“Kellie!” I pushed as forcefully as I could and reached the sliding doors as they came together and, like a cruel guillotine, severed me from Kellie. We were packed in, body to body, with no respectable breathing space. I pounded my fist on the closed door. It wouldn’t budge.
The train moved forward, and I had no way to stop it.
Kellie and I made eye contact through the window. She shouted something, but I couldn’t hear her. An instant later the train entered a tunnel, and everything outside our sardine can went dark.
Don’t panic. Think. Think.
Kellie and I never had been in a situation like this, so I didn’t have a precedent to refer to. We didn’t have an arranged meeting place or a backtrack plan. I supposed the safest thing to do would be to get off at the next station, turn around, and go back to where Kellie was standing when the train pulled away. Without the familiar convenience of instant cell phone connection, I was lost.
I decided that if Kellie wasn’t still standing where I last saw her, then I would take a cab back to our hotel. I would wait for her in our room. If she didn’t return to the room right away, at least I could ask the concierge to help me.
My racing heart calmed as I repeated the logical plan to myself.
Then I remembered. Kellie had my bag.
My purse was in the bag.
All I had with me were the clothes I was wearing.
I had been carrying a small stash of emergency money in the inside pocket of my jacket, but I had exchanged the jacket for the new raincoat. And all I had in the pocket of the raincoat was a wad of gray lint.
Oh boy, this isn’t good. Lost in London. Not good. What do I do? What do I do?
The train slowed, and I knew my first step was to get out. I couldn’t stand the claustrophobic conditions another minute. As soon as the door was halfway open, I slid out.
A recorded voice we had heard every time we boarded a train in the underground seemed to mock me as I stepped onto the cement platform: “Mind the gap.” The bloodless voice was referring to the gap between the train and the platform. It wasn’t a large space, but it certainly was wide enough for a wrong-turned foot to get wedged in.
I made sure to mind the gap as well as to mind my disoriented sense of direction. The first thing I did was stop in front of an underground map and determine which station I had just come from.
“Westminster,” I said aloud. I saw that I had gotten off at Embankment. All I needed to do was wind my way up through the layered maze of stairs and escalators and board a train from the same Green Line going in the opposite direction.
My logic worked. I meandered my way through the concrete catacombs, found the platform for the next train back to Westminster, and waited for its arrival.
A rainstorm of possibilities pelted my thoughts. What do I do if she isn’t there? What if I can’t find the right platform? What if she exited the underground?
The strangest peace rested on me. As confusing and disconcerting as all this was, I felt as if every step I was taking was being protected. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I didn’t know where I was going. But I wasn’t alone. More than I had ever experienced before, I was aware of the Lord’s presence.
I boarded the train heading back to Westminster and thought, When was the last time I felt this secure?
I held on as the train took off, and the first part of the verse I had read in Exeter Chapel came back to me. “I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD.”
That’s what was happening. I was recognizing that, even in this situation, Jesus Christ was Lord. And He was with me. I wasn’t about to stand up and applaud like the man from Ireland had done in the theater, but inside, my heart was kneeling in humble adoration of the King of kings. I knew He wouldn’t leave me.
Exiting at Westminster with renewed strength and more aggressive skills in place this time, I looked right and left for Kellie. I waited for the crowd to subside and walked to the end of the platform and back.
“Okay, what now, Lord?”
I went over to the map on the wall and looked for clues. Why did Kellie want to get off here? What was it she wanted to keep as a surprise from me? What was her clever plan?
Using my best Sherlock Holmes powers of deductions, I pulled together everything I knew about this part of London based on what I remembered from travel brochure photos and my Internet research.
Of course! Westminster. The Houses of Parliament. That means Ben is directly above me. Kellie was trying to arrange it so we would pop out of the underground station and be face to face with Ben.
Since no one was standing close enough to hear me, I raised my chin in satisfaction of a mystery well solved and said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
Then I took off with purpose, certain that Kellie would know I had figured out her plan and would come looking for her under Ben’s watchful gaze.
My optimistic steps took me as far as the exit of the Westminster underground. To leave the station, I needed to insert my ticket into the automatic turnstile that opens only after being fed the tiny slip of paper with the magnetic strip.
Thinking always of safety and potential pickpockets, I had placed my ticket securely inside the zippered pouch on the side of my purse. The very same purse that was now riding around with Kellie inside my heavy shopping bag.
I was stuck in the London underground. I couldn’t get out!
“Excuse me.” I stopped a woman who appeared to be close to my age. She was carrying a plastic grocery sack and a large box that had a picture of a toaster oven on the outside. She looked frazzled and in a hurry, but I imposed on her anyway. “I lost my ticket. Do you know how I can get out?”
“Find your ticket,” she said brusquely and moved on through the turnstile without ever making eye contact with me.
I noticed a uniformed man in a bright green vest. “Excuse me, sir. I’ve lost my ticket. Can you tell me how I can get out?”
