OH, THE JOYLESSNESS of the word “maturity”! Nobody ever cried “On, on to Maturity!,” with a reckless flourish of flags or opinions. Nobody ever wrote that to be mature was perfect heaven. During my time in journalism, when the trade was politer than it is now, the word “mature” went with “ample” (meaning fat), “attractive” (meaning plain) or “vivacious” (meaning garrulous), in the news-room vocabulary of euphemisms. In the wider social world, it spoke of settling down, early nights, the pram in the hall, prudence, mortgages, reality and common sense. President Truman of the United States, tiring of the mature reflections of his financial advisers—“On the one hand, Mr. President, but then again, on the other . . .”—said that what he wanted was a one-armed economist, and I know just what he meant.
With maturity we enter the lecture hall of academe, its truest dwelling place and to my mind the most dread of chambers. Here the meridian torture awaits us, even those who, like me, are experienced at reading frivolous novels while the presiding sage drones on (for however hardened we are, however thick-skinned, still we cannot help feeling the bloodless disapproval of the other people in the row). Maturity in the lecture kind is the devil’s smug revenge upon the merry.
Of course the adjective “mature” need not be pejorative. Applied to wine it speaks of mellowness, sublety, ease and grace. But even then it is not for me. The wines I like best are young, sharp and mischievous, the sort that ought really to be warmed a bit, except that I cannot wait—wines beneath the notice of the connoisseurs who, in the infinite complacency of their analyses, are the very essence of the mature. “You may not appreciate it now,” I hear one such savant telling some brash young adolescent, “but you will appreciate its grandeur when you are older.” When he is more mature, the old fraud means, when the sap is subsiding, when the first fine rapture has been dullened by maturity . . .
What about a mature cheese? It tends to stink. Or a mature judgement? It takes an age to ripen. Mature students go to lectures. When a bill matures, you have to pay it. There was a famous actor called Mature, when I was immature myself, and I am surprised that he never chose a nom de théâtre for himself. Perhaps only family loyalty dissuaded him from an immortality with more panache—the name was doubtless fine for his dad George Marcellus Mature, cutler, of Louisville, Kentucky, but surely not for Victor Mature, film star, of Hollywood, California . . . !
In short, I do not like the adjective “mature,” because I resent the noun it has bred. Maturity! Maturity! Did ever a heart thrill to the sound of it, still less the meaning? There was a time when I actually congratulated myself on becoming mature, earning the respect of my experience, and throwing off the callowness of youth. No longer! Give me callowness every time, give me fizz, give me irresponsibility, and if ever I feel maturity creeping in, crack a bottle, put out more flags and ring the bells!
IF EVER YOU pine for the old bourgeois pleasures, genteel, discreet, complacent and in my own case fondly imperialist pleasures, get you to Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, and board one of the five glorious paddle-steamers which have been sailing those waters since the early years of the last century.
Make straight for the dining saloon, and there over a cup of coffee you will be eased into nirvana. Port and starboard the mountains rise above the lake, dappled even in summer, with recalcitrant patches of snow. The woodwork creaks around you, the pistons pound below, the paddles gently swish, there is a faint smell of engine oil and presently a breathy blast of the ship’s horn tells you that you are approaching the little lakeside resort of Weggis.
Relax. No hurry to finish your coffee. Weggis is a very haven of those patient bourgeois pleasures, and the captain of the Schiller (319 tons, built in 1906) will be tolerantly smiling down at you from his bridge when you are the last to disembark, before with another toot of the siren his ship swims like a punctual swan away.
WE CALL IT Lake Lucerne, but it is really Vierwaldstätter See, the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, and it lies in the very heart of the virtual Switzerland we are seeking: not the real Switzerland, an immensely competent and hard-headed little State, equipped with every modernity. but the Switzerland of our more languid fancies, where ships’ captains wave goodbye from the wheel-houses of centenarian steamboats, amiable porters greet you at the doors of unostentatiously comfortable hotels, and distant music sounds from municipal bandstands on Tuesday mornings.
It is quite likely to be gypsy music of some kind, but played in a decidedly un-Romany manner—no foot-stampings here, no cries of ecstasy or final triumphant waving of fiddle-bows. The audience is attentive, appreciative, even affectionate in its responses, but certainly not reckless. Average ages are high in Weggis, and the prevailing temper is kind but undemonstrative.
It is true that small boys sometimes somersault into the lake from the steamer landing, when the Schiller, the Uri (built 1901), the Unterwalden (1902), the Gallia (1913) or the Stadt Luzern (1928) is nowhere about. True, too, that sometimes shoppers and secretaries trundle insouciantly past on roller-skates, and stalwart soldiers of the Swiss Army clump through town in their camouflage gear and big boots. But the general mood of the place is placid, or perhaps valetudinarian.
Certainy Weggis is very concerned with health. “Wellness” is its leitmotif—in English, and with capital Ws. There are Wellness hotels and Wellness restaurants, Wellness diets, Wellness habits, and everywhere there are Wellness people walking, in varying degrees of exertion, with those Nordic walking poles. Believe me, by the time you have been in Weggis for a day or two you are likely to be either lying on a chaise-longue at the lake’s edge, wiggling your toes (if it is a Tuesday) to the beat of The Merry Widow from the bandstand, or are ambling the foreshore on your Nordic walking poles.
Or eating. Sad to say, probably not fish out of the lake—even the Vierwaldstätter See can be polluted—but robust healthy meals with lots of vegetables, and good Swiss wine to go with them. The local people seldom seem to be fat, and this I attribute partly to the diet, partly to the lovely mountain air, and partly perhaps to Nordic walking poles.
AND PARTLY TO the atttitude of meticulous regularity that comes with those ancient steamboats. The church bells of Weggis ring comfortingly throughout the night from the fourteenth-century tower of the parish church, but during the day it is the arrival of the steamers that gives the town its reassuring sense of order. Not all the ships of the Schifffahrtsgesellschaft des Vierwaldstättersees are venerable paddle-steamers: some are sleek modern motor vessels with Klaxon horns and revvable engines. They are the sounds and suggestions of the steamboats, though, that dictate the life rhythm of Weggis, its citizens, and not least its visitors.
