A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby
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have been the realization that the widespread use of the internal combustion engine was not just a phenomenon of war, and that for all practical purposes horse-drawn vehicles were doomed. If they did not believe the evidence of their own eyes, when now long ago they had seen, for example, the first horse-drawn brougham converted to run on electricity, it was only necessary for them to glance through some of the classified advertisements in the newspapers under ‘Horse and Carriages’:
ALDRIDGE’S, ST MARTIN’S LANE. LONDON.
ESTABLISHED 1753. On Wednesday, 10 December. Well known stud of horses, newspaper vans, harness and stable sundries, the property of the Star newspaper, who are discontinuing their horse department and adopting motor transport entirely.
ELEPHANT AND CASTLE HORSE REPOSITORY … Motor Auction Sales every Thursday at eleven o’clock.
That Saturday while I lay in my nursery in SW13, tucked up in a bassinet, which was shrouded superfluously in voile to keep off any stray draughts that might conceivably be about, and with a good coal fire burning in the grate, a number of totally unconnected events occurred and were reported in The Times the following week.
That day the Bishop of Oxford confirmed more than two hundred boys at Eton; ten people were injured in a tram accident in Hackney; Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood was buried with full military honours at Aldershot; four thousand members of the United Garment Workers Union met in the Mile End Road to demand a forty-eight-hour week; and at a congregation held at Cambridge, the Vice Chancellor presiding, a proposal that a syndicate be appointed to consider whether women students should be admitted to membership of the University and, if so, with what limitations, if any, was carried without opposition.
That day also, Renoir, who had died three days previously at the age of seventy-eight, was buried; the entire staff of the Army and Navy Stores which had been on strike went back to work;2 ex-soldiers at Bangor Training Centre completed a pair of shooting-boots for the Prince of Wales; the body of a young woman, wearing a velvet blouse, dark skirt and patent leather boots, was washed up by the tide at Swansea; Florence Langridge was sentenced to three months for giving Harrods a dud cheque, while masquerading as the widow of a captain of Hussars; William Docker, nineteen years a railway shunter with the Great Western Railway Company, more harshly dealt with, was given three months with hard labour for stealing a dozen pairs of stockings from the company; Stoke Poges beat Oxford University at golf; the will of Henry Clay Frick was published – he left $145,000,000 (about £38,250,000) bequeathing all but $25,000,000 (about £6,250,000) to educational and philanthropic objects.
That evening the members of the Overseas Club entertained the staff at a fancy dress dance, a function at which I would, in retrospect, have dearly liked to have been present. Just as I would also have liked to have been present at Diaghilev’s productions of La Boutique Fantasque, The Three Cornered Hat and Midnight Sun at the Empire Theatre, with Karsavina, Tchernicheva, Massine and Svoboda; although as a future traveller I might have been expected to derive more benefit from attending Lowell Thomas’s With Allenby in Palestine and With Lawrence in Arabia, – ‘Two entertainments for the price of one’ – at the Albert Hall; or a showing of Tarzan of the Apes at the New Gallery; or attending a lecture on The Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17 by Sir Ernest Shackleton at the Hampstead Conservatoire.
That day, too, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Ship, Bogota, left the Thames on the top of the tide, bound for Valparaiso.
That afternoon the muffin man ringing his bell went down Riverview Gardens, the side road outside ‘Ther Mansions’ as the local tradesmen who dealt with my mother called them, in which there were other blocks of flats, carrying his muffins in a wooden tray covered with a green baize cloth, which he balanced on his head; and the lamplighter came and went on his bicycle (lighting-up time that evening was 4.21 p.m.), lancing the gas lamps in the street into flame with a long bamboo pole.
I did not know about any of these exciting things, and if I had I would not have cared. I had no intention of going anywhere, certainly not to Valparaiso in the SS Bogota. And so ended my birthday. For all concerned it had been a jolly long one.
1 All sums of sterling have been converted from pounds, shillings and pence to their decimal equivalents and to American currency of the time.
2 Up to this time employees at the Army and Navy Stores had worked a sixty-hour week, and men of sixty were being paid as little as £2–£2.25 ($7.80–$8.80) a week. In one department fifty women were employed whose average wage was less than £1.26 ($4.90) a week. The strikers who received much sympathetic support from the public and the newspapers were successful in improving their lot.
CHAPTER TWO The Baby as a Traveller
At the time I was born, and for long afterwards, ‘middle-middleclass babies’, of whom I was one, rarely travelled in motor cars, ‘middle-middle-class motors’ being mostly open ones, and sometimes difficult to close if a change of weather demanded it. When I went on holiday the year after I was born, and the year after that – and photographs assure me that I did – it was by train from Victoria, Waterloo, or Liverpool Street with lots of trunks and my vast £25 ($97.50) pram with its fringed awnings and a sort of shotgun holster for parasols or umbrellas, according to what was going on overhead, which needed a couple of porters to lift it into the guard’s van, which meant lots of lovely tipping. In those years I went to nice, unadventurous places such as Frinton, Bembridge, Broadstairs, or Cliftonville which was ideal for babies because there nature had been almost completely eradicated. I cannot remember the lot, for I spent a week here, a week there, presumably as the spirit moved me.
Down on the beach at one or other of these or similar resorts, surrounded by babies of similar age and condition (The Times recorded some nineteen babies as having been born on the same day I was), I used to pass the cooler days at some of them against a background of cliffs and the only recently outmoded, horse-drawn bathing machines which, horseless, rather like the electric brougham but without the electricity, still performed the function for which they had been built but were now parked permanently above high-water mark. If the temperature rose above 55° Fahrenheit, an admittedly rare occurrence at the seaside (which is also the correct temperature for serving draught beer in Britain), we would all insist on being taken indoors and placed in our bassinets, still swathed in voile, not as a protection against treacherous currents of air but, on the same principle as Bedouins swathe themselves in wraps, against the intense heat.
The truth is that babies do not like travel, and I was no exception. Babies are unadventurous. Babies act as grapnels to prevent ‘the family’ dragging its ground. That is why they were invented. Perversely, their desire for fresh horizons comes much later when they have already begun to ‘attract’ fares, and can no longer travel free; by which time they are no longer babies at all.
The prospect of the Great Glen, the Grand Canyon, the wastes of the Sahara at sunset, the entrancing, set-piece landscapes of Tuscany, all leave them equally indifferent, and usually breaking out in a rash which takes weeks to clear up. Useless to consult the baby about where it would be prepared to go without these alarming side effects because it will never express an opinion until it arrives at its destination, when it is invariably adverse.
Thus did I spend my first two years of travel. It is a wonder, and a credit to my parents’ resilience, that I did not succeed in driving them permanently round the bend.
What can one truly remember of one’s infant life when one comes to write about it years later, putting as it were one’s hand on one’s heart, separating in the mind’s eye what one can really remember from what one has been told, separating fact from fiction, or what is more factual from what is more fictional on those frontiers where these nuances become blurred and indistinct?
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