Their two weeks with Robert and Gladys passed quickly. Before they knew it, the time to pack up for home had arrived. “Can’t say as I’ll ever be a tea-drinker, but there’s lots to like about this part of the world,” Harry allowed.
“Well,” Gladys parried, “I shall have to pass along your high praises to Her Majesty.”
“Tell her the door’s always opened, and there’s a spare bedroom at VORLand’s End if she’s ever looking for a rustic getaway in her former colonies.”
“Queen Lizzy’s idea of roughing it is Sandringham House, twenty-thousand acres, and nobody can quite remember how many rooms, closets, or servants.”
They trundled their luggage down the stairs and wrestled it into the boot of Robert’s Rover, then accelerated along the alternate route he had mapped back to London. “Through the old England you know and love, Bernice, my dear,” he’d promised.
“What?” he challenged when she sniggered.
“I can’t help thinking of Mr. Toad, rocketing along in his stolen motorcar the way you drive.” Gladys whooped and clapped her hands at the comparison. Harry, who’d never read The Wind in the Willows, looked puzzled. Robert frowned and smiled at the same time, apparently pleased.
“Thank you for taking us this way, Robert,” Bernice added. “I don’t expect we’ll ever see this countryside again, but we’ll have the memory of it and of a very pleasant holiday by the seaside with you two and your family.”
“What’s been the highlight of your visit?” Gladys asked.
“Seeing our niece and nephew and your grandchildren,” Bernice said without hesitation.
Harry grunted, nodding in agreement. “They’re a spirited bunch. But that’s how you learn things, eh? By standing up for what you believe in and agreeing to disagree when your points of view don’t line up.”
“It did get a little raucous, I have to say,” Gladys apologized.
“Bah! I’ve had louder arguments over darts down the pub.”
The conversations had ranged from old-growth logging, to indigenous rights, to colonialism and capitalism, and the consumerist mindset. “The term ‘settler’ doesn’t sit well with me,” Harry’d argued over dinner. “Chemainus, which is an English version of Stz’uminus, is where I was born and raised. Ain’t got no other home and don’t want one either. Do we have to learn to get along? Damn rights! Has old-growth logging gotta stop? Yeah, I s’pose it does. Do we have to settle those land claims? Has to happen, most everyone knows it. But it’s gonna take time… more years than I’ve got left in me and more patience, too.”
“Europeans, and emigrants from the British Isles in particular, have been a plague on the planet,” the grandson Phillip had declared vehemently. “Every bloody monument in honour of colonialism should be pulled down and buried.”
Harry looked hard at him and remembered how hot-headed he could be as a young man. “You know,” he said, treading carefully. “If a fellah hasn’t got any history, he can’t find his way. A lay-line includes where you are, where you’ve been, and where you want to go. You’re saying to me, ‘You’ve got no right to a history of your own. All those monuments should be carted off to the dump.’ I’m saying, ‘I need a history to figure out who I’ve become and, from there, who I want to be.’
“There’s nobody’s history doesn’t have bloody fingerprints all over it. But are you telling me there’s nothing good that’s come out of those pioneer years? That I should be ashamed of who I am? Cause as far as I’m concerned, my history, good and bad, is a part of me, and I don’t want to deny it. Any of it.
“I’m proud of you, Harry Sanderson,” Bernice said as they were preparing for bed that night. “Despite your deplorable history.”
He felt proud too, although it made him blush. “Eighty-something years old,” he shook his head, “and I’m still trying to figure things out. Sometimes I think it’s time to stop arguing, let the young up and comers and know it alls shape facts the way it suits ’em. Then I get into a conversation like tonight, and it gets my dander up. That’s important, isn’t it? To get riled every now and then, with yourself as much as anybody else.”
“That’s my Harry,” she smiled, taking his head in her hands and kissing him.
Like you would your favourite bowling ball, he couldn’t help thinking.
~~~
Their departure plan was to stay at a country inn overnight, then drive into London and begin the next day with a visit to the Kew Gardens. Then they’d have a late lunch and head for Heathrow. Gladys had suggested they might want to spend the day resting, but Harry and Bernice agreed they would have plenty of time to sleep on the plane. Harry knew what to expect at Kew. They’d been to Butchart Gardens several times, taking the Mill Bay ferry to Brentwood Bay and spending afternoons wandering the primped and groomed grounds. He always felt out of place there, like a shoplifter dressed in his Sunday best. Funny thing was, I like feeling out of place there!
He felt less obvious in The Kew Gardens, the layout being more park like and open. At first it didn’t bother them that they couldn’t see The World’s Tallest Flagpole. “Shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Harry figured. “We’ll just tour the grounds.” But, sauntering from one end of the Royal gardens to the other, they couldn’t see it anywhere. Finally Harry approached a groundskeeper, busy edging a flowerbed. “S’cues me,” Harry said, “Can you tell me where the flagpole is?”
The man looked askance, his eyes flitting from Harry up the common toward a clump of trees. “Now, which flagpole would that be, then?” he asked.
“The big flagpole! The biggest flagpole in the world.”
“Oh! That flagpole,” the man smirked.
“Yeah!”
“Took it down?”
“Who took it down?”
“Woodpeckers and rot,” the fellow said in what Harry took to be a faux reverie, as if the groundskeeper hadn’t really heard Harry at all but was responding to an ethereal, existentialist query. “Woodpeckers and rot,” he echoed from his trance.
Harry stood speechless, staring in the direction of the groundskeeper’s gaze.
“Last year,” the man said, taking his cap off and wiping his brow with his sleeve. “Quite the operation, steeplejack climbing up that pole like a trained monkey. Made me think evolution’s gone too far.”
“Huh?”
“Prehensile thumbs and big brains—a wicked combination.”
“Jeez,” Harry laughed… and laughed. The others looked on with consternation, as if they were companions to a lunatic.
Haw! Haw! Haw! All the way home. Every time he tried to figure out what was so funny, Harry couldn’t help laughing and shaking his head, revelling in the fact that he didn’t have a clue. Haw! Haw! Haw! The centre cannot hold he recited from his musty collection of English lit shards.
“Stop it!” Bernice whacked him on the arm, only half—jokingly. “What’s so funny anyway?”
“Nothing, dear,” he straightened himself, suppressing another quake of laughter, its epicentre at the very undefined core of him. “The world spins on as it should, unmoved on its proper axis. Except I’ve learned a few things during its last couple of rotations.”
“Such as?”
“We make such a fuss over our monuments and tallest flagpoles, but in the end they all come down, don’t they? They all get felled by ‘woodpeckers and rot’. In the great scheme of things, all human history can be summed up in the blink of an eye.”
“And who’s eye would that be?” Gladys challenged.
“Ooh!” he spooked. “If I knew that, I’d be Einstein and the Pope combined.”
“Stop talking stupid,” Bernice shushed. “If you’re going to fall off your rocker, at least wait until we get home.”
They all laughed at that one, drifting toward the Kew Gardens exit and the intensifying gravity of Heathrow.
Next: Star Gazing