In 1976, I spent the 200th anniversary of my native country's Independence Day in Fort William, Scotland, listening to a Faroese band sing folk songs, a British comedian mock the President of the US and the Primne Minister of the UK, and the Irish landlady complain about the English and the Scots. I ate hagis and washed it down with a glass of usquebaugh, Those sultry days smack dab in the middle of the unaesthetic seventies kept coming back to me during the course of the past year. All the hype and hooplah over the "Bicentennary" as the British called it. All the unbridled patriotism. Me, I felt that 200 years was enough, and that we should reunite with the Crown.

My dad had spent the war years in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland with the US Army Corps of Engineers. He never talked about the war like some of my friends' fathers, but he did like to talk about the English. The cold mutton. (He would never eat lamb during the 19 years I knew him, he having died from cancer the previous fall.) I espcially remembered his stories about brewing tea in any old can or container that the UK soldiers could lay hands on. And, until the end, he called cigarettes "fags", much to my embarassment if any friends were about.

He never went into battle, but he once told me about the buzz bombs and the V2 rockets that fell frequently while he was stationed in London. Years later while reading Gravity's Rainbow, I couldn't help remembering that abnormally hot summer in England. People jumping into the Thames and dying of the shock of the cold water. Trying to imagine how the East End had changed since Jack the Ripper's days: what with the Luftwaffe's bombing it and the Londoners renovating it into oblivion. I stayed with one of my Danish cousin's family in Woking, south of the City. She had married into a English family, and a great aunt was visiting. She had been a young girl in 1888, and repeated to me some of the rumors (about the grapes the the Ripper used to lure his victims) that had been printed in contemporary papers and written up in the books I had read about Saucy Jack.