Pilgrimage

My friend Stephanie and I graduated from college on Sunday, and Wednesday morning we hopped a plane to London. For me, it would be a week of firsts—my first trip out of the United States, my first train ride, my first bus ride (not counting school buses), my first castle, my first taste of whiskey. In a way, my first real gulp of independence after sipping it through four years of liberal arts education at a college in the middle of Iowa corn. As English majors, Steph and I had read Shakespeare—now we’d kick around in his dust.

I spent most of the three week trip trying to nail down why Great Britain is different from America. But there are no easy answers and countries aren’t definable. I merely offer this illustration: the Chelsea Flower Show. It gets as much press as the Super Bowl does in the US. It’s a gardening show, but these aren’t your grandma’s flower beds. The gardens have names like “Diarmuid Gavin Design: A Colourful Suburban Eden” and “Fleming's Nurseries: An Australian Inspiration.” The nightly news updates the populace on that day’s winners. Men and women take off work and ride the train to Chelsea. They gaze at bluebells and cow parsley and hope to get a peek at the queen.

I don’t think the United States could generate that much interest in flowers. I’m not sure why—we have Home and Garden Television. It’s just not our style. And it’s not that Britain is a bunch of pansies, no pun intended. Near Shakespeare’s birthplace we saw a boy clutching his bleeding head and yelling he’d been hit with a bottle. Except he said “bah-ul.” They’ll beat the crap out of each other there same as here. And Shakespeare invented the word “bloodstained,” so it all comes full-circle in the end.

A difference in style is as close as I can come when contrasting the US and Great Britain. Maybe it has to do with history and just having so much more of it there. Pilgrims have been coming to Canterbury Cathedral since 1170, and I took my first train ride when Steph and I made our own pilgrimage. After viewing Thomas à Becket’s shrine—an iron construction with jagged daggers pointing to the spot of his martyrdom—we forked over nine pounds for the Canterbury Tales Experience. Students have been reading the Canterbury Tales so long it has become a theme park. I’m not aware that the US has the Alamo Experience or the Boston Tea Party Experience. Reminiscent of Disney World, the Canterbury Tales Experience showcased life-size pilgrims that popped out at us as we wandered through rooms designed to reproduce scenes from Chaucer’s masterpiece—a true English major’s fantasy. The experience even went a bit further than Disney, with each room recreating the smells as well as sights and sounds. Stephanie and I couldn’t wait to leave the stable scene, which featured realistic horse urine.

Britain churned out “experiences” at every corner. We enjoyed the Secret Wartime Tunnels Experience at Dover Castle, complete with odors of camphor and dinner rations. The Eilean Donan Castle Experience scored points for realistic looking pies and meat hunks in the kitchen, but it lacked smells and only earned a B+. We rode the train to all the experiences. I liked the train, especially the people pushing the trolley up and down the aisle saying, “Cakes and drinks.” The food trolley is another thing at odds with US style. Eventually I began to feel seasoned and no longer jumped when the guard asked to see my ticket. Nor did I obsessively keep track of the stops lest we miss ours. No, that’s a lie. I always kept track of the stops.

As a rule, Brits weren’t chatty on the train. Steph and I were taken aback when a rowdy youth from down the carriage staggered over, plopped down across from us and drunkenly asked our names. “You’re not from around here,” he said. “Where you from? America?” He looked disgusted at the thought.

“I’m from Canada,” Steph said quickly. Long subjected to living in a land without proper esteem for hockey, she relished any occasion to dissociate herself from the US and cling to her homeland. I didn’t say anything.

“Yanks are all lunatics, aren’t they?” he said, going even redder in the face. “What a bunch of wankers. And Bush is the biggest wanker of them all.” He began a tirade against Bush, swearing with the novelty only a drunken Brit can achieve.

Stephanie, ever polite, asked where he was from.

“Liverpool, like The Beatles,” he said. “You know—“She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah! She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah!” He bellowed the song at top voice, pointing to Steph and me in turn. “You know who The Beatles are?”

Several of our fellow passengers tittered; some looked uncomfortable, shifting in their seats. There was the sense that we were all in this together, everyone involved in the disturbance. I avoided any eye contact with the young drunk, a key factor in getting rid of unwelcome persons. Stephanie stared at him happily. Earlier in London she’d given our names and hotel to the man collecting the money people paid to sit in chairs in Green Park. She only ventured into rudeness when he asked how to contact her in Canada when he needed a name to get into the country. “I’m not giving out my address,” she said.

The Liverpudlian finally tired of us and returned to his party down the train. The nearby passengers breathed a collective sigh of relief. A man in a suit sitting diagonally from us turned, looking pained, and said, “You know, not all Englishmen are like that.” He returned to his magazine.

Of course he was right. There are rude Englishmen and civil ones, crass ones and proper ones. But a crass Englishman is different from a crass American—as I’ve said, it’s about style. You know there’s something different about a country where signs read “Way Out” instead of “Exit.”