‘Ain’t that right?’

In Montana once I found the road blocked for a mile or more by a mass of sheep. Some were moving very slowly, some were nibbling the sparse grass beside the highway, some were sitting down and one or two seemed to be fast asleep. At the head of this leisurely procession were two cowboys, mounted on fine black horses. The men were very weatherbeaten, dirty and bearded, with their tangled hair escaping from their hats and their fingernails black and broken. They had been rounding up the sheep in the surrounding mountains, to bring them down for shearing and to escape the coming winter storms. ‘We been fourteen days in the hills,’ said one, ‘and seven days on the move. Sheep ain’t very fast movers. Boy, will I be glad of a bed!

‘As for this horse,’ he added affectionately, ‘all he wants is a good hot cup of coffee and a place to put his feet up. Ain’t that right, boy?’

In a trance?

When I was alone in the Himalaya one day I saw a man. I saw him first in the extreme distance, across an absolutely blank snowfield at about 19,000 feet, to which I had climbed from the glacier below for the sake of the view. At first I could not make out what he was–only a black swaying speck, indescribably alone in the desolation. As he came closer I could see that he could only be human, so I plunged through the loose snow to meet him, and presently, there near the top of the world, thousands of feet and many miles above the trees, we met face to face. It was the strangest encounter of my life.

He was a holy man, wandering in the mountains, I suppose, for wandering’s sake. His brown, crinkled, squashed-up face looked back at me expressionless from beneath a yellow hood, and seemed to find nothing strange in my presence there. He wore a long yellow cloak and hide boots, and from his waist there hung a spoon and a cloth satchel. He carried nothing else, and he wore no gloves. I greeted him as best I could, but he did not answer, only smiling at me distantly and without surprise. Perhaps he was in a trance.

I offered him a piece of chocolate but he did not take it, simply standing there before me, slightly smiling. Presently we parted, and without a word he continued on his unfaltering journey, making, it seemed, for Tibet without visible means of survival and moving with a proud, gliding and effortless motion that seemed inexorable. He did not appear to move fast, but when I looked round he had almost disappeared, and was no more than that small black speck again, inexplicably moving over the snows.

The truth of it

In a churchyard in County Monaghan I stood beside the grave of Seamus McElwain, a young IRA man whose whole life had been a succession of bloodshed and imprisonments until he had been killed by British soldiers in a neighbouring meadow. His epitaph was in Irish, and on the cross, together with the relief of a bird escaping through a mesh of barbed wire, was affixed a coloured photograph of him, a good-looking dark-haired boy in a dinner jacket. The tears came into my eye as I stood there (the wind rustling the hedges all around), and a gardener working nearby asked me if perhaps I was a McElwain myself? But I said I was simply crying for them all, whatever side they were on. ‘That’s the truth of it,’ he said, ‘that’s the truth.’

Urgent inquiries

Wide eyed and open handed the Fijians greet me, in their tidy thatched settlements off the highway, or among the mangrove swamps where the women, hitching their skirts up to their waists, scoop about indelicately for shellfish. ‘Where are you going? What is your name? Are you married? Where do you live? Have you any children? Would you like a banana? How many people live in London? Do you sleep alone?’ Their inquiries are directed urgently at me: the Fijian for curiosity is via kila–knowledge want. I told the maids in my Suva hotel that I was scared of them, because they stared at me so hard, and in the evening I found a little bowl of flowers placed beneath my window in appeasement. ‘Aaah,’ they said, shaking their big kind heads in remorse, ‘we no wish to frighten you.’

Their forebears used to be cannibals, but I would not mind being eaten in Fiji. The pot would be spiced, the cooking gentle, and the occasion in most ways merry.

On the waterfront

After a day around the docks with the notorious Manhattan longshoremen, still among the more obstreperous of the city’s workers, I thought of them with more sympathy. That evening I took a coffee and doughnut in a diner down there, and tried to imagine what it would have been like to be a poor Irish immigrant half a century ago, looking for work on that hard and dirty shore. When the man on the next stool scowled across the napkin stand and said nastily, ‘You want all the sugar?’ I told myself he was the victim of historical circumstance, and said I was most awfully sorry.

Empire builders?

I loved to sit on a Hong Kong ferry and contemplate the remaining Britons of Hong Kong. They were trapped for me there, like historical specimens, deep in their tabloids or compiling their shopping lists. What a line they represented, I used to think! What generations of exile culminated in their persons, listlessly looking out across the passing harbour, or doing the crossword puzzle! Their forefathers blazed a way across the world, veld to outback, pioneering in shacks, beachcombing on reefs, disciplining recalcitrant Sioux or bayoneting fuzzy-wuzzies; and there they were beside me, the last of the long parade, indifferent to their origins, unconscious of them, perhaps, unexcited on the slat-seated ferryboat between Kowloon and Victoria!

The boat shudders; the gangplanks clatter down; the blue-shirted Chinese seamen swing open the iron gates; and in a trice, as the crowd streams off the vessel, those unobtrusive imperialists are so utterly overwhelmed by their Chinese fellow citizens that you would hardly guess there was a Briton left in Hong Kong at all.

Icelandic allegory

Beauty and the Beast is an Icelandic allegory. Everybody who goes to the island is struck by the splendour of the girls. Pick a choice example now–the shop girl, say, who is packing your stuffed puffin in the souvenir shop, or pricing your lava-stone powder box. What a gorgeous strapping girl she is, what a terrific golden girl, with her wide-apart eyes, her hair bleached in Arctic sunshine, her exquisite complexion mixed out of snow and pink blossom!

Take your eyes off her for a moment, though, and observe the young man shambling down the street outside–towards his trawler, perhaps, or off to his fearful shift at the fish factory. He is the original Viking, I suppose. His forehead and his chin symmetrically recede, his cheeks are wolfishly sunken, his eyes blaze, and there is to his loping walk a suggestion of immense loose-limbed power, as though a tap on his shoulder would unleash his doublebladed battleaxe and send him off to Greenland with horns on his head.

Wedding pictures

When King Hussein of Jordan married it was supposed to be a ceremony of liberated modernity. However, as I joined the society ladies for the occasion I could not help feeling that we were close in spirit to the huddled jealousies and school-girl excitements of the harem. At the head of the stairs were two bold lancers in scarlet tunics and white breeches, as the eunuchs would have stood sentry in an earlier age, and the body of the room was a seething mass of women. They were dressed magnificently, a glitter of satins and brocades and furs, a mosaic of lipsticks and mascaras, a tinkling kaleidoscope of earrings, a flurry of sequinned handbags. Chanel and Dior thickened the air. How often and how brazenly did the women of the court eye each other’s coutures! How heavily accentuated were the outlines of their eyes, like eyes seen through diaphanous curtains in forbidden corridors of the Seraglio! How scratchy and talon-like were the fingernails, how pinkly fleshy the figures, and how passive and doll-like those emancipated ladies looked, in serried and perfumed phalanx, as if some lascivious Sultan were about to pass through their ranks, picking a beauty here and a beauty there with a lordly gesture of his forefinger!

But presently a cameraman in a crumpled jacket suddenly pressed his way past the guards and said (as it were), ‘Just one more, ladies, please, give us a nice smile now.’

A holy clock

In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem a little chapel stands shrouded in black curtains beside the site of the sepulchre itself. One morning I found myself all alone before this shrine, and as I stood there in the silence I thought I heard a faint ticking noise from the inside. For a moment I stood hesitant, thinking it might be the working of a perpetual censer, or perhaps the swinging of an ornate lantern on its chain. But it was so regular and so insistent that I pulled the heavy curtains aside and looked in, and there on the altar, all alone among the ikons and candlesticks, a red moon-faced kitchen clock ticked away robustly, for all the world as though it were timing the eggs. I laughed with pleasure at this unexpected discovery, and there was an answering chuckle behind my back. Standing among the tall pillars of the rotunda, all but hidden in the shadows, there stood a gigantic Abyssinian priest in an attitude of serene meditation. When I turned to look at him a white gleam in the darkness testified to the smile upon his black bearded face.

Silly question

Wildness, freeness, recklessness–not in Vienna! I went to a police court there one day and, noticing one of the accused studying a road map between hearings, asked him if he was planning an escape. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am deciding the best route to visit my aunt at Graz.’

Expertise

I visited the Pioneer Museum, in Fremont County, Wyoming. During my visit a schoolmistress was taking a group of children round the exhibits, and I heard her drawing their attention to a chair that stood in a corner of the gallery. It was made all of bleached white horn: legs, seat, back and all. ‘That is an example’, she was saying, ‘of the craftsmanship of the very first pioneers to come to Fremont County. Isn’t that beautiful, children?’ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ most of them replied, but after the main body had moved on to the Shoshone relics, a section of the museum I preferred to circumvent, I noticed a pair of laggard urchins trailing along behind. They had not heard their teacher’s encomium of the chair, but they too paused as they passed it, and inspected it with no less knowledgeable admiration. ‘Jeez,’ said one to the other. ‘Take a look at that elk.’

First time lucky!

I crossed to Hoboken on the very last voyage of the very last Manhattan railroad ferry, and the shabby old boat was full for the occasion with reporters, cameramen, roistering office workers, people with banners and leaflets and comic hats and crates of champagne, and a trio of Salvation Army girls singing unaccompanied hymns indefatigably above the hubbub. I sat down on a grubby bench beside an elderly habitué of the ferry. ‘You sound kinda British,’ he said. ‘Funny place for you to be, ain’t it? You ride this boat regular?’

‘Never before in my life,’ said I.

‘Well, you don’t say. Some people have it easy. I’ve had to ride this ferry forty years to make the last crossing. You come over and do it first time!’

Advice

By and large, it seemed to me, British businessmen in Hong Kong pursued their various careers in a pleasant state of half-speed ahead, eating well, enjoying their friends, gossiping in the club bar, taking the junk out on Sundays–‘Whatever you do,’ they used to tell me, ‘don’t go out with Bill [or Simon, or Ted], you’ll be drunk before you get out of the harbour.’

Racial tension

Six or seven miles out of Pretoria, on my way to catch an early flight, I saw a black figure running helter-skelter down the road towards the city. A moment later another followed, and then two or three more, and they panted by us, with serious faces and bulging eyes, like participants in some strenuous sunrise celebration.

‘What are they doing?’ I asked my driver.

‘Those Kaffirs? They’re on their way to work. They’ve probably got to start at seven, and they’ve got a long way to go, so they’ve got to run fast. It won’t do them any harm.’

‘You don’t like Kaffirs?’ I surmised.

‘Kaffirs?’ he replied with a genial twinkle. ‘I love them like they was vermin.’

Kurds on the move

How’s this for a glimpse? Once, once only, I encountered a tribe of Kurds on the move. It was spring, the grasslands were thick with flowers, and in the distance the mountain barriers stood blue and purple and formidable, with a fleck of snow on their summits and a cloudless sky above. Against this heavenly background the Kurdish nomads moved triumphantly across my field of vision. Their herds of sheep and floppy-eared goats scrambled and jostled in the sunshine, and behind them the bold horsemen lorded it across the plain, riding their stocky horses like avenging marauders, rifles across their backs, bandoliers across their chests, sheepskin jackets slung about them grandly. The women walked alongside, carrying the baggage; the children scampered or lagged behind; the great herds eddied about and spilled over the landscape; and the effect of the procession, glimpsed in so wide and airy a setting, was that of a community of unusually cheerful brigands crossing a steppe to commit an atrocity.

Before fame hit him

A couple of days after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay became the first climbers ever to reach the summit of Everest, I was near the foot of the mountain on my way home. It was a still, oppressive, grey morning, and I saw away up the glacier, coming down from the mountain, a solitary figure moving swiftly and gracefully down the valley, swinging and buoyant, like some unspoilt mountain creature. A wide-brimmed hat! High reindeer boots! A smile that illuminated the glacier! An outstretched hand of greeting! Tenzing!

He took off his big hat, smiling still, and sat down upon a rock. He was going to rest and wash, he said, and then traverse a neighbouring ridge towards his home village, where his mother lived. We had breakfast together, and he pulled from his wallet a snapshot of himself with a number of little Tibetan terriers. ‘Given me by the Dalai Lama,’ he explained with pride, and taking a pen from his pocket he slowly wrote his signature (the only word he could write) across the bottom of it and handed it to me with a deprecatory grin. The last I saw of him there, he had stripped his lean lithe body to the waist and was soaping himself with water from a tin basin. It looked a chilly operation.

By the very next day he would be one of the most famous men on earth.

‘Mamma mia!’

A veteran fisherman took me out into the Venetian lagoon to find an island house I had read about, but when we reached the spot we found that nothing remained of it but a pile of rubble. The old man was astonished, but even more affronted. ‘Now why should a thing like that happen?’ he asked me indignantly. ‘Mamma mia! That house was there when I was a child, a fine big house of stone–and now it’s gone! Now why should that have happened, eh? Tell me that!’

He was an urbane man, though, beneath his stubble, and as we moved away from that desolate place, and turned our prow towards San Pietro, I heard a rasping chuckle from the stern of the boat. ‘Mamma mia!’ the old man said again, shaking his head from side to side: and so we chugged home laughing and drinking wine until, paying insufficient attention to his task, that fisherman ran us aground and broke our forward gear, and we completed the voyage pottering shamefacedly backwards. ‘Like a couple of crabs,’ he said, unabashed, ‘though even the crabs go sideways.’

An apartheid queue

In the evening all the poor black workers of Johannesburg, forbidden to live within the precincts of the city, rush for the buses that will take them to their slums and sprawling estates. You can hardly watch such a scene without the stirring of some crusading instinct, some Byronic impulse, or at least a stab of pity. As dusk falls, and as the bitter winter night begins to whistle through the buildings, a vast tattered queue moves in raggety parade towards the bus depot, and thousands of Africans shuffle their slow way in double file towards their shabby buses. There is an air of unutterable degradation to the scene, so heartless and machine-like is the progress of the queue, as the white folk hasten off in their cars to the rich city districts, and the lights glitter in the windows of the department stores, and those poor lost souls are crammed into their buses and packed off to their distant ill-lit townships. Many of them are half starving. Most of them live in fear of robbery or violence when they step off the buses into the dark streets of the locations; half of them spend almost all their leisure hours travelling between the city and the far-flung patches of high veld in which they are obliged to live; they reach their homes long after dark at night, and they start work again when the morning is still only a suggestion.

Old-school flying

In earlier days of transatlantic flying it was generally necessary for passenger aircraft to refuel en route, at Gander in Newfoundland, Shannon in Ireland, or somewhere or other on the way to San Francisco. I was travelling to America on a British Overseas Airways Corporation aircraft when we were told that because of favourable winds we would not for once have to make an intermediate stop. About halfway across, the aircraft’s captain came chattily around the passenger cabins, as was the BOAC custom, in the full glory of his regalia–they ran their planes like ships then, and he was very much the Master.

‘Everything all right?’ he asked courteously, in a clipped public-school accent, when he came to me. ‘Having a comfortable flight?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ I told him, ‘but there is one thing: are you quite sure you’ve got enough fuel to get us over without a stop?’

