MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
"iirHY is it," an American asked me, "that you Britishers always wear your overcoats in trains? " This habit of my
countrymen has irritated me for years, but I did not say so. "It is," I said, "an old-fashioned ,custom of ours ; it is, in fact, a relic of the coaching days." "Nonsense," he said, "it can't be that." "Well, you see," I said, "we are a small country and our railway journeys are- seldom very long." "Nonsense," he said again, "I have seen a man wear his overcoat all the way from Aberdeen to London." I had seen this strange thing myself ; I knew it to be true. "I suppose," I admitted, "that we have about us a touch of claustrophobia ; when we find ourselves enclosed in a railway- carriage with other people we feel an oppression of the lungs ; we wish to breathe more freely ; we wish for air. And since to open the window renders the compartment cold, we retain our warm covering in order to cope with, and surmount, that difficulty." He grunted neither in assent nor in dissent. I did not press the matter further. I love Americans, and I know that plumbing and ventila- tion are the only two things which can shake their courtesy. I know also that I am not very sound upon this subject myself. I like my rooms, my vehicles and my wine to have the chill taken off them, and I also become enraged when on some February morn- ing a man in a thick ulster will insist upon lowering the window and admitting the wind and rain I know that it is no use saying to him, however tentatively, however politely, "But, sir, if you find this carriage too hot, why not take off your overcoat?" That will not appease him, since it is not the temperature that he minds, but the sense of enclosure. I know that his passion for wide open windows is akin to that desire which has given us our far-flung Empire. I know that he, in his great ulster, is of the correct breed ; and I cower silently in the corner feeling un-English, epicene and cold.
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