Ayant un merveilleux temps
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
Mon cher Theophile—Figure to yourself if it pleases you our ecstasy to be spending at last our holidays in this England we have yearned for since our infancy with a desire so passionate and so tender! Installed at last at the 'Bide-a- wee,' this 'Residential Private Hotel' crouching in a hidden corner of Bognor-Regis, the most chic watering place of the English Riviera! What a fragrance of Dickens, of Sir Walter Scott, of Pamela Johnson-Hansford that lingers in the elegance, a little faded, of these peaceful residences with 'bow-fronts,' in the nostalgia of the Camping 'Butlin' under a fine rain, in the traditional English W. H. Smith's! After so long a time passed in anticipation, in studying those so seductive brochures of the Anglo- Saxon civilisation—Broadstairs, Clacton, Red- car—whose names alone whisper of gothic en- chantments, to find ourselves here at last at this Mecca of the anglophiliac pilgrim, where George the Good has laid his sacred bones!
No longer, alas, are these pluvious islands untrammelled by the ubiquitous tourist. Yugo- slavia, Turkey and Bulgaria have in their turn yielded the treasures of their quaint cultures to the lens of the amateur photographer. Now Albion at last, for so long the forbidden citadel of the North Atlantic, visited only by the richest Americans who could remain within the shelter of their luxury hotels and who but rarely pene- trated the dark hinterland, now this Albion lies unveiled, laid open to the passionate assaults of the German, the Italian, the Spanish, the Greek, the Yugoslav, the Arab tourist, most of all to us Frenchmen who have lusted so long to run our fingers through the sand of her foreshores, to caress the seat of Constitutional Government, to plunge ourselves with a cry of delight into the bubbling cauldron of efferves- cent joy of living that is Swinging England. For so long we have observed- with curiosity in our own land the aloof English Lord, the red-faced English merchant with his immense family, crippled with diarrhoea, the hirsute and repug- nant English minstrel dragging his guitar through our cobbled streets: now at last we can study the Englishman in his own habitat : we can understand the strange paradoxes of this mysterious and adorable land.
0 Bognor! Conceive, mon cher Theophile, the sense of expectancy with which we arrived, on a dark and windy night, in this foreign and exotic city beside the sea! Flurries of cold rain were carried down to us obliquely on the dark wind, lashing the broad green leaves that danced in frenzy under the pale gleam of the street lamps and rattling like deluges of gravel on the corrugated iron of the station's roof. One be- lieved oneself for an instant in the tropical violence of a story of Graham Greene: then a gaunt figure detached itself from the gloom, a wild figure in wet and shining oilskins, leaning on the wind and dragging after itself a heavy artificial leg made of wood. Was it Heathcliff himself, one asked oneself above the roaring of the wind and the fast hammering of one's own heart, come from the tempests of Wuthering to haunt us? It was not.
Though well versed in the subtleties and
shades of meaning to be discovered and sensu- ously fondled in literary English, I find myself from time to time baffled, albeit temporarily, by the vagaries of the spoken tongue: so it was on this occasion. Perhaps by reason of the fact that our bizarre interlocutor found it necessary to raise his voice to a harsh roar against the blus- tering of the wind, perhaps because his pro- nunciation seemed marred by a cloven palate, perhaps because he appeared to be in some degree mentally deranged--his face twitched itself continuously and the eyes bulged in an alarming manner—perhaps, perhaps . . . my reverie, and the polite incomprehension of my dear wife, were abruptly interrupted, however, by our English friend uttering what sounded like an exasperated oath, casting his eyes heavenwards with an air of despair, seizing up our baggage and leading the way out into the puddled obscurity of the town.
Of the journey through this flawed jewel of an early twentieth-century city, whose houses seemed to grip with invisible claws the barren rocks of the island's storm-battered southern coast, their roofs pulled down low over the windows against the shrieking of the rising gale, I saw little: now our guide led us through nar- row and squalid alleys, where wet newspapers and nameless detritus flapped past us in the howling darkness like insubstantial demons or wrapped themselves round our heads with the wet embrace of putrefaction : now we found ourselves stumbling after him through lamp- illuminated 'parlours' where impassive English- men and their families regarded the television: now we waded thigh-deep through turbulent rivers of swirling sewage, the strange laughter of our mutilated companion somewhere ahead in the buffeting darkness our only guide.
Our reception at the 'Bide-a-wee' re-created, in its bleak and yet brooding simplicity, that trembling of horror evoked so uncannily by Mary Shelley and the Monk Lewis. The door creaked open to the extent of a short rusted chain and the withered face of an ancient crone, a native of Sussex in traditional cos- tume, thrust itself into the aperture. Hideous and unintelligible snarls were exchanged, and after some moments we were admitted. Our guide demanded payment of five sterling pounds—about one new franc, he kindly in- formed me—and slamming the door withdrew into the night. We were shown in silence to a bare garret, and the door was locked behind us.
In England taboos still abound. To demand food or drink on entering a dwelling such as the 'Bide-a-wee' after the hours of darkness, is to invite, as the old crone laconically explained to me when I tapped upon the door, 'hard luck.' So it was that we fell fasting upon the creaking springs and awaited the dawn. 0 ineffable trans- formation! Under the grey light of an English summer morning, how the gothic visions of tortured Byronic darkness • fled and gave way to the peaceful dripping of Wordsworth, of Chaucer, of Godfrey Winn. After the tradi- tional English breakfast of 'burnt toast,' Chico' and 'marge,' to stroll through the grey streets of this distant and poignantly proud city, to greet the dignified inhabitants as they go about their age-old businesses, to take the air upon the promenade, observing the trembling droplets of pure water forming upon the iron balustrade, the, shuttered shops, the fluttering newspaper placards which announce 'Flood Chaos Havoc Strikes': this, as one American Greek remarked to me in the deserted 'Bumper Fun-land,' taking his cigar from his mouth and inhaling the ozone- impregnated gale, 'this is really the living.'
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