A few months later, when I was at a shoe store with my mother, the salesman commented that I had flat feet and ventured that I would have back problems in later life (true, alas), but also that I might be disqualified from the draft. The Vietnam War was dominating the headlines, and I had taken on board the idea that when I finished high school, I’d have to go fight. I wasn’t good even at scuffles in the sandbox, and the idea of being dropped into a jungle with a gun petrified me. My mother considered the Vietnam War a waste of young lives. World War II, on the other hand, had been worth fighting, and every good American boy had done his part, flat feet or otherwise. I wanted to understand the comparative standard whereby some wars were so righteous that my own mother thought they warranted my facing death, while others were somehow none of our business. Wars didn’t happen in America, but America could send you off to war anyplace else in the world, rightly or wrongly. Flat feet or not, I wanted to know those places, so I could make my own decisions about them.
I was afraid of the world. Even if I was spared the draft and fascism failed to establish a foothold in the Nixon years, a nuclear attack was always possible. I had nightmares about the Soviets detonating a bomb in Manhattan. Although not yet acquainted with the legend of the Wandering Jew, I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port. I thought I might be kidnapped; when my parents were being particularly annoying, I imagined I had already been kidnapped, taken away from nicer people in some more benign country to be consigned to this nest of American madness. I was precociously laying the groundwork for an anxiety disorder in early adulthood.
Running in counterpoint to my reckonings with destruction was my growing affection for England, a place I had never visited. My Anglophilia set in about the time my father started reading me
My incipient Anglophilia was nourished by a childhood babysitter. I was a colicky infant, so my mother had sought a helper who could give her a bit of a break one day a week. She advertised the position and set up interviews with likely prospects. One day the bell rang when no one was expected. My mother was surprised to find at the door a middle-aged Scottish woman as wide as she was tall, who announced, “I’m the nanny. I’ve come to take care of the baby.” My mother, presuming she had forgotten an appointment, led Bebe back to my room, where I grew calm in seconds and ate my best meal yet. Bebe was hired on the spot; only later did it materialize that she had gotten off the elevator on the wrong floor and was supposed to be going to the family in 14E rather than to us in 11E. By then, it was too late. For the next decade, Bebe came on Thursdays and made us sherry trifle and told us stories about growing up on the Isle of Mull. As a little girl she had had a purse with three patches on it that read
Like the characters in my beloved British books, Bebe was eccentric and magical—childlike herself, and incapable of exasperation, disappointment, or anger. She taught me how to roll my