Falling for London

by Sean Mallen

  Suzie nodded knowingly as we related our tale of woe about the flat hunt. She had endured a string of negligent landlords who cared little about the upkeep or safety of their properties. Fed up, she and James finally bit the bullet and bought their place, which, although modest, at least had a view of a church steeple out the back windows and was close to the Heath.

  We gave her a rough idea of our economic realities — the pay versus the likely expenses.

  “Oh well. The wonderful thing about London is that most of the permanent collections in the museums have free admission,” she advised cheerfully.

  It was a benefit that left Isabella and Julia cold, not being lovers of either museums or sightseeing.

  Their first visit to London was stressful, frustrating, and guarded, with a few moments of laughter. In the end, it was generally inconclusive. Weary and drained, we got on a flight back to Canada, where I would spend a week wrapping up some unfinished logistics.

  Toronto’s skies were leaden, not unlike London’s, as we rode a taxi home from the airport. Staring out the window at the industrial landscapes that surround the city, I decided to have another look at the brochure for the international school. We needed to finalize Julia’s application shortly or all the available spots would be taken. I leafed through to check the deadlines and was struck by a sickening realization.

  “Isabella, the tuition that I thought was for the entire year was actually for each semester.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked sleepily.

  “There are three semesters. The tuition is actually three times what we thought it was. We’re looking at close to $30,000! There’s no way we can pay that.”

  “How could this have happened?”

  “I goofed. Again.”

  Foolishly, we had not checked out any alternatives during Isabella and Julia’s scouting trip. They would not be coming back until the fall, if they came. It would be all up to me to find a school for my daughter, without her ever seeing it in advance.

  Jet-lagged and glassy-eyed, I leaned my head back against the seat and wondered what else could possibly go wrong.

  Chapter Four

  The week in Toronto flew by. With my new giant suitcase jammed with another load of clothes, I waited for the taxi to the airport. This time Julia had no tears, just a hug and a “Bye, Daddy.” I was to be back in another month for my previously scheduled vacation.

  “You’re leaving us now,” said Isabella flatly at the door. “I’m going to be here alone with Julia, living through a kitchen renovation and holding down a full-time job while you’re a single guy in London being a foreign correspondent. Not exactly fair.”

  It was all true and I had no effective response.

  “It’s a huge sacrifice and I’m going to owe you,” was the best I could muster.

  “Oooh, yeah. For. The. Rest. Of. Your. Life.”

  It was my third time flying across the Atlantic in a month, so I had pretty much seen all the movies that interested me on Air Canada. The all-night flight was the usual ordeal of half-sleep and cramped neck. I had learned that it was useless to try to sleep upon arrival, so I showered and shaved at the short let and headed into the office, planning to just force myself to stay awake and get on London time as soon as possible.

  There were four more days at the short let before moving down to Buckland. The night before the move I had a brainwave: to save a bit of money, I would just walk over, rolling two big suitcases, thus ensuring that I could fit all the remainder into one taxi.

  It was at least downhill, but the wheels started to make alarming squealing sounds as they rattled over every bump in the sidewalk, raising the possibility that the cases might explode in the middle of the street, scattering my undies all over Fitzjohn’s.

  Somehow, they held together. Drenched in sweat and breathless, I hauled them up the dingy stairs to my new home. It was not a magical moment.

  On departure from the short let the next morning, I somehow managed to avoid another encounter with Sneezy BritFuck. Had I been more creatively vengeful, I might have considered curling a steamer outside his door (a wonderful Canadian phrase for taking a shit). The image of Sneezy stalking out of his lair and stepping in a fragrant souvenir from the land of the Maple Leaf brings a smile to my face. But alas, I chose the high road. There were no wistful feelings as I closed the door behind me and loaded my meagre belongings into a taxi for the short trip down to Buckland.

  Distributing everything around the flat took a matter of minutes. It was an empty place, but Isabella had asked that I leave most of the decorating to her so that she would have something to do upon arrival. Presuming she came of course.

  Hearing footsteps upstairs, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself to the neighbours. Anetta answered the door, looking slightly fearful at first until I explained that I was the new tenant downstairs. And a Canadian. Everyone seems to relax a bit when they hear you are Canadian.

  She was a slender woman in her thirties who appeared as if she could have been a model. She was the Bulgarian wife of an American banker who spent most of his time in Southeast Asia. Her daughter, Elena, crowded the door beside her, curious and ebullient. She was almost exactly Julia’s age, a good sign — a neighbour who might be a playmate.

  “How do you like living here?” I asked Anetta.

  She shook her head with a rueful smile.

  “They don’t take care of this place very well.”

  Her son, who seemed about eleven, ran up to join the conversation.

  “Did they tell you that the ceiling collapsed in your bathroom?” he asked gleefully.

  “Uh … no.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Anetta. “It made a horrible crashing sound.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Oh … just a few months.”

  “We thought the whole house was coming down,” chimed in the son with a huge smile. He clearly thought I was a rube for renting such a questionable dump.

