From Lancashire and the Lake District we drove across the Pennines into Yorkshire. The Pennines were just a name I’d learned to draw on a Fifth Form geography map, but the Yorkshire Dales turned out to be beautiful. Beautiful fields, stone walls, sheep.
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York impressed us too — York Minster and the Keep of the old York Castle — but it was memorable also because Heather wanted to visit a hairdresser. Having agreed where to meet, I wandered off to kill time while I waited — and waited and waited and waited. Eventually I thought I’d better go back to the hairdresser and see what was going on.
It turned out that Heather had offered to pay with our very respectable Thomas Cook British Pound Travellers Cheques and they’d refused to accept them. More than that, they’d refused to let her go to the bank and exchange them for cash. She was effectively being held hostage.
You might think, so what? — phone Ian and he’ll bring the £4.50. But if you’re too young to know about travellers’ cheques — google them — you probably don’t know about life without a mobile phone either. They wouldn’t be in circulation for another ten to fifteen years, and the only way to contact independent travellers like us was by letter or telegram — google those too — care of the nearest American Express Office.
There are two remarkable aspects to this story. First, that I remembered where the hairdresser was — I sometimes can’t be relied on to know what day it is, let alone the address of somewhere I don’t expect to visit again. Second, that Heather never made a break for it. Northern hairdressers must have been a pretty tough lot.
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We had other problems with those travellers’ cheques. If we stopped at a petrol station and asked, “Do you accept travellers’ cheques?” chances were they’d stay no and we’d have to part with our precious cash.
The day finally came when we needed petrol but had no cash. We decided not to risk a refusal. Instead we filled the car and then presented the Thomas Cooks. Our underhandedness wasn’t appreciated but we got our petrol and they got paid.
We were visitors from the Ends of the Earth but were comforted that we were more up to date than many in the Old Country. Our business even had a telex.
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The Yorkshire accent was familiar because that’s where the Brits in the Solomons came from. Sailors, engineers, fishermen etcetera, they were all refugees from the Cod Wars, a dispute with Iceland that had a devastating impact on the British fishing industry.
We drove through Hull, where Trevor had managed a fish processing plant, across the massive Humber Bridge and on past other Yorkshire towns like Beverley and Grimsby that had featured in the after work yarns of the expats down at the Tulagi Marine Base, and our own engineer.
We were headed for London.
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We stayed a week in an Earls Court hotel, because that’s where we Antipodeans always stayed.
We did what we was expected. Went to the Victoria and Albert and the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery.
We went to Buckingham Palace, took in The Mall and St James Park, and happened upon the beautiful horses there. Walked Bond Street and Regent Street and Oxford Street. Went to Selfridges, because we knew about it, and because Heather’s grandfather was the founding senior designer.
We caught the tube and walked a lot. Marble Arch and Speakers’ Corner. Across Hyde Park to Knightsbridge and Harrods. All the names so familiar. Tower Bridge, St Paul’s, Whitechapel, Westminster. Battersea, Putney, Kew Gardens.
Getting visas for the rest of our trip took quite some time, in taxis, queues, consulates and embassies — the tedium that gives every trip its special flavour. Because of my Solomons job I had an “official” passport, which made the process more pedantic. And little did we know we were largely wasting our time.
We went to the Windmill Theatre, the English version of the Folies Bergère, to the original theatre production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show — memorable — and to a production of Doctor Faustus. Apparently.
And we had a memorable Indian meal. I’m pretty sure the only Indians I’d ever met were in Fiji, and, knowing nothing whatsoever about Indian food, we simply asked the waiter to choose for us. It was a revelation.
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I’m not going to say that New Zealand food was bad at the time but it was certainly insular. We were introduced to Mexican food in the Solomons by Paula, our Peace Corps Prima Donna. Occasionally she’d come back from Honiara with the fixings, cook up a storm and collapse on the couch saying, “I’m damned if I’m doing the dishes.” Not that she often did.
In the same vein, we met Lebanese cooking at a restaurant called Abdul’s in Melbourne — another revelation. Thank you Graeme.
But my first impression of Australian food was the sandwiches in the Flinders Street Railway Station. Stacks of them piled high in glass cabinets, each one a cornucopia. Our own sandwiches were two slices of white buttered bread with pre-sliced “Chesdale” between them — “making cheddar taste beddar”. Or you might prefer luncheon sausage, egg salad, tomatoes or — the “filling” visitors couldn’t believe — cold canned spaghetti.
When we learned what we were missing, we came home — some of us, I mean — and opened restaurants. For years you’d go to an “ethnic” restaurant in Auckland to find it was run by a couple of Kiwis. It took quite a while for the ethnics to move in and the prices to come down.
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Finally, Heather’s cousin Katy took us to see her Aunt Maggie, Kath’s older sister, at 1 Ardlui Road. Trust Heather not to forget the address, or the bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden, or the gate through to the back of her grandparent’s house, which fronted on to Chestnut Road — round the corner, where the rambunctious Sharpe family grew up.
But so much for London. Next stop was Frankfurt on Pan Am. We’ll be back, we said.
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As we were flying out, I was thinking how old the Old Country was, and how it was Our Country too, the place my grandparents called home. We’d spent much of our time there visiting and thinking about family.
These days I’m more conscious of the differences between them and us — they stayed and we left. “We” left and built something new.
It doesn’t make them, or us, better, but it has made us different.
Back then — after two years in the Solomons and this trip — I badly wanted a break back home before returning to the Solomons. I’m pretty sure that means I’m a New Zealander.
But the UK is still a lure for young New Zealanders, and so is Australia.
The challenge that many small towns face — in New Zealand certainly, but everywhere I suppose — is depopulation. Or to put it more vividly, what’s to stop their young people leaving?
Small countries are like small towns. What’s to stop our young people leaving?