I was eighteen the summer my family moved from London to a much smaller town; eighteen, and greatly disappointed

I was eighteen the summer my family moved from London to a much smaller town; eighteen, and greatly disappointed. To me, the Metropolis represented everything I could ever ask out of life. It was bursting with activity and anticipation of greater things; anywhere I looked, there was somewhere for me to be, somewhere where I could meet other young people, somewhere that I could go, away from my family and away from the unfashionable. The people in London meant far more to me than the people anywhere else; after all, though I knew only a few of them intimately, I had grown up with all of them, and I had been raised as one of them. The fact, then, that my father proposed, with little forewarning, to remove me from this paradise right in the bloom of my adulthood, and as I understood it, the cusp of my enjoyment, was absolutely unforgiveable. I remember the train ride there, sitting through it, and though the green country flashed before my eyes, I was determined not to enjoy it, and though the rolling hills, dotted with sheep and cattle, were beautiful, to me they might as well have been covered in the muck and slime of the London backstreets. I folded my arms upon entering the car, and sulked the entire distance there.

My sister was much more sporting about everything. She was only fourteen at the time, and I thought she was incapable of logical thought, for she delighted in every new animal she saw, pointing excitedly at the farms we passed as though she were an impressionable young girl. My father supported this behaviour for some length of time before, at long last, he begged her to sit down and be quiet for a while. This was a simple command for most, but Cecily was a definite exception. She used the better part of her time in speaking, and when she did not happen to be talking, she was thinking about a future conversation she might have. She was far more social in every way than I could ever hope to be, and it was rather a joke between us that she would likely marry before I did. This was said in jest, but there was some truth behind it; she was far more likely to find a suitor, with her outgoing personality than I was with my rather more reserved character. In any case, she wanted a suitor more than I did; I simply could not be brought to care, to my mother’s lasting disappointment.

I was wearing, as best I recall, the latest fashions from London, as was my sister; indeed it was her influence that interested me in clothing to begin with. I had finally begun to dress as an adult, which brought me no end of delight, and to Cecily, was a matter of utmost rudeness to her, that I would not wait a few years until she, too, was allowed. She always saw us as being on equal ground, my more numerous years notwithstanding to any arguments between us or any privileges or favour I might otherwise have garnered. She asserted herself so forcefully to our family, and to all of my friends and acquaintances, that to ignore her would have been folly. She was there, she would always be there, and to suppose or hope otherwise was vain on my part. That day, I believe I wore the neat beige tailored jacket with the large buttons that so many women had been sporting as of late, a skirt to match, and over all that, a flat straw travelling hat. All of my worldly possessions had been confined, out of necessity, to a leather case that I held at my feet, greatly annoyed. I had not only been forced into leaving behind all of my clothing, but also, an even larger insult, all of my books. My father said that we were to start completely afresh, and that these items would just be cumbersome in our new life, and that better use would be made of them if they were sold.

It was my father who decided that we should move from the city. He had declared quite suddenly one afternoon that Hitler, the German leader, was up to no good, and that he would be damned if London was not to be colonised next. This was in 1936, and since then, I thought that he had forgotten about it; a thought I was to regret a year later, when I discovered the plans he had been making for us to leave the city behind, for reasons of safety, and travel to a smaller, more secure town. I did not pay very much attention to world news at that point in my life – this was soon to change – but I did not see any reason to panic. It seemed to me that Britain was invincible, and that anyone who would try and attack her would have to be absolutely mad. I also thought that Hitler was doing alright, helping the German people to recover; I saw, in short, no reason for alarm. My father had always been eccentric; he had fought in the Great War, and those who I spoke to assured me that he had taken a piece of shrapnel to the head, forever altering his judgement. As if this were not enough, he was also a playwright in his youth, and folks of that sort, I was told, were bound by their very profession to be a bit queer. My mother said nothing on the matter, only smiling and remaining silent when my father’s faults were touched upon. She was very old-fashioned in her views on the duties of wives to their husbands.

When the train reached the station, I was glad to be out of it, even if being so meant being in a country completely alien to me, surrounded by people, a setting, and a way of life that was as unfamiliar to me as America, across the Atlantic. These were places I had only ever read about, and not for the first time, I longed for London. It was never the sharp pain of loss I would feel later in life; it was more of a constant desire, an acute awareness that I wished to be somewhere I was not.

I declared to my father and mother then that I would much rather walk to our new house than wait for the automobile that would be along shortly to pick us up and take us there, and they had no choice but to acquiesce. I was not nearly as much of a presence as Cecily, but I was most angry, and I had no fear in showing it. I left my suitcase to be brought by the car, and upon receiving a map drawn by my father on a small piece of paper, I promptly left.

