MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IHAVE always been interested in means and habits of loco- motion. I should even today be prepared to put myself to inconvenience in order to sample some new method of conveyance—rattling down the cobble-stohes of Madeira in a tea-tray or being hoisted in a precarious rope-basket up the precipices of Meteora. I have not as yet been transported any great distance in a sedan-chair, a litter, or even a rickshaw ; but I have certainly experimented in many strange types of cOnvey- ance, and am always entranced by reading about other methods of travel in distant days. Recently we .have had two separate accounts of how English people travelled in the early years of the nineteenth century, at the time when the Congress of Vienna had brought peace to Europe and the English propertied classes regarded it as necessary for their own social position, and the education of their daughters, to indulge in a protracted and expensive Continental tour. We have had the detailed diary of Jane, Lady Franklin, and we have had the engaging journal of Miss Beaujolois Campbell. Up to comparatively recent times the rich and great transported their travelling carriages from Dover to Calais and stuck to them for months, trundling along from auberge to auberge all the way from the Channel to Mont- pellier and then along the Corniche to Pisa and Rome. My own grandmother, who lived to the age of ninety-eight, assured me that every April her patents would cross to Belgium or France, and that she would spend the dreadful hours of the sea-passage in their travelling carriage which was lashed to the deck. The theory was, it seems, that sea-sickness was caused by our inability to adjust our brain to vertical movement, and that therefore if one could not see the horizon dipping up and down behind the bulwarks, no giddiness need occur. For these reasons, when my grandmother and her gbverness had at .Dover been installed among the cushions of the family barouche, the black panel shutters were raised. They remained during the crossing in utter darkness, dabbing their foreheads with Cologne water and sniffing salts. Thus did the young journey to the Continent between the years 1830 and 1840.
* * * - * - Many English travellers learnt from experience that it was a mistake to entrust delicate English harness to the impatient hands of foreign ostlers or to expose the springs and enamel of their carriages to rough Continental roads. They would therefore send back their own conveyances from Dover, make the Channel crossing seated stiffly in a cabin of the packet, and acquire at Calais a hired conveyance, complete with courier and postilions. Reading Jane Franklin or Beaujolois Campbell, one is amazed at the patience and endurance of British nineteenth-century parents. These hired conveyances cannot have been larger than an ordinary touring car, and yet they appear to have stuffed into them a vast quantity of provisions, five children, a governess and several trunks. The maids and valets would follow slowly in the fourgon behind. Very imaginative travellers, such as the gorgeous Lady Blessington, would cause their, maids, couriers and valets to rise early in the morning and to precede them with the heavy luggage by several hours. On arrival at their destina- tion they would by these means find their rooms aired, their trunks unpacked and an exquisite dinner ordered. All who have travelled by road or caravan know that this is the only possible method of securing that the tents will be pitched by the time one arrives ; yet again and again do we hear how Jane or Beaujolois had to wait hours on arrival before the fourgon turned up.
* * * • I should not have-enjoyed the stuffiness or the bumping of those hired vehicles any more than I should have enjoyed the promiscuity of the inevitable table d'hôte, or the bad sanitation and linen of the Continental inn. I am always grateful to destiny for having set my little life-span in the fascinating first fifty years of the twentieth century, and have no patience with those who sigh for some epoch easier than our dangerous dynamic own. Yet I find that even those who long for the muslin and lavender of Cranford agree that there is some merit in modern transport, as there is also in modem anaesthetics. I am above everything grateful to destiny for having allowed me to pass my youth and manhood in an age when little motor-cars could run about Europe and Africa with, security and _ease. The nineteenth century may well claim to have been the great age of exploration: it is the glory of the first half of the twentieth century that it procured, even for people of small incomes, the delights of travel. I know of few enjoyments greater than to escape in a small car, reliable but unpretentious, and to feel, when one gazes up at its under-belly as it swings gently on to the quay at Havre or Dieppe, that every road is open, stretching hospitably all the way to Riigen or the Seven Towers. It is not only the climate that shifts obligingly in the five days that follow: it is one's mind that again is rendered malleable, one's heart that twitches again to some sudden aspect of beauty, and one's palate that recovers the sense of anticipation that in London it had lost. What stimulus can be more subtle than the contrast between the interior of one's own little runabout (the A.A. guide in the net above the driving-seat, or the door-handle that was broken that afternoon at Tunbridge Wells) and the clouds steaming up the flanks of the Col de Liseron, or the small waves lapping the hot parapets of Phaleron?
There come lean 'years when we cannot afford foreign excur- sions and are obliged to circle round the small confines of our own dear island. How minute she seems in the cold of an English August, when we look down from some ridge upon the .pattern of the coloured counties, or pass in a few hours from sea to sea.! The names of historic English cities succeed each other upon .the sign-posts as fast as the figures on a taximeter clock : one has hardly left Salisbury before one reaches Penzance. Inhabited this island appears to us more than other realms ; con- gested and urbanised ; rich in trees and meadows, sprinkled with flowers ; and confronting the horrors of a chilly climate, bad cooking and the humiliation of lost power with a stolid but agreeable face. It is some years now since I devoted a fortnight to visiting my own country. I have been interested during the last twelve days in observing the changes that have taken place since 1946. I noticed a great increase in caravan traffic ; these painted boxes that swing and bump behind the cars of their inhabitants are designed to provide the pleasures of solitude and independence: yet it seems that they possess the very herd instincts that they are intended to assuage ; they group in fields and camps, nuzzling together like a herd of elephants in the bogs of the Sudan. I noticed also that the servants and pro- prietors of inns were less angry with one than in the year imme- diately after the war : there were moments even when one could detect upon their proud faces the flicker of a smile of welcome. No possible pleasure can ever be expected from English meals ; I found that they were seldom nasty but never nice ; it is a source of sorrow -tO me, when obliged to spend a holiday in England, that my greediness is never either stimulated or assuaged.
* * * How unchanging,,, moreover, and I fear unchangeable, are the aesthetic results of the Industrial Revolution! It is perplexing, as one passes through the breadth of England, to realise that whereas up to 1840 people could hardly build an ugly house, they became unable thereafter to build a comely one. It is with a real shock of anger that, after dawdling among Cotswold villages, one ,comes upon the outskirts, of Stroud. It might have been supposed that the building traditions and materials of that lovely district were eternally fool-proof ; but we always under-estimate the ingenuity of fools.
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