I Conquer Britain Read Online Free

to tell him the truth I was kind of in a hurry.
    He nodded. “I noticed that.”
    I said that if it was all the same to him I’d just as soon skip it this time because not only my destiny but the Pitt-Turnbulls were waiting for me.
    He nodded again. “We’ll start with the box of peaches, shall we?”
    I tried to reason with him. I said I took the green lane because I didn’t have anything to declare.
    “Look at me!” I cried. “Do I look like I’m smuggling drugs or guns or stuff like that?”
    He said I’d be amazed what he’d seen in his hundreds of years of going through other people’s belongings. He said he reckoned that anything was possible.
    I said I’d be willing to swear on the Bible that he could trust me. But reason never works with most adults I’ve tried it on, and it didn’t work with him.
    He waved at my cart. “We’ll just have a little look to make certain.”
    Nothing ever goes the way it’s supposed to with my family. When you live with people like that you learn to take disaster pretty much in your stride. It’s why I’m so adaptable. “OK,” I sighed, “but I really hate to see you wasting your valuable time.” I heaved the box onto the counter.
    “I’ve only ever been searched once before,” I told him as he started to untie the string around the box as if he was defusing a bomb. “When we drove into Mexico by mistake. My mother has no sense of direction.”
    “Is that so?” He took out the presents from Gallup and Tampa.
    “She’s totally hopeless. She can’t even find Brooklyn without a map, and we’ve lived there for six years.”
    He looked at Gallup’s painting for a few seconds, then he opened Tampa’s box.
    “Anyway,” I went on, “even though we were only in Mexico for like ten minutes they tore the whole van apart.”
    He moved on to my CD player and CDs. “And did they find anything?” he asked without looking up.
    “Of course not. We hadn’t been there long enough to buy a taco.”
    Next he took my make-up and toilet bag and the books I’d brought along for all those quiet English afternoons sitting in the garden sipping tea.
    “It was all pretty traumatic. They kept asking us how long we’d been in Mexico and Jake kept saying five minutes.”
    Next came my jewellery bag and the candles and charms I use for my altar to the Earth Goddess.
    “I believe in keeping my spiritual self in touch with the cosmos,” I explained. “You can’t live just on bread, can you?”
    The inspector said, “Ummm.” Then he reached in and took out the woven bag Sal brought me back from Thailand.
    “You’d don’t have to look in there—”
    He pulled out a strip of rag and held it up. It looked pretty grubby hanging from his hand like that. “And this is?” There were long, dark hairs wound around it.
    It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to warn him. “That’s for my hair. You know, to make it wavy?”
    He dropped the rag back in the bag. “In this country we have curlers.”
    He finally came to the black velvet bag covered with stars that Sky gave me for Christmas. “And what have we here?”
    “That’s my herbs and oils and stuff like that.”
    The oils were in tiny blue bottles and I’d put the herbs in old film canisters.
    He opened one of the bottles and sniffed. “I think you’d better come with me.”
    He took me into this windowless room with fluorescent lights like in some cop show. The only furniture was a big formica table and a couple of plastic chairs. It was about as cheerful as a morgue. I figured I was lucky I was in the most civilized country in the world or I might really be in trouble.
    He took everything out of my duffel (including the stuff I hadn’t exactly had time to wash before I left and my yoga mat) and spread it all out on the table. All the while he was doing that he was asking me every dumb question he could think of.
    Where was I going?
    (Well, where did he think I was going, Katmandu? Um, duh… Don’t tell me I got