Wilfred steams through Shakespeare Country

Hello!  It's me, Wilfred!  And I am still in England with my two dads.  This week, I want to tell you all about our great weekend in Warwickshire visiting our friends, Adelle and Moray in the land of Shakespeare! 

Me!  Still in London with my two dads!

We got up with the birds on Saturday morning so that we could get out of our flat early to catch our train.  All the time we were rushing around to get ready, Poppy kept saying, "Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare" until I finally said, "Poppy!  Why do you keep talking about that Shakespeare guy!?"  We went to his theatre (the Globe), we saw his monument in Southwark, and everywhere we go in England or Scotland, Dad or Poppy will say, "Remember this from Shakespeare?  Take a picture!"

While Poppy squeezed the tooth paste on my tooth brush and Dad patted water on my head to plaster down my sticky-uppy hair, Poppy explained that Shakespeare has a lot to do with their work.  Poppy teaches actors and they spend hours and hours learning Shakespeare's plays and studying every word so they know what it means and how to say it.  Dad studied Shakespeare, too, and even though Dad writes stuff for other people to say and doesn't act himself, he said Shakespeare was one of the best writers ever.  I asked Dad if that's why Shakespeare is famous, because he made up good stories and Dad said Shakespeare didn't really make up the stories, he mostly used other people's...and then it got too hard for Dad to explain - but Dad said he still wanted to see Shakespeare's second-best bed anyway... which didn't even make any sense, but that is my dad.

Poppy was already down on the street with our suitcase, tapping his foot and going, "Where IS he!?" while Dad was upstairs finding his glasses and putting on his jacket.  I called back up that Poppy said we were going to miss our train.  Dad came down, grumbling that we still had an hour -- and we were off to the Gloucester Road tube station with our suitcase rolling behind us!
 
We took the Piccadilly line to Green Park and then transferred on to the Victoria line to Euston.  We hurried through long underground walkways and came up in Euston Station.


Me in Euston Station

Me on the London Midland.  "Get on Dad!  We'll miss the train!"

The train pulled out of the station and an hour and a half later, we were in Rugby in Warwickshire!  We know Adelle and Moray because they came over to Canada for a year-long adventure -- sort of like we are doing, but in reverse -- and Dad and Adelle sang together in our church choir.  Adelle and Moray are really nice.  When we first got to London, they came over for dinner and gave Dad and Poppy lots of good living-in-London advice; one time they took me to the British War Museum and Moray bought me a Lego that he helped me build; and then, they invited us out to Warwickshire for a weekend. 

This is my friend, Adelle, when she was in Toronto

Adelle and Moray were waiting at the station and they had our whole day planned.  First stop, their place to drop our suitcase and have a quick cup of tea. 

Rugby is a very pretty town near to Coventry and Leicester, Warwick Castle and Stratford-upon-Avon.  Adelle and Moray used to live in London but they bought their first home out here.  Adelle gets to take the train into London to work three days a week.  Can you even believe it?  EVER LUCKY!

As we whizzed through Rugby in their little silver car, Adelle and Moray pointed out the famous Rugby School and the playing fields where the game of Rugby football was first invented. 


Rugby train station

Rugby



The famous Rugby playing field

After our quick "cuppa" (and a visit with their kitten, Ravage) we were off to Shakespeare land.  Shakespeare wrote 38 plays while he was living in London, back in the days when the English theatre was first being invented, but he was born and grew up in the little market town of Stratford-upon-Avon almost four hundred and fifty years ago.  Stratford-upon-Avon wasn't much in those days.  Shakespeare's family lived on the edge of town.  His dad was a glove maker.  Shakespeare went to the local little school, but his family couldn't afford to send him to university.  He got married when he was just a teenager and had three children before he was 21, and then he left his family and went off to seek his fortune in London.

