I watched him intently, from the moment he boarded the train.
He caught me, this rambunctious child... eight or nine years old, possibly autistic. His impatience was a fresh breath of silliness, a current of charm, a contrast against the cold, stuffy air of adult British passengers on their morning commute. I assumed his name was George, Harry, or William, like all of the little boys in England (purely my observation after just a few hours in the country).
The train was crowded and we failed to find three empty seats together, so we stood, each grasping a silver passenger pole (or whatever-they're-called) for support. We’d chosen the "high-speed" for our journey, which meant a firm grip was essential for balance. There was an art to it – the grip – solid enough to keep you from tumbling into the lap of the nearby seated passenger, but light enough to seem like second nature. I wanted to wink at everyone and assure them that I was acculturated, "Don't worry. I do this all the time." Instead, I stayed quiet and resorted to people-watching, but kept the boy in my peripheral.
My parents had already lifted their suitcases onto the luggage rack above, but I kept two large bags draped around each of my small shoulders. Looking back, I'm sure that my motive had been (whether I realized it at the time or not) to lead my audience to believe what I so badly wished were true – that my leather shoulder bag was packed with the textbooks and journals of an Oxford student, rather than the maps, passports, and voltage converters of a self-proclaimed Anglophile on a literary pilgrimage of sorts. Out to prove my love to this country.
I lurched with each unexpected sway of the train, bags swinging in true tourist-form. And somewhere on the shiny steel tracks between London's bustling Paddington Station and Oxford's rainy City Centre, something beautiful happened.
My eyes, unlike my feet, were steady and fixed, fascinated by the foreign scenery. It was more breathtaking than I had imagined – the rolling, dew-soaked, emerald green hills, dotted by quaint cottages, crowned with plumes of gray smoke that billowed out of stone chimneys. For a second, I regretted taking the high-speed train, only because I couldn't absorb the view quickly enough. Too fast, slow down, I thought. I pondered the all the possible pronunciations of towns like Slough and Reading. I listened for the train station announcements to correct my uneducated guesses. Yep, I was wrong. It’s definitely not 'Sluff' or 'Slow'...
This is what I loved about England. All of my interests were entertained – language, art, history, beauty, God… Everything within me buzzed and whirled, a steady flux
of two things: the intake of the real, touchable, undeniable beauty around me,
the kind I could photograph or file away in my memory – the keepable things –
and then the opposite... the out pour of the intangible, the wandering thoughts
and guesses of a girl in a foreign place. In and out these things went, the
absorbing and the asking. As life-giving as breathing, but better.
Breathing.
Breathing in a foreign country... is better and richer, that's for sure. It's like Rudyard Kipling (another beloved Brit on my bookshelf) once wrote, "The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it." England smelled like history to me. Whatever that smells like. Wet, centuries-old stone and mortar... that's the best I can explain it.
...back to the train...
Breathing.
Breathing in a foreign country... is better and richer, that's for sure. It's like Rudyard Kipling (another beloved Brit on my bookshelf) once wrote, "The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it." England smelled like history to me. Whatever that smells like. Wet, centuries-old stone and mortar... that's the best I can explain it.
...back to the train...
My busy thoughts broke when I clearly heard the boy ask (with a precious British accent), “Daddy, where are we going?”
“To Oxford,” the father replied, readjusting his son's navy blue knit toboggan.
“Oh yes,” the boy said, with a nod. “That’s where Narnia is.”
The train swayed again, jolting me partially out of bewilderment – just enough to shake the jet-lag, but not enough to dissolve my sudden state of shock. I asked myself, Did he just say Narnia?
I gripped the pole tighter, adjusted the weight of the heavy bags on my shoulder and shifted my eyes, surveying the nearby passengers, searching for some sort of confirmation – maybe an adult reaction that I could relate to. A rustle came from the serious, middle-aged woman seated at my right. But she was only shuffling and smoothing the crinkled pages of the Daily Telegraph, most likely a copy she had found orphaned in her seat by a previous passenger.
She, like everyone else within earshot of the loud little boy, was completely unfazed. Is this normal? I thought. Do all the small children in England still believe in this?
I turned and met eyes with the boy, and suddenly, we were both small. Neither was more wise or less adventurous than the other.
He, in his toboggan and scarf, and I, in my brown boots and peacoat, were more like Edmund and Lucy, instead of George (Harry, or William)... and Karen.
I smiled at him, that mischievous, brave little "Edmund" – my new friend. He might have been the only human that I felt truly connected to in all of England. His clear blue eyes sparkled with the same excitement that my heart held inside. The train swayed onward, and I remembered a C.S. Lewis quote...
"Some day, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."
And I couldn't even begin to imagine what C.S. Lewis would think, if he knew that there are children in England who still believe in his Narnia.
Original illustration by Pauline Baynes
