ABSTRACT
About twenty-five years ago, I took a job at the London bureau of Time. New in town, I had set out on foot from Bayswater Road for the Time-Life Building, on New Bond Street. Soon I was desperately lost and desperately trying not to show my desperation. It was that time of the morning when the only people around were those who actually worked on the street, and they all seemed to speak an alien tongue. This was my first time in England, where I was to live for the next few years, but I might as well have been in Vladivostok: I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. Then I saw a black face and, out of habit, eagerly approached: at last, in this strange land, a brother. The man was cleaning the sidewalk outside a men’s clothier’s, dousing the concrete with soapy water and sweeping it over the curb. I gave him a prayerful look: Could he possibly tell me how to find New Bond Street? The man stared at me quizzically, and when he opened his mouth he sounded exactly like every other workman I’d encountered.