‘Never fear,’ he replied in the best old-school British style. ‘We’re terrible cowards up front.’

Festivities!

On Princes Street that day, when the Edinburgh Festival was in full fling, half a dozen sideshows were performing. An old-fashioned socialist demagogue was haranguing the crowd from his soapbox. A man in full evening dress was singing ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ from the steps of the National Gallery. Two comedians dressed as ancient Egyptians were doing a comic act, and a tipsy old fellow in a kilt was dancing a reel to the music of a wind-up gramophone. All of a sudden amidst the hubbub two young toughs in shirtsleeves struck up a bit of a fight, punching each other in a tentative way and exchanging high-pitched Scottish insults. Instantly all attention turned to them. The orator found his audience dwindling before his eyes, the ancient Egyptians were soon playing to an empty pavement, and swirling here and there across the pavement went all the audiences, wavering and staggering with each exchange of blows. Through the melee, as it disappeared behind the Scott Memorial, I could see the fierce squabbling heads of the contestants, mouthing festive curses.

Aloofly towards the dawn

I once heard a pair of Venetian inebriates passing my window at four o’clock on a May morning, and looking out into the Rio San Trovaso I saw them riding by in a gondola. They were sitting on the floor of the boat, drumming on its floor-boards, banging its seats, singing and shouting incoherently at the tops of their thickened voices; but on the poop of the gondola, rowing with an easy, dry, worldly stroke, an elderly grey-haired gondolier propelled them aloofly towards the dawn.

Mother Russia

In Soviet Russia during the Cold War the foreign writer was generally at the mercy of Intourist, the government tourist organization. It was efficient and courteous enough, though speckled no doubt with agents of counter-intelligence, and its younger employees were often refreshingly undogmatic. Now and then, though, Intourist would send you an interpreter of the old school, a woman of severe bearing and inflexible party loyalty. Polite but unmistakably chill such a lady was likely to be, as though you were an emissary of capitalist encirclement, and a day with such an ideologue could be exhausting. I found there was a solution, though, an exorcism. When my companion was particularly severe about my bourgeois deviations, I would turn to her with an expression of deeply wounded sensibility, allow the warm tears to well into my eyes, sniff a little, blow my nose shakily, and tell her I thought she had been unkind.

This was a magic word. Instantly there would be released from her bosom a flood of immemorial Russian emotion, dimly lit with ikons and scented with incense. In a trice all thought of norms and Seven-Year Plans would be driven from her kindly mind, and she was likely to be on the telephone half the night, making sure I was warm enough.

‘Nobody’s used this cup’

One of the notorieties of the Cape of Good Hope is the ‘tot’ system, which legally allows a wine farmer to pay his coloured labourers partly in cheap sweet wine. ‘You’re just in time,’ a Huguenot farmer told me when I asked to watch the process. ‘We give them six tots a day, you see–one when they start, one at breakfast, one at eleven, one at two, one at four and one when they finish work.’

There stood the labourers in a quavering crew, seven or eight tattered coloured men, and on the steps of a barn a white overseer was doling out the tots. He had a big bucket of thick red wine before him, and as the workers came shambling up with their old baked-bean tins he scooped them their ration in silence. It was an eerie spectacle, for it was plain to me that those dazed and ragged half-castes were in a state of perpetual dissipation. Quaffing their tots in one experienced and joyless gulp they shuffled away again. It was as though eight elderly machines were being greased or refuelled.

‘Yes, we give them six tots a day,’ said the farmer chattily, ‘that’s the law. It comes to a bottle and a quarter a day. They sweat it out very quickly–it gives them kick, you see. It’s a good wine–here, taste it.’ And with fastidious courtesy the foreman, producing a tin cup from inside the barn, wiped it carefully with his handkerchief and drew me a ration. ‘It’s quite all right,’ he said kindly, ‘nobody’s used this cup.’

Expatriatism

Almost anywhere in the world of the 1950s I met expatriate Britons of the upper bourgeoisie, and almost always they liked to tell me their memories, personal or inherited, factual or fictionalized, of an England long extinct: a garden party England it seemed to have been, where nobody talked too loud, and there were parasols on the lawn, and we so often used to visit Sir Henry…Sir Henry…what was his name now?–Never mind, I shall remember it later–Anyway, he had this lovely old house. Oh, the smell of the honeysuckle and such gay tennis parties we used to have. ‘Of course I know it’s all changed now and I could never go back, it would break my heart to see it all so different, socialism, and strikes, and white girls with black men in the streets, they tell me, and all these death duties and so on. But it will always be home to me, Mr Morris–you may be a little too young to understand just how I feel–that’s Lindley Hall there, by the way, above the mantelpiece, painted by Robert…Robert…you know, very famous–but I’ll remember later, I always do…’

On second thoughts

When I was writing a book about Oxford I read that a special duty of the High Steward of Oxford University was ‘to hear and determine criminal cases of the gravest kind, like treason or felony’, if the accused was a resident member of the university. In legal theory it meant that until capital punishment was finally abolished in England, this purely academic official was authorized to hang you.

I once told a proctor, one of the intendants of university discipline, that I proposed to follow him and his officers (popularly called Bulldogs) on their patrol through the streets one night, to see how the undergraduates responded to his authority. He advised me not to follow too closely, in case the Bulldogs took offence at my attentions, and summoned me into the proctorial presence. I bristled a bit at this. They’d better not, I said, I was a free citizen, I knew my rights, I could walk where I liked when I liked, nobody could pull antique usage over my eyes, he and his minions certainly had no authority over me. The proctor smiled darkly. ‘Are you quite sure?’ he inquired; and by heavens, remembering the bit about the High Steward and the felonies, on second thoughts I wasn’t.

Alas, proved right

I was never a very astute political observer, and I really did not know what to make of Jack Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, when I went to one of his Washington press conferences soon after his inauguration. I was charmed by the look, sound and presence of him, as everyone was. I was impressed by his professionalism and his fluency, but some vague instinct told me that although he was only in his mid-forties he was already in his prime. In a report I wrote for the Guardian I tried to express my feeling that the Kennedy we were seeing then was the definitive Kennedy, that we would never know him greatly changed by time or experience, and, as it sadly happened, for once I was proved right.

A Mikado

Sir Charles Dalrymple Belgrave was officially Adviser to the Ruler of Bahrain, but in effect he was prime minister as well, while Lady Belgrave enjoyed the beguiling title of Directoress of Female Education. For thirty years Belgrave had guided the destinies of the island, and his influence was all pervasive. A mere mention of the name Belgrave would instantly bring a price down. There was a street called Belgrave Road, and not a soul in the place, not a sheikh or a tailor or a man picking his teeth on the high curved prow of a dhow, who could not direct you to the house where the Belgraves lived.

This Mikado viewed his own eminence with a trace of dry amusement, and his home (above his office) was a gay and racy place. Belgrave had a splendid and eclectic library, and he was a man of esoteric tastes, addicted to (for example) roulette, cigars, watercolour painting, swords and pantomimes. Each year he presented a panto of his own in the dining room, with bold backcloths painted by himself and dialogue verging upon the risqué. It was curious that his effect upon his bailiwick was almost sanctimonious. ‘How good are roads are,’ the island seemed to say, ‘and how sensible our schools are, and how thriftily we use our oil royalties. Mohammed, stop picking your nose in front of Lady Belgrave.’

Beggars and buskers

The indigenous beggars and buskers of Venice are treated with indulgence. There is a dear old lady, bundled in shawls, who sits in the evening at the foot of the Accademia bridge, and has many faithful patrons. There is a bent old man who haunts the alleys near Santo Stefano and who is often to be seen pacing from one stand to another, plucking a neat little melody upon his guitar. On Sunday mornings a faun-like couple of countrymen materialize on the quayside of Giudecca with a set of bagpipes and a wooden whistle. A well-known comic figure of the Zattere is a man in a cloth cap and a long blue overcoat who suddenly appears among the tables of the outdoor cafes and, planting himself in an uncompromising posture on the pavement, legs apart, head thrown back, produces a sheet of music from his pocket and throws himself into a loud incomprehensible aria, tuneless and spasmodic, but delivered with such an air of informed authority that there are often a few innocents to be seen following the melodic line with knowledgeable attention. I once asked this man if I could see his music, and discovered it to be a specimen page from a score of Beethoven’s 9th, held upside-down and close to the stomach.

Among the Delhi Spearmen

Among the officers of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers there was a powerful sense of family. It was hardly like being in an army at all. Age was disregarded and rank was tacit. Nobody called anybody ‘sir’. The Colonel was Colonel Jack, or Colonel Tony. Everyone else was known by his Christian name. Courtesy towards each other was not a deliberate form, it was merely a matter of habit, or convenience. This was a very professional regiment. A sense of heritage accordingly bound us one to another, and made us conscious of lance and plume, saddle-carbine and cuirass. These were the Delhi Spearmen; and though the details of the regimental history were less than vivid to most of us, still there hung always around our mess a general suggestion of glory (not that anyone would have been so insensitive as to mention it, for if there was one attribute the 9th Lancers were not anxious to display, it was keenness).

Mixed sensations

It seems only the other day that communism ended in Romania, but here I am already at the dinner table with a jolly crew of acquaintances, eating pike-perch from the Danube and drinking a happy Moldavian Riesling, to the deafeningly amplified thump of a band in the chandeliered dining room of the Central House of the Army. I have poked my nose into several such unpromising bastions of old Establishment. At the Writers’ Union, for instance, which has been for several decades a tribunal of communist orthodoxy, I wandered bemused and unhindered through the accumulated cigar smoke of a thousand ideological debates, amiably nodded at now and then by marvellously literary-looking confrères. And at the Military Hotel, strolling in, I was befriended without question by a most formidable captain of the Romanian navy, wearing over his gilded uniform a leather coat like a U-boat commander. It is a queer mixture of sensations. On the one hand nearly everybody is welcoming. On the other hand few seem altogether frank.

Sharing the pleasure

In Wyoming cowboys sometimes walked their horses up to me as I picnicked in the sage, sat sketching in my car or took my morning walk through the scented countryside; and then, after we had exchanged pleasantries and told each other where we came from, and explained what we were doing, sometimes they would slide from their saddles and join me for a few minutes, looking over my shoulder at a sketch, accepting a slice of cheese, or simply sharing the pleasure of the place and the moment–not a talkative presence usually, but one so naturally kind and unembarrassed that a silence was never awkward, and the parting came organically, like the end of a good meal, just before satisfaction moved towards surfeit.

Siren call

Seen from Hong Kong’s New Territories in those days, China seemed to me essentially simple, like a world stripped of its complexities and pretensions. I found myself looking towards that silent landscape as though it were calling me home. Home to where? Home to what? As I wandered down the track towards my car, one of the stall sellers spoke to me quietly, without urgency, across his wares. ‘Why don’t you buy,’ he inquired, as though he genuinely, if mildly, wanted to know the answer, ‘the thoughts of Chairman Mao?’–and he held up a small red book, bound in plastic.

‘Get thee behind me,’ I said.

Valleys music

I prefer to catch a Welsh male voice choir at practice, when it has not been stiffened up with clean shirts and clasped hands for a concert. Nobody ever tried harder than a choir of the valleys intent on getting an interpretation absolutely right. Just once more, cries the conductor–Unwaith eto, bois!–and the lady accompanist stiffens herself again at the piano, the stocky tenors, the well-paunched basses adjust their spectacles, smooth out the creases in their music sheets and wait in tense taut postures, like tennis players awaiting a service, for the drop of the baton. The rustlings and the coughings stop. Silence falls. The maestro crouches there before his men, half doubled on the dais, a demoniac figure, black of hair, swarthy of face, eyes gleaming. He is irresistible! He raises his baton. The choir takes a breath. The pianist lifts her fingers. Crash, the place reverberates, the whole town surely, perhaps the whole of Wales, with the passion of the opening chord.

R.I.P.

The foreign news editor, my immediate superior at The Times, was ageing, and week by week I noticed not merely a faltering in the old gentleman himself, but a progressive disregard of his views. People did not listen to him. Decisions were taken without his knowledge. He clearly sensed it too, and for what seems to have been hours at a time, talking in an infinitely slow grating voice that was, I admit, among the heavier of my burdens, he would disclose to me his anxieties or more often his resentments.

He grew increasingly talkative, bitter and confused, until finally, one winter evening, he gave me a letter. If anything should happen to him, he said, buttoning his thick black overcoat, straightening his homburg and removing his walking stick from its stand behind the desk, I was to hand it to the higher authorities of The Times; and gently chewing–for he generally seemed to have in his mouth, when not a cigar, some kind of lubricant lozenge, perhaps to keep his voice going–he nodded at me in his usual way, said goodnight with his habitual icy trace of a smile, and went home to kill himself with sleeping pills.

Levantine life

I was happy working for the Arab News Agency in Cairo. My friends were mostly in the office, and we were none of us rich. We were boulevardiers, but of a modest rank, frequenting the shabbier of the downtown pavement cafes, murky places with marble-topped tables where the coffee was as thick as porridge and the water glasses were a perpetual dingy grey. There we would sit and talk in the early evening, when the long siesta was nearly over, until we heard the rattle of the heavy steel shutters being raised one by one from the shop fronts, and it was time for us to saunter to the office and start work on the evening bulletin.

The news that greeted us up there was always full of drama and piquant intelligence–wars and corruptions, desert crime, court conspiracies, religious polemics, family feuds–and we worked in a spirit of Bohemian release. Once we were inside our dim-lit, crowded and untidy rooms we would forget the truth about ourselves, forget the impending misery of the midnight tram, forget the shabby villa off the airport road, forget the swarming children and the skinny black-veiled wife, forget our lost hopes for a career in the law or the Ministry of the Interior, forget that we were indigent Egyptian effendis or struggling Levantines, forget even our sexual ambiguities, and lose ourselves in that strange little world of ours upstairs.

America verbatim

From my notebooks:

‘I told him, I said, “Johnnie, if you want me you’ve just gotta come right down here and get me…”’

‘Crooked? Crooked as a green snake…’

‘She said that? She actually said that, right there? She said that to your face…?’

‘Listen, Ed, I’ll blind you, honest I will, I’ll cut your tongue you old son of a gun you…’

‘She says to me, “Leon,” she says, “I wantya to know, I’m fond of you, truly I am, but there’s this problem of Juan’s baby, see?” “To hell with Juan’s baby,” I says. “What’s Juan’s baby to me?” And she says, “Leon, honey,” she says, “listen to me…”’

‘If Consolidated Edison could be boiled down into one man I wouldn’t have him in my home…’

An indistinct saint

St Frideswide was an indistinct medieval divine who is the titular saint of Oxford Cathedral. Every 19 October the bigwigs of the city and the diocese process, begowned, befurred, cassocked, epauletted and even bewigged, to celebrate her memory at her shrine in the building. When I was once at the service I noticed that one of the most venerable canons of the cathedral showed signs of irritable impatience. He scowled, muttered audibly to himself, hitched his hood, twitched his surplice, nudged his companions and occasionally gazed frowardly around the congregation. It was true that ‘Jerusalem, My Happy Home’ did seem more than usually protracted that day, with so much civic weight to slow it down. I watched that clergyman closely, though, and after a time I reached the conclusion that he was not annoyed by the music, only by the occasion. He didn’t dislike the hymn tune. He had doubts about the saint.

