Ciao Mate
1. Rule Britania
I’ve been in this room for a long long time. Oh in truth perhaps not yet an hour. Time is useless except in passing. I’m only 14. If only.
In truth today at this moment I’ve been here (or ‘there’ as you wish) for almost 60 years. Myself now and myself then, we two lie together. We think, observe, wonder surprised. The older me, my I, is chagrined at failing to reach any conclusions. The 14 year old me doesn’t know anything about conclusions.
Today I am introspective, as is my want. I’m seeing the sure truth of time when I look down at my aged hands, wrinkles moving on this clavier. Staring into the tunnel of time and memory, I go following my trail back, retracing my own solitary footprints.
I’m come to the moment and place where I believe I began to have a first concept of me. It’s the when-where- and why of beginning to behold myself. Laugh at the self image, admire it, despise it, cry for that me in all its sorry glory. On the bed back then my changing began, from it I first arose as a changeling.
We arrived in this parsonage, the fifth I’ve known so far in my life, manse as the people here call it, this afternoon. We came by train from London Euston Station, by BOAC from Idlewild Airport, by TWA from Wichita, by car from Great Bend.
Less than three days away from Great Bend, Kansas. That’s a difference of eight hours behind here, or me, to then and the west. But time for me floats away surreal as a cork bobbling in the Atlantic. It’s an easy mind trick when one is 14 and has lived a life time in only these three days of too many ‘firsts’.
My first plane trip from Wichita to New York! I start mapping. It’s an obsession I have, trying to figure where everything is or should be. My first night in a New York hotel, the Edison—I know where to find it, just off Times Square! First transatlantic crossing! First landing in London! First train trip in Britain my seduced eyes reflecting back at me from where they are plastered dazzled inside the frame of a second class train window! Twice seeing, literally, and blinded by myself.
Then the first consternating sights of England’s dark satanic mills, crumbling down ruins! No reading had warned me of them. Row houses everywhere in a skein web of macadam.
Then at last Liverpool’s bulk rising stark and dark directly out of the estuary, made even more monumental by its bombed down spaces, the dramatic gaps between the rotten teeth of its black buildings.
Mid-afternoon and the sixty degrees F goes deep in my virgin flesh where I lie under two blankets and something else I’ve never experienced before, an amorphous mash potato-like mound of what mother claims is called an eiderdown. Principally, I’m in bed, fully clothed for warmth. I’ve even kept my shoes on.
I’m alone in the room designated as mine. Face up as if dead on the bed I am to sleep in for the next three months. A stay of 13 weeks, 90 days, I’ve counted. It seems so long when young.
Father and mother know a lot about Britain, mother because she’s read everything, father because he was also here during the second World War. Father was selected among pastors across the US to exchange churches for the summer. This is the manse of the reverend Babcock and family. They’re replacing us– the reverend Bell and family– in Great Bend, which at first to the Bell family’s amusement the Babcock’s thought to be ‘Great Ben’, Kansas, big become great. My first encounter that with the British sense of uniqueness and entitlement, an endearing trait which in time morphs for me into ‘irritating’ and finally into ‘pitiful.’
This bedroom in this foreign house is taller than it is wide. This gives an impression of my having become a small promotional toy at the bottom of a cereal box.
How could the British Empire fit into this box? It does even if the fit is a bit snug. In 1963 the empire has lost the majority of its one-time land area and population. Never mind a great deal still remains to dismay the world and beguile a boy fascinated by glory, longing for its tingle even in decay.
But how to rectify the then still-lingering pretentions of empire with this harshly redacted and dreary reality? Pulling the eiderdown closer I discover its own serious limitations because my shoes, scuffed by long confined travel since last shined, poke out below, my toes thrust into permafrost. They are pointing toward, and too close to, the streaking rain that’s razoring the window pane.
I try to analyze the smell of this place. Damp in all its vestiges. Forever wet wool, dry rot and mold, coal soot slopped in a porridge, permeating whiff of boiled mutton, burnt sausage, stale potatoes, charred tomatoes. Sour milk! Soggy cornflakes.
Odor transfigures onto the ceiling high above then comes back slipping down onto me like never-drying paint oozing from an on-high invisible fresco of the Industrial Unenlightenment.
