Tea With The Ladies

by Susan Cameron

Jennifer and her husband Sam strolled hand-in-hand down the gently curving streets of Bath. At first, she had the odd sensation of walking through a movie set. It was classic Georgian England as seen in movies and TV shows: tall rows of dignified homes, as genteel and quiet as elderly ladies lined up in church pews, half-dozing through the sermon. And like church ladies, the congregation of houses all looked much the same: pale weathered stone faces in calm repose; all windows identical, neatly aligned, tastefully covered; a perfectly centered front door with polished brass fittings; and spiked black iron fencing emphatically separating all of them from the pavement just a few feet away.

Jennifer and Sam had wandered all afternoon along these old streets, admiring the impressive sweep of the Royal Crescent and the lovely park at Queen Square. As they strolled, Jennifer noticed an odd thing she wouldn’t have seen from a car; every house sat in a one-story-deep hole. Behind its iron fence, every house had a narrow staircase down into a hole almost a full story below street grade that led to another beautiful door. Some of the entries were like claustrophobic little patios, with colorful shade plants in pots and climbing vines stretching toward the light, but what a peculiar way to build houses, she thought.

“Honey, why did all these people put beautiful windows and a door in their basement?” she asked Sam, her authority on all things English. He laughed and squeezed her hand.

“No, my love, that’s not a basement. That’s the ground floor, at street level -- at least it was street level back when these houses were built. You’ve got to remember how long ago that was. When the original road deteriorated, the people just laid another layer over it. They built roads by hand in those days -- too hard to tear up the old road and begin fresh. They kept adding layer after layer to the road over the centuries. So the owners had to build steps to get down to their old front doors, and they had to put new front doors where first-floor windows once were.”

Jennifer leaned on the iron fence and craned her neck, trying to see down in the hole. Would the wall facing the door have layers, like an archeological dig? Could the residents see rock and cobblestone, brick and macadam, like the different-patterned stripes of a Fair Isle sweater?

She imagined these genteel houses over the centuries, watching the street rising just a meter or two away, an eight-foot slow-motion landslide engulfing them to their knees.

“Oh, dear,” murmured one of them as the cobblestones rose above her threshold. “I don’t like this a-tall.”

“Mustn’t grumble, dear,” another chided gently as brick paving reached doorknob-high. “We can’t stop progress.”

“I say,” whispered the first. “I can’t see out my ground-floor windows any longer. There’s no air, there’s no light.”

“It’s the smell of this awful new stuff that bothers me,” sniffed another. “I believe they refer to it as asphalt.”

“Mustn’t fuss,” another sighed. “I’ve a lovely pot of tea and chocolate hobnobs in the withdrawing room. Stiff upper lip, girls.”

Jennifer felt so foreign, so American.

Susan Cameron, copyright 2009