Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

I haven ’ t lived in England for years and years. And years. Basically a very long time. The kind of time you cough into your hand over, trying to hide the exact humungous number of years. Long enough ago that any reasonable person could be forgiven for calling me an American. But beware, should you say anything negative about the UK or Queen Elizabeth, my British roots will start showing and my British blood will start boiling. I ’ ll start flapping my British passport in the air, and put on my best True Brit voice. While I ’ m very much an American, I ’ m British by birth, born in 1953, in —as I ’ m fond of saying and saying—a scene right out of Call the Midwife. I ’ ve got a thing for the Queen from being born so close to her coronation day that my parents gave me Elizabeth for my middle name. Just a few days shy of being named Elizabeth Simone instead of the other way around. A few days shy of being a Liz versus a Sim. Liz, Lizzie. I don ’ t mind the sound of that. Growi...

I’m taking a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide and my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk at least 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings. This is Day 11. I feel like one of those quasi-detective types in a old-fashioned book. On the cover there’s a group of three people—two men and a woman is the usual mix—all leaning over an oak table covered with historical documents. A lamp casts its glow on a map, a few old photos, identity papers. A mystery is afoot! After getting that initial email from my cousin Sean last week —up to now, a virtual stranger—suddenly I ’ m diving into my family ’ s British history, pulling old photos and clippings out of worn manilla envelopes. Trying to piece the past together. Last week I learned that my grandfather, who I was vaguely aware had served in World War I, was wounded three times in the Great War. At Ypres, Flers...

My dad could always make us kids laugh when he put on a Liverpudlian accent, pretending to be one of the Beatles. While Liverpool was only forty odd miles to the south of his hometown of Preston, Lancs, the Liverpool dialect was  slightly  different from the way he grew up speaking. These days they know Liverpudlian as 'scouse', a dialect influenced by the Scandinavian as well as an Irish and Scots influx of workers via the Liverpool seaport. My dad didn't have that terminology; he just called it 'thick'. Thick it is, almost like you've got a cold or something nasty stuck in your throat.  He had left home at seventeen, left England even, escaped to Egypt. Time and distance, and a bit of a determined effort on his part to sound more cosmopolitan had softened the way he spoke, erased his broad north country accent, replaced it with something more elegantly BBC-ish British.  Now, our dad warned in a long-distance phone call, when my sister and I, at ...

Waxing nostalgic on Facebook this morning, thinking about the package of Christmas prezzies we used to get in the mail from our British grandmother, this old post about a trip to Grandma's house in the 70's came to mind. And that's why call it FlashbackFriday. I was waiting for my sister to come and join me in London, as if, instead of being on vacation, I was being held hostage, waiting for someone to rescue me while the yellow ribbons tied around the old oak tree faded and turned to tatters and the days disappeared. As though my grandmother and uncle had kept me locked in a squalid room, or hidden me under the stairs like I was Harry Potter. The reality was that I'd been spending a few weeks at their absolutely lovely house in Chorleywood on the outskirts of London and I was miserable. I'd come down with a simple case of old-fashioned homesickness, made worse by a touch of social anxiety. I felt so lonely I wanted to die but I wasn't dying. I was perfect...

I've been linking up with  Dreaming of France  for the past fews posts, posting some newly recorded stories about a trip to France back in 1973. I was supposed to be backpacking around Europe with a boyfriend but since ' life is what happens when you're busy making other plans ' —and he was a two-faced lying schmuck—I'd ended up staying at my uncle's house in England  intending to have a look around London, before heading to the continent with my younger sister. We'd been to Paris , and taken the night train to Marseilles, but by happy accident we  ended up in Bandol. After a rocky start we were settling into a rhythm in Bandol.   Good morning we smiled at the proprietress of the pension, so cheerfully we almost curtsied. Bonsoir we greeted her, dipping our heads like novices in a convent, when we returned each afternoon to find the rows of tables newly set with fresh white linen tablecloths.  Bonjour! we cried to the owner of the little stand wh...

Originally posted January, 2015. Watching Downton Abbey, I find myself weeping, homesick for a country I barely lived in. I was born in London at the end of May, 1953 in a scene right out of Call the Midwife. Princess Elizabeth was officially crowned Queen on June 2nd and my parents, who had been hoping my birth would come a few days later — thereby entitling them to a year's worth of free nappies— named me Simone Elizabeth in her honor. But we left England when I was three. In my 60's now, I haven't been 'home' to England in 25 years; with both my British parents dead, I know some of my tears are for them. I feel bereft, my British heritage vanished with the passing of my parents and the few aunts and uncles I ever knew. Watching top British actors like Benedict Cumberbatch, Helen Mirren, and Eddie Redmayne in the films I write about on   Chapter1-Take1, my book-to-movie blog makes me ache with longing. All the episodes of Downton Abbey, Broadchurch, Las...

