To ask whether we are all suffering from subconscious claustro-
phobia sounds a little pretentious. To put it more simply, I wonder how many people are secretly longing to get out of England—not to stay out, but just to see a little of a world which they have not seen for six years and more, or never seen at all. It is the latter that have my sympathy most. You find them in rather unexpected places—at Women's Institutes, for example, where travel talks are always popular, and invariably elicit the exclamation, either publicly or privately voiced, "If I could only see a country like that for myself." And what a pity they can't. We have only one life to live—on this earth at any rate—and so many people spend it in such a tragically narrow groove. Here, as in other cases, Hitlerism has something to teach us, or would have if the Kraft durch Freude tours by land and sea had been more than a limited window-dressing affair. I suppose bodies like the Workers' Travel Association will gradually resume activity, but there are no very obvious pleasure- grounds abroad at the moment, and it will be a long time before travel becomes reasonably cheap, if it ever does.
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