In Kensington Gardens

In future I shall try to arrange an annual mid-April visit to London. First, I am a big-city girl, and I feel energised by London. Second, spring comes to England before it comes to Scotland, and by mid-April London  has blooming gardens and flowering trees. There was magnolia tree in a garden under my hotel window, and I could smell it from my room.

Yesterday morning I had no appointments, so I went for a walk to Kensington Palace ("No Photographs") via Kensington High Street and through Kensington Gardens as far as the Round Pond. I sat on a bench, admired the swans, and tested my Polish vocabulary with flashcards

One can now visit Kensington Palace and traipse through its gardens, but I thought I'd rather not. I prefer to keep a respectful distance from the Royal Family, so as to retain the mystery. There are also a playground and a fountain in memorial of the late Princess of Wales. I was sentimental about Diana from her engagement up to her honeymoon and then on the day she died, and that was enough. I am currently sentimental about Prince George, Princess Charlotte and the Royal Bump.  

But I am even more sentimental about my parents, who arrived in London with my brother Nulli and me a very long time ago. My mother was taken to London by her parents about 17 years before that, which is another sentimental thought. Her father had been on leave from his regiment in London on VE Day some years before that. Family legend said he stayed in his hotel and slept through the riotous celebrations. I pondered whether or not his father had been in London during (or before, or after) the First World War, and reflected on how different London must have looked a hundred years ago.

Yes, I had quite enough sentimentality to be getting on with, and it's a miracle if I didn't mutter "Centre of the Empire" again. 

Naturally, as I sat on a bench in the Centre of the Empire, I was vastly amused to hear passers-by speaking to each other in Polish. One pair of Polish conversationalists were two women in sports clothes, one older, one younger, and the younger one carried a hula-hoop with knobs on it. I couldn't imagine what it was for, and I still cannot. 

I did not do particularly well at understanding all the Poles around--the Polish businessmen in the hotel breakfast room, the tough Polish youths in Ealing, the Polish families in parks--but I did have some success on the Tube. On that particular Tube journey, some very noisy Polish girls erupted into the carriage and settled around an elderly Englishman trying to read the Telegraph and me. 

"I am sitting here!" announced one, in Polish, plunking herself down beside the Englishman. "You sit there," she advised her friend, who sat on his other side.

"And I am sitting here!" said a third girl, dropping down behind me. 

There was some conversation about Michał. I believe the girl beside me said she liked him. He was, at any rate, the grammatical object of the sentence. As for the rest, they spoke too quickly for me to understand, and I couldn't guess the context, which is usually a help. Then they came to their stop, and there were Polish cries of "Let's go!" and "Come along!" 

These Polish girls really made my day although probably not that of the elderly Englishman, who looked a bit squashed. Tube carriages are rather narrow. 

When I returned to my hotel from Kensington Gardens (and I did not, after all, go into the Kensington Hobbs of London, for I have an Edinburgh Hobbs of London to spend too much money in), I packed up my laptop in my old kit bag and left them with reception. Then I went to Kennington, which is south of the Thames, to visit the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and lunch with a friend. 

Although Kennington is south of the Thames and therefore too far from Brompton Oratory for true comfort, it has some very elegant streets and, what is more, gardens and flowering trees. After half an hour of photographing SPUC, I went to a very pleasant salad place with my friend, and afterwards on the way back to the Tube station, I admired the sun, and the gardens, and the trees, and the quirky little streets and felt the kind of happiness I believe I felt when I was four. 

For, lo, the crux of the matter may be that I remember being four--and being three, for that matter--in England.  I have a goodly store of memories of England--quite apart from all the false memories bookish children get from English children's books. For the rest of my childhood, I  wanted to go back there.  And although people often tell me how awful London is--how unfriendly, how expensive, and how big--I think I could live there quite happily, especially in the spring.  

That said, I wasn't particularly interested in England after I got into the direct train to Scotland. Instead of looking out the windows all that much, I studied my Polish textbook and then wrote out first sentences of travel stories, to see how proper travel-writing is done. But four hours later, when we had passed Berwick-on-Tweed, I got rather excited about Outdoors again, and stood for the rest of the journey, looking out the window at Scotland. It was great fun recognising the coastal towns of East Lothian and then, to my great joy, I saw the Historical House flash by in the distance.

So maybe I love Scotland best of all. Hmm.