or not—which we had been discussing on the plane—by seeing one; make it run like mad for cover by going over for a closer look (squirrels can’t be as common here as in the States, though; only saw one more during the entire trip, where in similar country at home we probably would have seen dozens). Walk down to the Round Pond, which, it turns out, is where most of the geese and ducks and swans have been hanging out. Stroll around the curve of Round Pond, throwing the rest of the bread in the water for the birds, who end up following me in swarms as if I were the Pied Piper, particularly the aggressive and nasty Canada geese, who will crawl right up your pantleg if you let them. Someone sailing a model sailboat on the Round Pond, just as people had twenty years ago, when I used to walk around this pond as a young man. Drifted slowly over to the Broad Walk, sat on a bench, and reflected sadly on how little this haunt of mine from years ago has changed, and how greatly I have. Is there really any connection between that boy who used to stride excitedly around here so long ago and me, except that we share some continuity of memory? Perhaps I just think that I used to be him, and that belief, taken on faith, is the only connection there really is.

  Walk up to Queensway. Finally manage to put in a call to the Gay Hussar for a reservation by the expedient of buying a phonecard, since I can’t seem to get any of the coin phones to work; notice that the phone booths along Queensway are still festooned inside with advertisements for massage parlours and prostitutes, although the discretely worded advertisements of my youth—“Madam Colette gives lessons in French”—have been replaced by much more explicit solicitations of the “Want a spanking?” “Like hot oral sex?” kind that leave little or no room for misunderstanding. Walk along the Bayswater Road for a while, then catch a cab back to the Russell. Wake Susan up, and we catch a cab to 2 Greek Street, to the Gay Hussar, a Hungarian restaurant just south of Soho Square. Dinner alone there in the upstairs room, the waiter dividing his time between us and a private party in the room upstairs, whose footsteps we can hear clomping around over our heads from time to time. I have roast duck with red cabbage, Susan has chicken paprikas. Two out of the three paintings on the wall behind Susan are clearly a matched set, scenes from Little Red Riding Hood, but the picture in the middle is of a maddened gorilla attacking a party of armed men, which makes a curious addition to the story of Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood meets Congo, perhaps? All the pictures up here appear to be old magazine illustrations. Always forget how tiny the Gay Hussar is until I eat here again. It’s not much bigger than a Trinity house back in Philly.

  Walk back to the Russell by way of Oxford Street to Great Russell Street, past the sleeping Museum, to Southampton Row. Stop at a Garfunkel’s on Southhampton Row for some tea and some peculiar-tasting vanilla ice-cream, then back to the hotel. The room is stiflingly hot, as it has been every night so far this trip, with not a breath of air coming in, even though the night outside is relatively cool by now; our windows look out on the internal courtyard of the hotel, and no breeze ever comes in, although we have every window wide open. As we try to get to sleep, snap briefly around the dial on the TV. British TV has become much more like American TV than it used to be, which, from my perspective as a tourist, is too bad, another piece of local color lost. Soon London will be just like New York City—and then, why bother to go? When I finally fall asleep in the smothering heat, Susan is sitting up on her bed, still industriously filling out postcards.

  Thursday, August 10th—London & Train to Cornwall

  Up early, pack. While Susan finishes getting ready, I go downstairs and consult with the concierge about the feasibility of getting to Highgate Cemetery (where Lizzy Siddal is buried), which, without a car, doesn’t look to be very feasible. We have breakfast, buy theater tickets for Crazy For You, and check out, leaving our bags stored with the concierge. We give up on Highgate Cemetery, and instead take a cab to Chayne Walk in Chelsea, where we look at the house where Rossetti used to live, and where he kept a wombat in the front yard until, not surprisingly, it sickened and died. Walk around the neighborhood for a while, then catch a cab to Little Venice, where the Jason’s Trip canal boat tour starts from. Sit by the canalside and have tea while waiting for the canal boat to arrive, then get on the canal boat for a pleasant ride down the Regent’s Canal, past the zoo, past banks lined with moored canal boats, past the two-story floating Chinese restaurant, to Camden Locks. Get off at Camden Locks, walk around and look at the little craft shops, and then take the waterbus back to London Zoo. We are really a little too hot and tired to really appreciate the zoo by this point, but we trudge around anyway, dutifully looking at elephants and white pelicans and marmosets, and stumble unexpectedly on a demonstration of falconry that freezes us in our tracks, the great bird swooping overhead, huge wings beating, seeming to almost brush the tops of our heads as he sweeps past to get his piece of dead rat from his handler.

  Take a cab to Leicester Square, which is totally jammed with tourists, students, buskers, street bands, mimes, jugglers, to a degree that makes Times Square look nearly deserted by comparison. Watch the plastic glockenspiel at the Swiss Center, then walk around looking for a restaurant, gradually realizing that we are on the edge of London’s Chinatown, and we basically have a choice of Chinese food or American fast-food places such as Pizza Hut and Burger King and the ubiquitous McDonalds. Finally settle on a restaurant called Poons, which I recognize from the Michelin Red Guide, not without some trepidation on my part, since, although I love Chinese food, I have never had a good meal in a Chinese restaurant in England . . . and some of them have been memorably awful, like the hideous Chinese meal we had in Stratford-Upon-Avon eight years ago. The food turns out to be actually pretty good, though, to my relief, and one of the cheapest meals of the whole trip. After dinner, we stroll around Leicester Square for awhile, in places having to force our way through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, and then head up Old Compton Road to the Prince Edward Theatre, where we see Crazy For You. The show is shallow but entertaining, with good dancing, great sets and costumes, some good effects, and a brisk pace which helps keep us awake this time; the female lead is not really up to singing some of the standards suc
h as “Someone To Watch Over Me,” and does an uneven job overall—she may have been a stand-in, though. On the whole, as good a way to kill two hours as any, although by the end I am beginning to get nervous about catching our train.