And if that wasn't enough, once I got back to the flat I again stripped to the same wife beater (now with great, dark beer stains running down the front of its once pristine white front (thanks, Adam -- beer is supposed to coat the insides of your stomach, not the front of my clothes), walking around with a bra on (thanks, Katy), a cigarette dangling from my lips. I looked just like James Dean (except for the bra, of course.) On the whole, pints were drank in great abundance, pictures were taken as evidence (uh oh), and I passed out like a champ a little after two.
So this morning I wake up a little rough around the edges and a lot dehydrated (I sat up in bed and found my tongue stuck to my pillow, a dry, crusty paste holding the two in unwanted matrimony.) I guzzle some agua, go out for some authentic take-away fish and chips (they're authentic because they wrap them in paper instead of boxing them up) and then spend the day walking around Hyde Park, the giant park ten minutes from my flat (the same place I go to feed the swans and geese at its Round Pond.)
It's a gorgeous day -- sunny for only the sixth or seventh time this year -- and I wander the park, endlessly killing time and eventually ending up at Speaker's Corner, a neck of the park where a weekly pilgrimage of amateur orators of all races, religions, and levels of intelligence occurs.
I listen to the idiots for a while -- a black man in a suit, a pick perched off-kilter in his hair, shouting about how this is the chill out corner of the park. "Everyone else is shouting about Jesus, Mohammed, and all sorts of sinners. Let 'em. We won't talk about none of that shit. We'll just talk about fun stuff -- drinkin', smokin', ladies, whatever. But none of that religious bullshit. That stuff's for the birds." And then he proceeded to feed said fliers, saying intelligent stuff like "the only reason we care about the Holocaust is because they were white people being killed. If they'd been black, we'd be building floats for a parade rather than statues for a memorial." Sure...
Next is another black man, this chap a bald Guardian Angel, who instead of answering questions people were asking about Islam and Malcolm X, artfully danced about any queries, smacking the area around the local shrubbery and avoiding giving any real answers (he did, however, constantly divulge how he was a big TV star and how he was much better than Mr. Malcolm.) Sure...
And then there was the redneck -- 100%, no doubt about it (he said so himself) -- replete with a cream button down shirt with those interesting swirling black designs, a big mustache, tight blue jeans (with "Jesus loves you" written down the side in masking tape) and a ten gallon hat, to boot. This bloke was leading the crowd in songs of "You're going to Hell, hippie," "Straight to Hell, sinner," and "Mohammed, the moron" (which continued his harassment of the Islamic people in the crowd, a task he particularly relished and spent a good portion of his afternoon doing.)
Having reached my threshold of idiocy and desperately missing home -- just not necessarily this brainlessly bumpkin portion of it -- I leave to wander the park some more, walking along the banks of the Serpentine, the largest man made waterway in the country, soaking up the fresh air and sunlight like a sponge until only the former remains.
After a brief dinner, it's off for the Jack the Ripper walking tour, a guided journey that takes you through the East End of London, retracing the steps of a murderer in 1888. It was called the Autumn of Terror -- it took place within the one square mile that was (and is) the official City of London (this is the original town that was walled in by the Romans) and by its termination, five prostitutes were dead and a town was living in fear.
The victims were all East End prostitutes, but they weren't the clean, romanticized versions you see in movies of the Victorian era. They were the dirtiest, cheapest, most disease-ridden incarnation - they guzzled gin and so were always drunk, they lived on the streets and thus were always dirty, and they had to wear all of their belongings (usually two or three dirt-encrusted, tattered dresses at the same time). They often had no shoes and so walked around barefoot (or they wore big, clunky men's boots), most were in or out of their 40s, and they could be paid for with three pence, two pence, or a loaf of stale bread, depending on what you wanted to do (discuss Dickens, play gin, etc.)
Most of the time they hooked all day trying to make money, but rather thank spend it on a room in a shelter (which were also very cheap -- you could pay two pence to lean on a rope and sleep standing up, even) many opted to spend it on gin, the vicious cycle starting anew.
These were the victims of Jack the Ripper (this name wasn't attached to him until after murder #4, though -- he was originally called the Whitechapel Murderer.) The dawn of the Autumn of Terror was early in the morning of August 31, 1888. The victim, Polly Nichols. She was 42 years old, was exceedingly drunk, had five front teeth missing, but still felt sexy enough to go hooking (why? She had a brand new hat on that day) and was hoping to make a big score. Whether it was the hat or a cruel stroke of fate that caused it, she made a big score all right -- she picked up Jack late that night and was dead an hour later, her throat cut to the spine, almost severing the head, and her torso slit from the vagina to the breastbone.
