London After Bloomsbury

In the mid-1950s, 22-year-old Nora Sayre left her beloved New York and headed for London. An English major from Radcliffe, she was lured by the mystique of Bloomsbury. She also wanted to flee her parents' tormented marriage, her mother's suicidal manic-depression and visits to the dismal psychiatric wards in Bellevue hospital.

She remained in London for five years. Looking back at that time in her memoir On the Wing, Sayre sees that those expatriate years made her the "observant stranger" Henry James chose to become. Ideal training for a writer, her outsider status changed her lens, challenged her assumptions. It was liberating, she writes, to reach maturity outside 1950s America, with its crushing conformity. The years in fog-bound London pushed back her horizons. Ironically, she also became "more American each month," going to third-grade American movies for nostalgic glimpses of Manhattan. Despite persistent Yank-bashing in Britain, and quips about "un-British" behavior provoked by the infamous antics of the House Committee on Un-American Activities back home, Sayre was not going to be one of those Anglophile Americans in London who pronounced the "h" in herb or said cheerio instead of goodbye.

A decade after the end of the war, there were still the remains of bombed-out buildings in central London. Domestic coal fires reinforced the thick yellow industrial fogs. Houses were cold and drafty, and Sayre discovered chilblains. Plumbing was often primitive. As a freelancer, working from her bed-sitter in Queen's Gate, Sayre competed for the pay phone in the hallway with an unemployed Irish journalist who struck matches on the seam of his trousers.

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