Flying from Belfast to London, I read T. H. White's The Goshawk (and became a falconry fan), ate all the sandwiches the stewardess would put in front of me (and became a bit fatter), and watched the Irish Sea crawl beneath me (and realized that jet travel has spoiled me). When we set down at London airport early on a mild but overcast Monday evening and the girl in the opposite seat was met by a hulking monster of a boyfriend, the sun fell and I took a bus to a west London subway terminus.

Once I got below the surface, things changed; I left the weather behind me and found I didn't know all there was to know about subways after all. In London each car has a map of the entire subway system, and several smaller maps, all about, color-coded to show you the route that particular car follows. The cars move incredibly fast, but my trip across town was over an hour, and my way was clearly marked; by ten pm I was at the West Kilburn station with only one wrong change of cars and a single backtracking to get back to the right route. And the cost? Nothing. Nothing to me, that is — because the Science Fiction Club of London had given me a seven day "Go As You Please" free pass to any and all public transportation in London. For this they paid thiryy shillings (four dollars), and the moment I stepped on a bus at the airport I began noting on an envelope how much I would have spent had they not done this superb thing. The trip to Ella's, in particular, would have cost me a little over fifty cents.

When I arrived at the Pen — Ella's flat, shared with her brother — Ella and Len Gleicher were sitting up talking, worrying about me. It was getting late, but I hadn't been worried; then they told me that at midnight, sharp, the subways just pull into the next station and stop. If I'd still been aboard one, there's no telling where I'd have ended. With coffee and cookies, Len and I met after ten years of correspondence — we sat and exchanged notes about life since the correspondence flagged a bit some time ago, and just sort of nattered about fandom and work and things. It seems he's got married and works in a travel bureau, and like that; it's a long time since he was attending London Circle meetings at the White Horse Inn.

After he left, Ella and I talked. You know Ella -- everybody in England and America has met Ella — you know that she can sit down with a virtual stranger and in half a cigarette be plumbing conversational depths undreamed. She looks flighty, and her direct drive makes you think she'd be hard to relax with ... but we settled down to a long natter, and I guess we could have sprawled talking all night.

In fact, it was morning when we exhausted the topics of American fandom, England, English fandom, my ostrichism about current events, and subways. I think we talked about science-fiction, too.

Tuesday morning, May Day, might never have been. It was after noon when I woke, and Ella came in about one with black, black coffee and the morning mail. Professor Tolkien had answered my letter, regretting he was not at Oxford over the holidays; to make up, he thoughtfully enclosed four specimen autographs — and, plonkingly enough, in the same mail came the big package of my copies of his books, which I had sent to myself c/o Ella a month earlier. I re-mailed them without opening, and cancelled the trip to Oxford I had planned.

One of the packages for me was one I recognized — it was from John Trimble, and had five dollars in airmail postage on it. Under Ella's eye I very neatly placed it, unopened, next to my suitcase — and left it there until Friday night. She will never forgive me for that, I'm sure.

Ella infomed me that the SFCoL had provided her with an (unspecified) amount of sterling to ensure that I paid for nothing while in the city; that she had, further, arranged for me to meet Ted Carnell that afternoon, so I would get dressed to travel into town immediately; and that I would, further, please state succinctly and without ambiguity my desires for the evening.

"Shucks, Ella," I said, flabbergasted at all this, "I dunno. What's to do in London, anyway?"

She stared incredulously at me.

And so we went downtown. I had gotten my camera ready just after rising, and kept it ready as we travelled ... but because I abhor photographing things like Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus (sites you can see in any travelogue) and also because I'm not really a camera bug regardless of Norman Shorrock's opinions, I took few pictures that day. As we made our way to the editorial offices of Nova Publications (then still in London S.E.1) I happily rubbernecked about at all the things you can see in any travelogue -- after all, I was actually there.

We found Maclaren House easily enough, and doggedly made our way up the narrow staircase to the seventh floor where Ella told me Carnell had his offices; we knocked, and a complete stranger came out. No, he was sorry, but the sciencefiction magazine chaps had moved down to the second level! Ella roundly cursed Carnell, piling a decade of hell on him for each step on the way up and again for each down. I quietly followed, making some brief notes on the subject of native Billingsgate, and thinking she'd do better to vent all this energy on the stairs than on Carnell's spirit.

But you know Ella — she hadn't used a tenth of her fire. We all but stomped through the door to the outer offices of Nova, with her bellowing:

"Where's that blackguard Carnell?" and giving a glower to the secretary that sent her quivering behind a chair. The inner sanctum opened, and I chalked up the fifteenth charter member of FAPA that I'd met.