Enid Maude Good (nee Hayden) 7/30/1925—4/22/2012 My parents both had birthdays this week. I suppose would have had is more grammatically correct. My mother would have been ninety if Alzheimer's hadn't taken its final toll in 2012. My dad might have made it to one hundred but for the liver disease that took him out over twenty years ago. My mother was born in London; she was fourteen when World War II broke out. Accompanying her two younger brothers, she was one of the millions of British children the government sent to the English countryside to shield them from the blitz. Miserable, she returned home and went to work as a clippie on the iconic red double-decker buses. She loved running up and down those stairs, taking money, making change. Making it home before curfew, diving under the Morrison bed when the bomb sirens squealed. Dating Yank soldiers stationed in the UK. Later, working at a munitions factor, she had to wrap up her hair so it didn't get caught in...

Before my husband and I visited London in May of last year (2017) I spent Fridays taking a virtual walk of the city, sharing what I learned via my friend google in a weekly post called Above Ground on the London Underground. That’s when I first visited Peter Pan in Kensington Garden . At the time Joy, fellow blogger and host of British Isles Friday commented that she found the Peter Pan statue difficult to photograph. After visiting the statue for myself, I can only say, No kidding! I couldn’t get a really good shot either. But I wonder, does the fault rest with the photographer or the subject? J.M. Barrie commissioned the statue from Sir George Frampton and secretly had it installed in Kensington Park—without permission—in the middle of the night, as if Tinkerbell herself had flown it into place.  According to the announcement J.M. Barrie himself had published in the Times  ... “There is a surprise in store for the children who go to Kensington ...

The Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens IF there is a heaven, it’s lovely to think that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are happily reunited for all time. Watching the second season of Victoria, Lord Melbourne finally out of the Queen’s head, we see the young Victoria’s absolute devotion to her handsome prince consort. I’d be swooning over Albert too if he looked like Tom Hughes. The real Queen’s devotion to her man—besides bearing him five children—begins with her commissioning of the Albert Memorial in honor of the prince consort who died in 1861. We ran into the Albert Memorial last year on our trip to London when we were walking in Kensington Gardens. As you can see in the top picture, the memorial is directly to the north of the Royal Albert Hall. Royal Albert Hall Victoria’s love and devotion is further evidenced—remember, Victoria wore black for all the remaining days of her life after his death—by her naming of the  Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences i...

The V&A Chandelier by Dale Chihuly at the Victoria & Albert Museum* Watching the new season of Victoria , the young queen played the beautiful Jenna Coleman and Prince Albert by the equally gorgeous Tom Hughes, I find myself wondering how it all ends. How does this tender young queen, seeking out her own voice, come to spend so much of her life in widow’s black? When does Jenna Coleman’s lovely Queen Victoria turn into Judi Dench’s aging powerhouse? Albert lives until 1861, at which point he dies at the age of 42, of what was probably stomach cancer. Victoria, who herself said she ‘moved not a finger, didn’t put on a gown or bonnet if he didn’t approve it,’ was devastated.  According to HistoryInAnHour.com the whole of England went into mourning, sharing the queen’s pain in an outpouring of grief that wouldn’t be seen again until the death of Princess Diana 136 years later. “The Blue Room in which Prince Albert died remained unaltered for the rest of Victori...

British Cemetery, Courcelette, France My husband and I spent last May hitting a few of the European hotspots Americans have been visiting for eons. London, Paris, Rome. The Cote d’Azur. One of the places we stopped at isn’t on everyone’s list: a trip to a cemetery about an hour north of Paris.   Learning in 2015 that my grandfather and great-grandfather both fought in the Battle of Flers-Courcelette in the Somme in France in the autumn of 1916 sparked my interest . Finding out that my great grandfather, George Hayden actually died there and was buried there, is what ultimately spurred our trip to Europe. I was born in England but hadn’t been home to England or the continent in almost 30 years. Why not make the most of it, visit the grave to pay our respects and squeeze in as much of Europe as we could over the course of a month, pushing our budget to the limit? Why not? As it turned out, there were so many amazing sights to see that we left our visit to the cemeter...