Lost Tribes

That fall, the only flat I could afford was in southwestern London, where the heel of the city lay wedged toward Surrey and Putney and the famously pristine English gardens I never actually laid eyes on. You took the train to Tooting Bec, the last station on the line, and from there the red bus to Streatham High Road, and then you walked: down the blaring Road, past the enraged Cypriot widow's fish-and-chips shop, past the doors opening and swinging shut at the Streatham Arms at the corner of High and Lower, onto a curved block of squat brick row houses with earnest patches of lawn protected from dogs and children by waist-high iron fences. This was my daily route, from the university where I studied the principles of anthropology according to the exacting standards of British colonialism, to my two dark rooms at 28 Fernwood Avenue, bath privileges down the hall.

My landladies, an elephantine Scottish mother and daughter, shared a high-pitched breathy brogue, pasty white skin, flyaway hair, and a deep suspicion of me and my comings and goings, of the sights and sounds they lay in wait for as they sat in their parlor knitting and watching telly. Every so often they would summon me to their doilied haunt for a lecture on my misbehaviors. The list was long: I was not to place my bricks of English butter and glass milk bottles on the window ledge (I had no refrigerator) for the neighbors to comment on. I was not to run a bath in the freezing bathroom after ten P.M. Surely I was not to play rock-and-roll too loudly or leave my big wet American boots in the hall.

The daughter was married to a frail, thin Pakistani dressed perpetually in a grey wool suit, argyle sweater vest, and tie, who chuckled nervously whenever our paths crossed and who was brought forth for these sessions as a witness to my crimes. When I took my spring vacation and went to Ireland for a month in search ofYeats and Joyce (the Americans and the Irish love each other, a Dublin hack told me, because the English think they're both bloody barbarians), I came back to find my flat broken into and evidence of a major battle—broken glass, flung clothes, overturned chairs. Somehow, the husband explained, a poor English sparrow had been trapped inside the flat through an open window and was screeching and flinging itself about in my absence. The husband had to come in and flush it out: bird droppings on my sweaters and bedclothes, feathers in the tiny kitchen sink.

Everything in the flat ran on shillings: the gas heater jerry-rigged inside the fireplace in the main room, the two-burner gastop cooker in the alcove that served as a kitchen, the hot water for the bathtub. I huddled by the heater and fed it its coin of the realm every half hour, crowding the double row of blue flames so that the knees on my three pairs of trousers had symmetrical brown burn marks by winter's end. The sharp odor of wet wool, the mild stink of gas. I taught myself knitting in defense of my cold bones and in admiration of the women I saw on the tube every day, long needles stuck under their left arms, their right-hand fingers wrapping and rewrapping stitches with the other needle like machines, never looking down. My product was a Kerouacian black wool turtleneck with sleeves that hung down past my hands and a crooked hem.

I furnished the place with what I found at nearby secondhand stores and could lug home on foot or beg to have delivered, and with what had been left by the previous tenant, a clearly unsatisfactory single man forever unnamed and darkly alluded to as "that one" by the mother and daughter. My biggest prize was a postwar oak-veneer radio console on which I...