  “Well, I’m sure it’s all fixed now,” I said weakly.

  Anetta and I agreed that our daughters would be sure to have a play date as soon as Julia arrived.

  In an exchange of emails with my new landlord, he advised me to try to make friends with the woman who lived in the main-floor flat in the hopes that some kind of mutual cleaning agreement could be reached for the common areas in the hallway. According to him at least, she had always been opposed.

  I could see a light on through the window above her door. But there was no answer to my repeated knocks. Her mail was piled up on a decrepit plastic chair in the hallway. As I turned away to head back upstairs, the door opened and a heavy-set woman in her seventies looked warily out.

  “Hi. I’m your new neighbour. Just wanted to introduce myself,” I said, beaming with the friendliest, most Canadian face I could offer.

  “Oh … how nice,” she responded, offering a crooked-tooth smile, with a hint of yellow around the edges of her incisors. Her grey hair was unkempt, her sweatshirt stained and slightly fraying at the edges.

  It turned out that she had inherited the flat from her late mother, that she was a musician, and that she was contemplating a legal war with the owner of the garden flat.

  “You see, it is supposed to be a mutual garden in the back. But in order to reach it, we must walk across the front yard to reach the gate. The yard is officially his. And he refuses to allow us access.”

  The front yard was roughly ten square feet of toxic soil held together with weeds.

  “I’m thinking of consulting with my solicitor about taking some kind of action. But it’s a lot of money, you know. What do you think?”

  I pleaded ignorance of British law, but commiserated that she certainly seemed to have a case. The garden flat was vacant, but undergoing renovations, and I had heard from the estate agent that the owner was hoping to sell it for the equivalent of close to a million dollars. A basement apartment in London was worth more than my home in Toronto. Clearly it
was even more valuable if no one else could use the garden.

  London real estate is replete with these kinds of ancient battles over tiny patches of valuable land, the combatants using archaic and loopy regulations as weaponry.

  Gently I broached the touchy topic of the cleanliness of the common areas.

  “Oh, it is horrid, isn’t it?” she said, shaking her head as she looked down at the dust-caked carpet. “The property managers really don’t keep it very tidy.”

  “My landlord suggested that I speak to you about the possibility of agreeing to some kind of regular cleaning, with the costs shared among the owners.”

  “Oh, well, I would certainly like to see it tidied more. It’s all a matter of cost, you see. I don’t have much money.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “Did you say you were a journalist?”

  I nodded.

  “Have you done any stories on the British National Party?”

  “Uh … no.”

  The BNP is a far-right party that advocates for what it calls the “voluntary resettlement” of immigrants back in their homelands. Many prefer to call it by other names, such as “fascist.”

  “Well, you really should look into them,” she said with concern. I expected her to say that the BNP represented a disturbing undercurrent of intolerance in British society.

  She continued: “Many people say bad things about them, but you know much of what they have to say is really quite sensible.”

  I pressed my lips together, nodded thoughtfully, and took a step back.

  “Well, I must be going now. I hope you’ll give some thought to the cleaning issue.”

  “Oh yes. But really, I do insist: investigate the BNP,” she said. “It’s very, very interesting.”

  Far more urgent for me was to find a school for Julia. It was now June. Most good schools had locked up all their places months before.

  Even though we could not really afford it, I decided I had better get an application into the international school. During the visit in Canada, we had obtained the necessary glowing letter from Julia’s kindergarten teacher and a transcript of her Grade 1 report card. But when I contacted the school, the brisk registrar informed me that there were no longer any places. I was of course free to put in my application, along with the non-refundable £200 deposit, to have Julia placed on the waiting list. No guarantees.

  I sought advice from one of my few contacts in London. Harshini is a Sri Lankan woman who was close to one of my cousins. She had married John, a Canadian lawyer, and they settled in London to be roughly halfway between their two homelands. We met over Sunday brunch, with their sweet three-year-old, Mimi.

  They had, it seemed, been researching Mimi’s school since roughly three minutes after conception, and Harshini had consequently become an expert on London schools.

  There is of course a state school system in place so that, officially, all children have access to a free education. In practice, though, the best schools are difficult to access. You have to live in the proper catchment area and you have to apply.

  As Harshini explained, it leaves parents in our situation with a choice: “pay or pray.”

  That is: get your kid into one of the better church schools (some of which also charge) or spend the money to send them to an “independent” school.

  She promised to forward me a list of good choices in North London and advised me to go online and get a copy of the Good Schools Guide. Finding an education for your child in England is a challenge matched only by the search for reasonable accommodation.

  My mornings before work were now consumed with online searches and calls to prospective schools. Most of them had long since filled all their places. Julia was baptized as a Catholic, so the pray option was available, just not quite so available as if she were Anglican.

  There was what appeared to be a good Catholic school just up the street. The affable registrar gave me a tour, showing off classrooms that seemed to be full of smiling children in uniform, walls covered with their artwork, and what appeared to be overall an atmosphere of kindness and support. Even better: it was free. The only catch was that there were already three kids on the waiting list for her class. I put in an application anyway.

