Maida Vale Chapter One

Maida Vale Opening Chapter

“Jack is the reason I’m traveling to London,” she spoke loudly over the deafening drone. “He is my father’s dog. A blue shepherd with a natural bob tail. Black and red-roan and silver. One eye is a patch of intense licorice black while the rest of him is ticked with grey over black and red roan markings. It looks like a silver net was thrown over him except ...” She stopped to see if her companion showed interest. She felt vaguely foolish. “Except for his eye.” Her voice trailed off.

She was speaking over the roar of the plane noise, seated as she was by the small porthole window. The old East Asian was wedged in the middle seat between her on one side and an American businessman on the aisle. The flight was crowded this last week in May 1972 which was both a blessing and a curse. Although cabin lights were dimmed and she was tired, Carol could not sleep. Neither could the cocoa skinned man in the immaculately wrapped turban beside her. She was cold and wrapped the meager airline blanket around her. She glanced at her temporary companion.

The East Asian man had been astonished and pleased to meet a young American who could discuss the Indian sub-continent. In her stead, Carol felt lucky to find someone with whom she could talk on the last leg of this long, sleepless flight to London from Baltimore. Small talk was unbearable to her. She had asked the old gentleman’s opinion on the independence of East Pakistan and enquired about the state of the conflict over Kashmir. He was delighted and spoke passionately and gently for the first few hours. To hear each other they leaned their heads together.

The two of them were small so the broad American business man on the aisle could have had a little extra space but he did not take the room. She glanced at the big man in wonder. How could a man his size sit so still and sleep so soundly? He was a consummate traveler it appeared. Upon arriving at the row of seats, he had nodded politely to the two of them, removed his shoes, and pulled a special travel pillow out of an attaché case. For all the world the pillow was a blue neck brace; it began at his occipital bone and sat low on his clavicle. When he put the pillow on after takeoff, he slipped into a corpse position. She envied him the peaceful slumber.

“One Eyed Jack,” said her temporary companion in the most luxurious and melodious voice she had ever heard in a man. “Your dog was named after the knave card.”

He laughed elegantly at her astonished expression. “I may be a British citizen but I have spent many years in America,” he said. “But why would this blue dog bring you to England?”

“My father is a Navy Commander assigned to NATO in London. He has been stationed there for about four years now. The Navy is sending him to Turkey for the next six months. I don’t really know what he does. Something in communications. I am coming to take care of his London flat and his dog while he is gone.”

“Your father is alone in England?”

“Except for Jack. And now me, of course.”

“Of course.”

London. She was anxious to be there. Anxious to be away. Away from the US. Away from the university. Away from home.

Was it just the night before that she was at university? Time had not only the feeling but also the smell of being so long ago. She was sitting on her bed last evening, her roommate in the spotlight at the twin desk. Carol had packed her dorm room into suitcases and boxes and was sitting on the edge of the narrow, lumpy matching bed. A noise escaped from her throat without warning. A yelp. Please hurry. Please hurry. She willed her stepfather’s arrival with wave upon wave of the little prayer. Please hurry. Please hurry.

She obsessively packed and repacked his car trunk in her mind’s eye with this box here and that box there. This to storage with her stepfather and that with her to the airport. Her roommate had watched surreptitiously from the corner where she was busy over books for finals. Finals. That glorious passage that would also soon free her roommate from the putrid décrète of the University of Virginia.

Carol would skip the graduation ceremony entirely and had placed out of three of her finals so she was safe from this corrupt terminus. She had placed out of her major classes by writing undergraduate theses. She had submitted each thesis by mid March. Two of the three professors had responded with critiques by the end of April. She had blasted back revisions by May 5. The third professor had asked if she needed recommendations to graduate school in economics.

Terrorism of the Luddites, Aerodynamic Stability of Hydrofoils, and Economics of the Emerging Indian Sub-continent. Subjects of these papers spun like a Buddhist prayer wheel flashing tricolor in a bright blue sky. She had worked on the subjects beginning Christmas break, relentlessly focused and brutally cold-hearted until completion. In April she had no idea where she would be in June. By May 1, she had received the invitation from her estranged father. I am being temporarily assigned to Turkey for six months. Come to London and take care of my small flat and my big dog. I’ll be back by October’s end.

