“YOUR FATHER’S VERY NERVOUS,” I said to Mark.
“That place gets on your nerves,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going to Carnaby Street to buy some clothes”
“What’s that?”
“Carnaby Street. It’s where all the Mods buy their clothes. They have cool clothes. The Beatles’ tailor is there, the Stones shop there. This is a very cool place,” he said contentiously. “The music is great. You don’t appreciate it.”
“I do appreciate it,” I said, stung. “All my life I’ve loved England.”
We took a cab to Selfridge’s and fought our way through the crowds to the Jungle Room on an upper floor. “It doesn’t look like much,” I said apologetically, “but the scones are good.”
“I want some ice cream,” Mark said.
“They have ice cream.”
We sat down next to the wall; there were large jungly-looking leaves on the wallpaper.
“Boy, is this creepy-looking,” Mark said. When the waitress came to our table, Bruce and I ordered scones. Eric said he wanted chocolate milk. He was always demanding outrageous things: chocolate milk, coke without lemon, more toast, no prawns…. Now at Selfridge’s, I was telling the waitress, “He’ll have chocolate milk.”
“Oh, we don’t do chocolate milk,” she replied. She was a pretty girl, with a fresh complexion. “We do do chocolate sodas,” she added, kindly.
“Well,” I said, “if you make … if you do chocolate sodas, you must have chocolate syrup.”
“Y e-e-s,” she said doubtfully.
“And if you have milk, all you have to do is take a few spoonsful of chocolate syrup and put it in the milk and stir it up, and you’ve got chocolate milk.”
There was a pause.
“What?” she said.
“You see,” I said, “you have the chocolate syrup in a jar or something. You pour a glass of milk. Then you take a spoon and you put syrup on the spoon and put the spoon into the milk and stir it up and you have chocolate milk.”
“You mean,” she said, “that you mix … ? You put … ?”
“Yes, you put the chocolate syrup on a spoon, into the glass of milk, a few times, and you mix it or stir it, and that makes chocolate milk.” I didn’t look at the children while this conversation was taking place.
“I’ll go and check,” the waitress said. “See if it can be done.”
She went off, and after a while she came back with a dramatic announcement. “We can do it!” she cried triumphantly.
“It’s all in handling them,” I said smugly.
“I don’t believe this,” Mark said.
She brought the scones, some tea, a chocolate soda for Mark, a glass of milk for Bruce and a glass of heavily chocolate milk for Eric.
“The soda looks good,” I said to Mark. It was tall and topped with whipped cream and a cherry.
He took a deep swig through the straw and his face turned purple. “It’s all hot chocolate on the bottom,” he said, when he could talk. “Only the chocolate came through, and they heated it.”
I said they couldn’t possibly have heated it. “Well, it’s awfully warm. Visualize this: you take a deep drink, you’re thirsty. You expect a cool swig of ice cream. You get hot syrup. Faugh.”
“Mix it up,” I said. “You take a spoon and you put it in, and you move it—”
“There’s too much chocolate in this milk,” Eric said. “I can’t drink it.”
“You have to drink it,” Bruce said. “Look what she went through.”
“Pour it in your shoe,” Mark said. “She won’t know.” We went home, to find the wall streaked and peeling, and the carpet black and soggy.
“The plumber didn’t come,” I said. “I’d better call him myself.”
I studied Mrs. Stackpole’s lists and came up with a telephone number.
“Is Mr. Kradge there?”
“No, I’m afraid he’s away.”
“Oh. Well, this is Mrs. Miller. I’m renting Mrs. Stackpole’s house for the summer, and she left Mr. Kradge’s name….”
“Mr. Kradge is on holiday.”
“When do you expect him back? Or could you send someone else? You see, there’s a lot of water….”
“When he comes in,” she said, losing her patience, “I’ll send him round.”
“But when do you expect him? I think it’s an emergency.”
“He’s on holiday. When he comes back,” she said, evidently through clenched teeth, “I’ll … send … him … round.” There wasn’t any business section in the phone book, so we were dependent on Mr. Kradge.
The next day the Air Force camp was going to the zoo. We had already been to the zoo on a Sunday, but we decided to go again because there was nothing else to do and the Air Force children cheered us up. They were a pleasant lot, friendly and agreeable. The London Zoo was a very good zoo and we roamed around, enjoying it. It was a sunny day. Eric found a stand that sold cold milk, and he kept buying and drinking it.
“It’s really cold,” he said, surprised.
The elephants were interesting: they stood near a railing and ate what people gave them. All the children gave them peanuts. Eric gave his elephant all the peanuts he had. “Now give them the bag,” a little boy said to Eric. Before I could stop him, Eric, impressionable as always, put the little empty peanut bag in the elephant’s trunk.
“Oh, Eric,” I said, reaching toward him, “that wasn’t … you really shouldn’t …”
Before I could go on, I was shoved rather roughly aside, and a man in his fifties with a brown moustache and popping eyes had seized Eric’s arm. “You mustn’t do that,” the man gasped, shaking all over. “You mustn’t tease animals. If you … if you tease animals, they’ll be angry with you, and … and … hit you!”
“The elephant spit it out, mister,” one of the children said soothingly.
The man released Eric’s arm and trembled off, on the verge of tears.
“I want to go home,” Eric said.
I noticed a violent reaction in myself. Crazy English animal lover, I thought.
At this point the chimpanzees provided a distraction. One of them grabbed a pocket handkerchief and pretended to cry into it, and the other one came up to the bars and spat at the crowd which screamed and ducked. I was fascinated with this spectacle and when I finally turned away, I discovered that we had lost the Air Force camp. We wandered around for a while looking for them and buying cold milk; finally I got a map and tried to find the exit. I am very bad at reading maps and soon we found ourselves in the wilds of Regent’s Park. It was incredibly large and empty. We walked and walked, sitting on benches periodically to recoup our strength. Eventually, we stumbled on a place that sold cold bottled drinks and near that a large pond with boats for rent. At last we had found something both children enjoyed.
I sat on a bench and Bruce and Eric swirled round and round the pond in motor boats. I read a paperback, looking up occasionally to watch the boat boys, in rubber hip boots, disentangle boats and give people starts. These boys were thin and rather undersized; they were surly with the customers and nasty to each other. A very elegant lady came up, holding a little girl by the hand. An obvious nanny was with her, pushing a boy about a year old in a stroller. The nanny went off in a boat with the little girl, and the elegant lady sat down beside me, arranging the baby, who had a fat face and was wearing a small blue overcoat with brass buttons. He bounced up and down and pointed to the water.
“Oh, Oliver,” the lady said. “Do sit still. Don’t squirm so.”
“Wah, wah!” Oliver said. “Blah. Wah. Goo goo.”
“Oh, Oliver,” the lady said, with distaste. “Do be sensible.”