"Carnell, you censored unrepeatable idiot," Ella thundered, "haven't you any better manners than to let guests from America hike eighty miles of stairs before they find you down here in thick atmosphere?"

As she said this she swept him from the way and with the two of us in her wake she went up to his desk and sat down on it.

"This," she said demonstratively, "is Ron Ellik."

Fortunately Carnell has a staggering control of himself in untoward situations, and he rescued the day with aplomb and apology before I could stop laughing at Ella's flair for the abrupt. Before the dust had settled about us he was telling me how much he appreciated receiving a complimentary copy of Al Lewis’s 1961 magazine index — which had arrived only a few hours earlier. 1 couldn't have timed a better calling card. And then we were talking about the 1956 Worldcon, where we hadn't met. We both remembered having a fine time at the con, despite the many faults for which it became famous.

During our visit Ted pulled out a treasure trove in original covers from his magazines, among which were three fine Quinns from recent Science Fantasy's that he wanted me to take to the Chicago convention if I would. I warned him that one was a favorite of mine, and put them under my arm before he could stop me. And then he really astonished me.

"Except for those three that have to go to Chicago," he said, "and except for — ah, this one here —" he removed another Quinn from the stack, "I'd like you to pick over the lot of them and select one you like best, as a souveneir of your trip."

Do you know, when I was a letterhack pouring out thousands of words of tripe a week to the editors of all the pulp magazines in the early fifties, I used to dream of being given the run of an editor's originals. It was so fierce a thing that at the Solacon I bid sixteen dollars (one more dollar than every cent I had in the world) for a Bergey cover that had attracted me since my early stfnal days. About that time (perhaps because I was outbid by another Bergey fan) I decided that artwork was juvenile stuff -- but all my hard shell of indifference cracked when Ted Carnell stood back from a table covered with original paintings large and small and told me to take my pick. I think I spent an hour in the sorting, and I can imagine no finer gift. It's a gaudy, primary-colored beefcake-and-cheesecake by Brian Lewis, and I took as much care packing it for the return flight as I did with Al's camera.

Ella and I wound our way to Oxford Circus summat before dusk, still taking in the sights of London in a very general way. We looked up Regent Street and down Tottenham. Court Road, and we walked the length of Oxford Street up and back again. Finally we agreed to see South pacific that evening, and went to a Chinese restaurant for supper.

Ella hadn't eaten Chinese food since her trip to the States and both of us were interested in the differences between Chinese restaurants in the US and the UK. The hour was early and we were two of only four customers in the place; the waiters were busy setting up for the evening trade, and service was slow. But the food was essentially the same as I'm used to in California, and the only major difference was British tea, not Oriental, and the arrangement of the menu. Here, the Chinese offer only a number of dinner combinations, plus side-dishes; in London, the diner must select his entire fare from individual plates, each priced separately. The continental arrangement, capped with prices in sterling, left me at a disadvantage... but I made up for it by giving Ella her second lesson with chopsticks.

The restaurant is named after an English boxing star — who owns it — and it's in the basement level, with a very low ceiling. And I think the waiters knew I was a tourist, because after dinner while we drank tea I took a few minutes to change film and clean the lens in case the darkening night showed me a choicer picture than twilight had.

Then the waiter finished mopping up from my demonstration with chopsticks, it was show time and we made our way across Oxford Circus to the Dominion Theatre. I'm no specialist on theatre-going, but I've seen nothing in the States to compare with the service and spread we enjoyed that evening, and at prices far below what South Pacific was showing for in Los Angeles at the time. The only lack I found I suddenly realized had been bothering me for two weeks — virtually nowhere in the British Isles is there a drinking fountain.

It was intermission when the water problem hit me; Ella and I decided to sneak down into the higher-priced, almost empty rows of seats in front of us, and while we walked out to the lobby and back again to where we didn't belong I looked around for a drink of water... and Ella told me she didn't think there was such an animal anywhere in the building. (The only drinking fountain I ever saw in London was in the American Express office.)

We sort of floated back to the Pen after the movie, borne on a Rogers and Hammerstein cloud. Parker's Pen, at 151 Canterbury Road, was one of those historical fan-gathering spots, like Inchmery or Riverside Dive, and many fans knew it. Almost anyone, at almost any time, was welcome there — it was the third and fourth storeys of a tenement building, with no pretensions to grandeur (the watercloset was on the 2nd/3rd floor landing) and good cheer for all. While I was there I used the bed in the living room half of the third floor, Ella's room being on the fourth floor, part of which was the kitchen. Ella, the rock-solid realist type, admitted to me two days later that she was still humming "those bloody songs" -- but you've all seen South Pacific, haven't you? We went off to sleep at a fairly respectable hour that night, because next day was Wednesday, my day to travel some eighty miles to Cheltenham.