Leading the way, in the vanguard, one might say, were my father and I. Leaving my mother, two brothers, and sister behind in London, the plan of action called for us to embark first for Milford, scout out the terrain, and attend to settling all the logistics, preparatory to the remainder of the family joining us a month later. Circling around it was a definite air of adventure, blazing a trail, off into the unknown; and my mind, at that time just beginning to flex a new-found yen for new experiences, embraced the prospect without hesitation.
According to schedule, therefore, on a dreary Sunday afternoon in August, my father and I set forth from Paddington Station in West London, majestic terminus of the Great Western line to west Wales since the mid-1800's, booked on the overnight express to Milford – the end of the line.
Certain structures exude a gravitas, somehow harness and concentrate within their confines a singular aura of force and power; and this is the feeling that came strong upon me at Paddington. One of the venerable old London train stations produced by the energy and largesse of empire and the Industrial Revolution, Paddington, with its stolid Victorian architecture, its age and command of place, its huge train shed, wrought-iron arches, and triple transept, created in my mind both a cavernous, imposing effect, and a smothering sense of confinement, an uncomfortable feeling of enclosure within some alien hive of metal and machinery.
And this enclosure, this hive – well, it was like nothing I had ever seen or known! A weird, self-contained city, overrun with huge, menacing, mechanical creatures, all buzzing, clanging, swarming, with an unseen, insect-like intelligence; creatures made not of steel and bolts and cable, but of some hard, glinting, metallic flesh; strangely sensate, heaving and straining on their tracks like muscled Dobermanns tautly leashed, and then, with enormous gaseous bellows, leaping alarmingly to life and bursting forth to hurtle fiercely off into the world. Such were the startling impressions the great station set to bubbling in my mind on the wet and dismal Sunday of our departure for Milford; bizarre and unnerving impressions, rising upward from the tangle of sound, motion, and activity in the overawing and vaguely macabre heart of Paddington.
Wide eyes swiveling left and right, I followed my father along wet, dirty platforms, solemnly absorbing the scene's iron immensity, feeling my own paltry insignificance amidst the flurry. Above, below, to every side - people hastening, announcements blaring, cold metal wheels wailing hideously, lights flashing. A jarring cacophony of voices, anxious, angry, joyful; faces drawn in introspection, faces wide and aglow with anticipation, blank with fatigue, with boredom, pinched by some inner turmoil; clothes shabby and rich, plain and colorful – and every soul moving, every soul in transit, heading somewhere on some private mission, as behind it all some unseen force pulled levers and manipulated switches so that indeed the myriad of living, beating locomotives came and went with dull predictability and delivered, in the end, astonishingly, every person to their precise desired destination, to waiting friends, warm hearths, and loved ones, or perhaps to loneliness and regret, all at their scheduled times.
To the blank, receptive slate of my mind, doused in Paddington's frantic torrent, it seemed an impossibility of logistics, as if only chance or luck could possibly hold it all together. The massive board meant to inform travelers of departures, arrivals, platforms – was to me incomprehensible and unfathomable, as if carved in scratches; its code undecipherable to my overstuffed brain. Even worse, it was impossible to make any sense of the language crackling from the loudspeakers into the hyper-agitated air – the garbled skein of sounds assaulting my ears with jagged waves of furious electronic noise. Odors of oil, dirt, sweat, and steam swirled and mingled into a vaguely sickening miasma, the stench of which roiled and rolled in wet draughts, causing my eyes to swim and my thoughts to stumble. Babble of ten thousand voices, kaleidoscope of countless skittering bodies, rough scuff of shoes against grimy, well-worn cement. I sidestepped burly men and frail old ladies and bawling children. I bumped my knees on mounds of luggage stacked on the sticky platforms. It was too much, this sensual maelstrom, too stimulating, too disorienting – and yet, overriding the frenetic vibrato oscillating throughout the smelly air, overriding the madhouse tenor of it all – well, at the same time, my heart raced in a kind of thrall, and my eyes bugged big and bright so as not to miss a single thing; not one exhilarating, mesmerizing thing.
We maneuvered through a slick metal turnstile, wedged through another crowd, clambered up some stairs, then down onto a dirty, busy landing; shoved our way onto one of the waiting trains, then down a narrow aisle, then finally into our compartment. The door slid shut. Immediately, the clamor fell away. Throwing our luggage onto the overhead rack, we dropped heavily into our seats, where I sat dazed, breathing heavily, numbed by the sudden silence, isolated now from the press and uproar outside.
