I have therefore always regarded the Zip with a wary eye. But it appears that all travelling bags have Zips.
‘The old-fashioned fastening is quite superseded, Modom,’ says the salesman, regarding me with a pitying look.
‘This, you see, is so simple,’ he says, demonstrating.
There is no doubt about its simplicity – but then, I think to myself, the bag is empty.
‘Well,’ I say, sighing, ‘one must move with the times.’
With some misgivings I buy the bag.
I am now the proud possessor of a Zip travelling bag, an Empire Builder’s Wife’s coat and skirt, and a possibly satisfactory hat.
There is still much to be done.
I pass to the Stationery Department. I buy several fountain and stylographic pens – it being my experience that, though a fountain pen in England behaves in an exemplary manner, the moment it is let loose in desert surroundings it perceives that it is at liberty to go on strike and behaves accordingly, either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper. I also buy a modest two pencils. Pencils are, fortunately, not temperamental, and though given to a knack of quiet disappearance, I have always a resource at hand. After all, what is the use of an architect if not to borrow pencils from?
Four wrist-watches is the next purchase. The desert is not kind to watches. After a few weeks there, one’s watch gives up steady everyday work. Time, it says, is only a mode of thought. It then takes its choice between stopping eight or nine times a day for periods of twenty minutes, or of racing indiscriminately ahead. Sometimes it alternates coyly between the two. It finally stops altogether. One then goes on to wrist-watch No. 2, and so on. There is also a purchase of two four and six watches in readiness for that moment when my husband will say to me: ‘Just lend me a watch to give to the foreman, will you?’
Our Arab foremen, excellent though they are, have what might be described as a heavy hand with any kind of timepiece. Telling the time, anyway, calls for a good deal of mental strain on their part. They can be seen holding a large round moon-faced watch earnestly upside down, and gazing at it with really painful concentration while they get the answer wrong! Their winding of these treasures is energetic and so thorough that few mainsprings can stand up to the strain!
It therefore happens that by the end of the season the watches of the expedition staff have been sacrificed one by one. My two four and six watches are a means of putting off the evil day.
Packing!
There are several schools of thought as to packing. There are the people who begin packing at anything from a week or a fortnight beforehand. There are the people who throw a few things together half an hour before departure. There are the careful packers, insatiable for tissue paper! There are those who scorn tissue paper and just throw the things in and hope for the best! There are the packers who leave practically everything that they want behind! And there are the packers who take immense quantities of things that they never will need!
One thing can safely be said about an archaeological packing. It consists mainly of books. What books to take, what books can be taken, what books there are room for, what books can (with agony!) be left behind. I am firmly convinced that all archaeologists pack in the following manner: They decide on the maximum number of suitcases that a long-suffering Wagon Lit Company will permit them to take. They then fill these suitcases to the brim with books. They then, reluctantly, take out a few books, and fill in the space thus obtained with shirt, pyjamas, socks, etc.
Looking into Max’s room, I am under the impression that the whole cubic space is filled with books! Through a chink in the books I catch sight of Max’s worried face.
‘Do you think,’ he asks, ‘that I shall have room for all these?’
The answer is so obviously in the negative that it seems sheer cruelty to say it.
At four-thirty p.m. he arrives in my room and asks hopefully:
‘Any room in your suitcases?’
Long experience should have warned me to answer firmly ‘No,’ but I hesitate, and immediately doom falls upon me.
‘If you could just get one or two things –’
‘Not books?’
Max looks faintly surprised and says: ‘Of course books – what else?’
Advancing, he rams down two immense tomes on top of the Empire Builder’s Wife’s suit which has been lying smugly on top of a suitcase.
I utter a cry of protest, but too late.
‘Nonsense,’ says Max, ‘lots of room!’ And forces down the lid, which refuses spiritedly to shut.
‘It’s not really full even now,’ says Max optimistically.
He is, fortunately, diverted at this moment by a printed linen frock lying folded in another suitcase. ‘What’s that?’
I reply that it is a dress.
‘Interesting,’ says Max. ‘It’s got fertility motifs all down the front.’
One of the more uncomfortable things about being married to an archaeologist is their expert knowledge of the derivation of the most harmless-looking patterns!
At five-thirty Max casually remarks that he’d better go out and buy a few shirts and socks and things. He returns three-quarters of an hour later, indignant because the shops all shut at six. When I say they always do, he replies that he had never noticed it before.
Now, he says, he has nothing to do but ‘clear up his papers’.
At eleven p.m. I retire to bed, leaving Max at his desk (never to be tidied or dusted under the most dire penalties), up to the elbows in letters, bills, pamphlets, drawings of pots, innumerable potsherds, and various match-boxes, none of them containing matches, but instead odd beads of great antiquity.
At four a.m. he comes excitedly into the bedroom, cup of tea in hand, to announce that he has at last found that very interesting article on Anatolian finds which he had lost last July. He adds that he hopes that he hasn’t woken me up.
I say that of course he has woken me up, and he’d better get me a cup of tea too!
