Two Sides of the Same Coin
(an Introduction to Ticket to Ride)
The Broad Strokes
by philip scott wikel

Growing up in the 70s, and having semi-hippies for parents, I heard a lot of talk about positive change. There was something in the air back then, what with the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Consciousness Movement, Women’s Liberation, Vietnam War protests, the Back to Nature Movement, the “success” of Woodstock, the environmental movement, America’s Bicentennial, and the American Indian Movement; it seemed that everything was changing for the better. And while I realize many got lost in the “Me-decade” aspect of the 70s and the pseudo-sexual revolution, in the final analysis, and from a kid’s point-of-view, it felt as if the world was beginning anew and that the average American was embracing, and looking forward to, greater freedom and a world redefined. I was so naive, in the best possible sense of being so, that I believed the whole world was joining together to ensure that the future would be full of all that our nation’s forefathers had set out to create; a land of free-thinking, loving, and idealistic people. I believed in all of this, even in spite of Watergate, the Gas Crisis, the Kent State Massacre, the instability of the Middle East and the terrorism at the 1972 Olympics.

In Ticket to Ride I have attempted to sort through the good and the bad of the 70s and to create characters who embody both sides of that time; not unlike a Bicentennial coin with Independence Hall on one side and a forward looking George Washington, or a thoughtful JFK, on the other. While I realize this might be a grandiose claim, I see my two protagonists as representative of America. Livy Tinsley, for me, embodies the positive side; free-thinking, confident, passionate and driven. Morgan Blake and his father William on the other hand, represent mostly what I see as needing to be changed. While Morgan does share some of Livy’s characteristics, his dysfunctional upbringing leads him to a number of pitfalls. And it is only through his exorcism in psychotherapy that he is ready to break the negative cycle of his past, grab the proverbial mantle and forge ahead to a better version of himself. It is within this transformation that Morgan must decide what to keep that is good in himself and what must be left behind. The child in me smiles when I think of what he, and we, may still become.

I must say I make no claim at being a cultural anthropologist, or an iconoclast, for that matter. I’m just a guy who believes there is still in all of us a wish for greater goodness and a greater good for our fellow man or woman. Many still believe, as the Beatles once sung, “All We Need Is Love” to make a difference in America and in the world. While I believe love figures in on a grand scale, I also feel it’s going to take an awfully lot of internal reflection and soul-searching to bring us to a true understanding of today’s global community. It may only be through quiet introspection, and self reflection that we can all find in ourselves the best “us” possible. Again I must say, in Ticket to Ride I make no claim to have made a comprehensive study of the 70s and America but I would like to think that my characters represent, mostly figuratively, and have grasped literally, some of the broader aspects of the time.

Some of The Nuts and Bolts

This part is a tough one because my manager in New York suggested I open the book with a chapter about Livy Tinsley, the female protagonist in Ticket to Ride. That’s all well and good, ladies first and all, but it seems to put off my potential male readers. The book opens with a heavy sense that this is a romance novel though the book itself is not specifically a romance.

All I can say to that is, hang in there guys, as Morgan Blake’s first chapter follows this prologue and in it we can get on with some serious “guy stuff.”

A comment that has been repeated a few times about the Prologue is that Livy is depicted as being too intelligent for a 10-year-old. To that I say, nonsense, the character was modeled after a real, nine-year-old girl from England, my ex-girlfriend’s little sister. While I believe her to be an exceptional person, and therefore a wonderful example of what a child can be, it may very well be that she is, sadly, not the norm for a girl her age.

Another comment has been made that my opening sentence is too long. For that, I offer no apology, but that I love the English language and enjoy using it to its fullest. Is this a brag? I say no. I believe we should all strive to use our language the best way we can. With the advent of email and social networks, English is suffering under the influence of abbreviations that cause English users to abbreviate themselves to the point of non-existence. “Use your words” say the preschool and kindergarten teachers and I agree. Express yourself to the fullest. Make your thoughts known. Use big sentences to do so and don’t worry that people are in too big a hurry to listen. You’ll find your audience eventually.