Mayor Murphy’s inducements

It happened that while I was in town St John’s, Newfoundland, was celebrating its centenary as a municipality. The festivities closed with a public party which suggested to me an enormous country wedding–everyone someone else’s sister-in-law, everyone ready to talk, with no pretence and no pretension either. Jigs and folk songs sounded from the stage, and when people seemed slow to dance jolly Mayor Murphy took the floor alone, offering free booze coupons to any who would join him. ‘You have to get them half tight,’ he remarked to me as he handed out these inducements, jigging the while himself.

Later I was walking along a city street when a man launched upon me, without warning, a challenging statement in such advanced Newfoundlandese that I can only reproduce it impressionistically, so to speak. It sounded something like: ‘Sish yarkin trapse John Murphy.’ He looked at me expectantly for a response, so I simultaneously shook my head and nodded, to be on the safe side.

Things to attend to

The millionaire, a man of taste as well as power, commanding everything that money can buy–even he seemed restless and impatient; not socially, for he was kindness itself, but temperamentally. The whole luxurious establishment seemed to me somehow disposable: the manservant, the housekeeper, the masterpieces on the walls, the carpets from the East, the gorgeous maps and the calf-bound library, the great silver tray of decanters and silver-topped siphons, the bronze picked up from an unknown but infinitely promising young sculptor in West Africa–none of it seemed destined to last. It was as though he might decide one day to rip it all up and start again. As he saw me off at the door two things happened. An alarm buzzer sounded, announcing that the eldest son of the house had got stuck in the elevator, and the millionaire’s wife called through the drawing-room door to say that the White House was on the telephone. ‘Excuse me,’ he said in his flat velvet voice, shaking hands on the doorstep. ‘I have one or two things to attend to. Thanks for coming.’

Give and take

One still hears the instant give and take in Dublin pubs and parlours. ‘Ah, me rheumatism’s cured,’ says the old lady quick as a flash when the landlord pats her kindly on the knee, ‘you should advertise your healing powers.’ ‘Sure it was only my left hand too,’ says the landlord. ‘Well and it was only my left knee–try the other one there’s a good man.’

The judge

The judge at the Court of Session, Scotland’s High Court, wore his tight-curled wig as though it had sprouted spontaneously from his pate in childhood. Crouched over his papers at his high dais, he was big nosed, wrinkle eyed, high cheeked, hooded, with eyes that never seemed to blink, and a mouth that expressed, whatever interrogation he supervised, whatever sentence he was decreeing, no flicker of concern, distaste or even particular interest. I could seldom hear what he said, for he spoke in a cracked and high-pitched drone apparently outside my aural range, but I observed that, like an owl peering down from a telephone wire, he missed no nuance or allusion of the proceedings below him. When I left the court I turned at the door for one last fascinated look at him, and discovered that, although his slumped posture had apparently not budged an inch, those pale blue eyes of his were staring fixed and motionless into mine–rather as though, like the owl, he could rotate his head without reference to his body, preparatory to dismembering a mouse.

Across a chasm

All the windows in the huge slab of a building are brilliantly lit, and in each a little cameo, separate from all its neighbours, is joylessly displayed. Here four girls sit tense over their sewing machines, silent and unsmiling, motionless but for the quick twist and tug of their fingers. There a solitary shirtsleeved man is hunched over his files and calculators, beneath the dazzling light of his naked bulb, dead to all else and perhaps to himself. Along the way eight or nine families seem to be packed into one room, and one sees only flashes of infant limbs, waves of drapery, buckets, black loose hair, bedclothes and grinning mop faces, as though some perpetual and appalling farce is being played inside.

Every room there is ablaze, every room full; and across the gloom one hears radios, clicking machines, shouts and children’s screams. In another city all that life over there might be a comfort, a reminder that if you happen to be alone that night, all around you is the warmth of community. In Hong Kong it is different. Nobody in that building seems to take the slightest notice of anyone else–let alone of you as, peering out of the night, your wan Western face gazes aghast across the chasm.

Dead guys

I stood on the edge of Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC–Fame’s Eternal Camping Ground, as it says on its triumphal arch–and looked across the massed ranks of the departed, like a vast city of slabs. ‘Are all these,’ said a child beside me, surveying Fame’s Eternal Camping Ground herself, ‘are all these dead guys?’ ‘Dead,’ said I, ‘as mutton’–but at that moment her grandmother arrived, and throwing me a distinctly accusatory look, as though I were undermining the loyalty of the young, she gave the child’s nose a necessary wipe of the Kleenex and hurried her down the hill to catch the Tour-Mobile.

Duke of London

As it happened the only time I ever saw Winston Churchill was at the very moment of his ultimate triumph–the moment when, on the day of German surrender, he appeared on a balcony in Whitehall to accept the gratitude of London, his battered capital of victory. All around us were grand old monuments of English history, Parliament and Abbey, Nelson on his column up the road, Admiralty and Banqueting Hall and Horse Guards Parade, and it seemed to me then that he was already one of them–so perfectly did his portly smiling presence up there seem to satisfy the setting, the story and the meaning of the day. I always thought he should have been made Duke of London.

Magic in Paris

Wandering into Notre Dame on a Sunday night, I found a choir and orchestra celestially performing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. The cathedral was full, a reverent multitude of young people sitting on the floor if they could not get a seat in the nave, or simply milling about like me. It was magical. All Paris seemed to be there, singing its heart out or half lost in the marvel of it all. When I discovered that the choir and orchestra came from Germany, and realized that half the listeners were as foreign as I was, it only seemed more magical still.

Insufficient compassion

Scary beggars used to infest the centre of Alexandria. I was walking home in Alex one evening when I felt, rather than actually saw, a legless beggar observing my passage from across the street. He was strapped to a low wooden trolley, which he pushed along with his hands, and made an object at once heart rending and frightening to see: but I had no money with me, neither a pound nor a piastre, so I quickened my step self-consciously and hurried down Zaghloul Street towards my hotel.

Behind me I could hear the whirr of his roller-skate wheels as he pursued me through the town–a thump when he eased himself off the pavement, a clanking when he crossed the tramlines, a change of pitch when he left the tarmac for the flagstones. Faster and faster I walked through the evening crowds, but I could never escape those whirring wheels: over the low wall into Zaghloul Square, across the little garden, and I could still hear them skidding down the path, closer than ever behind my back, so that I could hear the poor man’s panting breath, too, until at last, breaking into a run, I threw myself into the revolving door of the Cecil.

The wheels came to a sudden stop on the sidewalk outside, and a curse bade me goodnight.

Dignities

In the last years of the Iraqi monarchy the real power behind the throne was the Crown Prince Abdul Illah, a sallow but handsome man. I interviewed him once. He talked fluently and amusingly, and our conversation turned to the pictures on the palace wall, a galaxy of chieftainship. ‘What a splendid costume it is,’ I said of a portrait of the great Feisal I in Arab dress. ‘Do you ever wear it yourself?’ ‘Sometimes,’ said the Crown Prince. ‘You would be surprised how comfortable it is.’ ‘And it does make one look so fearfully dignified,’ I said lightly. This was not a success. A chill seemed to settle upon our encounter, and the interview soon ended. The Crown Prince Abdul Illah, it seemed, needed no romantic trappings to give him dignity.

Iddums-diddums

Come with me, and watch a full-blooded beldame selling fish upon the waterfront of San Sebastian. She is flanked by cronies, sitting brawnily on kitchen chairs like a gangster’s bodyguard. She herself stands in the middle with a microphone around her neck, wearing a blue anorak, a pink chiffon scarf, white ankle socks and a suggestion of innumerable underclothes. She looks as though no nuance of life has escaped her. Her face is heavy jowled, her wrists are muscular, and she is built like a boxer, but there is a rich urbanity to her voice as she intones the price of sardines. The crowd is altogether at her command. The seamen stumble in with their fish trays like acolytes in an archiepiscopal presence. The cronies laugh at her every joke. Policemen sheepishly perambulate. Customers never dare to argue. But sometimes that empress of the fish market, pausing to scribble a price upon her pad, notices a baby in somebody’s arms, and looks up unexpectedly with the sweetest of grandmotherly smiles, a twiddle of cod-scaled fingers and what I take to be the Basque equivalent of ‘Iddums-diddums.’

In the park

I woke early and walked across Chowringi into the green of Calcutta’s Maidan, before the sun rose and the heat haze fell like a web upon us. It was lovely then in the park. Rooks cawed, kites hung, sparrows pecked, smiling pi-dogs padded by. Here and there across the grass white figures moved or loitered, and whenever I paused I was sympathetically accosted. ‘What you are seeing is the Theatre, built in honour of our great poet Rabindranath Tagore.’ ‘If I may say so you would be more comfortable where there not so many ants.’ Or: ‘Wouldn’t you like a game of golf? I am teaching golf, you see. Here are my golf clubs.’

Tradition

‘Does he, do you think,’ tactfully inquired the Bishop of Barrackpore, ‘expect a T-I-P?’ But no, my guide was not ready for one yet, having high hopes of further services to be performed, so I joined the bishop on his verandah, where during a lull before evensong he was eating peanut butter sandwiches with a kind Anglican lady in blue. He was all an aficionado of the tradition could ask: cassocked, distinguished, fatherly, concerned about that T-I-P. Soon, he told me, he would be retiring. Going home? I wondered, but as the lady replaced the tea cosy with a significant air he answered me in grave italics: ‘Staying in India–for ever.’

At evensong we sang the hymn that says the Lord’s throne shall never like earth’s proud empires pass away, and as I left the cathedral a Balliol voice called kindly across the transept–‘I say! Excuse me! You do know where we are, don’t you, if you’re coming to the children’s dance drama in the parish hall?’

Arrival of the tourists

Down in the harbour of Capri I can see the morning vaporetto from the mainland, still hazy about the funnel, and here flooding into the piazza, pouring out of taxis, out of buses, out of horse carriages, out of the steep funicular that runs up from the waterfront–wearing floppy straw hats and rope-soled shoes and pink jeans and multifarious bangles–festooned with cameras, inquiring the price of swimsuits, unfolding maps, touching up their lipsticks beneath the campanile–talking German, English, French and every variety of Italian–young and old, blatant and demure, strait laced and outrageous, earnest and frivolous and thrilled and sick-to-death-of-it-all–here past my cafe table streams the first quota of the morning’s tourists.

Teatime in Old Chicago, 1950s

I love to watch the customers at a carriage-trade Chicago restaurant at English Teatime, with Jasmine Tea and Toasted Muffins beside the goldfish pool. Its children behave with almost fictional decorum. Its daughters wear pearls. Its young mums look as though they have come direct from committee meetings of charitable balls. Its husbands look as though they keep fit by riding hunters through parks before breakfast. Its grandmothers, best of all, talk in throaty turtle voices, as though the words are being squeezed out from beneath the carapace and they are heavily loaded with inherited gewgaws, and are inclined to call the waitress ‘child’, as though expecting pretty curtseys in return. ‘Would you care for some more Jasmine Tea, Mrs Windlesham? Do you desire another Toasted English Muffin?’ ‘Why thank you, child–how pretty you are looking today!’ ‘Thank you, Mrs Windlesham, it’s always a pleasure to serve you and the members of your family.’

A separate sphere?

One evening at Akureyri, on the northern coast of Iceland, I heard the sound of solemn singing from a restaurant, and peering through its door I saw that a large party was in peculiar progress. I felt as though I were looking in at some utterly separate sphere of existence. There the Icelanders, men and women, sat in ordered ranks, their arms linked around the long tables, and as they sang what seemed to be some kind of sacramental anthem they swayed heavily from side to side in rhythmic motion. The sight of them gave me a queer sense of secret solidarity. Everybody clearly knew the words of the song, and the whole assembly seemed to be in some sort of arcane collusion. I noticed that if ever I caught an eye, as the celebrants sang and swayed there at the table, after a moment’s puzzled focusing it abruptly switched away from me, as if to dismiss an illusion.

‘Are they?’

Every evening at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul a string trio plays, attentively listened to by the German package tourists at their communal tables, and gives the place a comfortable, palm-court air. Two elderly gentlemen in Gypsy outfits are on piano and accordion, and they are led by a romantic Gypsy fiddler, adept at waltzes and polkas. I was sitting there one evening when suddenly there burst into the room, driving the trio from its podium and severely disconcerting the hausfraus, a team of ferocious Anatolian folk dancers, accompanied by a young man with a reedy trumpet and an apparently half-crazed drummer. The dancers were fairly crazed themselves. Apparently welded together into a multicoloured phalanx, they shrieked, they roared with laughter, they leapt, they whirled, they waved handkerchiefs–a performance of furious bravura, leaving us all breathless and aghast. They were like so many houris, come to dance over the corpses on a battlefield.

They withdrew as abruptly as they had arrived, and in the stunned hush that ensued I turned to the Americans at the next table. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘I’m glad they’re on our side!’ But a knowing look crossed the man’s face. ‘Ah, but are they?’ he replied.

Tyrant

A terrifyingly ambitious, inexhaustible girl supervisor works at one of the downtown McDonald’s of Manhattan. Over the serving counter one may see the glazed and vacant faces of the cooks, a black man and a couple of Puerto Ricans, who appear to speak no English; in front that small tyrant strides peremptorily up and down, yelling orders, angrily correcting errors and constantly falling back upon an exhortatory slogan of her own: C’mon, guys, today guys, today…The cooks look back in pained incomprehension.

Divine merriment

We find ourselves lost on the edge of a deserted traffic junction somewhere east of Kranj, Slovenia. Helplessly we consult our map, hopefully we look for somebody to ask the way, and presently there somehow seem to sidle into our company half a dozen Slovene men and a very talkative Slovene woman. Between us we speak five languages, but we are fluent only in our own, and gradually our discussions descend into farce. It’s that way, for sure, no it’s the other, they haven’t been through Preddvor, no, no of course they haven’t, they came the Cerklje way–they should go back the way they came then, they should have gone by Duplice–no, no, no, look here, look at the map–and so, as the map gets more and more crumpled, the arguments louder, the languages ever more incomprehensible, we subside into impotent merriment, shake hands with each other, clap one another on the back and, chuckling still, go our various ways. We ourselves are no wiser about our situation, so we leave the car on the grassy verge and go for a drink instead.

God habitually smiles upon Slovenia, and sometimes he laughs out loud.

Violetta down under

Go to La Traviata at Sydney Opera House and, my, what a robust Australian chorus will be attendant upon Violetta in the opening act, their crinolines and Parisian whiskers delightfully failing to disguise physiques born out of Australian surf and sunshine–while even La Traviata herself, as she subsides to the last curtain, may seem to you the victim of some specifically Australian variety of tuberculosis, since she looks as though immediately after the curtain calls she will be off for a vigorous set of tennis with the conductor, or at least a grilled lobster with orange juice and caramel.