Jack's next strike came on Sept. 8. Annie Chapman came to Spitalfield Market, a big open air fruit market, during the early break of day and had a fight with another hooker over a bar of soap. She stormed away in a huff, met Jack outside of an alleyway, and minutes later was dead inside said alley, her womb and 2/3 of her vagina missing, her body cut from vagina to breastbone, and her throat cut, the head almost completely severed. The people overlooking the alley say or heard nothing, allegedly, even though it was in broad daylight and they were all up, and they saw this as a chance to make some cash, so they sold tickets to people to come inside and look out their windows to view the body. (High class neighborhood, huh? It's the birthplace of opportunistic marketing...)
Jack was quiet for a while, but he came back with a vengeance on Sept. 30 with a big double slaying. The first victim of the evening was Elizabeth Stride. A salesman who lived on Burner St. was coming home late at night and saw a mysterious bundle next to his gated entryway. He called to it, even poked it, but got no response. It being dark, he pulled his carriage up to the house and returned to the bundle with his lantern. Upon further inspection, he found it to be the dead body of Stride, her body subjected to the same unpleasantness as the previous victims -- throat cut, body split open from vagina to breastbone -- but this time her intestines were draped over her right shoulder and her cheeks were deeply slashed.
What the man had seen upon entry was the just-dead body of Stride, and all the evidence points to the fact that Jack was still hiding in the bushes, ready to kill the man if need be, and then rapidly slipping out the gate when the man went to his house to fetch his lantern.
This close call didn't phase him, though, for 40 minutes later he killed again, this time on City of London territory (the first of the night was on Scotland Yard territory. You see, there were two different police forces in use back then, the same two that are used today -- one for the actual City of London, and the other for the rest of the metropolitan area, this latter part controlled by the men of famed Scotland Yard. These two forces were fiercely independent and disliked each other immensely. (We'd have to wait years for the levels of camaraderie we see today which compel members to cover up any wrongdoing in the ranks...) Rather than help each other, these two quibbled over the tiniest jurisdictional things, and Jack used this to his advantage, jumping back and forth between the two areas, and this is why it was so hard to catch him.)
So the second half of the night's double dip went down in Miter Square, a bricked in plaza completely surrounded by buildings and windows, and one that was patrolled by police every fifteen minutes. Unfortunately for Katherine Eddowes, luck was not on her side, for she was picked up earlier in the day for being too drunk. The police picked her up and threw her in a cell to dry out, but she seemed to be all right after only a short time, so was released earlier than usual. Showing the depths of her descent, she immediately began drinking again and promptly went back to the notorious prostitute's church, St. Botelti to pick up some clients (funny thing about the church is that everyone knew its purpose, even the police, but prostitution was legal so long as you weren't standing still and soliciting on the corners. So the women treated this church as a big merry-go-round, endlessly walking around it, chattering away at the people in carriages on the busy roads surrounding the church, inviting them to partake in their profession.)
So Eddowes went back to Hooker HQ (anyone else appreciate the delicious irony in their HQ being at a church?) and picked up Jack the Ripper. Minutes later, she was eating sushi in a nice little candlelit bistro by the coast. (Just kidding, she was dead.) Right after this, Jack fled and wrote a little message in chalk in the doorway of a building he passed on his way to his hideaway: "The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing." (Quite the wordsmith, eh?)
This odd spelling of "Juwes" leads researchers to a Freemasons parallel, that notorious system of secret societies, which has a similar legend telling of three men whose chests were slit from pelvis to breastbone by Solomon for stealing. This is thought to imply that Jack was once a member of this group, for how else would he know of their secretive lore, but nothing is conclusive. (Why? Because despite being written in the back of a rather deep entryway, making it rather invisible to those on the street, the chief of Scotland Yard rubbed the message away before it could be photographed for fear of infuriating the Jewish community, so no one is sure if this is exactly what was written, no one knows how it was arranged, if there were other visual clues with it, etc. (But more importantly, no one knows what the hell it means. If you know, please send all information to Travelin' Tim, PO Box 178, London, England...)
It was after this that Jack stopped being the Whitechapel Murderer and became the Jack the Ripper we all know and love ("Isn't he ever so cute?"), a fact he didn't like much -- he sent a letter and the kidney of Katherine Eddowes to the chief of police expressing his disdain for the moniker.
