After
dropping off bags and catching our breath, Chris took us on a walking tour of
his Chelsea neighborhood, daughter Chloe and son Alistair in tow. We grabbed a
bite to eat at a bright, chatty little place called Sophie’s down the street
from his flat. I didn’t feel much like eating, afraid that a big meal at
whatever time my body thought it was would send me into a body-clock-metabolic
netherworld, so I just ordered some toast and rash of bacon from our American
waitress (born in Knoxville, lived in Seattle, had been in London for 10 years
and without the slightest hint of an acquired accent).
We made
our way over to Brompton
Cemetery, one of London’s Magnificent Seven
public cemeteries, opened in 1840. We had had it in our minds that we would
find lots of ancient cemeteries in England, but soon came to learn that the
reality is a little bit more complex than “old country, old cemeteries”. The
public cemeteries tended to be not terribly old – early to mid Victorian –
primarily because the main burial areas for England’s dead were the churches up
until that time, and the public cemeteries (especially in the city centers)
were opened as a way to deal with the growing population and the rather
unceremonious way of disposing of dead who were not headed toward their parish
churchyard. There’s a lot behind all this, and too little time to go into it
fully, but suffice to say that our encounter with our first English cemetery
was a revelation.
Brompton
was a sprawling mass of huge headstones and foliage run wild. Entire stretches
of graves covered deep in ivy and other native weeds, waist-deep in areas,
magnificently carved monuments sinking deep into a weird kind of urban jungle,
exuding a kind of post-apocalypse vibe. The place is considered something of an
English landmark (England has a lot of them), but were struck by the apparent
surrender of the place to this shocking urban Amazonia. The first thought that
comes to mind is “neglect”, except the place is huge and it gets lots of water,
and this is a spectacularly green country, and let’s face it, who is going to
spent the many hours every week trimming away ivy from 150 year old headstones,
month after month? Still, my mind went back to Cleveland’s Lakeview Cemetery,
the city’s largest and most noble burying ground, seven times the size of
Brompton and barely a generation newer, in a similarly wet and green
environment, and the place is utterly immaculate. So it made sense to us, but
it didn’t.
We fired
off a few dozen pictures, Chris and I got caught up on family and other
affairs, and we went off to look at a couple of other Chelsea-Kensington
landmarks. On our way back to his flat, walking up Fulham Road, we suddenly
heard a loud – very loud – bang not
far behind us, maybe 30 yards. We wheeled around and saw a Nissan Pathfinder up
on two wheels, actually careening its way in our direction before dropping back
down on all four and coming to a rest somewhat awkwardly in the street. The
screams of children coming, we thought, from the big white passenger van behind
the Pathfinder, the guy who had slammed into the Pathfinder, and was now
halfway across the lane, bits of his front end and the beginning of a decent
puddle of water-oil oozing from the front.
The
Nissan driver leapt out, shouted “you fookin’ piece of shit !!!” at the van
driver, a middle-eastern looking guy who looked shocked and practically
despondent, and the Nissan doors opened and out scrambled three small kids,
absolutely shrieking and crying their heads off into the arms of their mother,
similarly sobbing and quaking. The physics and choreography of the accident
remain a bit of a mystery to us – the passenger van was trying to make a right
turn across Fulham road and clipped the right rear of the Nissan, but we
couldn’t figure out how he managed to hit it as hard as he did, actually
sending the SUV (mid-sized by US standards but a behemoth by British standards)
up on two wheels, obliterating his own front end and rendering the van
(certainly) and the Pathfinder (perhaps – we didn’t stay long enough to find
out) un-driveable.
Now,
accidents happen all the time, and we presumed that on the insanely narrow and
generally fast paced streets of England they are as common an occurrence as
anywhere else. But…this was the evening before I was to pick up the rental car
for the start of our 10 day driving tour, and I was a little shaky at the
prospects of climbing into a car and negotiating the left-lane driving thing,
on a Monday morning in London, in the first place. This happened on the very same
piece of road I would be driving up a half-day later, and it didn’t exactly
fire me up with confidence.
The
whole thing left us a little shaken – might have been probably well-on freaked
out if we weren’t jet lagged out of our minds, half thrilled by the start of
our vacation and half numbed by surfing a functional all-nighter.
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