The Leading Citizen’s lesson

‘Have your fun, Jan,’ said the Leading Citizen. ‘Sure thing, this is a Fun Town, but what we especially do not like is these comparisons with Sodom and such. What people forget is that here in Las Vegas we have a thriving civic-minded community. We have 130 church buildings, Jan, in this city of ours. I think I could safely say that you won’t find a more lovely home environment anywhere than some of our high-grade home environments here. What I want you to remember, Jan, is this–the Spanish Trail came this way, right over this very spot, before the game of roulette ever entered the Infant Republic–that’s what I always tell people like you, who come inquiring–before the game of roulette ever entered the Infant Republic of the United States!’

The Very Reverend

Almost at once I met the Dean of Wells, actually in the shadow of Penniless Porch. Eton, Oxford and the Welsh Guards, he was not hard to identify. With a splendid concern his voice rang out, as we sat there watching the citizenry pass by. ‘Good morning, good morning! Lovely day! What a success yesterday–what would we have done without you? Morning, Simon! Morning, Bert! Morning, John! (John Harvey, you know, our greatest authority on church architecture…)’In his cathedral, I was later disconcerted to learn, they habitually call him ‘Father’, but I certainly could not complain about his authenticity qua Dean.

Our Gracie

On a bus in Capri I chanced to meet, I can’t remember how, a man who introduced himself as Boris Alperovici, the third husband of Gracie Fields. She was a famous star of the past, a Dame of the British Empire–‘Our Gracie’, formerly a household name in her native England but by then somewhat forgotten. She was living in elderly retirement in her villa on the island. Boris took me along to visit her, and she received me graciously, and told me anecdotes of her theatrical life, and had coffee served to me by her seaside swimming pool. It was just as though the old lady were some great Hollywood actress at the height of her career, and she evidently enjoyed it as much as I did. When I got back to Britain I was surprised to meet other people, too, who had chanced to encounter Signor Alperovici on the Capri bus, but couldn’t quite remember how, and had sat drinking coffee at the feet of Our Gracie.

The exchange

Wandering around the purlieus of the High Court in Madras, I took out my tape recorder to remind myself of some of its architectural peculiarities. At once I heard an admonitory clapping of hands, and a policeman with a nightstick beckoned me over.

‘What have you got there? What is this machine?’

‘It’s a tape recorder.’

‘What are you doing with it here?’

‘I am reminding myself of some architectural peculiarities.’

‘How do I know it is not a bomb?’

‘You can speak into it yourself.’

‘What shall I say?’

‘Anything.’

‘I cannot think of anything to say.’

‘Sing a song then.’

‘What kind of a song?’

‘A Tamil song.’

‘Very well, I will sing you a very old Tamil song, a tragic song’–and half closing his eyes, and assuming an unmistakably tragic expression, there in the sunshine outside the court in a high wavering voice he sang several verses of a very, very old Tamil song. I played it back to him.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘now you have my voice. What will you give me in return?’

But, bless his heart, I was gone by then.

Temper of the South

The temper of the South is inescapable in Houston. You can sense the swagger of it in the postures of the cattle people come into town for dinner or convention: hulking rich men in Stetsons and silver belt buckles, paunchy with their generations of beer and prime steaks, lacquered observant women in bangles, talking rather too loud as Texans are apt to, the wives greeting each other with dainty particularities (‘Why, hi, Cindy. My you’re looking pretty!’) the husbands with spacious generics (‘Well, boy, what’s things like in East Texas?’)

And you can sense the poignant charm of it in the faded white clapboard houses of the Fifth Ward, stilted above the dust of their unpaved streets. There the black folk still idle away the warm evenings on their splintered porches, as in the old story books; there the vibrant hymns still rise from the pews of the Rose of Sharon Tabernacle Church; there the garbage still blows about the garden lots, and you may still be asked, as I was, if, ‘Say, ain’t you Miss Mary’s daughter from the old store? Bless your heart, I used to be one of Miss Mary’s best, best customers…’

Monty

Late one evening during World War II I was walking up Arlington Street towards Piccadilly when there emerged from the door of the Ritz General Sir Bernard Montgomery (not yet a Marshal or a Lord). A policeman saluted as he scuttled down the hotel steps and into his waiting staff car, but I thought there seemed something almost furtive about his movements. I expect he was really in haste to get back to the War Office, or even into battle, but if he had been another kind of general I would have guessed he was hurrying to an assignation down the road in Soho!

Confrontation

Through the crowd waiting for their luggage at the Toronto airport carousel there staggered ever and again a middle-aged woman in a fur hat and a long coat of faded blue, held together by a leather belt evidently inherited from some earlier ensemble. She was burdened with many packages elaborately stringed, wired and brown-papered, she had a sheaf of travel documents generally in her hands, sometimes between her teeth, and she never stopped moving, talking and gesticulating. If she was not hurling questions at expressionless bystanders in theatrically broken English, she was muttering to herself in unknown tongues, or breaking into sarcastic laughter. Often she dropped things; she got into a terrible mess trying to get a baggage cart out of its stack (‘You–must–put–money–in–the–slot.’ ‘What is slot? How is carriage coming? Slot? What is slot?’) and when at last she perceived her travelling accoutrements–awful mounds of canvas and split leather–erupting on to the conveyor, like a tank she forced a passage through the immobile Canadians, toppling them left and right or barging them one into another with virtuoso elbow work.

I lost sight of the lady as she passed through customs (I suspect she was involved in some fracas there, or could not undo the knots on her baggage), but she represented for me the archetypal immigrant, arriving at the emblematic immigrant destination of the late twentieth century, and I watched the confrontation with sympathy for both sides.

The spy’s discomfort

Roller skating was then all the rage around the Lake of Geneva. Whole families skated along the promenade. Dogs rode about in rollered baskets and youths whizzed shatteringly here and there, scattering the crowds with blasts of the whistles that were held between their teeth. I lunched with a spy of my acquaintance. What kind of a spy he is, who he spies for, or against, I have never been able to discover, but he has all the hallmarks of espionage about him, divides his time between Switzerland and the East, wears raincoats and speaks Greek. We ate little grilled fish at the water’s edge and discussed the state of the city. Uncomfortable, he thought it, and getting worse. Security getting tougher? I conjectured. Banks turning difficult? Opposition hotter? No, no, he said testily, holding his hands over his ears, nothing like that: only those damned roller skaters.

Admiral’s walk

Split in Croatia is a naval base, and when I was driving out of town I stopped at the traffic lights near the fleet headquarters. A very senior naval officer started to cross the road. He was loaded with badges, braid and medal ribbons, but wearing as I was a floppy old hat and a less than spotless blue shirt, just for fun I saluted him. His response was Split all over. First he faltered slightly in his steady tread. Then he brought his hand to the peak of his cap in a guarded and cautious way. And then, as the lights changed, I started forward and he scuttled with rather less than an admiral’s dignity to the safety of the opposite pavement, he turned round, all rank and propriety discarded, and shared my childish laughter.

True gents

At Three Rivers, stopping for a hamburger, I found that I had locked my car keys in the boot. Small-town Texas swung instantly to my rescue–well, eased itself slowly off its cafe stools, tipped its Stetsons over its eyes, strolled into the car park and stood meditatively eyeing the problem, saying things like Huh or Kindova problem there. In easy stages they approached the task, sniffing it, feeling it, and when in the end they got the hang of it, enlarged the right aperture, unscrewed the right screws, and found that the keys were not in the boot at all, since I had left them on the Dairy Queen counter, they seemed not in the least disconcerted. Deftly reassembling the mechanism, tilting their Stetsons back again, they drifted back into the cafe murmuring, ‘You bet, lady, any time.’

The Low Riders

In Santa Fe the Spanish culture is relentlessly pressed upon by all the influences and temptations of the American Way. Often in the evenings the cultists called the Low Riders cruise through town. They are the public faces, I suppose, of young Hispanica, and as they drive slowly about the streets in their weirdly low-slung limousines, wearing wide hats and dark glasses, radios booming, unsmiling, proud, stately one really might say, who knows what resentments or aspirations of their race they are trying to declare?

The call of conscience

On the Bund in Shanghai one evening a youth with the droopy shadow of a moustache confronted me with a kind of dossier. Would I go through his examination paper for him, and correct his mistakes? But I had been pestered by students all afternoon, and I wanted to go and look at the silks in Department Store No. 10. ‘No,’ said I. ‘I won’t.’

At that a theatrical scowl crossed his face, screwing up his eyes and turning down the corners of his mouth. He looked then, with that suggestion of whiskers around his chin, like a Chinese villain in a bad old movie, with a gong to clash him in. I circumvented him nevertheless and, ah yes, I thought, if the Gang of Four were still around, you would have me up against a wall by now, with a placard around my neck and a mob to jeer me, not to consult me about participles.

But my conscience pricked me, and I went back and corrected his damned papers after all.

A lesson

I helped a blind lady over a street crossing near the Gare de Lyon. She looked particularly irritable, cross and demanding, but though born and bred in the 12th arrondissement, turned out to be diffidently gentle. It was a lesson to me not to misjudge the hard-mouthed, sharp-eyed, fast-shoving, middle-aged Parisian housewife. I took the lady first to the post office, then to the pharmacy, and when I left her she said: ‘Now I give you back your liberty.’

After a Mexican dinner

Theatrical characters, it seemed to me, filled the main square of Oaxaca when we strolled down there for a drink after dinner: nut-brown women cloaked in red, and dapper old gents with silvery moustaches, and gaggles of students like opera choruses, and small policemen with nightsticks, and rumble-tumble infants everywhere, and a blind guitar player doing the rounds of the coffees shops, guided by his urchin familiar, and a gringo hippie or two, and barefoot families of peasants loaded with shopping bundles and making, I assumed, for the mountains. The faces were mostly dry and burnt. The movements seemed kind of airy, as though tending towards weightlessness. Among the trees some children were blowing up long sausage balloons and letting them off with a squirt of air into the night sky, where they rotated dizzily off into the darkness like so many flying serpents.

Harry’s

It was in 1946, when the war in Europe was hardly over and Venice was still under the control of the Allied armies, that I first poked my nose through the doors of Harry’s Bar in Venice. I was in my twentieth year, and did not know what to expect. The room was smallish and unexpectedly cosy. At the tables were smoky looking, hooded-eyed, tweedy, sometimes hatted, heavily made-up but rather weatherbeaten persons I took to be members of the Italian aristocracy. Sitting at the bar were three or four officers, the British looking disconcertingly suave to me, the Americans dauntingly experienced. The conversation was low but intense, and everyone looked up as I made my entrance. The officers looked up in a cool, officer-like way, holding their glasses. The patricians looked up patricianly, rather disappointedly, as though they had been hoping for better things. But it was the contact I made with the three pairs of eyes behind the counter that I remember best–the eyes of the boss sitting behind his cash till, the eyes of the two busy barmen in their white jackets. The expression in their gazes seemed to me generic to the place. It was at once interested, faintly amused, speculative and all but collusive. It put me simultaneously at my ease and on my guard, made me feel in some way a member of the establishment, and has kept me going back to Harry’s from that day to this.

Only in London

I was sitting over my croissant and the morning paper in a coffee shop in Marylebone High Street when a tall elegant man in late middle age walked stiffly in and ordered a cup of coffee. He wore a long dark coat and a trilby tilted over his brow, and I rather think spectacles were inclined towards the end of his nose. He looked to me as though he had enjoyed perhaps rather too good a dinner the night before, but he emanated an air of unconcerned, if not actually oblivious, composure. I put him down for some mildly eccentric and very likely scholarly earl, of the Irish peerage, perhaps, and thought to myself that only in London could one still see such a genial figure, at once so urbane and so well used, more or less direct from the eighteenth century.

‘Know who that was?’ said the proprietor, when the man had walked perhaps a little shakily out again. ‘That was Peter O’Toole. Remember him in Lawrence of Arabia?’

No thanks

I went to a place on the Rio Grande which was, I was told, a favourite place for illegal immigrants to cross into the United States. There were a few houses nearby, grazed about by goats, guarded by many dogs, but I found it a chill and spooky spot. It seemed full of secrets, and sure enough one of the neighbours told me that almost every night of the year people from the south clandestinely crossed the river there, and crept damp and dripping through the shrubbery into Texas. ‘You see that forest there,’ my neighbour said, pointing to a confusion of shrubbery beside the water. ‘I’ll bet you there’s people laying there this very minute, waiting for dark, bad men some of them, from far, far away.’ I peered at the bushes through my binoculars, hoping to see glints of weaponry, the smoke of marijuana rising, blackened faces peering back at me through the leaves. All seemed deserted, though. ‘Want to go over and see? See if there’s men there now?’ asked my informant helpfully. ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

Glaswegians

George Square in Glasgow has a family feel to it. People talk to each other easily on benches. People share gambles, compare prices, take their shoes off to give their poor feet a rest. The five-year-old boy riding his motorized buggy around the benches smiles indiscriminately at us all as he blasts past yet again, and his father proudly tells us how much he paid for the machine. Sitting there among those citizens, looking at the civic statues, cursing the buggy boy, while the big buses slide around the square and the City Chambers look paternalistically down at us, I seem to feel a comforting sense of community. Ay, well, responds a freckled woman sitting beside me, that’s all very well, but life’s not all statues in George Square–and what’s a wee bairn doing with a contraption like that anyway, he’ll do himself a damage in the end.

Wildlife

While searching unsuccessfully for kangaroos in the bush of Mount Ainslie, a wooded hill rising immediately above Canberra, I felt a sudden need to relieve myself. I was just doing so when I heard a padding and a shoving and a rustling through the bushes. Kangaroos at last? Very nearly. Crashing among the branches, as I was in the very act, a few feet away from me there appeared a very large, very bearded, white-shorted and energetically sweating Australian, doing his daily jog, I suppose, during the luncheon break from his duties as Executive Officer Grade Two in the Department of Inter-Administration. ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ was all he said, as he bounded distinctly roo-like past.

Two in the morning

At two in the morning I decided that enough was enough, and clambering upstairs I knocked upon the door of M. le Propriétaire’s private apartment. It sounded as though they were having a football match inside and, sure enough, when the door opened it was the hotelier’s three-year-old son, all flushed and tousled with hilarity, who first poked his nose through the crack. ‘A million pardons, madame,’ came his father after him. ‘How can you forgive us? We were having–how do you say it–a little practice match!’

Two Berlins

‘I’m the Boss’ was the first T-shirt slogan I saw, on the ample bosom of a housewife dancing a vigorous jig with her decidedly un-henpecked husband. East Berlin was having a public holiday, and at the hotel beside the lake several thousand citizens, great-grandmothers to babes in arms, were enjoying a family feast in the sunshine. How genially they laughed, danced, sang, drank their beer and ate their pickled pork knuckles! With what indefatigable smiles the two bands alternated, one with the old oom-pah-pah, the other exploring the less raucous fringes of rock!

That same evening, al fresco in the Grünewald woods on the other side of Berlin, I observed two middle-aged ladies, mother and daughter, perhaps, sharing delicate jokes over their asparagus, and balancing their purses carefully on the rims of their glasses to stop the chestnut blossoms falling into their wine.

