A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby
A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby
Eric Newby
A collection of writing from Britain's best-loved travel writer, ‘A Merry Dance around the World’ is the culmination of a lifetime of adventure.A collection of writing from eleven books by Britain's best-loved travel writer, A Merry Dance around the World is the culmination of a lifetime's adventures, from the birth of Eric Newby in 1919 at the 'ghastly hour' of 3.45am, to Herculean cycling escapades in his seventies through the wiles of the Irish winter. An astonishing catalogue of disasters and misunderstandings, Newby's compassionate grace and sharp wit ensure that every adventure is as charming, hilarious and wild as his last.Including extracts from his masterpiece of love and courage in wartime, Love and War in the Apennines, travelling epiphanies against the breathtaking backdrop of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and the memorable excursions of the long-suffering and truly heroic Wanda Newby on bikes, in boats and planning daring prison escapes. A brilliant introduction for any Newby newcomer, or handy collection for the intrepid Newby veteran traveller, A Merry Dance around the World is a whirlwind tour around the globe, guided by the forefather of the modern comic travel book.
A MERRY DANCE
AROUND THE WORLD
THE BEST OF
Eric Newby
Contents
Cover (#u51c75be3-04a6-5c96-ad96-8e8569c659bc)
Title Page (#u2583f230-4b1b-5b27-a3e0-df5ff0ff226e)
First Steps (#u9f59d038-7554-53a0-a901-7d10f3f50b4b)
In and Out of Advertising (#u01b3ea61-2259-592b-9c1b-78b952e465ee)
Around the World in a Four-masted Barque (#u66a01266-2a5d-5be6-92da-eab1f4317e43)
A Short History of the Second World War (#u7b1b1bc4-07a0-5c08-8538-3e36713b4e9e)
Rag Trade (#ua599fce4-72af-59aa-bd10-4684b964cb3c)
Birth of an Explorer (#u2fd7f4ee-9c7a-5fdc-8696-9c0065fc3026)
Ganga Ma: Mother Ganges (#ud1b0ce8f-27c1-5a0c-a591-030254bb86fa)
Around the Mediterranean (#u40a88284-faf8-58d3-be4e-71b63bb47381)
On and Off the Trans-Siberian Railway (#u3d86ec7f-a166-5c0b-82da-2da4ddbc2c36)
A Long Bike Ride in Ireland (#u226b7255-7949-5373-b200-90119f12f252)
At the Foot of the Apuan Alps (#ub73c5c53-e9f1-5518-967e-397fa67f6ef0)
Plates (#u3d119ed4-9588-53e0-8cae-bf559f4950bc)
Index (#u6686254b-7eb6-5974-a0af-a279ac598f0d)
About the Author (#uabe1ab24-e4d3-50f6-8dcb-1c479492e29f)
Also by the Author (#uf920c6c0-6467-5033-b81e-265a70806851)
Copyright (#ud2bae91e-a15a-5fec-925d-13997a66c9a4)
About the Publisher (#ucb688720-88fd-57a2-8664-f3c4691903fe)
First Steps (#ulink_5eec4608-31cc-51dd-8c89-fb0ee330b495)
BIRTH OF A TRAVELLER
Births, Marriages, Deaths NEWBY. – On the 6th December at 3 Castelnau Mansions, Barnes, SW13, to Hilda Newby, wife of Geo. A. Newby – a son.
IN THIS EXTRAVAGANT fashion – altogether it cost 50p ($1.95)
(#ulink_89954067-ec7b-5318-b343-48bac1345592), at a time when Lady Secretaries with shorthand and typing were earning around £3.50 ($13.65) a week – my arrival was announced on the following Tuesday, 9 December, in The Times and the Daily Telegraph, two of the daily newspapers my father ‘took in’ at that period. The other was the Daily Mirror, then a rather genteel paper, which he ordered for my mother, but never looked at himself, and which she passed on to the cook/housekeeper when she had finished with it. From then on it was also passed on to a nurse.
At 3.45 a.m., the ghastly hour I chose, or rather the doctor chose, for my arrival – I had to be hauled out by the head – conditions must have been pretty beastly in Barnes. It was a dark and stormy night, with a fresh wind from the west whose gusts would have been strong enough to blow clouds of spray from the big reservoir (which was opposite our flat by the bridge and which has now been filled in to make playing fields for St Paul’s School) over the pavement and right across the main road (which was called Castelnau but which all the inhabitants knew and know to this day as Castlenore) as it always did when the wind was strong from that particular quarter, sometimes, but rarely at 3.45 a. m. wetting unwary pedestrians and people travelling in open motor cars.
And it was certainly dark, although the moon had been up for more than thirteen hours and was only a day off full. It would be nice, more romantic, altogether more appropriate for a potential traveller, to think of myself arriving astride the Centaur, and, Sagittarius being in the ascendant, perhaps carrying the latter’s arrows for him, as we moved across a firmament in which ragged clouds were racing across the path of a huge and brilliant moon; but it was not to be. It was ordained that I should be a child not only of darkness but of utter darkness, of ten-tenths cloud.
When it dawned, the day was even more rumbustious than the night. And when the sun rose, just before eight o’clock, like the moon, it remained invisible. Thunderstorms visited many parts of the country, accompanied by hail, sleet or snow and west or north-westerly winds which reached gale force in high places. In Lincolnshire, the Belvoir Hunt, having ‘chopped a fox’ in Foston Spinney (seized it before it fairly got away from cover), ‘were hunting another from Allington when scent was totally swept away by a tremendous rainstorm’.
‘Flying Prospects’ on my birthday were not good, according to The Times. It is now difficult to imagine that a pilot, or even a passenger, might actually buy a newspaper in order to find out whether it was safe to ‘go up’, but it must have been so, otherwise there would have been no point in publishing the information at all. ‘Unsuitable for aviation or fit only for short distance flying by the heaviest sort of machine’ was what the communiqué said. ‘Sea Passages’ were equally disagreeable. The English Channel was rough, with winds reaching forty miles an hour, and there was extensive flooding in France.
But if the weather was disturbed that Saturday, it was as nothing compared with the state of great chunks of Europe and northern Asia. In spite of the fact that the advertising department of The Times had chosen this particular Saturday to announce ‘PRESENTS SUGGESTIONS FOR THE GREAT PEACE CHRISTMAS’, on it Latvians were fighting Germans, on whom they had declared war a week previously on 28 November, and so were the Lithuanians. In Russia, on the Don and between Voronezh and Kirsk and in Asia, beyond the Urals, along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway, where typhus was raging, Bolsheviks and White Russians were engaged in a civil war of the utmost ferocity. Meanwhile, that same Saturday, while their fellow countrymen were destroying one another, with their country in ruins and becoming every day more ruinous, Lenin and Trotsky and the 1109 delegates of the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets passed a resolution to the effect that ‘The Soviet Union Desires to Live in Peace with All Peoples’. On that day, too, Lenin told the Congress that ‘Communistic Principles were being utterly disregarded by the Russian peasantry.’
That day, too, much nearer home, while I was taking my first nourishment, as it were, in the open air, French Army units with heavy guns were rumbling across the Rhine bridges in order to force the Germans to ratify the peace treaty which they had signed at Versailles in June; and in the same issue of The Times which carried the headline about ‘THE GREAT PEACE CHRISTMAS’, there were other headlines such as ‘GUNS ACROSS THE RHINE’ and ‘WAR IMMINENT’, although who was to fight another war with millions killed and wounded, armies in a state of semi-demobilization, and millions more dying or soon to die from sickness and starvation was not clear. Nevertheless, that weekend, the only thing, theoretically, that stood between the protagonists and another outbreak of war, was the Armistice, signed in a French railway carriage parked in a wood, thirteen months previously, so that, equally theoretically, it would simply have meant carrying on with the old one. That weekend, too, the Americans quitted the peace conference.
There was, altogether, a lot about death in the papers that Saturday. It was as if Death the Reaper, an entity embodied by cartoonists in their drawings as a hideous, skeletal figure, and it would have been difficult to have lived through the last five years without thinking of death as such, had become dissatisfied with his efforts, had once again sharpened his scythe and was already cutting fresh, preliminary swathes through the debilitated populations of the vanquished powers, as if the great influenza epidemic, which reached its peak in Britain in March 1919, and which altogether killed more people in Europe than all the shot and shell of four and a half years of war, had not been enough.
In Britain, that Saturday, things were rather different. Bank rate was six per cent, exports were booming. On Friday, the US dollar closed at $3.90 to the pound. The only disquieting news that morning, and that was more or less a rumour, was that there was a possibility of a number of pits being forced to close in the South Wales anthracite fields.
Altogether, for many people that Saturday, life seems to have gone on much as it had done before the Deluge. Giddy and Giddy, House Agents, offered a luxuriously furnished town house, facing Hyde Park, with thirteen bed and dressing-rooms for £26.25 ($102.40) a week. Harrods announced Laroche champagne, 1911, the last vintage generally available (shipped) since the war, at £6.50 ($25.35) a dozen. Very old vintage port (Tuke Holdsworth) was £4.50 ($17.55) a dozen. Not advertised in The Times or the Daily Telegraph, but still listed in Harrods’ enormous current catalogue, (and for some years to come) under ‘Livery’, were red plush breeches for footmen.
Domestic servants were still comparatively inexpensive, although more difficult to find, than they had been before the war. That Saturday Lady Baldwin, of 37 Cavendish Square, advertised for a housemaid, ‘five maids and a boy kept, wages £28-£30 ($109-$117) a year’. And there were vacancies for live-in under nurses, at £25 ($97.50) a year, the price of a high-class baby carriage of the sort that my mother had acquired for me.
That Saturday, too, wholesale garment manufacturers, at what was, and still is, known as ‘the better end of the trade’, the sort of firm my father was a partner in, were advertising jobs in their workrooms for bodice and skirt makers at around £2.50 ($9.75) for a five and a half day, forty-nine hour week (8.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. week-days, 8.30 a.m to 12.30 p.m. Saturdays), £130 ($507) a year, which made the 5op spent on announcing my birthday seem hideously extravagant.
That Saturday some London fashion houses, including the then ultra-fashionable Lucile, in Hanover Square, were advertising for ‘Model Girls’, in emulation of Paul Poiret, the Parisian designer, who had just returned from the army and for the first time showed clothes on living models.
A sketch in The Times that Saturday shows that clothes were good-looking, if not positively saucy. Dresses, according to their fashion correspondent, were ‘décolleté, sometimes dangerously low’, in brilliant colours, with tight, mid-calf-length skirts. Jet was high fashion for the evening: embroidered on coloured velvet, used for making girdles and shoulder straps. Feathers, which had been used for years for making headdresses for evening, were being replaced by flowers, ‘as little like nature as possible?’, although another couple of years were to pass before the Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act became law. The ultra-fashionable were already wearing the long, skimpy jerseys which were to become a sort of hallmark of the 1920s; but there was nothing about them in the papers the day I was born.
