Tuesday: Initial Venture

We arrived in London on Sunday evening and took a cab to our VRBO flat in South Kensington. (We have, that is to say Steve has, been using VRBO with great satisfaction since our first trip of this part of our life, in spring 2010. AirBnB came along somewhat later and we have never thought that it offered us any improvements. I was confirmed in this bias by this recent article that may already have come to your attention:  https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/43k7z3/nationwide-fake-host-scam-on-airbnb -- this is a UK url, but you can find it on Vice.com as “I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide AirBnB Scam.”)

We unpacked and went straight to bed,  and we spent the next day, Monday, doing laundry, getting groceries, becoming familiar with the neighborhood, and generally not doing anything cultural or noteworthy. 

Today, however, we had an out-of-town excursion to Chichester, a small cathedral town in Sussex near the Channel coast. I was aware of the Chichester Festival Theatre's reputation as a regional theatre of the highest quality, and since theatre-going has become a central theme of these autumn visits to England I wanted to visit it. (This is the fourth consecutive fall trip to England for us, which is not quite enough to be something we “always“ do, but on the other hand, two points are sometimes claimed to be enough to make a trend.)

This season the theatre’s program includes at least a dozen productions for slots of a few weeks, including an adaptation of the novel “The Lovely Bones,” a musical “Calendar Girls” based on the film you may have seen about middle-aged women who raise funds by posing topless for a calendar, “The Wizard of Oz,” the ballet “The Sleeping Beauty,” “My Cousin Rachel,” and others. 

The production going on during our stay is “The Butterfly Lion,” based on a best-selling novel by Michael Morpurgo, of which and of whom I did not recall ever hearing, although they are both apparently beloved by all ages in Britain and therefore a good choice for a holiday-season theatrical offering. Subsequent investigation reveals that Sir Michael Morpurgo, OBE plus many additional initials, and the Children's Laureate from 2003 to 2005, has had an astonishingly prolific life as author, poet, playwright and librettist, is

famous for his "magical storytelling"and is best known for the novel War Horse. We have seen (twice ) the wonderful play based on that book, but I'd forgotten the author's name; the puppetry in today's play is very reminiscent of that in War Horse, and the World War I theme is important in both.

Consequently we got up in time to go to  Victoria railway station for the train for Chichester. The ride of about an hour and a half passed through low-rise urban housing, small industry, more rural towns and farmland with lots of sheep. I finished a book on my Kindle and Steve continued to work his way through The

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in which he continually finds chilling foreshadowing of events in our own country today. 

Our arrival in Chichester was a little late on account of an accident on the line earlier in the day, which necessitated a change of train with a short delay,  so we took a taxi to the theatre and its restaurants. While I had booked the theatre tickets early—in June—we hadn’t booked lunch until more recently, by which time the “better” restaurant was fully booked; but the other, more casual one was just fine and we had a pleasant lunch before the 2:00 matinee. Every person in the restaurant looked to be at least as old as we are, and all of us were there for the play, but the attendance inside the theatre was skewed heavily toward a different demographic. Children wearing the distinctive uniforms of three different schools streamed in with their teachers and chaperones; the seats were soon completely filled. 

The play is charming and it is easy to see why it has become a beloved classic, with its story of a bullied little boy befriended by an old lady who tells him the story of her husband’s growing up in Africa where he adopted an orphaned white lion cub. The play uses life-size puppets to represent several of the animals—the cub, the grown-up lion, and a dog among them—operated by from one to three fully visible actors. The lighting is particularly remarkable —imaginative, effective, and at times magical— as with no changes in the minimal physical set the scene becomes African veldt, green hillsides in England, World War I battlefields with explosions and flames, rainstorms and more. Actors run (in place) while a road slides away beneath them, or scrabble on the floor to carve out a gradually appearing chalk figure that will dominate a hillside. It was a performance full of marvels. 

We walked back to the train station along the attractive, mostly pedestrian main street, passing the cathedral along the way, but without enough time to go in.

Arriving at the station I asked a railway representative where the loos were. He replied that they were closed “for decorating,” which sounded to me as though they were putting up Christmas decorations, as those are much in evidence throughout the commercial and public sectors already in mid-November. But no, “they’re repainting.” No functioning restrooms for who knows how long, during a busy season and, at that moment, at rush hour. It seemed to me to be so typical of a certain kind of English dimness that I thought about how much my late mother, whose 100th birthday it would have been last Saturday, would have enjoyed it. 

The train back to London, in the dark with no views, featured an apparently mentally ill young woman —sitting near us until we moved—who talked throughout in a hard-to-completely-ignore monologue addressed to no one in particular about her family’s origins (her mother was from Cyprus but she herself was proudly English) and underprivileged situation (her sister is handicapped, higher education is expensive) and periodically she would seem to be addressing us, and imputing snobbish attitudes to us, with a loud and derisive“Ameri-CAN”.  Poor thing, but we were not in a position to do anything for her. She had no ticket and had been wailing loudly to the station master before the train arrived about how she had lost all her documents  and money and had to get home to her children, and she had been allowed by him and then by the conductor to travel free. She may be a regular on this train.