There you are, recumbent in the garden of the Beau Rivage Hotel, say, which has been attending to our needs under one name or another since the early seventeenth century. All is calm, all is Swiss, ducks doze upon the jetty, and at one o’clock somebody is going to bring you an omelette to eat in the multicoloured gazebo at the water’s edge. You are half-asleep, perhaps, awaiting the gentle summons to your victuals, but just before the moment arrives you hear the chunk-chunk of paddles, and a thoughtful touch of a steam-whistle, and almost simultaneously three things occur: the church clock strikes one, the Stadt Luzern docks, and a sweet soft voice says your omelette awaits you.
In between the hours, too, the impeccable coming and going of the steamers is like some pledge of eternity. At summer weekends the Vierwaldstätter See is a restless pageant of water life. Hundreds of yachts are tacking all across the lake. Speedboats scud about. Excursion boats are jammed with tourists. Anglers are out there with their rods and nets, and everywhere small white pleasure craft with parasols are sidling along the wooded shorelines below the mountains. But among them, every now and then, there stalks one of those grand old ships, stately and silent in the distance, with a rim of white around its prow, the faintest shimmer of heat haze from its rakish smokestack, and a constant, purposeful flurry of foam beneath its paddle-boxes, as though Time itself could not deter its passage.
FOR THE GREATHEART paddle-steamers of Lake Lucerne are not only splendours in their own right; they are integral to the ethos of the Vierwaldstätter See, to the ethos of precise respectability that we have come here to enjoy. Long after you have left the lake, when the corrosion of the great world is all around you once more, you will still hear their sirens sounding, see their captains lordly on their bridges, and remember the delicately fattening sweetness of the cakes in their saloons.
Mark Twain, that old river pilot, undoubtedly responded to their magic, even then—he thought a steamboat voyage on Lake Lucerne “almost the perfection of pleasuring.” And perhaps Kipling the romantic had an echo of them in his mind, as I do now, when he wrote about those imperial paddle-wheels chunking from Rangoon to Mandalay.
IT WAS ALLEGORY with a vengeance when, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cartographers of the European Union decided that Wales did not exist, and struck it (inadvertently perhaps) from the map. For Welsh patriots of my persuasion, though, no worries. We know that since the beginnings of history ours has been, as often as not, a country of the mind, a homeland of the imagination, a love-land if you like, impervious to the vulgarities of map-makers and politicians.
Besides, our traditions are full of places that have sunk without trace, or are temporarily invisible. Castled islands irrevocably subside into lakes, remembered in a bubbly way only by subaqeous chimes of bells at midnight. Swathes of land are swallowed by the sea—if you are suitably constituted, like me, you may still distinctly detect them shining on the western horizon. Lord bless you, in proper Welsh weather it often feels as though the country is about to be submerged anyway, and it doesn’t discourage us—good for the character, we say.
For of course the prospect of elimination has been with the Welsh nation for generations—if not extinction by drowning, then expungement by history. Removal from the rest of the United Kingdom, which the EU visionaries apparently foresee, is for many of us no threat at all. I myself often love to dream that we have somehow been geologically detached, and have drifted south-westward into the Irish Sea, to a location somewhere between Cornwall and Cork.
FOR MANY ENGLISH people too the disappearance of Wales from the map would be no disaster, although to be fair to them they are generally thinking of political rather than physical maps. As the London Daily Telegraph observed in 1860, it was only “a small country, unfavourably situated, with an indifferent soil and inhabited by an unenterprising people.” The Prime Minister Herbert Asquith once said that he would rather go to hell than visit the western flank of the kingdom, and it is well known (though apocryphal, I fear) that the entry for Wales in the Encyclopaedia Britannica used to read simply: See England.
It was not always a joke, and isn’t now. English policy was for centuries directed towards the absorption of Wales into England, and has repeatedly been nearly successful. The ancient Welsh culture, which is unique to itself, has been at one time or another almost overwhelmed by the sheer presence of its insatiable neighbour, the mightiest cuckoo in all the nests of history. Heirs to the English throne were impertinently dubbed Princes of Wales, when as often as not they seldom came near the place if they could help it. English bishops and clergymen swarmed over Welsh parishes. English landowners occupied huge estates, living ineffably English lives.
Above all, the English tried to stifle that essential inspiration of Welshness, Cymraeg, the Welsh language. In churches, in schools, in courts of law, in every aspect of Government, the language was ignored, despised or where possible extinguished. Nothing is more bitterly remembered among Welsh patriots, to this day, than the humiliating “Welsh Not,” the sign that was hung around the neck of any pupil heard speaking the Welsh language in nineteenth-century Welsh schools.
It is a miracle that it has never happened. The most determined of the Welsh remain just as Welsh still. The language remains indestructible. Few English people, I think, would now wish Wales to be struck from the map, and on the whole, as far as I can make out, few of them care much about Welsh independence from the United Kingdom. The worst attitude they display towards Welshness is one of frivolous contempt, expressed in adolescent humour by comedians and journalists: this is due, as we all know, to their national sense of inferiority, and is best dealt with by a proper noblesse oblige.
I LAUGH, BUT that map may well come metaphorically true. Welsh patriots know that even now the Welsh identity is maintained only by a ceaseless resistance to every inroad from across Offa’s Dyke—assaults made immensely more powerful nowadays by England’s subservience to everything American. Anglo-America, or rather Amer-England, is the threat to their survival now, and as all its manifestations pour insidiously and inexorably across our defenceless frontier, Wales may yet disappear by sheer force of osmosis.
There are people in the Welshest parts of Wales who are made so profoundly unhappy by the whittling away of their language, their values and their ways of life that they are driven to alcoholism, driven to nervous breakdown. It is not only incoming ideas and examples that are doing it to them: it is incoming people. They may be accused of racism, but as they see whole villages, whole districts virtually taken over by newcomers, with the best will in the world (and the Welsh are the kindest of people) they can only wish to God the English would stay at home in Wolverhampton or Basingstoke. “Welcome to Wales,” says the slogan of one resistance movement. “Enjoy your Stay, Then Go Away.”
In Wales tourism, the badge or front of almost any country nowadays, is already very largely in the hands of English people, from the country pub to the allegedly posh hotel (not very posh, actually). Nearly every corner shop is gone. Half the post offices are in English hands. And the vast tide of English families means that even the schools, where the Welsh language is part of the curriculum, become more Amer-anglicized every term—for every incoming child who becomes Welsh, half a dozen Welsh-speaking children no longer speak Welsh in the playground. Every day of the year another few hundred Welsh houses of the Welsh countryside are sold to English people for prices that very few Welsh country people can afford, more often than not to become bridgeheads of cultural corrosion.