Yet in spite of all this display of what an American politician described as ‘normalcy’, ‘The Great War’, as it would still be referred to by the British far into the next one, although over, must have seemed terribly close to most people, as it still must do today to anyone reading some of the classified advertisements which appeared in the quality papers that Saturday. The request for a lady or gentleman to play once a week at a thé dansant in a hospital for shell-shocked officers. The offers to keep soldiers’ graves trimmed and lay headstones in the neighbourhood of Albert, Bapaume and Péronne – the dead had not yet been gathered together in communal cemeteries. The endless columns of advertisements inserted by ex-servicemen, under ‘Situations Wanted’ (there were 350,000 of them unemployed), part of the huge citizen army of the still living that was being demobilized into a world in which, in spite of there being whole generations of dead, there was not enough work for all. Such advertisements, inserted by ex-officers, warrant officers, petty officers, NCOs and men of superior education (the labouring classes did not advertise their services in this way), were some of them despairing, some of them pathetic, some of them hopeless:
EX-SERVICE MAN. Loss of right arm, seeks situation as Window Dresser or Shopwalker.
DEMOBILIZED OFFICER. Aged 21, 4½ years’ service [my italics]. Good education. Left school to join up, therefore no experience. Accept small salary until proficient.
Will anyone lend DEMOBILIZED OFFICER, DSO, just starting work again, £5000 ($19,500) for one year? Highest references. Applicant desperately pressed by money-lenders. No Agents. Write Box J.28.
Money-lenders were so numerous that they had whole classified sections to themselves. Most of them offered ‘immediate advances on note of hand alone’. Their advertisements make repulsive reading, even across such a gulf of years.
A far more prominent advertisement than any of these announced the setting up of what was called the Bemersyde Fund, opened by the Lord Mayor of London and the Right Honourable Lord Glenconner, ‘to acquire the estates of Bemersyde from its owner and have the same conveyed to Field-Marshal Earl Haig, a member of the well-known whisky distilling family, as a personal gift from the people of the British Empire – the consideration for the purchase being £53,700 ($209,430)’.
Altogether – leaving present for the headmaster (the Estates of Bemersyde), although he had not been a very good headmaster, the boys (or what was left of them, for it had been rather a rough school with a lot of mud in the playing fields) now going out into the world to seek their fortunes – there was a distinctly end-of-term feeling in the air. But in spite of this there was no singing of ‘Lord Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing’ as one would perhaps expect on such occasions and as there was at the schools I later attended. Possibly because the only songs the boys knew were not hymns but songs that had become dirges: ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Tipperary’, ‘It’s a Long Long Trail A’Winding’ and ‘I Don’t Want To Join The Army’.
Even the Ministry of Munitions and the Admiralty were selling up. That day and every day there were offers for sale by auction of aerodromes, enormous munition factories, equally enormous hutted camps, and of minesweepers, motor charabancs, fleets of ambulances, ships’ boilers, railway engines, enough barbed wire to encircle the earth, millions of cigarettes in lots, miles and miles of ships’ hawser, inexhaustible supplies of bell tents, cereal ovens, lower fruit standard jam, wicker-covered stoneware jars, torpedo boats, with and without engines and part-worn and unworn issue clothing, etc., etc., etc., so inexhaustible that many items were still being sold off twenty years later on the eve of the next world war, when the whole stocking up process began all over again. Everything, except projectiles and the means of discharging them, was open to offer and even these would eventually come on the market, but for export only.
In fact the world was changing with a rapidity that would have been unbelievable in 1914, even though it was still possible to buy red plush breeches for footmen and under nurses could still be acquired with comparative ease. Yet it was, one sees in retrospect, only a temporary acceleration. If it had continued at the rate envisaged in 1919 man would probably have stood on the moon by 1939.
That afternoon the muffin man ringing his bell went down Riverview Gardens, the side road outside ‘Ther Mansions’ as the local tradesmen who dealt with my mother called them, in which there were other blocks of flats, carrying his muffins in a wooden tray covered with a green baize cloth, which he balanced on his head; and the lamplighter came and went on his bicycle (lighting-up time that evening was 4.21 p.m.), lancing the gas lamps in the street into flame with a long bamboo pole.
And so ended my birthday. For all concerned it had been a jolly long one.
The truth is that babies do not like travel, and I was no exception. Babies are unadventurous. Babies act as grapnels to prevent ‘the family’ dragging its ground. That is why they were invented. Perversely, their desire for fresh horizons comes much later when they have already begun to ‘attract’ fares, and can no longer travel free; by which time they are no longer babies at all.
I remember the Isle of Wight as the place where I first sat in the side-car of a motor cycle, at Easter 1923, but much more I remember it as being the Place Where God Lived, although this was later, some time in the summer or autumn of 1925. It must have been during one of those interpolated holidays my mother was so adept at arranging at an instant’s notice if my father had to go abroad without her, on the grounds that a change of air would do me good. He often used to go to Holland to sell enormous coats and costumes to the Dutch. With her she took her sister, my Auntie May, who loved travel, however banal.
On one occasion we made an excursion to a place near the middle of the island and some time in the afternoon of what I remember as a very hot day we arrived at our destination, a village of thatched houses that were clustered about the foot of a green hill, on the summit of which stood what seemed a very small church.
(#ulink_95e632aa-ab07-52fb-83c7-2539c5c2f0f4) From where we stood it was silhouetted against the now declining sun, the rays of which shone through its windows, producing an unearthly effect.
There was no time to climb the hill to the church and have tea as well. If there had been, I am sure that my mother and my aunt, both of whom were interested in ‘old things’, would have done so. Instead, we had the tea, in the garden of one of the cottages, and while we were having it I heard my mother and my aunt talking about the place and how nice it was, which they called Godshill.
I was very excited. Godshill. If this was Godshill then God must live on it. God to me at this time and for long years to come was a very old, but very fit, version of Jesus and much less meek-looking. He had a long white beard, was dressed in a white sheet and was all shiny, as if he was on fire. He also had a seat in the front row of the dress circle, as it were, so that he could see immediately if one was doing wrong. This was the God to whom I prayed each night, either with my mother’s help or with whoever was looking after me.
‘Does he live on it?’ I asked my mother.
‘Yes,’ said my mother, ‘that’s where he lives, darling, on top of the hill.’
I was filled with an immense feeling of happiness that this radiant being, whom I had never actually seen but who was always either just around the corner or else hovering directly overhead but always invisible, should live in such a shining, beautiful place; and I asked if we could climb the hill and see him. Unfortunately, the train was due and we had to hurry to the station. I cried all the way to it and most of the way back to Bembridge. I never went back to Godshill and I never will.
I can remember, in July 1923, being carried high on my father’s head through the bracken in the combes that led down to the beaches on Sark, and once having reached them I can remember falling down constantly on the rocks and hurting myself, I considered, badly. And it was on Sark that I had my first remembered nightmare, in the annexe to Stock’s Hotel, a charming, ivy-clad, farmlike building. I awoke screaming in what was still broad daylight with the sun shining outside my first-floor room in which the blinds were drawn, to think myself abandoned to a dreadful fate by my parents who were dining only a few feet away in the hotel, certain that I had ‘gone off’ to sleep. It was a nightmare of peculiar horror, because it was founded on fact; so horrible and at the same time so difficult to explain to anyone that for years I dared not confide the details to anyone, and to my parents I never did, although it recurred throughout my childhood, together with an almost equally awful one about falling down an endless shaft.
WESTWARD HO!
In 1925, when I was five and a half, we embarked on what, so far as I was concerned, was the most ambitious holiday I had ever had. In summer my father took a cottage at Branscombe, at that time a very rural and comparatively unvisited village in South Devon, between Seaton and Sidmouth. It promised to be a particularly exciting time as my father had decided that we should travel there from Barnes by motor. This meant that most of our luggage had to be sent in advance by train from Waterloo to Honiton, a market town on the main line to Exeter; at Honiton it was picked up by a carrier and transported the ten miles or so to Branscombe by horse and cart. Others taking part in this holiday, although they did not travel with us, being already foregathered there, were my Auntie May (the aunt who had accompanied my mother and me on the memorable visit to Godshill) and her husband, Uncle Reg. Before the war Uncle Reg had worked as a journalist in Dover on the local paper and in this capacity had been present in 1909 when Blériot landed on the cliffs, having flown the Channel. During the war he had been in the navy in some department connected with propaganda. Later he became editor of the Gaumont British Film News. He was very urbane and elegant. He was later on good terms with the Prince of Wales for whom he used to arrange film shows at Fort Belvedere, and for the Royal Family at Balmoral. For these services he was presented with cufflinks and cigarette cases from Plantin, the court jeweller, as well as other mementoes. He preferred to be called Reginald rather than Reg, but no one ever did so. They put up in the village pub where we, too, were to take our meals.
The third party was made up of three fashion buyers for London stores, Beryl, Mercia and Mimi Bamford, all of whom were friends of my mother, particularly Mimi, and their mother. All three were unimaginably elegant, often almost identically dressed in long, clinging jerseys and strings of amber beads, and they were surrounded by what seemed to be hordes of extremely grumpy Pekingese who did not take kindly to the country. Their mother, who did not take kindly to the country either, was even more formidable. She owned a Boston Bulldog called Bogey, which had had its ears clipped, a practice by then declared illegal. Like her daughters she was immensely tall, and must at one time have been as personable as her daughters, but even I could recognize that she was incredibly tough, if not common.
‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im,’ was the comment she made about me, by now a boisterous, active little boy, to my Auntie May while we were at Branscombe, ‘she’ being my mother; an anecdote that my aunt eventually told me, which she did with an excellent imitation of the old lady’s gravelly voice, having put off doing so until only a few years before her own death in 1974 in order, as she put it, to spare my feelings.
Neither Beryl nor Mercia nor their mother ever went to the beach, or even set eyes on the sea, the whole time they were at Branscombe. For Beryl and Mercia the seaside was Deauville. What Branscombe was to them is difficult to imagine, or they to the inhabitants. Only Mimi relished the simple life. The journey to Branscombe, a stately progression, took two days.
At Branscombe, behind the Mason’s Arms, the pub which stood next door to the cottage my father had taken for the summer and of which it formed a part, there was a yard surrounded by various dilapidated outbuildings and a piece of ground overgrown with grass and nettles which concealed various interesting pieces of rusted, outmoded machinery, the most important of which was an old motor car smelling of decaying rubber and dirty engine oil. The stuffing of what was left of its buttoned leather upholstery was a home for a large family of mice. This yard was to be the scene of some of the more memorable games I played with my best friend in the village, Peter Hutchings, whose mother kept a grocery, confectionery and hardware shop on the corner opposite Mr Hayman, the butcher’s. It was from Peter Hutchings, who was killed while serving as a soldier in the Second World War, and whose name is inscribed with the names of fourteen other village boys who died in the two great wars on the war memorial at the entrance to Branscombe churchyard, that I learned the broad local dialect which was so broad that by the end of that first summer at Branscombe no one except a local inhabitant could understand what I was saying. ‘Sweatin’ like a bull ’er be,’ was how Peter Hutchings described to me one day the state of his sister, Betty, confined to bed with a temperature, and it was in this form that I passed on this important piece of news to my parents.
