The Best Fish and Chips in Windsor

Here is another bit I read from A Yank Back to England. We're having lunch in Windsor--this is one of our favorite stories! Hope you like...

Where in the world is this church?

We've started scanning in Frances' photos from our trips to England and we need help--we don't remember where we saw this beautiful, double-spired church! We found it among the Rattlesden photos, so we're thinking East Anglia. Can you help? Please leave a comment or email me.
Thanks in advance!

A yank back to Broadstairs, part 1

I was secretly longing to get back to the sea. I find myself drawn to the coast, and I need a connection with the ocean that pounds and tries to batter Albion into submission. I long to swim in the water or, if the weather turns inclement, to at least paddle my feet in the briny foam. For some reason I’m drawn to English seaside places, specifically Broadstairs, with its huddle of Victorian abodes clustered around the cliff top. I fondly imagine bewhiskered gents and corsetted ladies from a century ago, promenading along the front, taking in deep breaths, listening to brass bands in Cliffside Gardens, trying to escape the constraints and the conventions of their day, if only with an occasional burp or fart swallowed up in the sound of a brass cymbal or a crashing wave. I love the town’s rocky terrain, the tiny harbor, the gaudy seaside swag, its weather-beaten elegance and quiet claims to the past that always seem so warm and inviting, whatever the season.

Back to Bleedin' Blighty, part 2

I gazed out of the window at the thick, snot-colored clouds that seemed to go on forever. England. It had to be England. I pulled my face into a grimy crease to speak, but the attendant was on a mission and spoke first, with authoritarian kindness.
“You’ll have to hold your baby in your lap and strap her in. I have to stow the cot.”
“How can I—?” I asked, lamely. But she was gone, mumbling something about landing soon and being back in a jif. A jif, a jiffy, the attendant was becoming a little more English, a little more quaint, the closer we got to London.
Here we go again, I thought. Another so-called vacation.

Mum vetoes the pub

“I didn’t like that place. I didn’t like to say,” said Jessie.
“But you did Mum, several times, in fact.”
“I was just speaking me mind.”
“What didn’t you like about it? The food wasn’t that bad.”
“Wasn’t the food. Dingy. The atmosphere. Not cheerful. No life. I like a bit of life meself.”

In the footfalls of Oscar Wilde, part 2

We did not explore the town, but walked instead by an old wooden lock located by the river, in a separate channel. A man was maneuvering his boat into the lock. He never looked up, but he obviously knew what he was doing. He jumped to the side and, using a big paddle like a handle, shut the lock gates. Then he turned wheels and opened two sluice gates. Creamy, green water gushed from one part of the lock to the other, and his boat rose to meet another level of river. Then he reopened the gates, untied his boat, jumped back on, and put-putted away. I felt like applauding. I could not imagine myself doing such a thing. I would have panicked and, no doubt, disrupted the flow of water or disabled the lock.
Just beyond the bridge, the river widened and opened up, with an old mill on one side and the squat gorge on the other side. We enjoyed the view but had seen enough. Looking for Oscar’s old haunts seemed a bit silly now, even to me. Besides, we were all very hot and getting hungry.

In the footfalls of Oscar Wilde, part 1

Just about noon, we shot across a bridge and promptly left Goring-on-Thames, our destination. Sheepishly we turned back, gently recrossed the river, and parked near a post office. We were welcomed by a church and few houses, but not much else. At least it was not flat. Just across the bridge, we could now see the land suddenly hiccuping into a small forested gorge, providing a delightful, verdant backdrop to the slow-flowing river.
Oscar Wilde had spent a family holiday in Goring, but I could not think why. We never saw anyone, even the ubiquitous Swan Hotel on the opposite bank looked deserted. Perhaps the heat of the day had scared everyone inside. Safe to say, we were the only tourists strolling across the bridge that afternoon. The river was flowing quite well and part of the greenish water was filled with mud, like a seam of fast-flowing milk chocolate.