Stratford-upon-Avon is a town with a lot of old buildings from Elizabethan times, and earlier, and a LOT of Shakespeare stuff  -- too much even for Dad and Poppy.  Dad says that some people think Shakespeare didn't really write his plays -- that he couldn't be the author because he was from a nowhere town with not much education. Dad calls those people, snobs.  He says that a genius can be in anyone from anywhere.  And that is the real reason why millions of people come to this town every year -- to see that Shakespeare was real, an ordinary seeming person, who went to an ordinary school and still he was great.

One thing I can tell you about Stratford-upon-Avon -- it has Shakespeare stuff EVERYWHERE.

Stratford-upon-Avon has old stuff in every direction

Shakespeare's house where he was born and grew up was once at the edge of town



This place is Shakespeare overload...

 

Shakespeare's school

Look what you started, Will

Me with "Shakesbeare..." sometimes there was too much Shakespeare
even for Poppy and Dad

After we wandered around the town centre, we walked down to the Avon River, where I saw boats for rent and boat rides.  I asked Dad if we could go on one and he said, sure.  The next departure was in twenty minutes, so we got an ice cream cone and then came back to board.  For half an hour we floated down the Avon --  to one end of the town and then, back up to the other, taking in all the sights from the river.  Lovely.

Me with Adelle on the boat dock..lovely...but breezy...

The boat!

Dad and I on the boat

Poppy on board

Where Shakespeare was baptized, married and buried

On the Avon River

From the river, we could see the big theatre that is the home to the Royal Shakespeare Company.  Poppy is very excited about the RSC.  He is meeting someone from there for his work and he and Dad are big fans of the company.  Of course, we had to go inside it and have a look around. 

There was a play on and we could watch some of it on TV monitors in the lobby.   They were doing a play called "The Merchant of Venice" and we saw a scene with two girls talking Shakespeare language sounding like they were teenagers at a club and then a disco ball started flashing...  I guess you'd have to see the whole thing to get WHAT was going on. There was also a gallery we could go through and a gift shop with -- what else -- MORE Shakespeare stuff!
 

RSC from the water

More RSC

I was anxious to go inside... I needed a lavatory...

Poppy is meeting someone from here for his work

By then, it was getting time to go.  On our way out of town, Adelle got Moray to drive past the house where Shakespeare's wife grew up.  It is called Anne Hathaway's cottage.  NICE cottage!  It is HUGE!

Anne Hathaway's not so little cottage 

We hurried back to Adelle and Moray's to get ready for a barbeque.  Adelle's parents came over and they brought Adelle's little brother, Sam, who is six.  And Sam is mad on trains, too!  He even brought some trains over for us to play with! CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE IT?!


Dad helps Adelle make dinner

Sam and I eat our burgers in our back garden tent

The next morning, Adelle wowed us at breakfast with a "fry up" of the full English breakfast,and then she and Moray told me they had a surprise for me.  We drove over to collect Adelle's parents and Sam in the nearby town of Hinkley and then the eight of us headed off to a place called Shackerstone in Leicestershire and guess what was there? The Battlefield Line STEAM TRAIN! 



The steam train at Shackerstone

The Battlefield line is a heritage railway that runs for four and a half miles on its own line from Shackertone Station -- which is a real life Victorian railway station -- through Market Bosworth to Shenton.  Shenton Station is beside a field where a famous long ago battle once took place, the Battle of Bosworth, which was the final battle of an English war called the War of the Roses.

I could hear the steam whistle shrieking, as we jumped out of the car.  Sammy and I ran ahead.  While Poppy was getting our tickets, I went out on the platform with Sammy and his dad, Trevor, to watch the old steam train shunt the cars into the station.  We clambered across an iron and brick pedestrian overpass so that we could board. 

Although it is only 4.5 miles, the train doesn't go very fast so it takes about twenty minutes to make the trip.  It passes through fields and forests, belching steam, with its whistle screeching at every crossing.  It was the best train EVER!

