Someday My Prince Will Come

by Jerramy Fine

  I have to admit that this sensation was not new to me. It had happened a few times before during my semester abroad: once on the main staircase of Hampton Court Palace, once in the dining room in Windsor Castle, and once in the Crown Jewels exhibit at the Tower of London. And every time, I had brushed it off, telling myself it was nothing more than my overreaction to finally being in England.

  My friend Heather once told me that she loved the Beatles so much that she couldn’t bear to listen to their music. And I knew exactly what she meant. To me, looking at anything royal was just like witnessing an astoundingly beautiful sunset or a glittering night sky. It hurt to look and it hurt not to look. And for a long time, I was sure my intense emotional response was part of that.

  What ever the reason, the feelings I experienced in these royal buildings was always exactly the same: Imagine the deepest, most crippling love you’ve ever been in and mix that with the most painful sadness you’ve ever felt, then multiply it by a thousand. And then imagine it swoops down on you out of nowhere—so hard that it knocks the wind out of you, and you can barely breathe. That’s what it felt like. And I should have known that touring Buckingham Palace would be no different.

  I’m not crazy. Really, I’m not. In fact for a long time I tried to approach the whole thing logically because I thought surely it could be rationally explained. So what if I had cried when I saw the Crown Jewels? Wouldn’t any girl burst into tears after seeing diamonds and rubies that big?30 Or maybe after so many years of living in a crazy hippie farm house full of purple walls and Guatemalan cushions, being surrounded by all that sumptuous furniture at Windsor Castle had filled me with such ecstasy that I felt faint. Same with Hampton Court. I was probably just being silly and overemotional and letting my royal-obsessed imagination run wild.

  But I wanted to be sure.

  So during my short backpacking trip through Europe, I’d made a point of visiting as many castles and palaces as possible. I wanted to see if the strange familiarity I had felt in England would come back the minute I entered any vaguely royal setting. But nothing happened in the dozens of castles and chateaus and royal residences I went to in France, Monaco, Spain, Germany, Belgium, and Italy. No heart-swelling achiness, no trapped underwater dizziness, no baffling weepiness. Nothing.

  So I knew it wasn’t just me being girly and teary-eyed and excessively romantic. It was more than that. And on a much, much deeper level than that. And so far, it only happened in England.

  Back in Buckingham Palace, I tried to stay with the group. I slowly filed past the famous Throne Room, and focused on keeping my breathing even. Wasn’t Diana’s family wedding photo taken here? Upon this dais, against this crimson velvet backdrop? Okay, that’s good, I told I myself. Stay calm and focus on Diana.

  The tour continued to move forward and in a surreal daze, I went with it. We reached the Corinthian marble columns of the Grand Hall, the sumptuous Grand Staircase with its gilded balustrade, the flock wallpaper and jewel-toned damask of the Drawing Rooms, the arched doors and windows of the Music Room, the lavish coved ceiling and ivory walls of the State Dining Room, and the sprawling, parquet-inlaid baroque Ballroom. I felt detached from everything—like I was in someone else’s body and watching myself from above. Every precious object I laid eyes on—every porcelain vase, every prominent painting, every silk tapestry—triggered a tangle of memories so dim and buried so deep inside me that I had no idea how to reach them. My heart was pounding like crazy, bursting with things it used to know, pleading with me to remember them, and I thought I was going to collapse with the force of it. But I kept it together.

  Thirty minutes later, the tour ended and I was thrust outside into the rare London sunshine. The feelings left me as quickly as they came, leaving me to wonder if I’d imagined it all.

  Exhausted and bewildered, I sat down on the marble steps of the Queen Victoria Memorial31 and tried to compose myself. I tried to ignore the hot dog vendors who had shamelessly placed their carts in front of the royal gates, and forced myself to look past the swarms of camera-toting tourists. Neither seemed to realize that their very presence ruined the true grandeur of the sight that had brought them there.

