School Uniforms

In England, all school children wear uniforms. I have to admit that it dresses the place up a bit when at 3:30 the students pour out of school, all wearing nice pants or skirts in their school colors. In smarter parts of England, the children wear blazers, instead of the sweaters and sweatshirts we see around here. I've seen pictures of my husband as a young child, big eyed and knobbly kneed, in a puce jacket with sky blue piping and dress shorts. In Walthamstow, uniforms are often modified for religious reasons. When a group of older girls leaves school, most of them will be dressed in American Catholic girl uniform styles, a few will be wearing head scarves in school colors, and rarely one or two will even be wearing school-colored abayas.

Yesterday, as I was taking my son for an afternoon walk, we saw a young girl, maybe six or seven, hop out of her family's car and onto the sidewalk a few feet in front of us. Her mother was on the other side, lifting something, maybe a younger child or a bag of groceries, out of the backseat. The girl wore a school uniform, and the top was a green and white checkered Pakistani-style tunic. Her curly light brown hair was falling out of its braids, and I smiled at her because she looked happy, unkempt, and unconcerned with her appearance, and she made me feel nostalgic for that age. Instead of returning my smile, she furrowed her brow, took a white piece of cloth that I hadn't noticed she was holding, and quickly covered her hair in a veil. I've seen these white veils before, on young girls and on store window mannequin heads. The veil looks a lot like a nun's wimple, leaving only the facial features exposed and draping down to obscure the neckline of the shirt as well. Over the forehead is a little bit of trim, sometimes with lace, a kind of fabric bang. Until this performance, I hadn't realized that the style meant young girls could quickly veil and unveil themselves. When she was done, she looked up defiantly, as if she had gotten the better of me. And it is true, that when she put on the veil, I no longer saw her as a reminder of my younger self, but not because she was dressed differently. At six or seven, I would never have had the nerve to stand my ground and stare down an adult. I smiled again and walked on.

The English Countryside at Easter

We spent Easter weekend with my husband's family in the country, about an hour southeast of London. After five years of frequent visits, the green, human-sized English landscape is now familiar and I have to think back to my first visit to remember what made it so striking and so foreign. On that visit, my then-boyfriend-now-husband picked me up at the airport, and we drove through the outskirts of London into the narrow winding roads of my mother-in-law's corner of Kent. Like streams, the roads have unpredictable twists, and hundreds of years of traffic on these ancient lanes have worn grooves into the landscape. Along the side, the branches are often trimmed into a neat line so that they won't trespass onto the lane, and then the trees open up into a canopy above. Two cars can't pass, so neighbors must back up into driveways or little shoulders to give way to oncoming traffic. The clumps of woods open onto beautiful rolling countryside, with farsighted views over fields of sheep. All the while, these narrow country roads pass house after house because in southeast England even the countryside is crowded. There are no billboards and many of the houses date back hundreds of years, and so, if you ignore the cars and the paved roads, one can imagine a trip to the country as an almost-successful trip back in time. My mother-in-law lives on a hillside, and the view from her back garden slopes away until reaching the flat Weald which spreads out below for miles. The fields are not like the square patchwork quilt of American farmland, but instead they are irregular shapes, with few straight lines and no right angles, and they are smaller than their American equivalents. England is green in a way that the States are not. Even in the middle of winter, when a Michigan forest is a dead grey-brown, southeast England maintains a bit of its color; the leaves may be gone, but there are lichen and patches of grass. This may seem a slight difference, but it is visible even from a plane. This Easter was cold and damp, and Easter morning the view was obscured by fog, but even then we were greeted by the English countryside as we stepped out into the trills and warbles and songs of dozens of birds.