There in the inn yard, in the long summer evenings, we used to sit in the old motor car, either myself or Peter at the wheel, taking it in turn, the driver making BRRR-ing noises, the one sitting next to him in the front making honking noises – the horn had long since ceased to be – as we roared round imaginary corners, narrowly missing imaginary vehicles coming in the opposite direction, driving through an imaginary world to an imaginary destination on an imaginary road, a pair of armchair travellers. In the back we used to put Betty Hutchings, if she was available, who wore a white beret, was placid, said nothing, apart from an occasional BRR, and was in fact an ideal back-seat passenger. Sometimes, if we felt like doing something ‘rude’, we used to stop the car and pee on the seats in the back, and Betty would pee too. This gave us a sense of power, at least I know it did to me, as I would not have dared to pee on the upholstery of a real motor car belonging to real people. Less courageous than my wife, who confessed to having peed on the back seat of a ‘real’ very expensive motor car stopped outside her parents’ house at her birthplace in the Carso, and smeared it with cow dung.
When we got tired of driving our car we ourselves used to become motor cars, tearing up and down the street outside making BRRR-ing noises of varying intensity as we changed gear, disturbing the elderly ladies who used to sit at their cottage doors making Honiton lace, pillow lace, appliqué and guipure, the principal manufacture of the village. Close by, over the hill at Beer where there were stone quarries, the quarry men’s wives had made the lace for Queen Victoria’s wedding dress in 1839, something that was still talked about in the neighbourhood more or less as if it had happened yesterday. It was these hideous BRRR-ing noises that no doubt prompted old Mrs Bamford, whose cottage also faced the main street, to utter the words, ‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im.’
But all this was in the future, that first day of our holiday.
The next morning I woke at what must have been an early hour and, obeying some mysterious summons, dressed myself in the clothes that I had worn the previous afternoon – white shirt, shorts, socks and white sun hat (I couldn’t manage the tie unaided), brown lace-up shoes from Daniel Neal’s in Kensington High Street (soon to be replaced by hobnail boots, bought for me at my earnest request so that I could be a real country boy, which took me ages to tie) and my pride and joy, a hideous red and green striped blazer with brass buttons that I had persuaded my mother to buy for me, much against her will, from Messrs Charles Baker, Outfitters, of King Street, Hammersmith, so that I should look more like what I described as ‘a real schoolboy’ rather than an infant member of the kindergarten at the Froebel School in Barons Court. As school blazers were not made to fit persons as small as I was, when I was wearing it my short trousers were scarcely visible at all. Not even Messrs Baker appeared to know which school it was, if any, that had red and virulent green stripes as its colours. Then, having picked up a stout stick that I had acquired the previous day, I stole downstairs and let myself out into the village street which was deserted as it was Sunday morning.
At the side of the road, opposite what I was soon to know as Mrs Hutchings’s shop, a little stream purled down from one of the side valleys, one of several such streams that, united, reach the sea at Branscombe Mouth; and there, under a brick arch, it issued from a pipe which supplied this lower end of the village with water, before burrowing under the road to reappear once more outside the shop. From here it ran away downhill over stones along the edge of a little lane with an old, ivy-clad wall on one side of it, chattering merrily to itself as it ran over the stones in a way that seemed almost human.
Here, in this narrow lane, the water had what looked to me like watercress growing in it, and it was so clear and delicious-looking that I got down and had a drink of it, only to find that it was not delicious at all and that it had a nasty smell. Later I discovered that Betty Hutchings used to drink from this crystal stream if she was not watched which was probably the reason why she sweated like a bull.
I continued to follow the stream, racing twigs down it, until it vanished into a sort of tunnel from which proceeded a delightful roaring sound. At the other end it emerged beyond a wicket gate to flow more placidly under a little bridge and in these calmer waters I spent some time stirring up the bottom with my stick and frightening some water beetles, the air about me filled with the droning of innumerable insects.
From this point it ran to join the main stream in the middle of the valley and here the path turned away from it to the left beyond a five-barred gate which, because I could not open it unaided, I squeezed underneath, to find myself in a beautiful and what seemed to me immense green meadow, hemmed in by hedgerows and huge trees and filled with buttercups, while high above it to the right were the hanging woods we had seen the previous morning from the car, the open down above them alive with gorse.
At the far end of this field the now augmented stream was spanned by a small wooden footbridge with a white painted handrail. When I eventually reached the stream, in spite of all these distractions and making a number of more or less unsuccessful attempts to spear on the end of my stick some of the older, harder sorts of cow flop in which the field abounded, and launch them into the air, the water tasted even funnier than it had done in the village outside Mrs Hutchings’s shop and I stung myself on the nettles getting down to it.
Beyond the bridge the path continued uphill, dappled with sunlight under the trees, and here the air struck chill after the heat of the meadow. Then it dipped and suddenly I found myself out in the sun on the edge of an immense shingle beach which had some boats hauled out on it, and in my ears there was the roar of the sea as with every wave it displaced and replaced millions upon millions of pebbles. To the left it stretched to where a cluster of ivy-covered white pinnacles rising above a landslip marked the last chalk cliffs in southern England; to the right to the brilliant red cliffs around Sidmouth; and beyond it, out to sea, on what was a near horizon, for there was already a haze of heat out in Lyme Bay, I could see the slightly blurred outlines of what Harry Hansford, the local fisherman who lived opposite the blacksmith’s shop, would soon teach me to identify as a Brixham trawler, ghosting along under full sail.
‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’
Many years were to pass before I read these words of Keats, but when I did the memory of that morning came flooding back.
There was a sound of feet slithering on the pebbles behind me. It was Kathy, my mother’s help, panting slightly, as she had been running. ‘Whatever did you do that for, Eric, you naughty little boy, without telling me?’ she said. ‘Your mum’s ever so worried, and your dad, too. He’ll be ever so cross if he finds out where you’ve been. You’d better keep quiet when you get back. I’ll say I found you in the field.’
Together, hand in hand, we went back up the hill towards the village where the church bells were now beginning to announce the early service.
LANDS AND PEOPLES
By the time I was eight years old, apart from a visit to the Channel Islands in 1923, I had never been out of England, not even to visit Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Yet, in spite of this, I already knew a good deal about these places and their inhabitants, as well as the wider world beyond the British Isles.
This was because, some time in the 1920s, my parents took out on my behalf a subscription to The Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples, a glossy magazine edited by Arthur Mee, at that time a well-known writer who was also responsible for the to me rather boring Children’s Newspaper, which I had given up buying in favour of more trashy, exciting comics. Lands and Peoples, according to the advertisements which heralded its publication, was to come out at regular intervals and when complete the publishers would bind it up for you to form six massive volumes.
What excitement I felt when Lands and Peoples came thudding through the letter-box, in its pristine magazine form. To me, turning its pages in SW 13 was rather like being taken to the top of a mountain from which the world could be seen spread out below, a much more interesting world than the one my father read bits out about from his Morning Post to my mother while she was still in bed, a captive audience, sipping her early morning tea.
Lands and Peoples was addressed to ‘The Generation whose business it is to save Mankind’ – mine presumably, although I had no suggestions to make about how it should be done. ‘We are marching,’ Mee wrote, an incurable optimist, apparently envisaging a pacific version of the Children’s Crusade, with the children waving white flags instead of brandishing crucifixes, ‘towards a friendlier and better world, a world of love in place of hate, of peace instead of war, and one thing is needful – an understanding of each other … it is the purpose of this book so to familiarize us with the lands and peoples of the world that we can cherish no ill-will for them. We are one great human family, and this is the book of our brothers and sisters.’
I never read the text. All the efforts of what was presumably an army of experts in their various fields, painfully adapting their ways of writing to render them intelligible to infant minds, were totally wasted on me. All I did, and still do, for I still have the six volumes, was to look at the photographs, of which there were thousands in black and white besides the seven hundred or so in colour, and read the captions and the short descriptions below them of a world which, if it ever existed in the form in which it was here portrayed, is now no more. What I saw was a world at peace, one from which violence, even well-intentioned sorts, such as ritual murder and cannibalism, had been banished, or at least as long as the parts kept coming.
In Merrie England, donkeys carried the Royal Mail through the cobbled streets of Clovelly, milkmaids in floppy hats churned butter by hand in the Isle of Wight, swan uppers upped swans on the River Thames, genial bearded fishermen in sou’westers mended nets on the Suffolk coast, town criers rang their bells, and choirboys wearing mortarboards, using long switches, beat the bounds of St Clement Danes.
In the Land of the Cymry, which is how Lands and Peoples described Wales, ancient dames wearing chimney-pot hats stopped outside their whitewashed cottages to pass the time of day with more modern, marcel-waved neighbours, and cloth-capped salmon fishers paddled their coracles on the River Dee.
In Bonnie Scotland, brawny, kilted athletes tossed the caber, border shepherds carried weakling lambs to shelter from the winter snows, women ground corn with stone hand-mills in the Inner Hebrides and, far out in the Atlantic, on St Kilda, the loneliest of the inhabited British Isles, men wearing tam-o’shanters and bushy beards were photographed returning homewards with seabirds taken on its fearsome cliffs.
In the Emerald Isle, bare-footed, flannel-petticoated colleens drew water from brawling streams, or knitted socks in cabins in Connemara, while little boys in the Aran Islands wore skirts to protect them from being kidnapped by the fairies.
Further afield, as I turned the pages, covering them with Bovril (for one of my greatest pleasures was to go to bed early with Lands and Peoples and at the same time eat Bovril sandwiches), I came upon Czechs and Slovaks and Hungarians wearing embroidered petticoats irrespective of sex, and incredible hats – in Rumania there were men who wore garters with little bells on them, who looked like sissies to me. I also saw fellers of proud giants in the Canadian forest; savages of New Guinea – their hair plastered with grease and mud; Jews in Poland – a new state with a glorious past; sun-loving Negroes in South Africa; happy Negro children romping in the ‘Coloured Section’ of New York; Kirghiz tribesmen on the ‘Roof of the World’; Orthodox scholars wearing arm thongs and phylacteries studying the ancient laws of their people; penguin rookeries in the Great White South; geishas negotiating stepping stones in Cherry Blossom Land; hardy Indian women on beds of nails at Benares; laughter-loving girls of the Abruzzi; Flemings and Walloons – little Belgium’s two sturdy races; Macedonian women weaving fine cloth with deft fingers; haughty-looking redskins decked in eagle’s feathers and wampum; Germany – rich country of an industrious nation; and so on, and so on.
Everywhere in Lands and Peoples there were photographs of schools and schoolchildren; ruinous-looking schools in which little Negroes were learning to add up, schools in Japan with the pupils marching round in circles dressed in military-looking uniforms, clinical-looking schools in the United States in which the children were being inspected for dental decay, children brandishing enormously long slates in Burma, memorizing the Koran in oases, going to school in wheelbarrows in China, learning to read in lonely Labrador and being bastinadoed in Persia, one of the only examples of violence in the entire work. That children had to put up with going to school in other countries besides my own I found encouraging. And here at home they didn’t have the bastinado, even at Colet Court.