Cecily followed me, as a matter of course. I could not be granted something and not she, even if it meant she would have to walk far further than she would normally endure, and she would have preferred to wait for the automobiles, cars being a subject that fascinated her. Today, however, when I wanted nothing more than to be left to fume in peace, she abstained from autos altogether, skipping along behind me, chattering incessantly. She flitted easily from one subject to the next, and she moved seamlessly from what we might have for supper that night to the latest fashionable outing she had been to in London to some new form of Chinese tea she had enjoyed, without ever pausing or running out of steam. She was such a contented child, and I rather think I resented her for it, but in that moment, I could not help but laugh at her pleasant prattling. I put in a few words and opinions in rare occasions where her mouth was occupied, but my input was hardly necessary; Cecily could hold a conversation with or without the aid of another party.

We found our way eventually, with a few minor missteps, one which led us into the unfortunate position of having to cross a farmer’s field, avoiding several large and frightening pigs; animals which my sister and I had never seen before, and which represented to us demons from the depths of depravity that was the English countryside, and from which we ran faster than our London shoes should have allowed. We found ourselves, after considerable length, in a town, which we could only assume was the town in which we were to live. It might, for all our knowledge, have been any number of towns, for there was nothing to distinguish it, particularly, as ours, no landmarks to look for, like Big Ben or Parliament. We were simply left to estimate for ourselves, to look at the different shops and somehow surmise from then whereabouts we were. This helped us very little; to me, they all appeared the same, and all vaguely disappointing after the large, expensive boutiques of our native city.

We walked along for quite some time, Cecily running ahead of me sometimes to look at some thing or other which caught her attention, stopping, usually, in mid-ramble, and scrambling back to finish her sentence before I seized an opportunity to speak, apparently. We headed along slowly, and despite my best intentions, I could not help but be contented. The air there was so much fresher than in London, so much crisper, and it smelled lovely. Cecily begged me to go into a sweet shop she found, and I did not put up much of a fight. We had some money left over from the sale of our possessions, which our father had not taken, and though it had not been expressly said that the money was ours, it had not been said that it wasn’t, and so we took to the latter option. Cecily bought a piece of peanut brittle, and stayed to chat with the owner of the shop, an old gentleman called Morris. I looked around the shop for a while, but sweets could only hold my attention for so long, and eventually, I wandered out, looking around at the surrounding shops on what I guessed was the town’s main street – an altogether disappointing affair, on the whole.

I wandered around a little, careful not to stray too far from the sweet shop, knowing that Cecily would blame me entirely for abandoning her if she were unable to find me once through with Morris. I found myself looking into a bookshop a few stores over, new titles in the window, desperately vying for my attention. I looked at them attentively, and though I tried to resist, I knew at once that it was futile, and I thought to myself that Cecily would likely be detained for some time at least with Morris, if her past monologues were anything to go by, and that I might slip into the shop without anyone knowing but myself. It was a quick decision, made instantly, and sealed when I saw, foremost in the window, the novel Pride and Prejudice, a lovely leather-bound edition, and long a favourite of mine. I entered through a heavy wooden door, which rang light silver bells above my head as it opened.

I was met at once with a distinct, heavy air, warm and inviting, and containing a pleasant, musky smell, a smell of tobacco and dust and everything I had ever liked about old things. The shop itself seemed inexorably old. The books inside of it were old, certainly, most of them printed, I figured, at least fifty years before, but the building seemed ancient, with its smell, such a smell that I could bring it to mind for years after that first encounter, and the smell of tobacco would always bring me back to that same place, and wooden floors that creaked every time I stepped on them. The silver bells in the doorway had attracted the attention of a man sitting at a desk at the far end of the shop. Unlike his surroundings, he was quite young, only just beginning to grow any substantial amount of hair on his face, which he had apparently decided to form into a rather nice blond moustache. He stood up, quite a tall fellow, and walked towards me.

‘Hello,’ I said pleasantly, hoping that my London accent would be well-received. I had read many novels where foreigners were repulsed after their mouths were first opened in some new place.

‘Good morning,’ he replied, in the same manner. I had rather expected him to speak in some sort of burr, so to hear the clear, clean accent came as a surprise. I suppose, though, that we were not quite as far from our city as we thought at the time; any distance, however, was too much. ‘Looking for a book, or just browsing?’