Shunting into Shackerstone



Shackerstone Station is a grade II listed historical building

Everything is just as it was over a hundred years ago

The train stops at Market Bosworth

Sam and I are both mad about trains

Lovely...but loud

At the other end of the track, we got off at Shenton Station.  We had an hour to look around before the train came back, so we walked down to King Richard's field.  Not far from Shenton Station, in a meadow beside a farm cottage, is a big stone with a plaque on it.  It marks the spot where King Richard III is supposed to have said, "A horse, a horse!  My kingdom for a horse!" and then he fought to the death -- and LOST!  Dad and Poppy said that Shakespeare wrote it in a famous play, so they had to take a picture, of course!

Shakespeare wrote about this.  Quick, take a picture!

Hundreds of years ago, there was a big battle with over a thousand knights in armour, fighting with swords and cannons and bows and arrows.  This was a vicious fight and the winner would be king.  Now, it is a sheep pasture and it is hard to imagine that this was the site of a bloody war.

Walking along the edge of the battlefield

No battles today, just sleepy sheep

Sammy and I wanted to stay at the station and wait for the train with Sammy's mom and Moray, but Adelle and her dad and my poppy and dad hiked around the battlefield, reading the markers about the great battle and looking at the views of the Leicestershire countryside.  Soon, the time passed, the train whistle shrieked and the steam train puffed into Shenton Station to take us back.

Dad waits for the train at Shenton

The train pulls back into Shenton Station

Well, that is pretty much all for this week.  Thanks, Moray!  Thanks, Adelle!  Thanks, Sammy! And thanks to Sammy's mom and dad.  Hope I see you some time in my kid's life again soon.

So everybody, I will be back next week.    Stay tuned for more adventures in the UK.  Bye for now!

 Wilfie


Wilfred from London Bridge to the Bloody Tower

Hello, it’s me!  Wilfred!  And I am still living here in London. 

It is May now, and soon our six months in the UK will be over.  Dad and Poppy have already started making lists of everything they want to get done before we go.  Me, I just keep going to Ravenstone and playing with my friends, Bella and Mir Ali. 

Me and Dad on London Bridge

In form 2 at Ravenstone, we are still studying maths – doing times tables (2s, 5s and 10s are my best so far) and we are learning about money.  We have spelling tests on Wednesdays.  I am good speller and almost every time I get ten out of ten.  We still have swimming once a week and now we go in a coach to a different park – Holland Park – for our tennis lessons and field hockey.   We are learning songs in English and French and on the recorder, doing computer art, learning about Egypt and mummies and pyramids in history, and taking RE – religious education.  This week, Miss Sanders told us all about the Pillars of Islam.    

And on every weekend, I do fun stuff with my dads!  This week, we did more exploring, and this time it was London Bridge and the Tower!  

Fish Hall...where the fishmongers guild meets to talk about fish.

We headed out late on Saturday morning and took the tube from Gloucester Road.  We had to take a different route than we might because there are a lot of tube line closures on the weekend so the city of London can repair and maintain the tracks.  We took the Piccadilly Line to Holborn and then transferred on to the Central Line to Bank.  From Bank, we walked down to the Thames, past Fishmongers Hall, and up on to London Bridge.

There has been a bridge here for 2000 years – since the Roman times - and for most of that time it was the only bridge into London.  I have seen lots of stuff about it in different museums.  Some people even say, the whole reason London is here is because this was the first place the Romans got to when they came up the Thames that was narrow enough for them to build a bridge.  After the Romans left, the Saxons didn’t like anything Roman, including their bridge and they let it fall apart.  They liked using ferry boats.  In fact, they thought the bridge just made it easier for Vikings and other enemies to attack the city, so finally they pulled it down about a thousand years ago.  They say that is when they wrote the song, “London Bridge is Falling Down.”  They changed their mind after a few years and built another.  Most people have seen pictures of the medieval London Bridge, which had shops and houses and even a church on it.   I saw a model of it at the Thames Museum on Canary Wharf and there is a really cool model in an old church called St. Magnus the Martyr. 



