Stella Gibbons lived her entire life in the Hampstead and Highgate area of London; she displays her great knowledge of and love for ‘Ham & High’ and other areas of north London in many of her books.
Stella Gibbons was surely also familiar from personal experience with the sort of nightmare journeys that are mentioned in several other articles on here; there is a similar but much smaller-scale nightmare episode in her novel My American.
My American opens with a description of 12-year-old Amy Lee’s visit to Kenwood House in Hampstead on a beautiful autumn day in 1928. Exploring the house and grounds is a wonderful way to spend her birthday, but Amy's journey home is something of an endurance test.
The nightmare is very short-lived; Amy gets just a tiny taste of what people in other articles got in huge doses, and she soon recovers.
There are some very familiar elements in the account of the return journey: bad decisions, wasted effort, unexpected setbacks, 'difficult' people and being cold, tired, hungry, alone and penniless with darkness coming on. It is these familiar features make her ordeal worth commenting on.
The end of the visit to Kenwood
Amy enjoys her visit to Kenwood very much. However, the day is very cold and when dusk is imminent she decides it is time to go home.
She now has to face a reality that is full of problems.
She is sick with hunger as she has had nothing to eat since early morning.
She spent her birthday shilling on a packet of postcards as a souvenir of her visit; now she has almost no money left. Buying something for her collection of mementos rather than saving her money for the practicalities reminds me of Antonia White, whose purchase of an expensive handbag in Vienna left her very short of money for her return journey.
Amy Lee’s nightmare journey home
The journey home starts with a walk from Kenwood to a place where Amy can catch a tram.
She makes a wrong decision: she runs to catch a waiting tram as she is afraid of missing it and climbs hastily to the top, but it is quite a long time before it is ready to move off so she has wasted her energy for nothing.
A ‘shilling’ that Amy borrowed from the American boy she met at Kenwood turns out to be a useless American coin. This is a severe setback and a bitter disappointment as she had hoped to buy something to eat. She has just enough money for a tram ticket for the first half of her journey home, but the bad-tempered conductor is rude to her so she gets off and takes a later tram, climbing the stairs once again.
She usually loves riding on the top of the tram, but now the movement makes her feel sick. Her head feels funny; she knows that this is because she is very hungry.
When she leaves the tram to walk the rest of the way down Holloway Road and up to Highbury Fields, she has to endure cold rain beating in her face.
She has a fright before she gets home:
“No one bumped into her - she saw to that -.but it was tiring dodging people, and once a car nearly ran her down when she crossed a road. Everyone shouted at her, looking frightened and furious. Her head felt queerer and queerer, but she took no notice of that, and as usual, enjoyed the walk.”
Amy reaches home safely, but her head swims so much that she has to hang on to the banisters when going upstairs to keep herself from falling.
It is the very realistic,detailed and rather extraneous account of this journey that suggests to me that Stella Gibbons had experienced some similar nightmare scenarios of her own.
It could have been so much worse
Amy is not ill, just weak with hunger; she is not lost in an area that is strange to her nor is she a long way from home. She knows that she will soon be back and will be able to get warm and have something to eat. She has had a wonderful day out; good experiences often make any associated discomfort seem a price worth paying.
She has some bad moments, but she does not cross into the danger zone. Her distress signals are not strong enough to attract predators, although her inner state after she discovered that her silver coin was useless might have affected the first tram conductor.
Amy had a penny to pay for the tram ride from Highgate down to the middle of the Holloway Road, but even if she had been literally penniless she could have managed to walk all the way home to Highbury. I know this because I have walked from Hampstead to my home in Highbury myself. I did this to save money. I was about the same age as Amy at the time.
It really could have been much worse.
Kenwood House with its grounds and lake:
A tram in the Holloway Road around 1930:
