Time and Tide, 15 AUGUST 1936
According to Gordon Bowker in his George Orwell (2003), Orwell was introduced to Time and Tide by Geoffrey Gorer (1905–85). He quotes from an unpublished letter to Brenda Salkeld of 2 May 1936 that the journal was his bête noire and added, ‘You see [to] what depths one has to sink in the literary life’ (p. 186). Time and Tide ran from 1920 to 1979. It was edited from 1926 by Margaret, Lady Rhondda, who, because it was loss-making, appears to have subsidised it. It began on the left but moved to the political right.
A journey by train or car or aeroplane is not an event but an interregnum between events, and the swifter the vehicle the more boring the journey becomes. The nomad of the steppe or the desert may have to put up with every kind of discomfort, but at any rate he is living while he is travelling, and not, like the passengers in a luxury liner, merely suffering a temporary death. Mr. Peter Fleming, who set out from Pekin and travelled on horseback across Sinkiang and down into India via the Pamirs (a distance of well over two thousand miles) knows how to make this clear. His account of the frightful discomforts of the journey—the icy winds, the constant hunger, the impossibility of washing and the struggles with galled camels and exhausted ponies—so far from making one shudder and thank God for confort moderne, simply fill one with acute pangs of envy.
‘We travelled for seventeen days with the Prince of Dzun …. There is something very reassuring about a big caravan …. There it wound, stately, methodical, through the bleak and empty land, 250 camels pacing in single file. At the head of it, leading the first string, usually rode an old woman on a white pony, a gnarled and withered crone whose conical fur-brimmed hat enhanced her resemblance to a witch. Scattered along the flanks, outriders to the main column, went forty or fifty horsemen …. The little ponies were dwarfed by the bulging sheepskins which encased their masters. Everyone carried, slung across his back, an ancient musket or a matchlock with a forked rest, and a few of the Chinese had repeating carbines, mostly from the arsenal at Taiyuanfu and all of an extremely unreliable appearance. Some people wore broadswords as well.’
The journey needed not only toughness but also supreme tact and cunning, for it was made through more or less forbidden territory and neither Mr. Fleming nor his companion (a girl) had a proper passport. There was also the language difficulty and the difficulties caused by some curious gaps in the equipment of the expedition. They had, for example, two portable type-writers (a frightful thing to have to drag across Central Asia) but only one frying pan. For food they had to depend largely on what they could shoot, and their only effective weapon was a .22 rook rifle. Mr. Fleming took the rifle in preference to a shotgun because it made less noise and the ammunition was less bulky; but it was a bold thing to do, for a rifle is not much use unless your game will obligingly sit still to be shot at. By the way, Mr. Fleming describes himself as killing an antelope with the .22 rifle at 400 yards. He says he paced the distance out; I can’t help thinking (I only whisper this) that he may have taken rather short paces.
Mr. Fleming seems to have set out on the journey mainly for fun but partly to find out what was happening in Sinkiang. His conclusion is that the U.S.S.R. already controls part of the province and has designs on the rest, less from its own sake than as a strategic jumping-off place against Japanese expansion. It is noticeable that he seems to disapprove rather strongly of the U.S.S.R.’s new imperialistic ambitions. It is a queer tribute to the moral prestige of Communism that we are always rather shocked when we find that the Communists are no better than anybody else.
I prophesy without misgivings that this book will be a best-seller. Parts of it are very badly written—why do writers of travel-books spend so much time in trying to be funny?—but the fascinating material would outweigh far worse faults. The real achievement was not to write the book but to make the journey. And the photographs, mostly taken by Mr. Fleming himself, are so good and so numerous as to make twelve and sixpence a very low price for the book.1