FOR MYSELF, HALF Welsh, half English, I am certainly no racist, and I am only just a nationalist nowadays, because I no longer believe in nationality, or in the cursed Nation-State. I am however a culturalist, and I fear that peoples must achieve Statehood if they are to preserve their very selves. To my mind it would be a dreadful tragedy if small peoples like ours were in fact to disappear from the map—not the geographical map, which probably won’t happen for a million years or so, but the political map, which might happen anytime.
But I dare say those cartographers of the Eurostat Political Compendium were subconsciously expressing a truth when they consigned Wales to oblivion. In a way ours is already an invisible country, or at least a hidden country. “As soon as we came into the pub,” say English raconteurs when they get home again, “those people started jabbering in Welsh.” Nonsense. They were jabbering in Welsh long before you came in, before your forebears even crossed the Severn, and believe me, they will be jabbering still when you are gone.
For much of the Welsh culture is private. Countless poems are written, innumerable tales are told, songs are sung, customs honoured, jokes enjoyed, loyalties upheld, beyond the observation of visitors. Beneath its surface ours is a strong society still, commanding the love, no less, of hundreds of thousands of its people, whether they speak Welsh or not—for if they do not speak it on the tongue, most of them speak it in the instinct.
So go ahead, you map-makers of Europe. Strike us off, let us drift off your margin. We know you mean no harm, and have probably just pressed the wrong button on your computer. Anyway, if you come to Wales now you will find it half-submerged already: by the end of the century it may all be flooded. Listen, though, whenever you come, listen hard, dream a bit, and down there in the waters you will hear those bubbly bells still ringing.
THIS IS WHAT I dreamed one night. It was a short dream. I dreamed that Elizabeth said to me, casually over our coffee, “By the way, when you held the paper up before your face before supper, was it because you were picking your nose, and didn’t want me to see?”
I had to admit that it was. “I have to admit that it was. It’s such an ugly thing to do, isn’t it, but sometimes I find it necessary. My nose gets so stuffed up. Do you suppose everyone does it? Does the Queen pick her nose when nobody’s looking?”
“I’m quite sure she does,” Elizabeth said, and there the matter dropped.
But it was a dream that was not entirely a dream. Was it a dream at all? Elizabeth tells me that we had never had such a conversation, but I have to admit that I had in fact picked my nose before supper, and had indeed hidden myself shamefaced behind the paper. It is such an ugly thing to do, isn’t it, though sometimes necessary even for the most fastidious. What has disturbed me about the little experience is its blending of sleep and wake, its accuracy so exact in some ways, so blurred in others, which has made me wonder where hallucination ended and memory began. Perhaps this overlap is true of most dreams: but I am beginning to wonder how much of it is true of life itself, and if the peculiarly easy, frank, inessential, glancing but conclusive nature of our exchange over the coffee is what dying is going to be like.
Why, I wonder, should this particular inconsequential dream lead me to such portentous speculation? Something out of childhood, you will doubtless say. It is true that I have one or two deeply ingrained phobias—for example, anything to do with candles, like candle-light dinners, or candle wax—which I can only explain to myself by supposing they were planted by some experience in infancy. And it is also true that one of my most vivid memories, not a dream at all, concerns picking one’s nose.
WHENEVER I LIKE, if I close my eyes and think hard, I can feel myself to be back within the few square feet of space, part light, part shade, that lies beneath the archway of Tom Gate at Christ Church, Oxford. I have known it all my life, and whenever I please I can transport myself there. I’ll do it now. Sure enough, here I am in that shadowy archway, beneath the majestic tower, and even now its bell Great Tom reverberates around me, striking the hour. On my left is a fluttering notice-board, and the usual jumble of bikes. On the right a stately porter in a bowler hat sits in his glass-windowed cubicle—the very same man, I swear it, who sat there in the 1930s, except that now he may be black. Students, dons and tourists sporadically pass through, and their progress in and out of the shadow of old Tom is like crossing a frontier.
For on one side the gate opens on to the tumultuous St. Aldate’s Street, where the tide of the world thunders by, but on the other it admits its visitors to Tom Quad, one of the most magnificent quadrangles in Europe, regally serene and private. As I stand there half-way between the two it is like sniffing two drinks, a Heineken, say, and a burgundy, whose bouquets seep in from opposite directions but never quite blend. They used to call this dichotomy Town and Gown, but nowadays it is a confrontation more subtle.
“Can I help you?” says the porter in a meaningful way, seeing me loitering there, half in and half out of the shadows of the gate. Christ Church is a decidedly authoritarian establishment, founded in the first place by a cardinal and a king. But it is authority from the other side, the St. Aldate’s side, the interference of the great world, of politicians and bureaucrats, of tabloids and ideologues, that I associate most pungently with Tom Gate. When I was eight or nine years old I was passing through the arch one day when I felt a tickle on my cheek, and scratched it with my finger as I walked.
At that moment there paraded down the pavement, walking in line ahead towards the police station along the street, half a dozen policemen, burly and helmeted in the manner of those days. They marched along, as they did then, in a semi-military way, and, with their antique helmets and their big boots, struck me as homely and rather comical. As they passed me, one of them spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t pick your nose,” he said.
I wasn’t picking my nose! I was scratching my cheek! But I had no chance to remonstrate. The constables went clumping on, and seven decades later, as I meditate now, the resentment of that moment lives with me still. The unfairness of it! The arrogance! Perhaps it really is the emotion of that distant injustice, the latent dislike of authority that I feel to this day, which has obscurely linked the matter of nose-picking with the matter of mortality, via a short dream. Even if I had been picking my nose, what business was it of Mr. Plod? And why shouldn’t I pick my nose now if I want to, whoever is watching, in my own house, at my age?
BUT I PROTEST too much. Shame enters my introspections. The habit of picking my nose only seized me, in fact, long years after that episode at Tom Gate, when a minor operation on my nose left it slightly disfunctional—unable to clear itself by the normal processes of blowing or, I imagine, natural dissolution. Ever since I have had to help it along by the unlovely process of picking it.
It’s such an unlovely thing to do, isn’t it, but d’you suppose everyone does it? I expect so, but since I am obliged to do so more often than most people, I am profoundly ashamed of it. As a matter of fact it is my only guilty secret, this unlovely habit. There have been times when I have been detected in the act. Passing motorists have caught sight of me picking my nose at the wheel, or at least I have thought they have, and although I have hastily scratched my cheek instead, and tried to persuade myself that they could not really have seen me, and will never see me again, and probably don’t in the least care anyway, and are perhaps even gratified to find that somebody else does it too—even so, when they have flashed by, I am left ashamed of myself. It is such an ugly habit, isn’t it?