The Model in St.Magnus the Martyr...the only building left of the old London bridge..

St. Mangnus’s church is kind of tucked behind office buildings now, but you used to have to walk under its bell tower to get on to London Bridge.  The church was rebuilt after the great fire and is the only piece of the old bridge still more or less in one piece.    The old medieval bridge looked cool, but it was a fire hazard, it blocked river traffic and it was too narrow.  They say the rule for crossing the narrow bridge was carts going into London from Southwark were ordered to go along the west side and all carts going out of  London were ordered to the east side and that is the first example of Britons driving on the left.  Anyway, they pulled that bridge down and built a new one in the 1800s, and then they pulled it down and sold that bridge to an American who moved it to the Arizona desert, and THEN, they built the bridge that we walked across, in 1973.

When we got to the Southwark side of the bridge, it was already lunch time – which is just the way Daddy and Poppy planned it.  They wanted to show me Borough Market. 

Borough Market -- under a train bridge!

Borough Market is underneath a railway bridge right next to London Bridge (heading for the Cannon Street Station) and they sell fresh and mostly local food.  Dad calls it, “foodies’ paradise.”  Everything you can imagine, all the best and lots of it.  They have tons and tons of fresh fish, meat and cheese and baking and vegetables and fruits and lots and lots of new and interesting things to try.   

Me and Poppy at Borough Market and I was HUNGRY

 

Mushrooms and fresh herbs



Pastries...yum!



Today's catch...the eye balls look a little gross...

So much to choose... what will I have...?

Poppy and Daddy took me to a stall that had very nice ladies serving up all kinds of good stuff on a bun for a quick lunch.  You could have venison sausage or ostrich burgers… I had a regular hamburger with lots of ketchup (homemade!). 

Dad bought me a fruit smoothie and we went to eat our lunch at little tables set up outside Southwark Cathedral.   

Me and Poppy dig into lunch beside the Cathedral

While I was finishing my burger, Poppy saw some ladies going by wearing those goofy sort of hat things called, “fascinators” -- sort of like Princess Eugenie at the royal wedding -- and Poppy realized that somebody posh was about to get married.  He went for a quick look before the ceremony.  Dad went next (he wanted to see the church – not the fascinators) and I went with Dad to see the inside. 

Southwark Cathedral has been around at least a thousand years.  They say that there was a place for monks to live built here in 606 AD and that it was probably built on the ruins of an old Roman temple.  This is one of the oldest churches in London.  One of the famous people who went to this church was William Shakespeare.  Shakespeare buried his brother here and Shakespeare has a monument.

Inside Southwark Cathedral

At Shakespeare's monument you are invited to say a prayer for theatre people...

After lunch we walked around the Cathedral toward the Thames and saw some cool stuff.  I saw the ruin of Winchester Castle.  It was an ancient castle where bishops used to stay. 

 

Look what they found inside a wall

They thought the castle was gone forever, but when they tore down some ruined warehouses in the 1980s, they found part of it buried inside the walls!  Next door was where there used to be a terrible prison dungeon that started as part of the castle called, “the Clink”.  Now, it is just a terrible tourist attraction according to Dad and he would not let me go in.  That was okay, because Poppy wanted to show me a pirate ship, Sir Frances Drakes’ Golden Hind!

Gibbet outside the Clink

On our way there, we saw some men from a village in Gloucester with bells on their pants and flowers on their hats, waving hankies and banging poles and jumping around.  Poppy said it was called a “Morris Dance.”  I don’t know who Morris was... but he was a kind of funny dancer… 



Morris dancing...



Not to my taste...

The Golden Hind was not the real Golden Hind of olden days, it was a replica, but it was made almost exactly the same and it has sailed on the real sea all over the world.  I went on board and had a good look around with Poppy.  Dad said that in Sir Francis Drake’s time, Dad would be considered tall and that most sailors were actually shorter than him… All I know is that the ceilings below deck were just about right for me.