Each time I got through all six volumes of the Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples I began again, in much the same way as the Scotsmen of Bonnie Scotland, sturdy independent folk, who painted the Forth Bridge, would start all over again as soon as they had applied the final brush strokes to that miracle of Scottish engineering.
At St Paul’s I became a Scout in order to avoid being drafted into the Officers’ Training Corps, the OTC, which would have meant wearing an insufferably itchy uniform that was blanket thick. As a Scout I learned to light a fire with one match and to use a felling axe without dismembering myself. On Saturdays we engaged in bloody night battles with other troops of Scouts in the swamps of Wimbledon Common. In the holidays we went camping in the beautiful parks of gentlemen’s country seats. Because I got on with Jews – I still do, I think they find my lack of subtlety restful – I was given command of a Jewish patrol. One of them, who was as prickly as a present-day Israeli, refused to wear Scout uniform and appeared at our open-air meetings wearing a double-breasted overcoat, a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. Another, who used to charge his mother half a crown to kiss him good night, was always loaded down with silver. On one occasion, when there was a danger of our losing one of the outdoor games known as ‘wide games’ (which necessitated covering large tracts of ground on foot) another member of my patrol whose family owned a huge limousine in which he used to arrive at wherever was the meeting place, summoned the chauffeur who was parked round the corner, and six scouts whirred away in it to certain victory.
In the spring of 1936, when I was sixteen years old, my father announced that, as it appeared unlikely I would pass the School Certificate Examination (the then equivalent of O-levels), in mathematics, a subject in which it was obligatory to pass, he had decided to take me away from St Paul’s at the end of the summer term and ‘put me into business’. I did fail. I was sorry about this decision. I was good at English, History, even Divinity, and I had dreamed of reading History at Oxford.
Apart from an innate inability to cope with mathematics the only disadvantage I laboured under at St Paul’s, and being a Scout made not the slightest difference, was that I had a curious sense of humour which meant that if anything came up in class with a suggestion of double entendre it caused me to dissolve into hysterics, for which I was punished, sometimes quite severely. In other words I had a dirty mind.
For instance, on one occasion, when we were reading Scott’s Marmion aloud, it became obvious to myself and everyone else in the classroom that by the working of some hideously unfair natural process of selection it would fall to me to read a completely unreadable part of the romance in Canto Two, entitled ‘The Convent’, which concerned the blind Bishop of Lindisfarne. And you could have heard a pin drop when I got to my feet.
‘No hand was moved, no word was said
Till thus the Abbot’s doom was given.
Raising his sightless balls to heaven …’
was all I could manage before going off into peals of mad laughter and to be beaten by John Bell, the High Master, a hedonist who showed in as marked a way as possible in the circumstances where his sympathies lay by beating me as hard as anyone else sent to him for punishment, and then giving me a shilling. I have never forgiven Scott.
(#ulink_ce7de623-9c0d-56d3-a8b4-b53b53edad50) All sums of sterling have been converted from pounds, shillings and pence to their decimal equivalents and to American currency of the time.
(#ulink_8f12840e-00ff-54c1-906f-023f39919e4b) It was originally intended that the church should be built at the foot of the hill near the site of the present village. However, when work was begun on it, the plan was vetoed by a band of local fairies. As a practical expression of their objection whenever the walls reached a particular height they proceeded to knock them down and carry the stones up to the top of the hill where they rebuilt the walls, after which they danced round them in a ring. After this had happened three times, the workmen who had on each occasion been forced to demolish the walls, carry the stones back down the hill and then build them up again in the low ground, lost heart and decided to build the church where the fairies wanted it to be built. As a result of this wise decision there was much jubilation among the fairies and when the church was finally completed they held a great fête on top of the hill to celebrate their victory, the sounds of their revelry being audible at a considerable distance.
In and Out of Advertising (#ulink_8e18f66b-a4d9-5051-8b0b-2e2226a286cb)
IN THE SUMMER OF 1936, my father took me away from school and put me into a large, West End advertising agency.
Two years later, on the day we lost the Cereal Account, I finally decided to go to sea.
‘You’ve ’ad it,’ said the Porter with gloomy relish as I clocked in a little after the appointed hour. I was not surprised. My father had known the Chairman, George Wurzel, in his earlier, more uncomplicated days and had placed me with him in the fond belief that the sooner I got down to learning business methods the better. By now they were beginning to feel that they might have been wrong. Wurzel’s had long held a similar opinion. Since I had ridden a bicycle into the office of Miss Phrygian, the secretary of the managing director, they had been more than cool. Julian Pringle, the most rebellious copywriter Wurzel’s ever had, bet me that I could not ride it round the entire building without dismounting. The coast had been clear, the numerous swing doors held open, and the bicycle, which was being sketched for the front page of the Daily Mail, borrowed from the Art Department.
I had started my uneasy career in the Checking Department at the age of sixteen. Miss Phrygian had escorted me there. On the way we passed the Porter’s cubby hole; inside, half a dozen evil-looking messenger boys were waiting to take blocks to Fleet Street. There were more seats than messenger boys and I found Miss Phrygian casting a speculative look at the empty places. For a moment I thought she was going to enlist me in their ranks, but she must have remembered my father’s insistence on the value of the business methods I was going to learn, and we passed on.
In the narrow, airless transepts of the Checking Department, where the electric lights burned permanently, I thumbed my way through the newspapers and periodicals of the world to make sure that our advertisements were appearing on schedule and the right way up, which they failed to do quite frequently in some of the more unsophisticated newspapers from rugged and distant parts of the globe. Some of the advertisements had to be cut out and pasted in a book. We always cut out Carter’s Little Liver Pills, but I never discovered the reason. Turning the pages of thousands of newspapers day after day, I accumulated knowledge of the most recondite subjects – croquet matches between missionaries in Basutoland, reports of conventions of undertakers at South Bend, Indiana, great exhibitions for tram ticket collectors in the Midlands – the world spread out before me.
When I was not speculating about what I read, I would fight with Stan, a great dark brute of a boy, one of the two assistants in the Department, to whom I had become quite attached. Both Stan and Les, the second assistant, called me ‘Noob’.
‘’Ere, Noob, what abaht a pummel?’ Stan would croak invitingly, and we would pummel one another until Miss Phrygian banged furiously on the frosted glass of her office door to stop the din.
From time to time we would be visited by the Contact Men who dealt personally with Wurzel’s clients and handled the advertising accounts. They would stand gingerly in our den and turn the pages of the glossy magazines with beautifully manicured fingers. They were all youngish, perfectly dressed in Hawes and Curtis suits, and they smelled of bay rum. The amorous complications of their private lives were hair-raising. One of them owned a Bentley. They all wore clove carnations every day except Saturdays when they were in tweeds and went to the ‘country’ around Sunningdale. I always felt a clod in their presence and for some time after their visits disinclined to pummel. More popular were the visits of the typists. Wurzel’s was run on pseudo-American lines and had a splendid collection. Two of the most popular were Lettice Rundle and Lilly Reidenfelt. Lilly was the more provocative of the two. It was generally conceded that Lettice was the sort of girl you married and had children by after trying Miss Reidenfelt, who was expected to run to fat.
When Miss Reidenfelt entered the Checking Department, Stan, the Man of Action, would be stricken dumb and with eyes cast down would trace bashful circles amongst the waste paper with his toe. Les, Socialite and Dreamer, knew better how to please, and, more forthcoming, usually succeeded in pinching her. At such times what little air there was would be so heavy with lust that I would develop an enormous headache of the kind usually brought on by thundery weather. When Miss Reidenfelt had finally minced away inviolate, Stan would fling himself at the piles of newspaper in the steel fixtures and punch them in torment, crying: ‘Oh, you lovely bit of gravy.’
With such experiences behind me it was easy to believe the Porter when he said I was going to be sacked, and when I went into the main office through the swing doors in the reception counter I was filled with strangely pleasant forebodings. By this time the place would normally have been a Babel, but this morning the atmosphere was chilly, tragic, and unnaturally quiet. Lettice Rundle was having a good cry over her Remington and the group of young men who handled the Cereal Account were shovelling piles of proofs and stereos into a dustbin and removing their personal belongings from drawers. Years later I was to witness similar scenes in Cairo when Middle East headquarters became a great funeral pyre of burning documents as the Germans moved towards the Delta. But this was my first experience of an evacuation.
It was easy to see that besides myself quite a number of people were about to leave. Those remaining pored over their tasks with unnatural solicitude and averted their eyes from their unfortunate fellows. I had no personal possessions to put together. My hat was in the cloakroom where it had remained for two years. I had never taken it out but sometimes I dusted it, as Mr McBean from time to time checked up on the whereabouts of the more junior and unstable members of the staff by identifying the hats in the cloakroom. This was my alibi; with my hat in its place I was permanently somewhere in the building.
Before they left I asked them why I had not been sacked with the rest of them. Robbie only called you ‘old boy’ in moments of stress. He was reluctant to answer my question. He called me ‘old boy’ now.
‘Well, old boy, they did think about it but they decided that it cost them so little that it didn’t make any difference whether you stayed or not.’
I was furious. The Porter had been wrong and I hadn’t ‘ad it’. I was perhaps the only member of the staff who would have actively welcomed the sack. Wurzel’s was a prison to me. All the way home in the Underground I seethed … too unimportant to be sacked … At Piccadilly the train was full but the guards packed in more and more people. At Knightsbridge two of them tried to force an inoffensive little man into the train by putting their shoulders to the back of his head and shoving. Someone began to Baa loudly and hysterically. There was an embarrassed silence and nobody laughed. We were all too much like real sheep to find it funny.
At Hammersmith where I emerged sticky and wretched from the train, I found that we had been so closely packed that somebody had taken my handkerchief out of my pocket, used it, and put it back under the impression that it was his own.
I bought an evening paper. It had some very depressing headlines about the breakdown of Runciman’s negotiations at Prague.
The next day I went to Salcombe for my holiday. During that fortnight while swimming in Starehole Bay I dived down and saw beneath me the remains of the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie lying broken-backed, half buried in the sand.
On my way back to London there was an hour to wait for the connection at Newton Abbot, and wandering up the hot and empty street in the afternoon sunshine I went into a café and wrote to Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn for a place on one of his grain ships.
I never went back to Wurzel’s.
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Eric Newby
A collection of writing from Britain's best-loved travel writer, ‘A Merry Dance around the World’ is the culmination of a lifetime of adventure.A collection of writing from eleven books by Britain's best-loved travel writer, A Merry Dance around the World is the culmination of a lifetime's adventures, from the birth of Eric Newby in 1919 at the 'ghastly hour' of 3.45am, to Herculean cycling escapades in his seventies through the wiles of the Irish winter. An astonishing catalogue of disasters and misunderstandings, Newby's compassionate grace and sharp wit ensure that every adventure is as charming, hilarious and wild as his last.Including extracts from his masterpiece of love and courage in wartime, Love and War in the Apennines, travelling epiphanies against the breathtaking backdrop of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and the memorable excursions of the long-suffering and truly heroic Wanda Newby on bikes, in boats and planning daring prison escapes. A brilliant introduction for any Newby newcomer, or handy collection for the intrepid Newby veteran traveller, A Merry Dance around the World is a whirlwind tour around the globe, guided by the forefather of the modern comic travel book.