The walkie-talkie on his belt crackled, and he turned down the volume. “Did you have a ticket when you got on?”
“Yes. I left it in my bag.”
“And where is your bag now?”
I should have considered my answer more carefully before saying to him in a lighthearted tone, “I don’t know. It could be anywhere.”
He removed the walkie-talkie from his belt and issued some sort of coded message before turning to me and saying, “Follow me, will you?”
I assumed he was taking me to the employee exit or some such exit for emergencies. Instead he ushered me into a small, enclosed office where two guards were standing next to a metal chair.
“Would you mind having a seat?” he asked. The other security personnel in the bright green vests both had their arms crossed and were giving me stern looks.
“What’s going on?”
“Security measures. Please have a seat.”
The door opened, and a uniformed bobby entered wearing black pants, a black hat, and a bright green, high-visibility jacket. He looked like the sort of officer who would be on international TV news reports explaining why a bomb squad had been called in to avert a potential disaster.
“Good evening,” he said to me politely. “May we have a look at your ID?”
“I-I don’t have it with me.” For the past two days I had given up the pouch around my neck and had tucked my passport into my purse, just as the young woman had suggested when we were standing in line at customs.
“You’re not carrying your passport?” he asked before I had a chance to explain.
“No, I had it with me, but it’s in my bag.”
“And your bag is …”
I decided I better talk fast. “I don’t know. It’s with my friend. She was carrying it for me, and I didn’t make it off the train fast enough. She got off at Westminster, and I didn’t. I went on to the next stop and then turned around and came back, but she wasn’t there. I’m not sure I was even on the right platform. At this point I don’t know where she is. I
thought she might be with Ben by now, but I couldn’t get out to see.”
“With Ben?” the officer asked.
“Big Ben.” I realized these men were unlikely to understand my crush on a clock.
“Are you saying you were going to meet your friend at the Parliament Building?”
“I’m not sure she’s there. I was just going to see if that’s where she went.”
“With your bag.”
“Right. She was trying to surprise me, and I’m pretty sure the surprise was to see Big Ben.”
“That was her surprise? To see Big Ben?”
I nodded and said in my fifteen-year-old voice, “I’ve never seen him before.”
By that point even I was beginning to question my story. Big Ben is, well, big. He’s hard to miss. Going to “see” him wasn’t exactly a normal kind of surprise. These officials had reason to question me, but I wanted to make it clear that all they needed to do was let me out of the underground labyrinth, and I wouldn’t bother them anymore. I was about to promise that I wouldn’t even take the underground again during the rest of my time in London. I would stick to the buses and cabs and keep my passport on me at all times. But apparently it wasn’t going to be that easy.
“Listen,” the officer said. “I do believe your account of being separated from your friend. Quite common. But I’m afraid we’re going to have to take our usual precautions and file a report.”
“A report for what?”
“We’re required to report all potential terrorist activity. This tube station has been on high alert the past few days, and we must report anything suspicious.”
“Suspicious?” I stared at the man in disbelief. “Me?”
It took almost an hour for me to comply with all their questions and forms. The more my story unfolded, the more sympathy I seemed to gain from at least one of the officers. He said I was the most “winsome” tourist they had questioned in a long while.
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I was relieved when the bobby said he was going to call the hotel I listed to see if I was registered there. A few minutes later he returned to the small interrogation room confirming that, yes, my story matched up regarding the hotel. I understood now why the front desk had taken our passports at check-in and logged the information on them. I was registered officially with the hotel and that might have been the main reason they agreed to release me. That, and Kellie having left a message at the hotel in case I called in. The message was that she would meet me at the hotel.
Papers signed, case closed, I was released. One of the security officers used a master pass to activate one of the turnstiles, and I was set free. The minute I was on the other side, I turned back to him. “Oh, excuse me. I don’t have any way of getting back to my hotel.”
He looked down at my legs, as if to make sure I realized they were still attached and serviceable.
“Never mind,” I said politely, realizing my issues were no longer his problem.
“I’ll give you a pass just this once,” he said as I was about to walk away. “Go back to Embankment, then take the Northern Line to Tottenham Court. You’ll be all right from there.”
The underground pass he handed me came with a friendly warning to keep this one in my pocket.
I thanked him and made my way into the belly of the earth beneath London. When I thought about it, having such an elaborate transportation system run extensively under the surface of this major city was pretty astounding.
The other astounding thing, I realized when I figured out how to make the change at Embankment, was that I was navigating these concrete-lined arteries of London. A few days ago I was hesitant to take a ride in a hot-air balloon. I had told Kellie I was afraid of defying gravity. That fear was gone. The Lord had been with me, guiding me, just as He had been every step of this trip. It had been many years since I had felt this close to Him.
The second half of the Jeremiah verse was becoming truer in my life than it ever had before: “They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me wholeheartedly.” What was happening inside me definitely was encompassing my whole heart.
