A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby. Eric Newby
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whose business it is to save Mankind’ – mine presumably, although I had no suggestions to make about how it should be done. ‘We are marching,’ Mee wrote, an incurable optimist, apparently envisaging a pacific version of the Children’s Crusade, with the children waving white flags instead of brandishing crucifixes, ‘towards a friendlier and better world, a world of love in place of hate, of peace instead of war, and one thing is needful – an understanding of each other … it is the purpose of this book so to familiarize us with the lands and peoples of the world that we can cherish no ill-will for them. We are one great human family, and this is the book of our brothers and sisters.’
I never read the text. All the efforts of what was presumably an army of experts in their various fields, painfully adapting their ways of writing to render them intelligible to infant minds, were totally wasted on me. All I did, and still do, for I still have the six volumes, was to look at the photographs, of which there were thousands in black and white besides the seven hundred or so in colour, and read the captions and the short descriptions below them of a world which, if it ever existed in the form in which it was here portrayed, is now no more. What I saw was a world at peace, one from which violence, even well-intentioned sorts, such as ritual murder and cannibalism, had been banished, or at least as long as the parts kept coming.
In Merrie England, donkeys carried the Royal Mail through the cobbled streets of Clovelly, milkmaids in floppy hats churned butter by hand in the Isle of Wight, swan uppers upped swans on the River Thames, genial bearded fishermen in sou’westers mended nets on the Suffolk coast, town criers rang their bells, and choirboys wearing mortarboards, using long switches, beat the bounds of St Clement Danes.
In the Land of the Cymry, which is how Lands and Peoples described Wales, ancient dames wearing chimney-pot hats stopped outside their whitewashed cottages to pass the time of day with more modern, marcel-waved neighbours, and cloth-capped salmon fishers paddled their coracles on the River Dee.
In Bonnie Scotland, brawny, kilted athletes tossed the caber, border shepherds carried weakling lambs to shelter from the winter snows, women ground corn with stone hand-mills in the Inner Hebrides and, far out in the Atlantic, on St Kilda, the loneliest of the inhabited British Isles, men wearing tam-o’shanters and bushy beards were photographed returning homewards with seabirds taken on its fearsome cliffs.
In the Emerald Isle, bare-footed, flannel-petticoated colleens drew water from brawling streams, or knitted socks in cabins in Connemara, while little boys in the Aran Islands wore skirts to protect them from being kidnapped by the fairies.
Further afield, as I turned the pages, covering them with Bovril (for one of my greatest pleasures was to go to bed early with Lands and Peoples and at the same time eat Bovril sandwiches), I came upon Czechs and Slovaks and Hungarians wearing embroidered petticoats irrespective of sex, and incredible hats – in Rumania there were men who wore garters with little bells on them, who looked like sissies to me. I also saw fellers of proud giants in the Canadian forest; savages of New Guinea – their hair plastered with grease and mud; Jews in Poland – a new state with a glorious past; sun-loving Negroes in South Africa; happy Negro children romping in the ‘Coloured Section’ of New York; Kirghiz tribesmen on the ‘Roof of the World’; Orthodox scholars wearing arm thongs and phylacteries studying the ancient laws of their people; penguin rookeries in the Great White South; geishas negotiating stepping stones in Cherry Blossom Land; hardy Indian women on beds of nails at Benares; laughter-loving girls of the Abruzzi; Flemings and Walloons – little Belgium’s two sturdy races; Macedonian women weaving fine cloth with deft fingers; haughty-looking redskins decked in eagle’s feathers and wampum; Germany – rich country of an industrious nation; and so on, and so on.
Everywhere in Lands and Peoples there were photographs of schools and schoolchildren; ruinous-looking schools in which little Negroes were learning to add up, schools in Japan with the pupils marching round in circles dressed in military-looking uniforms, clinical-looking schools in the United States in which the children were being inspected for dental decay, children brandishing enormously long slates in Burma, memorizing the Koran in oases, going to school in wheelbarrows in China, learning to read in lonely Labrador and being bastinadoed in Persia, one of the only examples of violence in the entire work. That children had to put up with going to school in other countries besides my own I found encouraging. And here at home they didn’t have the bastinado, even at Colet Court.
Each time I got through all six volumes of the Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples I began again, in much the same way as the Scotsmen of Bonnie Scotland, sturdy independent folk, who painted the Forth Bridge, would start all over again as soon as they had applied the final brush strokes to that miracle of Scottish engineering.
At St Paul’s I became a Scout in order to avoid being drafted into the Officers’ Training Corps, the OTC, which would have meant wearing an insufferably itchy uniform that was blanket thick. As a Scout I learned to light a fire with one match and to use a felling axe without dismembering myself. On Saturdays we engaged in bloody night battles with other troops of Scouts in the swamps of Wimbledon Common. In the holidays we went camping in the beautiful parks of gentlemen’s country seats. Because I got on with Jews – I still do, I think they find my lack of subtlety restful – I was given command of a Jewish patrol. One of them, who was as prickly as a present-day Israeli, refused to wear Scout uniform and appeared at our open-air meetings wearing a double-breasted overcoat, a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. Another, who used to charge his mother half a crown to kiss him good night, was always loaded down with silver. On one occasion, when there was a danger of our losing one of the outdoor games known as ‘wide games’ (which necessitated covering large tracts of ground on foot) another member of my patrol whose family owned a huge limousine in which he used to arrive at wherever was the meeting place, summoned the chauffeur who was parked round the corner, and six scouts whirred away in it to certain victory.
In the spring of 1936, when I was sixteen years old, my father announced that, as it appeared unlikely I would pass the School Certificate Examination (the then equivalent of O-levels), in mathematics, a subject in which it was obligatory to pass, he had decided to take me away from St Paul’s at the end of the summer term and ‘put me into business’. I did fail. I was sorry about this decision. I was good at English, History, even Divinity, and I had dreamed of reading History at Oxford.
Apart from an innate inability to cope with mathematics the only disadvantage I laboured under at St Paul’s, and being a Scout made not the slightest difference, was that I had a curious sense of humour which meant that if anything came up in class with a suggestion of double entendre it caused me to dissolve into hysterics, for which I was punished, sometimes quite severely. In other words I had a dirty mind.
For instance, on one occasion, when we were reading Scott’s Marmion aloud, it became obvious to myself and everyone else in the classroom that by the working of some hideously unfair natural process of selection it would fall to me to read a completely unreadable part of the romance in Canto Two, entitled ‘The Convent’, which concerned the blind Bishop of Lindisfarne. And you could have heard a pin drop when I got to my feet.
‘No hand was moved, no word was said
Till thus the Abbot’s doom was given.
Raising his sightless balls to heaven …’
was all I could manage before going off into peals of mad laughter and to be beaten by John Bell, the High Master, a hedonist who showed in as marked a way as possible in the circumstances where his sympathies lay by beating me as hard as anyone else sent to him for punishment, and then giving me a shilling. I have never forgiven Scott.
* All sums of sterling have been converted from pounds, shillings and pence to their decimal equivalents and to American currency of the time.
* It was originally intended that the church should be built at the foot of the hill near the site of the present village. However, when work was begun on it, the plan was vetoed by a band of local fairies. As a practical expression