UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
The Itching Foot
By ANTHONY LODGE (Wadham College, Oxford) YOUTH is on the hive. This is not a blatant headline but a footnote to contemporary history. The English youth now tramps over Europe and the rest of the world ; not in the revenge of war, not, I submit, for any particular purpose, but through an urge that is part of his present being. There is little of the set visit, but the continuous pressing on from one place to the next. We'hear of our friends going to mine minerals in Alaska, to dig groundnuts in East Africa, to run banks In the Persian Gulf, or of the demobbed man returning to the Army. This does not arise from a particular dissatisfaction with conditions in England ; it is almost something in the blood. A friend who had been severely wounded in the 1946-47 troubles in Palestine went off to Alaska. Before he went, he said to me: " I have felt restless ever since I have been home. The old foot is itching again."
Nor is there any sense of sensation for its own-sake. Two studen,ts travelled across America on an infinitely small capital, but with a social purpose ; another party explored Central Africa in scientific research ; another group sent a sudden message from the Tibetan foothills where few white men had been before. The most remarkable was the student who outdid Alain Gerbault by sailing across the Channel and along the French coast in a craft made of two pontoons, a cross-plank as a deck and a single sail ; but at the traveller's own request this received little or no publicity. If we are to indicate a root-cause for this continual desire for journeying, it is perhaps that this generation has been so conditioned by war that to keep moving is now part of its external as well as mental structure. At the same time all war-time travel was rigidly controlled. Like sb many puppets in the hands of theoliticians and the professional soldiers, young people were, during th_pose years, moved over the world's surface.
At the age of twenty-four, and of an average range of experience, I find that in the ten years from 1939 to 1949 I spent twenty-one months in my own home, including university vacations. This is neither a unique nor even a rare experience. In the last days of August, 1939, the school began packing up for a move to an unknown destination. This was effected with little organisation but with little fuss. We found ourselves, a group apart, in a big London terminus. Dominant impressions over the years are the white faces of the children, the ominous white labels on their breasts, the silence punctuated at times by an uncertain laugh of a small group, the lines of parents, their eyes tearful and afraid amid their well- wishing, as though their children were passing that bourne from which no traveller returns, and gas-masks. There was a sense of disappointment at moving only as far as a provincial town of our own country, and for us all, it was a disillusioning year. I myself travelled in and out of hospital, to convalescent home and finally home again. A sense of disappointment was caused, too, by the war itself, its occasional bursts of activity being regarded by the children as a series of exciting cup-tie matches.
The next evacuation was much more efficient. Parents were much more blase and war-conditioned. But there were still the same heterogeneous groups of children and luggage. We were a smaller group this time that was shunted from one home to another, via junctions, queues, prodding ladies, W.V.S. and a public-school gymnasium with bright yellow equipment.
The next stage was the Army—Scotland, Norfolk, Derbyshire, Wales, Hampshire, Somerset, Kent, Hampshire, Kent again and abroad. One camp was much like anotherr. The outsta iding memories are of buildings like Norwich cathedral floodlit, or the austere beauty of Nether Stowey church yellowed by the reflected light off cornfields, of long journeys and the adolescent shock of the proximity of " mixed " Service people, of rituals like the village dance or the celebrating bonfire and of the glories of the country- side churned up by the military machine. OtNe was conscious the whole time of never being able to accept oneself as part of an Army camp and cut off from the surrounding countryside. Fortunately, perhaps, going abroad was for me like an immense' Cook's tour in khaki. France was a country of ringing angelus,' striped fields still worked by oxen and the southern coastline with its cliffs, food, wines, almost vulgarly intense blue sea, and bizarre inhabitants just stretching beyond normal belief and becoming part of a dream. Egypt was yelling little boys, wailing old priests, fatalism about death, disappointment with the Pyramids and the Sphinx and the perpetual smell of ordure. Palestine was the' little square white houses, the seeing of both sides, the appreciation of the wrong dangers, the incongruous mixture of the ultra-Biblical and the ultra-modern. Greece was the glory of them all. Only, Athens came up to what one had always expected, and Salonika introduced a memorable personality at each corner. Cyrenaica was Tobruk, the battles still marked out by fallen equipment, the stern reminder of a cemetery upon which the desert was already making its inroads, the graveyard of warships in the harbour and the still-exploding mines ; and it was Tripoli where the vulgarity of Mussolini's architecture was linked to the world of gharry-drivers, troglodytes and rows of dates drying in amber files on yellow roofs, by a winding road that lifted to the hills, reported to have cost an Arab life a day to build.
At last it was time to come home. Malta with priests, old buildings, lotto offices and modern bureaucracy gave way to Pantellaria and Cape Bon through the mists, the exciting coast of Spain and finally Liverpool in a drizzle. The countryside really was green, the churches really grey and one could feel rain with no sigh of relief. Even then we were not finished. The special train took a magic route along the weed-grown side-lines of London's railways, through unknown stations. You did not have to worry about your luggage. Anything left at the station could be checked by telephone and received the next day. Everything seemed the same, as though you had never left it, but had entered into a long sleep, full of dreams, and awoken again. But, as I have indicated, that sense of security was not to last for any of us.
This is not a unique experience. It is the recording of a com- munal experience. It is seen in the different set of emotions pro- duced when we sing the local Service song such as " Shire, Shire, Somersetshire " or " Metaxas, Metaxa," as opposed to the merely bawdy ; or similarly the difference between the normal B.B.C. weather report and that, sometimes picked up by accidental twiddle of the wireless knob, of " Shannon Airport Shannon Airport clouds 5;8 visibility 50 repeat five-oh miles . . . one moment please . . .", which takes us to past moments of clouds and visibility and to future moments of other landscapes It is one of the marks of this generation that it is not yet re-oriented. The itching foot is a universal occupational disease. The solution or cure lies in the reformation of our own culture, so that something solid replaces that vague and disappearing concept on the horizon, something with which we can fashion a measuring rod for all experience.
Previous page
