Victoria Station, London

My cheeks were suddenly numb from the cold the moment I walked out of Gatwick Airport. After a 14-hour flight from Manila to London, I arrived at Gatwick at four o’ clock in the morning. There was none of Manila’s boisterous airport crowd, where every overseas Filipino worker who leaves the country is sent off by a busload of family, relatives and friends. I still remember the scenes from yesterday, when a small boy just refused to let go of the hands of his mother who was going to work as a domestic helper in the Middle East. The mother’s eyes had already turned red from crying but the young boy just refused to let go. He just gripped his mother’s hand and refused to cry. He just looked at her with his round and liquid eyes. I averted my gaze and instead arranged the things inside my bag.

The Customs man at Gatwick asked me, ‘From Hong Kong?’ and before I could answer that our Cathay Pacific plane just had a stopover there, he had already waved me aside. The airport’s silence and the directions spelt in so many arrows could stump any Filipino out on his first overseas trip. A year ago, I had applied for a British Council Fellowship to study in the United Kingdom. The interview was done at their office in an old and elegant mansion in New Manila, with a white tower at the back and magnolias blooming like small suns in the garden. Mr. Salmon, the British Council director, had asked me why I wanted to study English Literature in the UK.

‘All these authors are dead, white men any way,’ he said, a wicked twinkle in his eyes. ‘So what is the point of reading them?’ His eyes were the same colour as the soft shade of blue on the wallpaper behind him.

‘Well, they may be dead, but their words live on. And anyway, the reading list now, I am quite sure, already includes live, female writers, as well as writers with different skin pigmentation and sexual orientations.’

‘Quite true,’ chimed in Mr. Grant, the cultural affairs officer.

But the Brits were such cool cats, and they just laughed when I gave them my answer.

Mr. Salmon said, ‘Yes, indeed, Virginia Woolf is now part of the literary canon. But when I was reading English Literature at Oxford, she was not even part of the reading list. She was just considered a writer of memoirs.’

Mr. Grant assented, adding that there was a young British novelist of Japanese descent, Kazuo Ishiguro, whom I should read. He added, ‘That young man is a writer of such elegant and indirect prose. Who knows, he might win the Booker Prize one day?’

And Mr. Salmon added, ‘Or even the Nobel Prize for Literature as well?’

When I went out of the white and beautiful mansion I looked at the sky, which was as blue as the colour of my mother’s elementary-school uniform, and thought that if I make it, I will miss this wide blue sky and my beautiful mother and the sweet-sour, vinegary-soy food of my country.

Naturally I got lost in the labyrinth of Gatwick Airport. I took a deep breath, walked to the nearest elevator and pressed a button that brought me to the ground floor. Then I pulled my luggage and walked outside.

It was still dusk, a half-light suffused with muted tones of grey. It was only early spring, but a sudden clutch of coldness made me wear my grey winter coat in a huff. I saw a cleaning lady and asked her where I could get a ride to Victoria Station. She was polite and cheerful, her brown and curly hair bobbing as she moved her head as she spoke.

‘Hello, sonny, just take the lift again to go up, turn right, and then there you are, at the train going to Victoria Station. The train runs every 15 minutes.’

I thanked her and then she chirped: ‘I hope you will have a lovely holiday.’

Then I saw a young woman in a cardigan abloom with the colours of autumn – red and orange and yellow, like leaves turning in the still air. I recognized her. She had boarded the plane at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport. I walked over to her and asked her how I could reach Victoria Station.

‘Oh, I’m going there too,’ she said in a musical accent. ‘You can come with me.’

The next ordeal was how to deal with the coins. How to count these coins that I am now just seeing for the first time? The train was already here and about to leave in a minute. How now, brown cow? But the young woman said it was fine, she put some coins in the turnstile for my fare, and she helped me pull my luggage as well. We reached the train just before the door shut and surprised a young couple who were deep in each other’s embrace. The man smirked; the woman looked out of the window.

My new friend gave me her name, Ursula, and she talked with an accent that dipped and rose in the cold morning air. She worked as a banquet manager at a hotel in Seoul. ‘Before I left, we had a farewell party, and the Filipinos who worked with me cooked so much food we had to bring home some of them. They even gave me gifts. They are so sweet.’ She showed me one of her gifts, a round wooden key holder inscribed with the word ‘Baguio’, the name of this lovely mountain city in the north.

Outside, mist hung over the suburbs of London. Tall, sooty buildings made of bricks, then a blur of trees. ‘I am Irish,’ she said. ‘I have an uncle who is a Catholic priest in Jeju Island off the mainland of Korea. I just visited him. It is a fantastic island.’

I smiled at her and glanced outside. The spires had become taller, the roads wider. We must be near London now, I thought. I looked back at Ursula, then fished out a green T’boli pendant (cool, clear depths) from my carry-on bag. ‘May I give this to you, please?’ I said. ‘For your kindness.’

At first she did not want to accept it, but I told her I have several such pendants, to give away to people who were kind to strangers. She laughed and said, ‘Oh you, Filipinos. You are a lovely people.’

(Danton Remoto is the Head of School and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. His email is [email protected])