—Tellurian Edition—

Mushrooms in America

Part 1: Down Among the Sheltering Palms

Florida, Georgia, South Carolina

For those who wonder if being a seceded Aristasian means having no fun, or at least being terribly cloistered and unable to see the world and make it one's jolly old oyster-bar, I should like to present this humble account of Mushrooms in America.

This particular mushroom — your narratrix for the trip — is one of the most seceded Aristasians you are likely to meet, and one of the most cloistered. She rarely ventures out of the house alone and has almost no acquaintances outside Aristasia. Of course it is possible to be more cloistered, but that is only if one happens to like cloistering and find it cosy-comfy, or else wistfully romantic. This particular mushroom is as seceded as any blonde would ever be expected to be. And the point is that when one travels in an Aristasian bubble, with a group of Aristasians, one is in Aristasia wherever one goes, seeing the jolly old world through the lens of the Motherland, if that is not too mixed a metaphor.

The above picture is a cartoon presented to us by Blonde Tiggr on our return, based on the immortal words of li brunette: "Don't you think I'm a saint to take her to America in that hat?" The hat, by the bye (which the mushroom rather liked) was replaced in America. Twice, in fact. And here you see lhi mushroom, disguised as a people, in its Quirrie lemon-dress and li brunette in her usual world-saving clothes, together with world-saving equipment. As is usual for this District, the blonde is dark-haired and the brunette light-haired.

Blonde and Brunette Passports. British Passports have been abolished in favour of little red Enemy Union ones. Aristasians therefore favour nice little leather covers — either all looking Tellurian-traditional or else black for brunettes and pink for blondes.

Our journey started the night before we flew, because Brunette Tiggr, who was driving our particular party to the airport did not want to get up at the ungodly hour we had to fly at. She therefore, rather kindly, booked us into a hotel for the night so that she could deposit us there at a reasonable hour and leave us to do the get-up-at-the-crack-of-whatnot act.

The plan was then to go to bed and have a restful night before flying — but the best-laid plans of mice and mushrooms gang, as the combustible one put it, oft agley.

The first part worked out all right. We went to bed. But unforch I had been poisoned with a foodstuff I am allergic to (despite reassurances from a rather complacent waitress), and within an hour I was awake and in agony. After being fetched by an ambulance, we spent the remaider of the night at a hospital having injections in the sit-downeries and such before getting back to the hotel just in time to clean up and rush for the Aero. It was mildly awkward, not to say a little tired-making.

We flew to Florida via Washington, gaining eight hours on the way. This was not a special gift to a Royal Mushroom. It seems they give them to every one. Free air-hours, I think they are called.

Beautiful sunny landing. Temperature in the mid-80s which is just what 'shrooms like. Not hot, but not chilly the way it usually is in England. You may like chilly-mushrooms, but the shrooms themselves aren't so keen.

We were in Orlando, but the Boss Brunette did not want to stay in Orlando. She wanted to shake some dust off her feet and play with her new open-topped vroom-vroom. Time enough at the end of our trip to sample the delights of Orlando. Four thousand miles around the Confederate States and many adventures lay between us and Orlando, though when it came, it was a stunning climax to the trip. But you'll have to wait.

We picked up our rather jolly convertible and drove to Daytona Beach where we spent the night. We stayed at a charming hotel with a balcony overlooking Daytona Beach. It was full of girls in groups, the members of each group identically dressed. Many of them were engaged in precision drilling in the grounds. It was rather like the drill-yard at Selastine. It seemed an auspicious start. Only later did we discover that we had arrived just before a cheer-leaders' competition.

Tamara and Art-Neo seats in Daytona

We eventually found a chain-diner, and for the first time (but by no means the last) were struck by the Quirrie Art-Neo elegance of many American chain-diners. The proprietor was amazed at our taking pictures of his clock. But it was a delightful Art-Neo clock and we simply had to. They also had Tamara de Lempicka's auto-portrait on the wall, and the most delightfully Art-Neo seats. So we snapped them all.The proprietor looked at us as if to say:

"I didn't know the English were this crazy," and we looked back with charming glances, which, to one who could read them, meant:

"They aren't. We are Aristasians."

We meant to get an early night but that didn't quite work out.

