MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
0 NE of the most striking differences between the inhabitants of the United Kingdom and the inhabitants of France is that, whereas the former like foreign travel, the latter will seldom under-
take it unless they are compelled. The French contend, of course, that we are a seafaring race and that for us the Channel has terrors
no greater than those which confronted our Viking forefathers when they crossed the Atlantic in an open boat. They suggest even that if they in France were exposed to ordeals such as the English climate, the English Sunday and English cooking, they also would seek at any cost to escape. And they imply that since France herself contains every variety of scenery and climate there is no reason at all why any Frenchman should want to leave his native shore. We must admit that this latter contention is well-founded. For if in the space of a Algle night from London we could bask by southern seas or listen to the tinkle of cow-bells in an Alpine meadow, then assuredly our passion for leaving England would become less acute. It is not, I assure my French friends, because of our English cooking that my compatriots always want, if they can, to go abroad ; the reason why English food is so uninteresting is because most Englishmen are uninterested in food ; a small and eccentric minority among them may, it is true, notice that foreign cooking is prefer- able to our own ; but the great majority find French food " messy " and prefer the toast-and-water diet to which they are accustomed at home. Nor is it our English Sunday which compels this emigra- tion ; in the first place, the English Sunday is for most of us the most precious day in the week, and in the second place the Continental Sunday has itself become a day of Calvinistic gloom on which one can hear a solitary footstep echoing from one end of the Avenue de l'Opera to the other. What drives us abroad is a laudable desire for fresh experience, and a longing, if only for ten days or so, to feel the heat of the sun.
* * * * It is curious to observe that the French bourgeois of middle age does not care for fresh experience. The French intelligence, in adolescence, is so startlingly mobile that we imagine sometimes that it continues to be mobile throughout adult life. Conversely, our own school-boys and subalterns are in the mass so moulded to a definite pattern that we assume that they keep that pattern even when they have passed the age of forty. Of course, some French- men remain inquisitive until the day of their death, whereas some Englishmen retain through middle age the attitude and conventions of a school prefect. But it is, I think, an observable fact that the majority of Frenchmen do not readily absorb new ideas after they have passed the middle path of life, whereas a far larger proportion of Englishmen retain a certain elasticity of mind, or even develop a certain elasticity of mind, when youth has left them. The French are so interested in the things of the mind that we do not always notice that they are rarely interested in intellectual events which occurred after they had passed the age of thirty. The English are, or pretend to be, so uninterested in things of the mind that we fail to observe that a man who at school was interested only in games may in later life suddenly develop a taste for the humanities. I believe it to be true that our intellectual arteries, such as they are, remain far longer pliant than do the French intellectual arteries, and that the terrible sclerosis which assails the middle-aged French bourgeois does not afflict our own elderly people in exactly the same way. Moreover, whereas the French suffer acute perturbation of spirit when they find themselves among people who do not under- stand their language, the English merely derive the impression that they have reached a country of which the inhabitants are either partially or totally deaf.
* - * Yet the ordeals which my compatriots will endure in order to spend a week or two upon the Continent fill me with constant surprise and admiration. Crossing from Calais to Dover the other afternoon I observed with pity and terror the sufferings to which they
were exposed ; the patience with which they endured these sufferings convinced me, as at the time of our finest hour, that we are indeed an indomitable race. These men, these women, and above all these children, had for the most part spent the night in an overcrowded train travelling either from Switzerland or from the south of France. All through the night their poor heads had swayed or jerked to the movement of their voyage ; many of them had eaten nothing but an iron sandwich or two since they had left Basle or Zurich ; for twenty- four hours or more they had been denied the barest conveniences of life. In front of them stretched, as they well knew, a most uninviting prospect. Staggering under the weight of babies and suitcases they would have to queue up at Calais, and again they would have to queue up at Dover. All queues of any sort are an agony to the soul, but travelling queues are of all the most hard to bear ; with arms encum- bered one has to grope for passports or landing-cards, and those in front of one invariably dump their luggage on one's feet ; and behind it all is the dread that, if one be too long delayed, the train will become congested and may even leave. Yet with what serenity of patience do the British face these pains and anxieties! Jaded they looked, of course, after their prolonged suffering, having about them the dis- located appearance of all displaced persons. But not a murmur of mutiny arose from their serried ranks : they exchanged wan smiles.
When one adds to this physical exhaustion, to these trials of temper and endurance, the prospect—and in some cases the almost certain prospect—of being sea-sick while sitting . on luggage, one comes to understand how it was that our little island spread its influence across half the world. Being mySelf unencumbered either by luggage or the uncertainty of finding a seat the other end, I watched these unhappy people with sympathy and indignation. Yet I could nor honestly say that either the railway company, or the customs and passport authorities, were to blame. So long as you have passport and currency regulations there must be queues, and so long as you have queues there must come exhaustion and suffering. It is obvious that, if the hand luggage and the registered luggage of a thousand passengers have to be examined by customs officials, much weary waiting is bound to result. The officials themselves deal with turmoil with admirable efficiency and kindliness. Yet if a passenger declares three Gruyere cheeses, a bottle of scent, a bag of rice, four pairs of stockings, an alarm clock, a money box in the shape of a Swiss chalet, and three bottles of Benedictine, then even a lightning calculator would take five minutes or so to make out the bill. During those five minutes the others wait by the counter with mute appeal in their eyes. And when at last the blessed chalk marks are scrawled upon their bundles, off they go tottering unsteadily towards the train. I suppose that in a year or so, when all the cross-Channel services are working concurrently, this appalling congestion will be mitigated. Even now perhaps something more could be done to dilute the alter- nations between waiting and scrambling which now occur. It should be possible, for instance, to allow the passengers who so desire to have their hand luggage examined on the boat. It should be possible, on leaving Dover, to have one passport queue in place of two. It might be possible even to increase the number of customs officials at the ports and to have more than one passenger gangway from ship to shore.
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Mr. Bevin has announced, optimistically I fear, that he proposes to simplify these passport proceedings. He will have a sharp battle with the Treasury and the Inland Revenue. Herded like sheep towards the sheep-dip, the British passengers emulate the superb patience of sheep. Theirs is a fine example of civic worth and I trust that all foreigners are suitably impressed. But if I were a foreigner I should say to myself : " People have been landing upon this. Kentish shore for some two thousand years ; in the next few years this flux and reffint is certain to increase ; if the British were as efficient as they claim they would have devised some method by which to mitigate this agony."
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