“My name is Aleck Bernstein and I am 46 years old. I was born in the borough of Stepney, London, England on June 19, 1922. My father, Harry, was a furrier, self employed, and some of my earliest recollections are of wandering through the workroom and seeing skins being stretched, cut and sewn. The workroom was situated on the 1st floor of the house in which we lived till l940. The house was a massive brick built 4 story row house. The house and most of its neighbours had been built in the late l9th century as residences for clipper ship captains.”

So begins an autobiographical folio my father wrote in 1969, when he was roughly my age, and it serves as my guide today as I leave the Whitechapel tube station and wander back in time.

First I need to navigate the present, and it is a very different one than my father ever knew. The district around Whitechapel, Stepney Green, Stepney, Bethnel Green and Mile End — in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets — is now mostly populated by immigrant families from the Near and Middle East. Going east from Whitechapel one sees Moroccan, Egyptian, Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, etc., almost like a map of that region shrunk down small and splayed over the Tower Hamlets, each ethnicity seems to have carved out a distinct area for themselves. I know it is not that cut and dry, but it appears so to an outsider, which I decidedly am.

A marketplace spills onto the pavement by the station in brightly coloured scarves and pashmina, vegetables and fruit, toys and appliances. Stalls are ill defined and the vendors are all touting their wares in so many tongues that it all blends together to my ears. Just a street market lullaby lolling the tots in prams to sleep while their mothers haggle over the goods.

I pass an ancient facade, an alms house for aged sailors and their widows and orphans, built in 1695. It stands in stark contrast to the market place I have just passed.

I spy a sign across the street which sums things up to me, “Halal Chinese Buffet Opening Soon” it declares:

Just past the restaurant I see a sign for Stepney Green Road, and that takes me closer backwards in time. I veer to the right.

I will not find my father’s birthplace here:

“In June, 1940 I returned to London having graduated from school, and it was while waiting to enter Medical School that the Battle of Britain air war started. Just before I was due to start school the house was badly damaged during a heavy night bombing attack concentrated on the London Docks. None of us were hurt but we had to be evacuated from the house and spent the remainder of the night in a shelter.”

They had survived by hiding under the basement stairway, escaping with a wheel barrow of their most important possessions, and never really lived in the house again. So I won’t find that house, but there are some survived the raids, and I can get a sense of what it looked like. Here’s one now:

The other thing I can do is explore his old haunts:

“I was the youngest of three brothers and indulged in the usual boyish pranks in my free time from school and Hebrew classes. As a boy, one of my favorite pastimes was to explore London. We lived on the outskirts of Chinatown and close to the London Docks. We were also not far from the Tower of London (within the boundaries of the borough) and The City. All of these, then, provided many sites to visit and explore, usually on foot.”

The City, the historic city limits of London defined by the old siege walls, is today’s financial district, and I have already been there to shop on Petticoat Lane and such. The Tower of London I have already seen. That leaves the docks (that Chinatown being long gone, subsumed into Whitechaple). Off I go, then, to the docks.

My experience of the docks is necessarily limited to those I can explore in today’s security context, which means the very public docks at Limehouse. Here are views from Narrow Street, a tow way along the banks of the Limehouse Cut and northern embankment of the river Thames. This is all posh shops and diners now, but is still a working tow way (see sign):

The Limehouse basin is now a hot district for condo style development, which spreads all the way down the Isle of Dogs to Canary Wharf. Quite a change from even a decade ago. Here are some of those developments:

After taking a few snaps of the visage of St. Elmo atop Our Lady Immaculate Catholic church I am ready to take my leave of this cathartic venture and traipse off towards Mile End station.

This is where the stumbling part comes in. I am doing a frightfully poor job of finding my way to the station. My handy pocket maps don’t cover this area, it not being “Central London” after all, so I read maps at bus stops and try to figure it all out. I take far longer than I should but this is some sort of penance, I am sure, and I soldier on and I do persevere and I have gotten home!

So, did I find my father? Of course not. I knew I wouldn’t, and that was hardly the point any more. I know where he is, all I was looking for was to get a sense of where he was. What was his world like, what were the things and places that shaped him into who he was and that, in a generational trickle down, had helped to shape me. Did I find that? I think I may have, but I will not know for a while. I found my stubbornness, I got that from him, when I insisted that I would find my way home. I found my inquisitiveness as I explored his old sites of exploration. I found my sentimentality, not from him, as a shell of a building could bring a tear to my eye or a simple view of the Thames could transport me back over seventy years to when he gazed across that same expanse and dreamt the dreams that would one day culminate in…me.

See there, I have found me, which is really why I am here. All of the rest is just trappings and excuse. I have come here to find myself and I am beginning to feel that for the first time in a long long time I am hard on the track for that.

When I look at a well trimmed rosebush I will see my father. When I recall Ohm’s Law, which he taught me over the phone over three decades ago, I will recall his patience. When I hear a light and lilting English accent I will hear him. He is with me always, and now I have been to at least part of his London.