I am not actually ashamed of shame, if you follow me. Shame can be a saving grace, and certainly a consolation. We feel better ourselves if we are ashamed of something we’ve done, and with luck a show of shame can reduce the sentence in the courtroom, where slower-witted justices can be persuaded that shame is synonymous with regret. “My client is truly ashamed, m’lud,” counsel often successfully pleads, and he would have to be a moron to add “but, m’lud, he doesn’t in the least regret it, and it would give him the greatest pleasure to do it again.” Shame and regret are certainly not the same things: je ne regrette rien, like charity, can cover a multitude of sins.
Shame can operate as a prophylactic, too. I first heard the word “prophylactic” when, with my batch of innocent recruits to the wartime British Army, I was given a welcoming lecture about the pitfalls of sex. I confused the word in my mind with the little scrolls of sacred texts, phylacteries, that used to be carried in leather pouches around the foreheads of rabbis, until my cruder comrades made songs and jokes out of it, and it was years before I realized that it had nothing specifically sexual or Jewish about it, but merely meant a technique of preventive medicine.
The prophylaxis of shame can prevent bad behaviour before it happens. Often enough, like many another coward, I have been brave because I am ashamed to be frightened—or ashamed to look frightened perhaps, an even less admirable motive. Perhaps it’s true of everyone. Buzz Aldrin, when he landed on the moon, may have been ashamed to look frightened on the Houston TV screens (but it would have been hard to judge, wouldn’t it, through the little window of his helmet). I notice that shame, though it prevents me from picking my nose in public, does not invariably bring out my better self when I am all alone.
BUT HERE’S A thought. Perhaps I was picking my nose that day, when the policemen walked past Tom Gate! I remember with absolute clarity that I was only scratching my cheek, but what if I wasn’t? It has been a dogma of my life that truth and imagination are not simply interchangeable but are often one and the same. Something imagined is as real, to my mind, as something one can touch or eat. A fanciful fear is as alarming as a genuine one, a love conceived as glorious as a love achieved. A virtual reality may only be in one’s own mind, imperceptible to anyone else, but why is it any the less true for that? Music exists before its composer writes it down.
It is easy for writers, even writers of non-fiction, to think like this. Every sentence we create we have created from nothing, and made real, and every situation has been touched up in our memory. For years I remembered clearly how the roofs of Sydney Opera House hung like sails over the harbour when I first visited the city, until it was drawn to my attention that the Opera House hadn’t been built then. Every place I ever wrote about became more and more my own interpretation of it, more and more an aspect of myself, until in the end I determined that I was the city of Trieste, and Trieste was me, and decided it was time for me to give up.
I realized then that my dreams and my realities were merging. Could it be that much of what I had experienced in life I had not really experienced at all, except in my imagination? This was not at all an unpleasant conjecture—oddly soothing in fact, and it is what made me think that my dream about picking my nose, my shame about it, my secrecy, my denial, my realization that half was a dream and half wasn’t, the easy resolution of the conundrum, the sensation that it didn’t much matter anyway—all made me think that such a cloudy transition from one condition to another, or vice versa, might be what death will be like. If this essay is a muddle too, with its inconsequential repetitions—not at all my waking style—that is because I have allowed it to float along with the stream of instinct, among the weeds and little whirlpools, like Ophelia.
I always used to think that the most frightening words in literature were Hamlet’s “perchance to dream”—
To die—to sleep.
To sleep! perchance to dream! ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . . .
For years I laughed at Ivor Novello, who used the phrase as the title of a frothy operetta. But now I think the dreams of death may turn out to be much like my dream of life, mysteries gradually dispersing, shames forgotten, truth and fancy reconciled, drifting downstream through the weeds and the reeds—lazily, as Lord Salisbury once said of British foreign policy, “and only occasionally putting out a boat-hook to avoid a collision.”
“WHAT’S NEW?” I ingratiatingly asked the cab driver who picked me up at JFK. I had arrived to celebrate my fifty-odd years of acquaintance with Manhattan, and was making the conventional opening ploy. Answer, however, came there none. Either the driver spoke only Ruthenian, or he couldn’t hear me above the rattle of his vehicle. I tried again. “How are things?” I said in my most fulsome Transatlantic, and this time he replied.
“Traffic is lousy in the tunnel, we take Queensboro and 59th, OK? You just sit back comfortable, right?”
This was music to my ears, and I relaxed as we bumped erratically out of the airport. Matthew Arnold once wrote of an infinitesimal pair of English villages that “in the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same.” I have always believed precisely the opposite of Manhattan, the ultimate world city.
So “Fine,” said I, “thanks a million.” For I felt that I had known that agreeable fellow all my life, that he had always come from some generic Ruthenia, that down the years he never had heard me the first time, that traffic in the Midtown Tunnel had been lousy every day at least since Idlewild became JFK, and that in Manhattan indeed nothing really does change.
THIS OF COURSE is a wild generalization. It is my Manhattan that has kept the same—yours and anyone else’s may well change as often as the two Hinkseys. It’s all in my mind, my emotions, and perhaps my jet lag!
It is true, though, that with the possible exception of Venice, Manhattan retains its physical character more tenaciously than any other great city of the Western world—partly because it is an island, I suppose. It comes as a genuine shock here when some familiar landmark disappears—not just the usual pang of nostalgia for the past, but a true sense of personal loss.
Stores, restaurants, hotels come and go, of course, but very often Manhattan locations, however drastically they adapt to changing needs or opportunities, keep their personalties anyway. Grand Central Terminal has been revivified, but remains a terrific new version of its beloved old self. The Plaza Hotel is transformed, but thanks to strength of public opinion will apparently remain, like the collapsed campanile at Venice after its rebuilding, com’era, dov’era—as it was, where it was. Even Columbus Circle, which has been sensationally rebuilt, still somehow looks to me much as it always did, only more so.
For my Manhattan is a sentimental old body at heart, deeply fond of itself, and thus in many ways doggedly preservative. Out-of-town Americans still think it the very epitome of racy modernity, but to me it has for many years seemed a bit old-fashioned. I went to tea one day in an apartment infinitely more traditional, I swear, than anything in London—where the Earl Grey tea came with scones and cucumber sandwiches, where every inch of occasional table held its exquisite collection of trinketry, amd where the little dachsund who sat with us was visiting, all alone, from the flat next door.