Algérie Française

I stand in the big public forum of Algiers, outside the government buildings, watching the citizenry. The square is packed to suffocation, the crowd spilling away through the pleasant gardens, up and down steps, across neighbouring squares, until it peters away at its fringes into clutches of foot-weary housewives at the tables of deserted cafes. There stand the grim paratroopers, the high priests of mid-century Algiers, dressed in boots and camouflage suits, festooned with tommy guns, grenades and pistols, lounging about in attitudes fearfully tough and jungly, or swapping badinage with the crowd. There are the queer bigwigs of this confused and unhealthy city, hastening up the steps to the Governorate, or briefly appearing upon some flowered balcony: ramrod generals in kepis, greasy double-breasted politicians, wild creatures of the nocturnal right, bearded plotters or fanatic militarists. A sickly cheer greets a token delegation of Muslims: spindly old men with ragged robes and a covey of bewildered white-robed women, with a trilling of high voices and an arabesque of reedy clarinets. Before long that vast crowd, like so many maudlin drunks outside a saloon, is caught up in histrionics, swayed to a man by the querulous, pitiful passions of Algiers–until the whole assembly, with a roll of drums and a sting of hot tears, bursts into the ‘Marseillaise’, and for a moment all seems clear, all seems honourable.

Allegory in Amsterdam

Standing on a bridge in Amsterdam, I noticed a sleek tourist motor boat, all glass and chrome, gliding down the waterway with a warm hum of diesels. Inside it, snug behind the glass, sat five young Americans in bright open-necked shirts and jeans–servicemen, perhaps, from some air base. They all wore sideburns, and peered through their windows with an air of concentration; and as they passed slowly by, inspecting me, too, as though I were a medieval monument, they emanated a powerful sense of allegory. They were new men in a very old world. Their identity tags flashed at their necks like ritual amulets. They seemed to me like young priests from some distant cloistered seminary, on a mission of dogmatic inquiry.

All American

For me the All American has always been the city bus driver. Since I first saw him clicking that little lever above his change machine, to the tinkle of the nickels and dimes sorting themselves out–since I first heard his timeless response: ‘Yeah, lady, get out at City Hall’–since I first plucked up courage to ask him if he could manage change for a ten-dollar bill–ever since I first made his acquaintance he has exemplified for me The American. His slumped shirtsleeved posture over the wheel, the weary reach of his arm towards that change machine, the occasional cursing at a cab driver, the unflustered answering of questions as he drives, his eyes always flicking to the mirror–all are the hallmarks of a man who knows the world for what it is, knows his own city to be its epitome, and has no illusions left. ‘So it’s a big city? Sure it is. So they’re tall buildings? So?’

Dinkum Aussie

In Darwin you may meet the Australian male at his most confident, on the edge of the great Outback. He may be of any age, this dinkum Aussie. He may be a humdrum bank clerk, or a prospector driven wildly in from his shack in the wilderness to squander his money on drink and loose living. Whoever he is, he is magnificent to meet: as free a spirit as you can find in the world today, shackled by no inhibition of class or disadvantage, with little sense of thrift and still less of decorum, no agonizing reserve, no contempt, no meanness. It is as though he has been relieved of the burden of the centuries, strengthened and cleansed by the southern sun, and allowed to begin history all over again.

Suddenly there emerges…

Suddenly there emerges from some unexpected alley of Kyoto a vision of the legendary Japan–a geisha in all her plastered glory, moving fast and purposeful towards an assignation. Immensely tall is her mound of hair, jet black and shiny; her face is vivid with white and scarlet, her costume is gorgeous with silks, sashes, the gaudiest of clashing colours and the floridest of patterns; and as she hastens awkwardly down the street, embellished from head to foot with paint and brocade, she seems less like a living woman than some fabulous toy, some last masterpiece by Fabergé, enamelled like a queenly trinket, animated by ultimate refinements of clockwork.

A queen rides by

The people around you seem instinct with an air of happy collusion, as though they all know one another, and are linked in one long line of neighbourly acquaintance from Admiralty Arch to the Palace. The soldiers lining the street look fresh faced and rather touching, the policemen are properly genial, and presently you will see, undulating strangely above the crowd, the head of the Queen of England, in a tricorn hat. You can hardly see her horse for the people, but high above the soldiers and the policemen, as she paces grandly by, you may study her pale face–a sad, antique face, it seems to me at such a moment, young but tired, half commanding, half embarrassed, half person, half idea–a face lined with the blood heritage of Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, Roderigo the Cid, Barbarossa and her great-grandmother Victoria, Empress of India.

Saturday lunch in Hong Kong

There seem to be a couple of thousand tables at the restaurant, and at them in uproarious enjoyment sits a vast multitude of Chinese, in families running the gamut from infancy to old age. Nobody is alone. Nobody is silent. The noise is deafening, all that talking and laughter mingling with the clanking of plates, the shouts of waiters from one side of the room to the other, the occasional cries of babies, the sizzling of woks and the Chinese music blaring from hidden loudspeakers. In we go, extremely European, and it is like sitting on the edge of a maelstrom, as we vacantly study the enormous menu (bound in gold and scarlet). But we are offered encouraging nods and incomprehensible explanations from the family at the next table, and we smile ourselves in a baffled and innocuous way across the Chinese mass. In a daze we order, and as by a miracle our food arrives, piping hot and indefinable, and in no time at all we are slurping it happily away, all inhibitions lost, and nodding appreciatively to our neighbours as to the Chinese manner born.

Immigrants

Courtesy of the Department of Immigration, I once stood in the background of an immigration booth at JFK to watch passengers from Europe coming through, and it was revealing to see what emotions passed through their eyes when they noticed me there, looking I suppose like an unusually well-disguised Secret Service agent: suspicion nearly always, ingratiation very often, sometimes a hint of collusion, and occasionally a look I had never encountered before, which I took to be fear. Some of the new arrivals had clearly roistered their way across the Atlantic with champagne and canapés. Others, especially the mothers, the squirmy children, the stout beldames with swollen feet, arrived exhausted at that frenzied airport, into the glaring lights, the unremitting noise and movement of the New World; and as they looked wearily from the immigration officer to me, searching I imagine for some warmth of understanding in our faces, I sometimes thought I detected a flicker of regret in theirs. The officer treated everyone exactly the same, down to the badinage: ‘Oh, please don’t look at my picture there, I look terrible.’ ‘It’s like we always say, ma’am, if you look as sick as you do in your passport, you’re not fit to travel.’

An ugliness

I was once held up on a seashore track by the unloading of live pigs from the Chinese mainland. This is a familiar ugliness of Hong Kong. The pigs are transported in narrow cylindrical cages of wire or wicker, into which they must be jammed so tightly that they lie there grotesquely squashed and distorted, and frequently in pain. That day they were squealing heart-rendingly as they were bumped in barrows at speed towards their slaughter, and I stood helpless and grieving beside the track. At that moment there came in single file from the opposite direction, on their way home from school, a line of small girls in almost exaggeratedly English uniforms, crested blazers, pleated white skirts, small neat knapsacks their backs. Demurely they filed past, their faces exuding school pride and team spirit: and they took not the slightest notice, as they walked daintily by, of the doomed animals screaming in their torture chambers.

‘We’d be famous’

Off the top of a building we fell that day, and sidled across the Hudson River, and in few moments the helicopter stopped, shook itself and gingerly descended a couple of hundred feet. Looking out of my side window I found myself hovering, with a disrespectful clatter, close to the nose of the Statue of Liberty. We hung there for a minute, and the sunshine reflected off the water hung about her head. Then, with a last curtsey, we flew away. ‘If we hit her we’d be famous,’ I said to the pilot as we darted off. ‘What a way to go,’ he said. ‘I’d be the guy who assaulted the Statue of Liberty, and you’d be instant Shakespeare.’ Later I climbed up the statue from the ground, and sympathized with the lady who wrote in the visitors’ book that it was ‘a nice sight but the stairs weren’t that wide’.

Subterraneanism

The station was excavated in the early days of the New York subway system, and suggested to me a particularly cramped and airless cave, or perhaps a sunken submarine. The lady at the booth was elderly and all white, almost albino. Her face was ashen. Her eyes seemed to have no pupils. It was as though she had never in her life emerged into the daylight, but had been born and bred down there. When I asked her how she liked working underground, and whether she did not miss the sun, she was rather affronted. What could I know about it? She had worked in the subway for thirty years, and did not regret a moment of it. She loved the old station, liked to see the trains go by, and had many friends among the passengers; and, sure enough, when a black man walked by he called out unexpectedly to that pallid lady behind her grille: ‘Howya doin’, ma’am? Keepin’ well?’ ‘I’m fine, Jack, thank you kindly,’ she replied. ‘Keepin’ just fine.’

In Old Vienna

Watch now–stand back–here come a couple of ministers down the steps from the Council Chamber in the Austrian parliament, portly important men, deep in portly and important matters of state–and swoosh, like a rocket from his office leaps the porter, buttoning his jacket–out of his door, panting a little, urgently smoothing his hair, down the steps two at a go, bitte, bitte!–just in time, my goodness only just in time to open the door for Their Excellencies, who acknowledge his grovel only with slight inclinations of their heads, so as not to interrupt the flow of their discourse, as they lumber out beneath the figures of Minerva and her attendant sages to their waiting limousines.

Altercation on the Zephyr

I had pleasant companions at breakfast on the California Zephyr–a girl from Fresno who had never been on a train before, and two railroad buffs who kept me informed about the state of the track. However, I did have one altercation in the dining car. My ticket, I had been told, entitled me to anything I liked on the menu, but when I asked for cornflakes and scrambled eggs I was told I was entitled to one or the other, but not both. I called for the supervisor to expostulate, but I did not get far. I had got it wrong, the functionary said, not unkindly, and I quote him word for word: ‘You’re not from this country. You don’t understand the lingo.’ But the girl from Fresno thought that man had been rather rude, and one of the train buffs offered to share his scrambled eggs with me–only fair, really, because I had already urged upon him some of my Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade.

A very Irish lady

A very Irish lady, sitting beside me as the ferry chugged doggedly across Sydney harbour, told me sadly that her car had just been stolen, and deliberately driven over a bluff. Never mind, I said, it was only a thing. Her eyes misted. ‘Only a thing! Sure that’s the way to look at it. Only a thing! I must look at it that way. God bless you, God bless you for that!’ ‘God bless you too,’ I responded lamely, not knowing, as so often happens in discourse with the Irish, anything better to say.

Liveable city

Following the tourist signs towards the Old Town District and the Chinatown of Portland, Oregon, and expecting the usual harmless flummery of restored gas lamps and dragon gates, I crossed Burnside Street and found myself in a corner of hell. Suddenly all around me were the people of Outer America, flat out on the sidewalk, propped against walls, sitting on steps, some apparently drugged, some evidently about to vomit and nearly all of them, it occurred to me, idly wondering whether it was worth while mugging me as I passed. Portland has repeatedly been voted one of the Most Liveable Cities in the United States, but, thought I, you must choose the right part to live in…

A performance in Athens

On a lovely spring day I climbed the Mouseion hill in Athens, all among the olive trees, to see the celestial view of the Parthenon from its summit. The morning smelt delectably of pines, flowers and dust, and my mind was full of Hellenic glories. Halfway up a Greek sprang from the bushes, opened his mackintosh wide and revealed to me his manly equipment. Well, I supposed, why not? Greek art had been displaying masculine glories for a few thousand years, and for that matter the sentries outside the royal palace, down in the city, were something of a disappointment to one of romantic fancy. Goose-stepping up and down in their full and famous finery, they looked to me less like soldiers of lyrical myth than farm boys in drag–bulging, rather sweaty young men who might easily, in their off hours, mount a performance on the hill of Mouseion.

Positive identification

I was excited when somebody told me that the bronze statue of Enver Hoxha, the late dictator of Albania, still existed in Tirana, preserved in the Monuments Factory where it had been cast. Not so long before it had been the very centrepiece of the capital, dominating Skanderbeg Square until the rebellious populace toppled it–and him. In a flash I was there, accompanied by a young Albanian engineer of my acquaintance. A watchman directed us to a windowless warehouse, apparently sealed off for ever. ‘Enver’s in there,’ he said.

We circled this gloomy mausoleum until I found a spy-hole between the bricks, and there Enver was, recumbent in the shadows, just his bronze thigh to be glimpsed. It was enough. My engineer positively identified the old monster, and he should know. As a student he had been in the fore-front of the rejoicing crowd when the statue was pulled down in Skanderbeg Square. ‘I pissed on it,’ he complacently recalled, and you can’t get more positive than that.

Last post

Even in the very last days of British Hong Kong one could occasionally see an imperial exhibition of the old kind, bands and sergeant majors shouting, every plume out of its box, judges in wigs and red robes, medals jangling on officers’ breasts, swords, white gloves and His Excellency the Governor in full fig. I watched such a parade one Armistice Sunday, from a balcony above Statue Square, and all was as it always was. The commands were barked. The sad old hymns were sung. Trumpets trumpeted. Salutes were saluted.

Around the Cenotaph a handful of Europeans, mostly tourists I suspect, stood watching in twos and threes. Just behind them the Sunday multitude of Filipino women was settling down to its weekly jollities, spreading themselves happily on the ground, chattering, laughing, fussing about with paper bags, and beyond them again the life of the great city proceeded altogether oblivious of the few score imperialists, with guards and musicians, pursuing their rituals at the war memorial.

Breakfast Cokes

At breakfast in my Lithuanian hotel a long, long table covered with brown velveteen cloth is occupied by twenty young Russian males, while at the end of the dim-lit room there sits alone in silence at her victuals a woman who might be type-cast as a lady commissar: severe, spectacled, muscular, her hair in a bun and her skirts long and heavy. A solitary waiter in shirtsleeves serves us–thick black coffee (they’re out of milk), fried eggs with peas, black bread and very good cheese. Halfway through the meal we are each given a bottle of Coca-Cola. Most of the men drink theirs there and then, in tandem with the coffee, but I notice that as the lady commissar leaves the room, wiping her mouth carefully with her paper napkin and studiously not looking anyone on the face, she takes hers with her.

Grand cru

Being a crude islander, and an iconoclast at that, I decided to cock a snook. I bought for the first and probably the last time in my life a grand cru Montrachet–Marquis de Laguiche, vintage 1993. I got a kindly waitress in a cafe to uncork it for me, and picked up a hefty ham and cheese baguette to eat with it. ‘Kindly direct me’, I said to a viniculturist who happened to arrive at that moment in his Range Rover, ‘to the exact patch of soil that has produced this bottle of wine.’ He raised his eyebrows slightly when he saw its label and the napkin-wrapped sandwich in my hand. It was not much of a day for a picnic, he said, but perhaps the wine would help–and with a wonderfully subtle suggestion of disapproval he pointed me the way to Montrachet. ‘Bon appétit,’ he brought himself to say, for your Burgundy wine man is nothing if not gentlemanly.

Through a hole in the wall

I looked through a big hole just hammered in the Berlin Wall, and saw into the patch of no-man’s-land beyond. It was littered with rolls of discarded barbed wire, surrounded by ruined buildings and floored with the dismal mixture of sand, gravel and rubble that had resulted from three decades of herbicide–for nothing was allowed to soften the allegory of the Wall. Three East German soldiers were in there, one tilted back on a kitchen chair with his cap over his eyes, the others kicking an old steel helmet around in the dust.

