Traveling Music by neil peart

Author:neil peart
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2015-10-25T23:42:38.709000+00:00

Chorus Three

“Drumming at the heart of an English winter”

It used to be said that if you stood in London’s Piccadilly Circus long enough, you would meet everyone in the world. I doubt if that’s true anymore, but in July of 1971, I had a fateful meeting in Piccadilly Circus that changed the course of my stay in England, and, in far-reaching ways, my whole life.

The month before, I had flown into Gatwick Airport, south of London, on a $200 charter flight. I was eighteen, had never flown in an airplane before, never lived on my own, never been more than a few hundred miles from home, and the only “foreign countries” I’d ever visited were a family camping trip to Montreal for Expo ’67 (which only felt foreign, being a World’s Fair, and in French-Canadian Quebec), and the Finger Lakes region in Upstate New York.

My parents, my girlfriend, and the guys from J.R. Flood and their girlfriends had gathered at the Toronto airport to see me off, resplendent in my red corduroy double-breasted jacket and bad, shoulder-length perm. After the all-night flight, I was met at Gatwick by my childhood friend, Brad, and his two English “mates,” tall, cadaverous Bill and short, puckish Pete. Brad had moved to England with his mother and her husband a couple of years before, and when they returned to Canada after a year, Brad decided to stay. He worked as a “fitter’s mate” (plumber’s apprentice) and lived in a bedsitting room in a northern suburb of London called New Barnet.

Carrying my brand-new, plastic, folding suitcase with the inevitable Canadian flag stickers on the side, I followed the streetwise young lads onto the train. Once it was underway, they led me from our second-class seats to a first-class compartment, then promptly lit up a huge English-style “spliff” — as a welcome-to-England gesture, I guess. A little shocked, I declined, trying not to appear rude (or worse, uncool), but I was already so excited I had stayed awake for the whole flight. Plus it was about 8:00 in the morning.

As the train rolled through the countryside, so lush and green, and into the sprawling suburbs of south London, I stared around at all the strangeness: the narrow little “terraced” houses all in rows of brick and chimneypots, the tiny back gardens with clotheslines and garden sheds, the little cars all on the wrong side of the road — it was all so delightfully foreign, and exotic. My first lesson that the rest of the world really was more different than I knew or imagined.

When we reached Victoria Station and changed to the underground, we were issued a small yellow ticket, but Pete and Bill told us to throw them away; it would be cheaper if we said we’d lost them, and paid the “lost ticket” rate. Once again a little shocked, I did what they said, and rode the old Northern Line (smelling of coal, as much of London still did in those days) to its very end, the High Barnet station.

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