Christmas in Beckenham

Where have I landed this time?

I arrived in this place as if it were familiar, thinking I knew what it was about. The wind howls again like a giant practicing ujjayi breath, Mother Nature attempting to detoxify her soul.

People say: Southeast London. As if it’s a culture, as if it’s a known entity. They expect certain pieces of the experience. Trains frequently cancelled or delayed and roads built in a nonsense maze-like pattern. Suburban-like trees and parks juxtaposed with gritty little micro-city spaces. Nail salons one after another, hipster coffee shops, convenience stores to grab your gum and Coca Cola, fried chicken, a high end hair salon, a cheap barber. My students teach me the local language and I have to pardon? several times before understanding.

Dissonance everywhere. I feel like an alien.

Beckenham, near St George’s Church

I gaze at a photo from last night on my screen whilst still lying in bed. It was taken as a memory note, a capture of the world as fiction. My world, the way I experience our collective. A fiction in the way our memories and imagination blend with the now, in the way we choose to frame certain visions and experiences, collecting them in some kind of book that is our minds¹.

Beckenham is home and not.

We passed by the little park square by the big church on the hill, the one that’s always flying a brilliant English flag. The red cross sending sound waves as a haven, beckoning us toward the graveyard there with the giant stones they only used to use in the old days when people were more scarce, even in London.

My first encounter with this space was seven months ago. Walking the neighborhoods in search of where to rent a flat for us to perch a while, I sat in this coffee shop and gazed out at the same scene I was walking through last night.

Only now they are selling Christmas trees, and last night on our way to dinner a small band, carolers, and the mayor dressed in a red sash adorned the space further, filling us with the sounds of a familiarity from a childhood in Boston. With rain threatening and umbrellas left at home for their uselessness in the storm, we continued on our little journey to dinner at a place I have passed by on morning runs enveloped in darkness. I imagine it as a warm space like the lit up village homes, bakery, beer hall, and train station in our wintry Swiss miniature display. The candle glowing within the ceramic invites me like the gastropub’s glows of some strange light, perhaps an exit sign, that I resignify as some soul of this little town. This must be where the life is, where the warmth of her community gathers.

We eat and it does not disappoint. The usual fare: fish and chips, meat pie, sausage and mash. Our bellies are full in a way that will never be fashionable. The same warm fullness from decades ago in New England or that on cold nights in the Alps. Meat or hot cheese, some kind of potato, they taste good in the space of warm company. The kind of love that is forever.

The rain has stopped on the way back but so, too, have the carolers. I snap this photograph in their wake. The sign of this little town, a part of London, marks a place I won’t call home at this time next year. When I feel uprooted, it’s good to remind myself where I am.

The gusty wind carries us back. Our tiny Swiss village is lit up in the window like a beacon. The ceramic details of bakery windows and children playing in snow are blurred by the droplets of water that incessantly cover the glass. But I know it is there, beyond the pane.

My son takes my key and runs ahead. Santa has come!

As a child, I used to travel with my family to Texas from Boston each Christmas to see our grandmother. We left the fresh pine trees, soft snow, and traditionally decorated narrow cobbled streets for plastic copies of real things and empty, even, flat roads going nowhere we knew. Before our journey, there would always be an evening where my mom and dad would gather us in the car and declare: Let’s go look at the Christmas lights! We drove around for an hour or so, driving to the best neighborhoods with indoor two-story trees on display and tastefully wrapped six-bedroom houses, then off to the next town with the huge plastic Jesus and reindeer on top of the rooftops, reminding us of Chevy Chase’s near calamity. Our dad would slow down or speed up as he pleased, blissfully unaware of cars behind him or general traffic directions on side streets.

We would eventually arrive home and see our own lit tree in the window as well as a few haphazardly strung lights on a bush outside. My brother was asleep at that point, but my sister and I would race to the door, which was probably unlocked, and quickly discover that, yes, Santa had come!

There were no gifts to unwrap. Just a few treats in the stockings and his presence marked by eaten cookies and milk. Pens, chocolates, a tiny nail polish bottle, they were dumped out from our stockings and compared with ooohs and aaaahs. Our parents told us Santa wanted us to enjoy Christmas at home as well, before going to that foreign place without snow.

I remember those evenings much more vividly than my actual childhood Christmas Days. Now I know it was as much for my mother as it was for us. You see, her family was in Minnesota. Her parents had six of her eight siblings nearby. There was no ethical way for her to insist on going home at Christmas when her mother-in-law was by herself. And I do think that even if we had been heading to the frigid air of the north midwest, she would have wanted this little moment at the home she and my dad had made for us. A home-place that only grew when we moved to a different house in the same town when I was nine, the house I will fly to today.

My child knows that Santa comes to see us - just briefly, without pomp and circumstance - at whatever is our home-place. Due to jobs and the pandemic and general life choices, he, at six, has lived in three different countries and four different homes in December of different years. Sometimes I worry what this means for him. Feel guilty, confused. But don’t we carry home with us? Isn’t a feeling, not a place?

Beckenham has a different offer. This flat I found online with large rectangular prisms has been filled with our things and our breath. The pavement is cracked and it is difficult to ride a bicycle or to roller skate anyway due to all the hidden drives that pepper the shrubbed path (but we are technically in London, after all). Oak and sycamore trees line our street and a churchyard lies just around the corner. The great big park is a five minute walk. There we run in the woods, visit the playground, and have coffee and pain au chocolat in the mansion on the hilltop, dreaming of that old-fashioned aristocratic life in the movies that somebody once had here.

As I write on the morning after this supernatural occurrence when all of our carrots were eaten by reindeer that found a way to get in despite our lack of chimney (must be the broken balcony window, says he), I am surrounded by photographs, trinkets, and books that travel with me. As the wind continues to threaten the integrity of thin walls, I look out at streetlights, more raindrops, and newly hung icicle lighting on a flat in my direct view.

I still don’t understand it here. Maybe I never will. But it is a home now, however ephemeral that might be.

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I leave you with a song from a Beckenham native. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

1. I learned the other day from a student that some Hindus believe there is a god connected to each book, because they were originally trees.