And when, as part of my demi-centennial celebration, I gave a performance at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, my! how like old times it was, how incongruously simple the reception they gave me in that palatial house of learning, the laughter almost rural in its innocence, the welcome so unfeigned—there in the heart of the mighty metropolis, where the yellow cabs streamed by in their hundreds and the fire trucks screamed!
MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than the physical condition of a city, anyway, is its temperamental condition. Now as always, Manhattan is in intermittent frenzy. I have known it in political frenzies, social frenzies, frenzies about soap operas, or baseball games, or sex scandals, or the state of the stock exchange, or the state of the Union. One transient excitement or another dominates conversations in this city as it dominates the news bulletins, and sometimes of course there are several excitements at the same time.
During my celebratory visit these were some of the matters that seem to have preoccupied my acquaintances in Manhattan: soccer (soccer?), traffic congestion, gun violence (oh my God!), Iraq (oh my God again!), electoral chances, climate change, racism and rappers, George Bush and Tony Blair and Harry Potter. Give or take a name or two, or an anxiety, they could be the preoccupations of my acquaintances here several decades ago. For ecological threat read nuclear war, for Baghdad read Saigon, for Potter substitute Holden Caulfield, call back Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher, and Marilyn Monroe, and Billy Graham, and Spiro Agnew—in manner and commitment the conversations were much the same, except that in older times they were often conducted over long merry sessions of dry martinis.
In my experience, martinis or no martinis, the discussions have often been passionate, but not often vicious. I have always thought that if I had to have a heart attack somewhere, I would prefer to suffer it somewhere in midtown Manhattan. For all its reputation of cynical glamour, this is a kind city. I did fall over once—down in the Financial District, too—and was touched by the generic sympathy of Wall Street as I was helped to my feet, dusted down, and sent on my way with a clutch of clean tissues.
“Take care,” said that Ruthenian cabbie as we parted, “mind how you go,” and he meant it. Often and again, all down the years, I have been struck by the sincerity that so often informs the clichés of New York social intercourse—the mantra “Have a good day,” for instance, which is so often scoffed at in England, is frequently spoken in Manhattan with real meaning. When a doorman at a Borders bookshop said “Enjoy your evening,” as I left the store at closing time, it did not sound like a mere throw-away slogan, but a genuine pleasantry between passing acquaintances.
I must not, of course, relapse into sentimentality. The insults and accusations that fly around Manhattan are equally sincere, as any resident will be quick to expostulate. But I write as an outsider, and in my view there are few great cities more courteous to its guests.
BUT SOMETHING TELLS me, all the same—remember, this is all in the mind!—that there has been some subtle change to the nature of Manhattan since I first knew it. People tell me the city has never been quite the same since the tragedy of 9/11, and I do seem to sense some sort of coarsening in the air, a loss of composure, perhaps.
The first thing that greeted strangers like me when we sailed into Pier 92 half a century ago, was the romantic waterfront skyline, dominated then by skyscrapers of the 1930s, but irrevocably altered when the twin towers of the World Trade Center went up. I was never keen on those enormous blank obelisks. They seemed to me even then an insensitive bloating of the Manhattan style.
For the island city that had emerged from World War II seemed to me essentially a city of grace, its inevitable urban squalor redeemed for the stranger by a wonderfully civilized civic architecture. Whether they were Art Deco masterpieces like the Chrysler Building, or elegant internationalist examples like Lever House, or even post-modernist exuberances adorned with squiggles and fancy plinths, in those decades the iconic constructions of Manhattan seemed to get on well together. They struck me, in my anthropomorphic naïvety, as a tolerant lot of structures, respectful of their neighbours and fastidious of attitude. They were doubtless built out of greed, but they did not seem greedy. They spoke of tradition as well as innovation, and one could think generically of them as true emblems of humanism.
Plonk, as if they had fallen out of space, in the 1970s came the twin towers, taller and bulkier than anything else, oblivious of their surroundings, impossible to categorize except in terms of sheer bulk. They seemed to me essentially selfish. They heralded the virtuoso arrogance of fashionable twenty-first-century architecture, with its tactics of shock and surprise and its disregard of neighbourhood. They represented ethos rather than art, and their attitude has since swept the world, and is, in my perception, insidiously pervasive in contemporary Manhattan.
For example I stand at my eighty-first-floor hotel window above Central Park, in perfect air-conditioned silence, thinking. I am an impressionist, not an analyst, and at first I cannot make out what is different about the view out there, since I first marvelled at it in my youth. The park is still gloriously green, and the same familiar carriages trundle around it. The grand old buildings that line it retain their scale and discretion, and their windows glitter, and their flags fly as splendidly as ever.
But gradually, as my mental focus clarifies, I seem to discern there a suggestion of ideological change. In the new century buildings have sprouted everywhere among and behind those friends of my lifelong prospect, filling every nook and interstice, elbowing their own space, and they bring to the scene a new sense of jostle. Is it just capitalism in its feral fruition? Or does it really represent some profounder metamorphosis of the city spirit? Architecturally many of them are handsome: allegorically they disturb me rather.
“They disturb you!” scoffs the New Yorker who joins me at my window. “They disturb you allegorically! What a load of figurative garbage.”
BUT LATER WE had lunch together in a room which, beyond all others, represents for me that old truce-like serenity of Manhattan, from the 1960s and 1970s perhaps, when the harmony of its structures seemed to me representative of decency among its people, and buildings and citizenry seemed equally ready to give me a hand if I collapsed on 42nd Street.
The room was the Four Seasons restaurant, within Mies van der Rohe’s bronze-and-glass Seagram Building, his masterpiece of 1958. The building itself is the supreme temple of my Manhattan, expressing most exactly what I most admire about the island city, and the restaurant was designed by the great Philip Johnson to be a cool sanctuary at the core of it. I think of it as the gentle concord of two masterly creative minds, at the apex of a civilization. The Four Seasons is frightfully expensive, but to hell with the cost (to my mind purely figurative, as I told my friend when he paid the bill).
There is a pool in the middle of the lovely room, and the tables are generously spaced. It was all dappled sunshine that day. My companion was a delight, I ate soft-shelled crab, a waiter I knew told me about his recent illness and pointed to The Man Upstairs as the source of his recovery. Altogether I felt, once again, under the influence of the Manhattan genius (plus the crab), that the heart of the old place really did not change, whether in the fact, the fancy or just the sweet desire.
