• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

7

LOVE LETTERS

Dear Alice,

I wonder if there will ever be another event that brings people together as the Second World War did. Not in my lifetime, I suspect. The truth is, the world has changed so much I’m not sure any event could produce the “home front” mentality that existed then. We Americans had it and so did other Allied countries. But none so much, I suspect, as Great Britain. You stillcannot walk here in London without sensing the presence of Britain’s “finest hour.”

Love, Alice

One morning while having breakfast on the King’s Road I suddenly realized how foreign my life as a reporter now seemed. When I thought of it now—the deadlines, the constant search to find material for a story or column, the compulsive need to read three newspapers daily, the fear of getting something wrong or not getting the whole story—it was like imagining a country I hadn’t visited in some time.

Just how far I’d strayed from the newspaper mentality, however, was driven home that morning when my café au lait arrived and I settled in to read the papers. As usual I was armed with the International Herald Tribune, which I bought every day but didn’t always read, and the Kensington & Chelsea Post, a neighborhood newspaper that I always read. Instead of focusing on world news or politics or what might loosely be described as important-issue reporting, I found myself avidly reading a front-page story in the Kensington-Chelsea paper about a cat.

Under the headline, HUNT CONTINUES FOR MISS ARIELLE, the article began:

A Kensington woman has been overwhelmed by the response to appeals to find her missing cat.

The white pedigree chinchilla silver-tipped cat Miss Arielle disappeared two weeks ago, leaving three tiny kittens.

After printing 1,000 leaflets asking for help, she has been inundated with callers thinking they have seen the cuddly creature. Some have even called at the house with cats which look like Miss Arielle but so far no-one has found the real thing.

Next to the story was a photo, larger than the entire article, of a man holding a rather plain-looking white cat. “Pictured with the cat is the owner’s husband, John,” read the caption beneath.

I ordered another cappuccino and sat thinking about Miss Arielle’s disappearance. I thought about the people who took the time to show up with Arielle look-alikes, about the thousand leaflets put up by Miss Arielle’s owner and about what seemed—judging from the photograph—a totally romanticized and inflated description of the missing cat. Soon, a short story began taking shape in my head. Fortunately, before I reached the point of making notes on my napkin, my second cappuccino arrived, and I turned my attention to the Trib.

After glancing at the front-page headlines and passing over articles on the Treaty on European Union and Alan Greenspan’s position on inflation, I paid my check and left.

In the old days—the days before this trip—articles about lost cats would have passed quickly through my system, leaving me free to digest the meatier opinions of know-it-all politicians and pundits on the state-of-the-world-and-all-those-problems-that-threaten-it.

Not anymore. I’d given myself license to assume the world and its problems could struggle on without me, at least for the rest of the year. I was reminded of E. B. White, who commented, after leaving The New Yorker for a simpler life in Maine, that he hadn’t been able to keep up with the papers because he was “building a mouse-proof closet against a rain of mice.”

As I headed up the King’s Road toward the Underground station—keeping an eye out for a pedigree chinchilla silver-tipped cat—I spotted a few mice, along with two black cats, a gray tabby, and one unusually big furry creature that may or may not have been of the feline persuasion. I also saw a man who looked like my personal idol: John Cleese, the great British actor and comedian of Monty Python fame. Upon closer inspection, however, I decided that, like