The Apothecary Page 0,4

if I was anything like Katharine Hepburn, it was in the scenes where she’s being a giant pest. I cried in the taxi all the way to the airport, past the churning oil rigs on La Cienega. I cried on the first aeroplane I’d ever been on, which should have been exciting, and was exciting—all those tiny buildings below—but I wasn’t going to give my parents the satisfaction of knowing that I was enjoying it.

At Heathrow Airport in London, there was a framed picture of the brand-new Queen Elizabeth II on the wall.

“She’s not that much older than you are,” my mother said. “And she’s been through a war, and her father’s dead, and now she has to be queen, poor thing.”

“See?” my father said. “Your life could be worse.”

I looked at the picture of the young queen. We had escaped ahead of the US marshals, locking up the house and packing only the things we could carry. My parents were going to be writing for the BBC under fake names—fake names, when my mother wouldn’t even put yellow food colouring in margarine! We were living like criminals or spies. Although I was angry, standing there looking at the plucky young queen’s portrait, I allowed myself to think that my mother was right, and it might be an adventure.

But February in London crushed those hopes. We took a taxi through streets that were still bomb-scarred and desolate, seven years after the war’s end, to a tiny third-floor flat on St. George’s Street in Primrose Hill. Across the street was a haberdasher—my father said he was like a tailor—standing outside his shop with his hands behind his back and a look on his face as if no one would ever come in.

Our new landlady, Mrs Parrish, took off her apron and patted a wild cloud of hair to show us around. She said the gas water heater over the kitchen sink was broken, and we would have to heat pots of water on the stove.

The kitchen was along one side of the living room, no bigger than a closet, and could be closed away just like a closet. The rooms were freezing and the walls seemed damp. The brown wallpaper was water-stained near the ceiling.

We must have looked dismayed, because the distracted Mrs Parrish suddenly focused on us. She was not going to let some spoiled Americans fail to appreciate their good fortune. “You’re lucky to get the place, you know,” she said.

“Of course,” my mother said quickly. “We’re very grateful.”

“People are queuing up for a flat like this, with its own lavatory, and separate bedrooms, and a working telephone line. But the BBC asked to hold it, specially.” It was clear that we did not deserve such a bounty, when her countrymen, who had lost so much, were still going without private bathrooms.

“We’re very grateful,” my mother repeated.

“Do you have your ration cards for the marketing?”

“Not yet,” my mother said.

“You’ll need those,” the landlady said. “And you’ll find that the butcher sells out first thing in the morning, ration cards or no.” She lowered her voice. “I can sell you some eggs, if you like. They’re hard to get, but I know someone with hens.”

“That would be very nice.”

Mrs Parrish showed us where to put penny coins into the gas heater in the wall, to make it work. We didn’t have any English pennies, but said we would get some.

“Mark you,” she said, brushing dust from the heater off her hands, “it doesn’t do much. Apart from eat up pennies. You’ll want your hot water bottles for the beds.”

“We don’t have hot water bottles,” my mother said.

“Try the apothecary,” the landlady said. “Around the corner, on Regent’s Park. He’ll have pennies, too.”

And she left us alone.

My mother started investigating the closet kitchen, and my father and I put on every warm thing we had, which wasn’t much, to go find the apothecary, which my father said was like a pharmacy. The sky over St. George’s Street was grey, and the buildings were grey, and people wore grey. It sounds like a cliché, but it was true. Going from Los Angeles to London in 1952 was like leaving a Technicolor movie and walking into a black-and-white one.

Around the corner on Regent’s Park Road, just as the landlady said, we came to a shopfront with two bay windows full of glass bottles. A painted sign over one window said APOTHECARY, and one over the other window said ESTABLISHED 1871. My father pushed