London Calling (15 page)

“All right. At the very least, you’ll be able to point to this at the end of your life, on your day of reckoning, and say, ‘This is what I did to help.’ ”

“That sounds good. I need something to say.”

The conversation ended there. I settled into my seat. A few minutes later, Dad ordered his first drink.

I slept, on and off, for six hours across the Atlantic. To the best of my recollection, I had no dreams.

ANGLICAN COMMUNION

Sometime the next morning, Dad and I exited the plane at Gatwick Airport. We cleared Immigration and took the Gatwick Express to Victoria Station, London. Dad felt jet-lagged—or hungover—but I felt totally pumped.

Dad followed me out to the taxicab queue. We climbed into a big black taxi with fold-down seats, and I directed the driver to our first destination: “The American Embassy, Grosvenor Square.”

It was thrilling beyond belief to actually be there in London, rolling through the streets on the left side of the road. We passed Buckingham Palace and some large, tree-lined parks. I took it all in hungrily. I was sorry that it only took a short while to get to Grosvenor Square.

While Dad paid, I climbed out and looked around.

I didn’t like what I saw.

The American Embassy was surrounded by concrete terrorism barriers, and barbed wire, and policemen. I stared at it, completely baffled. This was not the place that I remembered at all! The building had a different façade and a different shape, and it stood in a different spot from the place I had visited with Jimmy. I felt a horrible sense of dread welling up in me. And foolishness. And craziness. I spun around three hundred and sixty degrees, not recognizing one thing.

The taxi pulled away and Dad approached me, smiling slightly. “I couldn’t understand a word that guy said, but he sure was friendly.” When he saw my face, though, his smile vanished. “What’s wrong, Martin? You look pale. Are you feeling sick?”

I pointed at the Embassy and choked out the words, “That’s not it.”

Dad shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Remember what I told you on the plane? I went to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Three times. But it wasn’t anything like this.” I felt my voice rising in desperation. “If this is wrong, then maybe it’s all wrong. The firemen—James Harker, Bill Lane. Those are common English names. There must be hundreds of people with those names. Some of them would have been in the Fire Service, right? Canby’s a common name, too. Some Canby guy could have been an air-raid warden. He could have gotten killed. Thousands of people were getting killed then.”

Dad placed his hand on my arm. “Calm down, Martin. Don’t work yourself into a state. I’m sure there’s an explanation for this.”

“Yeah. But what if the explanation is that I’m crazy? That I have been all along?” I sat down right there on the curb, muttering like a lunatic, “My God, what have I done?”

Dad left me sitting in my misery and crossed over to the Embassy’s security gate. He talked to the policeman there for a moment; then he turned and waved for me to come over. I put my head down and pinched my nostrils together, trying to fight off tears. When I got myself under control, I stood up and joined them.

“Here, Martin. Ask this fellow what’s what.”

The policeman smiled kindly. “What can I tell you, lad?”

I exhaled sharply, trying to find my voice. I pointed around me. “I, uh, I didn’t think this was the American Embassy. I didn’t think it looked like this, or that it was in this location.”

Dad interrupted. “How long has this building been here?”

The policemen answered, “Since 1960, sir.”

I pricked up my ears. “Really? Nineteen sixty? Please, where was it before that?”

“How long before that?”

“Nineteen forty.”

“Just turn around and walk east, boys, to the other side of the square. You’ll see the Canadian High Commission at Number One Grosvenor Square. That was the American Embassy during the war.”

“During the war. Yes! Great! Great! Thank you so much.” Both the policeman and Dad smiled at my utter relief at hearing that bit of news.

I hurried toward the east end of the square, with Dad right behind me. We passed a memorial to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. I told Dad, “They loved FDR in London. They even wrote pop songs about him.”

“Is that right?”

As we drew nearer to the corner, and the Canadian High Commission, my heart started to pound. Yes! That was it! That was it. It was right here that it all happened. Here’s where I saw my grandfather come out; here’s where James and Bill stood at their telephone stand; here’s where I hid with Jimmy Harker, hoping his dad wouldn’t see him and give him a licking. I took it all in, remembering every precious second of it, until Dad asked, “So, is everything okay now?”

“Oh yeah. Everything’s okay. This is the place. This is where it happened.”

“This is the place in your story?”