A MERRY DANCE
AROUND THE WORLD
THE BEST OF
Eric Newby
Contents
Cover (#u51c75be3-04a6-5c96-ad96-8e8569c659bc)
Title Page (#u2583f230-4b1b-5b27-a3e0-df5ff0ff226e)
First Steps (#u9f59d038-7554-53a0-a901-7d10f3f50b4b)
In and Out of Advertising (#u01b3ea61-2259-592b-9c1b-78b952e465ee)
Around the World in a Four-masted Barque (#u66a01266-2a5d-5be6-92da-eab1f4317e43)
A Short History of the Second World War (#u7b1b1bc4-07a0-5c08-8538-3e36713b4e9e)
Rag Trade (#ua599fce4-72af-59aa-bd10-4684b964cb3c)
Birth of an Explorer (#u2fd7f4ee-9c7a-5fdc-8696-9c0065fc3026)
Ganga Ma: Mother Ganges (#ud1b0ce8f-27c1-5a0c-a591-030254bb86fa)
Around the Mediterranean (#u40a88284-faf8-58d3-be4e-71b63bb47381)
On and Off the Trans-Siberian Railway (#u3d86ec7f-a166-5c0b-82da-2da4ddbc2c36)
A Long Bike Ride in Ireland (#u226b7255-7949-5373-b200-90119f12f252)
At the Foot of the Apuan Alps (#ub73c5c53-e9f1-5518-967e-397fa67f6ef0)
Plates (#u3d119ed4-9588-53e0-8cae-bf559f4950bc)
Index (#u6686254b-7eb6-5974-a0af-a279ac598f0d)
About the Author (#uabe1ab24-e4d3-50f6-8dcb-1c479492e29f)
Also by the Author (#uf920c6c0-6467-5033-b81e-265a70806851)
Copyright (#ud2bae91e-a15a-5fec-925d-13997a66c9a4)
About the Publisher (#ucb688720-88fd-57a2-8664-f3c4691903fe)
First Steps (#ulink_5eec4608-31cc-51dd-8c89-fb0ee330b495)
BIRTH OF A TRAVELLER
Births, Marriages, Deaths NEWBY. – On the 6th December at 3 Castelnau Mansions, Barnes, SW13, to Hilda Newby, wife of Geo. A. Newby – a son.
IN THIS EXTRAVAGANT fashion – altogether it cost 50p ($1.95)
(#ulink_89954067-ec7b-5318-b343-48bac1345592), at a time when Lady Secretaries with shorthand and typing were earning around £3.50 ($13.65) a week – my arrival was announced on the following Tuesday, 9 December, in The Times and the Daily Telegraph, two of the daily newspapers my father ‘took in’ at that period. The other was the Daily Mirror, then a rather genteel paper, which he ordered for my mother, but never looked at himself, and which she passed on to the cook/housekeeper when she had finished with it. From then on it was also passed on to a nurse.
At 3.45 a.m., the ghastly hour I chose, or rather the doctor chose, for my arrival – I had to be hauled out by the head – conditions must have been pretty beastly in Barnes. It was a dark and stormy night, with a fresh wind from the west whose gusts would have been strong enough to blow clouds of spray from the big reservoir (which was opposite our flat by the bridge and which has now been filled in to make playing fields for St Paul’s School) over the pavement and right across the main road (which was called Castelnau but which all the inhabitants knew and know to this day as Castlenore) as it always did when the wind was strong from that particular quarter, sometimes, but rarely at 3.45 a. m. wetting unwary pedestrians and people travelling in open motor cars.
And it was certainly dark, although the moon had been up for more than thirteen hours and was only a day off full. It would be nice, more romantic, altogether more appropriate for a potential traveller, to think of myself arriving astride the Centaur, and, Sagittarius being in the ascendant, perhaps carrying the latter’s arrows for him, as we moved across a firmament in which ragged clouds were racing across the path of a huge and brilliant moon; but it was not to be. It was ordained that I should be a child not only of darkness but of utter darkness, of ten-tenths cloud.
When it dawned, the day was even more rumbustious than the night. And when the sun rose, just before eight o’clock, like the moon, it remained invisible. Thunderstorms visited many parts of the country, accompanied by hail, sleet or snow and west or north-westerly winds which reached gale force in high places. In Lincolnshire, the Belvoir Hunt, having ‘chopped a fox’ in Foston Spinney (seized it before it fairly got away from cover), ‘were hunting another from Allington when scent was totally swept away by a tremendous rainstorm’.
‘Flying Prospects’ on my birthday were not good, according to The Times. It is now difficult to imagine that a pilot, or even a passenger, might actually buy a newspaper in order to find out whether it was safe to ‘go up’, but it must have been so, otherwise there would have been no point in publishing the information at all. ‘Unsuitable for aviation or fit only for short distance flying by the heaviest sort of machine’ was what the communiqué said. ‘Sea Passages’ were equally disagreeable. The English Channel was rough, with winds reaching forty miles an hour, and there was extensive flooding in France.
But if the weather was disturbed that Saturday, it was as nothing compared with the state of great chunks of Europe and northern Asia. In spite of the fact that the advertising department of The Times had chosen this particular Saturday to announce ‘PRESENTS SUGGESTIONS FOR THE GREAT PEACE CHRISTMAS’, on it Latvians were fighting Germans, on whom they had declared war a week previously on 28 November, and so were the Lithuanians. In Russia, on the Don and between Voronezh and Kirsk and in Asia, beyond the Urals, along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway, where typhus was raging, Bolsheviks and White Russians were engaged in a civil war of the utmost ferocity. Meanwhile, that same Saturday, while their fellow countrymen were destroying one another, with their country in ruins and becoming every day more ruinous, Lenin and Trotsky and the 1109 delegates of the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets passed a resolution to the effect that ‘The Soviet Union Desires to Live in Peace with All Peoples’. On that day, too, Lenin told the Congress that ‘Communistic Principles were being utterly disregarded by the Russian peasantry.’
That day, too, much nearer home, while I was taking my first nourishment, as it were, in the open air, French Army units with heavy guns were rumbling across the Rhine bridges in order to force the Germans to ratify the peace treaty which they had signed at Versailles in June; and in the same issue of The Times which carried the headline about ‘THE GREAT PEACE CHRISTMAS’, there were other headlines such as ‘GUNS ACROSS THE RHINE’ and ‘WAR IMMINENT’, although who was to fight another war with millions killed and wounded, armies in a state of semi-demobilization, and millions more dying or soon to die from sickness and starvation was not clear. Nevertheless, that weekend, the only thing, theoretically, that stood between the protagonists and another outbreak of war, was the Armistice, signed in a French railway carriage parked in a wood, thirteen months previously, so that, equally theoretically, it would simply have meant carrying on with the old one. That weekend, too, the Americans quitted the peace conference.
There was, altogether, a lot about death in the papers that Saturday. It was as if Death the Reaper, an entity embodied by cartoonists in their drawings as a hideous, skeletal figure, and it would have been difficult to have lived through the last five years without thinking of death as such, had become dissatisfied with his efforts, had once again sharpened his scythe and was already cutting fresh, preliminary swathes through the debilitated populations of the vanquished powers, as if the great influenza epidemic, which reached its peak in Britain in March 1919, and which altogether killed more people in Europe than all the shot and shell of four and a half years of war, had not been enough.
In Britain, that Saturday, things were rather different. Bank rate was six per cent, exports were booming. On Friday, the US dollar closed at $3.90 to the pound. The only disquieting news that morning, and that was more or less a rumour, was that there was a possibility of a number of pits being forced to close in the South Wales anthracite fields.
Altogether, for many people that Saturday, life seems to have gone on much as it had done before the Deluge. Giddy and Giddy, House Agents, offered a luxuriously furnished town house, facing Hyde Park, with thirteen bed and dressing-rooms for £26.25 ($102.40) a week. Harrods announced Laroche champagne, 1911, the last vintage generally available (shipped) since the war, at £6.50 ($25.35) a dozen. Very old vintage port (Tuke Holdsworth) was £4.50 ($17.55) a dozen. Not advertised in The Times or the Daily Telegraph, but still listed in Harrods’ enormous current catalogue, (and for some years to come) under ‘Livery’, were red plush breeches for footmen.
Domestic servants were still comparatively inexpensive, although more difficult to find, than they had been before the war. That Saturday Lady Baldwin, of 37 Cavendish Square, advertised for a housemaid, ‘five maids and a boy kept, wages £28-£30 ($109-$117) a year’. And there were vacancies for live-in under nurses, at £25 ($97.50) a year, the price of a high-class baby carriage of the sort that my mother had acquired for me.
That Saturday, too, wholesale garment manufacturers, at what was, and still is, known as ‘the better end of the trade’, the sort of firm my father was a partner in, were advertising jobs in their workrooms for bodice and skirt makers at around £2.50 ($9.75) for a five and a half day, forty-nine hour week (8.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. week-days, 8.30 a.m to 12.30 p.m. Saturdays), £130 ($507) a year, which made the 5op spent on announcing my birthday seem hideously extravagant.
That Saturday some London fashion houses, including the then ultra-fashionable Lucile, in Hanover Square, were advertising for ‘Model Girls’, in emulation of Paul Poiret, the Parisian designer, who had just returned from the army and for the first time showed clothes on living models.
A sketch in The Times that Saturday shows that clothes were good-looking, if not positively saucy. Dresses, according to their fashion correspondent, were ‘décolleté, sometimes dangerously low’, in brilliant colours, with tight, mid-calf-length skirts. Jet was high fashion for the evening: embroidered on coloured velvet, used for making girdles and shoulder straps. Feathers, which had been used for years for making headdresses for evening, were being replaced by flowers, ‘as little like nature as possible?’, although another couple of years were to pass before the Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act became law. The ultra-fashionable were already wearing the long, skimpy jerseys which were to become a sort of hallmark of the 1920s; but there was nothing about them in the papers the day I was born.
Yet in spite of all this display of what an American politician described as ‘normalcy’, ‘The Great War’, as it would still be referred to by the British far into the next one, although over, must have seemed terribly close to most people, as it still must do today to anyone reading some of the classified advertisements which appeared in the quality papers that Saturday. The request for a lady or gentleman to play once a week at a thé dansant in a hospital for shell-shocked officers. The offers to keep soldiers’ graves trimmed and lay headstones in the neighbourhood of Albert, Bapaume and Péronne – the dead had not yet been gathered together in communal cemeteries. The endless columns of advertisements inserted by ex-servicemen, under ‘Situations Wanted’ (there were 350,000 of them unemployed), part of the huge citizen army of the still living that was being demobilized into a world in which, in spite of there being whole generations of dead, there was not enough work for all. Such advertisements, inserted by ex-officers, warrant officers, petty officers, NCOs and men of superior education (the labouring classes did not advertise their services in this way), were some of them despairing, some of them pathetic, some of them hopeless:
EX-SERVICE MAN. Loss of right arm, seeks situation as Window Dresser or Shopwalker.
