City and Suburban
BY JOHN BETJEMAN THIS is the saddest week of all on railway stations. It is the beginning of the school year. Sons stand em- barrassed by their parents outside the school special train, and still more embarrassed by their younger brothers. Parents look suspiciously at other parents or are over-jolly. 'We don't care. Ha, ha! It'll soon be Christmas.' Tears are near eyes. Hearts are in boots. How soon will the names of Hillard and Boning, North and Hillard, Godfrey and Siddons, Abbot and Mansfield, and all those other pairs led by the single lone figure of Benjamin Hall Kennedy, become more familiar than those of home. Oh Eric, Eric, how glad 1 am I am not at school any more I hold him a hypocrite or a pathetic case of arrested development who ever, says schooldays are the happiest of your life. And as for Eth: and St. Winifred's. those despised school stories by Dean Farrar, they have always seemed to me more like school than any of the more realistic novels of a later age. Their language may be mawkish, their characters over-painted, their situations absurd, but the impending sense of doom which hangs over all school life. boarding or day, is caught as it has never been caught since.
MINI WATER It must be an unenviable task to be the editor of Waterways. whose first number has just appeared under the aegis of the British Transport Commission. It is a shamefaced and sad little periodical designed to pep up the bewildered remaining employees on our canals. The cat is let out of the bag surrep- titiously here and there. The Report of the Board of Survey. which has condemned 771 miles of canals to become stagnant ditches and nuisances, 'sets the pattern,' we are told, 'for our future development.' God forbid! Elsewhere, in a list of canals 'to be retained for the present,' we find Kennet and Avon (River Avon section). This is like closing Barking Creek but allowing the Thames to remain navigable between Barking and Southend. It is, of course, sheer casuistry. The editor. luckless man, says he 'will welcome photographs, etc.. on any subject connected with British waterways.' I wonder whether he would publish a photograph of the rally at Bath last April, in which that splendid character, Ted Leather, MP. took part. when they actually cut the lock-chain which the British Transport Commission had illegally put on the first lock-gate to make the Kennet and Avon Canal unnavigable. I wonder whether he would publish views of the Macclesfield Canal, which has been illegally stripped of much of its gear by the Commission. I wonder whether he would publish anything I wrote.
DANGER-BEAUTY Sir Osbert Sitwell sends me some cuttings from a Derby- shire paper 'to show that we are not behind the times even in this industrial district.' Part of the famous Creswell Crags which overhang the road has been blasted away by the National Coal Board because they were thought to be a danger to traffic. Who thought they were dangerous is not made clear. They were certainly very difficult to dislodge. Dynamite and levers and steel hawsers had to be used. I have often won- dered why any trees are allowed near roads; they have been known to fall on the heads of ratepayers. As for forests, no one who is security-minded ought to work in them. Perhaps the Italians will straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa if they learn about Creswell Crags—either straighten it or blow it up. There is far too much danger about, and when it is beautiful it is more dangerous than ever.
WHITE TRASH
My visit to Venice was terminated by a short, sharp shower which drove me to take shelter in the Danieli Hotel, which is, as it were, the Savoy of Venice. I heard the resounding, husky voice of an American woman addressing a friend : 'Venice is ruined, my dear. They're everywhere. I reckon Hitler didn't do his job thoroughly enough."Yes, dear, we all think that, but don't say it quite so loud."They're all over Rome too, dear. If you want to get into the nice set in Rome, you must get into the diplomatic set. We're going to Lourdes. [Could it have been Lourdes? It sounded like it.] It's a small community there. Everybody's nice and everybody's rich.' I looked to see who these extraordinary people could be whO talked as though the war had not been worth fighting. They were fat. old and ugly daughters of the Republic, unsure of themselves and really rather pathetic. There were several witnesses to this talk, some of them Jewish and one American. The American said it made him want to be a Communist.
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