  I finally managed to block out the noise of the fray and focus my gaze on the elegant front of Buckingham Palace. My God, how I preferred those massive gray stones to the ones of the bomb shelter, I laughed softly to myself.

  I was calmer now, but no less confused.

  Despite what others seemed to believe, I think it’s fair to say that my obsession with England wasn’t all in my head. What ever it was, I could actually feel it affecting me physically. And it was a lot more ethereal than I cared to admit.

  Were my crazy parents right all along? Did all of this unbearable yearning really have something to do with a past life? Had I really seen these royal furnishings before? Had I really lived in these palaces? Did I even believe in this stuff?

  Of course there was no reply. Nothing but the stoic stares of the Queen’s Guards in their silly bearskin hats.

  Nine

  “Eliza, you are to stay here for the next six months learning to speak beautifully…. At the end of six months you shall be taken to Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the King finds out you are not a Lady, the police will take you to the Tower of London where your head will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls.”

  —HENRY HIGGINS IN THE FILMMy Fair Lady(1964)

  I had to find Rupert.

  It was the only way forward. If the only way to meet English people was to be introduced to them by another English person then I figured I had better track down the only English person I knew. And fast. I simply couldn’t endure one more night with Max at that god-awful Long Island Iced Tea bar.

  But the mobile number I had for Rupert eighteen months ago didn’t work anymore and I didn’t have an e-mail address. And although it was 1999, London still didn’t have White Pages or anything vaguely similar. I couldn’t look him up on an online university directory because even if I knew which university he’d decided to go to, those kinds of details (which are so necessary to everyday networking in the U.S.) were considered highly confidential in the U.K. Friendster didn’t exist. MySpace didn’t exist. Even the MP he used to work for didn’t know where he was but finally suggested I write to Rupert’s parents and (was there hope at last?) gave me a partial address.

  I didn’t have a house number, a street name, or a postcode—just a county. It was the American equivalent of mailing a letter with nothing but the person’s name and state written on the envelope.

  But I didn’t care. I was willing to try anything.

  I scribbled a desperate note to Rupert, begging him to get in touch and explaining how he simply had to rescue me from this social hell I was currently enduring. Then I dropped the letter into the red cylindrical postbox, putting the future of my English social life in the hands of Her Majesty’s Royal Mail.

  And what capable royal hands they were! I nearly fainted when Rupert called me a few weeks later. His parents had not only received my letter, but had forwarded it to him at Oxford where he was now studying politics. I was so happy to hear his familiar insouciant voice I could barely contain myself.

  “So, Jezza,” Rupert teased, “have you moved into Buckingham Palace yet?”

  “As a matter of fact, Rupert, I have not,” I replied. “It’s been a nightmare since I came back to London.”

  “You mean Princess Anne didn’t immediately propose herself for tea when she heard you were back in town?” he persisted.

  “Rupert!” I wailed. “I don’t know what’s going on in this city anymore. Meeting English people is practically impossible. And meeting English people with royal connections is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack! Stop snickering like that! I’m being serious.”

  “Jezza, what did you expect? Something like a third of Londoners—including you—were not even born in the U.K. Christ, even when I lived in London my
flatmates were Swedish! And everyone knows the LSE is just a place for wealthy foreigners. Moving back to London was a really stupid plan if you wanted to meet English people.”

  “I’m realizing that,” I whimpered softly.

  “Christ, you sound miserable. Why don’t you come visit me in Oxford? I’ll show you what a night out with a bunch of English students is like and I can show my mates what a completely mad American bird looks like.”

  “I would love that.”

  “Why don’t you come over tomorrow night?”

  “But it’s a Thursday. I have a lecture on Friday morning.”

  “Jezza, no one goes to lectures but foreigners.”

  Something told me that visiting Rupert was going to do more for my future than any master’s degree ever would. So I agreed to take the bus to Oxford the very next day.

  It’s funny how you never really know why certain people cross your path in life. I’d always thought of Rupert as a rather exasperating office buddy. Little did I know that he would lead me directly to the glittering English people I thought I would never find.