But my host, being a true New Yorker not given to saccharine, reminded me that Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe had acrimoniously parted company after their master-work was done. “Allegorical, don’t you think?” he snidely suggested.
HALF-WAY THROUGH A protracted meander through Europe in 2004, I fell in love with a big black dog. He was very big, very black, very hairy, extremely old, and he slouched among the stalls of a city market, head and tail drooping, with an air of exhausted aristocracy. He looked world-weary, monstrous, immensely experienced, tolerant and faintly amused by life.
At first I did not recognize this marvellous animal, but in retrospect I realized who he was. He was Leonardo da Vinci. He was Lampedusa’s Leopard. He was Bismarck’s uncle, Philip II in old age, Churchill’s after-ego. He was, in short, Old Europe, and if he seemed to be picking his way through the market crowds with fastidious aloofness, that was because the market-place that day was such a jostling muddle.
There was no pretending that Europe at that particular moment of its history felt logically ordered. Much of it considered itself a union, but my wanderings through its north-west corner took me over five frontiers of decidedly varied character. There was a tunnel under the sea. There was a bridge across an estuary. There was a ferryboat. There was a ship. There were several apparently deserted old customs posts, and the most abandoned of them appeared to be at the frontier of the European Union itself, taking me into Norway, which is not within the union and uses its own currency, out of Sweden, which is within the union but does not use the euro.
No wonder that grand old dog shuffled bemused through the market, and through all the impressions of my stay!
THE FALTERING OF Europe then was a disappointment for those who dreamed of a super-continent to restore the balance of the world, a triumph for those who still believed in the glory of the Nation-State, and a bit of each for those of us (like me) who wanted a confederation of peoples devoted to their own ways and languages, but ready to sacrifice to Caesar those dullard matters of war, finance and foreign affairs that properly belong to emperors.
So for myself I was happy to find national characteristics, if not national sovereignties, still unmistakable. The moment I drove off the Euroshuttle train under the Channel, confident in the miracle of satellite navigation to declare my route for me, I found that road-works in the Pas-de-Calais had disoriented everything. “Never mind,” said my companion, “we’re in France now—trust the French”: and sure enough, simple, clear and highly intelligent Deviation signs guided us around the diggers and rollers, over temporary bridges, under slip roads, to set us safely on the way to Antwerp and the north. As Sterne discovered all those years ago, they order these matters better in France.
It was the same when we got into Holland, and settled for a night at Zutphen. How exceedingly Dutch it was still! With what maidenly grace the young Dutch ladies rode their very upright bicycles around the town, like so many students at a finishing school! And when, behind the cathedral, we found that a modern commemorative statue of a lion had been recently decapitated by vandals, how wonderfully Netherlandish was the response of the passing citizen who explained the spectacle to us. She was out for an evening stroll, she was as exquisitely made up as if she were off to a wedding, and her attitude was serenely apologetic. “It happens everywhere,” she said, surveying the mutilated beast before us, which had various bits gouged out of it, and a regretful bunch of flowers at its base, “but I’m afraid nothing happens quite like it happens in Holland.”
In Germany the national characteristics I noticed were my own. We found ourselves spending a night in a prosperous suburb of a decidedly prosperous industrial town, so prosperous that a police car discreetly patrolled its leafy lanes, and hardly a villa was without its double garage, its lawn and its rockery. Nobody I met in this place was in the least disagreeable, but I found myself shamefully resentful of everything I saw. The parked cars looked obscenely rich, the gardens ostentatiously well-tended. There was something baleful to the padded and cushioned calm of it all, as there was to the patrol car swishing gently by, and the most benign of the villas reminded me only of that house beside the Wannsee at Berlin where they drew up their plans for the Final Solution. I was ashamed of these totally unreasoned reactions, but there we are, I am a child of my times; and as a matter of fact, when I later confessed them to a German ambassador, he said he quite understood.
I had been rashly invited to stop in Sweden to speak at an extremely intellectual seminar about imperialism, and found myself all unexpectedly in a vortex of Swedish capitalism. I had never heard of my patrons before, but they turned out to be sponsors of a foundation behind which there stood, I gradually discerned, a gigantic conglomeration of mercantile and financial enterprise—scores of associated companies, related by family inheritance, with interests in shipping and construction and all kinds of consumerism. My principal hostess bore herself like a queen, and I realized that as one of the most powerful women in all Scandinavia she was used to being treated like one: but this being Sweden, the whole vast concern expressed itself with infinite grace and courtesy, and I was put up in a lovely room in an exquisite old country house, and handsomely fed, and given a book about the conglomerate, and so bluffed my way with impunity through all social and cerebral challenges.
And how’s this for a taste of Norway? From the coast south of Oslo the Telemark Canal runs for a hundred miles deep into the mountainous heart of the country, and two antique steamers (the Victoria [1882] and the Henrik Ibsen [1907]) carry tourists from one end to the other. The voyage takes eleven hours, including the passage of eighteen locks, and passengers disembark at one of Europe’s most delightfully weird hotels, in an isolated hamlet at the head of a lake. The building is made of wood, and is turreted and balconied, bobbled and fretted, lace-curtained and stained-glassed, decorated with dragons’ heads, equipped with croquet mallets and a Ladies’ Lounge. A pianist ornaments the evening hours with Grieg and Cole Porter, and at 8:30 next morning the more indefatigable of the excursionists troop down to the landing-stage for their eleven-hour journey back again, to a toot of the steam-whistle from Ibsen or Victoria.
IN MY FANCY the dog was present at all these venues. He was first off the Henrik Ibsen, looking understandably relieved after those eighteen locks; he was perfectly at home at the seminar; he growled slightly, as in a dream, at the German suburban police car; he sniffed sadly around the plinth of the decapitated Dutch lion; he never for a moment doubted the Deviation signs in the Pas-de-Calais.
But in my mind he really came into his own, assuming an almost heraldic bearing, when in the course of the journey we discovered symptoms of a European presence beyond the wrangles of constitutionalists. For instance he was proud when, entangled mile after mile in a ceaseless progression of trucks around the power centres of Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg, we crossed the Rhine to find that the vast energy of the continent was not only thundering around us on the highway, but was pounding below us too, in the mighty stream of barges making for the sea.