I objected to the word “story,” but not much. Nothing would bother me from here on out. I believed in myself again. “You can call it a story if you like, Dad. All I ask is that you stick with me for three days. Okay?”

Dad nodded. He looked around the vast expanse of the square. “Hey, I saw a pub over there, near where the taxi dropped us off. How about if we go there for a bite?”

“A bite?”

“Yeah. We have to eat.”

“To eat, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Not to drink?”

He shook his head, embarrassed. “My understanding is that they go to the pubs for food here. Grown-ups and kids alike. Everybody goes.”

I hadn’t meant to embarrass him. I felt terrible, and ungrateful, after all he had done for me. I said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m going to stop bothering you about drinking. You go ahead and do what you want. I have some things that I want to do.”

“What? By yourself?”

“Sure. I’ve got a map, and a pretty good idea of how to get around.” I could have added,
because I’ve been here before,
but I didn’t. I pointed to the west end of the square. “Why don’t you go have lunch over there, and I’ll come back and meet you.”

“Here?”

“No. Let’s meet where we got out of the taxi.” I looked at my watch. “It’s ten a.m. now. I’ll meet you at twelve o’clock.”

“Twelve o’clock, where the taxi dropped us off?”

“Yes.”

“All right. You be careful.” Dad took off walking.

I took off running down the east side of Grosvenor Square, trying to remember the route that I had traveled with Jimmy. I stopped for a moment on New Bond Street, in disbelief, when I saw a bench with two statues. A bronze Franklin D. Roosevelt was sitting and chatting with a bronze Winston Churchill while a group of Japanese tourists posed with them and snapped photos.

After a breather, I took off again, running easily until I turned left on Piccadilly and hit a wall of cars and people. I moved as quickly as I could through them, consulting my map, working my way steadily past Leicester Square toward the great dome of St. Paul’s.

When I finally got to the cathedral steps, I paused to rest and to take it all in. St. Paul’s was enormous, dark, and powerful. It was surrounded by place-names from my history searches, like Paternoster Square and Ave Maria Lane. This whole area had been a blazing inferno on 29.12.40.

I took my time walking up the long flight of steps to the entrance doors. I paid a fee, received an admission guide and a ticket, and passed inside. I read in the guide that I was in the cathedral’s nave. It was an immense space—wide, high, and deep—and it filled me with a sense of awe. I sat in a wooden pew for fifteen minutes, just resting. I gazed up at the dome and thought about life and death, and heaven and hell, and purgatory.

I checked the guide again, got up, and walked to a stairwell. St. Paul’s has 530 steps to the top, which I proceeded to climb. At one point I came out of the dark cement stairwell into the Whispering Gallery, a railed walkway that ran around the bottom of the dome. Then I walked outside to another stairway to complete my climb.

When I finally reached the top, I took a quick lap around the viewing area, studying the city of London from every direction. I used my map to pinpoint Grosvenor Square. Then I did my best to calculate how far Jimmy and I had run, and in what direction. I studied the warren of streets below me intently. Somewhere down there, on one of those streets, had stood a surface shelter where Jimmy Harker and an old woman and a little boy had been killed by a German bomber, and where an air-raid warden named Canby had been killed by a distraught man in a moment of rage.

A few minutes later, I worked my way back through the Whispering Gallery and down the worn stone stairs to the cathedral floor. I fell in step with a group heading into the cathedral’s sanctuary, which, I learned, was called the Quire. I joined those people, and a priest, in an Anglican communion service. It turned out to be very similar to a Catholic mass. When it came time to give out the host, the priest told us all to get up from our seats and walk to the center of the Quire. Then he passed out the wafers and told us to pray silently. As I swallowed mine, I said prayers for a list of souls—souls who may have been in heaven, or hell, or purgatory. I whispered their names into the immenseness of St. Paul’s Cathedral: Jimmy Harker, Harold Canby, Alice Lane, and Bill Lane.

I half walked, half ran all the way back to Grosvenor Square, arriving just after twelve o’clock. Dad was not at our agreed-upon spot. He was not there at twelve-fifteen, either. I finally set out in the direction our taxi had taken until I saw a pub—the Golden Eagle. I stepped inside, through a wall of smoke, and spotted Dad. He was sitting in a booth with a glass of dark beer and what I took to be the remains of a hard-boiled egg and some meat. He looked up. “Martin! Oh no, is it that late?”

