Our Hearts Were Young & Gay

This delightful book brings back memories of my own traveling abroad (thing seem to happen to me too) as well as time spend with my very own Emily. How refreshing to discover Europe through the wide and innocent eyes of two 19 years olds! The travel purses, rabbit-fur coats, and encounter with Mr. Wells are just a few of the delightful incidents you will find as you laugh your way through this book. This is one of those books that gets better with age--I can't wait to rediscover it again in a few years!

"We were poisonously young." - Co-authors Skinner and Kimbrough OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY is a travel essay that appeared in 1942. Within, co-authors and best pals Cornelia Otis Skinner from Bryn Mawr, PA and Emily Kimbrough from Indiana share the experiences of an independent trip to Europe made in 1920 when young, footloose and relatively free of parental oversight. Skinner's parents were traveling on a parallel but more or less separate itinerary. The charm of this delightful narrative lies in the fact that it's a recollection of girlish innocence, naivete, and silliness told from the perspective of a more mature adulthood that achieves an engaging, self-deprecating wit. Had the two travelers been teenage boys, I doubt that such a retrospective tale would've been conceived and told by their grown-up counterparts; it's just not a Guy Thing. From Montreal to London to Paris, our heroines' misadventures are myriad. Their passenger ship runs aground in the St. Lawrence Seaway. Cornelia contracts measles in the mid-Atlantic and must be virtually smuggled ashore on reaching England. The two get lost in the maze at Hampton Court. Misdirected to recommended lodgings in Rouen, they spend the night on the top floor of a brothel, to the bemusement of the house madam, and never have a clue. (Teenage boys would've noticed, you think?) At the Rouen railroad station, Emily's overstuffed purse looses its contents onto the tracks just as a train pulls in. Bedbugs attack Skinner in the City of Light. Lunch at the Paris Ritz proves mortifying. A treacherous hair net ("Venida double-mesh") manifests itself during Cornelia's introductory acting lesson with a French stage idol. Of course, not all of the mini-Grand Tour was comprised of frivolous mishaps. It was, for Skinner and Kimbrough, the experience of a young lifetime. As the latter put it: "You know, back in Indiana there's a lovely phrase of yearning. People say, 'I hope I get to go.' Well, I've gotten to go, and here I am ..." Kimbrough's "here" was in front of Rouen Cathedral, after having walked down from the city's Market Place where the 19-year old Joan of Arc, a girl of Emily's and Cornelia's own exact age and their hero, was burned at the stake. I myself have thought "Here I am" when, my interest being English history, I've stood on the spot where Becket was murdered, when wandering the windy hilltop ruins of Salisbury Tower where Henry II imprisoned his Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and when gazing upon the field where Harold II lost a kingdom. Oh, to be footloose and young again. I'd give anything.

Having first watched the black-and-white movie based on this book, I was eager to meet Cornelia and Emily again inside its pages, and was not disappointed. The story of two young girls taking their first trip abroad, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay is the true story of their adventures, ranging from heartwarming to hilarious. Some memorable incidents: Emily throwing a deckchair over the side of the ship to "save" a man who fell overboard and inadvertantly hitting him with it instead; the safety pockets which both girls' mothers insisted they wear beneath their clothes (to keep money and stuff in) and which mystifies their dance partners by swinging beneath their skirts and hitting them; Cornelia's bout with measles, and how she and Emily get off the ship without being quarantined; spending the night in a brothel which they have mistaken for a genteel ladies' hotel . . . and many, many more. Be prepared to laugh and laugh as you read this great book.