He was pleased by the spectacle of the old Soviet submarine U359, high and dry on the quayside of Nakskov, in Denmark, in reassurance that at least one threat to the meaning of Europe had lost its sinister power. He smiled with approval to find that four empty beer cans, neatly lined up on a sidewalk, were all the rubbish left behind by a rowdy Swedish disco party. He basked in the general sense of shared values, common kindnesses, that gave all these peoples a sense of relationship. He was thrilled by a moment of fulfilment when, beneath a brilliant blue sky, above a waterway speckled with white sails, we soared over the celestial new bridge that connects Danish Copenhagen and Swedish Malmo, cocking an exhilarating snook at the very notion of frontiers between societies.
And yes, in a condescending way (for he is evidently rather old-fashioned in his views) that conceptual dog of Old Europe actually wagged his tail when, having crossed the North Sea on a Norwegian ship, we were greeted in drizzly South Shields with a traditional English welcome. Two burly officials in yellow raincoats stood unsmiling beside the immigration booths, evidently ready for the worst, but when I showed our passports to the man at the desk he simply said: “That’s OK, pet. On you go. Sorry about the weather.”
THANK GOD NELSON died at Trafalgar! Can’t you imagine the bathos of the hero in his old age, absurdly vain, increasingly testy and hypochondriac, drinking too much, plastered all over with decorations, forever trying to avoid poor Lucy Nelson and recalling old victories in the arms of his grotesquely obese and fulsome mistress Emma Hamilton?
But then again, thank God for Emma! If there were more Emmas, as the Admiral said himself, there would be more Nelsons, and certainly without her the most operatic of England’s national romances (at a Verdian rather than a Wagnerian level) would hardly be a romance at all—just the career of a fighting admiral whose principal merit, so Lord St. Vincent thought, was mere animal courage, and whose lovelife followed a familiar naval pattern of humdrum wedlock punctuated by distant and transient infatuations.
Without Emma’s husband Sir William, too, the tale would lose much of its charm. What a thoroughly agreeable old cuckold he was, and what an artistically important part he played in the ménage à trios! He was more than just a foil, but a dramatic mirror to the passions of the spectacle, for he loved Emma almost as besottedly as Nelson did, and made the perfect Dr. Watson to Nelson’s Sherlock—or, one might perversely say, a Horatio to his Hamlet.
And what would the grand opera be without its chorus? Behind the virtuoso stood his Band of Brothers, worthy understudies one and all, steady bald Hardy, impetuous Berry (“Here comes that damned fool Berry! Now we shall have a battle!”), Foley always in the van, Beatty the gentlest of surgeons, “good dear little Parker”—and behind them again the rough, bluff, cosmopolitan company of seamen, half of them distinctly reluctant recruits to the Royal Navy, who threw themselves into Nelson’s service with a devotion worthy of football crowds or rock fans, and “cried like wenches” when he died.
The real allure of the scenario lies in its theatrical antithesis between life at sea and life ashore. What a perfect ass the Saviour of Europe could be, when he was away from his ships! How preposterously he swaggered around with his stars and his medals and his sashes and his scarlet pelisse and the chelengk on his cocked hat, given him by the Sultan of Turkey, whose diamond centre revolved when you wound it up! And what kind of a hero was it who, receiving a letter from the loving wife he had so shamelessly deserted, sent it back it to her with the despicable inscription “Opened in error. Returned unread.” Surely, one wonders, no amount of animal courage, no number of annhilations, could make up for Nelson’s failings?
But the glorious denouement of the performance does it. The Duke of Wellington, at his only meeting with Horatio, thought at first what a coxcomb and charlatan he was, only to discover that after a time his conversation became of matchless interest. Never had he known, recalled the Duke, such a complete metamorphosis; and never did caterpillar mutate more marvellously into butterfly than when Nelson the vainglorious landsman turned into Nelson at sea, and set sail for Trafalgar.
Of course we always know it’s coming: the swooning farewells from Emma, the adoring crowds on the promenade at Southsea, the dinners with the captains off Cadiz, the touching small kindnesses to midshipmen and sailors, the last letters, the noble prayer before battle, the fatal blaze of decorations on the quarterdeck, the heart-broken officers around the cockpit, Hardy himself, having kissed Nelson goodbye at the admiral’s command, kissing him again to show that he meant it. . . .
However often this libretto is worked in the end Nelson always gets us cheering in the aisles. One aria in particular sticks in my own mind, and perhaps reaches the truth about his character. He was, wrote Victory’s chaplain Alexander Scott, “the greatest and most simple of men—one of the nicest and most innocent . . . an affectionate, fascinating little fellow.”
He remains, I suppose, nearly everyone’s romantic ideal of that lost paragon, the true-born Englishman, so brave, so fallible, so bashed about by war, so heedless of precedent or convention, so gloriously sure of himself. Can you imagine him living in our own day, obliged to serve out his time as second in command to some dullard born-again acronym?
TO MOST BODILY evacuations there is, I think, a certain pleasure, if only of relief. I choose my words delicately, but you will know what I mean. Getting rid of fluids or substances which are surplus to our requirements, or have fulfilled their purposes, is generally a satisfying process—as a celebrated Himalayan climber of my acquaintance put it to me long ago, buttoning up his trousers as he emerged from a nearby gully, there’s nothing like a good shit.
Actually, though, in my opinion there is nothing like a good sneeze. Among all these clearances, the sneeze stands alone. Even its English name owes its derivation, I gather from the Oxford Dictionary, to a mishearing—it used to be fneeze. I surmise that people understandably didn’t believe there was such a word, and gave it an opening s instead. Even in its reformed version it was quite unlike anything else, and so it has always remained a bit of a laugh in itself, vaguely representing the noise a sneeze makes.
In many languages the word for sneezing really is more or less onomatopoeic, which adds to its innate suggestion of comedy. The Serbo-Croats call it kijati, the Hungarians tüsszant, the Welsh tisian, the Fijians suru and the Italians starnutare. I don’t know how all these various verbs conjugate, but I suspect that in any of their languages we might understand that the speaker was talking about sneezing. Even the few hundred people who still speak the Cornish language might just make themselves understood when they apologize for strewy. Even the Hawaiian kihe must sound, I would imagine, rather like atishoo.