Who the fuck am I? Where the fuck am I? Thanks to my older brothers, Steve and Alan—Steve 24 and Alan 21– I already talk, think, in a vivid vernacular. From them my thoughts already begin to paddle about in doubt of everything.
On my right flows the Mersey River and estuary separating me from the Liverpool docks and the odd pomposity of the city’s ‘three graces’, the Liver Building, the Cunard Line and the Port of Liverpool building. On the opposite side, to my left, my side by nature, the River Dee and its estuary bind me to the mystical border line of the magical realm of Wales. To there where that summer we’ll be going almost every weekend.
In revenge this is a small shabby bedroom, so in my eyes at least blinkered as I am by American middle class wealth. The single bed is wooden. The wardrobe is too. Window and door match. It could all have come from the same tree. I’m abiding in a good deal—apt word– of swollen veneer.
The hall door into here had swelled a bit tight too when I first tried it—a tentative attempt in alarm of what lurked for me beyond.
There is an old porcelain sink in here. A sink in a bedroom! Its off-off once-white surfaces are a display of fissures. Another kind of map I can’t read. The single faucet drips a Bolero phrase at me and that makes the room feel even colder and more terrible than it is. What a grim place in which to be ecstatic. Yet one that did so much good for my teenage spirit.
Wallasey in 1963. I go there easily, like flying again in a click of heels from Wichita to New York to London. I am transported to its place and time as easily as crossing from my study to the living room of this far older, much friendlier, French farmhouse.
Aw, what extreme exhilaration the first hour in that room was, is, for me. Nothing in memory resembles it, except drinking strong coffee on speed. Reading Yeats on acid, “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” Or above all fucking on a Saurian night in Lawrence, agile bodies bleeding out into each other from one too many beers.
What the fuck! There I am. At 14, tall, more than 6 feet, filling the bed, spilling out of it my thoughts No more than a lad still astonished by his erections. I’m a large twink struggling out of a lanky adolescence that I’m shedding behind me like the rattle snake skin I once find on the lone prairie.
That chilly springtime room of England’s faded and corrupted charm, I’m in a place too rich in my mind then and now, a holy land among others, still dwelling about Jonathan in so many archeological-dig strata names. Chaucer, Spencer. Shakespeare! Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats. Dickens! D.H.Lawrence! Me!
It’s swooning with a profusion of places and identity—The British Empire, Europe, The United Kingdom, England, the blacklands, Greater Liverpool, The Wirral, Birkenhead, Wales, that Mersey River, The Irish Sea, the town of Wallasey.
All overwhelmingly impressive to me because I’m coming from a place of so few names, except most eloquently and simply Kansas.
This speck of space I’m in is the upstairs of the manse, parsonage to me, of the Claremont Road Methodist Church. What a pleasure for me to put my tongue to all the applicable brand new very old brand names.
Nearby, in their own bedrooms in this house of creepy gloom my parents and brothers are also resting. They give my bewildered self a much needed reassurance although I would never consider articulating so much. My habit is to swagger when I think, never when I walk, too shy.
All this remembering is unknown and topsy turvy old mossy stuff, but far too marvelous for fear to intrude upon. I am here! Listen to me. Bold and blazing I proceed an adventurer with a fluttering heart.
The family there is felled in mutual existential gluttony by this long day’s journey into ‘here’, a journey we dearly wish to end as we are all surfeited by it, drugged, over-stuffed like the once-genteel furniture in the rooms below.
But me? I’m too eager to shock, too smug by far in what I think to be thinking—“I’m an atheist!” I confide in a teen voice to those I don’t fear in some way.
I lie in bed less than 15 miles from the border with Wales. A place I have as yet absolutely no reference for at all. Excepting it is vaguely Celtic. I am as well. Wales then a pageant blur in my head hiding more of the unknown, of golden griffins, crimson banners, a wild mountain language, horrible mines bored deep down into hell.
Northern afternoon light is in the room. Iron light. There’s a single bare bulb, I’ve left it on overhead for warmth and companionship. It’s a silly dangle down sun. It does nothing.
And in Great Bend it would be something like a merry cloudless sky decked with a huge cheery sun over a warm 80 degrees. Zippity Doo Dah.
Here I’m reeling delightedly betrayed by this delighting turn of events. This narrow room, on this eiderdown, only a 14 year old boy of too much imagination can feel so ancient.