DEMOBILIZED OFFICER. Aged 21, 4½ years’ service [my italics]. Good education. Left school to join up, therefore no experience. Accept small salary until proficient.
Will anyone lend DEMOBILIZED OFFICER, DSO, just starting work again, £5000 ($19,500) for one year? Highest references. Applicant desperately pressed by money-lenders. No Agents. Write Box J.28.
Money-lenders were so numerous that they had whole classified sections to themselves. Most of them offered ‘immediate advances on note of hand alone’. Their advertisements make repulsive reading, even across such a gulf of years.
A far more prominent advertisement than any of these announced the setting up of what was called the Bemersyde Fund, opened by the Lord Mayor of London and the Right Honourable Lord Glenconner, ‘to acquire the estates of Bemersyde from its owner and have the same conveyed to Field-Marshal Earl Haig, a member of the well-known whisky distilling family, as a personal gift from the people of the British Empire – the consideration for the purchase being £53,700 ($209,430)’.
Altogether – leaving present for the headmaster (the Estates of Bemersyde), although he had not been a very good headmaster, the boys (or what was left of them, for it had been rather a rough school with a lot of mud in the playing fields) now going out into the world to seek their fortunes – there was a distinctly end-of-term feeling in the air. But in spite of this there was no singing of ‘Lord Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing’ as one would perhaps expect on such occasions and as there was at the schools I later attended. Possibly because the only songs the boys knew were not hymns but songs that had become dirges: ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Tipperary’, ‘It’s a Long Long Trail A’Winding’ and ‘I Don’t Want To Join The Army’.
Even the Ministry of Munitions and the Admiralty were selling up. That day and every day there were offers for sale by auction of aerodromes, enormous munition factories, equally enormous hutted camps, and of minesweepers, motor charabancs, fleets of ambulances, ships’ boilers, railway engines, enough barbed wire to encircle the earth, millions of cigarettes in lots, miles and miles of ships’ hawser, inexhaustible supplies of bell tents, cereal ovens, lower fruit standard jam, wicker-covered stoneware jars, torpedo boats, with and without engines and part-worn and unworn issue clothing, etc., etc., etc., so inexhaustible that many items were still being sold off twenty years later on the eve of the next world war, when the whole stocking up process began all over again. Everything, except projectiles and the means of discharging them, was open to offer and even these would eventually come on the market, but for export only.
In fact the world was changing with a rapidity that would have been unbelievable in 1914, even though it was still possible to buy red plush breeches for footmen and under nurses could still be acquired with comparative ease. Yet it was, one sees in retrospect, only a temporary acceleration. If it had continued at the rate envisaged in 1919 man would probably have stood on the moon by 1939.
That afternoon the muffin man ringing his bell went down Riverview Gardens, the side road outside ‘Ther Mansions’ as the local tradesmen who dealt with my mother called them, in which there were other blocks of flats, carrying his muffins in a wooden tray covered with a green baize cloth, which he balanced on his head; and the lamplighter came and went on his bicycle (lighting-up time that evening was 4.21 p.m.), lancing the gas lamps in the street into flame with a long bamboo pole.
And so ended my birthday. For all concerned it had been a jolly long one.
The truth is that babies do not like travel, and I was no exception. Babies are unadventurous. Babies act as grapnels to prevent ‘the family’ dragging its ground. That is why they were invented. Perversely, their desire for fresh horizons comes much later when they have already begun to ‘attract’ fares, and can no longer travel free; by which time they are no longer babies at all.
I remember the Isle of Wight as the place where I first sat in the side-car of a motor cycle, at Easter 1923, but much more I remember it as being the Place Where God Lived, although this was later, some time in the summer or autumn of 1925. It must have been during one of those interpolated holidays my mother was so adept at arranging at an instant’s notice if my father had to go abroad without her, on the grounds that a change of air would do me good. He often used to go to Holland to sell enormous coats and costumes to the Dutch. With her she took her sister, my Auntie May, who loved travel, however banal.
On one occasion we made an excursion to a place near the middle of the island and some time in the afternoon of what I remember as a very hot day we arrived at our destination, a village of thatched houses that were clustered about the foot of a green hill, on the summit of which stood what seemed a very small church.
(#ulink_95e632aa-ab07-52fb-83c7-2539c5c2f0f4) From where we stood it was silhouetted against the now declining sun, the rays of which shone through its windows, producing an unearthly effect.
There was no time to climb the hill to the church and have tea as well. If there had been, I am sure that my mother and my aunt, both of whom were interested in ‘old things’, would have done so. Instead, we had the tea, in the garden of one of the cottages, and while we were having it I heard my mother and my aunt talking about the place and how nice it was, which they called Godshill.
I was very excited. Godshill. If this was Godshill then God must live on it. God to me at this time and for long years to come was a very old, but very fit, version of Jesus and much less meek-looking. He had a long white beard, was dressed in a white sheet and was all shiny, as if he was on fire. He also had a seat in the front row of the dress circle, as it were, so that he could see immediately if one was doing wrong. This was the God to whom I prayed each night, either with my mother’s help or with whoever was looking after me.
‘Does he live on it?’ I asked my mother.
‘Yes,’ said my mother, ‘that’s where he lives, darling, on top of the hill.’
I was filled with an immense feeling of happiness that this radiant being, whom I had never actually seen but who was always either just around the corner or else hovering directly overhead but always invisible, should live in such a shining, beautiful place; and I asked if we could climb the hill and see him. Unfortunately, the train was due and we had to hurry to the station. I cried all the way to it and most of the way back to Bembridge. I never went back to Godshill and I never will.
I can remember, in July 1923, being carried high on my father’s head through the bracken in the combes that led down to the beaches on Sark, and once having reached them I can remember falling down constantly on the rocks and hurting myself, I considered, badly. And it was on Sark that I had my first remembered nightmare, in the annexe to Stock’s Hotel, a charming, ivy-clad, farmlike building. I awoke screaming in what was still broad daylight with the sun shining outside my first-floor room in which the blinds were drawn, to think myself abandoned to a dreadful fate by my parents who were dining only a few feet away in the hotel, certain that I had ‘gone off’ to sleep. It was a nightmare of peculiar horror, because it was founded on fact; so horrible and at the same time so difficult to explain to anyone that for years I dared not confide the details to anyone, and to my parents I never did, although it recurred throughout my childhood, together with an almost equally awful one about falling down an endless shaft.
WESTWARD HO!
In 1925, when I was five and a half, we embarked on what, so far as I was concerned, was the most ambitious holiday I had ever had. In summer my father took a cottage at Branscombe, at that time a very rural and comparatively unvisited village in South Devon, between Seaton and Sidmouth. It promised to be a particularly exciting time as my father had decided that we should travel there from Barnes by motor. This meant that most of our luggage had to be sent in advance by train from Waterloo to Honiton, a market town on the main line to Exeter; at Honiton it was picked up by a carrier and transported the ten miles or so to Branscombe by horse and cart. Others taking part in this holiday, although they did not travel with us, being already foregathered there, were my Auntie May (the aunt who had accompanied my mother and me on the memorable visit to Godshill) and her husband, Uncle Reg. Before the war Uncle Reg had worked as a journalist in Dover on the local paper and in this capacity had been present in 1909 when Blériot landed on the cliffs, having flown the Channel. During the war he had been in the navy in some department connected with propaganda. Later he became editor of the Gaumont British Film News. He was very urbane and elegant. He was later on good terms with the Prince of Wales for whom he used to arrange film shows at Fort Belvedere, and for the Royal Family at Balmoral. For these services he was presented with cufflinks and cigarette cases from Plantin, the court jeweller, as well as other mementoes. He preferred to be called Reginald rather than Reg, but no one ever did so. They put up in the village pub where we, too, were to take our meals.
The third party was made up of three fashion buyers for London stores, Beryl, Mercia and Mimi Bamford, all of whom were friends of my mother, particularly Mimi, and their mother. All three were unimaginably elegant, often almost identically dressed in long, clinging jerseys and strings of amber beads, and they were surrounded by what seemed to be hordes of extremely grumpy Pekingese who did not take kindly to the country. Their mother, who did not take kindly to the country either, was even more formidable. She owned a Boston Bulldog called Bogey, which had had its ears clipped, a practice by then declared illegal. Like her daughters she was immensely tall, and must at one time have been as personable as her daughters, but even I could recognize that she was incredibly tough, if not common.
‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im,’ was the comment she made about me, by now a boisterous, active little boy, to my Auntie May while we were at Branscombe, ‘she’ being my mother; an anecdote that my aunt eventually told me, which she did with an excellent imitation of the old lady’s gravelly voice, having put off doing so until only a few years before her own death in 1974 in order, as she put it, to spare my feelings.
Neither Beryl nor Mercia nor their mother ever went to the beach, or even set eyes on the sea, the whole time they were at Branscombe. For Beryl and Mercia the seaside was Deauville. What Branscombe was to them is difficult to imagine, or they to the inhabitants. Only Mimi relished the simple life. The journey to Branscombe, a stately progression, took two days.
At Branscombe, behind the Mason’s Arms, the pub which stood next door to the cottage my father had taken for the summer and of which it formed a part, there was a yard surrounded by various dilapidated outbuildings and a piece of ground overgrown with grass and nettles which concealed various interesting pieces of rusted, outmoded machinery, the most important of which was an old motor car smelling of decaying rubber and dirty engine oil. The stuffing of what was left of its buttoned leather upholstery was a home for a large family of mice. This yard was to be the scene of some of the more memorable games I played with my best friend in the village, Peter Hutchings, whose mother kept a grocery, confectionery and hardware shop on the corner opposite Mr Hayman, the butcher’s. It was from Peter Hutchings, who was killed while serving as a soldier in the Second World War, and whose name is inscribed with the names of fourteen other village boys who died in the two great wars on the war memorial at the entrance to Branscombe churchyard, that I learned the broad local dialect which was so broad that by the end of that first summer at Branscombe no one except a local inhabitant could understand what I was saying. ‘Sweatin’ like a bull ’er be,’ was how Peter Hutchings described to me one day the state of his sister, Betty, confined to bed with a temperature, and it was in this form that I passed on this important piece of news to my parents.