Ticket to Ride is, at times, a very self-consciously literary novel. For better or for worse and, as such, it is sometimes much more writerly than it is readerly. For some this will be a welcome challenge. For others, it may be a distraction. And still for others (probably most) it won’t matter.

The first 2 chapters of Ticket to Ride are consciously written in an “antiquated” style for three reasons. The first is to attempt to show a depth of the English language of the past, the second, to attempt to raise the commonplace to a loftier height, and thirdly, to attempt to point out the movement away from ornamental language and into the more utilitarian writing that is now demanded of writers by their readers.

So without further ado (mostly about nothing), here is my coming-of-age novel. You will ride along with Livy and Morgan as they wend their way through life and, though the period in which they live is the 70s, I believe their struggles are as timeless as the story of Odysseus.

Ticket to Ride
Prologue
Just Another Day – Livy Tinsley

To lead a better life, I need my love to be here.
- from “Here, There And Everywhere” by the Beatles

As the sun was setting over the Pacific Islands, casting it’s multi-color, thousand shaded dance on the faces of people she would never know, if only through the stories of a future, decade away lover, Olivia Tinsley (Livy) was waking to the new day. North London, having yet shed its coal-smoke past, greeted the morning like a stepmother embracing an unwanted child. But Livy’s spirit was above this, stepmother or not, she was connected to the morning. Her world was never just East Finchley. Hers was all that the equator bisected and all that lay between the poles. And while only a young girl, she knew she would bring them all to see this.
This particular morning, Saturday, December 17, 1967, was Livy’s birthday. She was turning ten today, double-digits, the first step toward young womanhood and the springtime of Psyche.

Trudy would be waiting. And the two friends, connected by a vision that stretched beyond the High street and market day, would walk above what others saw. Today their trek would take them to the Thames, a river which, in both their minds, led to the all of the oceans of the world.

They met at the corner as they did on so many other mornings, liberated from the utilitarian drabness of their council-flat homes. (This drabness should be seen as only the narrator’s point of view because neither girl could be “bothered” with pigeonholing themselves as being poor.) Poverty was something they saw in their parents’ eyes. It scared them, like the [Boogie Man], and solidified in them, a desire to not be poor, at least in spirit, and dreams. Dreams were what they had, a warm cloak against the morning air and their protection against their mother’s insistent urging to dress more warmly. The only warmth Livy needed today was what she saw in the floppy-haired eyes of Paul McCartney. The Beatles were in full force and she saw in them, especially in Paul, the promise of the world outside; a world full of Europe, America and the power of words to make change.

They walked along the High street, peering in the windows of the shops that had yet to open, not to appraise the wares laid out for sale in the way their mothers saw them, as objects to be possessed and kept, but as objects of discovery and promise, things that told tales of the people that created them and the lands from which they had come. In the window of the Tea shop sat boxes and tins bearing English names but the brands were so much less important than the places they had come from. Ceylon, Bombay, Jakarta and the like were names that conjured in them, fantasies and dreams of sweet-smelling air and fragrant fields of tea, places where their supposed poverty was alternatively noble, and lives built around the cultivation of these crops were simple and pleasurable and fraught with tradition, ritual, and beauty.

At Finchley Road they turned, and walked the long stretch from the here to there. A long walk for you and I, but just here to there for Livy and Trudy. Just here to there. The “there” being the banks of the Thames, and a bridge. And it was on this bridge, Blackfriars Bridge, looking East along the river that their conversation began. With the warm lands in their minds, their Saturday dreams took flight and Livy would often pose a question. “What would this have been if it wasn’t for Norsemen and Saxons? If we two had had a say in the building up of this island?”

Instead of answering, Trudy would turn inward, subconsciously erasing feudalism and Burgundian kings. She would instead picture a world where Joans’ of Arc would ride in on silver steeds and carry a message of peace. Or Emile Guillame’s, La Deliverance, an actual female nude statue standing in the middle of Finchley, holding a sword in the Battle of Marne, projecting power and grace and a vision of something other, other than the usual outcome of war, and other than a temporary half-conjured promise, but a promise of finally broaching that next world, that world where definitions are based on how well all is defined and not on the appearance of things. And while the barges and steamships of commerce rolled by she would picture a river full of music and romance, and a body of water that carried instead promise, and intangibles like adventure and freedom. These commodities would, in most cases be, under the cold eyes of the economist, trade goods, but to Trudy they weren’t simply traded goods, but an exchange of the wealth of kingdoms, kingdoms borne of diplomacy, goodwill and temperance.

