Fruits of Insanity

The United Kingdom: I Found Stories There

I flew into the Manchester Airport in June. It had been a long flight. I traveled from Baltimore down to Dallas (which was storming), and the plane circled for forty-five minutes before finally landing. After a layover, we boarded the international flight and then rested in the taxi line for more than an hour waiting for the weather to clear enough for takeoff. The seats were cramped, the chatter was getting mean, and I was tired. I hadn’t slept at all the night before because—hello, England. And now, when we finally took off and headed north (flying directly over Baltimore along the way) two hours late (by the time we landed) to a new country I’d never seen before—I was tired and nervous and cranky.

The first thing I noticed in England was that the toilets were shaped funny. Not enough to make them unrecognizable, but enough that I realized that I wasn’t home any longer. People were talking in English, but it wasn’t my English. It wasn’t the big things that made me realize that I was in a foreign land, it was the little things that were almost right, jarring at my mind again and again over my eighteen months that I spent there with the abrupt realization that home was very far away.

People use less space in England than they do in the United States. My first flat was in terrace housing in Birkenhead. I left from a town house (for those of you confused by the competing technical terms, a terrace house is a row of houses along a street that share adjoining walls. So is a town house.), that was as third again as wide, but as deep. I slept in a room with Man United wallpaper (with red shapes that gave me nightmares as they marched in the dark). The back garden was roughly a ten foot square (less than half the size of the back yard at home). I was just renting, but if it had been my garden, I would have looked at the neighbors to get ideas—the personal gardens I saw in England were marvelous to look at. When I got home again, it was jarring to see all the space that people in America find necessary to place around their houses, all the plain grass lawns instead of sculpted gardens.

In Barrow, I stopped on the water and looked at the ships lying on their sides while the tide was out. It was there that I wrote home and realized a gap in my thinking. All my life, in every map of home, I knew that the Atlantic Ocean was to the east, the Pacific to the west. In my head, I somehow thought that that rule still applied—it was disconcerting to realize that the Atlantic could lie in the west.

I spent time in West Yorkshire on the banks of a canal living above a chippy. Which means (of course) that by the time I left my clothes, hair, luggage, life, and dreams, all smelled of fish and chips. We would follow the aqueduct into town, and then go home at night to climb five stories to our flat. I spent time in Preston, where it rained every day. I spent time in Blackburn, without a shower. I took baths for six weeks and washed my hair out in the sink with hot water from the kettle.

I spent six months in Kendal. There we visited the lakes—Windemere, where the swans bite as they rule the shoreline, and Rydal Water where the lake is a perfect mirror to the hills around. I hiked down to a waterfall near Ullswater and drove through hills that were as smooth and strong as sleeping elephants. I sat in the windows of ruined castles and imagined the time when they rang with life. I wondered what they were dreaming of.

No matter where you go in England, to the most remote lake, to the smallest town with houses that were built when people were smaller and stairs were second generation ladders, you never escape the sound of the motorway. Every bit of land is owned and labeled and used. It was another thing that hit me, every so often, with the reminder that I wasn’t home.

I left Manchester Airport in December, traveling back to Memphis where my family had moved in the time I was away. I didn’t sleep the night before because—hello, home for Christmas! but the trip was smooth. Painless. In Chicago, I left the international flight and boarded a baby plane with business men, one to a window, lining the aisles. As we drove home, the houses were too far apart, the trees too wild, the roads too wide. I had to tune my ears again to new voices.

I brought things back from England. Words and phrases that made people look at me. Echoes of dialect in my speech, especially when I gave presentation. A handkerchief from an old woman who pressed it into my hands with love. A tiny model of a house, complete with an English garden. A tea cup. Two beanie bears—one purple Princess Diana and one brown with a pumpkin in its middle. A notebook of names and addresses and notes. Pictures. Memories. Stories to be made, to be shared.

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