Day of service, East End style

Until the middle of the twentieth century many East Enders, and those who lived south of the river, in the poorer boroughs of London, went hop-picking every year. It was quite an industry and a practical way to earn a few pennies, enjoy a family vacation, albeit a working one, and breathe clean country air. Of course, the descendants of those hop pickers are now barreling down the motorway in their land cruisers, roaring past those old hop fields and disused kilns without a second glance, as they head to the Channel Tunnel and the promise of warmer, richer pickings on the other side.

Launching Cy's car

With its huge fins and tail lights, Cy's baby blue Ford Galaxy convertible looked like a relic from either an alien planet junk yard or an unfinished Flash Gordon movie set. As always, it was parked halfway up the curb, more on the sidewalk than off it. A parking ticket fluttered from the windscreen. The car was like Cy in many ways; it was big, outlandish, almost exotic, completely out of place and out of time but still managing to look cool. And the car lumbered just as he did, attracting attention, lots of amused glances and lots of parking tickets. “Christ! I hate getting these!” Cy stuffed the ticket into his ping pong bat bag. “Maureen wants us back for lunch, it’s kinda good she likes you Denis under most other circumstances, she hates the people I drag around the house. But you, she likes you, my young friend. Go figure!”
Cy gently rocked the car back and forth until he had enough room to launch it into the road. He drove so slowly, he looked as if he was prowling, which was just as well because, when Cy was behind the wheel, he insisted on looking at the person he was speaking to, not at the road.
“Cy, look out!”

Afternoon stroll in London

In the pale gold of the following afternoon we took a stroll in the neighborhood beyond the shopping hordes on the Brompton Road, towards Hans Place. In this the residential part of Knightsbridge, with its soft edged blocks of blood orange colored mansion flats and lovely town houses the area seemed to take on an almost village-like calm, broken only by the occasional soft purring tick of passing cabs. We discovered an elegant mews with cobble stones, a leafy square and Italianate side streets whitewashed and splashed with red carnations and geraniums. And no one seemed to be in sight until we came to Pont Street, filled with locals crisscrossing the road, milling, chatting, doing their bits of shopping, buying everything from baguettes to Beluga caviar. The array of boutique food emporia in Pont Street was truly astonishing. Bright eyed and bright scaled creatures almost flapped with freshness on the fishmongers marble counter, the aroma of fresh bread wafted from the bakery, and vegetables in the green grocers window seemed mounted and displayed like individual jewels in blue tissue paper.

And the winners are...

I confess, we were too lazy to pull out our lovely roulette wheel this time, so we used random.org to determine the winners of the Todd Charles books. We ended up with 32 valid entries, and the winning numbers were 8 and (surprisingly) 1. So that means our lucky winners are:
*my Goodreads buddy, Jersey Girl, who tagged, posted, voted, and more (thanks, darling!).
*Prodigal Wife's faithful friend Syl, who was the first to enter our giveaway.
We have emails, so getting info for HarperCollins should be easy.
Congratulations!

One little thing--I know we haven't posted as regularly as we might have over the summer. Hopefully that will change as the weather cools...
Cheers,
The Prodigals

An inauspicious beginning

When England was celebrating the Festival of Britain and cheering for the Queen, I came into the world without many cheers but quite a lot of tears. Mum bawled her eyes out when I turned out to be a boy and not the girl she always wanted. Regardless, after the nurse offered to take me, mum reluctantly assumed the maternal role.

Dagenham? You come from ... where?

“Dagenham? You can’t possibly come from Dagenham!” a flamboyant acquaintance in the West End of London once told me. “You simply must tell people you come from ‘Darn-em’ and you must place your hand over your mouth as you say it, just in case.”
Just in case? In case of what? I felt an urge to defend the place, but then thought better of it.
Dagenham. “Call it Daggers,” said another wag. Well, I called it home.

Kate meets T-rex

From Thurloe Square, it was a short walk to the Natural History Museum. Our timing was perfect. It was after four o’clock, and the entry was free.
This famous Victorian museum was enormous and smelled as old as the fossils and dinosaur bones it contained. We walked around one of the newer exhibitions featuring dinosaurs covered in plastic skin that roared and clicked and made slobbering sounds. Kate was fascinated by dinosaurs, as most young children are, but even so, she was a little disturbed by their realistic look. And yet she was quite unperturbed, once I picked her up, by the huge, life-sized, animated Tyrannosaurus Rex we encountered in the high-ceilinged atrium by the museum teashop. Odd to see a fearsome dinosaur swishing a huge tail, roaring and swooping about as weary museum-goers drank their tea and did their level best to ignore it. In England, dinosaurs should not make scenes in tearooms. It just isn’t done.

