Finding One’s Grit, or Lack of Same, With 3 Ladies’ Help

It’s tough coming to grips with the fact you’re a wimp, but it rankles even more sourly when the revelation is driven home by a succession of little old ladies.

Make no mistake, though. Underneath the rosy cheeks and the gentle Mother Hubbard smiles and the sensible shoes, these women were razors. Absolute iron. And nothing as foolish as a little cold weather was going to get in their way. Rubbish, they said.

Brrrr, I said.

My self-esteem in the face of winter weather was dashed forever last month on a three-week trip to England, a country which managed to amass a world-spanning empire but never figured out central heating. That, however, didn’t worry me. In California, no matter what the weather, I never feel truly cold. (I did stick my hands in my pockets a couple of times during last week’s cold snap, but that was just to avoid looking too smug.) I wear shorts to the beach in January. I ski in sweaters when everyone else wears parkas. I drink iced tea when everyone else is having hot chocolate.

So, England in December? Pleasantly brisk, I thought.

Several-Hour Wait

The first slap came in Cambridge on Christmas Eve. I had decided to stand in the traditional long queue to hear the choir of King’s College sing its famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Hundreds of people come from all over England to hear it, and the service is broadcast worldwide. You can be assured of a seat in the King’s College chapel only by waiting in line for several hours.

After an hour of standing on wet flagstones in the college quadrangle, watching the clouds lower and the wind rise, I became aware I had lost almost all feeling below my knees. I began to jump up and down, trying to restore the flow of blood. A 70ish woman in a tweed overcoat standing in front of me turned around and smiled pleasantly.

“And where are you from?” she piped. “C-c-c-california,” I chattered. “S-s-s-south of Los Angeles.”

“Oh, lovely,” she went on. “How do you like the weather here? We’re having a particularly mild winter so far.”

She and her husband, a jovial Wilfred Hyde-White type who looked perfectly comfortable and content, twisted the knife a couple of hours later by offering to hold my place in line if I wanted to duck into a pub for a warming brandy. By the time I had driven out to the village of Lavenham in Suffolk county a couple of days later, I realized that December in England, mild or not, was not December in Orange County. When the chill begins to penetrate in Costa Mesa (and it never truly does), you simply roll up the power windows, flip on the heater and turn up the music. In England you wrap yourself in a heavy sweater, a trench coat and a wool scarf, and it doesn’t help at all. That damp cold could cut through titanium.

At Lavenham I was taken on a tour of a farm that once was an American air base during World War II. I stood on the old runway and took photographs and watched my fingers shrivel like prunes in the teeth of a wind that would have turned back the Mongols. Later, as I sat by the hearth in the farmhouse, the farmer’s wife, a brisk septuagenarian, clucked solicitously as she shoved a cup of hot tea into my throbbing hands. The wind had lashed my face to a glowing crimson, and she seemed to be staring at it in wonder.

In Search of a Toddy

I wanted to get as close to the fire as possible without igniting, but she had other ideas. She had to visit the greengrocer in the village, and she would show me the way back. The last I saw of her, she was chatting amiably with the grocer, ignoring the cold, while I went shambling off in search of a hot toddy, shrinking into my overcoat. It all caught up with me a few days later. In the little Cotswold town of Moreton-in-Marsh I came down with a racking cough. The warmest and driest place in the village--it was raining--seemed to be a cozy pub called The Bell. The publican was a jolly, chatty woman who could have easily played Miss Marple. After listening to me hack for about 15 minutes, she disappeared into a back room and emerged with a small brown bottle. “What you need,” she said brightly, “is some good old English lung tonic.”

I eyed it suspiciously. “Don’t bother about that rubbish that says to take only a teaspoonful,” she said. “Just throw down a big slug. That’s what I do.”

I accepted the bottle, unscrewed the cap and threw down a big slug. The world listed to port. It was a screaming bolt of liquid lightning, searing everything it touched, scorching a path toward my stomach. I gasped and hiccuped involuntarily. She smiled and nodded encouragingly. “That should do it,” she chirped. “I just love it when I get a bit wheezy. Another pint of lager, then?” It took another two pints to kill the taste of the lung tonic and stop my eyes from watering. Later I read the label and saw that it contained tincture of capsaicin, the ingredient contained in red hot peppers that causes them to be red hot. But the awful stuff did work. Perfectly. The day after I arrived home, a cold snap struck England. Part of the bell-ringing mechanism in Big Ben froze. Trains froze to tracks. Snow fell. Many people in England and on the continent actually froze to death as the result of freak accidents or loss of heat in their homes. And in the middle of all that, according to news reports, a woman stood in line for 18 hours to buy tickets to hear Placido Domingo sing Otello at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

I’m not sure who she was, but I think I’ve narrowed the possibilities down to three.