Recent Outings

Fresh from my return from Paris, I decided that I really needed to get out and see more of my “home” town of London. Of course, that was largely just me being silly, because I do get out and see stuff. All the time. In fact, I’m getting somewhat tired of “seeing stuff,” because that usually involves walking miles and miles over hard concrete, which is causing a minor reactivation of the tendonitis I’ve got in both knees from years of beating myself up (snowboarding: is the pain worth really the fun?!), and in one hip from – don’t laugh, please – belly dancing. Yes, a career-ending belly dancing injury. Tragically more common than you might think.

But anyway, in a typically obsessively compulsive way, I’ve started setting some goals about what I want to see in London while I’m here. I thought about taking a map with quadrants and marking off each one as I see it, but that seemed a little too OCD even for me. But I have started keeping an eye out in guidebooks and tourist-y websites for stuff I want to see. Since everything I do has to be free or minimally costly, that pretty much leaves me with museums and parks. So Saturday of last week, I hiked myself down to a not-so-lovely part of town to see the Imperial War Museum.

Now, I kind of assumed that this would have at least some camp value – the name itself implies some laughably pompous intentions. As it turns out, the name is kind of unfortunate. The museum is one of the most well put together exhibits I’ve ever seen, some of it spectacularly so. And, I found out later, the building is the original site of the Bedlam hospital, where the mentally ill were chained to the wall and visitors were allowed to come and gawk. I know that lots of people have legitimate beefs with modern medicine, but geez, at least we’ve quit doing things like that.

The entry is into a warehouse-looking room filled with tanks and planes and other articles of war, covered with crawling children who are encouraged to explore them. There’s something disturbing about kids dancing around on the hoods of tanks, but at least there’s no firepower in them anymore. To the side of the main exhibit was a sign saying “The Children’s War”, and having no idea what that might be about, I decided to check it out. As it turns out, no matter how many World War II documentaries I’ve watched on PBS on the rare occasion when there are no episodes of Law & Order on network TV, I had no idea that a very large number of children were evacuated out of London and into the British countryside for the duration of the blitz. Some were away so long that they really didn’t know their families when they came back at the close of the war – especially those returning to meet their shell-shocked soldier fathers for the first time. There was also a mass evacuation of Jewish children out of mainland Europe near the start of the war, and these are perhaps the most devastating stories – no one could have known at the time that this act of sacrifice on the part of the parents would save a generation of lost kids that otherwise would have been exterminated. I was also interested to learn that while Germany was interning Jews into concentration camps, and the US was herding Japanese citizens and immigrants into internment camps, Britain was attempting a wholesale removal of Austrian and German residents onto the Isle of Man, where they were largely left to their own devices as Britain struggled to keep its own people fed throughout the war.

One of the other most striking exhibits was a walk-in reproduction of a trench during warfare. Closed spaces do not sit well with me; I cannot imagine having lived and fought there ninety years ago (a similar mock-up of a bomb shelter during the blitz came with the warning that visitors should not enter who have weak hearts or object to confined spaces; I took the latter as a personal warning and stayed out). Nearby the exit from the mock trench was small corner of the exhibit dedicated to an incident I’d only heard rumor of from pop culture reference, and never known if it was true or myth. If you listen to country music, you’ve probably run across the song Belleau Woods, from Garth Brooks’ earlier years; on the far opposite end of the music spectrum, if you listened to modern rock in the 1990s, you might remember The Farm and their song Altogether Now, which tells the same story set to a synthesized version of the harmony line from the Pachelbel’s Cannon.

Turns out, the incident really happened: on Christmas Eve of 1914, along the line marking the Western Front, the soldiers in the German trenches near Flanders stopped firing and starting singing carols. The opposing side slowly realized that this was not a ploy, and a spontaneous truce erupted on the battlefields of Belgium. In some areas the truce lasted days, some claim weeks, until generals on both sides forced their foot soldiers back into battle. In the remaining three years of the war, officers specifically forbade their soldiers from pulling a similar stunt on Christmas Eve, and it never happened again. It’s one of those moments of history when human nature surprises you, and the people in the trenches turn around and tell the war-makers exactly what they think of this business of killing. It kind of takes the breath out you.

Anyhow, continuing in my circuit around the museums of London, the next day I went to the museum complex that houses the Victoria & Albert museum on one side of the street and the Museum of Natural History on the other side. The line for the latter was out the door and around the block, so even though that’s what I really went for, I decided to cross the street to the other one. This had some interesting exhibits – especially a whole hall devoted to fashion, where ancient garments are displayed next to last year’s Prada, as well as a massive hall of castings of famous statues and monuments.

In this week also I had my first out-of-town visitor – Alicia, who is employed along with me in the glorious ranks of the dredge girls. Actually, she’s now a tugboat girl (way better pay, way worse living conditions). She and her family were visiting her sister, who is a grad student at one of the many institutions in the same neighbourhood as mine. Her sister happens to be a student in history education with an emphasis on museums and multi-media learning, which meant that she had the scoop on all the best museums to see. The two of them came and visited me on the evening when Alicia arrived, before they left for a few days’ canal trip out of the city. But they were coming back into town in time for – what’s it called? – bonfire night or something like that. Since I hadn’t heard anyone else mention it, I took it in faith that this wasn’t some Leftwich family tradition of staking and burning Alicia’s gullible friends. No, apparently, this is the night when the city of London and its inhabitants burn things and set off fireworks to commemorate some plot to blow up Parliament four hundred years ago, which ended in the drawing and quartering of the villain or scapegoat (depending on whose version you listen to) Guy Fawkes. Ah, Britain: still celebrating while most of the rest of the world is trying to politely forget that we ever did things like drawings and quarterings. You can even visit websites like http://www.bonefire.org/guy/, where you can virtually burn Guy Fawkes face all over again.

Anyhow, I met up with Alicia and family again Friday when they rolled back into town and went out to a lovely dinner with them in Chinatown. Saturday being the night of burning things, I met up with them again and we went out to dinner at a gorgeous and yummy Middle Eastern restaurant along the Thames, where the waiters told us we could eat there as long as we promised to be out by 7:30. Since it was only 5:30, we shrugged our shoulders and agree that sounded fine. By the time we left there around 6:45, a crowd was gathering along the waterfront accompanied by several small phalanxes of police officers in neon green vests. Alicia stopped and asked, and it turned out by pure happenstance that we were very close to the launch site for the city’s fireworks display. So we climbed out onto the Southwark bridge and got probably the best view in the city of the explosions over the river. Well worth the wait!

The remainder of the weekend I tried to catch up on some things I’d been neglecting, especially since this marks the beginning of reading week, when we are expected to do much, uh, reading, though most of us have plans to escape town in one way or another – I for one will be going up to Dublin for four days toward the end of the week. Much to do before then...