‘Just browsing,’ I replied quickly, turning towards a shelf. He was a terribly attractive chap, I could not help but think. He was wearing a grey tweed suit with the utmost dignity, and had dark blond hair, streaked with lighter colours, brushed back from his lean face, and nice blue eyes. I had always been rather attracted to fair hair – I blame James Cagney for this. If it were not for him, I might not have given the young bookshop keeper a second glance, but as it were, I looked away, at the first books I saw, to keep myself from looking at him and blushing. I picked a book that was at eye-level on the shelf closest to me, and began flipping through it. The man moved over, looked at the book I had chosen, and laughed.

‘Are you very interested in turtles?’

I raised my eyebrows – thin, in the fashionable style at that time, as was the rest of my makeup, down to the red lipstick on my mouth, which I now pursed as I looked at the book I had chosen, and realised that the title decreed it to be the definitive guide to breeding turtles for re-sale. I never knew such an occupation existed, but I defended it fiercely now.

‘Well, sir, you can never be too prepared, I say. Perhaps I will need to know how to handle turtles in the future, and will come to regret not having read the definitive guide to breeding them. It could be a very lucrative business.’

‘Indeed,’ he smiled. ‘Are you just come to this town? That is to say, I don’t believe we’ve met before, or at least we might have but I do not remember it. And I rather think I would.’

‘No sir, we have not. I’ve just come in from London. Harriet Warren.’ I stuck out my gloved hand, which he shook. I was the picture of womanly efficiency; my father always said that I would make a terrific secretary, though I was unsure whether or not this was strictly complimentary.

‘Well, hello to you, Harriet Warren, I am Thomas Allard. You’ve just come from London, you say? Well, that’s quite something. I’ve never been there myself, but I’ve been told that it’s quite something to behold.’

‘Yes, I should say it is. Although I’m just myself getting over the amazement of finding myself in the middle of the country. The things you do have here! Animals as I have never seen before in my life!’

‘I suppose they must look odd to you, coming from London as you do, Miss Warren. To be sure, I’ve never considered it before, but I suppose they must, yes.’ He was bumbling now in such a way that made me think he must be somewhat simple, but he coughed into a handkerchief he had pulled from his pocket, and quickly regained composure. ‘What sort of book would you like, Miss Warren, if I might ask, if you were not interested solely in turtles?’

I shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. It seemed inexcusable to pass this place by, but I’ve not come for anything in particular.’

‘Do you like mysteries?’ he asked. ‘Christie has just released a new one, which I hear is rather thrilling.’

‘Oh, no, I’m not interested in that,’ I waved him off. I was much to pretentious for that. I read Tolstoy and Austen and the Brontë sisters but never good old-fashioned murder mysteries.

‘Oh, pity, that, I find them most interesting indeed.’ He put in delicately, without trying to offend, in a very English manner.

I nodded curtly. I was hardened by years of London salesmen, whose idle chatter had the one goal of selling me something. Friendliness, certainly friendliness where money was concerned, was alien to me. Nonetheless, I saw that I was in different surroundings now, and I saw that perhaps this was a “country” attitude, that perhaps here was a man whose chatter had no ulterior motives.

‘This yours, then?’ I asked.

‘What, this?’ He looked at a book he had been handling since I came in, evidently some new item or other that he had planned to put away.

‘No, this,’ I gestured around impatiently. ‘the shop.’

He blushed. ‘Oh, no, good heavens no,’ he mumbled. ‘I should hardly say that. I tend to it, that’s all, it’s owned by an elderly gentleman, really, but he’s had a time of it, moving around and all that, so I’ve been looking after it for a while. It’s certainly not mine.’

‘Oh.’ I said, thinking he was getting most awkward about nothing – but then that was what proper Englishmen did, wasn’t it? I was just beginning to get rather annoyed, and had started looking some of the lovely leather-bound volumes on the dusty shelves, when Cecily burst in, breathing heavily.

‘Harriet! Oh, God, there you are! I’ve been looking all over for you! Why’d you give me the slip?’

‘Stop talking like that, you sound like a Yank.’ I rebuffed her. ‘I left because I was no longer interested. Are you ready to continue onwards then?’

‘Yes! Hullo, who’s that? Who are you?’

‘Thomas, Thomas Allard. Good morning.’ said the man behind me, holding out his hand to Cecily, which seemed to please her to no end. She chatted easily with him for a few minutes – and he responded with far more ease than he had with me, I noted. I was by this point very much annoyed, all my visions of James Cagney destroyed. In a huff, I suggested that we leave before we were missed. Allard seemed disappointed.

‘You’ll come back, though, won’t you? I’ll try and get some better stuff in, some stuff I think you might enjoy, alright?’

‘I shall try.’

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