“It’s almost twelve-thirty.”

“Oh man. Sorry.”

“Forget it. Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah. If you are. Do you want something, Martin?” He pointed at his plate. “Do you want a Scotch egg?”

I regarded his plate suspiciously, but I was hungry. “Yeah. Okay.”

“How about something to drink? You must be thirsty.”

“Uh, water, I guess. But can we get it to go?”

“Sure. Are we running late?”

“A little.”

Dad went to the bar and negotiated the egg, the water, and a taxi while I went out to the street to escape the smoke. I looked around, trying to imagine these same streets blacked out, packed with sandbags, reverberating to the wail of the air-raid sirens and the anti-aircraft guns.

Soon another big taxi pulled up, and the driver took us through Mayfair, past Russell Square, and up to King’s Cross Station. By two p.m., Dad and I had settled into seats on another train. He asked me, “So, did you like London?”

“Yes. Most definitely. I think I could live here.”

“Then maybe you will.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t want to become Martin Mehan.”

Dad seemed genuinely surprised. “Really? You don’t?”

“No. Of course not. Did you think I did?”

“Yeah.”

“Never. I never did.”

After that, Dad turned away and looked out the window. I expected him to fall asleep, but he didn’t. He seemed lost in thought as we rode north to our final destination, the haunted city of York.

As advertised on its Web site, the Wayfarer Bed-and-Breakfast Hotel was within walking distance of the York train station. The manager, a skinny man in a short-sleeved white shirt, showed us to a corner room upstairs. Our suitcases and a large box were already waiting for us, lined up against one wall.

“Those arrived from the airline,” the manager said, “with their apologies.”

The room had a single bed and a cot. I told Dad to take the bed, which he did gratefully. He was snoring loudly within minutes. I had no such intention. It was now nearly five o’clock, too late to talk to most workers at the York Minster, but not too late to go there. I fished out my Map-Quest printout of the city and slipped out of the room quietly. The hotel manager, seeing my printout, handed me a York welcome packet that included a foldout map, a brochure for a Viking museum, and an advertisement for a Haunted City ghost tour.

I hurried through an area called the Shambles, which, the packet claimed, was the oldest street in Europe, dating to medieval times. I looked up and suddenly realized that the Minster, the great cathedral, was looming right before me in the darkening sky. It was huge, completely dominating the city. It was visible from just about anywhere.

I ran up to a high, wide front door and pulled it open. As I had done at St. Paul’s, I paid a fee and entered. The York Minster, according to its brochure, was one of the largest Gothic cathedrals ever built. “Gothic” meant that it had two towers instead of a dome. Still, entering the cathedral filled me with that same sense of awe. I walked slowly forward through the nave, past row after row of perfectly straight wooden chairs, taking in the carved artwork on the walls and the ceiling.

Then I saw what I was looking for: the stairs to the top. A volunteer seated at a table took my payment, but she told me, “You’ll have to wait ten minutes to go up, son. Passage on the stairs is one way only. For thirty minutes, the traffic climbs only up. Then, for thirty minutes, it climbs only down.”

I said, “All right. Thank you,” and drifted back against a cold stone wall to wait with some other tourists. After ten minutes, a cluster of people emerged from the stairs; then it was our turn to climb. My group, mostly middle-aged English and German people, allowed me to go first, probably since I looked like the fastest climber. The steps, 275 of them, were very narrow and entirely circular. I took my time climbing them, but I still reached the top far ahead of the rest of the group. Another volunteer, a petite older woman in a blue blazer, was standing in the door of a small office to the right. I waved to her, and she said, “Is there a group coming up now?”

“Yes. I’m the first.” I took advantage of the moment to ask, “What do people usually look at from here?”

In reply, she reached under a counter and produced a pair of binoculars. “There is nothing in particular to look at. The cathedral is what most people come to York to see, and you’re already in that. But you’re welcome to use the binos to look around, if you like. The view is lovely with the lights coming on.”

I reached out and took them. “Thank you very much.”

The woman left her post and led me across the roof. The top of the cathedral was a windy place with a strong wire cage overhead and on the sides—I guess to keep people from throwing stuff off. The woman stopped and pointed down at the city. “You see that street down there? That’s the Shambles, the oldest street in Europe. Have a look.”