Feral Animals of England

I often say that my first trip out of the country was to France, the time that I went with Julia to record her grandmother’s Holocaust story. And it’s true that Safta’s house was the end destination, but on the way, we had an overnight stop in England, where we would be staying with Julia’s cousin, his wife, and their daughter, who lived in a suburb of London. The cousin was Israeli, his wife was Norwegian, and the little girl had been born in the UK. As I said, Julia had an extremely international family. They were kind of a one clan diaspora unto themselves.

I think the reason I don’t really count the stop in England when I think about that trip is that it wasn’t really pleasant, or interesting, or warm. We landed in London and had a morning to kill before we had to get on a train and ride out to the near countryside where the cousin lived. We spent it in the London War Room museum, which is an underground bunker where they preserved the wartime headquarter of the British Command, as well as some displays depicting the lives of ordinary Londoners during the Blitz. Now, I am interested in history, I am interested in World War 2, and surviving terrible things, but I was also jet lagged and so I kept suddenly waking up with an audio guide recording of Winston Churchill speaking directly into me ear. I would just open my eyes to find myself in a tunnel staring at a mannequin in a gas mask while the round bottomed voice of the long dead Prime Minister told me how so many owed so much to so few and I didn’t know where I was, who the few were and who the many were or for that matter, who I was. It was like living in someone’s terrible vacation slide show, just disconnected images with lots of explanation but no actual information, while fighting a losing battle to stay awake. Then it was time to ride out to the grey late autumn outskirts of the city.

We took a train and got off in a town that I have long since forgotten the name of. But, due to their work or childcare schedule or something else, Julia’s relatives couldn’t pick us up at the station. Instead, Julia had some walking directions. We started out through a steady drizzle that was just cold enough to remind you how nice it is to be warm, or just not soggy. By this time, the sun was going down and we found ourselves walking past a graveyard that looked so much like the set of An American Werewolf in London that I wanted to ask it for its autograph.

“England certainly lives up to the gothic novels,” I said, “How many ghosts do you figure are wandering the mists in there?”

Julia, refusing to even look in the direction of the graveyard, told me to shut up with a surprising amount of conviction. I hadn’t realized till that moment that she had a superstitious streak. Years later I would show her The Shining, insisting that it transcended the gore and guts of your standard horror movie, and she watched the whole film from the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She said she needed to be able to see that it was on a TV and not in the room.

The whole wandering the moors portion of the trip took much longer than anyone had anticipated, and we arrived pretty late. The cousin and his wife were still up, but their daughter had been put to bed. The reception was chilly. They had saved some of dinner for us and laid it out with a kind of flat browed patience that they clearly felt obligated to display. I didn’t know if this was a British coldness, a Norwegian coldness, or just the disdain that all Israelis seem to have for anyone who’s never manned any kind of turret. We ate quickly and retired to their spare room.

In the morning, we woke up to find Julia’s cousin heading out the door to work. He said that it was nice to see Julia and to meet me and if you squinted hard, you might have thought he meant it. Then he was gone, and it was just us and the Norwegian and their daughter, who was now awake. And here’s where things got weird. The child was three years old, but she was the size of a six year old. I assumed that this, like her red hair, came from the Viking side of the family. I assumed that was also the source of the short berserker rages she flew into, running around the house shouting that she was now “PLAYING THE JUMPING GAME!” or that she had gone through a transformation, “I’M A UNICORN! LET’S PLAY THE UNICORN GAME!” We were sitting at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee while her mother stared at us with the same even, unimpressed gaze that she’d worn the night before, so it was kind of unclear who the “us” in the “let’s play the unicorn game referred to.” Especially as she would shout it whether she was in the kitchen with us, or in the living room alone. We had a little breakfast and then, the Norwegian announced that she would wash up, the subtext being because that was her fate as proscribed by an unjust and indifferent cosmos.

Dismissed, Julia and I went into the living room to find the child throttling a teddy bear that was almost the same size as her. When we came in and sat down on the couch, she brought the stuffed animal over to us and held it out.

“This is Gildenstern and he loves me SOOOOOO much!”

“Gildenstern?” I asked.

“Yes, Gildenstern. And he loves me SOOOOO much.”

“That’s an interesting name for a teddy bear.” I said. I didn’t take this kid for a child prodigy who had spent her time, between MRIs of her clearly over-active pituitary gland, devouring the collected works of William Shakespeare. Obviously, they had given the kid the bear and told her what its name would be, rather than letting her name it. Maybe this was fair, because the kid seemed to think the name was not the important part of what she’d told us, and to focus our clearly wandering attention, she restated the bit we should have been picking up.

“He loves me. He really, really loves me. He loves me SOOOOO much.”

She said this several more times. She said it as we packed our stuff, as we put on our coats, as we walked to the mudroom and put on our shoes, as we curtly shook her mother’s hand and thanked her for her hospitality. As we made our escape, every stage was soundtracked by a small voice saying, “Gildenstern loves me SOOOO much” in a tiny English accent. She really needed us to know that she was certain that someone or something in this house loved her, and they loved her sooooo much.

Julia and I walked back to the train station in silence. The graveyard looked just as creepy and haunted in the daylight as it had at night, because England. Finally, as we arrived at the station and settled in to wait for our train, Julia said, “Y’know, I really don’t know my cousin that well. We’re not… close.”