Joe Queenan - Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophiles Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

A Passage to Indian Take-Out

While serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, my wifes uncle Gordon had occasion to bomb some of the most beautiful countries in Europe. The future wing commander, just a boy at the time, had bombed the Germans, he had bombed the Italians, he had bombed the Austrians, the Hungarians, and the Romanians, and he may have bombed the French. Years later, when I first made his acquaintance in 1977, he was confined to a wheelchair in the tiny village of Charing, a stones throw from Canterbury. He had lost his legs to gangrene after his wife died, and was living with his sister Margaret, herself a widow. Back in those days, desperate for a hobby, he would busy himself making his own Kentish wines, which he impishly compared to the finest Bordeaux. These concoctions were cheerfully horrid, but as he had been instrumental in terminating the Thousand-Year Reich 988 years ahead of schedule, I thought it my duty to force them as far down my gullet as they would go.

My wife, Francesca, whom I had met in 1974 in the quaint Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown, never once went home to England without visiting Uncle Gordon and Aunty Margaret. On frosty nights, Margaret would stoke up the electric blankets hours in advance of our arrival. The crotchety siblings were chipper and game, and many a frosty evening we would sit in their living room camped out in front of the telly marveling at the adroit badinage of The Two Ronnies. As my own grandparents had died long before I was born, Margaret and Gordon were the closest things to grandparents I ever had. I adored them.

As a rule, my wife and I would stop off to see the pair on our way to France, where we would visit my wifes brother, Max, who lived near Amiens, a lackluster city with a breathtaking cathedral. The ferryboat at Dover is just a short trip down the road from Charing, meaning that we could say our good-byes at nine in the morning and be in Jules Vernes hometown by late afternoon.

Youre quite taken with the French, arent you? Gordon remarked one muggy afternoon as we sat watching Jimmy Connors demolish John McEnroe at Wimbledon.

I accept them on their own terms, I replied. Theyre hard to deal with, but have many fine cheeses and impressive chateaux.

So Ive been told, Gordon replied, reaching for another glass of Chateau de Canterbury Cant say I care for the French.

But France is a beautiful country, I protested. You have to admit that.

At this point, Gordon dropped the other shoe.

Ive never actually been there, he said. I thought I might get across the channel one day, but now that Im stuck in this wheelchair, I doubt that I ever will.

Charing, as noted previously, is no more than thirty miles from the White Cliffs of Dover. France itself is only twenty-two miles across the Channel. Gordon, in his capacity as a wing commander, had been all over the world, and had spent many years in this lovely region of England. But he had never actually set foot in France.

It turned out that Gordon had a number of other shocking gaps in his tourist resume. He had been stationed in Iraq in the 1950s, but had never visited Baghdad. He had been stationed in Yorkshire without once visiting York. He had bombed Berlin, Hamburg, Toulon, Bremen, and the suburbs of Bucharest but had never seen any of them from closer than ten thousand feet. At the time, I took this to be a classic example of English insularity and good-natured xenophobia. Later, I began to have my doubts. After twenty-five years of marriage to Gordons niece, I was beginning to think that the wing commanders eccentric travel habits were a family tradition. My wife hails from Stroud, a tiny town in the Cotswolds that is neither especially interesting nor especially attractive, but is surrounded by picture-postcard villages and hamlets that are. The mythical Cotswold Way, which stretches from Bath to Chipping Camden, passes directly above the town. Cirencester, with its well-preserved Roman ruins, is but a short jaunt up the highway, and the equally impressive Roman plumbing miracles at Bath can be reached in an hour. Stonehenge and the Vale of the White Horse are easy junkets; Wales, with Tintern Abbey and all those brooding border castles, is not an hour away. The cathedral towns of Gloucester (where Edward II is buried), Worcester (where King John is buried), and Hereford (where no one of any consequence is buried, but which has a very presentable chained library) constitute the Three Choirs for which the region is famous. London, Salisbury, and Stratford-on-Avon can all be reached within two hours, and the region abounds with more Chipping Nortons and Chipping Sodburys than you can shake a stick at. Planet Stroud gives off little direct light, but it is ringed by luminous constellations.

Unfortunately, over the course of our marriage, we rarely ventured out of this particular solar system. In our twenty-plus trips to Britain, we had visited Yate but had never been to York, had been to Huntly, hundreds of miles from anywhere, but had never been to Hastings, sixty miles from London. We had visited Aberdeen but had never once set foot in Edinburgh, Glasgow, or the Isle of Skye. We had spent enormous amounts of time in dreary, depressing Birmingham, which gave the world the Spencer Davis Group, but had never been to Liverpool, which gave the world the Beatles. We had been to Oxford, but not to Cambridge; had dined in Tetbury, but never once lunched in Tintagel. Our summer vacations were rigorously constricted by family visitation duties; there was never any time to hear Sir Colin Davis at the Albert Hall or Sir Andre Previn at Covent Garden because we were always feasting on impromptu curries with dear friends in Bow. Over that quarter century, we got to do lots of amazing things and spend lots of time with truly wonderful people, but we always did the same amazing things, and always with the same truly wonderful people.