The Summer Before the World Changed

In 2001, I won a fiction grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Small victories like winning this grant keep a writer going. After rejoicing, I worried. The $4000 grant was taxpayer money. How could I put it to best use? What should I do with the funds that would help me grow as a writer?

Slowly an idea emerged: I could use the grant to travel to England. I was 50 and had never crossed the Atlantic. My husband, an expert witness in energy trials and my son, a college junior, could manage without me for a month. Now was my time.

I bought my airline ticket as well as a book called Cheap Digs in London. Cheap digs were necessary since the airline ticket had been expensive. In the book I found the St. Thomas More House run by the sisters of Notre Dame. More House served as international student housing during the school year and rented rooms to travelers in summer. The Arts and Sciences Department at Marymount University, where I taught writing, allowed me to use their fax to contact More House and secure a room.

As my departure neared, my panic grew. I knew no one in London. I had never traveled so far from home. And I would be alone, completely alone. Why had I decided to do this?

But I had little time for reflection. I packed, stocked the fridge for my absence, and studied my map of London. How many times did I put my finger on More House, the row house on Cromwell Road that I would call home? I read Edward Rutherford’s London, watched Masterpiece Theatre, and went to sleep thinking: London, London, London, over and over, the syllables singing in my head.

Also I studied the tube route from Heathrow to my digs and decided to get off at the Gloucester Road Station instead of South Kensington, a mistake since South Ken has a tunnel that allows travelers to roll their suitcase out of the station to the street. At the Gloucester Road Station I struggled on steep stairs until a kind man came along and helped with my rolling suitcase. This was something I discovered often on my visit. How kind the English are.

I emerged from the shadowy station into dazzling sunlight. Before my eyes adjusted, the city’s sights, sounds, aromas rushed at me. There at the corner of Gloucester and Cromwell Roads I stood transfixed, an ocean away from home. Okay, so the Starbucks’ mermaid winked from down the block, but its presence did not diminish that I had journeyed to another world.

A sweet Scottish nun in regular dress welcomed me and showed me to my room on what she called the second floor which was really the third. Tall French windows opened onto Cromwell Road directly across from the Natural History Museum. A flapping banner proclaimed their life-size dinosaur exhibit. Every evening before the museum closed, guards opened their massive double doors and let out the bone-chilling roar of tyrannosaurus rex and worse the pterodactyl’s screech right before they swoop in on their prey. Eventually these sounds wove their way through my dreams like a lullaby.

My first afternoon in More House I was jet-lagged and exhausted, but grateful to have made it across the Atlantic safely. I stood in my open widows and felt the city rise around me, wide, wonderful, astonishing. Thus began my wanderlust. I needed to travel, to see the world in all its splendor.

I would be stymied by what the fall of 2001 brought to America. Travel would be halted for a while, but when I could travel again, I took my husband to Paris. After that we kept going year-after-year to Krakow, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, Bratislava, Budapest, Prague, Lithuania, Ukraine.
Still London is my first love. God willing, I will return there soon.