Chapter 3
3
Queen Mary University of London was a cluster of gray stone and tan brick buildings on Mile End Road, a slightly seedy area in East London. My walk from the Tube station took me past betting shops, pawnshops, greasy spoons, and far too many of those white ghost-bikes erected wherever a cyclist has been killed.
After my class on the literature of the First World War, I’d take the Overground up to North London, where I bartended a few nights a week in a music venue called the Garage (pronounced GARE-idge ) that seemed to specialize in hard-core rock and hearing loss. I’d answered a job posting when I first landed in London, did a five-minute interview, and came back the next day for my first shift. I received almost no training, an ugly polo shirt, and a fistful of foam earplugs. I learned to read lips and not to expect tips. There was nothing good about the job apart from the biweekly paychecks, which helped me float along until my larger, monthly paychecks came in from Kramer.
I jogged up the steps of the humanities building and hurried to the classroom, to the only empty chair in the circle of desks. Professor Wright started class a moment later. For the last few weeks, we’d been studying what she called the Trench Poets, reading beautiful, tragic, catastrophic poems written by soldiers who were dug in at the Somme or Ypres for months while their friends were killed around them. The poems were impossible to look away from.
“Well, it’s Sassoon time,” Professor Wright said. “Who wants to give us a reading, start us off?” She looked around, but not at me. By now, we both knew I wouldn’t volunteer.
One of my classmates raised his hand, and Wright nodded him on. “?‘The Humbled Heart,’ by Siegfried Sassoon,” the boy began. Then he delivered, from memory and without hesitation, the entire poem.
I would have been surprised, but I’d seen the same thing week after week. My classmates were all British, or from Commonwealth countries. They knew these wartime poets deep in their bones, drilled into them from childhood like the Pledge of Allegiance.
I made a note to research the poem further and tried to reassure myself—I could figure it out on my own, even I couldn’t always keep up in discussions—but deep down, I knew how laughable that was. Between bartending and teaching, I averaged almost thirty hours a week. I barely had time to do all the reading, let alone time to build the vast historical and cultural context my “peers” had by birthright.
Professor Wright was speeding through some of that context now, talking about when Sassoon was hospitalized with shell shock, where he met another soldier-poet, Wilfred Owen. And then she rushed on—a third poet I hadn’t heard of, who seemed to have somehow saved Sassoon from court martial—and two of my classmates chimed in about some letters that I had never read or heard mentioned, and the others were nodding, adding their own comments and favorite lines, and I listened and took notes and wondered why I had thought this was a good idea.
Here I was, finally in London, in love with the city but not with my place in it. Queen Mary was just another world where I didn’t make sense. I’d felt like that since middle school, when I landed in honors classes with the upper-crust kids—the sons and daughters of professors, provosts, business owners. My old friends from the neighborhood, kids who grew up on the same street, in the same small houses, fell away. A few to sports and clubs, some to the vocational school, but most to after-school jobs. By then I was working at a local ice cream shop, my honors classmates stopping by for sundaes, laughing together in the booths for hours, dropping their parents’ money into my tip jar. Later, it was my Smith College classmates. Maybe a professor or two, always surprised to see me there, forearms smeared with dried hot fudge and ice cream.
Professor Wright let us go with a reminder to begin brainstorming topics for our master’s dissertations. She said we could stop by office hours if we wanted to talk out some ideas, and a few students approached her while I was packing up. I didn’t have time to stay after class, just like I wouldn’t have time for office hours. I had to stop at the library to borrow the next assignment—Pat Barker’s Regeneration novel trilogy— before anyone else did, so I wouldn’t have to buy it. My bar shift started in just over an hour, and I had a long Overground journey to get there, and a few pounds for a ploughman’s sandwich to eat on the train.
I squeezed by the students waiting for Professor Wright, discussing their erudite dissertation topics. I hadn’t made close friends at Smith—it might as well have been a foreign country for how well I belonged there—but I had at least fit in academically. I had kept up with my classmates, even surpassed them in literature classes. It was where I’d learned to want a job in publishing. When I was lonely at Smith, I’d remind myself that it was only for a few years, only for undergrad, and then I’d be in England, where I’d meet people who didn’t know me at all. I would arrive, blank like a sheet of notebook paper, and write myself new.