He didn’t understand half of what he read, even if he could decipher all the individual words. The texts were packed with political allusions, inside jokes, slang, and conventions that he’d never learned. In lieu of a childhood spent absorbing it all in London, he tried devouring the corpus instead, tried to plough through references to things like Tories, Whigs, Chartists, and Reformers and memorize what they were. He learned what the Corn Laws were and what they had to do with a Frenchman named Napoleon. He learned who the Catholics and Protestants were, and how the (he thought, at least) small doctrinal differences between the two were apparently a matter of great and bloody importance. He learned that being English was not the same as being British, though he was still hard-pressed to articulate the difference between the two.
He read the city, and he learned its language. New words in English were a game to him, for in understanding the word he always came to understand something about English history or culture itself. He delighted when common words were, unexpectedly, formed from other words he knew. Hussy was a compound of house and wife. Holiday was a compound of holy and day. Bedlam came, implausibly, from Bethlehem. Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you. In London’s East End he encountered Cockney rhyming slang, which initially presented a great mystery, for he had no clue how Hampstead could come to mean ‘teeth.’* But once he learned about the omitted rhyming component, he had great fun coming up with his own. (Mrs Piper was not very amused when he began referring to dinner as the ‘meal of saints’.)*
Long after he learned the proper meanings of words and phrases that had once confused him, his mind still formed funny associations around them. He imagined the Cabinet as a series of massive shelves where men in fancy dress were arranged like dolls. He thought the Whigs were named for their wigs, and the Tories for the young Princess Victoria. He imagined Marylebone was composed of marble and bone, that Belgravia was a land of bells and graves, and that Chelsea was named for shells and the sea. Professor Lovell kept a shelf of Alexander Pope titles in his library, and for a full year Robin thought The Rape of the Lock was about fornication with an iron bolt instead of the theft of hair.*
He learned that a pound was worth twenty shillings, and a shilling was worth twelve pence – clarity on florins, groats, and farthings would have to come in time. He learned there were many types of British people, just as there were many types of Chinese people, and that being Irish or Welsh was distinct in important ways from being English. He learned Mrs Piper was from a place called Scotland, which made her a Scot, and also explained why her accent, lilting and rhotic, sounded so different from Professor Lovell’s crisp, straight intonations.
He learned that London in 1830 was a city that could not decide what it wanted to be. The Silver City was the largest financial centre of the world, the leading edge of industry and technology. But its profits were not shared equally. London was as much a city of plays at Covent Garden and balls in Mayfair as it was a city of teeming slums around St Giles. London was a city of reformers, a place where the likes of William Wilberforce and Robert Wedderburn had urged the abolition of slavery; where the Spa Fields riots had ended with the leaders charged for high treason; where Owenites had tried to get everyone to join their utopian socialist communities (he was still not sure what socialism was yet); and where Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published only forty years ago, had inspired waves of loud, proud feminists and suffragists in its wake. He discovered that in Parliament, in town halls, and on the streets, reformers of every stripe were fighting for the soul of London, while a conservative, landed ruling class fought back against attempts at change at every turn.
He did not understand these political struggles, not then. He only sensed that London, and England at large, was very divided about what it was and what it wanted to be. And he understood that silver lay behind it all. For when the Radicals wrote about the perils of industrialization, and when the Conservatives refuted this with proof of the booming economy; when any of the political parties spoke about slums, housing, roads, transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing; when anyone spoke about Britain and the Empire’s future at all, the word was always there in papers, pamphlets, magazines, and even prayer books: silver, silver, silver.
From Mrs Piper, he learned more than he’d imagined possible about English food and England. Adjusting to this new palate took some time. He had never thought much about food when he lived in Canton – the porridge, steamed buns, dumplings, and vegetable dishes that comprised his daily meals had seemed unremarkable to him. They were the staples of a poor family’s diet, a far cry from high Chinese cuisine. Now he was astonished by how much he missed them. The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.
He took more pleasure in learning about the food than in eating it. This education came unprompted – dear Mrs Piper was the chatty sort, and would happily lecture as she served up lunch if Robin displayed even the slightest interest in what was on his plate. He was told that potatoes, which he found quite tasty in any form, were not to be served around important company, for they were considered lower-class. He found that newly invented silver-gilded dishes were used to keep food warm throughout a meal, but that it was rude to reveal this trickery to guests, and so the bars were always embedded on the very bottoms of the platters. He learned that the practice of serving food in successive courses was adopted from the French, and that the reason it was not yet a universal norm was a lingering resentment over that little man Napoleon. He learned, but did not quite understand, the subtle distinctions between lunch, luncheon, and a noon dinner. He learned he had the Roman Catholics to thank for his favourite almond cheesecakes, for the prohibition of dairy during fast days had forced English cooks to innovate with almond milk.
One night Mrs Piper brought out a round, flat circle: some kind of baked dough that had been cut into triangular wedges. Robin took one and tentatively bit at the corner. It was very thick and floury, much denser than the fluffy white rolls his mother used to steam every week. It was not unpleasant, just surprisingly heavy. He took a large gulp of water to guide the bolus down, then asked, ‘What’s this?’
‘That’s a bannock, dear,’ said Mrs Piper.
‘Scone,’ corrected Professor Lovell.
‘It’s properly a bannock—’
‘The scones are the pieces,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The bannock is the entire cake.’
‘Now look here, this is a bannock, and all the itty pieces are bannocks as well. Scones are those dry, crumbly things you English love to shove in your mouths—’
‘I assume you’re excepting your own scones, Mrs Piper. No one in their right mind would accuse those of being dry.’
Mrs Piper did not succumb to flattery. ‘It’s a bannock. They’re bannocks. My grandmother called them bannocks, my mother called them bannocks, so bannocks they are.’
‘Why’s it – why are they – called bannocks?’ Robin asked. The sound of the word made him imagine a monster of the hills, some clawed and gristly thing that wouldn’t be satisfied unless given a sacrifice of bread.