There, I have written what I must for the night. I have reports on tonight’s theatre which will wait for morning. Today started with an earthquake which I didn’t even feel, and it ends with a recognition that one can be moved and shaken up from within as well, perhaps more profoundly even. That’s a quake I most certainly felt.

A funny thing happened to me today.  Let me tell you about it.

I had my last full day in London today.  I leave tomorrow on an 11:something flight, which means I must be on the westbound train to Paddington by a little after 8:00.  So, what to do for my last day?  I came here in part to have some business meetings, and I had finally managed to nail one down for midday.  In preparation I slept well, having gotten to bed early last night after the whole Sister Wendy Chow Mein disaster.

I started off the day with a prepared breakfast at DÃŽN, around the corner.  This was a Halal take on a “Full English Breakfast”, a normally repugnant affair made better here by an utter lack of sausage (English sausage is best avoided) and no pitiful fried tomato.  It was rather good.  I spoiled myself by requesting a croissant rather than toast (75p extra) and by getting to both read The Independent and watch the BBC with sound, the first time I have enjoyed that on this trip.

It was a good day to have all this news. Last night saw the worst storm of the season hit, with 80mph winds, huge waves fed by Spring tides, and some major upsets in both the FA Cup soccer matches and the 6 Nations rugby tourney.  There was lots of news.

I have an Oyster Card, a magical RFID device which I just wave over a turnstile to let me on any train or bus in the capital, charged up for a full month of travel in zones one and two (central London and the immediate outskirts) but I opted to walk down to my meeting.  The weather was very strange; sunny one moment and raining the next – or both at the same time.  I kept taking out my brolly and stowing it again.

I stopped in at La Frommagerie to get some mints, and generally just ambled slowly through the crowds down towards my meeting spot in Soho.  A rather nice stroll, and the perfect way to spend my last day — no galleries, no ticket booths, just a nice walk.

Soon I was sitting in a Soho coffee shop, and then, when it went well, in a very nice Indian restaurant just a block off of Piccadilly Circus.  What was to have been a 30 minute get acquainted session turned into 2½ hours of rollicking good discussion, which I won’t go into here.  But I made a good friend, let’s leave it at that.

After leaving the restaurant and parting ways, I was left wondering how to complete my day, still young at only 2:40 pm or so.  Soon I had my answer when in a bracing wind I realised I had left my scarf behind at the restaurant.  A walk back yielded no scarf, much to the consternation of my hosts.  They were beside themselves trying to find it (It is cold sir, you need scarf, no?).  I waved off their concern.  I was feeling pretty good about things, and that was a really cheap scarf I had bought down in Petticoat Lane.  I deserve better, and since my dinner companion paid for my meal and tea, I decided I had some money to spend on a scarf.  I leave tomorrow, and I have more pounds in my pocket than I need to see me through.  Off to Saville Row I went.

Okay, Saville Row is intimidating.  This is where “Bespoke Suits” rule.  These are custom made suits which cost around £2,500 each.  This is not the place to buy a scarf even if you are feeling flush.  Their idea of flush has at least a couple more 0’s tucked onto the right hand side of the price tag.  I went a block over to Regent street where I found a lovely cashmere number for the right price.  Quite posh all the same.

I could have just walked back up towards home, or a closer tube station, but I thought I would like one more turn around Piccadilly Circus.  I am glad I did.  As I emerged from Soho into the Circus I saw an American couple pouring over their map.  “Welcome to my London” I thought, and thought to help them find what they needed.  I stopped myself, though.  Piccadilly Circus is one of those places that is typically filled with either tourists or hucksters.  If you get directions here they are likely to be tainted in some way, and most guides will tell you as much.  I realised that as well intended, any advice I gave may well be treated with suspicion.  Besides, I had made this very same map inspection several times — they will figure it out, and having done so once, will be better set to do so again.

I walked on by, and then it struck me: My London.  “Welcome to My London” I had thought.  Suddenly I stopped in my tracks, which in the middle of the Circus is not advised, and realised that I’d had an epiphany: my unspoken comment “Welcome to my London” put me squarely in camp with Alexandra Styron and her sensation, reported in her essay (which preceded my trip here and which I wrote about in my preamble over a month ago).  “My London;” I’ve realised that I have a London, I have my London; my view of the place, my streets I know backward and forward, my own internal map of the place, of the layout, the tube, the neighbourhoods.  It is limited, my London, but it is mine.  My father had his and now I have mine.  Just like Ms Styron and her father, they are not the same, and now I understand the sense of disconnectedness that she expressed between her Brooklyn and her father’s Brooklyn.

In my preamble I saw a gulf between her experience and my own, I now see that was myopic.  I just hadn’t gone far enough down the line to understand.

I spent the next hour or two walking my London.  I navigated effortlessly to Covent Garden where I shopped the antique stands.  I strolled The Strand and found a place that would actually make me a Martini (no small feat here, believe me).  I finally ducked into Charing Cross station and caught the Bakerloo home.  The last time on this trip I will take that line, that trusty train which is so much a part of My London.