So we planned to wake up late-ish. That didn't work out either. Li Brunette awakened one at some time a bit after 6 a.m. You see we had a charming balcony looking out over Daytona Beach and Li Brunette thought it was a good idea to see the sun rise over the Atlantic (a thing you can't see from the east side of it for some reason or other).

Sunrise over Daytona Beach

Well, it was a good idea. And after all one can always get another hour or so afterwards, can't one? Well, no one can't. Not when one is full of boingy shroomesque excitement. So instead we had coffee and croissants on the terrace and watched the glittering sea and sun-warmed sands and cheerleaders pitching each other into the air (really).

We also received a rather distressing wire from England telling us that Brunette Tiggr had been admitted to hospital with suspected malaria. Fortunately, this later transpired to be only a severe case of Punjabi 'flu contracted in India (which country the Tiggrs had returned from only two days before we left for America)

The next day we travelled north to St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in the U.S. of A (or should one say the oldest surviving city as several, far older, were destroyed by the Conquistadors), though still, of course, a baby by European standards. There we visited Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum — an exhibition based on the syndicated and illustrated column that ran from the 1930s to the 1950s. We saw many extraordinary things there, ranging from freaks of nature to a picture of Miss Marilyn Monroe made entirely of rhinestones (rather ironic in view of her famous interjection "I don't mean rhinestones!" in the song Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend). Connee Boswell of the Boswell Sisters was honoured there, having made a record by travelling 50,000 miles in a wheelchair (she has been crippled from birth and does all her concert tours in her wheelchair).

Vampire-killing Kit

We also saw a genuine 19th-century vampire-killing kit. It was a little hard to photograph trough the glass case, but here it is. In the top left corner is a pistol and below it a flask of powder and containers with silver bullets. There is also an ivory cross and lots of vials of things that are supposed to ward off the Forces of Darkness. Come to think of it, there are times when we might find such a kit very useful!

Upon leaving Ripley's we found ourselves in the middle of a sub-tropical storm, so heavy one could hardly see a foot ahead. We decided to travel this part with the convertible's hood up. But we finally ended up in St. Mary's, Georgia, where we spent the next night.

The next day I awoke at 7. Too excited to sleep, I fear. I supposed we should collapse at some point. Actually there was no real collapse, but I was rather a mellow mushroom (i.e. tired) while visiting Cousin Isabel and after that fell rather ill. For this I blame the sub-arctic temperatures at which dear Isabel keeps her air conditioning. Moving frequently from the Georgia sunshine into her deep-freeze of a drawing room was too much for the old constitusher after the battering it had received en route. Isabel and I are Best Blonde Friends but our temperature preferences are polar opposites, perhaps because she has come from a temperate climate into a warm one, and I from a sub-tropical climate into what is laughingly called a temperate one. My rooms are a hot-house in the midst of English chill, while hers are a fridge in the midst of Georgia heat.

Spanish Moss in Savannah

But I am getting ahead of myself. The next day we drove north to Savannah. Savannah is simply beautiful. The trees everywhere are hung with a grey-green drapery known as Spanish Moss, though it is neither moss nor Spanish. It is not a parasite either. It just settles on the trees and lives there without drawing anything from them. It is an air-plant, like the one the Tiggrs have in their drawing-room, which can be lifted out of its bed of stones and put back at will, for it has no roots and just sits there.

The great squares and avenues of Savannah are looped and swagged with this Spanish Moss, as if dressed for an arboreal festival, or as if nature had decided to add her touch of grandeur and elegance to the colonial grace and charm of the city.

This city is beautiful and has many places of interest to Aristasians. It is the birthplace of Juliette Gordon Lowe, the founder of the American Girl Guides, later known as the Girl Scouts. Amelia Bingham fans will remember that she operates from rooms at the Girl Guides' Club (which has nothing at all to do with the Girl Guides). Another Savannah daughter was Mary Telfair, a Victorian benefactress who, as well as decreeing that the great Methodist church there should have no stained glass (which to this day it hasn't), founded a hospital with the stipulation that it should be entirely female. Doctors, nurses and patients were all women. The only males ever allowed in the hospital were those born there — and they must be out within three days.