Sunday seafood teas in Dagenham, part 1

“Remember the teas we had on Sunday, Mum?”
“No, I can’t say I do,” said Jessie, tearing at a slice of bread.
“Of course you do,” scolded Lew. He went on to explain, mainly for Frances’ benefit, what afternoon Sunday tea was like.
“The fish man showed up, on Sunday. He sold prawns and winkles and cockles, welks. Never much liked welks. Mum got the prawns, I got the winkles, and Denis had the cockles. Lots of vinegar and pepper, and bread and butter. Lovely.” He grinned at the memory and I recalled it myself.
Seafood was a regular Sunday afternoon treat in Dagenham. Shrimp, tiny, tiny crustaceans, heads and tails pinched between forefinger and thumbs, a slight crunch like biting into the sea. Cockles, chewy and soft and tasting mostly of the vinegar and pepper they were dunked in. The seafood was sold from the back of a van that dripped with briny ice water and smelled of the sea.

Going nowhere fast

“What was it that happened?” Jessie shot a look at Lew, “Something happened.”
“Nothing happened,” said Lew.
“Something happened,” said Jessie, stubbornly.
“We almost got lost, but Pam knew the way,” said Lew, quickly.
“Oh that was it. He almost got us lost!” Mum recalled triumphantly.
“You going to tell the story, or shall I?”
“What story? What story you telling?” asked Jessie. “I like a good story.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I just got a leg over with me directions.” Lew fumed.
“It was alright, I knew where I was going. Used to come down this way a lot,” said Pam.

My Nan holds court at “The Vic,” part 2

“I’ll have what she’s having,” my Nan would say, pointing. An assortment of half a dozen liqueur-type drinks would appear, which she would drain like shooters. Inebriation was never far behind, a condition feared by all the menfolk who dated her daughters. Unfortunately, curtailing Nanny’s booze intake evoked her wrath, but plying her with drinks did not abate it. For no particular reason, my Nan would focus her ire on one of her daughters’ boyfriends.
I’m sure it was the same thirty years before when Lew was courting Jessie.
“So the journey down was okay?” asked Frances, changing the subject.

First time in Windsor

Nestled in the curve of the Thames, at its prettiest and most leafiest, Windsor is really three towns in one. The first clings and cowers within the mighty shadow of Windsor Castle, suitably deferential. Beyond this is a rather ordinary town that, apart from a large army barracks, looks like any other middle class suburban town in England aspiring to be something it’s not. The third part is Eton, which is not really Windsor at all but, rather, a small village just across the Thames on the opposite bank. Eton is not much more than a one street village but it is very old, pleasantly genteel, and subdued.
With three very different towns to choose from, we had unknowingly booked a hotel in Windsor’s boring bit.

Full steam ahead, part 2

As the trains would slowly pull out of London, I saw the soiled backsides of buildings, embankment walls, and nondescript bridges with sidings sprouting clumps of grass and weeds beneath dilapidated, rusting undercarriages. The train moved farther and the concrete-and-brick gullies and gorges and tiny road tunnels gave way to residential back gardens. The odd signal box. Then more houses, walls of bricks, then wooden posts. The city was being stretched out like toffee, thinner and thinner, first translucent, then quite transparent, then suddenly disappearing altogether. The train would break free and there were green embankments on either side and nothing much else. The stagnant urban life had been banished in a flash, reappearing periodically in gray-brown blurs as the train hurtled through small village stations and county towns.

Full steam ahead, part 1

I found it strange to travel by car to a coastal region in England. Holiday trips with my parents, Jessie and Lew, always started at one of London’s main-line terminus stations, usually Victoria for the South Coast or Paddington for the West Country. As I drove I remembered those large, glass-covered edifices, filthy from the soot of train smoke built up over the great age of steam, a gummy brown legacy of time gone by. When I was a kid steam trains were still in service and I could easily recall the loud engine noise as they scudded to a halt, wheezing smoking, billowing steam and sounding like metallic raspberries. But it was the smell I remembered most, the smell of grease, oil, and coal. These were the ingredients that fueled adventures far from my home in Dagenham.