UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
The Craft of Auto-Stopping
By GERDA L. COHEN (Girton College, Cambridge) WE were two of the unemployed intelligentsia—tough, unprincipled and feminine. The students at the Casa Studenti di Torino assured us: " No one goes hitching in Italy except hoboes and criminals." After several spirit-crushing attempts on the Route Natipnale southwards we were charmed by those students. And it was not until we had sweated dumbly for two hours by the side of the auto-strada that we realised why "faire auto-stop" has no equivalent in Italian. Firstly, a surviving streak of the Roman inclines the country folk towards oxen, dignified aristocrats of the road, rather than lorries. Also, Italian roads were not intended for tyres. Secondly, an unusual common sense has attached to each lorry-driver a mate, a slumbering twin who halves the amount of space available to passengers in front. But it is amazing how long one can endure the heat from an ancient inside engine, while fortified by vino rosso offered by the driver and Neapolitan songs as additional flavouring.
They do not seem to worry over the ethics of hitch-hiking, still less that it is illegal to carry females ; we ducked at sight of the carabinicri, and improved international relations by making friends with the Italian proletariat. Even on basic Italian it was possible to exchange views about Signor Creeps and the frigidity of our fellow- countrymen. We argued a whole afternoon with a couple of dis- gruntled Fascisti, trying to prove that poverty and unemployment in a free democracy was better than Mussolini's forced-labour gangs.
The amorous Venetian who introduced us to the custom of eating peaches in Chianti ; the business-men with friends at Covan-Garda who took us over the Mont-Cenis pass and insisted on a four-course dinner at 3.3o in the afternoon—these were 'delighted to meet unchaperoned English misses. Italian girls, as the lorry-drivers explained, "have molti bambini, 15-years-old married, no time to go voyaging." No wonder that Italian youth-hostels are filled by foreign visitors—the emancipated youth of France and England, enduring primitive sanitation for the sake of perspiring pilgrimages among dusty chunks of stone. How blasé that sounds! Yet it is difficult to be blasé with health, no money and all the time in the world.
When we arrived at the Albergo per Gioverau a brick-faced Liverpool cyclist was squirting D.D.T. on a cockroach in the girls' dormitory. We soberly counted it out for ten, and proceeded to remove our belongings to the healthier atmosphere of the terrace. That night, after a communal feast cooked by a team of enthusiasts from Greece, Holland and Norway, and lubricated with pints of poisonous vino rosso, we all slept on the terrace. The moon was as ripe and yellow as the plums we had eaten, and the Mediterranean lapped soothingly, like a little pond. Only the Tunisian boy wandered disconsolately, articulating with alien distinctness, "1 think—I am piccolo drunk." But in the morning he was ready for another bout of sun and vino rosso. And so were we.
We discovered that American youth could on occasion be as Ingenious and as penniless as we English. True, they clung to time- tables and suitcases, but they had a cunning way with tins, and
Vannagcd to keep at least ten degrees cooler than the raw-red Briton long shorts and wind-jammer. The hostel wjndows signalled Yankee occupation with crisp nylon shirts, cottons without a wisp of rayon. We grimly boiled our aertex and prayed that the next lorry would not ooze oil at every pore. Clothes apart, Americans resembled all the other atheistic, bumptious, and energetic young students. "Atheistic" is generalising. We met a couple of auto- stoppeurs as we were breakfasting by the Leaning Tower who had received permission from the bishop to visit the Pope in shorts. But they were exceptions. To the super-tramp of today Sunday is a nuisance, because churches and museums are often crowded, and shops are dosed.
We extricated ourselves from the hot and pious crowd in the funicular at Rapallo, and ascended the heights towards the church of Montallegro. We read the notice outside, and sadly, warmly, descended. For our legs were bare, to a blasphemous degree.
Perhaps a lemonade. . . . But the café, it seemed, was under papal jurisdiction and our legs were very bare. The bar-tender com- miserated ; he could do nothing. In the café our pious Italians, refreshed in body and soul by papal provisions for their well-being, began to object. "Not even un poco di acqua for the English tourists—absurd! " they remonstrated gently. Then a note of amused exasperation set in. Finally they stood up and demanded. The bar-tender burst into praise of Christian charity and the spirit of the law, and strode into our secular territory outside the café with a bottle of ice-cold beer. He was not averse to shorts, he admitted with a captivating grin. If, indeed, the letter killeth, the Italians are bountifully endowed with life ; and that you may believe with full realisation of the exaggerations and elevations into principle practised by the tourist. It is our prerogative to generalise. Never- theless the trite statements are truest.
Ears strained from new gabblings, eyes weary from recording the strange and lovely, we crossed the Alps into Savoy. How pale and petite the French women after those matriarchal gypsies of the piazzas! And where were the Michelangeloid muscles, the slender loins, the sun sucking up all colours until only ochre and chalk were left ? But now we could relax in the green and snowy silences of France. At least, if the obliging Belgian had not been going to Chamonix we could have relaxed. His doughnut cheeks greasy with benevolence, he deposited us outside the Mont Blanc hostel. On the road behind, a dozen husky hikers, each with three feet of bread protruding from his rucksack, doggedly marched towards the youth hostel. A hundred yatds back cyclists flying Swiss pennants, rings of bread around the handlebars, charged head-down towards the youth hostel. A gang of Parisian students bivouacked outside. "Tout complet! " they yelled, pointing to their cosy chicken-hut. " Try at the cremerie up the road." We wrote off the youth hostel and inquired at the Maison Balmat. "Only 6o francs ? How reasonable! "
The daughter conducted us upstairs. We should be very thankful, she explained, that the Scouts had gone for a trip in the mountains, and we could have their beds. We began to feel wary. " Scouts ? In our bedroom ? " She opened the attic door, and there lay a vast carpet of palliasses, fenced off with ice-axes, coils of rope, Camem- bert boxes and condensed milk tins at the viscous stage. Two silent and sinewy women were pricking their blisters among the chaos. We fled the Maison Balmat.
But night swirled over the glaciers, and we were houseless. A New Zealand girl, brewing tea in the gloom, invited us to share a barn, hay inclusive, at 20 francs per body. "There's three of us already, but they can crawl into the loft." Thus it was that we were awakened at five by the farmer raking off our bed-clothes to provide breakfast for the cows on the ground-floor. Half-frozen, we staggered out. The soft apricot light was flooding snow-field and fat green meadow. The melting ice thundered through village troughs and taps, drowning the moos of our companions so that only their bells could be heard. It was a perfect morning to breakfast on cream- cheese and butter supplied by the ground-floor.
Our next barn, on the road to Paris, was not a success ; we preferred the sweet Alpine hay to the needles of Dijon straw. Fiercely squeaking rats held a Walpurgisnacht under our very pillows, and queer smells rose from the yard. Picking the straw from our hair, we chatted to.the farm boy who was waiting until the cows bestirred themselves at dawn. Drought, tile- blight, the Ministry's
mad prices—life was hard. Plenty of butter and meat for all, if you could pay. They had an uncomprehending admiration for Monsieur Creeps and the ascetic potato-eating British. So also had our last fellow-traveller, speeding us through Auxerre, Sens, Fontainebleau, while he sang snatches of Duparc and reminisced about his student days in Paris. The end was near. Our final host insisted on
Chablis—because it was impossible to return without trying it—and that compensated with its cool, dust-removing touch for the rats and the long roadside waits which appal the spirits of a super-tramp.
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