Falling in Love with London: The Beginning

London was her idea.

Mary Beth and I met at freshman orientation and hated each other. We sat next to each other in speech class first semester, by the pure luck of alphabetical order, which also paired us together for a project. We had to deliver speeches about someone who changed our lives. We both picked a dead uncle. We’ve been best friends ever since.

At the start of sophomore year, my boyfriend since senior year of high school broke up with me (again). I was restless, spiraling, desperate for something to cling onto, something to save me from that heartbreak that feels so end-of-everything when you’re 19 years old. Mary Beth grew up in White Pine, just a few miles from our college town in Tennessee. She’d lived there her whole live, generations before her. On weekends, she camped with her cousins, ate Sunday lunches with her grandmother, cheered her little brother on at high school baseball games. She’d never been on a plane, hardly left the state, let alone the country.

“What if we fucking went to London?” she asked me sitting outside Henderson Hall one day.

“Like a trip?” I asked.

“Nah, dude, like study abroad.”

“We can’t afford that,” I told her.

“No, one of my professors was talking about it this week. It ends up being the same as a semester here.”

There was no way that could possibly be true.

It was.

Our college partnered with an exchange program that went through Imperial College in London, though we didn’t actually go to campus for our classes. Instead, the program was run from a tall, narrow, 4-story building off Gloucester Road. Most of the professors were through the exchange program as well, coming to London only for the semester as we did. Only our British Life and Culture professor and the staff and program directors were London natives.

If I’m honest, I thought she would back out. Maybe I thought I would, too. Even though Scott* and I had been broken up for weeks, he still acted as though we were together—but only when it was convenient. I was tired of the back and forth. Maybe I thought by leaving for four months, I’d force him to make a choice about us.

When I told him I was leaving for the semester, he was furious. He didn’t understand how I could make a decision like that, how I could just leave, how I could have already made the deposits, booked a flight, planned a whole half a year without him. You’re the one who left me, I reminded him. Who’s leaving who now? he shot back.

He came to the airport to send us off all the same. Our closest friends, our siblings, our moms, Mary Beth’s aunt and cousins, some of our sorority sisters, they all met us at the Knoxville airport on January 13 (Scott’s birthday) to tell us goodbye.

We stared with excitement as the city of London passed by our windows in a black taxi cab. We gawked at how much we owed the cabbie for a ride from Gatwick to Belgravia.

We didn’t know it then, but the apartment building our exchange program owned was in one of the poshest parts of London. We were assigned to Flat 4 in Johnson House, a building on the corner of Ebury and Cundy Streets in Belgravia.

We had three other flatmates: Paige, a type A, by-the-books girl who would tire quickly of my and Mary Beth’s antics, from Kentucky (or was it West Virginia?); Sara, a theatre enthusiast from Missouri; and Rachel, a fun-loving up-for-anything yes-girl, also from Tennessee, just a few counties west of us. Mary Beth and I shared a room, while Rachel had her own small single and Sara bunked with Paige.

We rode the Tube for the first time later that evening to meet the rest of our exchange program at the Regency Hotel for tea. All the girls in the program lived in Johnson House, between the Tube stations of Victoria and Sloane Square, while the boys lived in a building near Earl’s Court. As we settled in our afternoon tea time, we learned that almost the entire program was students from universities in Missouri. Our flat consisted of the only 4 students not from Missouri, with the exception of Sara.

We took a bus tour in the rain, saw all of London’s main attractions, made notes of what to revisit later: Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Westminster Abbey. We were high on sleep deprivation, adrenaline, excitement. Fear, even.

“Kate, what the fuck are we doing?” Mary Beth asked me through the darkness of our small, shared bedroom one of those first nights.

I laughed. “I have no idea.”

“I can’t believe we did this. We’re in London. We’re in London, Kate.”

the girls of flat 4, tower bridge, 2010

It was a city we fell for quickly, faster than either of us had ever fallen for a boy, for a place, or even for each other. We were close friends when we left Tennessee, but at the airport, Grandmother—Mary Beth’s, but the closest thing to one I’ve had for the past 12 years since losing mine—took us each by the hand and said, “Oh girls. This is so special. You’re doing this together. You’ll always be bonded by these four months. You’ll always be best friends because of this.”

We laughed because we were 19 and we thought our friendship of less than two entire years ran pretty deep. We remember this moment now, together, often: remember what Grandmother said about London? God, she was right.

We took what felt like a hundred photos that first week of everything we saw. Phone still flipped back then; we had handheld cameras we kept in our purses. Periodically, the girls in our building would trade memory cards, and we’d download each other’s pictures to our computers, where we would upload them to Facebook to share with our families. When I look through the photos now, I laugh at how blurry they are, how rain streaked, how low quality. How few there are. Whispers of where we were, out of place snapshots, memories we can’t quite place now.

In the first week or so, before classes got going, the program took us on a day trip to Bath and Stonehenge. We marveled at the rocks, at the mysticism of it, and how powerful it felt to be standing in front of them instead of viewing them from the pages of a book. That’s when it hit me, I think, the gravity of what we’d done. Perhaps, too, the love of a more ancient history that just isn’t present in America—or rather, isn’t able to be studied in the same way.  

We got drunk at a pub near our flat and took whiskey from a stranger, precisely something an officer guest speaking on the dangers of exchange student intoxication, advised us against. We saw Wicked at the Apollo Victoria theatre, just outside the Tube station we walked to daily. We got told by a couple of girls at a pub we sounded like we’d been in the movie Forrest Gump—fuck Alabama, we said, we’re from Tennessee, the great state of Jack Daniels. We marveled at the markup of our favorite whiskey, now an import. We walked through the rain most every day; we learned not to buy more groceries than you can carry on the Tube. We tried the patience of our flatmate, Paige, who was far too practical and responsible to have been paired with the likes of us at 19. We listened to British boy bands and learned to navigate the Underground and bought new clothes to dress more like Londonders. We forgot to miss home.

We fell in love with London.

*name changed to protect identity

This post is part of an independent academic project, studying late medieval and early modern British history, Renaissance literature and theatre, and the history and culture of London. Posts are a blended approach of academic responses, memoir musings, and literary analysis intended for the purpose of chronologizing both past and present, personal and historical.