My London summer "home away from home" 

Bless Google Earth…there it is:   48 Lancaster Gate, London W2 3NA, UK.

It all changed there.  My whole life.  My outlook on life.  In fact, the rather prosaic life I’d been living gave way to the fast lane life I’d dreamt of decisively and undeniably right there above that bicycle in that picture. 

That was the apartment of my college summers.    I was ‘way too young for much of what happened there during those summers, but life has a way of throwing you into the deep end before you’re ready sometimes. 

And I’m rather glad, actually.

But it all began rather cruelly, to be honest.   You see, I had willfully decided to break my mother’s heart.  And the old umbilical.   

It was a necessary if only symbolic matricide.   My mother had been almost fanatically possessive of me my whole life.  She had good reason.  First, she’d been orphaned as a child and had, though I knew she didn’t quite understand this herself, used me to create her own rather desperately unrealistic idea of what a mother and daughter relationship should be like. 

Second, she’d lost three other babies before I just as willfully refused to vacate that apparently inhospitable womb of hers until I’d had my full nine months.  Only one of the lost babies had done that.  He weighed six and a half pounds and lived six and a half hours—they repeated those grim but very vital statistics often during my childhood.  And I recently found, through a genealogy site, his very odd birth/death certificate.  No name, save my parents’ names, and “Gender: male.”

I arrived a puny but feisty bundle of joy a few years later to the relief of the entire family of mostly childless folk.  And from then on…I was a goner.   My mother had decided exactly what my life would be like before my life had even begun.   My father’s views were quite different, but she didn’t let that ruin her plan.  And she would lose him, later, at least in part because she refused to share me with him.   

As for that plan, well….her daughter  would be docile and dutiful for…no particular reason save the fact that I’d survived somehow.  And in exchange my mother would smother me in avalanches of gifts and privileges.  I have to thank her for all that, because I grew up believing I could have anything I wanted despite being a young Black woman in a country which, at the time, wasn’t very good to Black people of any age or gender.

But it was also the proverbial tender trap.  My mother gave me all those things in exchange, as I’ve said, for absolute obedience and adherence to that “dream daughter” thing she had in her head.   If I didn’t like the Easter bonnet she picked—and it would indeed have all the frills upon it because she’d bought it at the then very swanky Marshall Field just to blow our neighbors’ minds—there would be hell to pay.  

She would freeze me out, sullenly and furiously cleaning and futzing around the house without speaking for a few days, except to talk about what an ingrate I was to friends who dropped by or phoned—always loud enough for me to hear about and feel guilty for this transgression.  And everything I did or said for a few days would be wrong and ridiculed soundly.  She would not like how I did my hair, how I walked through the house, how I breathed, even, until she got tired of the silence herself.

I was the only kid on the block who dressed like a preppy princess, who had a pricey Raleigh English Racer bike—not the Chopper for kids, but the racer for…racers-- imported from England, thanks to a rich godfather who didn’t want me to have the ones made for the American market.

This kind of fanatical snobbery was quite typical.  I was also the only kid who was not allowed to sit on the grass at picnics or beach parties.   Mom literally forbade me to sit anywhere but on the big, fancy quilts and blankets she’d brought because she didn’t want me to run off with the rest of the “hoodlums.” 

She was also terrified that some germy insect might crawl upon or, horror of horrors, bite me.   In fact, I remember showing her, as an adult, a mosquito bump and hearing her hiss, just as she had when I was a baby, “What bit my baby?  I better not find it!”

Oh, yeah.  She was serious.   And she found and murdered it a few minutes later, God bless her.

To please her, I became a tap and ballet dancing, charm schooled, piano playing phenom who won every competition she could find, the better to show me off with.  My various teachers were thrilled to have a little Black prodigy among their prize pupils.   I myself told people I felt like a white gloved, petticoated, patent leather shoed organ grinder’s monkey.   When I watch some of the flashbacks in the The Joy Luck Club, I feel like I’m seeing the story of my life.  Only it wasn’t my life.

I was living two lives, actually.  Hers and a fantasy one of which she had only a slight notion.   I had fallen in love, to her  never ending chagrin, with four long haired, wise cracking white guys when I was about ten years old.  They were The Beatles, and after them, there would be The Who and many, many more.  Worse, there would also be this wild haired, Black, guitar playing sum bitch who didn’t look or play anything like her beloved BB King.

