Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN When Carl Reiner interviews Mel Brooks on the American comic record, The Two Thousand Year Old Man, and asks the ancient survivor what was the principal means of transport in his earliest days, the answer is swift and un- hesitating—lean' Savages and animals need to keep legs braced for a fast take-off just ahead of their enemies. It is only modern man, the house-dweller and the door-locker, who can afford to choose between being vertical or horizontal. Even here the Puritan is suspicious of any angle beyond 45° to the upright, condemning his children to sit stiffly in straight-back chairs and banning sofas from any room .frequented by adolescents of mixed sex.
The difference between the two positions is not just a matter of temperament. There is a distinct physical alteration in the balance of mind and body—the brain puts itself at the mercy of the blood stream, the stomach begins to assert its equality with the head. This is presumably why there comes a moment when the drinker realises that he can only keep the alcohol at bay while he remains on two legs. As his face comes closer to the pillow, he begins to feel the room slide and loop in a dizzying round of aerial acrobatics. I wonder does every toper see the light trace the same pattern? With me the bulb toboggans down to the left, swoops up and back to its starting-place, like a tear- drop blown by the wind.
It is not necessary to have an intake of poison, such as alcohol, to savour the strange defence- lessness of 'being horizontal. I find that lying flat on any moving bed starts off in all my cells the fantasy that I am being wheeled on a trolley
into an operating theatre. Dream puns begin running on imaginary ticker tape across my pupils and I sit up muttering some such head- line as 'Drama Critic Attends His Own Open- ing.' The basic primitive urge to adopt a fight- ing stance at the threat of being hurled into space struggles with the conscious wish to sink into luxurious oblivion. In the wagon-lit, I re- called a memory of another such journey which I had obviously long suppressed. The first time I flew to America was de luxe at the expense of Lord Beaverbrook and I felt very superior to the mummied tourist passengers, snoring in their outdoor clothes, as I climbed in my pyjamas on to my mattressed shelf. Five minutes later I was considering begging for a swap.
As sleep began to fold over me like soft, dark waves of silk, I distinctly heard the engines cough and splutter. A wing broke off with the tearing sound of a wisdom tooth being extracted. And phantom voices, strained to falsetto with phony calm, could be heard murmuring: `No need for alarm—the ship has struck an iceberg, the cargo is on fire, the slaves have mutinied, the roof is collapsing, last pf the pemmican, all hope abandoned for survivors.' And as I struggled to adjust my Jack Hawkins stiff-upper-lip, my Main fear was what a fool I should look trying to keep up pyjama trousers as I came plum- meting down into a furious ocean.
A similar sequence of soundtrack noises plagued me last week as the express towed my restless form sideways towards the Pyrenees. If the purpose of dreams is to keep the dreamer asleep, by scripting all outside distractions into an enthralling, if nonsensical, scenario for the private movie theatre of his mind, then my internal executive producer is no longer in touch with his box office. Or perhaps he is just not used to handling the sort of raw material made available by French Railways. This time I heard no dialogue. Instead, whenever I
,dipped up my consciousness, I was sucked down a roaring plug-hole, an insane maelstrom of howling and shrieking and cursing, which sug- gested that Dante was at the controls and we had just branched off on to the Inner Circle of the Inferno.
The wagons-lits of today are hardly what I had been led to expect from the spy novels of .Eric Ambler. The two-berth first-class sleeper to Narbonne is distinctly inferior to the two- berth second-class sleeper to Edinburgh—it is an experience roughly comparable with bedding under a couch .'in a house where Rachman is staging an all-night party. There are some odd touches in the design such as a corner mirror which locks at an angle which gives you a small- screen view of whoever is in the other bunk, and a twin pair of glass-holders for the upstairs traveller and none for the lower. But it would he unfair to blame the designers for my personal wrigglings like St. Anthony on his griddle. The fault, I'm sure, lies in the inability of the human body to withstand travel at high speed in a horizontal position. It is a false analogy to assume that because we sleep lying down at lest we must sleep lying down in motion.
Perhaps the solution lies in sonic kind of Pneumatic slab which slopes exactly at the per- fect angle between lounging and slumping so that we are transported like rows of fish in a fishmonger's window, ready to spring erect at .a sudden halt or continue at ease throughout a long haul. •
When dawn eventually came on the Narbonne .flyer, after several false starts when I attempted to abandon train in a lid-glued panic at deserted whistle-stops, I made another dis- covery. This article, I realised, was not after all .going to be about the joys of le camping.
The sight I saw through the misted windows might conceivably have cheered the damp spirits of Shem, Ham and Japhet—mile after mile of muddied water above which a drown- ing vine or a drenched corncob appealed for a rescue raft. For those who had survived the deluge, it was a sign that life still went on. For antediluvians. carrying their tent in the back of the car, it was a warning against assuming a horizontal position under canvas.
I was sorry about this because I carry my camping article with 'me as a freelance journal- ist rather the way a refugee might carry the last family diamond—it can always be pawned in moments of shortage. First of all, you begin writing it with the consciousness that 99 per cent of your readers will be filled with admira- tion at the thought of anyone who can live so rough and tough, far from the big hotels and the. swarming tourist traps. You can pose almost as the man who led the donkey on Robert Louis Stevenson's travels through the Cevennes. I remember, as a boy, how 1 envied him wrapped in his blankets under the stars, his pistol under his pillow, his wine and bread by his side, while the fresh air crept across his moustache. (Come to think of it now, Stevenson was an invalid for the last half of his life and died of tuber- culosis, so perhaps he is not the best advertise- ment for the benefits of damp bedding.) Then, having made your readers as embarrassed as a dude rancher faced by an old prospector, you turn the other cheek and reveal how elaborately comfortable the modern terrain de camping can be. There is even a Michelin Guide to the several. hundred best sites, with tents instead of knives and forks as the sign of their rank—five red tents being the grand luxe of camps. Many of them have hot showers, sit-down toilets,
restaurants, bars, kindergarten, power points set in pine, trees on the beach so that the camper can stand knee deep in the Mediterranean. and use his electric shaver, even mechanical in- flaters which blow up the air mattress at the press of a button. Often I wonder, as I sling my tent in a beauty spot with running water and .electric light, why the local Communist Party has never thought of seizing these tourist paradises for the benefit of their neighbouring card-carriers who live in tumble-down villages with one tap in the village square, a sewage stream down the middle of the street, and pic- turesque hovels lit by oil lamps. The foreign visitors are, after all, in search of local colour-- why not let them live among the smell and dis- comfort of the genuine thing?
It is quite an entertaining, and socially con- scious, article, as you can gather. Unfortunately even the tourist-conscious French have not yet reached the stage of rooting over the camps and thus keeping out the downpour. After two nights, with lightning thumping down like cannon balls and rain screeching like torn cloth, when the water began to rise under the tent so that it soon ached to up anchor and sail into the storm. I decided to give up my principles. I am now settled in nattier splendour with prosperous friends of mine whose spreading house looks out over the mountains round Toulon. The doors lit, the terraces droop with grapes, the mosquito nets only slightly blur the stars, the wine is young and strong, the bath water is hot, and the window shelves bulge with books—it is dull stuff .for an article, but it makes a mar- vellous holiday. And I lie, horizontal, in the hammock by the lemon trees, willing even to .risk its swaying in one of the tiny earthquakes they suffer here as punishment for such luxury.
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