Travelling Tediously
Spanish Journey. By Halliday Sutherland. (Hollis and Carter. 15s.)
IT probably would not please Dr. Sutherland to be told that he is just the kind of tourist approved of by Mme. Maisky, the amiable wife of the one-time Soviet Ambassador in London. Mine. Maisky used to say to me, "You should visit Russia. You would like to see our hospitals, our prisons, our schools, our public lavatories." In vain I assured her that these were not the sights I travelled abroad to see • in Russia I should go to see the steppes, the Crimean orchards, the Caucasian plains, the onion domes of Kieff, the great rivers. . . . Similarly, in Spain I see the landscape, the•ancient cities, the magnificent buildings, the lovely little fishing ports, the coloured beauty of land and sett. Not so Dr. Sutherland, who has a mind above these beauties. On arriving in Spain I decided to visit prisons and sanatoria."- "In Seville I saw" (not the Cathedral, not the Alcazar, not the Giralda) "a large air-conditioned Cotton-mill ... the Provincial Hospital . . . the prison." "At Valencia, the Provincial ,Medical Officer of Health showed me the prison, the sanatorium, and a children's mining home." In Murcia, that city of baroque,
he saw "girls selling loaves." And so on, all over Spain. • He varied his programme slightly by seeing a bull-fight at San Sebastian, and General Franco twice (he was the guest of the Spanish Government). "What are you really doing in Spain ? " a lady asked him • he told her that he was visiting sanatoria. He found, naturally, that the sanatoria were excellent, the prison system most humane, the whole regime satisfactory. He was accompanied by a phantom Communist 'tstooge named Ditherby, who kept making idiotic Communist stooge remarks. He was, in fact, haunted through- out his Spanish tour by phantoni Communists, authors of the left-wing literature that he so earnestly perused • he could see nothing without making it a missile to hurl back at tem. His book opens, "A Communist sent me to Spain" ; he meant that he went there to confute left-wing lies. That was why he had such a tedious time, among hospitals, prisons, cotton-mills, and reports of Red atrocities and Nationalist humaneness during the past civil war. To coinplaints about alleged faults of the present regime, he retorts that there are worse faults in Eastern Europe ; certainly true, but surely • irrelevant ? Poor Dr. Sutherland: I myself have a much better time when in Spain, travelling under my own steam and seeing none of these dull social services, but the eternal Spain, Greek, Roman, Gothic, Moorish (to do Dr._ Sutherland justice, he did have a look at the Alhambra) and Spanish.
Left-wing rubbish, right-wing rubbish : when will there be an end of these tedious battle-cries that so stridently resound about Europe?
ROSE MACAULAY.
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