31_days | [September 3rd] [Original Short Story] Summer Trip

Title: Summer Trip

Day/Theme: September 3rd/Being as yet but a girl

Series: Original

Character/Pairing: Vera Campman, brief mentions of others.

Rating: G?

Author's Note: This is just a little character sketch for a girl I don't know too well yet. Her parents, Sam Campman and Kamilla Verkhanovskaya, play a more prominant role in my piece for yesterday, "Kitty." This works fine as a stand-alone, but if you want to read that one, too, it will bring this one into context.

Summer Trip

When she was fifteen, Vera Campman went to England. It was during the summer of 1961, before her freshman year of high school. She'd gone with a tour comprised of other students in her grade, something for cultural exchange and international friendship. Jean Satz came with her, as a chaperone. They'd already planned that Alik would go when he was fifteen, and Petya would chaperone him then.

She spent happy days running through the streets of London with two or three other girls, looking into funny souvenir shops. They saw plays and went to a concert; they rode the Tube and visited Westminster Abbey.

"Look! There are so many tombs of kings and queens!" Betty exclaimed. "Don't you wish we had a queen back in America?"

And of course, they walked about the streets listening to that adorable British accent. Betty and Linda couldn't stop talking about how they could fall in love with a boy who talked like that. "It's so cute!" Linda would say.

"Bloody brilliant," Betty would reply to nobody in particular, trying to imitate the accent.

"Why do they say 'bloody?' Doesn't that mean 'bleeding?'" Vera asked, puzzled.

"It's not the same thing. Well, yeah, it does. But they use it to mean something else," Betty tried to explain, but Vera didn't really understand.

"I want to marry an Englishman!" Linda cried dreamily.

"Any foreigner would do," Betty responded. "As long as he sounds really cute, while still being able to understand English."

Vera had snickered. "You have such low qualifications, Betty."

"What, don't you think it's adorable?"

"But no, Vera is foreign. Better yet, Vera is Russian! She's an international woman of mystery! You can speak in an accent and get any boy to go gaga!" Linda chimed in enviously.

Vera simply shook her head, smiling.

They moved on to see medieval villages with castles and pastoral stretches of countryside. They ventured up into Scotland and stayed a night in a small town there, where each student stayed with a different family.

"My host brother told me that the national flower of Scotland is the thistle!" Linda told her friends the next morning.

"I see it everywhere," Vera commented. "I bought a package of handkerchiefs that had them embroidered on them. Strange flowers."

"He said they were the national flowers because a long time ago, when England and Scotland were having wars, there were fields full of thistles and the Scots were used to walking on them, but the English weren't. The thistles cut their soft feet and they died. I'm not sure if it's true. The kid was like, eight. Doesn't it sound dreadful?"

"Brutal, that's for sure," Vera commented.

"I thought the English and Scots were friends?" Linda remarked.

"Well, they're all part of the UK now. It's like how England and the US are friends, only we used to not be. The world got smaller and people found enemies further away," Vera murmured thoughtfully.

"Do you think wars so long ago were really awful? I mean, they didn't have the bomb back then," Betty mused.

"Human defense is always one step behind the technology of killing," Vera replied sadly. "Besides, in Korea they didn't use the bomb but lots of people still died."

At the end of their trip, returning to the South of England, they stopped in Dover and looked out upon the channel. This time, Vera did not join her friends as they gazed at the cliffs and chattered, but rather wandered as far along the beach as was permitted and gazed out to sea, trying to catch a glimpse of France through the fog. France, where her parents' old comrades lived! France, a place that would give her so many answers!

Oh, she would visit France later. For now, she would reflect, as the wind pulled wisps of her dark hair out of its braid and flung them here and there around her face, she would reflect on how her parents had always wanted to go to England together. Her father had been there for a few weeks, in training, but that was during the war and he had hardly a chance to enjoy himself. And her mother had never seen it. Never seen the West at all, in fact.

But Vera, as of yet only a girl, had already been to England. It was a bittersweet thought, as her heart filled with both pride and regret, that she had made it there, but without them.

-END-