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. Get me out, get me out, get me out. Please hurry, please hurry, please hurry. Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. She had not practiced her religion for – she didn’t remember when – but in these last five months she had prayed more fervently than during her previous 21 years combined. Even more than those years after her parents divorce.

Her parents had legally separated when Carol was six. Perhaps they had been separated longer in some fashion, perhaps always been separated, because her father was a career military man, a naval officer, graduate of Annapolis ‘45. Carol knew little more. Carol imagined that Mater must have enjoyed those ‘grand days in Annapolis’ where the handsome naval officer had charmed the beautiful daughter of a formerly wealthy Baltimore family with sailing on the bay, whirling ‘round the dance floor at formal balls, and finally marriage in full military regalia. Carol had seen pictures in albums at her grandmother’s house. But this young officer with the gift of languages and a degree in engineering seemed to be needed in far flung corners of the world. Berlin, Indochina, Korea, Egypt, Lebanon. The young family had been stationed first in Germany and then in the Philippines. Grandmama Sweeter said that Mater did not like the rigors of life with an ambitious naval officer and could not stand the loneliness of deployments and separations. “She couldn’t abide military life, childe. I can’t say much else.”

Mater came home after the Olympics in Australia ‘55, divorced the naval officer and soon married an oilman from Colorado. Mater told Carol ever after that the naval officer did not want them so they came home and she found someone who did love them.

Carol entered a Colorado high school in 1964, less than a month after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. She entered a Virginia university in the fall of 1968, just seven months after the Tet Offensive.

As she began her studies at the University of Virginia in 1968, unrest on campus against the Vietnam War intruded on her peace. Professors, fellow-students and faceless demonstrators began to apply increasing pressure on the skillfully, carefully mapped future she had chosen for herself. The unrest touched her peripherally and concerned her intellectually but she could not take sides because both sides seemed unsound to her.

Life at university was a blur of swirling, rampaging influences. She had kept her distance and her balance. All in all it was easy to do because it was easy to recognize the outrageous. The swirling eclectic psychedelic times went berserk with a lust for casual violence, irresponsible sex, indulgent alcohol, mindless drugs, self-destructive effrontery. Anything objectionable for any reason, any prescription of conduct or morals, was demeaned. Radical ways were calculated to incite outrage just for the sake of outrage. Haughty hedonistic excess threatened a carefully achieved stability. In fits like childish temper, students and professors became erratic, ever more erratic, in frenzied indulgences, and they bated police with lewd and offensive behavior and language.

It was the draft that frightened the student body. The boys dreaded being shipped off to Vietnam. As she went through the later years of high school and well into college, the young men talked long into the night about running away to Canada or Sweden. Or they spoke of joining before they were drafted. But with Nixon’s election in 1968 and a gradual draw down of troops in Southeast Asia throughout 1969, the specter of Vietnam began to diminish. Only the panic of the draft lottery, which began in December 1969, kept the adrenals hopping. That lottery number was all important. Plans and futures were made or broken with that wicked twist of fate. But life on campus began to ease back from the insanely fanatic and dissention seemed to go underground in the fall of her senior year.

But something was changing, really changing. If her three years at university before had been chaotic, these new times had turned inward, more vicious and more hateful, onto each other. She felt threatened by malevolence she could not name. It was creepy, destabilizing, degenerative. The Fulbright Commission broadcast testimony from antiwar soldiers who accused their fellow American soldiers of brutal, despicable war crimes. The melodrama felt manufactured. Shadowy groups built bombs in basements and overheated young men took over University offices.

Her charted center course had helped her through most of her university time. She watched the players but took no passionate side, suspicious of all overheated accounts.

She could have kept her center course in turbulent times. Yes, except for the revelation of the secrets about her personal life. Secrets that her mother had kept from her.

The revelation came in the form of five, heavy-duty cardboard filing boxes with an overseas APO address, postmarked on her 21st birthday. The letter from her father had said, “I want you to know that I love you. The day your mother took you away from me was the worst day in my life. I tried very hard for years to be allowed in your life. These boxes of legal filings, court briefs and court orders are the proof. Now that you are 21 and legally an adult, the court has no jurisdiction. Remember that I love you. I always have. Your father, Karoly Joseph Vincze”

--------------------------

“You never even told me I was named after him.”

“Carol, I don’t know why that man would send you those papers. It’s just not right.”

