My First Look at London

My first glimpse of London was from a cab following another cab following a truck to my new home in Upper Norwood, south of the Thames. Those three vehicles were carrying my family and the worldly possessions that would have to sustain us for the next year. We were part of that year’s crop of Fullbright exchange teachers from the U.S., here to represent our country and maybe learn something in the process.
The plane ride had been a rough one, a charter from D.C., full of squalling babies and restive children, including four of my own. To compound my misery, the truck was late to arrive at Gatwick to pick up our thirteen large pieces of luggage, and I was reeling from a bad case of jet lag.
I didn’t get to cross the Thames that day, busy with unloading, unpacking, soothing hysterical kids, and dealing with the mysteries of British food shopping, British telephones, and most of all British weather, the hottest in decades.

But a few days later I was able to get on the Number 68 double-decker that runs north and south through the heart of London. It was thrilling, when I crossed the river, to see the houses of Parliament and Big Ben, looking in morning mist just as they had looked on a hundred pictures I had seen. I didn’t take the famous bus tour of the city, though I recommend it for someone in London for just a few days. I had the leisure to wander around and to jump on and off buses or descend into the Underground.

This was not the London of Shakespeare, which mostly burned down centuries ago. It is very much, however, the London of Dickens and Galsworthy, of T.S. Eliot, and even of Blake. The Old Vic has been rebuilt for the tourists, Covent Garden refurbished, but you can still find old buildings and old alleyways that make you think you might see a young Harry Potter and Hagrid coming out of one of the shops.

Samuel Johnson said almost three hundred years ago, “If a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” In my year there, I never tired of finding new places, new wonders, like the Inns of Court where the Knights Templars met so long ago. But none of it could match that first magic moment of discovery and recognition.


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