There in the inn yard, in the long summer evenings, we used to sit in the old motor car, either myself or Peter at the wheel, taking it in turn, the driver making BRRR-ing noises, the one sitting next to him in the front making honking noises – the horn had long since ceased to be – as we roared round imaginary corners, narrowly missing imaginary vehicles coming in the opposite direction, driving through an imaginary world to an imaginary destination on an imaginary road, a pair of armchair travellers. In the back we used to put Betty Hutchings, if she was available, who wore a white beret, was placid, said nothing, apart from an occasional BRR, and was in fact an ideal back-seat passenger. Sometimes, if we felt like doing something ‘rude’, we used to stop the car and pee on the seats in the back, and Betty would pee too. This gave us a sense of power, at least I know it did to me, as I would not have dared to pee on the upholstery of a real motor car belonging to real people. Less courageous than my wife, who confessed to having peed on the back seat of a ‘real’ very expensive motor car stopped outside her parents’ house at her birthplace in the Carso, and smeared it with cow dung.
When we got tired of driving our car we ourselves used to become motor cars, tearing up and down the street outside making BRRR-ing noises of varying intensity as we changed gear, disturbing the elderly ladies who used to sit at their cottage doors making Honiton lace, pillow lace, appliqué and guipure, the principal manufacture of the village. Close by, over the hill at Beer where there were stone quarries, the quarry men’s wives had made the lace for Queen Victoria’s wedding dress in 1839, something that was still talked about in the neighbourhood more or less as if it had happened yesterday. It was these hideous BRRR-ing noises that no doubt prompted old Mrs Bamford, whose cottage also faced the main street, to utter the words, ‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im.’
But all this was in the future, that first day of our holiday.
The next morning I woke at what must have been an early hour and, obeying some mysterious summons, dressed myself in the clothes that I had worn the previous afternoon – white shirt, shorts, socks and white sun hat (I couldn’t manage the tie unaided), brown lace-up shoes from Daniel Neal’s in Kensington High Street (soon to be replaced by hobnail boots, bought for me at my earnest request so that I could be a real country boy, which took me ages to tie) and my pride and joy, a hideous red and green striped blazer with brass buttons that I had persuaded my mother to buy for me, much against her will, from Messrs Charles Baker, Outfitters, of King Street, Hammersmith, so that I should look more like what I described as ‘a real schoolboy’ rather than an infant member of the kindergarten at the Froebel School in Barons Court. As school blazers were not made to fit persons as small as I was, when I was wearing it my short trousers were scarcely visible at all. Not even Messrs Baker appeared to know which school it was, if any, that had red and virulent green stripes as its colours. Then, having picked up a stout stick that I had acquired the previous day, I stole downstairs and let myself out into the village street which was deserted as it was Sunday morning.
At the side of the road, opposite what I was soon to know as Mrs Hutchings’s shop, a little stream purled down from one of the side valleys, one of several such streams that, united, reach the sea at Branscombe Mouth; and there, under a brick arch, it issued from a pipe which supplied this lower end of the village with water, before burrowing under the road to reappear once more outside the shop. From here it ran away downhill over stones along the edge of a little lane with an old, ivy-clad wall on one side of it, chattering merrily to itself as it ran over the stones in a way that seemed almost human.
Here, in this narrow lane, the water had what looked to me like watercress growing in it, and it was so clear and delicious-looking that I got down and had a drink of it, only to find that it was not delicious at all and that it had a nasty smell. Later I discovered that Betty Hutchings used to drink from this crystal stream if she was not watched which was probably the reason why she sweated like a bull.
I continued to follow the stream, racing twigs down it, until it vanished into a sort of tunnel from which proceeded a delightful roaring sound. At the other end it emerged beyond a wicket gate to flow more placidly under a little bridge and in these calmer waters I spent some time stirring up the bottom with my stick and frightening some water beetles, the air about me filled with the droning of innumerable insects.
From this point it ran to join the main stream in the middle of the valley and here the path turned away from it to the left beyond a five-barred gate which, because I could not open it unaided, I squeezed underneath, to find myself in a beautiful and what seemed to me immense green meadow, hemmed in by hedgerows and huge trees and filled with buttercups, while high above it to the right were the hanging woods we had seen the previous morning from the car, the open down above them alive with gorse.
At the far end of this field the now augmented stream was spanned by a small wooden footbridge with a white painted handrail. When I eventually reached the stream, in spite of all these distractions and making a number of more or less unsuccessful attempts to spear on the end of my stick some of the older, harder sorts of cow flop in which the field abounded, and launch them into the air, the water tasted even funnier than it had done in the village outside Mrs Hutchings’s shop and I stung myself on the nettles getting down to it.
Beyond the bridge the path continued uphill, dappled with sunlight under the trees, and here the air struck chill after the heat of the meadow. Then it dipped and suddenly I found myself out in the sun on the edge of an immense shingle beach which had some boats hauled out on it, and in my ears there was the roar of the sea as with every wave it displaced and replaced millions upon millions of pebbles. To the left it stretched to where a cluster of ivy-covered white pinnacles rising above a landslip marked the last chalk cliffs in southern England; to the right to the brilliant red cliffs around Sidmouth; and beyond it, out to sea, on what was a near horizon, for there was already a haze of heat out in Lyme Bay, I could see the slightly blurred outlines of what Harry Hansford, the local fisherman who lived opposite the blacksmith’s shop, would soon teach me to identify as a Brixham trawler, ghosting along under full sail.
‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’
Many years were to pass before I read these words of Keats, but when I did the memory of that morning came flooding back.
There was a sound of feet slithering on the pebbles behind me. It was Kathy, my mother’s help, panting slightly, as she had been running. ‘Whatever did you do that for, Eric, you naughty little boy, without telling me?’ she said. ‘Your mum’s ever so worried, and your dad, too. He’ll be ever so cross if he finds out where you’ve been. You’d better keep quiet when you get back. I’ll say I found you in the field.’
Together, hand in hand, we went back up the hill towards the village where the church bells were now beginning to announce the early service.
LANDS AND PEOPLES
By the time I was eight years old, apart from a visit to the Channel Islands in 1923, I had never been out of England, not even to visit Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Yet, in spite of this, I already knew a good deal about these places and their inhabitants, as well as the wider world beyond the British Isles.
This was because, some time in the 1920s, my parents took out on my behalf a subscription to The Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples, a glossy magazine edited by Arthur Mee, at that time a well-known writer who was also responsible for the to me rather boring Children’s Newspaper, which I had given up buying in favour of more trashy, exciting comics. Lands and Peoples, according to the advertisements which heralded its publication, was to come out at regular intervals and when complete the publishers would bind it up for you to form six massive volumes.
What excitement I felt when Lands and Peoples came thudding through the letter-box, in its pristine magazine form. To me, turning its pages in SW 13 was rather like being taken to the top of a mountain from which the world could be seen spread out below, a much more interesting world than the one my father read bits out about from his Morning Post to my mother while she was still in bed, a captive audience, sipping her early morning tea.
Lands and Peoples was addressed to ‘The Generation whose business it is to save Mankind’ – mine presumably, although I had no suggestions to make about how it should be done. ‘We are marching,’ Mee wrote, an incurable optimist, apparently envisaging a pacific version of the Children’s Crusade, with the children waving white flags instead of brandishing crucifixes, ‘towards a friendlier and better world, a world of love in place of hate, of peace instead of war, and one thing is needful – an understanding of each other … it is the purpose of this book so to familiarize us with the lands and peoples of the world that we can cherish no ill-will for them. We are one great human family, and this is the book of our brothers and sisters.’
I never read the text. All the efforts of what was presumably an army of experts in their various fields, painfully adapting their ways of writing to render them intelligible to infant minds, were totally wasted on me. All I did, and still do, for I still have the six volumes, was to look at the photographs, of which there were thousands in black and white besides the seven hundred or so in colour, and read the captions and the short descriptions below them of a world which, if it ever existed in the form in which it was here portrayed, is now no more. What I saw was a world at peace, one from which violence, even well-intentioned sorts, such as ritual murder and cannibalism, had been banished, or at least as long as the parts kept coming.
In Merrie England, donkeys carried the Royal Mail through the cobbled streets of Clovelly, milkmaids in floppy hats churned butter by hand in the Isle of Wight, swan uppers upped swans on the River Thames, genial bearded fishermen in sou’westers mended nets on the Suffolk coast, town criers rang their bells, and choirboys wearing mortarboards, using long switches, beat the bounds of St Clement Danes.
In the Land of the Cymry, which is how Lands and Peoples described Wales, ancient dames wearing chimney-pot hats stopped outside their whitewashed cottages to pass the time of day with more modern, marcel-waved neighbours, and cloth-capped salmon fishers paddled their coracles on the River Dee.
In Bonnie Scotland, brawny, kilted athletes tossed the caber, border shepherds carried weakling lambs to shelter from the winter snows, women ground corn with stone hand-mills in the Inner Hebrides and, far out in the Atlantic, on St Kilda, the loneliest of the inhabited British Isles, men wearing tam-o’shanters and bushy beards were photographed returning homewards with seabirds taken on its fearsome cliffs.
In the Emerald Isle, bare-footed, flannel-petticoated colleens drew water from brawling streams, or knitted socks in cabins in Connemara, while little boys in the Aran Islands wore skirts to protect them from being kidnapped by the fairies.
Further afield, as I turned the pages, covering them with Bovril (for one of my greatest pleasures was to go to bed early with Lands and Peoples and at the same time eat Bovril sandwiches), I came upon Czechs and Slovaks and Hungarians wearing embroidered petticoats irrespective of sex, and incredible hats – in Rumania there were men who wore garters with little bells on them, who looked like sissies to me. I also saw fellers of proud giants in the Canadian forest; savages of New Guinea – their hair plastered with grease and mud; Jews in Poland – a new state with a glorious past; sun-loving Negroes in South Africa; happy Negro children romping in the ‘Coloured Section’ of New York; Kirghiz tribesmen on the ‘Roof of the World’; Orthodox scholars wearing arm thongs and phylacteries studying the ancient laws of their people; penguin rookeries in the Great White South; geishas negotiating stepping stones in Cherry Blossom Land; hardy Indian women on beds of nails at Benares; laughter-loving girls of the Abruzzi; Flemings and Walloons – little Belgium’s two sturdy races; Macedonian women weaving fine cloth with deft fingers; haughty-looking redskins decked in eagle’s feathers and wampum; Germany – rich country of an industrious nation; and so on, and so on.
Everywhere in Lands and Peoples there were photographs of schools and schoolchildren; ruinous-looking schools in which little Negroes were learning to add up, schools in Japan with the pupils marching round in circles dressed in military-looking uniforms, clinical-looking schools in the United States in which the children were being inspected for dental decay, children brandishing enormously long slates in Burma, memorizing the Koran in oases, going to school in wheelbarrows in China, learning to read in lonely Labrador and being bastinadoed in Persia, one of the only examples of violence in the entire work. That children had to put up with going to school in other countries besides my own I found encouraging. And here at home they didn’t have the bastinado, even at Colet Court.
Each time I got through all six volumes of the Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples I began again, in much the same way as the Scotsmen of Bonnie Scotland, sturdy independent folk, who painted the Forth Bridge, would start all over again as soon as they had applied the final brush strokes to that miracle of Scottish engineering.
