London
Large drops of the rain are running along my steamy glasses: I am standing in the Stoke Newington High Street without the umbrella wearing the only three-quarter sleeve sweater, shifting from foot to foot in the wet snow-white sneakers which I have washed and dried in a complicated way especially for my traveling to London. Now, surely, my sneakers resemble more two hungry Dalmatian puppies.
Two rabbis are going towards me with black packets blown with the air on their heads protecting their headdresses from the rain which makes a feeling that the aliens from the Kurt Vonnegut’s stories are walking along the street.
A bicycle rider with an umbrella in his hand is driving past by me and sweetly saying: Hello, beautiful!
- Excuse me, I am looking for the Newilgton Street.
- Hm, NewilgtON – emphasizes the Englishman correcting my pronunciation.
- Yes, Newilgton - I answer for sure.
- Hm. I wish I said where this street is, but I do not know.
We are laughing together.
The girl is asking me to show the written notes on a sheet of paper.
- But this is the Nevill Road!
- Ah, surely!
We are laughing again.
- You make new names very likely! – The boy smiling shows me the direction, - Your street is there. Have a nice day! 
I put my key into the keyhole of a creaky door with bated breath prepared for the worst but the door eases up and opens.
I appear in the empty house with a narrow hall and a steep staircase upwards, I look around: there are rooms to the right and to the left, there is a kitchen between them and one more staircase upwards covered with a claret-coloured rug. I enter my room, take off my wet clothes and crawl under the blanket.
I am woken up by the sunshine which is striking through the blinds ajar. There is a beautiful picture on the wall formed from the shade and the light. I spring out of my bed and run into the kitchen to make tea. There Jim, my neighbor, is having his breakfast. – Hello, would you like a toast with jam?
There are three of us in the double apartment – me, Jim and Chimene, a pretty girl, the criminal investigator from New Zealand. The kitchen and the bathroom are one for all. If the weather is fine, you can go out through the window and hang out on the roof.
And in the rainy weather you are sitting with neighbors in the kitchen chatting about everything you know. In general, if you are short of money for an accommodation, you will hardly feel lonely in London: you will definitely share a rent of a flat or a room with several people. So, you won’t live alone until you make very good money. I enjoyed the company of my neighbors; I used to read my script until late in the night, they gave their feedbacks with pleasure, helped to rewrite the sentences. I used to tell them about Ukraine; Chimene treated me with the most delicious chocolate from New Zealand and told about geysers as well as that in her country almost all people were acquainted with each other because few people lived there. In his turn, Jim introduced to me London through the art galleries, displays of London shop windows from the glass of the double-decker. I helped Jim to buy chairs at the local flea market and to choose a tie for the friend’s wedding in London shops.
The Stoke Newington High Street is an incredibly noisy, busy street, and to my mind, it is a very exotic one because of a pile-up of the various cultures: Turkish, African, Chinese, Moroccan, Ukrainian, Jewish shops and cafes straggled along the whole road.
On my way to the tube I met different people: with some of them I stopped simply to have a chat, the other got acquainted with me by theirselves and asked where I was from, some of them I stopped with the endless questions how to get to one place or another. It was amazing that independent of what time of the day it was when I stopped the passers-by with my questions how to get to somewhere, how to drive, where to buy a telephone card, a bus pass, etc., I was never refused and said “I am busy, ask anybody else”.
It is interesting that in such crazy life style the Londoners manage to find time for chatting in streets or having a quick word in the café. Not just once I discussed the film catch-ups with the coffee sellers. People with whom I got acquainted thought that I was the Ukrainian journalist having come to make a report about London that was why they tried to tell me more about their lives. As a matter of fact, the war in Ukraine is felt very much overseas; the second question which you answer while meeting new people it is “where are you from?” You answer that you are from Ukraine and they at once say anxiously “Oh, it is difficult there for you now, we are sympathizing with you very much”.
Once on my way home along that street I heard somebody singing in Spanish and walking behind me. From the underground to my house it is 20 minutes on foot, the whole way I was hearing the singing of the stranger until I started dancing straight in the street. In such way I got acquainted with Jonathan who was a musician and fond of playing chess.
Once on my way home along that street I heard somebody singing in Spanish and walking behind me. From the underground to my house it is 20 minutes on foot, the whole way I was hearing the singing of the stranger until I started dancing straight in the street. In such way I got acquainted with Jonathan who was a musician and fond of playing chess.
Having made a long way along the street I finally got to the tube. The London underground is a separate organism with a dark soul which lives its own life where sometimes magic and fateful meetings appear. Once I spent the whole day in the underground trying to get to the necessary station. You can stand on the correct platform, but still get on the wrong train, as several trains with different directions and end stations pull into to the same platform. In order to get on the correct train you should definitely know the end station of your line and all the time read the scrolling text on the train displays.