Then I’d not yet walked up the short distance from the manse to the point where Wallasey stands above the Irish Sea. But I intuited it very intimately, understanding that it was there, heaving away silent, salient, sloppy.
It was supposedly the spring following the worst ever winter in known British history. Seems all the people I was meeting were a bit high, giddy as if rejoicing in being thawn from ice.
A miserable limey pigeon hunkers into its feathers on the outside window ledge. It coos a trill the very same as the pigeons of Kansas.
I am enthralled. In love with it all. This is creepy to my heart’s desire.
Through my window of time I see that in 1963 the British Empire is taking a decided listing toward its final demise. Except for the rich everyone suffers still in thrall to Post War austerity.
But 1963 Britain was birthing a new cultural power, a musical one, which began replacing the trumpet blasts for charges of yore. This led by The Beetles, whose music dominated the radio of that summer—Please Please Me, From Me To You— and the Rolling Stones, Come On. Their first single was released four days after we arrived. June 1963, The Beatles weren’t yet inside the American mind. They’d not yet landed in the States to reclaim it like the errant colony it was. That wouldn’t happen for another nine months. The Stones wouldn’t be arriving yet for 12 months.
Me and the bedroom are in a crepuscular time.
Can it really remain so close to me, that long ago time? Simple revelation, easy as peeling open the little door on an advent calendar. I see it in its living steam on the reflection of a of breathless breath.
I’d come 4500 miles to be half a mile from the shore of the Irish Sea, not much more than 100 miles away from the Irish coast. Ireland, where my mother’s grandfather and grandmother were born.
People she had known well, and I knew too at least from their photogenic cameos curling up in her drawer of family keepsakes. Handsome persons, prim, self righteous, the us-against-them sort of Ulster folk. Just the right kind of faces for black and white photos, or for Klan meetings.
They had made the journey in the opposite direction from the one I’d just taken. Where they as stunned by its challenge to everything imagined or known before?
Then, that afternoon, the monsters of me went colliding outside my chilling room without a view (except of more somber rain and more brick walls in a landscape built of brick) plus a solitary angle, of the drain pipe ferrying a course of rain water from the slate roof down to the tiny bricked over backyard.
My milling young self trolls that dying afternoon. It’s wandered in on me like a wave of the neighboring Irish Sea. Over such a sea I’m keeping an alarmed watch for Viking long boats, horrifying all before them, coming closer and closer intent on snatching me away.
Recently I’ve learned that many notable individuals were born and/or raised in this town of Wallasey. Eric Idle comes from here, of Monty Python fame. So too Charles Crichton, director of the films The Lavender Hill Mob andA fish Called Wanda. And also Malcolm Lowry, of course he would come from here. Under The Volcano. A work of genius erupting.
Doth a savage humor lurk here parasiting upon the innocent? Does an inappropriate snicker wait to leech onto one’s soul? Is it where my fall from grace comes from, imbibed in the tap water, consumed in the fish and chips? I think the devil once came fuming up from the toilet bowl here to pry open my anus and invade my virgin self while I sit brooding innocently on a porcelain shitter made in Devon.
A nightmare that becomes reality the day in the manse when I do find a drowned rat in the toilet bowl water. My first rat!
Fourteen. Adolescence has made me crazy with lust for new thoughts, sensations. Infatuations burst like bombs around me while I lie here inert with longing to acquire all seductive bodies, all art, all ideas. In less then three years I’ve metamorphosed from a sweet child into a cruelly sensitive man creature who blushes crimson monstrously upon a word, a glance, any dreamed up Ovidian indiscretion that I yearn so ardently to have for myself. Oh please please please, let it all, everything and anything happen to me.
My life is lived only in books. I moon for hours over books of history, fiction, poetry. Probably far too many of them are crammed into my small psyche. I’m become hundreds of pages, but sadly lack a table of contents.
It’s mid afternoon but through the one high narrow window the afternoon is as dim as dusk at home.
Here age and decline all around make me feel so American and so young. I’ve already sensed instinctively it is too dangerous to be naked here, my clothes under the blankets they comfort me.
I am felled by tricks of time and transit, mowed down along with the rest of my family by what I now know to be jet lag – then a plane traveler’s plague without a name. I’m trying without luck to nap it off.