A dressing down at Harrods

The side entrance to Harrods had steps and, as I struggled with Kate’s stroller, a young man in morning coat and gray-striped trousers rushed out to me.
“Oh, thanks so much, I was having a bit of a—”
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t let you in.”
“Excuse me?”
“I can’t let you into ‘Arrods,” he said, blocking my path politely but firmly. “I’m sorry, sir, but cut down jeans are not allowed in ‘Arrods, sir.”
“You must be joking.”
“It’s the ‘Arrods dress code. Sir.”
“A dress code? In a store?”
“This is priceless.” Frances was amazed but, unlike me, she was smiling.

Keeping an eye on London

Just back from four months in London, Amy sent on this lovely shot she took from the London Eye on the South Bank of the Thames. See more of her photos at Amy's Daily Photo. Thanks Amy!
Got a great shot of England? email us; if we post it, we'll link back to you! (Please, one at a time and 100k max!)

Club Row and my first bagel

Club Row was a place to itself. Located just out of the stream of pedestrian traffic that either spilled out to Liverpool Street and Bishopsgate, or double-backed up to Aldgate. When I was a kid, Club Row was derelict, the enduring result of bomb damage from the London Blitz. But on Sundays, this empty space filled up with vendors. There were birds for sale, exotic parakeets, gaudy parrots, tiny songbirds, and hundreds of racing pigeons warbling with discontent, stacked up, cage upon cage, way beyond my gaze. Bordered with old warehouse buildings, ancient offices, and clothing sweatshops, Club Row also housed a variety of stores at street level, open on Sunday because it was an old Jewish neighborhood.
I particularly loved the bakeries, with their weirdly shaped loaves, twisted and plaited and covered with what I thought was bird seed. And rolls with holes, threaded onto long sticks! Amazing. No bread was sliced, or pre-wrapped in printed waxed paper. Fresh. Lew once bought us a bag of small, hot breads that were soft on the inside and crusty on the outside. Steam filled the bag and a yeasty, sweet aroma filled the air. My first bagels. What a treat. We ate most of them as we mooched around, looking at budgies and songbirds and kittens and puppies. For a few hours, I had become a part of Lew’s polyglot, unpredictable, and distant past.

Stopping for directions

“Now, when you get up there, you’ll come to this thing we call a ‘roundabout.’ Got that, yeah?”
He talked slowly. He talked loudly. We realized he thought I was foreign. He thought I was an American! He said again, but slower, “a ‘ran-da-bhat.’ ” Bloody nerve.
“Anyway, you’ll come to this ‘ran-da-bhat’ and—”
He never explained what a ‘ran-da-bhat’ was exactly. Instead, he started making large circular movements with his oddly bent hand and arm. If I had been American by birth and not by choice, I might have imagined he was describing a carousel with gaudily painted wooden horses placed on the highway to amuse passing commuters, rather than a traffic circle. I stared at him. He smiled, nodding, looking like the amiable idiot he thought I was.
“Yes, yes, I know what it is, I’ve been ‘ere before.” I tried to thicken up my Cockney accent. He went right on, ignoring me and my strategically dropped aitches.
“But don’t go right a-rhaand it. Turn off before you do, and that’ll get you on the Ilford Road. Can’t miss it.”
I thanked him and we were on our way.

Christmas at St. Paul's

“Remember when Denny took us up to Saint Paul’s for a Christmas Eve service?” Lew asked Mum.
“Lovely. Lovely place, Saint Paul’s.” Jessie spoke with solemn reverence. “Lovely place. At Christmas – that’s when we went.”
“Packed it was. Packed!” said Lew.
“Anyone would’ve thought it was Christmas.” I could not resist.
“Don’t you laugh,” Lew looked at Frances. “Holy communion, they had, and everyone, I mean everyone, went up for it – everyone except us, that is. I couldn’t believe it, took ages. Do you remember that?” Jessie shook her head and shrugged. Lew went on, “Well, I bloody well do. You turned around and said ‘they’re tearing the balls out it,’ that’s what you said. ‘They’re tearing the balls out of it.’”
Frances looked a bit disturbed.
“The choir was wonderful,” I added.
“After midnight, it was. Denis had a car then,” Lew said, recalling.
“Just as well he did. That’s why he can get around and we never could.”
“Don’t start that again,” said Lew.

Driving into London

The road became dense with cars, trucks, buses, vans, and motorized scooters that zigzagged around the massed traffic like demented pilot fish that had lost their way. Apart from intermittent stop signs, everything seemed to be speeding up. Everything, that is, except my reactions. I was feeling tired. Grimy. Horrid. And dreading where I was going. What had I been thinking? Why, oh why, was I planning to dwell in the damp valleys of East Anglia and not, say, in the sun-drenched hill towns of Tuscany? Oh, Christ. I was heading for ten days of gloom and doom.