One Enchanted Evening - And Here I Am by Fran Locks
Fran Locks
In the spring of 1975, I was 30 years old. I shared an apartment in North London with two friends and worked in an underserved area of South London as a teacher/social worker. It was a stressful but always interesting job with great colleagues. I come from a close family. My parents lived in London as did my two younger sisters. We saw each other often.
One Saturday evening two of my fellow teachers and I went to a country pub and started talking about our under-performing love lives. I remember saying that I rarely met anyone unless it was on holiday. (That’s British for “vacation.) Wendy said, “So let’s go on holiday.”
We had a mid-semester break coming up and decided to go to Amsterdam. As you know, Europe is very close to the UK and easy to get to. There were no under-channel trains in those days, but ferries. I said I wanted to go to museums--The Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh, the Anne Frank House – and laughed at their plans for romance.
On our first night we went to a Malaysian restaurant (Malaya was once a Dutch colony) and had “rice tafel” and lots of small dishes, like chicken satay in peanut sauce--all with rice. The three of us were seated at a table with another person, as it’s not unusual there to be seated with strangers.
He was a very charming man from Greece--an agent for Olympic Airlines, based in Amsterdam. He was attracted to Wendy who was very well-endowed. He asked us all if we would like to go somewhere after the meal and a waiter suggested we go to “The Blue Note”—the same name as the nightclub that used to be in Chicago. The club was quite small with music for dancing and drinks--especially the Dutch specialty—genever gin.
After a while the music stopped, and a young woman appeared with a large, inflated glove and commenced what I described as “choreographed strip” with no clothes removed. I got the feeling that she had probably wanted to be a professional dancer once, and this was her best shot. Most of the audience was surprised and openmouthed. It’s what the English call “gob smacked.”
Only two people in the audience laughed; it was amusing, not mocking laughter. When she finished, the dance music started. The young man who had been laughing in the audience asked me--the other laugher--to dance. There was an immediate attraction. After a while we left together and arranged to meet Wendy and Charlotte the next morning.
It may sound shocking, but it felt easy. He, David, was an American from Chicago, who had just opened his own sole practice law office. He had planned his first European trip with Richard -- a close friend who was in the army based in Germany. Richard’s leave was cancelled so David travelled alone. By the time we met he had been to London and Paris. He was planning to go to Brussels after Amsterdam but – as I will explain – he never got there!
We spent the week together and saw all the sights on both our lists. The best day of all was when we took the train to the city of Haarlem to visit the Frans Hals Museum. We sat in the garden for a long time and told each other about ourselves and our families.
When the week was over, we said a regretful goodbye, with no plans or commitment. He went back to his new law office, and I went back to my life in London. Then my phone started ringing in the middle of the night! David had completely forgotten about the time difference.
He wanted me to come to Chicago. And he persisted. As I had summer vacation coming up in July, I told him I would come for two weeks and if we didn’t click, I would visit some friends in Pennsylvania and then return home to London. I had been through a long-distance relationship some years before and I was not going to repeat that misery.
The day I arrived in Chicago we went to a pancake restaurant and David asked me to marry him. I told him to give me a chance to think about it and not to mention it for a week or so.
At the end of that week, we decided to get married. I had arrived here on July 25, and we were married on August 15. Our wedding was very small, at a Rabbi’s house in Skokie. Twelve of us went out to dinner to celebrate. His brother and sister-in-law came up from St. Louis with their five-year-old daughter and their month-old baby son.
My surprised parents were so good about it. They thought it was about time I got married. However, my sisters were furious because it was so sudden. They didn’t want me to live so far away – and there would be no party!
Two weeks later I returned to London to give notice at my school and apartment. The principal was generous, and all my colleagues were excited. Wendy and Charlotte--the traveling companions I had deserted, wrote in a farewell card: “Next time we go on holiday we’ll do as you do, not as you say!” Six weeks later I went back to Chicago to begin our married life.
David died four years ago. Throughout our 45-year marriage the memory of our meeting sustained us, and these three songs tell our story:
“Shall We Dance” from The King and I.
“Strangers in the Night” by Frank Sinatra. And always.
“Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific.
Copyright © 2024, Fran Locks