The Englishmen are real fans of the social advertising, in the underground it is hung everywhere and raises questions about the rubbish and the mutual respect. One social advertising affected me most of all: it tells about a boy who has found her mother crying. It turns out that his mother is working in the underground and last night one passenger shouted at her and she is crying now, but she has said to her son that something has got into her eye. One morning I was going by train and once it jerked to a sudden stop. The passengers began anxiously to exchange glasses, a male voice was heard in a load speaker and announced that the train could not go further as someone sprang on the rails and died. Suicides are a frequent occurrence in the London underground; I was said that once a week someone definitely sprang on the rails. After that I was not surprised any more by the announcement that if you had noticed a suspicious behaviour or somebody felt not good, you had to inform about it and be careful.
Anyway, the underground is the fastest and cheapest way of transporting through London. Moreover, in the carriage of the train I saw the interesting situation which serves a great material for the creation of my script “LadyBug”. I noticed as well that people read a lot, almost everyone was with a book in his or her hands and when you needed to get off, they let you pass to the door and did not crowd and block the door.
London museums are considered to be one of the best in the world. I had two holidays and I fully devoted them to visiting museums. Most of all I was impressed by the excursion in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A friendly woman came up to me and invited to join the group for the free of charge excursion which would begin in five minutes. A museum guide Mandy Komlosy made fun, talked interestingly and held the group of listeners in constant attention. I even did not know that it was possible to tell in such interesting way about the eastern tapestries: the peculiarities of their composure, fibers and patterns.
Not far from the museum, on my way to the underground, I noticed a woman twisted up near the concrete wall. I walked by and then stopped I was hesitating for a long time to get acquainted with her. Finally I considered and came up: Hello, my name is Anna. How are you?
So I got acquainted with Max, a homeless woman, who spent on the street 8 years. Max told me her story how she had appeared on the street. Firstly she buried her mother, then a husband, then she got a prolonged depression and she lost her job consequently she appeared in the street. She was speaking with me especially in Standard English and not in Cockney in order me to understand her. She said that she had got a pain in her kidneys and she did not like her life, she wanted to find any job and an accommodation. Also, she has got problems with the police, they dislike her sitting on the curbs of the central streets. She caught my attention because she was not begging alms but simply sitting on the concrete floor and thinking of her life plans.
Eleven days passed away and I had to move into the hostel as the hostess, the Ukrainian Alla, returned to the room having been rented by me.
I took up my residence in the Longridge Road in the room with eight women. My every day looked like the eponymous film of François Ozon. There were double-decked iron beds of blue colour in the room and all inhabitants held their things in the same blue iron chests which were closed with a key. I had a feeling that I was sleeping in the carriage of the iron train; the train stopped at the intermediate stations, the passengers got off – got on, almost every night somebody moved out and somebody moved in, only instead of rattling wheels someone’s blue chests were rumbling.
In general it was very funny. There I got acquainted with German Sofia and American Carolina. I had breakfast with girls in the entrance hall of the hostel, drank cocktails in Soho, whispered at night in the room, watched British TV series and had a great fun. I told them about life in Ukraine, about the war, about my living in a beautiful Lviv city.
Once I entered the room and saw Sofia. She was sitting in the room alone and was very upset. I asked her, if everything was ok, she told that she had lost a lot of money. I started asking where she was, what she was doing, whether she had left her bag unattended. Altogether I helped her to reconstruct the chronology of the events of her evening. We drew a conclusion that she had lost her money in the supermarket. Sofia went to that supermarket and said that she had lost the envelope with money, she mentioned the precise sum and that she came from Germany. She was returned the envelope and the whole sum as it was written in German on the envelope and the sum coincided with the sum in the envelope. This is it, there are honest people everywhere.
London for tourist is the easy-going city with lots of restaurants and cafes, excursions, all possible performances for the absent-minded tourists. Taxis and other cars overfill the city roads, turn into the slowly traffic jams of the double-deckers, private cars and nervous drivers. The girls are making photos on the parapet, there is the Big Ben in front of them.
On one of such easy-going sunny London days I had met with the fellow citizens in the Oxford Street and went to the park, we bought a white wine in the local shop, having been waiting for a long time for a cold one we were brought a warm one. We began paying for the wine and I was not believed to be full-aged and refused to sell it, more than that I did not take my passport for a walk with me. In my turn I said that I was so grown-up that it was a shame for me to say that number aloud. The cashier smiled at that and asked to stand aside while friends were buying wine. Finally we came to the park, choosing a cozy place for a long time, we at last sat down on the grass under a large tree. We were joking and laughing a lot. I came down to the underground cheerful and drunk. I had a lot of nice meetings in London, but that one I remembered as the most warm-hearted.
The next day a long-waited course of a screenwriting began at London Film Academy which was namely a reason my visiting England. But this is already quite another story. I know for sure that I will come to this incredibly wonderful city more than once as I have fallen in love with London for the rest of my life.
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