Returning with the tea, Max says he has also found a great many bills which he thought he had paid. I, too, have had that experience. We agree that it is depressing.
At nine a.m. I am called in as the heavy-weight to sit on Max’s bulging suitcases.
‘If you can’t make them shut,’ says Max ungallantly, ‘nobody can!’
The superhuman feat is finally accomplished by the aid of sheer avoirdupois, and I return to contend with my own difficulty, which is, as prophetic vision had told me it would be, the Zip bag. Empty in Mr Gooch’s shop, it had looked simple, attractive, and labour-saving. How merrily then had the Zip run to and fro! Now, full to the brim, the closing of it is a miracle of superhuman adjustment. The two edges have to be brought together with mathematical precision, and then, just as the Zip is travelling slowly across, complications set in, due to the corner of a sponge-bag. When at last it closes, I vow not to open it again until I get to Syria!
On reflection, however, this is hardly possible. What about the aforementioned sponge-bag? Am I to travel for five days unwashed? At the moment even that seems preferable to unzipping the Zip bag!
Yes, now the moment has come and we are really off. Quantities of important things have been left undone: the Laundry, as usual, has let us down; the Cleaners, to Max’s chagrin, have not kept their promises – but what does anything matter? We are going!
Just for a moment or two it looks as though we aren’t going! Max’s suitcases, delusive in appearance, are beyond the powers of the taximan to lift. He and Max struggle with them, and finally, with the assistance of a passer-by, they are hoisted on to the taxi.
We drive off for Victoria.
Dear Victoria – gateway to the world beyond England – how I love your continental platform. And how I love trains, anyway! Snuffing up the sulphurous smell ecstatically – so different from the faint, aloof, distantly oil
y smell of a boat, which always depresses my spirits with its prophecy of nauseous days to come. But a train – a big snorting, hurrying, companionable train, with its big puffing engine, sending up clouds of steam, and seeming to say impatiently: ‘I’ve got to be off, I’ve got to be off, I’ve got to be off!’ – is a friend! It shares your mood, for you, too, are saying: ‘I’m going to be off, I’m going, I’m going, I’m going….’
By the door of our Pullman, friends are waiting to see us off. The usual idiotic conversations take place. Famous last words pour from my lips – instructions about dogs, about children, about forwarding letters, about sending out books, about forgotten items, ‘and I think you’ll find it on the piano, but it may be on the bathroom shelf’. All the things that have been said before, and do not in the least need saying again!
Max is surrounded by his relations, I by mine.
My sister says tearfully that she has a feeling that she will never see me again. I am not very much impressed, because she has felt this every time I go to the East. And what, she asks, is she to do if Rosalind gets appendicitis? There seems no reason why my fourteen-year-old daughter should get appendicitis, and all I can think of to reply is: ‘Don’t operate on her yourself!’ For my sister has a great reputation for hasty action with her scissors, attacking impartially boils, haircutting, and dressmaking – usually, I must admit, with great success.
Max and I exchange relations, and my dear mother-in-law urges me to take great care of myself, implying that I am nobly going into great personal danger.
Whistles blow, and I have a last few frenzied words with my friend and secretary. Will she do all the things I have left undone, and upbraid suitably the Laundry and the Cleaners and give a good reference to the cook and send off those books I couldn’t pack, and get back my umbrella from Scotland Yard, and write appropriately to the clergy-man who has discovered forty-three grammatical errors in my last book, and go through the seed-list for the garden and cross off vegetable marrows and parsnips? Yes, she will do all those things, and if any crisis occurs in the Home or the Literary World she will cable me. It doesn’t matter, I say. She has a power of attorney. She can do anything she likes. She looks rather alarmed and says she shall be most careful. Another whistle! I say good-bye to my sister, and say wildly that I, too, feel I shall never see her again, and perhaps Rosalind will get appendicitis. Nonsense, says my sister; why should she? We climb into the Pullman, the train grunts and starts – we are OFF.
For about forty-five seconds I feel terrible, and then as Victoria Station is left behind, exultation springs up once more. We have begun the lovely, exciting journey to Syria.
There is something grand and stuck-up about a Pullman, though it is not nearly as comfortable as a corner of an ordinary first-class carriage. We always go by Pullman solely on account of Max’s suitcases, which an ordinary carriage would not tolerate. Having once had registered luggage go astray, Max takes no chances with his precious books.
We arrive at Dover, to find the sea moderately calm. Nevertheless, I retire to the Salon des Dames, and lie and meditate with the pessimism always induced in me by the motion of the waves. But we are soon at Calais, and the French steward produces a large blue-bloused man to deal with my luggage. ‘Madame will find him in the Douane,’ he says.
‘What is his number?’ I ask. The steward is immediately reproachful.
‘Madame! Mais c’est le charpentier du bateau!’