For in the common view, at least in the English-sneezing world, atishoo is how a sneeze transliterated appears, and I often find that when I sneeze it does sound exactly like that, as if I am acting in amateur dramatics. The sound of a sneeze can be downright majestic, especially if it is one of those convulsions that take a long time to reach fulfilment, keeping everyone in suspense, not least the sneezer, until the moment of explosion arrives. But in general most of us, I suspect, find it rather funny. It goes with red noses and seaside postcard humour. It is a Falstaffian evacuation. There was a time when writers of farce could with impunity make fun of stuttering. No longer, and I have a feeling sneezing may go the same way. Like passing wind, we cannot always help it, but I suspect social custom will make it less and less permissible. It used, after all, to be a stock constituent of music-hall comedy: the stout florid man flourishing his enormous spotted handkerchief across his face in order to catch the effluence of a gigantic sneeze. I have not seen it for years, though—perhaps it went the way of music-halls themselves—and that may be a portent for sneezing itself.
For I fear the sneeze is dated. It is like whistling, or the yo-yo. We seldom see it on the stage nowadays. We seldom hear a frank atishoo on the subway. That fat man with the spotted handkerchief seems to be extinct. We have tolerated it because it makes us laugh, but soon it will be politically incorrect to make jokes about it, and socially unacceptable even as an involuntary method of nasal hygiene. So, like the fart, it will wither away in polite society, fainter and fainter in the public memory, to be replaced by evacuative symptoms altogether more discreet, more elegant, and less likely to raise horse-laughs in the stalls.
A NIGHT AT the opera at Llandudno, on the holiday coast of north Wales! The idea might make Groucho smile, but for most of the world it probably sounds a contradiction in terms, like caviare at Coney Island, say. For most of the world the name of Llandudno goes with dated seaside pleasures, donkeys on the beach, pier-head concert parties, and men with handkerchiefs knotted over their heads, together with the odd party political conference and steamer trips to the Isle of Man.
But I went there once to hear the Welsh National Opera sing Rigoletto, and found that Llandudno on the right day can be just Verdi’s style.
IN THE FIRST place its setting is almost operatically beautiful. To my mind its topography makes it one of the most surpassingly lovely coastal resorts in Europe, on a par with Opatija on the Adriatic, which was formerly Abbazia, and where the patricians of old Vienna used to flock for their summer holidays. Mountains in a distant ring behind it, a wide bay in front, a high bare hill rising in the very centre of the place, with a tea-garden half-way up and a shimmer of light off the sea—time and again on my visit I was reminded of the garden villas of Opatija, clustering at the water’s edge for the gratification of dukes.
Architecturally, too, Llandudno is rather like a stage-set, relatively untouched by modernist notions of theatrical design. The waterfront retains a classic Victorian unity. Its two parallel streets around the bay were built in the mid-nineteenth century more or less at a go, obeying strict precepts of scale and proportion, and they have been miraculously preserved ever since, hotel after hotel along the promenade, shop after shop behind, with glass canopies over their sidewalks. The world expects tatty boarding-houses and run-down once posh hotels, but in fact the whole ensemble is bright with new paint, and looks indeed as though it might all be whisked away on a revolving stage, to make way for Act Two.
For Llandudno’s Act One, like Opatija’s, was rather grand, and has left its traces to this day. The ancient Mostyn family were its chief patrons as a commercial venture, and gave the project social cachet from the start. It never caught up with Brighton, so close to the English metropolis, but still it attracted diverse swells who have never been forgotten, at least in publicity brochures. Princes and emperors came here, as they went to Abbazia, and there was a time when Llandudno boasted more businesses By Appointment to Royalty than anywhere else in Britain except London. One such visiting swell was Queen Elizabeth of Romania, whose judgement of the town as a beautiful haven of peace, translated into Welsh, promptly became the town’s official motto.
Think of it! Wartski’s the Llandudno jewellers, 93 Mostyn Street, bought most of the Czar’s jewelry when the Bolsheviks sold it! John Jones along the road supplied Royal Sandringham Sausages to Queen Victoria! Queen Rambai Barmi of Siam lived at the Imperial Hotel until, during World War II, she had to make way for requisitioners of the Inland Revenue! And in a house called Nantyglyn, 59 Church Walks, for years there resided the missing last staves of Mozart’s Rondo in A Major (K. 386), whose pages had been scattered across Europe since 1791.
Sufficiently operatic? But the second act is still to come.
IT WAS THE railway, in the long run, that turned the reputation of Llandudno into honky-tonk. It meant that, just as Brighton became a kind of suburb of London, this town was half-annexed to Liverpool and Manchester. The railway brought the chorus in.
The holiday crowds of Llandudno are much like British holiday crowds anywhere else. They contain their fair share of the obese, the yobbish and the raucous. The same thump of rock music blares from passing cars with shirtless youths in them. Countless caravans park in their field around the bay, and hundreds of tourist coaches roll in from Merseyside. The outdoor cafés proliferate with beers, ice-creams and tattoos. If there are no men with knotted handkerchiefs over their heads, there are hundreds in baseball caps.
But there is a difference in Llandudno. There is an unexpected wistfulness to its crowds, and this is because so many of its holiday-makers are old. It is a resort of the elderly. Age takes the edge off the fun of it, and makes the town only intermittently boisterous, with a tinge of the sedate, the regretful, even the tragic perhaps. So many old couples, arm in arm along the promenade—so many elderly folk being helped out of coaches—such a prevalent glint of false teeth and anxiety about lost luggage!
“Keep going, chief!” shouts the young blood cheerfully, stepping from his deafeningly souped-up Mini as a pensioner hobbles by: but is he expressing kindness or mockery? The motley Llandudno chorus is rich in suggestion, ambiguity and anomaly, as an opera ought to be.
IT WAS AN idyllic evening for Rigoletto. The theatre was full of happy enthusiasts. The performance seemed to me quite perfect. In the interval helpful neighbours taught me how to extract my plastic spoon out of the ice-cream container, and at the end we spilled out into a twilight as headily romantic as Verdi could have wished, or La Scala or the Met could have provided.
It was very quiet out there—hardly a sound of traffic. Around the wide bay strings of light were shining. Along the promenade people strolled in twos and threes. The pier was a gentle blaze of illumination, and beyond it part of the bare hill was floodlit. There was a murmur of conversation in the air, and a strong suggestion of melody.
A night at the opera! A night in Llandudno! I had a Guinness and a prawn sandwich, and went to bed with “La Donna è Mobile” in my head, interpersed with “Oh, I Do Like to Be beside the Seaside.”