~o~o~o~

Basil the cabbie, probably sometime in the early 1980s, had been married to a woman who was an employee at GCHQ (I don’t know her name either; I’ll call her Beatrice).  At that time, housing was available on the grounds of GCHQ for its employees, and so Basil and Beatrice were living in a nice little flat near GCHQ, and Beatrice, presumably, had a blessedly short commute to work.

One evening after they had retired to bed and the room had grown quiet, Basil heard something rather odd, a very soft noise at the edge of his hearing.  Dah-di-dah-dit di-dit dah-di-dit dit …

“Can you hear that?” he asked Beatrice.

“Hear what?” she asked.

“That odd noise,” Basil described helpfully.

“No.” Beatrice answered, and that was the end of any conversation about odd noises that night.

The next night the same thing occurred – Basil heard that odd little noise, asked Beatrice if she heard it, and again she had not.

The noise continued to recur, though, and strangely enough, Basil could only hear it when he was in bed.  He eventually managed to convince Beatrice that he was not making this up, and since what he described sounded a lot like Morse code, Beatrice talked to someone at GCHQ, and amazingly, managed to convince that someone to come to their flat and have a lie down on their bed.  That gentleman did, in fact, hear Morse code, and shortly thereafter a higher-ranking succession of GCHQ personnel dropped by to lie down on the mattress and hear the Morse code.

After discovering that Basil’s mattress was receiving a rather sensitive Morse code signal, some GCHQ people approached Basil with some bad news.

“We need to take your mattress,” they told him.  “It could compromise British national security.”

“It’s my bloody mattress, and you’re not taking it,” Basil replied.

Well, apparently they couldn’t argue with that.  Basil got to keep his mattress, and not long after he refused to give it up, it fell silent for good.  GCHQ had changed their Morse code frequency so the signal could no longer be received by Basil’s mattress.  (Wouldn’t you have liked to have been the guy who had to write that memo?  “We have to alter the frequency rota because we have confirmed that an unauthorized mattress is receiving the current signal.”)  Basil and some GCHQ people speculated that perhaps the pig iron in the mattress’s box springs had just the right kind of crystal in it that it was able to pick up that one particular frequency.

This would have been a funny enough story as it is, but it gets better …

Basil’s mattress was the second occupant of that flat that had compromised British national security.  The previous occupant had been Geoffrey Prime, an infamous British turncoat and GCHQ employee who had informed the Soviets that Britain and the U.S. had cracked some high level Soviet encryption codes.  At the time that Basil’s mattress started its classified pillow talk, the British were still very sensitive about the whole Geoffrey Prime incident, and Basil’s mattress made a few people just a bit more jittery.  Eventually Basil and Beatrice moved out of that flat (and took the mattress with them), and the Brits tore the flat down to its studs, looking for any devices or other evidence of espionage that Prime might have left behind.

Basil, in addition to being a cab driver, was also a funeral director.  He was no fan of Prime, and stated quite firmly that he would offer his funeral director services for free, if he could see this traitor get buried.  According to Wikipedia, though, Prime is still alive; he was released from prison in 2001, and is living somewhere in Britain (if he’s smart, he’s nowhere near GCHQ).  I sincerely hope that Basil’s mattress, after learning its lesson that silence is golden, had a long and peaceful mattress life, and had no more run-ins (lie-ins?) with the British authorities.

Do you trust your box springs to not reveal your secrets?

———

In adapting to England over the last several weeks, I would say that the culture does not feel foreign, so much as different.  It’s like seeing something odd out of the corner of my  eye; I shift my perception to take it in more completely, and spend a little more time processing it, but what originally caught my attention does not seem so strange as it did at first glance.  What wears me down is the sheer number of times I have to stop and process the new and somewhat different information, and attempt to relate it to what I already know.

Traffic roundabout, in London (where fortunately I never had to drive!)

The signs are in English, although the English is often not quite the same usage as what I would anticipate.  The street signs are strange but generally understandable, after a few moments observation of the traffic and the area.  The food often has funny or incomprehensible names but usually tastes good, although not quite like anything I’ve ever had at home, either.  The coins look odd and sound funny when clinking together in my pocket (and the denominations are slightly different as well) but they work as coins ought to when I need to use them.  The accents of the people I pass by on the street often render their speech incomprehensible, but if I end up chatting with those same people, eventually something clicks in my brain and the words fall together (albeit usually not until after an embarrassing pause whilst my brain furiously processes the shift in pronunciation and the slightly different grammar and usage).  On top of this is my knowledge that most of these people have no problem understanding me, because they have been watching American films and TV shows their whole lives and have no problems at all understanding an American accent and American English usage.  Brits do like Americans, though, so any problems I have understanding them usually injects a bit of humor in an otherwise awkward situation (as long as I am polite about it, of course).  This is why I stated in my previous letter that I have not been unhappy here, simply overwhelmed.  I have met so many nice people and when I am willing to express my confusion, they are always willing to help me clear it up.  The only times I do not try to clear things up are when I am already at my limit and feel that I can no longer take in new information.

Road sign in Little Barrington, UK

Ah, the wisdom of maturity.  Only a few years ago, I would have been constantly berating myself for not understanding everything instantly.  Something that a constantly changing military lifestyle has taught me, though, is patience with myself and a better understanding of my learning curve and my limits.  I am confident, now, that I will learn what I need to learn eventually, and I am willing to grant myself the time to learn it (usually).

For those of you who received my Australia trip e-mails, you may recall that I mentioned that Australia felt less foreign than Hawaii.  Modern Hawaiian culture has such a strong Asian and Pacific cultural influence that Hawaii often appears to feel more like a foreign country than a U.S. state.  So I must admit that when I say that England does not feel really foreign, I am again comparing it to my experience in Hawaii.  Mainstream American culture often feels closer to English culture than it does to Hawaiian culture.  I would like to emphasize, though, that I don’t consider this to be either a good or bad situation; I truly enjoyed my experience in Hawaii, and the strong Asian influence simply made it more interesting.  I’m just commenting on the differences between the cultures.

Well, enough philosophizing!  Onward to the specific bits…

London street, near Big Ben (in the background)

Of course, no discussion of the differences between our two cultures would be complete without mentioning the traffic.  I have had a truly difficult time learning that the British drive on the left… and I am only referring to my experiences as a pedestrian!  This IS foreign, no doubt about it.  I have crossed more busy streets here in the last several weeks than I have in the last several years, and every time, it is a challenge for me to remember which lane contains traffic going in which direction.  It is as if I learned American traffic patterns in infancy, when I can’t even remember learning them, and now I cannot unlearn them, or at least adapt them to these new conditions.  My car will be arriving soon.  My American friends here tell me that it really isn’t too difficult learning to drive on the left side of the road, that you just follow the cars in front of you and you usually do okay.  I do suspect that once I have been driving for a while, that will help me learn the drive-on-the-left traffic patterns much better than just being a pedestrian.

Park Place (road leading to my flat, at The Park, in Cheltenham, UK)

———

I had an awesome time in England.  I met many wonderful people, both at work and outside of it, especially in my A Course in Miracles study group.  I eventually adapted quite well and took the opportunity to travel both locally and further afield, to Scotland and the Shetland and Orkney Islands, and on continental Europe (which I mentioned in an earlier post about driving through the Alps).  On the one hand, I wish I’d been able to stay longer in England (I was originally supposed to be there for 3 years, but was there only 1 year).  On the other hand, a few months after I arrived back in Quincy, I met my future husband.  Well … I guess it was a good trade.