And they all lived, even the Black one most of the time, in this country she only knew from the time my father had been in the war there:  England.

And so in my 17th year, I decided to go there.  It just hit me and wouldn’t let go.  I was probably listening to one or all of them on some long Sunday afternoon—I hid from her in music.  Loud, strident rock and roll of the kind that the boys loved.  No Herman’s Hermits for this gal.   I loved Clapton and Townsend and Beck—all the guitar gods.   

After having seen the Beatles twice with her blessing, I was beginning to sneak off to see the others with wild children who danced in the parks down by the lake.   It was the time of Be Ins and hippies and glam was around the corner, too—Bowie and Marc Bolan would be heroes soon.

I would later meet a little coven of groupies, including the infamous Cynthia Plastercaster whose ash trays were plaster casts of the…male…organs, of some of rock’s most celebrated stars.   She and her crewe knew and hung with Jim Morrison’s notorious Pam.   One of her crewe would actually marry her rock star, and moved into a little castle in…yes, England.

That story was legend among the "band aides."  Banned from many hotels for her very bad behavior, the would be star wife kicked off her platform boots and scaled the walls of an off-limits Holiday Inn  like a tiny, sequined King Kong to get to her rock star lover.  He would tell us a few years later:  "When I saw her clinging to that balcony railing with her hair all mussed and her mascara running...I knew I had to marry her." 

Ah, yes, all is fair in love...

And I wanted my own wild adventures.  So I decided  I would strike out on my own for a summer—turned out to be three summers—by running away to London, the city of music and madness, with my very best friend, Linda. 

I knew it would almost literally kill my mother.  But…that was, of course, the idea.  Ah, cruel, callow youth…

Now, this is before the Internet, remember, so getting information about a trip to a foreign country when no one in your family had ever been to a foreign country save as a “guest” of the United States Army wasn’t as easy as it might sound.  I couldn't do the travel agent thing because I didn't want to take a travel agent type of trip.  Nor could I afford one.

I knew I would have to have the entire plan mapped out and financed so that she couldn’t tell me that it couldn’t be done.   I also knew that having that plan ready would be the surest way to get my father to kick in a few extra “emergency” bucks.   He would love the idea, of course.   He had loved England, and had talked about it often throughout my childhood. 

If I met him even close to halfway, I knew he’d help me seal the deal—and force my mother to see reason.  He was, even or rather especially after he’d left us, the only person on Earth who could turn her spine to jelly.  She wanted him back.  And she would do almost anything to please him.  

This…maybe not.  But without Daddy, my plan didn’t have a prayer.   She would do that, “Go on, stay over there if think you’re so grown now!” thing that she did whenever I asked to go to spend a weekend with some friends over on “the North Side,” where all manner of evil, in her eyes, lurked around every corner.  Read that: long haired hippie boys just waiting to feed me all kinds of drugs so that they could get me pregnant.

Okay, she wasn’t far off, except for the pregnant part.  Sex, drugs and rock and roll, yes.  Babies, no.

I had long learned how to handle all that, though—in fact, I was the only virgin in my little circle of friends, still.  So I knew I could handle myself in England, too.

I had to do all this on a shoe string budget saved up from my little part-time job.   And I didn’t want to do it like a tourist.  I wanted to stay a few weeks, and really be part of a neighborhood somehow.

I began to read everything I could get my hands on and discovered that there were dirt cheap flights--$150 round trip.  Seriously, round trip.  Students only, though lots of non-students scammed their way onto those flights.   And later, lots of them would wind up stranded in airports when the “fly by night” companies they’d contracted with suddenly folded in the middle of their European adventures.

The one I chose was legit.  And then…I discovered that I could have an apartment, near Hyde Park, for less than half of what it would’ve cost me to stay in a hotel or do one of those guided things.  

Now, this was the London of the late 60s and early 70s.   Prices were ridiculously cheap and the exchange rate in our favor.  I remember being flabbergasted by the things my little bit of money could buy.  You could buy a winter coat for what a cup of coffee costs in a swank hotel today.  No joke.

That meant I could pay in advance, shop for groceries in the local markets, and still have plenty of money left over for Bibas (then the boutique of choice) and the Marquee Club (home of the Who and many others including, later, a lot of the punk bands), and Ronnie Scotts (home of the best jazz in the world).  I could even take side trips to Scotland and Paris and do...whatever else I felt like getting into.