With quiet confidence and nothing in the world but the clothes on my back and the underground pass in my pocket, I boarded the Northern Line train and took one of the open seats with the self-assurance of someone who did this every day.
When I disembarked at Holborn, I walked out to the street and looked around. It was dark now. I recognized the station since Kellie and I had started our daily adventures from this station twice. I started walking, and two blocks later I turned and walked another block and a half. There was our hotel—as grand as it had been when we first arrived in the taxi.
I went to the front desk to ask for a duplicate key. Before the clerk ran one of the credit card–sized keys through the machine for me, the hotel manager cordially stepped over and with a formal expression asked, “How are you this evening?”
“Fine,” I said. And I meant it.
I took the elevator up to our floor and inserted the key in the door. Kellie must have heard the key because she rushed to the door and greeted me with a wild hug and expressions of relief. We talked over each other’s sentences while still standing in the hall.
“How did you get back here? You didn’t have your purse—”
“And I didn’t have my tube ticket.”
“I didn’t realize I had your purse until I got back here to the room and dropped the bags on the floor, and there it was—”
“I tried to figure out where you wanted to take me—”
“I was saying to come back to the hotel. That’s what I was yelling through the closed doors as the train pulled away: ‘Go back to the hotel.’ ”
“I thought you were planning for us to come up from the underground station and see Big Ben.”
“That was my original plan. How did you get out of the underground station without—”
“I asked for help and ended up being questioned as if I were a potential terrorist!”
“What!”
The door next to ours opened and shut soundly. It seemed our neighbors were giving us a subtle hint that we were being too noisy in the hallway. Covering our mouths, we took our debriefing session inside our room and closed the door.
We quickly agreed that staying in and ordering room service was a good option for us that evening. We had had enough excitement for one day.
Tell me again why we’re getting up so early,” I said the next morning after our wake-up call rang at five o’clock.
“The brochure says it’s best to get an early start for the Portobello Road Antiques Market.” Kellie had picked up a brochure in the hotel lobby the day before while waiting for me to arrive. The brochure promised us that all the fruit stalls and bakeries in Notting Hill offered their freshest wares first thing in the morning. “Some of the stalls open at 5:30 a.m. on weekends.”
Kellie’s determination paid off. When we arrived at 6:05, the place already was hopping. My impression of Portobello Road came from the movie Notting Hill. As it turned out, the images in the film mirrored the real-life experience quite closely. A few vendors still were unpacking their wares, but most of them were in full commerce swing when we strolled by the small, charming stalls.
We found a bakery on the corner that was doing a brisk business inside and had a cart set up outside laden with freshly baked goods. The croissants were as large as my outspread hand, and the ones filled with almond paste looked decadently delicious. We took two of those.
Then we found a tiny coffee bean store that had a long line of customers out the front door—neighborhood groupies waiting impatiently for their morning cup of joe. We soon knew what the attraction was. The fragrance of the dark ground coffee beans lingered in the nippy morning drizzle and surrounded that particular corner of the block like a promise of sunbeams in a cup.
We succumbed easily. Ten minutes later, with steamy, foamy lattes in one hand and big, fat, crumbly almond croissants in
the other, we left the fruit and vegetable section of Portobello Road and journeyed into antique enlightenment as we strolled through the endless stalls. Anything, and I do mean anything, an antique seeker was looking for could be found somewhere within the jumbled, endearing maze of treasures.
When I pause now and remember all the delights of our trip to London, that morning, weaving through the indoor and outdoor booths with our coffee and croissants, oohing and aahing at every turn, well … I smile one of my best smiles every time I think about it.
The rain strolled right along with us all morning. I had on my new London Fog raincoat with the handy-dandy hood, so I didn’t mind the drops or the drips. Underneath the wonderful coat I wore my new jeans and my new cashmere–merino wool sweater. I was happy. I was comfortable and full of contentment.
Kellie and I loved observing all the amazing people, particularly the vendors, who showed up here every day, rain or shine. They seemed to be barely affected by the swarms of people pressing their faces into the tiny stalls and picking up various items from the collections for inspection.
An odd china cup and saucer from a long-since-discontinued nineteenth-century Spode pattern was filled with antique earrings from the art deco era. The bejeweled items were tagged as coming from the estate sale of some lord and lady in the Lake District. Resting comfortably under the fine china cup was a dilapidated copy of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, complete with etchings, copyright 1845.
For the serious or even the casual collector of anything old, this was the one place in the world where that collector might find her elusive treasure.
Kellie and I bought a lot that day. We didn’t spend an outrageous amount of money, but we bought a lot of treasures. Our treasure hunt started with a ring.
“Look at this,” I said to Kellie when I spotted the darling ring in one of the indoor stalls. Sitting on a faded blue velvet pincushion, the ring looked like a dainty Miss Muffet sitting on her tuffet. The curds and whey were missing, but I’m sure a spider had sat down beside her more than once during her captivity in this haphazard display.