“That man. That man is my father who fought in the courts to be a father to me. You hid it from me. So when were you going to tell me, Mater? When were you planning to tell me about this? What was your schedule going to be? When I was thirty? Forty? On your death bed? 'Oh, Carol, by the way,’” in a singsong voice, " 'Just as a matter of historical fact, your father did not abandon you after all.'”

“Well, Lolly, he did. He did, you know, he did abandon me.”

“Abandon you, Mother. You? That has always been your story. So what else are you hiding from me? And don’t try to lie to me anymore. I have read the court documents. I have made the timeline. I know everything.”

“You and your timelines. Always the timelines. Always”

“Yes, me and my timelines. Too logical for you. Too concrete for your fluffy, aristocratic, wavy-handed way of the world. Cocktail parties. Beautiful hair, beautiful clothes. Perfect family unit.”

“I wanted the best for you.”

“The best for me, the best for me. For yourself. I’m a bobble in your life, mother. A good daughter who does not embarrass you.”

Her mother waved both hands over her head as if fending off insects, not realizing the irony of the action in context. “What do you want from me? What do you want?”

“The truth, Mater-Otter-Otter. The truth.” She turned to her stepfather. “And you. What do you have to add?”

Carol’s stepfather just opened his hands in silent supplication.

“For your own good,” her mother jumped in. “For your own good. Your safety and security.”

“My ass, my safety. Your vanity and your status. So upstanding, so pure. Daughter of the Sweeties of Baltimore, by God, couldn’t be tainted with impropriety.”

“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” said her stepfather. “That language is unacceptable.”

“Lying is unacceptable. The essence of vulgar. Crude, offensive, uncouth and naughty. Yes, naughty, mother dear. Caught between the sheets naughty. Spreading your legs to a man naughty …”

“That’s enough!”

“I have reviewed the timeline, Daddy,” she said. “So don’t try to deceive me. And you know what happened.”

His voice softened with the inference of his familiar standing with her. “Lovey, please. Please be reasonable.”

“I am under no obligation in the face of brazen deception to pretend indifference to the trickery that has been perpetrated on me my entire life.” She reached out an accepting hand to him but the touch transformed into a pinch. “You. You have been my father. And you betrayed the fundamental bond between us.”

That word brought silence, all around.

Her mother woke from the stupor. “Carol, you must understand,” she whimpered. “You have to understand.”

“I do, Mother. Better than you wish for me to. So, tell me now. Do not lie. What did this man do that caused you to deny his right to be my father?”

“He chose a career in military intelligence. You would have been, you were, at risk.”

“What kind of risk?”

“The risk of your life. And mine. And mine too.”

“What data do you have that we were at risk?”

“It was during the Olympics. The Olympics in Australia in 1955 when you were just a child. We had to run for our lives. He was unable to protect us. He could not protect us.”

“What happened?”

“Richard protected us. Richard saved us.”

“That’s enough, Margaret. I said, that’s enough.”

Prologue, Maida Vale

Maida Vale Prologue

But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather

She heard the song in the car on the way to pick up the grandchildren from school. She cried. Not the sobbing, whole body tears of fresh loss but the slow, welling tears of ruthless melancholy.

She had heard that a new contestant, a plain 47 year old woman from Scotland, had astonished the judges and the crowd with an unexpected performance on Britain’s Got Talent. She had read Victor Hugo’s book and attended a performance of Les Miserables in the city so she thought she knew the song. She had not watched Britain’s Got Talent nor had she called up the video on YouTube but she had only seen a newspaper photo of the contestant, Susan Boyle. Good going girl, she thought.

But it was this song and this voice finally heard in the intimacy of a short, solitary trip to pick up the joys in her life that brought back the memory of a time in 1972, such a long time ago but so near to her heart. A time when she had lost the anchors of a carefully prepared youth and watched the jetsam of her life – the hull and keel, deck and transom – slip starboard in a darkening night.

But Jack had been there, watching with her. Jack was always with her. Just as he had been with her during the loss of her premature son in 1981. Jack was old and tired by that time. The once licorice black patch of fur around one eye was flecked with gray and his once stately head and proud muzzle had turned gaunt and jagged. But he had patiently waited for her at the door when she returned from graveside. Nobel and dignified, bone-weary but uncomplaining.