Early back home, I settled in to take care of some updates to the blog, a nice cold supper to polish off my last bits of grocery, packing my bags.  And a nice relaxed night with myself and my new found comfort in my original hometown.  Fluent? I don’t know yet.  Comfortable? Most certainly.

I imagine myself to be a simple enough man. I am not given to epiphany with great regularity, nor am I given to cypher. I am probably plain to a fault, and tend to expose too much of my inner world. I do not often have dreams which move me. I had one last night, and it is still resting heavy in my chest.

I will, no I must, try to record what I dreamed in order to lighten this weight. I am on an airplane right now, flying somewhere over Canada on my way home from a month in London. I went to try to find myself, and in some ways I have. I have a better sense of who I am right now than I long have. I once again feel a level of confidence which I once carried like a shield but which has been missing for too long now. But this dream.

Before I left on my trip I wrote my ex-wife a letter about an essay I had read. No, not really about the essay, but about how my own experiences have left me in a different place than that author. That essay was by a woman who had lost her father when she herself was already an adult. In her map of the universe there were places which she associated with her father, places from which she had stayed away, as though they were off limits to her. There was his Brooklyn, and there was hers. Only after he passed had she allowed herself to venture too far into his Brooklyn.

I wrote that I had a very different map than she. In my map of the universe my father occupies times and not places. I do not think of a place and say “That’s my fathers” (fill in the blank). I think of times, “When my father was alive we…” I can no more venture into those times than could H. G. Wells without his time machine. I could not understand, I couldn’t relate to what this woman wrote, but she wrote it beautifully and it did make me think to recount in writing an event of which I had never written before – my father’s death in my 13th year. This I did in painful detail, and I cried while I wrote it. I suspect she cried when she read it. Later, when I cleaned up the letter and put it on my website, I suspect that other people cried when they read it. I did not intend to make people cry, I just had to get that account out of my system, and I had.

This was all in prelude to my month-long trip to London, and it served as a sort of cathartic warm up. In London I took a day to go and try to find my father’s London, and ended up finding how much the world changes in 60 years. Instead I found myself, or part of myself, and had a new catharsis. That prelude piece had ended in my admission that in a way I had always blamed my mother and her pack-rat tendencies for his death. I don’t know how aware I have ever been of this, but it must have been there and it came out full force as I wrote that memoir. I shudder to think of my siblings reading that and what they may now think of me.

But my dream really startled me, for in my dream I found myself confronting those demons directly in way I have never imagined one could in a dream. Here then is that dream, make of it what you will.

I am 45 years old now, middle aged. My marriage of 12 years failed, though there were many good years and much happiness, there was an unhappy period which came over me and by annex my marriage, commencing a few years ago, roughly coinciding with my mother’s final illness and ultimate death. After her illness, death and the administering of her estate I never really get back to enjoying my life as it was. Too much has changed. I cannot even see what is different or what is wrong, I am just sublimely unhappy.

But now I am a teenager again, I am in my mother’s living room and the room is clean, something it had not been since my father passed away. This in part is how I place my own age, as I cannot see myself. I am in a clean living room so I must be a teenager. The doorbell rings and someone answers. My father is at the door. He has been dead for five years now, and has come to talk about that. My mother comes out from the kitchen and they have the same little kiss on the lips with which they would greet each other every time he came home. My mother wore an apron and tea was soon served. We sat and chatted; my father, a neighbor, some other people. I was there, but I cannot recall any of my four siblings being in the room.

Dad asks for a glass of water. Oh my god, I cannot explain, but his voice is just the same, that thin reedy voice with the palest of English accents, the almost singsong lilt. My heart jumps as I offer to go get him one.

The kitchen is a mess, it is not clean like when dad was alive, it is a horrid, unlivable mess as I remember it from visits to mom 10 or so years after dads death. I am caught in a Sisyphean struggle to find a clean cup, or a cup I can clean, or something to clean a cup with, or …

My mother comes into the kitchen. She is still wearing her apron but is now as she was in the era of the kitchen looking like this, she is as she was at 60, not the 47 she was when dad died. I look at her with contempt and frustration. Dad is out there, in the other room, and if only she could keep house I would be there with him instead of trapped in this kitchen trying in vein to get him a cup of water. How long have I got, will he still be there when I get back? She is old now, will he be gone? Is the dream over? The dream, the dream

Yes, the dream. It slips away as I realize that I have been dreaming. I try to fetch it back, but I will never go back into the living room with a glass of water. I have failed. All I have done is find contempt for my mother, who certainly didn’t deserve it.

That is how I awoke at 4:00 this morning. I never really did get back to sleep properly, and a couple hours later was getting up to go to the airport and fly home. We will land shortly, so I must power down and stow my computer. Much to think about I guess.

Maybe I’ll sleep on it.