Friday, January 23, 2009
London

I awoke this morning to the most shocking news in the world. It was 6.10 am, I switched my laptop on and froze. I had just received an email message from my friend Margaret Loose, Professor of English at the University of California at San Diego, informing me that a very dear mutual friend of ours, Professor Sally Ledger, had died on Wednesday. I looked at the words on my screen but they failed to make any sense. How could that be possible? That very morning, I had received an email from Sally, who is the Director of Victorian Studies at London’s Royal Holloway College, inviting me to attend a seminar there. I had emailed her back suggesting that we get together for lunch and had been awaiting a response from her. Sally is usually very prompt in responding to her email, so when Thursday passed, I have to admit I actually wondered at her silence.

It turns out that she was at her stove cooking dinner on Wednesday night when she had a sudden brain hemorrhage and dropped dead instantly. Just like that! Can you even believe it? Sally is my age–may even be younger–and a renowned Victorian scholar and a Dickensian whom I got to know at the Dickens Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz which I have attended for the past two summers. Though we have had regular email contact since I arrived here in London, we met only briefly and just by happenstance, at an Italian restaurant called Paradiso in Bloomsbury in October where we had hugged and kissed and promised to make plans to meet at the British Library over coffee or lunch. Alas! It was not to be and now poor dear Sally is gone and I will miss her warmth and her concern for me and the inspiration she provided as a scholar and as a teacher. I have been checking the website at Royal Holloway College because I do wish to attend her funeral since I am right here in London and, if it is scheduled before my departure for Berlin, I shall be there.

When I was over my shock and sadness, I got on with my work for the day. I actually put in a whole three hours of effective work on my laptop before I stirred and got out of bed. Ryanair’s offer of one-way five pounds fares meant that I was finally able to book my tickets to Venice and back for the March trip I was will be undertaking to Italy as my friend Annalisa Oboe, Professor in the English Department, has invited me to give a lecture at the University of Padua. I also needed to finalize accommodation arrangements in Berlin where I will be flying on Tuesday and, I have to say, I am a little concerned as my friend Anya Brug seems to be traveling again and hasn’t been checking her email. This means that I am not sure how to get from Schoenfeld airport to the flat in the city that she has arranged for me to occupy. If I do not hear from her over the weekend, I guess I will have to stay in the Youth Hostel where I’ve made alternative arrangements. I also emailed my friend Catherine Robson, Professor of English at the University of California at Davis, currently on a one-year research assignment in Berlin, to inform her about my arrival there and to make plans to meet. All of this took a good chunk of my early morning work hours and I was finally able to turn my thoughts to the interview I was scheduled to do in distant Wimbledon.

I could not have chosen a more miserable day to go out to interview Vivian Lawless and his wife Dorothy. Journey Planner instructed me on how to get there by bus, so I gritted my teeth against the awful weather and set out–wishing I had done the interview yesterday when I met him at the Norwood meeting. Anyway, a long journey and many bus changes later, there was Vivian waiting for me at the pub as promised and we walked the short distance to his home where I gratefully accepted a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits.

The Lawlesses live in a old Edwardian House that has a lot of external charm and character. Like the typical terraced houses of that era, all the houses are identical on a street. They have handkerchief-sized front patches that open up to the main door. Inside, the rooms are very tiny (by American standards) and since most of the people I am interviewing for my study purchased these homes in the late 60s and early 70s and never moved out, most of them are in a decorating time warp with dark carpets, busy wallpaper and tons and tons of pictures of children, grand children ( and amazingly, in this case, even great grandchildren, for the Lawlesses too do not look their age at all). It must be the fact that these Anglo-Indians live in the cold, damp climate of England that has allowed them to preserve their youthfulness because their counterparts in India look old and haggard and have none of the vitality of body and spirit that these folks proclaim so heartily.

The interview went off well and I even had the chance to meet their only son, Gary, who popped in for a little while. I think it would have been nice to interview Gary as well but he did not say a word to me the entire time I was in his parents’ home, which led me to believe that he might not be interested in my project. At any rate, the Lawlesses were very nice to me and responded to my questions candidly and truthfully. I asked them if the famous tennis courts were anywhere near their place and they informed me that they were about two miles away but that they were probably closed at this time of year. By the time my interview wad done, the sun had started to shine down and dry up Mother Earth and the entire journey back was so much better. I was fascinated by the Little India that had developed along Tooting Broadway where sari shops and Indian sweetmeat stores, sub-Continental groceries and jewelry showrooms spoke of a vital ethnic community in the area.

Since the day was still young, I got off the bus at Trafalgar Square and returned to one of my favorite places in London–the National Gallery–where I decided to cover six more galleries. I have finally reached the oldest and most ornate part of the museum–the rooms surrounding the main dome that gives the building its solemn profile. These galleries are decorated to the hilt with lavish gilding on columns, elaborate plasterwork on the ceiling, thick moldings and damask covered walls that give the entire design a grand Baroque feel. These galleries house works by the French, Italian and British artists of the 19th centuries, some of whom happen to be my favorites–such as Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin (who is well represented here with many small canvases), Gainsborough, Turner, Constable and Canaletto whose Venetian landscapes with their minute detail leave me spellbound for hours. I was deeply taken by the series of river scapes of the Stour that Constable painted and I would like very much to get to Suffolk before I leave England so that I can see for myself the rural scenes he loved so well and look upon Willie Lott’s house which Constable has presented in scene after scene (and which still stands today). If this is true of Suffolk, the same is true of Canaletto’s Venice. As I looked upon the details of the Piazza San Marco and the views along the Grand Canal, I was struck by the fact that nothing seems to have changed at all since Canaletto made the depictions of the city his obsession in the late 19th century.

Realizing that I now have only six more galleries to study in detail before my perusal of the National Gallery is done, I took the bus home and had only a little while to check email and watch some TV before my friend Gauri Kasbekar-Shah was buzzing me downstairs. As in the case of Sally, I have been in email contact with Gauri since I arrived here in August to make plans to meet some evening, but it just did not happen. Eventually, we did settle on dinner and when I invited Gauri to have a drink at my place before we set out to eat, she agreed. Having come straight from work (she works at the Royal Bank of Scotland), she was starving and devoured the Stilton Cheese and Crackers that I laid out for her with our wine. I checked my book Cheap Eats in London and found a small seafood place, just behind my street on Farringdon, called Little Bay. We walked there and found the place located in a building in which Gauri says she almost bought a flat. The only thing that had prevented her from doing so was the presence of this restaurant on the ground floor! How coincidental was that??!!

We spent the next hour catching up over a really fabulous meal, which, was truly as the book said–cheap. We chose two different starters and split them: Garlic Mushrooms which were divine and Crab in Choux Buns–also very good. For a main dish, both Gauri and I opted for the Cod on a hot potato salad with a tomato coulis. It was melt-in-the-mouth good, but because I have a really tiny capacity, I carried half of it home in a doggy bag and I look forward to eating my leftovers soon. Unbelievably, it was past 11 pm when we finished our meal (we both decided against dessert as we were too full) and looked for buses to get us back to our respective homes–Gauri owns a flat in Islington where I have stayed twice on my previous visits to London. This place is not too far from mine at all and we have now made plans to get together again soon after I return from Berlin.

I was merely able to chat with Llew for a few minutes before I felt really tired and decided to call it a day.