As I settled down, though, and began thinking clearly again, I noticed my father gazing with his own wide eyes beyond the window; and then, before I could inquire what it was, what was so fixing his attention, he turned to me with a grin and announced “Hold on, here we go!” For our own train had shuddered briskly to life, was easing forward, bumping and grinding over the maze of switch-tracks, laboring into motion – and then Away We Charged! Bursting out of the alien hive, out of the city, blasting down the track between rows of trees, past yellow-green fields, as the sun sank into the blue-to-grey western horizon and shadows settled gently upon the entire landscape. And then, before long, it was night, black as oblivion outside our cozy berth, and I dropped off to sleep sitting up, leaning my head against the cool glass of the darkened window, my mind empty and still.
I may have slept for a minute; or it could have been an hour. My father roused me with a hand to my shoulder. We tucked away a hearty meal in the dining car, returned to our nook – I went bouncing off the sides of the narrow passageway as the train swerved and swayed – and climbed into our bunks, where I fell immediately into the deepest of dreamless sleeps.
Behind us lay Paddington. Ahead lay Milfiord.
It would have been completely natural, had I been wracked with unease over relocating to this new locale, of which I knew nothing. In fact, however, I harbored not one whit of anxiety or foreboding. I realize now this phlegmatic attitude was unusual. In retrospect, however, its explanation is clear.
This move from London to Milford was really the lesser of our recent upheavals. A few scant months earlier, our family had undertaken a much greater and more daunting transit, picking up from my childhood home in south Florida and flying across the ocean to London; the site of Bechtel's European headquarters, where the planning and design phases of the Gulf project were to occur. This phase, it was expected, would occupy several months. Then, upon its completion, we would relocate to Milford for the actual construction of the refinery. Accordingly, London was our initial landing-place, as a way-station leading to a longer residence in Milford. And this first migration from Miami to London was unquestionably the more momentous adjustment. That move was a true rupture – yet also became, in an unexpected way, a revelation, a pivot point in my young life; one consequence of which was that I regarded our latest resettlement, this one merely from London to Milford via the Great Western's overnight express, with anticipation instead of unease.
My childhood had unfolded serenely, cocooned in a small and familiar world of parents, siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, the close and comforting routines of school, church, Little League baseball, dinner get-togethers, Saturday evening TV, holiday gatherings, laughter, jollity, and a vigorous collection of small, eccentric, family traditions. Our extended familial life in south Florida had been wide and deep and rich. And, as the date of our departure for London approached, there formed an awareness – keener with each passing day - that I was leaving the only place and only life I had ever known, for something very far away and sure to be very different, and from which I already intuited a return to be unlikely. We were stepping off a safe and solid platform into the air, I sensed, and nothing that followed that fateful step would resemble what had existed before.
To my young mind, of course, this was a deeply disquieting prospect – exacerbated by my complete inability to influence the matter in any way. Yes, as we played catch one evening in the backyard, my father told me it was going to be a great job, the kind he had always wanted to have. And yes, I heard my mother tell her parents, on the phone one night, that she couldn’t wait to see everything there was to see, that it would be a wonderful adventure. Behind it all, however, I perceived only a vast dislocation. Naturally, therefore, the immense unknowns surrounding this first transition had spawned a swirling cloud of trepidation; my first encounter with what I dimly grasped to be separation, finality, and loss.
I need not have feared, however. Little did I know the reshaping wrought within me by our journey from Miami to London would prefigure everything that followed, both during our tenure in the UK and afterwards – I can trace it, in fact, as easily as tracing a figure on a sheet of paper, so clearly does its imprint remain.
We departed Miami on a humid, sultry, overcast afternoon. The air had a texture damp and sullen, thick with intimations not normally present – tension, anxiety. I made a final, somber study of my boyhood bedroom. I glanced, on my way to the front door, at the tree-house my brother and I had cobbled together the previous summer in one of the backyard trees. I stared thoughtfully at the spot in the living room where our Christmas tree had always stood. As we loaded into the car I turned and paused to commit to memory – for I knew something irrevocable was occurring - the shape and appearance of our plain and ordinary house, its front steps, its color, the porchlight, the bushes, the shutters, the knocker on the door. And then, the farewells at the airport had been sad and tearful, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, all gathered dolefully to see us off. All of it was real, and as morose as I had anticipated.
Then, however … then came the unexpected thing, the big leap, the big change – when it all fell away. When all the fears, all the apprehension with which I had boarded the airplane and swooped across the Atlantic, fell away within hours after landing at Heathrow; the entire, heavy-hearted, shroud of hesitation and doubt crumbling to nothing on our very first day in London, replaced by some influence that pulled me irresistibly, willingly, into its grasp; some stimulus electric, magnetic, and transforming.
The unknowing author of this experience … but is “experience” even the right word? It wasn’t simply an isolated, definable experience. It was more like a general remolding, an overall reshaping, emptying a container of its old contents and filling it anew with something different, something more substantial … the author of which was my father.