WE ROSE VERY EARLY on Monday, our first day at day camp. Jordan took us in a cab to the South Kensington—he and Mark kept calling it South Ken—underground station. He made inquiries, handed me a little colored map and he and Mark rushed off. The children and I waited on a platform with several large bearded men in turbans who looked like extras in an old Ronald Colman movie, and a knobby Buddhist priest carrying prayer beads. It was a long ride to West Ruyslip, but we all felt cheerful because at least we were going somewhere and not just wandering around looking for happiness.
West Ruyslip was the end of the line. We disembarked, surprised to smell trees and flowers, and walked half a block down a hill to the American Air Force base. There large people in uniforms blocked our way, looking at us suspiciously. Some of them wanted us to go away, but I stood my ground and finally an officer told them that the day camp was open to civilians, and it was all right. A uniformed person took us across the camp to a wooden building. The ground was brown and bare; it had started to rain, and an icy wind was blowing.
I signed the boys into the camp for one week and hung around in a large auditorium while the lady from Texas sorted all the children into groups. Bruce and Eric were in the same group. She gave them all paper Indian headdresses and told them to run around in a circle. At this point I went out into the hall because I could feel Bruce trying to catch my eye. I sat down on a bench in the hall and started to read. The rain beat on the tin roof of the building and the winds swirled about it. I was reading a British reprint of an American novel about a sensitive man who lived in New Jersey and felt stifled. His wife joined the PTA and he was booed at meetings.
I visited the lavatory and was shocked to find lewd things written all over the walls; severe notes from the authorities were posted threatening to shut the ladies off from a lavatory entirely if they did not mend their ways. Finally, suffering from cold, headache and general malaise, I went to the base cafeteria for lunch, to find that they would not take my English money. A young American girl gave me some American change, and we sat together to eat.
“I’ve been here three years,” she said. “I hate it. They call us Yanks, we call them Blokes. The children beat up my little sister. I have to stay here because I’m getting married and my fiancé hasn’t finished here. Everybody makes fun of my accent. I do telephone ordering for the base; yesterday a man said he couldn’t understand a word I said. He said he didn’t know what language I was speaking.”
She went off moodily and I went back to my draughty hallway and my book. After an hour or so I wandered into the office to thaw out. The girls there were chatting. “I’m getting out,” one said. “I’m going to college in the States. I feel awfully sorry for my mother, though; she’s got another year here. She wants to come with me and settle me in college, but my father won’t let her because he’s afraid she won’t come back.”
“I just got back from Manchester,” another one said. “We had a ball.”
“You liked Manchester?” I said.
“Oh, it was great. The people are friendly up there. Not like London. They’re almost like Americans up there.”
I huddled in the office until four o’clock when I collected Eric, who said he had had a good time, and Bruce, who was too miserable even to complain, and we walked back to the underground where we changed trains once, traveling on a monumental escalator, and then reached South Ken where we took a cab home. The house was dark and very cold. Eric went into the little lavatory on the ground floor.
“Hey, it’s all wet back there,” he said.
I went back. Water was running down the wall between the lavatory and the small study.
“Oh, dear,” I said, “I’ll call Mr. MacAllister.”
“ … and there’s quite a lot of water coming down the wall,” I said to him on the phone.
For some incomprehensible reason, Mr. MacAllister laughed.
“How awful for you,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Well, do you know a plumber?”
Mr. MacAllister’s voice became rather frigid. “I don’t know any plumbers,” he said. “I do know of a builder.”
“Well, do you think you could call him? Someone is here every day until two o’clock.”
“Well, I could try to call him, yes.”
“Because you see,” I said slowly and distinctly, “there’s quite a lot of water coming down the wall.”
Mr. MacAllister laughed, and we rang off.