Homesickness

In Moscow I made the acquaintance of Guy Burgess, a renegade British diplomat who had been a Soviet agent for some years but was by then sadly nostalgic for England and his mother. I could not help feeling sorry for him, and we agreed to go together one evening to the Bolshoi. We arranged to meet outside the theatre door, and when I got there I saw him waiting for me on the steps. I waved a greeting as I approached him through the crowd, and he waved a response, but by the time I reached the door he had vanished. I never saw him again.

Grecian collusion

I had taken a room in a private house on the outskirts of Monemvasia, and in the evening I walked a mile or so to a taverna for my supper. It was very full and very lively–local people mostly, with some merry Americans. We drank large amounts of furiously resinated retsina out of metal mugs, and I seldom had a happier evening. In the small hours I staggered up the road again to my lodgings, and my landlady, in a flowered housecoat over her nightdress, pulled back the bars and undid the chains of her front door to let me in. I expected her to be tight lipped and disapproving; instead she greeted me with a sly and knowing smile of collusion, as if she had been enjoyably up to no good herself. I went to bed incoherently whistling, and awoke in the morning fresh as a daisy.

Nothing to say

In the bad times of communism a Polish colleague drove me out to a writers’ retreat near Zakopane in the southern mountains, and on the way we were stopped by the police. My friend, a man of great charm and intelligence, did not speak when the policeman tapped on his window. He merely took his driving licence from his inside pocket, tucked a banknote into it and handed it out. The policeman did not speak, either. He had no need to. He just took the note, handed the licence back and walked away. My friend drove on without a word to me. There was nothing to say.

Who cared?

It was midnight, and wartime. Sarajevo, pitted all over with bullet marks, was dark and shuttered, and the airport was closed, but I got a seat on a minibus going down to the coast. There were four other passengers–a Swede, a Finn, a Croat and an Englishman. Behind us a second busload was following us through the night. The snow was deep, every now and then we were stopped at road blocks, sometimes we clattered across a temporary bridge beside a blown-up original. Scattered ruins passed dismally by–house after house gaping in the darkness, with no sign of life but for a single dim light, perhaps, on a ground floor, or a fire burning in a brazier. The awful gorges through the mountains loomed around us, dark and dangerous. At about two in the morning we stopped, and our driver got out and peered rather helplessly into the black emptiness behind him, up the highway banked with snow-drifts. ‘What’s happening?’ said the Englishman in front of me. ‘What have we stopped for?’ The driver explained that the other bus seemed to be lost: there was no sign of its lights, and he was worried that it might have got into trouble back there. The Englishman stretched, pulled his coat more tightly round his shoulders, and settled down to sleep again. ‘Who cares?’ he said, but he may have been joking.

Too late

Long ago I came across the ruin of one of the great Anglo-Irish mansions of the old Ascendancy, and paused to imagine all the blithe existence it had once known–hunt balls and elegant dowagers and Etonians larking about with girls in the rose gardens. I remarked to a passing Irishman that it seemed a shame all the festive and colourful life of the house should have come to an end, but he replied, ‘Oh, wouldn’t you think it was too late for that kind of fandango?’ He was right, of course, and years later I came across that ruin again, and found I could no longer hear the hunting horns, or glimpse Lady W’s ancestral pearls, still less imagine those young English toffs living it up among the bushes.

City of Art and Culture

So enamoured were the Nazis of Weimar that they erected there one of their most celebrated and characteristic monuments. The site they chose was the lovely hill of Ettersberg, just outside the city, which Goethe had long before made famous–he loved to sit and meditate beneath an oak tree there. On my last day in Weimar I paid a visit to this place, now a popular tourist site well publicized in the town. My taxi driver, a gregarious soul, chatted cheerfully to me all the way. Had I enjoyed my stay in Weimar? Did I visit the Goethehaus? What did I think of the food? Did I know that Weimar was to be the European City of Culture in 1999, at the end of the millennium? Congratulations, I said. Recognition once more for the City of Art and Music. ‘Exactly,’ replied the taxi driver, and just then we turned off the highway up to Buchenwald.

God bless Swissness!

Halfway through my stay at Weggis I cracked my head open entering the lake for a swim, and had to have it stitched. How glad I was of Swissness then! Calmly and steadily the Herr Doktor worked, assisted by Frau Doktor and by their son the computer specialist, and delicate was his technique, and state-of-the-art his equipment, and whenever I opened my eyes I saw through the spotless windows of his surgery the glistening lake, streaked with leisurely waves and ringed with green hills, like a visual tranquillizer.

Norway, 1950s

Norwegian writers still looked wonderfully writerly then, painters were like painters, middle-aged ladies properly middle aged and cardiganed. I happened in Oslo one night to see some members of a theatre cast assembling for a post-performance supper in a restaurant, and watching their meticulously staged arrivals, their accomplished greetings and their mastery of incidental business was almost as stimulating as seeing the play itself.

Welsh pride

In Argentinian Patagonia, long ago, Welsh people established a colony where they could speak their own language and live in their own way, far from the intrusive English. They called it simply Y Wladfa, The Colony, and a century and a half later, when Welshness was fading there, in a farm on the outskirts of Trevelin I found a last archetype of its settlers. He was like the smile, as it were, on the face of the Cheshire Cat. Not a soul in his household understood Welsh besides himself, but they all clustered eagerly around us as we talked–a jolly Argentinian wife, diverse unidentified children and grandchildren, dogs and chickens and a horse tied to the fence; and with his cloth cap tilted on his head, his hands in his pockets, that Welshman of South America touched my heart not with melancholy at all, but with grateful pride to be Welsh myself.

‘Ai, ai, ai’

Several times during my stay in Rome I came across a couple of countrymen who seemed, in their quaint fustian clothes and peculiar shoes, to have stepped more or less out of the Middle Ages. They were like substantial fauns, haunting the city out of its remote rural past. These medieval figured seemed to me wonderfully exotic, until late one night I encountered the pair of them anxiously consulting a bus timetable beneath a streetlight in the Corso. Then I realized that in fact they piquantly illustrated the matter-of-factnesss of the city. Nobody took the slightest notice of them, as they huddled there; they looked up and asked me for advice about the best way to get home, but when I told them I was a foreigner, ‘Ai, ai, ai,’ they said theatrically, like Italians in old movies.

The first of the Morgans

On the land of Mr Harold Childs, a horse breeder of Harolyn Hill in Vermont, is buried the stallion Justin Morgan, the only progenitor of that superb American creature the Morgan horse. Mr Childs kindly allowed me to visit the horse’s grave, down the hill below his house, and when I walked back he was waiting for me with a present. It was a short piece of lead piping. ‘Now this is true,’ he said. ‘Just here where we’re standing there used to be the stables where Justin Morgan was kept, and when we was digging up there on the hill we found this old lead piping, came straight down the hill here, and a branch of that pipe it came right across the yard here and took the water to the stables. Now that’s a fact.

‘Now I’m going to give you this bit of that pipe. You can say–and it’s true–that Justin Morgan drank from the very water that came through this bit of pipe. You take it away with you, now.’ I took it gratefully and I have treasured it ever since. ‘I shall mount it on wood,’ I said as I started the car to leave, ‘and I’ll have a card saying “From this pipe drank Justin Morgan, the first of all the Morgan horses”.’ Mr Childs tipped his hat politely, in the old American way. ‘Good idea,’ he said.

Hell’s traffic

Nobody could be much less Neapolitan than I am, and when at last we reached the hotel, limp with excitement, amusement and exhaustion, and I had paid our driver his exorbitant but entirely justified fare, I told the hotel receptionist that I wanted to go home. ‘Don’t say that,’ he replied. ‘Wait till you get up to your room, and everything will seem different.’

So it did. Dusk was falling by then, the harbour was speckled with small fishing boats, and in the distance Vesuvius loomed hazy in the half-light. The docks were full of white cruise liners, and even as I watched one of them slipped away from the quay towards the open sea. For a long time I could see her lights, fainter and fainter to the west–treading her way, I liked to imagine, towards calm realms of order. But it did not make me in the least homesick. The receptionist was right. I rang for a bottle of wine, and we sat there on our balcony in perfect contentment, while hell’s traffic snarled convivially below.

Frenchness like a cloak

Nothing had changed in the corner restaurant, the one with the awnings and the menu in the polished brass frame. It remained quintessential France, as we islanders have loved and loathed it for several centuries. Madame remained the epitome of everything false, narrow-minded and unreliable. One waiter seemed, as ever, to be some sort of duke, the other was evidently the village idiot. At the table next to mine sat a prosperous local family out for Sunday dinner, well known to the proprietress and esteemed throughout the community–unsmiling, voluminously napkinned, serious and consistent eaters who sometimes, eyeing me out of the corners of their eyes, exchanged in undertones what were doubtless sly Anglophobics before returning sluggishly to their veal.

I do not doubt the bill was wrong. I am sure Madame disliked me as much as I detested her. The veal was, as a matter of fact, rather stringy. But what a contrary delight it all was! How excellent still the vegetables! How much better the wine in France! How stately that duke! How endearing the idiot! With what real gratitude, evading the final scrutiny of the prefectorial table, and sweetly returning Madame’s shifty glittering smile, did I wrap the Frenchness of that cafe around me like a cloak, and return cherished to the autoroute!

They thought not

In Beijing the compound called Zhongnanhai is the very heart of the Chinese communist despotism. Its main entrance is to the south, with two great guardian lions. The Red Flag flies from a mast outside, and within the gate an inner wall is inscribed with the cabbalistic text ‘Serve the People’. You cannot see past it, though. Two armed sentries stand there, with two more over their shoulders. They look distinctly unwelcoming, as they stare motionless and expressionless into the street: and sure enough, when I asked them if I could take a stroll inside Zhongnanhai, they seemed to think not.

The Smile Test

The Smile Test is the system I employ to gauge the responsiveness of cities, and it entails smiling relentlessly, if not unnervingly, at everyone I meet walking along a street. I devised it in Vancouver, which remains a good place to test the system. Pay attention now, as we try it out in Robson Street, one of the raciest of the city’s downtown boulevards. Many of our subjects disqualify themselves from the start, so obdurately do they decline eye contact. Others are so shaken that they have no time to register a response before we have passed by. A majority look back with a blank but generally amenable expression, as though they would readily return a smile if they could be sure it was required of them, and were quite certain that the smile was for them and not for somebody else. A few can just summon up the nerve to offer a diffident upturn at the corners of the mouth, but if anybody smiles back instantly, instinctively, joyously, you can be sure it is a visiting American, or an immigrant not yet indoctrinated. Whenever I go to Vancouver people ask me how they’re doing in the Smile Test. I respond with a nervous smile myself.

Suburban enchantment

In the evening I saw Die Fledermaus, staged with a genuine rollicking panache, and so instinct with the magic of the waltz, the whirl of white skirts and the flick of tailcoats, that when I inspected the faces of the women around me, Soviet proletarians every one, I found them glazed with a true suburban enchantment.

GORGE

One person in particular at Iceland, the Sydney skating rink, seemed to me quintessentially Australian. He was about five years old, I suppose, blond, lively, tough and unsmiling. He could not, it seemed, actually skate, but he was adept at running about the rink on his blades, and his one purpose of the morning was to gather up the slush that fell off other people’s boots, and throw it at passing skaters. This task he pursued with skilful and unflagging zeal. Hop, hop, he would abruptly appear upon the rink, and, picking a likely target, staggering his way across the ice, inexorably he would hunt that victim down until slosh! the missile was dispatched–and hobble, hobble, quick as a flash he was out of the rink again, gathering more slush.

He hardly ever fell over, he seldom missed, and he did everything with a dexterous assiduity. When I asked him his name he spelt out GORGE with his finger on the rail of the rink; when I asked him if he was enjoying himself he just nodded grimly; and in my mind’s eye I saw him thirty years from then, exploding into a company meeting perhaps with an irresistible takeover bid, or relentlessly engineering the resignation of a rival undersecretary. I kept my eye firmly on him as I walked out of Iceland, for instinct told me he was assembling slush for me.

Seen from a bus

I sit in a motionless bus near the Sugar Loaf, at Rio de Janeiro, at a place where a small park runs down to the sea. There are military offices nearby, and in constant twos and threes colonels and captains walk by carrying briefcases. My eye is captured, though, by a solitary middle-aged man hanging about at the edge of the park. He bears himself elegantly, slim and erect in a well-cut grey suit, but there is something wrong with him. It seems to be partly physical, partly mental and partly, perhaps, too much coffee. He can never get comfortable. If he sits on a bench, after a moment he gets up again. If he takes a turn around the grass, he abruptly stops. Sometimes he looks up at the hill above, but it seems only to disappoint him, as if he cannot see what he is looking for up there. He inspects the passing officers keenly (was he once a colonel or captain himself?) but he recognizes none. He gazes longingly out to sea, but the sun gets in his eyes. When my bus starts, and we move away from the park, I wave at him through the window, he waves abstractedly back–but not at me, I think, not at me.

Very simple matters

‘Certainly,’ said the government spokesman, perusing my list of questions. ‘By all means, these are very simple matters. We can attend to them for you at once. As I told you, it is our duty! It is what we are paid for! I myself have to attend to an important meeting this afternoon–you will excuse me I hope?–but I will leave all these little matters with our good Mrs Gupta and all will be taken care of. I will telephone with the answers myself without fail–or it not myself, then Mrs Gupta will be sure to telephone you either today or tomorrow morning. Did you sign our register? A duplicate signature here if you would not mind, and the lady at the door will issue you with the requisite application form for a pass–it will make everything easier for you, you see. Have no fear, Mrs Gupta will take care of everything.’

But neither he nor Mrs Gupta ever did ring.

I smell

I drove direct from the horrible purlieus of San Cristóbal, one of the worst of the Lima barriadas, to have tea at the Country Club in San Isidro. The odour of the slum went with me, clinging to my clothes and the soles of my shoes like some blasphemous travesty of incense, and as I sat there among the little black dresses and the sticky cakes, the greying distinctions and the foppish playboys, the starched nannies and the exquisite children on the lawn, the chic and the cultivation and the chit-chat of urbanity–as I sat there with the squalor still in my hair I could not help remembering, Pharisaical it seems in retrospect, Dr Johnson’s celebrated differentiation, I smell, you stink.

Bastille Day

For hours I had been hanging about the airport at Kharkov, fobbed off by supercilious airline employees through delay after delay in a bitterly cold and comfortless waiting room, until at last the patience of my Soviet passengers expired. They found a boarding ramp, pushed it on to the tarmac, climbed up to the aircraft and, brushing aside the horrified stewardesses, plumped themselves in their seats and called for vodka. I followed in their wake rejoicing, feeling as though we had stormed life’s varied Kremlins.