  Another Catholic school in Belsize Park was housed in a gorgeous old mansion, built by a nineteenth-century magnate. The main lobby was framed in lush dark wood, with a grand staircase and a quaint chapel off to the side. The grounds were impeccably groomed. It had places available, but there was tuition. Application submitted.

  Not counting on that, I continued my search online, where I found an alluring link to “the school with a heart in the heart of Hampstead.” The Royal had a picture of the Heath rather than the school building, which gave me pause. But all the other descriptions and reviews sounded appealing.

  For one thing, it had a history. It was founded in 1855 as a noble cause. In those days, there were several charities to assist the orphaned sons of soldiers who had been killed abroad, but precious little for the daughters. The school began its life with the mandate, “to nurse, board, clothe, and educate the female children, orphans or not, of soldiers in Her Majesty’s Army killed in the Crimean War.” It was born with the blessing of Queen Victoria and even now had a royal link: Prince Charles’s wife, Camilla, was the patron.

  London is a city of villages. As it grew over the centuries, it swallowed up smaller communities. It means that there is no downtown in the traditional sense. Instead, each neighbourhood has its own high street and commercial area, remnants of the independent village that each used to be. It is one of London’s most attractive qualities.

  It is also why, in part, the same street will change names inexplicably. Camden High Street ran beside our bureau, then turned into Chalk Farm Road, Haverstock Hill, Rosslyn Hill, and then Hampstead High Street. It was up that particular road that I walked to have my first look at the Royal. It was uphill, past the imposing old St. Stephen’s Church, along a narrowing road lined by trees and increasingly trendy shops and cafés.

  On the left, along the Rosslyn Hill stretch, was the entrance to a dead-end street called Vane Close. Now I could see why the Royal used a picture of the Heath on the website. The school building was a drab block of a thing — industrial, grey, and cold. Not very promising.

  Inside, though, I was met by the sunny-faced head of the junior school. As she led me through the place, its charms quickly grew on me. The walls were covered with students’ paintings and the girls in their cute, red-striped summer dresses all had smiles on their faces. She told me that they valued music and the arts and that they prided themselves on adapting to the needs of each girl. Out back there was a playground that actually included a bit of green space. I took pictures of everything.

  In a vestige of its long history, it was still a boarding school for about 10 percent of the girls, who stayed in the top floor residence. It meant that there was always staff around, and if a parent happened to be delayed picking up a child after school, there would be someone who could care for her.

  Most importantly, they had space in their upcoming Year Two class. The Royal seemed like the best candidate, but I feared what Julia and Isabella would say when they saw the grim exterior. On my way out to the high street I stopped to take a shot of it. A teacher walking out spotted me and I explained that I was thinking of enrolling my daughter in the fall and needed to send a picture to her and my wife.

  “Oh, then please don’t show them the picture of the building,” she said with a laugh. “Then they’ll never come. It’s what inside that counts.”

  She was right.

  As anticipated, my ladies were dubious about the look of the place from the outside, but the Royal seemed to offer more than the Catholic school with the lovely building, and we could not count on Julia ever getting off the wait list for the free school.

  She had to go somewhere, so it was back up to the Royal to lay down a £1,000 cheque for the deposit, fill out the paperwork,
and hope that I had not sentenced my daughter to a year of academic purgatory in England.

  By this time I had managed get myself a British bank account so that I could actually write a cheque. It is not a simple matter. The regulations seemed to have been drafted by Monty Python, inspired by Catch-22, with a consult from the estate of Franz Kafka. To get an account, you need to present some kind of proof that you have paid bills in the U.K., something like a utility statement. Except you cannot pay a bill properly until you have an account.

  Fortunately, I had some good advice from my predecessor in the bureau: open an HSBC account in Canada, show them your work visa, and then they can remotely open a British account for you. It still required several visits to the bank and a wait while they mailed my card from somewhere else in the country. And of course I immediately forgot my PIN.

  The friendly people at the Royal invited me for a parental get-together, a preview of the year to come. Seemed like a good way to start to meet people, one of my great weaknesses. It was in the school’s tiny gymnasium one morning, which was packed with well-dressed parents, uniformly younger and probably much more affluent than me, all chatting in little groupings as they sipped coffee. I strolled around, trying to look curious and engaged when in fact I was uncomfortable and tongue-tied. The head of the junior school rescued me by grabbing my arm and introducing me to the parents of one of the girls who would be in Julia’s year.

  Graham and Alanna glowed about the Royal. Their daughter had transferred a few months earlier from another school where she was struggling and now was doing much better.

  “I’d have to say she was utterly transformed,” said Graham.

  I was starting to feel more confident about our choice.

  Then, at my elbow was a comforting sound, a voice from home.

  “I see from your Mountain Equipment Co-op backpack that you must be Canadian,” she said.