Jack sat and stewed for about a week before striking again this time on the rainy evening and morning of Nov. 8-9. This was to be his grand finale, and Mary Kelly was the unfortunate soul who starred in his production. It all went down, appropriately, in apartment 13, and since no one was around in the neighboring flats, Jack had hours to torture the poor woman, and that's exactly what he did.
Using the trusty 12 inch blade he'd used so effectively before, he skinned her head and parts of her torso, piling the skin on a bedside table, her femur was axed open and left protruding through the skin like a flagpole on the surface of the moon, her breasts and lungs were resting under her feet, and her heart was missing. When this massacre was finished, so was Jack -- apparently he lost his stomach for it after this display (and I certainly did, especially after our tour guide (who happens to be an author on the subject -- Donald Rumbelow -- so he really knew his stuff) showed us a pic of it, the only picture of a JTR crime scene that was ever taken. It's horrible, as are the autopsy pictures of Eddowes. Kelly looks like someone set off a bomb in her stomach while she was lying in bed -- there's just blood and flesh everywhere. Ugh...)
We close up with a quick stop at the Ten Bells pub, a pub Kelly and the others used to frequent, including Jack himself, allegedly. It's quite old and dingy (it should be -- it's well over a hundred years old) but very cool and creepy. It's extremely dark, the only light coming from tiny Gothic candle holders on the tables, their small candles struggling to permeate the thickening darkness and smoke of the interior. (The reason for the name is that you used to be able to hear the bells of ten churches ringing there.)
Rumbelow tells us that Jack was never caught -- he just disappeared into the dark of the East End as rapidly as he emerged from it -- and no one knows who he is. The top three suspects are a career crook, a school teacher, and a crazy man (the cheap joke here is that the latter two are one and the same, but I'm above such easy digs...), but no one knows for sure. The list grows yearly with people discovering new evidence or just feeling like making wild accusations, so he may still be out there, ready to leap from his cryogenic preservation chamber and beat you to death with his cane. Look out!
Out of this big clash of titans, only one nobleman died -- the unlucky Count of Perch (most noblemen were so well armored they were invincible, but the fair Count managed to have the weak spot found -- the slit between the eyes of their helmets which allowed them to see. A chap on horseback came and got him right between the eyes with his sword. Game over, lights out.)
The main reason hardly no noblemen died, other than their armoring, was the fact that the objective of medieval battles wasn't to kill the opposition, but rather to capture them. Thus, surrender was the ultimate ideal. And why not? It takes less work to capture someone than to overpower them and kill someone who's more impenetrable than a nun with a thorny chastity belt. Plus, many of these noblemen were worth more alive than dead, often fetching hefty amounts of ransom. (That, and the fact that it was thought bad manners to chop off the heads of men like this. How far we've come -- assassinations are almost chic these days...)
And while the knights hardly ever died, the peasants who fought next to their horses often did (Poor people getting the short end of the stick? Never...) This 90% of the population was mainly agrarian, farming to make a living. You needed ten acres to sustain yourself and your family, the well-to-do usually had 20-30 acres, but the poor only had two to three (almost all had less than eight, a telling fact to the state of living for these people, huh?)
These farmers were under the rule of a lord, a man (and ladies, don't even kid yourself to think women could be in charge of this stuff. I don't even think it's permissible in 2000 yet...) who dictated your duties and decided whether or not you got to keep your land. This proliferation of poor conditions, besides causing starvation, also helped usher in the era of the Black Death, a fun little epoch which killed a quarter to a third of the entire English population. It came from rat fleas, which after feeding on the blood of a diseased rat and becoming engorged, began to suffocate and slowly starve, thus becoming ravenous with hunger again. Not being able to find any nearby food, they hop on the nearest food source available and go to town -- the humans. The disease is spread by actually being bitten or, after their excreta irritate your skin, scratching and spreading it in the bloodstream that way. And don't think two Tylenol and a bottle of water are going to cure this bad boy -- once you've got it, you're pretty much a goner since it's 90-95% fatal. (And while this was a bubonic plague spread by direct physical contact with the pathogen, this particular barrel of laughs metamorphosed into a pneumonic plague, one spread via particles in the air, or indirectly.)
So after all of this, we go to Canterbury to see how religion factors into this style of life (and I know what you're saying: "Parasitic, overwhelming, exposure to it almost impossible to survive -- if these aren't words to describe organized religion, I don't know what are. How can you miss the connection?") This tiny town, while originally founded and occupied by the Romans, was abandoned in 400AD and then reinhabited later on by the Saxons.
