From Cambridge to London

I said to a woman pushing a child by our house, “Do you know where I might buy ice?”

She stopped, and with an expression that indicated she had just discovered something about herself, replied, “Why, no. I don’t think you could buy ice in the village. You’d have to go out of town.” Then, with manifest satisfaction, she added, “You’re in England now.”

Sometimes the abrupt recognition of the obvious can be like a revelation: how manifold the differences that separate us Americans from the English and their self-conscious pride in their peculiarities, as one of their own put it. How could a simple convenience such as carry-out ice be seen as an intrusion into their world?

We were staying in Little Impington in a stone house among a collection of similar ones, of stone or brick, nearly all presenting to the streets trimmed hedges and shrubberies demonstrating the English impulse to garden. Behind the houses ran a belt of dark trees. Our house had four cats, which our vacationing hosts asked us to feed and nuzzle, and plants to water. Little Impington lies a short distance north of Cambridge, the blazingly famous university town that had drawn our interest. Serious things happen there, and a few silly ones, too, like punting.

But Impington also enjoys a minute fame: Samuel Pepys, the renowned seventeenth-century naval bureaucrat, diarist, and biographer of other English personages, was frequently here to visit the family mansion, Impington Hall, and with his kin to “discuss publique matters” and the outrages in Parliament by “the young men, that did labour to oppose all things that were moved by serious men.”

It is like that throughout Cambridgeshire, the political entity that contains the university city and all the hamlets that bestride its twisty roads, each one of which touts a specific, if sometimes untested, renown, usually derived from the physical remains or memory of a citizen who figured large in the world, wrote a never-dying poem, threw up a heaven-storming church—places like Grantchester, a Cambridge suburb where Chaucer lived, Byron visited, and Rupert Brooke was born. Hereabouts nothing is more respectable than old fame, except maybe old money.

This was a family visit to England: I, accompanied by my wife, my daughter and son-in-law, and their two boys; three generations of tourists we were, out and about in Ol’ Blighty. We had made our vague plans with no intention of avoiding London; we would spend our last two days there. Susana and I had been there the year past, and wanted first to show the kids other parts of the island kingdom: Bath, Stonehenge, perhaps some spots on the North Sea. But our primary focus was Cambridge, where Charles Darwin was educated, DNA mapped, and where the original manuscript of Milton’s Paradise Lost is preserved, revered, and protected.

It was the summer of the suicidal terrorists who bombed three trains in the London Underground and one bus, killing fifty-two people. That occurred on July 7; we landed at Heathrow on August 1st. Before coming, I phoned my friend Michele, who lives in Covent Garden. “How’s the mood?” I asked. “Normal,” she said, “though some avoid the Underground.”

I wasn’t surprised at this equanimity: London has been besieged in modern times—by the Nazis in the early 1940s and by Irish nationalists during the postwar years. Londoners are familiar with the sudden deployment of uniformed police on the streets, the sealing of manhole covers, evacuations triggered by the occasional suspicious package spotted in a tube station. As a correspondent there for the Baltimore Sun a little over a dozen years ago, I recall being jarred awake by the phone in the black morning of April 26, 1993. Springing from my bed I tore down to the financial district to witness the smoking skeletal tower of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building, stripped of its skin by an IRA fertilizer bomb. It is not that the English have more courage than other people in these situations, but they do have a little...