I'll send you a postcard from Edinburgh (of Burke and Hare, if I can find one), but after that I'll be incommunicado. The dig is on a tiny island with no inhabitants and no mail service. Perhaps we can get together for the family Thanksgiving ordeal and inflict slide shows on one another. Until then—
As ever, Elizabeth
TRAVELER'S DIARY
You can't sleep on a DC-10. Not this one, anyway, with stewardesses rolling drinks carts up the aisles and making movie announcements and hawking duty-free goods. It's like trying to fly to Britain in a K-Mart. I'm hunched up in my window seat, trying to decide which half of my body I want circulation in and where the Band-Aid sized pillow would do the most good.
"I feel like a squirrel in a coconut!" I hissed to Cameron.
"No. Sorry," he replied. "They only serve those on Caribbean flights."
British humor. I'm still not accustomed to it, even after all these months of knowing Cameron. He seems to be able to take a phrase and turn it inside out, so that I have to think for a minute before I understand the point of the joke. During the year that he has been at the university as a visiting professor, he has been trying to absorb American culture; I, in turn, have spent the year learning him, as if he were a foreign language. Having ancestors who came from Scotland two centuries ago is certainly no help in figuring out a specimen from the present! For the longest time I thought that dear was a term of affection, until I began to notice the circumstances in which he used it. "That restaurant is fine, dear," when we had to wait an hour for a table. "Next street, I think, dear," when I hadn't noticed the sign that said one way.
Dear means idiot.
I still don't know what he would use as a term of affection. It would probably take implements of torture to find out. He said he liked an outfit I was wearing once. And he told me that I was the only woman he could really discuss his work with. Two compliments in a year-long relationship. Whoever said that the British are not demonstrative had a gift for understatement. The only real indication that he likes me is his assumption that I'll always be there, always be free to go out, always want to hear about his experiences at the biology lab. That, and the fact that he eats the potato chips off my plate in restaurants, a sure sign of intimacy. There's more difference between Brits and Americans than a few vocabulary changes—flat for apartment, and that sort of thing. I don't know how he thinks. Does he simply not show affection, or does he also not feel it?
I wonder what else I'm going to learn about British-American culture while I'm over here.
PEOPLE WHO PRIDE THEMSELVES ON THEIR BRITISH PREP SCHOOL MANNERS SHOULD NOT READ OTHER PEOPLE'S TRAVEL DIARIES WHILE THEY ARE TRYING TO WRITE!
Finally got to sleep (from sheer exhaustion) and woke up to sunlight—at a time my body knew was 1:00 a.m.
The cumulus clouds below us look like white outline embroidery seamed on a white quilt. What is that called? Candlewicking? My mother would know. I wonder when we'll see Ireland and if it will really look emerald-green down below. . . .
I must have dozed off. A change in the noise of the airplane engines woke me up, and I looked out the window to see a patchwork of golden fields and green meadows, with little stone houses set all among them. We are much nearer the ground now. Must be coming into Heathrow.
I stand corrected. Gatwick. We are coming into Gat-wick. And when I find out what silly git means, you're going to be in trouble, Doctor Dawson, sir.
Caveat, Britannia! Here we come.
"Hmmm," said Elizabeth MacPherson, "the glove compartment in this car is awfully small."
"Glove box." Cameron Dawson's correction was automatic. "Small?"
"Yes. I was thinking of crawling into it." She risked a glance out the windshield. "Everybody here is driving on the wrong side of the road, and they must be doing eighty at least.''
Cameron smiled. "High speeds are allowed on the Ml. You'll be used to it by the time we get to Scotland."
If we get to Scotland, Elizabeth thought, but she tried to look reassured. "It's quite amazing how quickly you got used to British driving again," she remarked. After that one little incident with the truck as we were leaving the car rental lot, she added to herself.
"I’ve only been away for a year," he reminded her. "Look at that car ahead of us. The red one. That's a Vauxhall VX 4/90. You can hear those things two streets away."
"That's nice," Elizabeth said absently. She was scanning the horizon for castles or picturesque villages with cobbled streets, but so far the drive on the motorway from Gatwick had been mostly trees and pastures, looking remarkably like the Virginia landscape they had just left.
"And that white one is a TR6. My cousin had one of those. On a cold day we used to have to stick a fan in the engine to get it started."
"Look!" cried Elizabeth, seeing a flash of purple on the roadside. "Heather!"
Cameron did not spare a glance out the window. "Rose-bay willow herb, I expect," he told her. "Heather doesn't grow on roadways in Hampshire, dear."
"It's very pretty, though."
"It's a weed. We had to slave to keep them out of the garden. My father says that during the war willow herb was the first plant to grow in the ruins of a bomb site."
"How lovely!" Elizabeth cried. "Like a condolence card from Nature."
Cameron refused to be drawn into paeans of nature. "That green car is a Moggie Thou—a Morris 1000," he informed her. "My first car was one of those."
Elizabeth sighed. "Cameron, is this your idea of a guided tour of Britain? Identifying all the cars we pass on the motorway?"
He looked puzzled. "Well, you didn't know them, did
you ? I haven't seen a Moggie Thou in the States. Thought you'd be interested."
"Why stop with cars?" asked Elizabeth sarcastically. "See those black-and-white cows in the field? Those are Holsteins."
Cameron smiled. "Actually, they're not. In this country they're called Friesians." Noting the dangerous look in her eyes, he added hastily, "All right! You're the tourist. Just what would you like to see?"
And for the next fifty-six miles she told him.
TRAVELER'S DIARY
Haworth doesn't seem to have changed much since the Brontes' time. Despite the fact that their home has become a shrine for half the English lit majors in the world, the village itself is still a tiny community off a side road in the Yorkshire moors. It wasn't even listed on our map.
"I know the Bronte sisters were notorious recluses," I told Cameron, "but an unlisted village is going a bit far!"
He finally located it on a Yorkshire map, in the vicinity of Bradford, and, as out of the way as it was, he agreed to take me there. I had packed a paperback copy of Wuthering Heights in my suitcase because I'd hoped we could visit Haworth. There is a modem part of the town down in the valley; you can see it from the road as you drive in, but the village as the sisters knew it is a collection of stone houses on the top of a hill, centering on the church and on the Black Bull Tavern, where Branwell got drunk and claimed to have written Emily's book.