In the late 500s (597, to be exact) the king of the area, a bloke named Ethelbert (lovely name) married a Frenchwoman by the name of Bertha (egads! Even better. Hopefully their kids will be able to overcome the apparently huge deficiency their parents' names suggest they'll have in the Looks Department. No parents in their right minds name perfectly attractive kids Ethelbert and Bertha, so these two must have been real lookers...)
Bertha was a Christian, but Ethelbert was not, and in 597 St. Augustine was sent by the Pope to convert the Pagans here to Christianity. Ethelbert, with a little persuasion from his wife (and for once I'm betting it's not the offer of sex that won him over) okayed the religious conversion, was baptized, and then built a church especially for his wife to worship in (aww, what a nice guy.)
On the way to town we pass fields of these mysterious vines, but they're not grapes -- they're hops. You see, the Kent area (the area we're in) used to be a big producer of those little things -- they look like tear-shaped Brussel sprouts -- and these were stored in oast houses, circular (or now the more conventional square or rectangle) buildings with slanted chimneys (the chimneys cover the junction of the roof's four sides and look a bit like church steeples whose top quarter got bent back in a stiff wind.) These chimneys were spun around based on where the wind was blowing so as to get the proper drafts stirring inside to dry the hops. Many of the fields and oast houses stand empty, though, for their trade in the hop industry isn't quite as vigorous as it once was.
We pull into town and make our first stop at the eponymous Canterbury Cathedral, the centerpiece of the English religion (the archbishop of Canterbury is the most important member of the Church of England) and the first cathedral in England. Thanks to my having seen close to five gajillion churches in my time over here, I'm not all that enthused, but there are some interesting things of note here. Like the fact that in 1170 when Thomas of Beckett, the then-archbishop of Canterbury, was killed within the sacred walls.
He was a pal with the king, Henry II, and because of this friendship was appointed to his position (Henry thought since they were chums, Thomas would be his patsy and go along with whatever he wanted, primarily the eradication of the separate Church law, which he thought to be too lenient. (You could kill, say a few Hail Mary's and be absolved, and to escape a trial all you needed was the ability to read, and all that took was the ability to read your name. Ahh, the good old days...)
But Thomas was no one's fool, and he resisted the change, frustrating Henry and becoming a persistent thorn in his side. It got so bad that he was driven to say, "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" Some knights overheard him and, eager to please, decided to help him and make the journey Canterbury where they entered the church and killed Thomas of Beckett right in the midst of all that holiness, slicing the top of his head off (the force with which the sword was swung was so great (obviously, if it cut off part of his head) that when the sword struck the floor on the follow through, the point shattered into pieces. Somebody's been eatin' their Wheaties...)
This was a travesty -- apparently you're not supposed to kill people in churches (no matter how tempting it may be sometimes. When sermons run long on football day, it's enough to drive anyone mad...) -- and it started a lifelong repentance for Henry who never intended for this to happen. Inside the church there's this memorial to him on the site he was slain -- a cool, jagged T made out or dark metal pinned to the wall, with two equally ragged swords hanging from the ends of the top (so all together it looks a little like the upside down head of a trident.)
Other nifty things are the stained glass windows -- some look like the ones I found in that church in Spain, all bright colors and simple designs -- the effigy to the Black Prince, a black body covered with gold chain mail and a helmet, and the crypt in the basement with its ceiling frescoes from the 12th or 13th century.
I check out the Great Cloister, an exterior square full of tombs and memorials with grass covering the inner portion (you walk around the grass under a covered border where most of the tombs lie -- only really important people get buried in the grass), and then take off to see as much of the town as I can in the remaining hour.
I stroll past St. Augustine's abbey, a series of ruins made by St. Augustine in 598 (he made the original building which turned to ruins, not the ruins themselves, smart ass...) that is the home of a monastery today, and then I stop at St. Martin's church, the oldest parish church in England. The church is named after St. Martin, the Bishop of Tours (the town in France where beautiful Bertha lived before marrying equally enchanting Ethel) and is the church I mentioned earlier, the one he rebuilt just for her to worship in. (One more time -- "Awww...")