“Didja know Trudy… an early, maybe the first, Briton and his wife, Hwll and Akun came through here in the summer some seventy-five hundred years before Christ, on their way to Salisbury? They came down here to find a new home, somewhere warmer as the last ice age was ending. This place was full of trees but they didn’t stop. Something drove him further south. London was a forest and the Thames ran freely, wide, and big. * Trudy there was nothing here. No off-licenses, no Minis, no Austin Healeys, no Ty-phoo or Tetley, no London Times or BBC… just trees and the river. How must that’ve been?”

Livy had broached this before, several times thought Trudy, but Trudy never tired of the speculation. She loved that Livy would ask it. That’s where Trudy wanted to go, away from the council flat, away from the sinking feeling that permeated it. She felt this more deeply than Livy. She could feel it creeping up around her ankles, threatening to choke her, and she, unlike Livy, felt powerless to fight it. Her only escape was through Livy’s words, and her questions, and her spirit, and her eyes, blue as nothing she’d seen. Livy was like a happy little female Buddha, smiling lovingly and defiantly at the world. It couldn’t touch her. She was wholly Psyche; nothing of Aphrodite and her sometimes steamrolling quality were present. She was fun, and hope, and promise, “cheeky” and detached.

“I’m ten Trudy, a decade old, ten years, double-digits. I mean, what will I mean? I’m sorry but, bloody hell, what is this councilflat-eastfinchley-povertyshite. I’m biding my time Trudy. I’m not long for here. I’m just ten but there’s work to do…
St. Paul’s. What do you think of St. Paul’s? Trudy? What do you think of St. Paul’s?”

Trudy had drifted off. She felt Livy pushing, moving, couldn’t be there for her anymore. Livy wanted too much. Trudy wanted just to talk. Livy spoke her dreams and Trudy rode on them, but Trudy couldn’t see it for herself. Livy, livy, livy, she thought. She’ll leave me here.

“I think my mum got me new ballet slippers. God knows why, I’ve only done one thing right in four years. Stopped the whole class to show them I was so excited. But mum still thinks I’m going to make the Royal Ballet.”

“But you’re going to be a writer Livy.”

“Mum’s dream.”

“Which?”

“The ballet… girls don’t write, not supposed to… not girls from East Finchley.”
Trudy sort of nodded in agreement and disbelief at the same time then pulled something from her coat pocket.

“I wrote this for you,” handing a folded sheet of paper to Livy, “You’re a much better writer than me, but well, here it is. Happy Birthday.”

“Thanks Trudy, I suppose they’ll be more coming out of East Finchley than just ink.” **
She stopped to read.

Silken voice,
silken smile
whistles on wind
all the while
sweet songs of seashells, seabirds & sandy crabs.

Transplanted manner
wide-eyed sigh
walks in whispers
under white light sky
through pretty poetry of
mustard greens and autumn sun

Lancashire castles
reproduced in sand
lyrics and verse
composed in her small hand
conversation adrift that she can’t understand
she sleeps quietly with Nana
in Nana’s new land.

“Thank you so much lovey. You are a love…”
Livy put her arm around Trudy.

“I love the look of St. Paul’s from here. It looks… well… it looks like someone cared…. but, at the same time… the constructs of it.” she continued.

“Construction…” Trudy added.

“I hate construction…” said Livy.

Trudy frowned, “Exactly.”

They looked at each other and Trudy smiled through Livy, then both turned back toward the Thames and at a passenger ship heading downriver to Dover, the Channel and everywhere else.

“Nana’s new land Livy! You can see it too.”

“You’re going to leave someday,” Trudy finished.

They were quiet again until Livy had to speak.

“My dad drank a lot again last night.”

“Ditto.”

The two of them hugged one another.

“I love you sweetie,” Livy said.

“I love you too,” replied Trudy.

“Best friends forever.”

“Best friends forever.”

It ended like this most every time.