  Growing up, there were only two videos in my house hold: Hair and My Fair Lady. (Well, three if you count The Making of “We Are the World,” which I don’t.) On special occasions (like a good report card or after a visit to the dentist) I was allowed to watch one and you can guess which one I picked.

  Hair is based on a Broadway musical about a tribe of flower-power hippies and the drug/music/antiwar/free-love culture of the 1960s. It’s mainly famous for being performed with all of the actors naked in some of the scenes. My dad claims the original play broke through the barriers of theater in the same way that the hippies broke through the barriers of society. Fine. All I know is that I wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies or swimsuit-clad beauty pageant contestants, but I could watch groups of all-nude hippies dancing around Central Park and singing to themselves about the dawning of Aquarius. Gotta love my parents’ logic.

  Meanwhile, My Fair Lady is my favorite film of all time. It was then, it is now, and I’m confident it will maintain this status until the day I die. I’m pretty sure My Fair Lady was one of those things my parents naïvely exposed me to (like royal library books, Disney, and refined sugar) that they assumed I’d enjoy but would eventually grow out of—yet are now kicking themselves twenty years later for starting a lifelong obsession.

  But can you blame me?

  My Fair Lady is the story of an impoverished young girl named Eliza Doolittle (played by Audrey Hepburn) who sells flowers on the dirty streets of London. When a wealthy linguistics professor named Henry Higgins hears her piercingly crass working-class accent (sounds “like chickens cackling in a barn,” he says. “I’d rather hear a choir singing flat”), he makes a bet with a friend that a few weeks of speech coaching is all it will take to pass off this “guttersnipe” as a duchess. Eliza agrees to participate in this wager and by the end of the movie everyone at the Embassy Ball is convinced that she is of royal blood. And Henry falls in love with her of course. But the most important part is that everyone thinks she’s royal just because her accent changed, when only months ago she was a common ruffian living on the streets.

  As you can probably tell, viewings of Hair only occurred after every two dozen screenings of My Fair Lady. And it’s a good thing, too, because My Fair Lady proved to be an invaluable education for me when it came to understanding the intricacies of the English class system.

  I realize the very concept of a class system is hard for most Americans to grasp. After all, it’s been drummed into our heads since birth that all people are created equal. But in England, class is something that practically permeates the air. House of Lords and House of Commons only scratches the surface of the class system’s grasp.

  In America, social divides are primarily about income. But thanks to My Fair Lady I knew that the English defined themselves by a bevy of qualities that had nothing to do with raw cash and everything to do with one’s language, style, and manners.

  If you’re English and you speak with upper-class pronunciation and use upper-class vocabulary, you will always be considered and treated as a member of the upper class, even if you’re bankrupt, working in a factory, or living on welfare.

  Conversely, if you’re an English billionaire, complete with private jets and expensive cars and houses all around the world, but you speak with a working-class accent or accidentally use a bit of working-class terminology, you will always be recognized as working class—no matter how much money you have and continue to make.

  If you want to know what an upper-class English accent sounds like, just watch any movie starring Hugh Grant or Rupert Everett and listen to their voices. (And I dare you not to become weak at the knees.) If you want to know what a working-class accent sounds like, watch something like The Full Monty, Layer Cake, or Snatch. While these three films are all really entertaining movies, no one can tell me that the rough accents of the characters are attractive in any way.

  While the English are able to determine one another’s class within seconds of hearing another’s voice, the U.S. has no equivalent to this. Think about it. Your accent—be it from the Bronx, Texas, Wisconsin, or a tiny mountain town in Colorado—doesn’t come with any kind of class label and you’re not instantly judged or pigeonholed by the sound of it. You can usually tell where in America someone is from, but you can’t tell anything about their socioeconomic background. And thank God for that.

  I’m no actress and as much as I hoped it would, my fairly neutral American accent wasn’t changing anytime soon. (I liked to view this as a sign of strong character rather than a particularly weak ear.) Besides, I can always tell if an American is attempting to fake an English accent (à la Madonna) and it’s not at all flattering.