Jack had shadowed her life like a guardian angel, a solid dog deep through the heart. Without him she would have been truly lost. She had met Jack in the summer of 1972 when she went to take care of her father’s little flat and big dog in Maida Vale, London. In an anchorless time he became the reason for continuation. Dogs need to be watered and fed and walked, groomed and bathed and patted. He didn’t always do what she asked, being – after all – rather stubborn. And wise. But when real danger approached – life-threatening, disastrous peril, not just the dashed dreams of a broken heart – yes, when she needed him most, he did exactly what was needed, at great risk. Though he almost got her killed, he redeemed himself by saving her life and he continued to save her throughout his 13 long years.

Her tears in the car that spring afternoon in 2008 were for him too, for Jack had waited for her all his life and never disappointed her. She knew without doubt that when he slept he dreamt of their partnership, when he woke his first thought was for her, and when he laid his head down at night his last thought was of her. A good dog. Her dog. So when he struggled to hang on, she knew he hung on for her.

She said to him, That’ll do, Jack. That’ll do.

And it did. It did do.

Maida Vale 1972 Jacket Cover

Necessary Losses

By Elle L. Childs


Carol Miller is a recently graduated college student invited to London to look after her estranged father’s small flat and his big dog while he is away for the summer. Her divorced father is an American naval communications officer attached to the American Embassy on Grovesnor Square and the year is 1972.

The flat is in London’s Maida Vale just overlooking the slightly down at the heels Little Venice section of the City which has its roots in Gypsy Canal Boat culture: a little shady, a little dangerous but beguiling. Everything looked calm and secure under tree-lined streets, far – so far – from the confused, hazy turmoil she left behind on campus at the end of the Vietnam War.

Carol was anxious to leave the US. Until her 21st birthday, she had lead a quiet sheltered life, raised as she was in the peaceful, upscale Country Club Manor neighborhood of central Denver, Colorado. Her mother had remarried and the oilman stepfather had provided well for them all since she was six. As she began her studies at the University of Virginia in 1968, unrest on campus against the Vietnam War intruded and began to apply increasing pressure on the skillfully charted, carefully mapped future she had chosen for herself. The unrest touched her peripherally and concerned her intellectually but she could not take sides because both sides seemed unsound to her.

But it was the revelation of a personal betrayal that sent Carol reeling. Her mother had kept secret from her all the court battles over child custody and had blocked her father’s visitation rights throughout her childhood. The whole family was aware of or participated in keeping her father from her. All the while, there she was, smoothly gliding on a silken childhood, silently believing her father did not love her.

Two weeks after Carol’s 21st birthday with a postmark date of her birthday, a crate of legal documents arrived from a military address in London and with it a letter from her estranged father. Here was the proof in legal documents and court filings that her father had fought for years and years to be allowed to visit her. The letter said: I love you and now that you are an adult, I am free to tell you so.

Her mother’s betrayal exploded like a bomb in Carol’s life. The debris of her security lay about her like rubble. She had to get away. All around her were strangers to her.

Through the kind-hearted efforts of her maternal grandmother, Carol found respite. Granmama had kept in touch with her paternal grandparents who had soothed their son over the years and had kept him up-to-date with Carol’s progress through childhood. Now, at the threshold of her adulthood, the three of them brokered the plan to send Carol to London where she would be on her own for the summer but carefully – all be it secretly – protected.

But Carol did not know – nor could her grandparents guess – that in leaving turbulence behind, she would stumble into treacherous international intrigues swirling through London’s radical underground.

Who is the puzzling man on the third floor flat of the Regency block house in Maida Vale? Quiet, dark, and commanding. Because her name is similar to his, she is mistaken as the contact for a shadowy confederation with connections to … to what, to whom? Radicals? Anarchists? Terrorists? And she learns a secret that upends her tranquility yet again.

The Olympic Games are set to begin in September. In the spring an airplane taking off from Rome is damaged by a bomb in a record player given to two English girls by two Arab men. In early summer, the son of a British prince dies in a fiery air disaster in the West Midlands. If he had lived, one of the titles he would have inherited was ‘Earl of Ulster’. Ulster, the British name for Northern Ireland.

In the terrorist summer of 1972, against a backdrop of bomb blasts, bloody rampages, upheavals, ghastly terrorist attacks and the bloodiest year in the Northern Ireland conflict, Carol learns a secret about the opening of the Olympic Games in Munich that if not exposed could spell disaster. Or is she mistaken?

