I Conquer Britain by Dyan Sheldon Page B

Putney
.
    “You said you’d take today off,” Caroline reminded him. “I sorted out Mum early this morning so I’d have the afternoon free.”
    Robert looked at her like she was a wrong word. “But Caroline—”
    “Cherry didn’t come all this way to sit in the house watching telly,” said Caroline. Which was true. Even if you called it telly and it had hardly any commercials, it was still television, which is generally a whole lot less interesting than watching a leaf blow down the street. “She wants to see London.”
    As a good guest – and an honorary Englishman – I know I should’ve said they didn’t have to worry about me, I didn’t want to be any trouble, I was sorry if I was being a nuisance, and I was totally jim dandy staying at home flicking through the four channels. On the other hand, I did want to see more than Putney. I mean, it was already pretty obvious that any of the really interesting things that were happening in London weren’t happening there. Putney wasn’t the throbbing heart of a multi-faceted, creative, ever-changing metropolis – it was more like the big toe. Or the nail on the big toe. I might as well be spending the summer in Queens.
    “Well … to tell you the truth, it would be kind of nice,” I said. “You know, to tell the folks back home about. And I did promise Mr Scutari I’d take a picture of that big clock for him.”
    Robert sighed. “Well, I can’t deprive you of taking a picture of the big clock for Mr Scutari, can I? I’d never be able to sleep again.” He looked at his watch. “All right, group, The Grand Tour sets out in precisely thirty minutes. Umbrellas will be provided by the management.” He gave me a nod. “Don’t forget your camera.”
    Apparently, Robert invented The Grand Tour when Sophie and the Czar were little because they wanted to go to places like Disney World like their friends but Robert wouldn’t take them. Robert said it was more important to learn about your own history and culture than to have your photograph taken with Donald Duck. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but he sounded a lot like Jake. The closest she’d ever come to taking us to Disney World was to drive by it shouting, “There it is!”
    The Grand Tour headed for The City of London. I thought we were
in
the city of London, but apparently I was wrong. We were in London, the city – and so is The City of London.
    “The City of London was built on the site of the first Roman settlement,” Robert informed me as he locked the car.
    I didn’t know there were any Roman settlements in England. It seemed like a long way to go for bad weather. (And it definitely hadn’t given the English any clues about how to eat pizza either.)
    “For nearly four hundred years,” said Robert. And just in case I didn’t believe him he dragged us all over the place to show us the remains. We saw a hunk of the old Roman wall. We saw what was left of an old Roman bath. We saw some old Roman tiles. “Try to visualize it!” ordered Robert. “Try to picture what it was like.”
    But it was hard to imagine a bunch of dudes in togas and sandals strolling around with all the traffic and the modern buildings and planes flying overhead.
    After that he took us to see the place where a lot of the early after-the-Romans-went-home city would have been if it hadn’t been wiped out by the Great Fire and World War Two.
    I said I thought World War Two was fought in Europe and in Africa and the East. Robert said not if you were British.
    Robert led us through the rain to the Tower of London, which if you ask me isn’t exactly the cheeriest spot in town. There’s Tower Hill, where everybody used to come to watch them kill people, and then there was the Tower itself, which if you weren’t the king or some friend of the king (or if you’d been a friend of the king but he got mad at you for something) was just a big prison. We shuffled behind clumps of damp tourists to see the dungeons, to