I THINK it was in King Solomon's Mines that, when sonic
massive shutter of rock was lowered to bar a secret passage, the witch Gagool perished beneath it `with a sickening scrunch.' The phrase—at one time regarded by me as the most masterly and luminous in English literature—came into my mind when at 6.30 a.m. on Sunday I closed the boot of my car. I closed it with difficulty on a sort of aspic of gum- boots, mackintoshes, cartridge-bags, grouse, venison, wet clothes still warm from the drying-room and other debris, be- neath which were buried the uncompromising outlines of the luggage proper. There was a sort of squidgy finality about the the Highlands must have started without any effective form of shelter for the ponderous and lofty automobiles which first found their way thither. Why, while scholars wrangle over cave- drawings executed (if genuine) by a Isom sapiens whom they cannot hope to reconstruct in the round, does no deviationist sidle off to Caledonia and return with a monograph entitled A Study of the Development of the Domestic Garage on Sportipg Estates in North Britain? It might not be a particularly gripping monograph; but it would avert squabbles between learned men in one or two thousand years' time, and the subject, specialised though it is, is one well calculated to yield its secrets to the arts of modern sociology.
It was, as I remember, soon after the First World War ended that people started driving up to Scotland as a matter of course, and the breakfast-baskets that used to be put on the train at Crianlarich were relegated, with Christmas stockings and other pleasant totems, to the box-room of memory. But the journey was regarded as something of an undertaking and surrounded (from the children's point of view) with a certain amount of mumbo-jumbo, such as going to bed early on the night before you started and at the hotel where you stopped on the way and being required (in an odious phrase) to 'take things easy' on the day after you arrived. When at the age of fifteen 1 obtained permission to travel north in a sidecar attached to my cousin's motor-bicycle I thought it unlikely that I should ever have a more exciting experience; and although I can remember little of the journey I dare say that my expectations were not far out.
As we fled south through the winding glens I thought of that motor-bicycle, and of the various small cars in which, becoming at last an owner-driver myself, I had rumbled doggedly along these roads. At that time there had been no question of 'doing it in a day'; and even now I was not certain that the project was quite the thing with such a load of juvenile passengers.
But children have great resilience as travellers. Just as you think they have fallen into a coma, they suddenly revive and either embark on a pointless argument among themselves, or ask you a series of unanswerable questions, or sing 'The Lincolnshire Poacher' very loudly in your ear, or demand to hear Meet the Huggetts on the radio. They delight in pheno- mena which madden you, such as the successive convoys of War Department vehicles, ambling nose to tail through the Midlands, which we had perilously to overtake. The facetiie chalked by the RASC on their tailboards—Pass Carefully. No Driver,' The Nasser Express'—made a powerful appeal, and when at last we were clear of these obstacles to progress, their angry complaints that there were no more convoys were only stilled when we met another fascinating obstruction—a cordon sanitaire of part-time bureaucrats who for inscrutable reasons were conducting a traffic census round Leicester.
However, everything really went very well, and for most of the last two hours the children were spellbound by a rather unsuitable BBC drama (Daddy, why did he call her a bitch? She's not a dog, is she?'). There were 483 miles on the clock when the Relief Driver drew up outside our front door, thirteen hours after the start of the journey; and although I personally felt rather dazed I was resuscitated by the first letter which I opened from the pile on the.hall table. It was from an insurance company, and it began :
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