SINCE I WAS more interested in the people who had
come to gaze than in the visitors themselves, I stood well to the rear of the crowd outside Victoria Station on Wednesday afternoon. There was nothing unusual; it might have been waiting for the Lord Mayor's Procession or the arrival of the. President of the French Republic. While it waited it ragged the police, as a London crowd always does on these occasions, and the police, as they always do, remained unsmiling and stern. Now and then a thin cheer could be heard from the precincts of the station, but nothing happened. Everything was running true to form, for a crowd on these occasions always expects a few false alarms. Then there was a slightly louder cheer and thirty seconds later the visitors had passed. My impression was that about 60 per cent. of the crowd remained silent, about 20 per cent. cheered, about 15 per cent. booed (I have never heard booing from an English crowd on these occasions before), and the remaining 5 per cent. were either policemen or plain-clothes men. But it was a typically frivolous crowd, except for a few Communists who would presumably have cheered Stalin just the same if he had come four years ago. In this respect it differed from the crowd which greeted Marshal Tito when he landed at Westminster Pier. On that occasion the crowd main- tained a sullen silence : I don't think it entirely approved of having to take this swaggering dictator, preceded by roaring motor-cycles, as an ally. But Marshal Bulganin and Mr. Khrushchev are not allies. The crowd had come to gape at two oddities, as it might have done at Brumas or General Franco, and even those who had seen only the tops of their cars and had uttered not a squeak went away happy—as London crowds always do. *
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