  So while my accent was here to stay, I was eternally grateful that it gave very little away. Can you imagine if Rupert’s friends could tell that I came from a redneck town the minute I opened my mouth? Can you imagine if nothing more than my enunciation revealed that for the two years before I was born my parents didn’t believe in money? When it came to hiding my identity in that respect, all I can say is God bless America.

  Oxford University has hundreds of famous alumni, including Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan,32—not to mention the dreamy Tony Blair and Hugh Grant himself. And with its legendary towering spires, sprawling green lawns, and breathtaking eleventh-century architecture, it sure beat the dull gray buildings of the LSE. If you stopped for a second and tried to imagine Oxford without the modern cars parked along its streets, you could easily transport yourself a few hundred years back in time. And I was doing just that when I arrived on Rupert’s doorstep just before dark.

  “Jezza! I can’t believe you’re here!” Rupert exclaimed as he kissed me on both cheeks.33 “Quick! Drop off your rucksack and get in the cab! We’re going to a toga party!”

  I looked behind me. Sure enough, there was a mini cab34 waiting at the curb with the engine running. But all I had was an overnight bag! How was I ever going to find a suitable outfit for a toga party in less than sixty seconds?

  Like a female Clark Kent, I rushed up the ancient staircase of the elegant student house and exchanged my chunky turtleneck sweater35 for a plum-colored, cleavage-enhancing party top (never leave home without one). Glancing frantically around Rupert’s bedroom, I grabbed a white pillowcase off his unmade bed and pinned it diagonally around me into a makeshift toga. I retouched my makeup in the cab and when we stopped to pick up one of Rupert’s friends along the way, I hopped out and grabbed some random greenery from a stranger’s front yard and wove it through my hair in what I hoped looked like a Greek-style wreath.

  When we arrived at the party I thanked my lucky stars again and again that I had made such a superhuman effort. For never in my life had I seen so many good-looking, half-naked Englishmen in one room.

  I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes. It’s no wonder I couldn’t find any Hugh G
rant look-alikes in London! They were all at this party! And draped in nothing but flimsy white sheets!

  Everywhere I looked I saw rosy cheeks, sharp noses, and golden hair that rose into little cute wings behind their ears. Their rowing and rugby muscles flexed gloriously as they offered me cup after cup of sangria with English accents so marvelously upper-class and cavalier, for a moment I truly thought I might have died and gone to heaven. It was like someone had gone through all of the lusty English fantasies locked away in my brain and magically brought them to life!

  I was positively swimming in happy delirium. If there were girls at that party, I didn’t notice. All I knew was that I was finally surrounded by young, well-spoken English boys. The ones I was afraid I might never meet.

  For the first time in months, I was having conversations with English people that didn’t involve buying a train ticket or saying thank you for my change. And after roaming around London for weeks—desolate, friendless, and practically invisible—suddenly all kinds of people (English people) wanted to meet me.

  Rupert seemed to know exactly what effect this party was having on me. And forever amused by my English obsession, every so often he would drop hints to provoke me even further.

  I had just finished dancing to “Mambo No. 5” with Hugh Grant look-alike No. 5 when Rupert pulled me aside and nodded to a pair of floppy-haired boys standing across the room.

  “You’ll like Piers,” he whispered to me. “His family owns a castle in Scotland. And I’m sure you’ll love Giles. He’s going to inherit a lordship.”

  Castles? Lordships? Despite my sangria-enhanced state, I perked up instantly. Just like when a dog hears someone mention its name, my head tilted and my eyes widened.

  “Really? A lordship?”

  “Jezza!” Rupert laughed. “Don’t look so gobsmacked! They’re just normal people.”

  I still couldn’t believe this was Rupert’s life. He got to hang out with these people every day and seemed totally unfazed by it. What must it be like to be born English? To be able to take all of this magic for granted?