The Lingering Memories of Generosity

Sam and I chose to hitchhike from London to Edinburgh, rather than take the train, because it was the summer of 1970 and this was what American students touring Europe did. Although we didn’t think of ourselves as hippies, we resembled the quintessential hippie couple, with our Navy surplus bell-bottom jeans and knapsacks. Luckily, we were also young and benign-looking and lorry drivers kept picking us up.

They asked us about life in California (“Do you know any movie stars?”) and eventually deposited us at the truck stop where we ate beans-on-toast for lunch. Sam and I loathed English food, adored English people and vacillated between those two emotions regarding each other. We were 20, out of the country for the first time, traveling haphazardly on a beans-on-toast budget, and somewhat cranky.

We got crankier when our hitchhiking luck started to wane in the afternoon, just as the weather was getting misty. We counted the passing cars and trucks, making bets as to who would stop for us--No. 28 or No. 45. When the mist became actual raindrops we glowered at each other and said simultaneously, “I told you we should have taken the train.” We were just beginning to rail about who left the umbrella in London when an old brown car rumbled to a stop and a man in his 70s leaned out the window. His white hair moved slightly in the increasing wind, and he mumbled something unintelligible.

Sam and I looked at each other blankly. Was he speaking English? The man spoke again. This time I heard the word “Edinburgh” at the end of his sentence.

“Yes, Edinburgh, that’s where we’re going!” I shouted.

He said something incomprehensible and motioned us inside his car. Sam jumped in the back, I in front. We introduced ourselves and thanked him profusely. Once in the car, without the competition of the weather or passing trucks, we realized that this man--this Mr. White--was indeed speaking English. He was merely speaking it with the thickest brogue in Scotland.

Reached the Punch Line

Mr. White puffed on a pipe, drove with one hand, and told us jokes for most of the three hours it took to get to Edinburgh. Neither Sam nor I could make out a word at first, but we could tell by his intonation when he’d reached his punch line and we politely exploded into appreciative laughter like monitored hyenas. By the time our ears were actually trained to understand Mr. White, he tired of jokes and told us, newly animated, everything about his homing pigeons. He’d bred and raced them for 10 years. They could fly a thousand miles and always find their way home again. His two prize pigeons were named Madeline and Geoffrey.

“It beats talking about California all the time,” Sam mouthed to me from the back seat. It was almost 10 o’clock but the sun was just starting to set as we reached the city. The rain had stopped. So had Mr. White’s car; we were parked in front of a small house surrounded by a white picket fence.

“It’s time to meet my better half,” Mr. White said, pulling up the emergency brake. Sam and I looked at each other, confused. We’d expected to be dropped at the outskirts of town, or anywhere where we might find a cheap bed and breakfast. But here was Mr. White’s home. We’d never expected to be invited into someone’s home . I hastily pulled a comb through my hair and wished my jeans were cleaner. Sam grabbed my comb after me and we climbed out of the car. Mrs. White, small, white-haired, and infinitely easier to understand than her husband, was already on the porch ready to shake our hands.

Sipping Tepid Gin

“Yankees!” she exclaimed. “How lovely.” She ushered us into her living room, which was all doilies and bookends. In half a minute we were sipping tepid gin from delicate glasses and being invited to supper.

“Supper? Oh, that’s too much. We couldn’t,” I protested, ever the female. Sam shot me an agonized look. The beans-on-toast had been hours ago. “Of course we’d love to. Let me help you,” I said, following Mrs. White into her kitchen. On my way I looked behind me to see what Sam looked like in a Scottish living room. He was wonderfully incongruous leaning against the green velvet sofa, his suntanned hand idle on a doilied armrest. Mr. White, having turned us over to his competent wife, was happily ignoring everyone behind his evening paper.

When I turned back to the kitchen, the table already was set with rose-strewn china and linen napkins. Mrs. White was opening a canned ham and looking chagrined. “I’m afraid we don’t own a refrigerator,” she apologized.

“Who needs a refrigerator?” I said, realizing she was the first person I’d ever met who didn’t.

“You’ll find there are lots of people in Scotland without refrigerators,” she continued. “We’re a poor country, you see.”

I recalled one of the fights Sam and I had conducted during our charter flight to London. I had told him there was something sickening about him, an orthopedic surgeon’s son, applying for food stamps he didn’t need just so he could have more money for dope. He said everyone did it and I was up-tight. He and his roommates had a refrigerator-freezer that could spit out perfect ice cubes on command and always was filled with Sara Lee cakes and imported beer.

