You Can Never Go Home Again

THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL

I left Britain many years ago, and landed in the New World, eyes shining and ready to make my fortune. After twenty years the old enthusiasm waned a little, and during a particularly cold Detroit winter, I flew back to the UK, full of American confidence, to take up a new job and show the Brits how things are done.

We arrived on a charter flight in the very early hours of Christmas Eve, just as the airport lights went out and the National Transportation strike began. Most of the passengers on my flight took off for the bright lights of London in a charter bus. Five of us were left, sitting around a rickety table, under dim emergency lights in the empty airport. Three Canadians and two Brits (if I could still be counted as one), sat, elbows soaking in cold tea, discussing the best way to get ‘up North.’ We tried to phone out, but the operators were all out in sympathy with the transportation workers, and cell phones were unheard of in this pre nasdaq era. We were all seasoned travelers, only forty miles from London, but we might as well have been in the middle of Siberia. My plans for a triumphal return to the homeland were fast-fading as I looked at my desperate fellow-sufferers in the pale light.  

SALVATION

A dim figure opened the glass doors of the cafeteria, looked around, and disappeared, shoes tapping the way out to the cold streets. Something about him said taxi driver, and we dashed after him. We were right. He was looking for a cup of tea, prior to getting a few hours sleep in his cozy suburban home, followed by Christmas with his waiting family. No, he didn’t want to drive us to Newcastle-on-Tyne, three hundred miles to the North. It was Christmas, he explained patiently to these crazy Yanks (we were all Yanks to him; only mad dogs and Americans go out in the early hours of Christmas eve.)

We surrounded him, offering a fortune in cab fares, pleading, wheedling, threatening. We could starve in the deserted airport. He was adamant. His wife and kids were expecting him. It was Christmas. Finally, one of us wrenched open the cab door and jumped in, and we all piled in after him. Nervously, the cabbie drove us towards London and the M1. We pressed money into his reluctant hands, and the ever-resourceful Canadians bought several six-packs of Bass from a miraculously still open off-license. We all took a drink, and insisted that our driver join us. He had to drive home, he said wheezily after a hasty swallow; otherwise his wife would think him dead, or kidnapped. “Hijacked,” someone said, and none of us laughed because it was too close to the truth.