At the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem

I looked at Adolf Eichmann to see how he was reacting, half expecting to see some flicker of perverse pride crossing his face. But he was sitting well back in his chair, with his hands in his lap, blinking frequently and moving his lips, and he reminded me irresistibly of some elderly pinched housewife in a flowered pinafore, leaning back on her antimacassar and shifting her false teeth as she listened to the railing gossip of a neighbour. It was only towards the end of the morning, several hours, ten thousand words and an eternity of horrors later, that the old lady in the pinny began to sway and fidget a little in her chair, as though she were pining for a nice cup of tea.

Waiting for Churchill

Up on the mountainside, while the press of the world jostle for scoops and angles in the hostelries below, old Sir Winston lies in bed. He lies there in seclusion, the last of the giants, reading his newspapers and confounding his pleurisies while they wait for him to die. Some of my colleagues depict him demanding brandy, puffing cigars, writing his own health bulletins, calling for splendid enormous meals. For myself, when I was up the mountain one evening I thought I heard a sound from the villa, above the sweetness of the birds and the distant sawing of a woodman. It came from an upstairs window and it sounded to me uncommonly like a rich, quixotic, irrepressible, ageless Harrovian chuckle. ‘How come you heard that and nobody else? You got influence some place? Hey, garçon, two dries.’

Home thoughts from Barbados

The parishioners who came to the service were nearly all black people, sugar workers and their families from the island estates, but few of them were really strangers to me. Their white muslins and their wide straw hats once graced the English social fabric, and when they sat down expectantly for the sermon the rustle of their petticoats and the crackling of their starch filtered though to me across the pages of many an Edwardian memoir. I knew what hymns they would sing with gusto, for I had heard the same tentative starts and communal diapasons at many a grumbling British army church parade. The verger in his black cassock I had often met before, pointing out the ravages of death-watch beetle in the shires, and when the piano struck up its preliminary chord I knew from her air of proud command which of those old friends would be the one who always comes in half a beat before the beginning of the verse. ‘Amen, amen,’ murmured the congregation at the end of the sermon, and it was like the clatter of hobnailed boots on the stone-flagged floor of a dairy.

End of a battle

The Israelis had won. Tanks clattered by. Trucks came and went. Soldiers climbed aboard and waved goodbye to each other. It rained, and I prepared to move on too, but just then a rainbow came. ‘Look, a rainbow,’ I said to a bearded and taciturn sergeant not long from Romania, and added sentimentally: ‘Omen of peace!’ ‘It is not a reasonable analogy to the present situation,’ he replied, shifting his Sten gun on his shoulder. ‘God showed Noah the rainbow as a promise for no more floods in the future. When He merely wished to show that Noah could now leave the ark, He dispatched a small bird, carrying a piece of tree in its snout.’

Among the treasures

In the vaults of the Central Bank of Persia, before the Iranian Revolution, were kept the priceless and legendary Crown Jewels, in a huge underground strongroom. I was down there one crowded weekday, when it was open to the public, and came across an agreeable case of brooches and little jewelled watches. I stooped to examine them more closely, and as I did so the treasure house suddenly reverberated with the ear-splitting blast of an alarm hooter. Everyone froze. Not a word was spoken. The hooter went on hooting. For a moment nothing else happened, and then a smart young woman in green walked with composure across the room. She avoided the case containing the Gika of Nadir Shah, with its diamond ornaments of bayonets and gun barrels around a monumental emerald. She ignored the sceptre presented to Reza Shah by the people of Azerbaijan, with its gold lions rampant around a jewelled globe. She took no notice of the Sea of Light inherited from the first Mogul Emperor of India. Instead she walked calmly through the room, utterly silent but for the clicking of her heels, directly between the display cases to me. ‘May I please ask you,’ she said with an amiable smile, ‘to remove your elbow from that metal bar around the jewel case?’ I moved my arm. The hooter stopped. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and walked composedly back again.

Affronted

‘Those Algerians!’ expostulated an elderly politician in Reykjavik, when our conversation turned to politics. He wagged his beard irritably, as elderly Nordic politicians do. ‘They’re nothing but troublemakers. They were up here, you know, making mischief–Einar Arnarson, I think it was, he put paid to them, he and Jon Olafsson and one or two others’–and suddenly it dawned upon me, as his sharp affronted eyes blazed into mine, that he was talking about the Barbary Pirates.

A lovely dream

The day I arrived in Harar, Ethiopia, I spent a happy hour in the market, sitting beside a courteous silversmith and watching the rural citizenry at its shopping. There was nothing ugly to be seen there, nothing sham, nothing pretentious. It was like watching an assembly of beautiful lithe-limbed animals, so easily did all those people move, so naturally, so discreetly; and as I sat there on my stone seat, the craftsman tinkling away beside me, or engaged in earnest but desultory haggling with half-naked but otherwise impeccable debutantes, I thought how fortunate were those creatures of nature, those children of the thatched hut and the empty places, those sisters of specious innocence. But alas, even there the dream would soon be over.

Fair enough

Would they be casting their votes as Jamaicans, I asked the Kingston Rastafarians, in the forthcoming elections? The idea horrified them. ‘Tell your Queen Elizabeth,’ they said, ‘that the suffering Ethiopians assembled here from the corners of the earth, yea verily from the four corners, it is written, the seventh year of the seventh epoch, yea verily the time has come, Abja!–tell her that we are aliens in this land, and cannot vote in elections imposed upon us by our oppressors. Fair enough?’

Proverb in Formosa

The Vice-President of Nationalist China, in his garden on the island of Formosa, folded his intricate old hands in his lap and projected a Chinese proverb at me. Beneath the trees on the edge of the lawn a stalwart servant waited in attentive silence, and a few soft raindrops were spattering the foliage in a sly, oriental kind of way. ‘Among our people we have a saying,’ the Vice-President said. ‘“It is foolish to judge the character of a man by the complexion of his face.”’ And his pale eyes flickered at me, as an old experienced tiger’s eyes might blink in the forests of the night.

Opposite directions

Very early one morning two men met outside my tent on a mountainside in Wales. The younger of the two was a tatterdemalion Welsh shepherd, cloth capped, driving his sheep down to the road with a clatter and scurry, calling to his dog, shouting guttural Welsh encouragements and waving his thick stick like an apparition. The elder, a scholarly looking man in plus fours, was evidently a believer in rhythmic breathing, for as he walked he whistled to himself a monotonous Bach-like melody–two beats to each footstep, round and round, over and over again in an endless classical cadence. The two men passed each other as I gaped at them through my tent flap. The shepherd brandished his stick and grunted casually; the scholar interrupted his fugue to offer a greeting in a reedy academic voice; and so they disappeared into the rain, in opposite directions.

At the theatre

The audience at a Tokyo Kabuki theatre consists mostly of women in kimonos, following the drama with an informed avidity I have seen paralleled only among rugby crowds in South Africa. You sit there wedged between the brocades, baffled by the tortuosities of the plot, swathed in the sickly perfumes of Japan, while high above you in the balcony the narrator declaims his lines majestically from a tasselled lectern. The man beside him plucks dreamily or astringently at his ancient instrument, and on the magnificent stage the queer medieval figures sit and strut and gesticulate with falsetto voices and grand flamboyant costumes. All that is grand, awful or ablaze in the old Japan lives on, twitching and quivering, in the theatre of the Kabuki.

Schooner travel

At Granada the schooner captain kindly signed me on as crew, and to avoid awkward questions stuffed me away in a cubbyhole of his vessel until the heavy footfalls of authority had died away along the quay. When I was released I crept out blinking to find the schooner already scudding gaily out of harbour, and the captain grinning beside the wheel with a tin mug of rum in his hand. African, British, French and Indian ancestors had all contributed to his ship’s company, and in the tiny starboard deckhouse, I presently discovered, there resided a seductive mulatto camp follower, immured there silently like a lady about to be sawn in half. We all slept on the open deck, and when the moon came up I heard somebody murmur to this nubile shipmate: ‘You got your moonburn lotion, honey?’

The clock and the nougat

‘My brother-in-law,’ said the woman I had given a lift to, who was dressed funereally and clutched a posy of lilies in a sanctimonious sort of way–‘my brother-in-law has told me that the British are more honest than we Calabrese. Is this so?’ I had taken a peculiar dislike to this person, and had noticed that she was eyeing my travelling clock with an interest unmistakably covetous. So when she asked me again, wriggling in her seat in a manner at once obsequious and obscurely arrogant–‘Eh, is it true?’–I answered her harshly. ‘Perfectly true,’ said I. She was unperturbed. When I dropped her she said nastily, ‘Haven’t you got some small memento to give me, some small gift or souvenir?’ ‘Only the memory of our meeting,’ said I firmly, shoving the travelling clock out of sight beneath the dashboard–and she shamed me then, by pressing into my hand a large and rather nasty bar of nougat.

The portrait

Brigadier Abdul Karim Kassem has today led a violent coup d’état which has suddenly made him the prime minister of Iraq, and he has invited the gentlemen of the press to meet him at the Ministry of Information. Soldiers stand guard with tommy guns, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Information (since this morning) are in attendance, and pointedly on the floor of the room is the new leader’s camp bed, with a pair of green striped pyjamas folded primly on its pillow. In a corner stands a large, enthusiastic and evidently freshly painted portrait of the brigadier. ‘May we ask the Prime Minister’, says an American reporter with a courtly air, ‘if that is a new portrait of His Excellency, and, if so, who painted it?’ The Prime Minister smiles a glittering smile and is silent, so his deputy answers for him. ‘Yes, it is a new one. It was painted by the people. It is a present.’ ‘All the Iraqi people like this government very much,’ adds the Prime Minister then. ‘Ask the people yourselves. When I go into the street everybody is friendly.’ The American clears his throat. The American public would be interested to know, he feels sure, if it is not too personal a question, if any particular one of the Iraqi people painted the portrait, and if so, which? But ‘Gentlemen,’ intervenes the Minister of Information, ‘I think we are all very tired,’ so we shake hands with His Excellency and filter through the sentries into the street.

‘For heaven’s sake’

One Christmas in Vienna I went for a walk in a park before returning to the hotel where my Christmas dinner was roasting. There was hardly a woman in the park. Everywhere the husbands of Vienna, with their children, aimlessly but expectantly loitered, expelled from under the womanly feet of the city while Gretchen and Helga got on with the job. Christmas is a time when old hierarchies are restored. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I could hear the housewives of all Europe grumbling that day, ‘go out and get yourself some fresh air, and take the children with you.’

Wine of the country

The Colonel’s family had lived in the same Scottish Lowlands house for several centuries, but as a retired widower he lived unostentatiously, and I was greeted with a homely plate of scones and raspberry jam, and a pot of tea in a blue flowered teapot beneath a bobbled cosy. He ate and drank his ration with enthusiasm, but very soon afterwards fetched a bottle of whisky from the sideboard and poured a couple of glasses–‘Wine of the country–I always say, you should drink the wine of the country.’

He looked like an Irish deerhound, very tall and elongated, his figure only slightly stooped with age, and he was dressed tweedily, with shoes that looked handmade. At first sight he did not appear to be Scottish at all, but after a while, through that expensively anglicized exterior there began to appear something pricklier, more gingery, more ruthless, perhaps, and I realized in fact that I was talking to a man almost aboriginally Scots. His attitudes were mellow. His subjects of conversation ranged from Bonnie Prince Charlie (‘All those Stuarts were a rotten lot’) to the price of claret (‘I used to get it from a man I know in Bordeaux, but now I just go to the supermarket’) to snooker on TV (‘They’re very sporting fellows, extremely sporting’). He alludes now and then to some duke, marquis or other (‘by way of being a relative of mine’), but only to tell a comic tale about him, discredit a medieval anecdote or explain the genesis of a portrait. It was raining when I left him, but he came to the bottom of the garden to wave me away, and as I turned the corner of the drive I glanced in the driving mirror to see that old inheritor of blood feud and cattle raid regain the shelter of his door, as though he were escaping a royal posse, in a single mighty stride.

Holy experiences

Consider this family of Irish people, sitting beneath a canopy in the drizzle of a Marian shrine in County Waterford. The image of the Virgin is not very old, but stands strangely half in shadow on a rock wall in a frond-filled grotto, with a stream running below. During the last few months it has repeatedly been seen to move of its own accord, and to be transfigured. Sometimes its face changes into that of Christ, and sometimes it apparently comes to life–early last night, a bright-eyed lady at the gate tells me, she met the Virgin walking silently by the stream. The family sits there, mother, father, adult son and daughter, in a determined common trance, their eyes fixed immovably upon the statue on the rock–willing it to move, praying for a manifestation, clutching rosaries, lips moving sometimes but bodies still as images themselves. They were like addicts at a gaming table. The rain fell all around.

Sacred memories

I went to the 300th-anniversary march of the Prentice Boys in Londonderry (aka Derry), by which the Protestant Orange Order remembers a famous victory over the Catholics, and never did I see such a variety of remarkable faces, pinched, florid, genial or fierce beneath their bowler hats or tam-o’-shanters. Never were pipe-and-drum bands more fervent. Never was I in a crowd so absolutely united in its bigotries. Thirty thousand Orangemen took part in the march, and for five hours an air of perfervid dedication enveloped the city. There were tiny boys of three or four marching with the rest. There were half-crazed bass drummers and clown-like drum majors, juggling their batons, balancing them on the ends of their noses, strutting and gesturing like circus performers. There were ranks of stern elderly men, bowler hatted, some carrying swords, all swathed in the regalia of the Orange Order. Halfway down the procession the hero of the day, a large Presbyterian clergyman, came swaggering by with a cohort of aides, smiling here and there and cheered along the way like a dictator moving among his adoring subjects. Hour after hour the beat of the drums reverberated, and when I left Derry the Orangemen were still streaming across the Craigavon Bridge, banners flying, drummers prancing, strutting infants, determined old men in medals and bowlers marching in steadfast line abreast.

Reciprocal ill will

I can see to this day the face of a Benedictine monk I encountered at the Bavarian monastery of Andechs. In his late twenties, I would guess, he looked more like an interrogator than a confessor, far more accusatory than forgiving. Tall, thin, pale, unsmiling, cold eyed, pious as all hell, when I asked him the way to the monastic cemetery he did not at first reply at all, but simply turned his cod-like features upon me with raised eyebrows. When at last he gave me a curt and loveless answer I hardly had time to thank him (not that I was planning to be very fulsome about it) before he turned on his heel with a flounce of his cassock and disappeared inside the church. I hope he choked on his vespers.

‘Oes heddwch?’

Assembled on stage at the National Eisteddfod, the great cultural festival of the Welsh nation, are the Bards of the Druidical Orders, a strange conclave of eminent citizens, doctors and philosophers, writers and politicians, dressed in long hooded robes of white and grey. They are presided over by sages and attended by nymphs in green, by matrons with horns of plenty, by harpists and by trumpeters, and they are there to honour the victor of a poetry competition. The winner’s identity is a secret, but he is sitting, we know, somewhere in the audience around us. A hum of excitement and speculation accordingly fills the pavilion. Strange preliminaries occur on the stage: harpists pluck arcane strains, elves dance, a gigantic sword is half drawn from its sheath, then majestically slammed home again. ‘Oes heddwch?’ cries the Archdruid. ‘Is there peace?’ ‘Heddwch!’ thunders back the audience, and the trumpets blow their fanfares, and gathering their robes about them a deputation of Druids gravely leaves the stage to summon the victorious poet to his honours. The organ thunders. A spotlight plays at random over the auditorium. The television cameras are poised in their gantries. The audience strains forward in its seats. Presently the light steadies itself, sweeps deliberately along the seats, and falls at last upon the person of the winner–who, blushing with pride and self-consciousness, and pretending hard to be astonished, allows himself with mock reluctance to be led away by the Druids, up through the huge applauding crowd, up through the reverberating organ music, to the throne that is, for those few moments, the very crucible of Wales. Some years ago I was a member of that Druidical delegation, the man who drew the great sword from its sheath was a famous rugby player and my son Twm was the poet.