The Golden Hind in Southwark

Sheesh...they MUST have been short...



Me having a good look around



Fire!!



After the Golden Hind, we walked along the Thames heading east.  We saw a really strange but cool statue in the old Hays Wharf (which is now full of shops and stuff).  We walked past the HMS Belfast, which has part of the British War Museum on board.  We saw the REALLY cool new buildings around the new London city hall.  And of course we walked across the famous TOWER BRIDGE.  I even saw the drawbridge go up!

Me checking out the statue at Hays Wharf



Me and the HMS Belfast



Tower Bridge, Me, Poppy and London's new city hall

Did you know that in December 1952, a bus driver was driving an old fashioned double decker bus across the bridge when he saw the road moving in front of him!?  He realized the bridge was going up and that if he slammed on the brakes he would probably skid into the Thames, so he stepped on the gas and the old double-decker jumped a three foot gap!  With passengers on board!  Can you even believe it?

We saw this postcard in a souvenir shop... the great jumping bus of 1952!

Don't go up,  bridge...don't go up!

After, we went to the famous Tower of London!  The Tower is actually a castle, although it is famous for being a prison where the kings and queens of England sent their enemies and chopped off their heads.   They started building it a thousand years ago and are actually still adding on to it – even if nowadays all they are adding is ticket booths, lavatories and souvenir shops.  

Entrance to the Tower of London

On the wall -- that's the White Tower, the oldest part

Poppy and me figure out where we are in the old apartments

 There is lots of great stuff to see inside.  You can see the old part that has royal apartments and really narrow windy stairs.  You can walk the walls and see Traitor’s Gate, where prisoners were brought in by boat at low tide.   Or you can go inside the towers and see the very cool collection of armour.  And the world famous crown jewels.  The crown jewels has a moving sidewalk, like at the airport, so you can stand there and look, but the crowd keeps moving.  Very cool.

The Crown Jewels are in here

He guards the jewels...and tickles kids!

The Crown Jewels are in cases -- no touching or trying on!

The White Tower has a big exhibit of armour

Even the horses wore armour

The biggest suit and the smallest suit

On this spot, heads were chopped

Poppy says, if the ravens ever leave the Tower...bad news for London

But the best part for me was I met two nice olden day ladies.  When I went to talk to them, they told me that one of the ladies wanted to be married, but a mean man who was a prisoner in the Tower stood between her and TRUE LOVE!!  They asked me to come back at 3:30 and help them.  It was a play!   

Olden times ladies with a mission for me

They had a basket of POISONED tarts to deliver to the bad man and they asked me and a couple of other kids to deliver the tarts for them.  And I did!  I have a very loud voice – just as loud as the actors – and when the mean man asked me why he should eat my tarts, I said, “They are FREE!  No MONEY!!”   Everybody laughed and the mean man ate one.  And then, he died!  

Mean man in the way of TRUE love

I play my part perfectly.  Don't I look innocent?

Later on, I found out, I was FOOLED!  The lady I helped wasn’t so nice after all, and she said we all had to get out of the tower by sundown or we might be arrested and they would throw us in the tower!   I got scared, but Dad told me not to worry – the mean man wasn’t really dead.

Time to get out of here

Heading home

Dad explains how Traitor's Gate worked... sometimes people throw money in there

Hey... what does this even mean?

When it was time to go, we walked along the Thames and saw the Tower Bridge again, gleaming in the sun.  It was so lovely and warm in the late afternoon that we walked back over to the London Bridge tube station to catch the Jubilee line homeward. 

Me and Dad and my favorite bridge in all London

The Jubilee is cool because there are sliding glass doors between the platform and the train



Well, that is all for this week.  Speaking of plays and stuff -- be sure to read my blog next week.  We are going to visit our friends Moray and Adelle and they are taking us to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see the famous home of the famous William Shakespeare! 

Bye for now, Wilfred.