Without Reservations (25 page)

I got out my book on the Cotswolds and read the names on the map: Shipton-under-Wychwood, Bourton-on-the-Water, Moreton-in-Marsh, Stow-on-the-Wold. How I loved these quaint names. In my head I had a picture, formed long ago by seeing photographs in one of Grandmother’s books, of what life was like in English villages such as these. The corner pub, the medieval church towers, the flocks of sheep driven to market through the village, the thatched-roof cottages and wild, blooming gardens, the square where everyone gathered: this was English country life as it existed in my head.

The drive from Oxford to Burford took us first through Witney. It was a village that seemed less idyllic and picture-perfect than many of the better-known Cotswold tourist attractions.

In Witney, the quick eye caught glimpses of real people living real lives. Housewives with hunched shoulders and weary expressions
carried their string-tied packages from the butcher shops. Elderly men sat in the sun, canes by their sides, caps pushed back to reveal faces sculpted by hard work. Bored-looking teenagers gathered in front of a drugstore, flirting and puffing on cigarettes, their schoolbooks lying in piles on the ground. At Angelina’s Beauty Shop a young shampoo girl with butter-colored streaks in her long, dark hair stood daydreaming at the half-open door, a wet towel slung over her shoulder.

I tried to imagine what it was like to be young in a place such as Witney. Does growing up in a small town make for a smaller life? I wondered. Or does it offer a more secure, less complicated one?

I knew from my conversations with the owner of an Oxford bookshop—a smart, observant man who grew up in Oxfordshire—that many young people from nearby villages, restless for adventure, emigrated at an early age. “I’m too old for that,” he said. “Oxfordshire is where I’ll make my stand.”

After talking to him, I thought of Grandmother, who moved to America in her late fifties. Unlike so many younger people, she moved out of necessity, not the desire for adventure. From her I learned that the older emigrant feels something the young do not: the deep sadness of leaving home. The “Old Country,” she used to call it, when telling me bedtime stories about her life in Scotland. Occasionally, she would pull out from under the bed a cardboard box. Inside, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, was a kilt woven in the tartan of her clan. “It’s from the Old Country,” she would tell me with pride and, I later realized, sadness, too.

For a long time I thought the Old Country was the name of an ancient land, one that, like Atlantis, no longer existed. I pictured it as a place of rolling green hills and deep glens, of cottages with smoke puffing through chimneys; a place populated with kind
When we arrived in Burford I set out to explore the town on my own. Positioned on a hillside, its main street rising dramatically from a small stone bridge spanning the poetically named Windrush River, Burford retains the unspoiled charm of the seventeenth-century wool town it once was. With its steep main street—the High Street—and its quaint, honey-colored limestone inns and shops, Burford emerges from the Oxfordshire countryside like a mirage bathed in golden light.

Standing at the low point of the town, looking up the long street that seemed to rise until it simply disappeared into the sky, I felt as though I’d stumbled across an English version of Brigadoon: a storybook village that existed somewhere out of real time. But it was not just the look of the village; even the friendly, sturdy locals out on their morning errands conjured up some primitive image of how life ought to be.

Earlier that morning I had been told by one of the Brasenose “scouts”—the name given to the good-natured women who clean the rooms at Oxford’s colleges—that there were two things I should do in Burford. “You mustn’t miss the church,” my scout said as we chatted at the top of the perilously steep steps leading to my rooms. “Oh, it’s a beauty, dear. And mind you, get a jar or two of the homemade lemon curd. There’s nowhere you’ll get better curd than Burford, I always say. It’s quite lovely.”

Her recommendations suited me. Not only do I, too, think lemon curd—a custardlike combination of lemons, sugar, eggs, and
butter—quite lovely, I also think there is nothing better than having as short a list as possible of must-see places when you travel. A two-item list seemed about right. I decided to visit the church first. That, I reasoned, would open the rest of the day for lemon-curd shopping and creative wandering.

The Church of St. John the Baptist was just as my scout described it: a beauty. Left behind by the Normans, the church had changed and grown over the centuries—it was fairly large for a village the size of Burford—but care had been taken to preserve its splendid original architecture. I lingered for quite a while in the cool stone interior. The air inside was redolent with the smell of the damp, fertile earth seeping in from the surrounding countryside; it was like breathing in life itself.

Outside, on my way back to the High Street, I stopped to admire the stalks of purple lavender blooming along the pathway. I smiled, remembering all the handmade sachets Grandmother and I had filled with lavender from her garden. Months later the small, stitched-together squares of blue silk would be given away as Christmas gifts.

I squeezed the blossoms between my fingers, releasing their aromatic scent. Instantly, like a genie let loose from a bottle, Grandmother was there, standing beside me, in her no-nonsense pith helmet. The helmet was a gift from my father, who wore one himself during the summer months. Grandmother wore hers as a sun hat when she worked in the garden.

Suddenly a voice behind me broke into my thoughts: “If you put the crushed lavender under your pillow, you’ll get a fine night’s sleep.”

I turned around and saw the voice belonged to a woman with wavy, reddish-gray hair, lively blue eyes, and fair skin that was papery and lined, like a sheet of parchment. She wore a well-tailored
poplin raincoat and carried a smart-looking tan leather purse with a gold clasp. A tweed skirt peeked out from beneath her raincoat. She looked, I thought, as Mrs. Miniver might have looked in her later years. She also struck me as a woman who in her youth might very well have had a rose named in her honor.