Forced to flee, she sets off from the alleys of Notting Hill during festival through the canal network of London with the big dog that will quite possibly save her life if he doesn’t attract the unwanted attention that will get her killed.

Simple, Hard Solutions - The Age of Reagan

The progressive administrative state was the result of a political movement that resulted in the enhancement of the power and scope of the federal government's administrative apparatus in an attempt to cope with what it saw as NEW and THREATENING PROBLEMS of a rapidly industrializing economy and society.

Starting with the Progressive Movement in the early 20th century, the political classes sought expertise of intellectuals and acedemics, as if the world had become too complex for the citizen to self-govern.

Perhaps our elite governing class was over its head.

The premise of the administrative state is that our public problems are coplicated with no easy answers, whose remedy requires sophistocated legislative and extensive bureaucratic management.

The ruling classes thought that life and problems of life are so complicated, that modern life inflicts wounds on us all, and the healing of problems and wounds are COMPLICATED, to be ameliated only by professionals and intellectuals with nuanced and complicated tinkering.

And with that nuance, all professionals can then hide from consequences of results.

"We did it by committee. Everyone has responsibility."

Therefore no one has responsibility.

Remind you of Obama Care?

The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964 - 1980, by Steven F. Hayward

Why am I reading Age of Reagan? It is in research for my novel.

I am writing a novel set in London 1972 about a young American woman recently graduated from college whose life is turned upside down by a central betrayal that sends her on a flight away from the turbulence of the times in search of peace and stability. The time period is right at that seam in history when The Old Liberal Order was being overtaken by this new age of ours, The Age of Terrorism. My protagonist is caught up in swirling currents of London’s radical underground and learns a secret about the opening of the Olympic Games in Munich that if not exposed could spell disaster for many. Or is she mistaken?

We are so accustomed to presentation in the mass media of the Vietnam era as a time of magic, libertine wonders, and really important socio-political struggles. Witness the “Recreate ‘68” nostalgia for the bracing backbone of something to rebel against. Follow that 70’s Show with groovy jargon and flower-power graphics, all so self-assured of its own importance in the rockin’ times. Snarky attitudes. But cool. Cooool, man; like – hey? And the current mass media would have us think that all those not completely on-board with the approved revolutionary side were, are, and forever will be – what? Not just wrong but disgusting. Unworthy of discussion. They believe that they won the argument because, hey man, everyone worth knowing has the same opinion. They don’t know anyone who feels differently. If their viewpoint isn’t on top, there must be something wrong with the process.

To have lived through that time in history was different than it is now presented. It was confusing.

And I want to know why. You don’t find out why by eating baby food.

I'm Reading Something Worth Reading, Thank God.

After the profound disappointment of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I need something well-written and profound to chase away the unpleasant aftertaste.

The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964 – 1980, by Steven F. Hayward.

The blog in which I reviewed "Girl" is called The Murder Room, named after P.D.James' book, and concentrates on my obsession with mystery genre, my guilty pleasure.

Age of Reagan is NOT in the genre. I will be handling that book review in this my new blog, The Cluttered Corner.

I am also reading The Black Moth by Georgette Heyer, a historical romance. I will review that book, also in The Cluttered Corner, but only at completion. I am not a fan of the romance genre especially in its current incarnation of feminine emotional pornography overdrawn with politically correct female protagonists way, way out of step with actual female experience in the time in which the stories are set.

But Georgette Heyer is widely credited with starting our modern historical romance genre. One might credit Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and others with the provenance and there is much to be said to support that claim. But Heyer wrote in our times about a time long gone; Austen, the Brontes and other foremothers wrote about their own time at the time they lived.

Not in the same league as Steven Hayward's books, still Heyer is also worth reading if only to appreciate how in touch she is with enduring feminine reality. (In stark contrast to Stieg Larsson's male fantasies. I digress. Sorry for the pot shot.)

By the way, I highly recommend Heyer’s historical romance novels Frederika and A Civil Contract. You will not have heaving this and engorged that, but rather a mature (meant in the highest possible sense), insightful story of women in Regency and Early Victorian time periods. No, it is not great literature on par with, say, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but pleasant.

And since I am recommending things, do get the unabridged audio book of Anna Karenina and enjoy its being read to you. You will keep the many, many characters straight and the sheer pleasure of the performance is a treat not to be missed.