UNDERGRADUATE PACE
Tvatta Diska
By KENNETH MOLE (St. Mary's Hospital Medical School)
THE Peruvian—he looks about twenty years old but is universally believed to be a professor of literature at a South American university—is a keen worker, and there is little for others to do when he is around. The time passes quickly, though, for all of us. The Chinese boy, who lived in Indonesia during the Japanese occupation, where he spoke Cantonese, Dutch and Japanese with equal fluency, and who now studies French and German in Amsterdam, is always happy making love in Finnish to the two girls who peel potatoes. The rest of us know enough French and English between us to pass the time in conversation. Usually we talk about national characteristics, with special reference
to national attitudes towards hitch-hikers. ..
" Autostop " is the word for hitch-hike, and of countries where this mode of travel is easy one says laconically: " Ca marche," hardly the best phrase, perhaps, for those whose main object is to avoid walking. "Ca marche" is high praise, and one cannot help glowing inwardly on hearing it applied to England, though out- wardly one preserves a mask of complete indifference. An air of neutrality must be worn like armour, for at any moment there may be some unanswerable, devastating crack at the English character. " Is it really true," they ask pityingly, " that the English actually put milk into tea ? " One blushes, murmurs faintly of the sophisti- cation of an acquired taste, but cannot escape being marked down as an utter barbarian. And as for driving on the left of the road, we are as bad as the Swedes, but at least they don't go on using impossible units of money and measurement.
Then a wooden crate stacked with steaming dishes trundles towards us along the rollers. The plates are too hot to touch, but in a moment they will be cool enough to handle and dry enough to need no wiping, and after a minute spent in stacking them we are free again for more talk. The professor buzzes around doing all the other necessary jobs which need time and effort.
Every two hours one must eat. Sometimes it is best to point at what is required as it lies sizzling in the pan, and then make a tour of the " cold kitchen," collecting little extras like smoked salmon and strawberries. Sometimes a cook who speaks a little English will hand you a plate of three fried eggs and a slab of ham saying that it would be nice for the poor boy from England to eat some- thing he is used to. With each meal is a bottle of beer, poor stuff, but there is something about the very thought of free beer which makes it good to drink. Then back to the dishes until half an hour before one is due to stop, when there is another meal to be eaten.
This is " Tviitta diska," which, as if you hadn't guessed. means " washing dishes." The scene is Stockholm, in almost any of the thousand restaurants which crowd the " Summer City." The dish- washers are mostly students, prolonging their stay in Scandinavia by earning Is. 8d. an hour plus, which is more important, free food and drink in a city where to eat well costs plenty of money if you walk into a restaurant through the front door. If, at almost any time of day, you go to the back door, and utter the password "Tvatta diska," you are immediately made to feel that your arrival has been expected for some weeks. So powerful is this magic phrase, and so universally understood, that it gives free entrance to places like zoos and pleasure-gardens which contain restaurants, where the common herd have to pay to get in. It is exactly as if anyone who went to an entrance of the London Zoo and mumbled " Wash dishes " with a foreign accent were waved past the waiting queues and hustled through a side door like royalty with an incognito to be maintained. Once inside the restaurant you are shown into a changing-room, where you help yourself to an apron and wooden clogs to lift your feet above the slops on the floor, and according to the time of day you are given a meal or a dish- cloth. In either case you are at liberty to quench your thirst or stave off hunger by helping yourself to unlimited quantities of milk. If it is not yet time to eat you find someone who speaks a language you understand, probably a student, and ask him what to do. The students are summer-holiday members of a curious com. munity of semi-permanent amateur tramps, many of whom began as summer members but stayed on after their holiday was due to be over. A number have drifted during 1950 to Stockholm, where work is easy to get and paid in a useful currency. Here there are two Irish girls who left home last year for a three-week holiday in Switzerland ; an Englishman who didn't like his new job on the Persian Gulf with an oil company and has spent the last two years moving vaguely towards Birmingham ; an Italian clerk from Milan who is always yearning for what is over the horizon ; a French ex-paratrooper who has been on the move ever since his feet touched ground five years ago. They are to be found in all European capitals, and on the roads between them, hitch-hiking.
At the youth hostels in the big cities where some of them live for short periods they form a big contrast to the part-time tourists, especially the more stream-lined Americans. " Why hallo, Carol " cries a superbly dressed American girl over her shoulder as she sweeps through the front door past a friend last seen in Paris. " Did you see Vienna"? " " Sure I saw Vienna," says her friend. " Did you see Rome ? ." And as the one goes on upstairs to renew her underwear before setting off for Helsinki, her friend speeds on to the next cultural assignment on her list.
The dish-washers observe this interchange from the veranda, where they are laundering their ragged multi-coloured shirts, nod wisely and begin to exchange useful infoimation about the real Vienna, the real Rome, cities of factories where there are temporary jobs to be had and of restaurants where there are dishes to be washed.
They also know a surprising amount about the cities the Ameridn girls have seen. They live their kind of life because they like it, not because they have to, and seldom get so hogged down by the necessity of making a little money from time to time that they forget that they are really on holiday. They will tell you where to find the Gauguins in Copenhagen or the wood-cuts of the sculptor Vigeland in Oslo, and their spirit is perhaps best shown by the two Swiss girls—they left home eighteen months ago to do six months' house-work with a family in Watford—who spent two sixteen-hour days in a steamy kitchen in Stockholm so as to save enough money to indulge in a quarter of an hour's air-trip over the city. One or two of them are displaced persons running the gauntlet of police registration, and for them life is a serious business, but the rest are seeing the world while they still have the chance. Should any of them become politicians when they finally settle down, one can only hope they will retain a tenth of the understanding they. are now getting of the values and habits of the different countries of the world.
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