The Man from Rangoon
By PETER FLEMING S the audience flowed out through the foyer at the end of the play I caught the tail-end of an invitation which a well-dressed, middle-aged, rather purposeful lady was ;addressing to a tall, serious young man.
"Next Tuesday," she was saying, "any time after six. Henry's bringing a friend of his who Is just back from Rangoon. Do come if you can."
"Thanks awfully," said the young man. "I should love to." ;And I heard no more.
It may be. of course, that the lady knew, or supposed, that the young man had a particular interest in Rangoon ; but he looked too young to have been there in the war (when in any case Rangoon was not a place where soldiers grew social or sentimental roots, as some did in Cairo or in Athens) and he had not at all the air of a youth who was on the point of setting out to seek his fortune in Burma. As I ,‘,,alked away from the theatre reflection failed to invalidate my first im- pression: which was that in England today a man who has just come back from Rangoon is a rare and a potentially interesting phenomenon, a purveyor of exotic information, a sort of little austerity lion.
It need not, of course, have been Rangoon. A dozen other place-names would have done as well. Names which were once large, uninviting milestones on the beaten track, places where big firms had their head offices and European communities were in general too preoccupied with suburban protocol to be well- informed or even curious about the hinterlands behind them. You felt rather sorry for the people who were obliged to live in such banal, unrewarding places. •You spoke of them as being " stuck " in (for example) Rangoon, and when they came home on leave you were not surprised to hear them say that they were terribly out of touch with things. If you travelled through the countries in whose capitals or seaports they lived they were wonderfully kind to you. They envied you your mobility and the chance it gave you of visiting places in the interior which they had never seen ; and when you came back from the interior they asked you many questions and listened, rather wistfully, as you tried to answer them.
All this has changed considerably in the last few years. Rangoon, and many places like it, have become "the interior." How interesting it would be, when one comes to think of it, to meet a man with recent first-hand experience of Poona. How unimaginable is the life of the foreigner (if there are any foreigners) in Hankow, how exciting it would be to visit Simla. The horizons of the British have been sharply contracted. The whole of China is out of bounds. Persia would hardly attract the casual traveller. The Indian peninsula, though still accessible, is no longer dotted with a dependable network of Government Houses and Residencies and dak bungalows, hill- stations and cantonments, between which residents and visitors formerly drifted almost without effort. French Indo-China is a battlefield.
I remember, in the '30s, spending a morning in an ante-room of the Legation in Moscow of the Outer Mongolian Peoples' Republic, the first, and in those days the only, satellite of the U.S.S.R. I was on my way to Manchuria and hoped—not at
all confidently—to get a visa from the Outer Mongolians which would enable me to leave the Trans-Siberian express at a place called Verkhne Udinsk and travel south-east by a motor road which led to Urga, the Outer Mongolian capital. It was a wasted morning. If there were any Outer Mongolians in the consulate, which had an uninhabited air, they were not interested in me •. and the uncommunicative Russian who took my card, though he came back once or twice to scrutinise me in a rather bewildered way, could throw no light on my prospects of an interview. Eventually I gave it up and wandered out into the early autumn sunshine.
I was not in the least surprised by my failure to make the slightest impression on what we should nowadays call the Iron Curtain, but I remember feeling mildly aggrieved that travellers should be arbitrarily excluded from a little-known territory with an area of a million square miles ; it seemed wrong and unnatural. Today embargoes of that sort, affecting not one but many millions of square miles, do not seem in the least unnatural. We accept them as an almost axiomatic feature of the world we live in, and they combine with the contraction of our Empire on the one hand and our incomes on the other to reduce very considerably our knowledge—as a nation—of the world. With the rather shallow civilisation of Africa we have indeed increased our contacts ; and the number of Britons with first-hand experience of Malaya and Korea is, fortuitously, far higher than it ever was before. But it must be true that, generally speaking, the British at the moment are more out of touch with the rest of the world than they have been for several
generations. •
One used to take very much for granted the far-flung but well-established contacts which linked these islands with remote parts of our planet. At one stage of the last war a plan was being made for the recapture of the Andaman Islands from the Japanese. At the end of a long day's work I remember one officer on the planning staff saying wearily to another: "I suppose these blasted islands really are important ? " " Important ? " said the other. "Of course they are. Only place I ever made a century." The point that struck me about this remark—which was quite true, incidentally—was that, though in a way it was surprising, it was also very typical. The world was until recently a, place in almost every corner of which the speaker's contemporaries had done enterprising or incongruous things. The atlas was dotted with points d'appui. "Who's consul there now ? " "My brother-in-law'll put you up if he's not on tour." . . . "There's sure to be someone in our Tientsin office who knows the form on that. I'll send them a cable." . . "I should ask the missionaries when you get there." Some people, of course, derived a more direct advan- Iage than. others from this sort of cosmic version of the "old boy net" ; but even if we had no contact with it as individuals, it did, I think, perceptibly flavour the background of
our national life. Muriel says Lashio's much better for the children than Mergui." . . "It's only pewter, but it's a
nice shape, isn't it ? My son had it made when he was in Swatow.' . . . Remote, romantic place-names became domesti- cated in English households, the ends of the earth were pasted into snapshot albums, grandmothers headed for Asia in the autumn.
Perhaps it didn't all mean very much. It is not essential to the well-being of fifty million people that one of them should have made a century while playing cricket in the Andaman Thlands. But our horizons have shrunk, and look like con- tinuing to shrink. "What's it like there now ? " we more and more often find ourselves asking ; in the next generation the question will be " What sort of a place is that ? " Sooner or later, no doubt, some new historical trend will reverse the process and the age of rediscovery will dawn. Publishers will announce titles like Poona Unveiled, My Three Weeks in Tsingtao and Forbidden Mandalay, and it will hardly occur to anyone to say "This is where my great-great-grandfather came in."
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