Mrs. White sliced the ham onto a platter and washed and dried leaves of butter lettuce. Under her direction, I placed these on the table, along with a jar of prepared salad dressing, rolls and a dish of curled butter. I gave Sam “don’t you dare have another helping” looks throughout the meal, and each time I did, Mrs. White put more food on his plate. “You’re still a growing lad, Sam,” she said.

After supper we took our tea into the living room. Mr. White returned to his chair and Mrs. White sat between Sam and me on the sofa. Sam and I were exhausted. Mrs. White held a huge photo album on her lap.

“Here are a few photos of our son, Danny,” she said, flipping to page one. “He lives in Australia, you see.”

Danny had moved Down Under 10 years before. He was still saving up to make a visit home, but meanwhile had acquired a wife and two children. “We’ve never met the grandchildren,” Mrs. White said. “Not really, I mean. Just in pictures.” We saw Danny on his first day of school, Danny and his teen-age sweetheart, Danny in Sydney surrounded by loving family. She narrated the album without rancor, but with a wistful pain. I saw Sam’s lids closing and pinched him behind Mrs. White’s back. Revived, he exclaimed appropriately at each snapshot until the book was closed. Looking up from the album, we saw that Mr. White had gone to the car to get our bags and was carrying them up the stairs. It was after midnight; it seemed we were staying. I pinched Sam again and he ran up the stairs to assist Mr. White.

Mrs. White sighed, put the album away in a glass cabinet, and looked at me pointedly. “Dear, are you and Sam married?”

Great. Not only was I a hippie wearing dirty bell-bottom jeans, but I was a loose woman. At least I wasn’t on food stamps. I looked at her, lost.

“Pardon me, dear. Let me put it another way. Do you . . . sleep together?”

“Oh!” I said. Sleeping accommodations. Of course. A simple question. “Yes, Mrs. White. Yes, we do.”

“Shall we give them our room?” Mr. White’s brogue shouted from upstairs.

“No!” I protested, as Mrs. White answered, “Yes!”

“It’s impossible for you to take the guest room,” she explained. “It’s filled to the brim with pigeon feed.”

She took me upstairs to show me. Indeed, the bed in Danny’s old room was dwarfed by the bags of pigeon feed surrounding it. Even making a trail to the bed would be difficult. “We can sleep here just fine,” I assured her.

She merely laughed and showed me the other bedroom. Our bags were already on their blue goose-down quilt. Doilies, I saw, had made their way upstairs as well.

“Good night, and sleep well, children,” she said, closing the subject and the door at the same time.

Sam and I crawled gratefully into the Whites’ soft, downy bed, feeling alternately criminal and blessed.

We woke to Mrs. White’s kitchen sounds, and were soon seated again at the small table, eating boiled eggs and plucking toast from Mrs. White’s wire rack. A dish of freshly curled butter sat beside a jar of orange marmalade; the sight of them in the morning sunlight made me feel a surprising happiness and I stroked Sam’s hand beneath the table.

“Mr. White will drop you off at the castle on his way to town,” Mrs. White said, pouring our tea. “You’ll want to see the castle first.”

“But right now you must meet Madeline and Geoffrey,” Mr. White announced. It took me a moment to remember who Madeline and Geoffrey were. Mrs. White waved us and our dish-washing offers away, so we followed Mr. White to the back porch where the pigeons lived. Madeline and Geoffrey were plump and sleek and had little bands around their legs. Mr. White invited us to pet them, so we did.

“I hope I didn’t bore you to death last night with the photos,” said Mrs. White, suddenly with us on the porch. She was wiping her hands on a frilly apron. “It’s just that we miss our Danny so much.”

“We weren’t bored in the least,” I assured her.

“We enjoyed it,” Sam said. I smiled at him. “How can we thank you for all your generosity?” he asked.

“No need. It’s a pleasure for us to be with young people,” she explained.

Fifteen minutes later we were on our own, two American hippies buying tickets for the tour of Edinburgh Castle. I’d written down the Whites’ address so we could send them a proper thank-you note. I think what we did, though, was send them a postcard from Paris. Sam remembered that Geoffrey had placed second in a race from Edinburgh to Paris (and back again, of course) and we thought the Whites would get a kick out of it.

Sam and I broke up at the end of the summer; it seems every couple does after touring Europe together. I told him later that I’d often thought of our visit with the Whites, and even wondered if Danny ever made it back to Edinburgh with his wife and kids. Sam told me he’d wondered the same thing.