AN AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE IN LONDON excerpt two

In 1998, my accountant husband said the three little words all anglophiles long to hear, "move to England." So we packed up our two boys and our belongings and shipped off to Bedfordshire for eight months with his company.

An excerpt from my non-fiction as yet unpublished book;

An American Housewife in London

One weekend My husband and I and our two young sons had the original idea to travel to old English town of Cambridge, but when we got there, to our surprise we found there was an entire tourist industry set up and running to service our original idea.

The drive to Cambridge was like a trip back in time. We drove past crumbly old kirks, thatched roofed cottages, cobblestone streets, and meadows that revelaed a patchwork of farms and fields. Cambridge is a beautiful historical town with an "oldy-worldy" feel to it.

The highlightof our visit was a trip to Cambridge University which is not one university but thrity-one distinct colleges. Our favorite was King's College. The first stone was laid in 1441 and was completed in 1515. It contains a dark oak screen that was a gift from King Henry VIIIth and bears his initials and those of Anne Boleyn.

But one of these visits was life-threatening to our one and half year old son. Benjamin was sitting in his stroller, sucking on a lollipop, when all of a sudden he started making these awful strangling noises. I paniked. Immediately I tried to get him out of the stroller but in my hysteria I couldn't get the clasp released. My husband pushed me out of the way and calmly undid it. My mind raced with --where was the closest ER? We had parked miles away how would we get to our van in time? Could an ambulance pull up to a chapel built in 1441?

Benjmian's eyes were bulging as we slapped his back over and over, finally he threw up the lollipop and everything else in his stomach all over the himself, the stroller and the ancient chapel floor. I grabbed my son and hugged him firmly to my chest.

A few weeks later, a friend who was with us at the time put the incident into an amusing news flash.

AP Newswire--The building and grounds of Cambridge University will reopen their chapel after an unforeseen shutdown over the weekend. The grounds were closed after an incident involving some American tourists. Apparently, the youngest member of the group expelled large quantites of gastric fludis onto the sacred stones of King's Chapel. Chapel officals reported that the situation seemed to escalate when a blonde-haired woman tried to dismantle a stroller with her bare hands to release the child. Onlookers were agast as the object finally dislodged from the child's throat, shot fifty meters across the courtyard, bounced off a statue, and impaled a pigeon."

AN AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE IN LONDON

In 1998, my accountant husband said the three little words all anglophiles long to hear. "Move to England." So we packed up our two boys and our belongings and shipped off to Bedfordshire for 8 months with his company for the adventure of a lifetime..

An excerpt from my non-fiction as yet unpublished book;

An American Housewife in London

“Oh, for an American bathroom.” I would mutter as I sat in a bathtub in the early morning hours. Unbelievably, our seven-year-old English home did not possess a shower. So every morning, as my husband was shaving, I sat in a pale pink tub, covered in frothy bubbles, relaxing when I should be trying to wake up. I soon discovered that bathtubs, not showers had always been the custom in English bathroom.

I noticed this bewildering attachment to tradition over and over during our stay. The homes in our neighborhood were not hundreds of years old, most had been built in the last ten years, but baths were simply how it was done and how it would be done regardless of modern inventions like an invigorating, hot shower.

In contrast, Americans are known to be constantly looking for a new and better way to get things done. A throw-the-tradition-out-with-the-bath-water kind of attitude. In my humble opinion, a steaming, brisk shower would be more efficient in the morning, but in British minds, baths were far cozier, and in England, coziness was next to godliness.

 

Our master English bathroom was quite large, but we missed our familiar spacious sprawling counter top framed with a large mirror and individual double sinks. Instead, this room had one tall thin sink and one tiny slip of a mirror. There was no linen closet. Actually, the entire house had no closets rather the English tended toward using an armoire in the bedroom, or had closets built in around the bed.

Our bathroom’s sink’s were quite confusing too. There were two spigots pouring into the sink. One had hot water and the other cold. But how did one mix the two without scalding one hand and freezing the other? The English may have been credited with inventing the bathroom in the 1800’s, but us Yanks made them much more comfortable.

Three months later, despite being in a rental home, we paid to have a shower put in!