Colours in Savannah are strictly regulated as to whether they are true Savannah colours. The maid who paints her house in an unusual colour must be prepared to show a precedent for it in one of the established houses of Savannah, or be ordered to re-paint. It sounds as if they've a District Governess there, doesn't it?

I must add that these pictures of Savannah are not selected for prettiness — well, they are, but not as much as you might think. Savannah truly is beautiful all over, as is New Orleans, though Savannah's beauty is prim and well-kempt, while that of New Orleans — at least the French Quarter, which we visited, has a battered and genially run-down air. Like much of France, in fact.

We have blurred the bongo cars so you may see the city as we saw it — through a sort of Aristasian bubble.

But I am running ahead again into New Orleans. We spent the night on Tybee Island just off the coast near Savannah, where I had snow crabs for the first time, and in the morning my first real Southen Breakfast of cheese grits, biscuits and sausage gravy bacon, pancakes and lots of maple syrup. Biscuits in the South, I should explain, are not at all what the English mean by biscuits, but are rather more like scones, and gravy is a sort of white sauce with (in this case) bits of sausage in it. Cousin Isabel, who has lived in the South for about a year, has never quite tried this sort of Southern food. I, on the other hand, could take to it easily. But since I am now trying to lose the stone I put on during our trip, I probably shouldn't.

I confess I was amused by the waitress who, observing that I was enjoying my biscuits, said "Of course you are English - you always have tea and biscuits". She was imagining that the expression referred to tea with Southern-style biscuits. Though since the English also have tea and scones, she wasn't really so far wrong. Except, of course that "tea" to an American means iced tea, not the hot tea of the English. My brunette adores American iced tea, but I can't take to it at all. But then I don't like the tea the English drink either, which is hot, strong, black and bitter stuff, full of dye and tannin, with sugar and milk in it. To me, tea is a delicate Lapsang Souchong, Jasmine or Gunpowder Green in an eggshell-china cup, perhaps with a hint of lemon, but usually not.

We headed back into Savannah and spent the morning there riding about the city in up-to-date streetcars. At one point when we were a bit lost on food, li brunette said "We need to see a street-name" and I said: "We must look out for a street-name card. We've got a street-name-card desire." Ahem. Well, it's funnier if you say it out loud.

We found a nice coffee-shop for some blonde-fuel (cappuccino), a feat which is sometimes harder than one might think in America, and then headed across the broad Savannah River into South Carolina. The river really is broad. The rather nice Art-Neo building you see is not on the further bank, but on an island in the middle that is still part of Georgia. But on the real nether bank lie the Carolines. We also had our first sight of the great riverboats that ply the Southern waterways, on one of which we sailed — or steamed — the mighty Mississippi at far-off New Orleans.

South Carolina was not really on our itinner, as our next destination was Atlanta, but the opportunity to take in another state was there, so we took it. We only saw a little strip along the border which seemed to be lined with mean-looking houses and meaner-looking people. It was the State we liked least, though our little strip of it was undoubtedly a most unfair sample. There was almost nowhere to stop for a coffee or even a cool drink during our entire 140-mile Carolina drive, and the few places there were did not look advisable for stopping. We then entered a forest which seemed to be a Secret Government Installation. The road was fenced off and there were constant injunctions not to stop or leave the road and to wear one's official obscurancy-factor-40 blindfold (handed out at the guard-post and to be returned upon leaving) at all times while driving in the Security Area. All right, I made up that last bit. Soon after we left the Forbidden Forest, we also left the Commonwealth of South Carolina, and were not all that sorry to do so.

We passed through Augusta Georgia at about the time one might be thinking of stopping for the night. There are only two weeks in the year when accomodation in Augasta becomes scarce and very expensive, and this was one of them. The Masters' Golf something-or-other was on, and was very much to the — er — fore. Since Aristasians are not unduly keen on masters we decided to head far from Augusta before stopping. When we thought we had headed a jolly long way and it was getting very late we stopped and tried to book a room, only to find we had not driven far enough and the place was still stuffed to the gunwhales with masters and charging outrageous prices. When li brunette informed them of the humorous nature of their prices they offered a lower but still outrageous one. Li brunette was no less amused and we drove on to Greensboro.

Proceed to Part 2