It's a very tiny church and no one is there, not even a member of the clergy, so I have the place to myself. I'm just about to send off the invites and roll in the kegs when I realize, despite the inviting desertion, this probably isn't the best place for a party, so I walk around, admiring its quaint feel and looking at St. Martin's chrismatory, a tiny metal box which held the three holy oils: the oil of catechumen (used for baptism), the oil of the sick, and chism (a mix of olive oil and balsam used for confirmation and ordination). This is believed to date to the 14th century and looks its age (unlike me, who neither looks nor acts mine...)
I soak up some more of this place -- I get a really cool feel from it: it's very quiet and peaceful, and it's an interesting thing to think, "So this is where it all started. This is the birthplace of Christianity in all of England." Kinda cool.
My time here up, I run back to the bus, passing the Roman wall which still surrounds most of the city (most of it still remains, despite the heavy bombing this town took in WWII. Lots of the interior of the city was hit and you can tell exactly where the bombs fell because those are the only spots where modern buildings and their more rigid styles of architecture are). I make it to the bus with time to spare, and then it's off to Dover on the coast.
Its castle is mammoth and lies perched atop the white chalk cliffs I've seen several times before on my ferry rides back from the coast of France. The castle dates back to the Norman invasion of 1066 and is known as "the key to England" due to its strategic position -- high atop the cliffs, you can see Calais, France only 23 miles away.
The place is like a giant playground inside with all sorts of cool things to see -- there's the outer walls, the inner walls, and then the central fortress or keep (this has to be one of the toughest places to capture, not only for its extensive series of walls, but also because it's way up on the cliffs. I don't know where you'd even start...) There's also the great view to be had walking atop the inner walls, one that stretches out before you, the sea on one side, the town on rolling hills on the other. (And the big artillery guns and ammo depots from WWII which still remain atop said walls are rather interesting, too, bringing a rather grim reminder of the latter portion of the castle's history.)
And then there are the system of medieval tunnels carved right into the chalk cliffs. This was originally used by the enemy who found burrowing into the chalk was easy to do and was a good way to get under those pesky walls, but rather than destroy these once the attempt was thwarted, the army at Dover decided to use them for themselves to deploy their troops behind enemy soldiers in battle. We walk around in them, even go off the beaten path a little bit (there's a tunnel a little bit higher up the wall that we're pretty sure we're not supposed to be in, but there's no signs saying otherwise, so we wander around in its pitch blackness until we come to a staircase of chalk leading up and a tiny window in the wall. The stairs lead nowhere, the window to the sea. This apparently was one that was never finished, but it is still pretty neat to see. It smells like a classroom of years long past after a kid has been smacking erasers together, and it's amazing at how soft the chalk really is -- you stick your thumbnail in it and a chunk of the wall flakes away. A few more hours and we could finish the staircase for them...)
We make our way back to the official path and wander around some more. I go into St. Mary-in-the-Castle, a tiny little church that's falling apart (signs read "Watch out for falling rocks" and they're not kidding, despite being inside. The walls are flaking away and little baseball sized boulders are plummeting onto the parishioners below. Nice -- I think I'll stay here under this pew...) The church is said to date back to the 4th century and is still in use by the military today (that makes sense. They're the only ones who could use it safely -- they have helmets...)
Right next to the church is the remains of the Roman lighthouse, a tower originally thirty meters high and still one of the tallest Roman structures in all of Europe. I pass by the church again, make my way past Admiralty Lookout, the lookout used by all the officers during military inhabitance, and then by the secret underground war tunnels, a vast system of tunnels built in 1797 and first occupied during the Napoleonic Wars. These were later used during WWII and the famous evacuation of Dunkirk was organized here by Churchill and his men (this was a mission to rescue stranded soldiers on the coast of France, all of whom had been left for dead. The government sent out a plea and begged anyone with a boat to come to Dover for a place in the armada, and thousands of boats, both civilian and military (the smallest being a rowboat) sailed across the treacherous channel while under heavy fire to save an astounding 338,000 soldiers.) And besides being several hundred feet below the surface and having been occupied until 1984 (they were prepared to be used in the 60s as a command center following a nuclear attack), these tunnels are the only underground barracks in all of Great Britain, but due to lack of time, I can't go in them. (Way to be organized, yet again, IE...)
Absolutely ravenous from all my walking, I buy an overpriced scone and butter (TWO POUNDS! @#$@*! (That self-imposed censorship goes out to my grandmother in Ann Arbor...)) and then run out the gate to the bus, first stopping to harass the biggest cow I've ever seen (this thing looks like a furry whale rather than a bovine.) I hop on the bus and leave Dover behind, probably for the third and final time...