Small change

There is a Sydney street group called the Aussie Small Change Brass Band which might well represent the city at ceremonial functions, so alive is it with the authentic Sydney mixture of fun, fizz and chutzpah. Its players are three very small boys in very large hats, with two trumpets, a tuba and extremely powerful amplifiers, and I can tell you they play ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ like nobody’s business.

Incidental music

I was driving down the Adriatic coast from Istria to Montenegro, and I was playing a recording by Vladimir Ashkenazy of Mozart’s 22nd piano concerto. It seemed to me that the vivacious allegro movement of this work absolutely suited the swashbuckling landscape of karst, sea and island through which I was passing, and I drove down the magnificent coast road playing the tape repeatedly, laughing and singing out loud. In the course of the journey I gave a lift to a frail and elderly Montenegrin traveller, wizard-like with stick and black coat, and when towards the end of the journey, Ashkenazy still playing, me still singing, in the delight of my mood I narrowly escaped head-on collision with a convoy of armoured cars, this delightful old worthy seemed to find it just as funny as I did.

The Algerian gardener

The Algerian gardener at our hotel in the Midi was extremely tall and cadaverous, and his eyes blazed deep in their sockets. His luxuriant sideburns, however, gave him a noble scholarly aspect. He was like a professor in some medieval academy of Islam. As he trundled his barrow about, I used to think, surely he was debating within himself subtle mathematical formulae, or composing Sufi couplets? Once I got up at the break of day, when the place was deserted, and I came across the gardener feeding a black and white cat. He stood very erect above the animal, having placed a grisly dish of offal before it, and I heard him murmuring endearments to the creature. They sounded stately endearments–Koranic, perhaps–and he stood there gauntly as the sun rose behind him, looking down at the cat and murmuring. The cat kept circling around his feet, casting glances at the food, rubbing its head against the man’s ankles until it felt it had paid its proper respects. Only then did it fall, with snarls and rendings through its purrs, upon the unlovely victuals.

The matter with me

‘Wazzamatterwidyou?’ hissed the angry cab driver, as I stumbled bemused across 45th Street. ‘Hey, you in the green hat,’ shouts the policeman from his horse, ‘can’t you see that signal?’ ‘You must wait for the green,’ says the passing lady slowly and sympathetically, assuming I speak only Welsh or Lithuanian, and am new to the mysteries of science. But it takes time to readjust, when you return to Manhattan from idler climes.

To touch the owl

I notice that for mistily religious reasons women in Dijon touch the little figure of an owl in the rue de la Chouette as casually as they might pull on a glove–except that, since it is perched rather high on a wall, small ladies have to jump a bit to reach the bird, and children have to be lifted one after the other, their mothers never interrupting, all the same, the flow of their own conversations.

The friar’s warning

At the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo the desiccated corpses of generations of citizens are on display, guarded by friars and climaxed by the body of a child labelled BAMBINA–SLEEPING BEAUTY GIRL. ‘Be very careful,’ one of the friars said in a flat sort of voice when I left this macabre exhibit–‘watch out for robbers.’ I thought there was a queer, occult look in his eye, and hardly had I left the sacred premises than two thugs on a motorbike snatched my bag and left me destitute.

One can always tell

If the hitch-hikers are American I generally stop for them. One can always tell. They try harder for their lifts, holding up well-lettered destination signs and offering ingratiating smiles. They are in the lift-getting business, and they do the job properly. When they are on board they generally work for their keep, too. They tell me all about themselves, they learn all about me, they may give me a brief lecture upon the social customs of my own country, or kindly correct me when I appear to be going the wrong way. They are usually willing to oblige, too. ‘Are you going to Scotland?’ one young man asked me when I stopped for him just outside London. ‘No, I’m going to Wales.’ ‘OK, make it Wales’–and I drove him all the way to Bala, and left him smoothly chatting up the farmer’s wife at a bed-and-breakfast place.

Marvellously goes the elk meat

My favourite place for a Christmas meal is the Operakällaren restaurant in Stockholm. There the restaurant’s famous house aquavit is poured most generously by merry waiters of the old school, and everyone soon gives the impression of being acquainted with everyone else. Marvellously goes the elk meat, swiftly pass the herrings, one great salmon succeeds another on the buffet, and very soon I find myself on familiar terms with the Swedes at the next table, complimenting them on their fluent English, admiring little Eva’s Christmas frock or little Erik’s smart bow tie, exchanging grandmotherly confidences with Mrs Andersson, toasting them one and all with yet more aquavit. Stockholmers are not especially religious people, and I like to think they have been eating those Baltic herrings, downing those fiery liquids, since the days of the pagan kings.

The red tarboosh

Andrew Holden was one of the very last British officials of the Egyptian government, still a highly respected functionary of the Ministry of Finance when Egypt had long recovered its independence. By the time I knew him he was near retirement, but he still went to work each morning by tram, clinging to the outside like any other Cairene if he could not get a seat. The amiable Egyptians, helping him up the step, would make sure he had a place on the rear platform, where he could hang on to the pole, and there I can see him now as the tram swayed and clanked its way into town, so scholarly looking in his spectacles, so slight, so incongruously at ease–and on his head, tilted at a jaunty but not ostentatious angle, the red tarboosh which was the only badge of his commitment.

Dance music

One evening I came across a dance in a Cretan courtyard. The lights were very bright there. The deafeningly amplified music was a quavery sort of oriental theme. A high gate closed the yard, but along the wall of the road above, from windows and shadowy terraces all around, a crowd of villagers watched. Beneath the lights inside, a long circling line of Cretans, men and women, danced a strange dance. I was bewitched. Gracefully, jauntily, thoughtfully, swankily, the dancers tripped their complex steps, and the music blared through the pergola. Round and round they went, to and fro, and sometimes the man at the head of the line, detaching himself momentarily from the rest, threw himself into a spasm, leaping, kicking his feet together, twirling about in an ecstasy of conceit and accomplishment, before the convulsion left him and he subsided into the music’s rhythm. When I tore myself away the half-tone music of the loudspeakers tracked me far into the night.

The three days

One of the most demanding of Irish pilgrimages takes the faithful to a grim island in Lough Derg, a remote and dispiriting mountain lake, where they endure a three-day fast, a twenty-four-hour vigil, barefoot peregrinations over stony tracks and the compulsory recitations of 63 Glorias, 124 Creeds, 891 Paternosters and 1,458 Hail Marys. I was once at a wedding at Drogheda, away on the east coast, when I heard a woman ask a worldly young guest with a carnation in his buttonhole and a glass of champagne in his hand where he was going for his holidays that year. I expected Mykonos or Barbados, but no. ‘I thought of giving myself’, he said, ‘the three days at Lough Derg.’

At a Breton window

My small daughter and I looked up from the waterfront of Douarnenez, in Brittany, to see an old woman smiling down at us from an open window. She had a shawl around her shoulders, her face was infinitely wrinkled, and her smile was so kind that it seemed to be reaching us from different times altogether–from before the Fall, perhaps. ‘I want that lady,’ my small daughter said.

Do I know her?

Now and then I chance to see in real life one of those nameless and numberless actresses of television, encountered in the Underground, perhaps, or browsing at a bookshop. At first I think I really know her. Who could she be? Is she a publisher, or a fellow author? Did we meet on an aircraft, or at a literary festival somewhere? Like one of those nagging fragrances one cannot place, or a tune whose words we can never quite remember, her presence tantalizes and disturbs me. But then with a touch of melancholy I realize that I know her only by proxy, through the medium of the TV screen. Some people in these circumstances introduce themselves anyway, and perhaps one should: I sometimes notice that if I chance to catch the woman’s eye she will give me one of those closed-lip actress’s smiles, turned up a little too resolutely at the corners of the mouth, as if she is dying to be recognized.

Salon life

A Jewish acquaintance of mine in Delhi, being a passionate horsewoman, established a sort of lien upon the social loyalties of a whole covey of equestrian maharajas, polo players to a man but as fascinated by the personality of their hostess as they were by her love of horses. They became a kind of salon. They used to sit in her drawing room, itself a strange and wonderful melange of cultures, or sprawl on the lawn with long cool drinks, hanging upon her every word: dark mustachioed military figures, handsome but rather running to plump, and in their midst that small vivacious woman bestowing a chaff here, a compliment there, like a Jewish maharani herself.

Days of liberty!

I chanced to arrive in Paris when a student rebellion was reaching its climax, and was astonished to find the students surging to and fro between their makeshift barricades, handkerchiefs over their mouths, throwing things now and then and shouting slogans. They were all that old people dreamed themselves to have been when they looked back to their days of liberty, the days when they had causes to throw bricks for, when to be alive was grand enough, but heaven itself was to be young, radical, brandishing a stick and shouting a slogan in Paris!

Harry’s Challenge

I had a pre-Christmas luncheon at Harry Ramsden’s Fish and Chip Shop at Guiseley, where the menu was dominated by Harry’s Challenge, a fish-and-chip dish so gigantic that if you got through it you were given a free pudding and a signed certificate. All the customers were the real thing–not another outsider among them, only celebratory office parties hilarious over Harry’s Challenge, and amiably extended families with grandmothers in hats, and burbling children with hand-held video games, and not a few stout parties who would have done better to cut down on the steamed ginger pudding. At one o’clock precisely there arrived outside the front door the Scissett Youth Band of Huddersfield, to serenade us lustily with all the old carols–none of your fancy ecumenicals–setting many a sensibly shod foot tapping to their rhythms and inciting me, as an inveterate whistler, to join in messily over my mushy peas.

In other circumstances

Trams are essential to the character of Vienna, but there are some places where they run against the flow of the traffic, and are likely to murder you. When I nearly lost my own life to one of them–‘Quick! Comes the tram the other way!’–sympathetic onlookers were quick to reassure me that Dr Kurt Waldheim himself had almost died a similar death (although that was of course, they respectfully added, before he became president of our republic…)

Below the ships

The longest escalator in Europe plunges beneath the Kiel Canal to take pedestrians to the other side. I stood there one morning looking down this dreadful shaft, which was all empty, dark and rumbling, wondering if anybody ever used it, when a cheerful girl rode up behind me on a bicycle. Without a pause she tucked the bike under her arm, so to speak, and launched herself upon the moving staircase. I stood there watching her go. Down and down into the dark she went, all alone, smaller and smaller, clutching her bicycle, until she disappeared into the hole beneath the Kiel Canal. Above her the ships sailed on.

Colombian coffee

I once sat for half an hour over a coffee at a pavement cafe in Buenaventura, Colombia, and never did I see a more piteous and dispiriting citizenry pass by, in the sticky blaze of that tropical afternoon. A mutilated beggar crawled about my feet, silently holding out his hand. A shoeshine boy with a withered arm sat listless at the pavement’s edge. A few tattered black men slouched about the surrounding tables. Two small boys played football with an old tin in the street. Sometimes a grey figure in white ducks shambled into the cafe, reaching into his money belt for the price of a brandy, sometimes the beggar scuttled off like a huge black crab towards some new arrival, and sometimes the waitress, with a clang of her bangles, screamed some raucous incantation into the kitchen. All around was filth, heat and degradation, malformation and truncation, stumps of arms and crooked arms and scabbed dry lips.

Through a glass darkly

The Yamut Turkoman tribes are the most daunting of the Iranian peoples. On Thursday mornings they hold a horse fair at the village of Pahlevi Dej, and there I went to see them. They converged upon the village in ones and twos, bolt upright on their horses, top heavy in their black fleece hats, in stately lolloping motion across their splendid landscape. Some brought their wives with them, demurely riding pillion and wearing purple or scarlet skirts with brightly flowered shawls. I saluted one formidable tribesman as he rode by; not for a moment did his pace flag, inexorably he continued his progress, kicking up little clouds of dust with each step, and looking distantly down at me from the saddle as through a thick glass plate.

Joking on the coastal route

Once on the Hurtigruten, the Norwegian coastal shipping service, an entire brass band boarded our vessel, with musicians of all ages down to small boys and girls. They were going to the next port up the coast and earned their passage by playing sombre but rousing marches in the forward lounge. The faces of the instrumentalists were quintessentially Norwegian: pale, long, incurious, handsome faces. One boy asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, ‘I have a grandmother in Wales.’ ‘You don’t mean it!’ I exclaimed in delighted surprise. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was only joking.’

Pan’s blood

Delight is still the occupation of Corfu, and sweet airs of comfort abound. The peasants of old may have deserted their olives for occupations of easier profit, but the olive trees are still there, and the stony earth beneath them, and the scents of herbs in the evening. On our way back from Kavos we saw, in one of the wayside villages, a pick-up truck run over a cat. In a trice the corpse of the poor animal was removed for burial, and I was struck by the air of true sadness that fell upon the village bystanders. It was the sweet silent sadness, I thought, of the ages. When we drove away the little pool of cat’s blood left in the street behind us suggested to me the blood of Adonis, or perhaps of Pan himself.

Canadian arrivals

Very early one morning I went down to Union Station to watch the transcontinental train passengers arrive out of the darkness from Vancouver. I knew exactly what to expect from this experience, but still it stirred me: the hiss and rumble of it, the engineers princely in their high cab, the grey faces peering out of sleeper windows, the proud exhaustion of it all–and then the thick tumble of the disembarking passengers, a blur of boots and lumber jackets and hoods and frosty breaths and bags and bundled children, clattering down the steps to breakfast, Grandma and Toronto.

Destiny in Missouri

‘Mr Truman? Certainly, he’s expecting you,’ said the pleasant secretary in Independence, Missouri, and in a moment there was his familiar figure, sitting at a big polished desk. Beside him there stood a large and splendid globe, in a frame stand, and from time to time during our conversation Harry Truman would reflectively spin it or point to parts of it in a manner that I can only describe as proprietorial. He was, as he reminded me, the president who, in the years after World War II, had decreed an interventionist foreign policy for the United States of America–the Truman Doctrine. When he twirled that globe he was retrospectively reshaping my world, abolishing my empire, and affecting the way I would live for the rest of my life.

A cabman’s wink

I was wandering the streets of Alexandria’s Arab Quarter–‘The best way to see it’, E. M. Forster said, ‘is to wander aimlessly about’–when I happened to catch the eye of a wrinkled cabby with a towel wrapped round his head, high behind his poor Rosinante on the seat of his gharry. On the impulse of the moment I winked: and instantly there crossed his face an expression of indescribable knowingness and complicity, half comic, half conspiratorial–as though between us, he, the city and I, we had plumbed the depths of human and historical experience, and were still coming up for more.