“Yes, I’ve been told that about lavender,” I said. “By my grandmother.”

“Well, now, that’s what a grandmother’s for, isn’t it? To pass on stories about lavender and such.”

I was struck by the wry tone of her voice; it conveyed a sharpness that attracted me. Emboldened, I told her the story of the lavender sachets and my thrifty Scottish grandmother. I think I even mentioned the pith helmet. It pleased me that she laughed in all the right places. Then I told her about my mission to purchase some of Burford’s finest lemon curd. For some reason she seemed interested in all this, so I took the next step: I introduced myself. She replied, saying, “And I’m Letty Thompson.”

I liked Letty Thompson from the start. She had a responsive air about her, one that suggested she was an intellectually curious woman. I could see it in her blue eyes, in the half-amused way they studied whatever came to their attention.
She reminds me of someone
, I thought. But try as I might, I couldn’t summon up the identity of the small shadow that, in my mind, accompanied Letty Thompson.

“Do you live in Burford?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, I do now,” she said. She told me she had retired five years earlier to Burford—where she’d grown up—after spending her working life in London. “The thing I love about living in Burford,” she said, “is that you can walk through the town and always meet someone you know.”

“And someone you don’t know,” I replied. “Like me.”

She laughed. “Well, now that we know one another, would you
like me to walk you up the High Street and help you find that lemon curd?”

“I’d love it,” I said.

For the next hour or so, I walked through the village with Letty Thompson as my guide. Up the High Street we went, then on to Sheep Street and Priory Lane, circling back to the High Street. And as we walked we talked. Although Letty gave no hint of being bored with village life, I could tell she was eager to meet new people.

Letty told me about her life in London as a young single woman—“spinster” is the word she used—and later, as an older single woman. She told me about the dressmaker’s shop where she had designed and sewn dresses for well-to-do ladies after giving up her hope of becoming an artist. She’d taken up painting again, she told me, since retiring to Burford.

“Watercolors,” she said. “Landscapes and animals, mostly. I rather fancy painting the birds hereabout.”

“In other words, you might be described as Burford’s answer to Audubon.”

“Yes, one could say that. Although perhaps just a bit more accomplished than your Audubon,” she said wryly. I laughed, silently admiring the quickness of her wit. It was one of the things I most admired about the Brits, their sly but sharp humor.

Suddenly Letty stopped walking. She turned to face me. “Would you like to see some most interesting paintings?” she asked. “They’re in a little gallery just near here. Quite captivating if you like the look of primitive art.” The artist’s name was Joan
Gillchrest, Letty told me. “She’s seventy-five and lives in Cornwall, in a small fishing town called Mousehole. She’s painted a long while. And with some success, too.”

We turned off the main street onto Bear Court, a narrow, cobblestoned lane, then stopped before a small shop with the sign
WREN GALLERY
. Peering into the window, our heads close together, I caught the scent of Letty’s perfume. It was fresh and light and smelled like orange blossoms floating on top of a sea breeze. It suited her, I thought.

“Let’s go in, shall we?” Letty said, leading the way.

The paintings were wonderful. Charming and sophisticated, they were like something out of a child’s book: tiny bold blocks of color painted without perspective onto the flat canvas. It was as though Brueghel and Grandma Moses had collaborated to bring to life the village of Mousehole. Tiny painted villagers marched by, leading their dogs along a frozen canal. Women wearing hats and mufflers stopped to talk by a seawall, gesturing as they exchanged the news of the day. Men in long dark coats and caps stood at the canal’s edge, where boats were trapped like fish frozen in the icy waters.

As we stood there in the Wren Gallery, we saw spring come to the village, too: flowers bloomed, cats stretched in the sun, and crabbers sailed in bright red boats straight from the bathtubs of my childhood. Like Alice in Wonderland, I had fallen into a strange, captivating country: Mousehole. Even the name held the promise of remarkable adventures.

What made it more exciting, though, was that Letty Thompson had fallen with me into this Wonderland. Together we raced from painting to painting, pointing out a black dog here, a skating figure there, the slumped posture of a sausage-shaped dog on a leash, the
tilt of a head in conversation, the single stroke of a brush that summed up a cloud or a wave.

Neither of us wanted the other to miss anything. And somewhere in the sharing and the laughing, Letty and I moved past the superficial barriers of age and background. Of time, too: I could see the young woman Letty had been and, beneath that, the adventuresome, fun-loving girl.

It was then I knew the identity of the shadow trailing Letty. It was my grade school chum, Ducky Harris, with whom I’d shared everything. It was Ducky who shared my preadolescent passion for swimming and tap dancing, for scouring thrift shops in search of exotic beaded evening purses, for putting on plays in Eve Blum’s club basement.

And it was Ducky who taught me how to lighten my hair by dousing it with lemon juice and sitting in the sun. And it was from Ducky that I learned it was okay to wear navy blue with green. The two of us even had matching outfits—red beanies and white smarty-pants shorts—that we wore each Saturday to our tap-and-tumbling classes at the YWCA. For some reason—I wasn’t sure why—Letty made me feel the way Ducky had: profoundly alive.