Maple Drive: England Was Not Pleased
Part 3 of 9. How I fell in love with my wife 33 years ago. The story of the the nurse who married the waiter and the waiter who married the nurse. The happiest two months of my life.
⬅️ Chapter 2
She had already been to the States for a week earlier in the year, flying out to revise and sit her exams. They gave her a thick, hard-bound American nursing book to study – “to revise” – and then, after arrival, the company that sponsored her helped their recruits prepare with a week of all-day crash coaching seminars in a hotel conference room before taking them to their state exams – “to sit.”
As they stepped off their Virgin Airways flight, the prospective American nurses were given a clear pouch with special SPF-UK tanning lotion, dark sunglasses, and instructions on tipping in America. They were put up at a generically luxurious Pasadena hotel, and after classes ended at 4 in the afternoon they were free to spend their evenings wandering around Old Town or sunbathing by the deserted corporate travel pool.
They wandered with their wet hair towel heads and their bare feet down the corridors laughing and trying to remember where they left their rooms. The happy English travelers marveled constantly: at the Godzilla-sized aloe vera in the reception area; at the colorful children’s newspaper on their doorstep every morning; at the high-fructose Los Angeles newscasters; at the impossibility of walking anywhere further in the United States than the shuttle bus drop-off area.
At the end of the week the nurses were led out of their conference rooms and bused out to the Pomona fairgrounds. Along with thousands of other potential nurses, the girls were herded – they were at least fifty years behind Modern American English and still referred to themselves as “girls” – into long rows of folding chairs in aircraft hangers to take the Californian nursing examinations.
A bull-horn proctor with a lasso and a ten-gallon hat gave them instructions, demanded they face forward, and had them pencil in multiple-choice ovals on the clinical importance of non-verbal communication and bedside manner in influencing patient outcomes.
Then, tests collected and pencils down, they were herded back into the buses and back to the hotel and back downstairs for one last stolen minute in front of Jacuzzi nozzles so powerful they left dice-like pressure indentations in their backs.
After the whirlwind American tour and the sunbathing and the late nights, my future wife returned to London Heathrow giddy and beaming and as tanned as you can get sunbathing after 4:00PM. She deplaned wearing white summery shorts and a Venice Beach t-shirt where the cutest little surfer boy was drawn in faux-children’s crayon art.
*
England was not pleased.
A jealous nation greeted her at the airport. She was met, almost no exaggeration, by the worst snowstorm in London in a century. There was one train running that deliberately pulled up in the middle of nowhere and evicted the young lady in her shorts and her pre-roller suitcase with the giant palm tree sticker.
The streets were empty; there were no black cabs, no red double-decker buses; no TARDIS booths to transport her home. The country known for being fastidiously well-behaved was in complete tantrum. She ended up shuttled to her Stamford Hill flat in a gypsy cab with broken, duct-taped windows that slipped precariously about the snowy streets and ultimately delivered the California Girl to the doorstep of her flat, a little square of England she’d bought on her own, a charming starter place for a single girl with a vest pocket garden in the back and empty, rowed up flower pots, now as deserted and lifeless as Torquay beach cabins in February.
For the next month she sat there and wiped the foggy pane of her ground floor window with the forearm of her wooly sweater and ran out to meet the postman to see if her test results had arrived. Then she watched the clotted cream snowdrifts melt slowly in the interminable spring rain. She drove absent-mindedly about London in her Special Edition Black Mini, losing herself in the dark recesses of the Knowledge.
Anxiety snuck in. She sipped her English Breakfast and started to think with a gulp about all those American malpractice questions and stone-to-pounds conversions.
She caught herself at stoplights sighing about the Southern Californian sun, the citrusy evening weather, the cocktails stuffed with fruit and paper umbrellas, the general promise of balmy adventure abroad. Meanwhile, the sunglasses on her dresser stopped working.
But then, finally, her watched kettle boiled: word came that she passed.
The girl from the Midlands was a California nurse.
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