And…go we did.  My father would later tell me that my mother stood watching the jet that carried me off until it was a gnat fleck in the distance.

I myself have never forgotten the feeling of the jet that took us over the ocean finally touching down at Heathrow.  Even the view from the plane had been…”foreign.”   Urban America is laid out in squares.  Mostly grey.   Or beige.   England was...circles.   And very, very green even above the cities.

We leapt gleefully into one of those huge black taxis, giggled at the driver’s cockney accent, and got whiplash checking out all the hot, rock and roll guys just walking the streets in droves.  We knew we were in heaven.

But then…we got “home.”   More heavenly, still.   At last, there it was, 48 Lancaster Gate, looking for all the world like something out of a British costume drama.   It’s in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, a few doors down from the place they used to shoot the film—or, it certainly looks to be.  And Joan Plowright does indeed ask for an address in Lancaster Gate when she gets into her taxi. 

The interior of that place reminds me of our place—I bought the movie, just to be reminded.   Okay, also because Rupert Friend is at his most adorable in it, too, but…still.

Back then…it was the perfect house the perfect distance from everything we wanted to do and see.  With a beautiful cathedral across the way that would become our refuge, and where we went to hear “Even Song,” always preceded by a little pipe organ concert that made the rafters shake. 

I was not the least bit religious, but I would close my eyes and feel the buzz.  If there was a God, he had to be thrilled by all that joyful noise.  I surely was.

We would get up to all manner of mischief in that apartment during those London summers.  We giggled at the new lingo—especially when one housekeeper promised to be back to “knock you up in the morning.”  Bathrooms were “loos,” radios were “the wireless.”   We soon also learned to keep a straight face when offered “faggots in gravy” and “spotted dick.”  And we learned that the American “peace sign” was an international invitation to cunnilingus.

Big oops, there.

The most hilarious moment came when the groupie I spoke of left her castle to bring her rock star and their new baby over to our humbler abode.   As I recall, we got a little bit baked on hubby’s very strong hashish-laced weed.   I’m understandably a little fuzzy about all this, but at some point, he got into a woman friend’s purse, and removed what looked, to him, like perfume or body spray or deodorant or...God knows what he thought it was.  But instead of asking what it was…he took it out, looked it over and just as we gasped and were about to lunge and wrestle it away from him, he sprayed a thick, acrid cloud of mace into the air.

Some of the Americans present grabbed his wife and baby and ran, leaving him literally reeling and gagging in the middle of the room.   He flailed his arms and grabbed a pillow or…something…to fan the air and managed to swat the chandelier hanging a little too low from the middle of the ceiling.

There was a buzz, some sparks, and a POP.   And then the lights went out not just in our place but throughout the entire building.

We booked it down the street with peals of tipsy laughter.   The rocker and his family got into their big Bentley and headed home, laughing just as loudly as they waved to us from the windows, their eyes red from the mace and the massive spliffs.

My mother would’ve had that heart attack all teenagers seem hell bent on causing their parents to have, had she known anything about that.  I never told her anything, of course.  We spent our last day in London riding one of those old red, double decker buses—route 48 I think it was…or was it 22?  Anyway, it was a bus route that actually seemed made for tourists, because it took you past all the “sights” for what?  Fifty pence?  Something ridiculously cheap. 

We sat on the top deck, took all the mandatory pictures of all the mandatory sights and they became the pics to go with the "Mommy-friendly" vacation story.

Daddy heard about Shandys and the Guinness and the Newcastle Brown.  He even heard about the jazz at Ronnie Scotts, but not that it was raided seconds after my girlfriends and our rocker boys of the week had left an after hours jam session.  As we sat in the band van watching the police swarm up the steps all I could think was that winding up in an English prison would have been no joke.  Neither I nor my parents would ever recover from a mess of that magnitude.

And yet...it was just the kind of night we’d flown over to have.  And there would be more.  Many more.

Oh, Mama ye hardly knew me.

And it would be a while before I really knew me, too. Those were heady but still tentative, formative years.

But they rocked at the address that rhymed--and was remembered therefore by all sorts of shady characters as THE place to crash in London during those music mad summers.

48 Lancaster Gate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...