At St Paul’s I became a Scout in order to avoid being drafted into the Officers’ Training Corps, the OTC, which would have meant wearing an insufferably itchy uniform that was blanket thick. As a Scout I learned to light a fire with one match and to use a felling axe without dismembering myself. On Saturdays we engaged in bloody night battles with other troops of Scouts in the swamps of Wimbledon Common. In the holidays we went camping in the beautiful parks of gentlemen’s country seats. Because I got on with Jews – I still do, I think they find my lack of subtlety restful – I was given command of a Jewish patrol. One of them, who was as prickly as a present-day Israeli, refused to wear Scout uniform and appeared at our open-air meetings wearing a double-breasted overcoat, a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. Another, who used to charge his mother half a crown to kiss him good night, was always loaded down with silver. On one occasion, when there was a danger of our losing one of the outdoor games known as ‘wide games’ (which necessitated covering large tracts of ground on foot) another member of my patrol whose family owned a huge limousine in which he used to arrive at wherever was the meeting place, summoned the chauffeur who was parked round the corner, and six scouts whirred away in it to certain victory.
In the spring of 1936, when I was sixteen years old, my father announced that, as it appeared unlikely I would pass the School Certificate Examination (the then equivalent of O-levels), in mathematics, a subject in which it was obligatory to pass, he had decided to take me away from St Paul’s at the end of the summer term and ‘put me into business’. I did fail. I was sorry about this decision. I was good at English, History, even Divinity, and I had dreamed of reading History at Oxford.
Apart from an innate inability to cope with mathematics the only disadvantage I laboured under at St Paul’s, and being a Scout made not the slightest difference, was that I had a curious sense of humour which meant that if anything came up in class with a suggestion of double entendre it caused me to dissolve into hysterics, for which I was punished, sometimes quite severely. In other words I had a dirty mind.
For instance, on one occasion, when we were reading Scott’s Marmion aloud, it became obvious to myself and everyone else in the classroom that by the working of some hideously unfair natural process of selection it would fall to me to read a completely unreadable part of the romance in Canto Two, entitled ‘The Convent’, which concerned the blind Bishop of Lindisfarne. And you could have heard a pin drop when I got to my feet.
‘No hand was moved, no word was said
Till thus the Abbot’s doom was given.
Raising his sightless balls to heaven …’
was all I could manage before going off into peals of mad laughter and to be beaten by John Bell, the High Master, a hedonist who showed in as marked a way as possible in the circumstances where his sympathies lay by beating me as hard as anyone else sent to him for punishment, and then giving me a shilling. I have never forgiven Scott.
(#ulink_ce7de623-9c0d-56d3-a8b4-b53b53edad50) All sums of sterling have been converted from pounds, shillings and pence to their decimal equivalents and to American currency of the time.
(#ulink_8f12840e-00ff-54c1-906f-023f39919e4b) It was originally intended that the church should be built at the foot of the hill near the site of the present village. However, when work was begun on it, the plan was vetoed by a band of local fairies. As a practical expression of their objection whenever the walls reached a particular height they proceeded to knock them down and carry the stones up to the top of the hill where they rebuilt the walls, after which they danced round them in a ring. After this had happened three times, the workmen who had on each occasion been forced to demolish the walls, carry the stones back down the hill and then build them up again in the low ground, lost heart and decided to build the church where the fairies wanted it to be built. As a result of this wise decision there was much jubilation among the fairies and when the church was finally completed they held a great fête on top of the hill to celebrate their victory, the sounds of their revelry being audible at a considerable distance.
In and Out of Advertising (#ulink_8e18f66b-a4d9-5051-8b0b-2e2226a286cb)
IN THE SUMMER OF 1936, my father took me away from school and put me into a large, West End advertising agency.
Two years later, on the day we lost the Cereal Account, I finally decided to go to sea.
‘You’ve ’ad it,’ said the Porter with gloomy relish as I clocked in a little after the appointed hour. I was not surprised. My father had known the Chairman, George Wurzel, in his earlier, more uncomplicated days and had placed me with him in the fond belief that the sooner I got down to learning business methods the better. By now they were beginning to feel that they might have been wrong. Wurzel’s had long held a similar opinion. Since I had ridden a bicycle into the office of Miss Phrygian, the secretary of the managing director, they had been more than cool. Julian Pringle, the most rebellious copywriter Wurzel’s ever had, bet me that I could not ride it round the entire building without dismounting. The coast had been clear, the numerous swing doors held open, and the bicycle, which was being sketched for the front page of the Daily Mail, borrowed from the Art Department.
I had started my uneasy career in the Checking Department at the age of sixteen. Miss Phrygian had escorted me there. On the way we passed the Porter’s cubby hole; inside, half a dozen evil-looking messenger boys were waiting to take blocks to Fleet Street. There were more seats than messenger boys and I found Miss Phrygian casting a speculative look at the empty places. For a moment I thought she was going to enlist me in their ranks, but she must have remembered my father’s insistence on the value of the business methods I was going to learn, and we passed on.
In the narrow, airless transepts of the Checking Department, where the electric lights burned permanently, I thumbed my way through the newspapers and periodicals of the world to make sure that our advertisements were appearing on schedule and the right way up, which they failed to do quite frequently in some of the more unsophisticated newspapers from rugged and distant parts of the globe. Some of the advertisements had to be cut out and pasted in a book. We always cut out Carter’s Little Liver Pills, but I never discovered the reason. Turning the pages of thousands of newspapers day after day, I accumulated knowledge of the most recondite subjects – croquet matches between missionaries in Basutoland, reports of conventions of undertakers at South Bend, Indiana, great exhibitions for tram ticket collectors in the Midlands – the world spread out before me.
When I was not speculating about what I read, I would fight with Stan, a great dark brute of a boy, one of the two assistants in the Department, to whom I had become quite attached. Both Stan and Les, the second assistant, called me ‘Noob’.
‘’Ere, Noob, what abaht a pummel?’ Stan would croak invitingly, and we would pummel one another until Miss Phrygian banged furiously on the frosted glass of her office door to stop the din.
From time to time we would be visited by the Contact Men who dealt personally with Wurzel’s clients and handled the advertising accounts. They would stand gingerly in our den and turn the pages of the glossy magazines with beautifully manicured fingers. They were all youngish, perfectly dressed in Hawes and Curtis suits, and they smelled of bay rum. The amorous complications of their private lives were hair-raising. One of them owned a Bentley. They all wore clove carnations every day except Saturdays when they were in tweeds and went to the ‘country’ around Sunningdale. I always felt a clod in their presence and for some time after their visits disinclined to pummel. More popular were the visits of the typists. Wurzel’s was run on pseudo-American lines and had a splendid collection. Two of the most popular were Lettice Rundle and Lilly Reidenfelt. Lilly was the more provocative of the two. It was generally conceded that Lettice was the sort of girl you married and had children by after trying Miss Reidenfelt, who was expected to run to fat.
When Miss Reidenfelt entered the Checking Department, Stan, the Man of Action, would be stricken dumb and with eyes cast down would trace bashful circles amongst the waste paper with his toe. Les, Socialite and Dreamer, knew better how to please, and, more forthcoming, usually succeeded in pinching her. At such times what little air there was would be so heavy with lust that I would develop an enormous headache of the kind usually brought on by thundery weather. When Miss Reidenfelt had finally minced away inviolate, Stan would fling himself at the piles of newspaper in the steel fixtures and punch them in torment, crying: ‘Oh, you lovely bit of gravy.’
With such experiences behind me it was easy to believe the Porter when he said I was going to be sacked, and when I went into the main office through the swing doors in the reception counter I was filled with strangely pleasant forebodings. By this time the place would normally have been a Babel, but this morning the atmosphere was chilly, tragic, and unnaturally quiet. Lettice Rundle was having a good cry over her Remington and the group of young men who handled the Cereal Account were shovelling piles of proofs and stereos into a dustbin and removing their personal belongings from drawers. Years later I was to witness similar scenes in Cairo when Middle East headquarters became a great funeral pyre of burning documents as the Germans moved towards the Delta. But this was my first experience of an evacuation.
It was easy to see that besides myself quite a number of people were about to leave. Those remaining pored over their tasks with unnatural solicitude and averted their eyes from their unfortunate fellows. I had no personal possessions to put together. My hat was in the cloakroom where it had remained for two years. I had never taken it out but sometimes I dusted it, as Mr McBean from time to time checked up on the whereabouts of the more junior and unstable members of the staff by identifying the hats in the cloakroom. This was my alibi; with my hat in its place I was permanently somewhere in the building.
Before they left I asked them why I had not been sacked with the rest of them. Robbie only called you ‘old boy’ in moments of stress. He was reluctant to answer my question. He called me ‘old boy’ now.
‘Well, old boy, they did think about it but they decided that it cost them so little that it didn’t make any difference whether you stayed or not.’
I was furious. The Porter had been wrong and I hadn’t ‘ad it’. I was perhaps the only member of the staff who would have actively welcomed the sack. Wurzel’s was a prison to me. All the way home in the Underground I seethed … too unimportant to be sacked … At Piccadilly the train was full but the guards packed in more and more people. At Knightsbridge two of them tried to force an inoffensive little man into the train by putting their shoulders to the back of his head and shoving. Someone began to Baa loudly and hysterically. There was an embarrassed silence and nobody laughed. We were all too much like real sheep to find it funny.
At Hammersmith where I emerged sticky and wretched from the train, I found that we had been so closely packed that somebody had taken my handkerchief out of my pocket, used it, and put it back under the impression that it was his own.
I bought an evening paper. It had some very depressing headlines about the breakdown of Runciman’s negotiations at Prague.
The next day I went to Salcombe for my holiday. During that fortnight while swimming in Starehole Bay I dived down and saw beneath me the remains of the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie lying broken-backed, half buried in the sand.
On my way back to London there was an hour to wait for the connection at Newton Abbot, and wandering up the hot and empty street in the afternoon sunshine I went into a café and wrote to Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn for a place on one of his grain ships.
I never went back to Wurzel’s.
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Eric Newby
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Отдых, туризм
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: A collection of writing from Britain′s best-loved travel writer, ‘A Merry Dance around the World’ is the culmination of a lifetime of adventure.A collection of writing from eleven books by Britain′s best-loved travel writer, A Merry Dance around the World is the culmination of a lifetime′s adventures, from the birth of Eric Newby in 1919 at the ′ghastly hour′ of 3.45am, to Herculean cycling escapades in his seventies through the wiles of the Irish winter. An astonishing catalogue of disasters and misunderstandings, Newby′s compassionate grace and sharp wit ensure that every adventure is as charming, hilarious and wild as his last.Including extracts from his masterpiece of love and courage in wartime, Love and War in the Apennines, travelling epiphanies against the breathtaking backdrop of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and the memorable excursions of the long-suffering and truly heroic Wanda Newby on bikes, in boats and planning daring prison escapes. A brilliant introduction for any Newby newcomer, or handy collection for the intrepid Newby veteran traveller, A Merry Dance around the World is a whirlwind tour around the globe, guided by the forefather of the modern comic travel book.