I become properly abashed – to reflect a few minutes later that that is not really an answer. Why, because he is the charpentier du bateau, does it make it any easier to pick him out from several hundred other blue-bloused men, all shouting: ‘Quatre-vingt treize?’ etc? His mere silence will not be sufficient identification. Moreover, does his being the charpentier du bateau enable him to pick out with unerring certainty one middle-aged Englishwoman from a whole crowd of middle-aged Englishwomen?
At this point in my reflections Max joins me, and says he has a porter for my luggage. I explain that the charpentier du bateau has taken mine, and Max asks why I let him. All the luggage should go together. I agree, but plead that my intellect is always weakened by sea-crossings. Max says: ‘Oh, well; we shall collect it all in the Douane.’ And we proceed to that inferno of yelling porters and to the inevitable encounter with the only type of really unpleasant Frenchwoman that exists – the Customs House Female; a being devoid of charm, of chic, of any feminine grace. She prods, she peers, she says, ‘Pas de cigarettes?’ unbelievingly, and finally, with a reluctant grunt, she scrawls the mystic hieroglyphics in chalk on our baggage, and we pass through the barrier and out on to the platform, and so to the Simplon Orient Express and the journey across Europe.
Many, many years ago, when going to the Riviera or to Paris, I used to be fascinated by the sight of the Orient Express at Calais and longed to be travelling by it. Now it has become an old familiar friend, but the thrill has never quite died down. I am going by it! I am in it! I am actually in the blue coach, with the simple legend outside: CALAIS-INSTANBUL. It is, undoubtedly, my favourite train. I like its tempo, which, starting Allegro con furore, swaying and rattling and hurling one from side to side in its mad haste to leave Calais and the Occident, gradually slows down in a rallentando as it proceeds eastwards till it becomes definitely legato.
In the early morning of the next day I let the blind up, and watch the dim shapes of the mountains in Switzerland, then the descent into the plains of Italy, passing by lovely Stresa and its blue lake. Then, later, into the smart station that is all we see of Venice and out again, and along by the sea to Trieste and so into Yugoslavia. The pace gets slower and slower, the stops are longer, the station clocks display conflicting times. H.E.O. is succeeded by C.E. The names of the stations are written in exciting and improbable-looking letters. The engines are fat and comfortable-looking, and belch forth a particularly black and evil smoke. Bills in the dining-cars are written out in perplexing currencies and bottles of strange mineral water appear. A small Frenchman who sits opposite us at table studies his bill in silence for some minutes, then he raises his head and catches Max’s eye. His voice, charged with emotion, rises plaintively: ‘Le change des Wagons Lits, c’est incroyable!’ Across the aisle a dark man with a hooked nose demands to be told the amount of his bill in (a) francs, (b) lire, (c) dinars, (d) Turkish pounds, (e) dollars. When this has been done by the long-suffering restaurant attendant, the traveller calculates silently and, evidently a master financial brain, produces the currency most advantageous to his pocket. By this method, he explains to us, he has saved fivepence in English money!
In the morning Turkish Customs officials appear on the train. They are leisurely, and deeply interested in our baggage. Why, they ask me, have I so many pairs of shoes? It is too many. But, I reply, I have no cigarettes, because I do not smoke, so why not a few more shoes? The douanier accepts the explanation. It appears to him reasonable. What, he asks, is the powder in this little tin?
It is bug powder, I say; but find that this is not understood. He frowns and looks suspicious. He is obviously suspecting me of being a drug-smuggler. It is not powder for the teeth, he says accusingly, nor for the face; for what, then? Vivid pantomime by me! I scratch myself realistically, I catch the interloper. I sprinkle the woodwork. Ah, all is understood! He throws back his head and roars with laughter, repeating a Turkish word. It is for them, the powder! He repeats the joke to a colleague. They pass on, enjoying it very much. The Wagon Lit conductor now appears to coach us. They will come with our passports to demand how much money we have, ‘effectif, vous comprenez?’ I love the word effectif – it is so exactly descriptive of actual cash in hand. ‘You will have,’ the conductor proceeds, ‘exactly so much effectif!’ He names the sum. Max objects that we have more than that. ‘It does not matter. To say so will cause you embarrassments. You will say you have the letter of credit or the travellers’ cheques and of effectif so much.’ He adds in explanation: ‘They do not mind, you comprehend, wh
at you have, but the answer must be en règle. You will say – so much.’
Presently the gentleman in charge of the financial questions comes along. He writes down our answer before we actually say it. All is en règle. And now we are arriving at Stamboul, winding in and out through strange wooden slatted houses, with glimpses of heavy stone bastions and glimpses of sea at our right.
A maddening city, Stamboul – since when you are in it you can never see it! Only when you have left the European side and are crossing the Bosphorus to the Asian coast do you really see Stamboul. Very beautiful it is this morning – a clear, shining pale morning, with no mist, and the mosques with their minarets standing up against the sky.
‘La Sainte Sophie, it is very fine,’ says a French gentleman.
Everybody agrees, with the regrettable exception of myself. I, alas, have never admired Sainte Sophie! An unfortunate lapse of taste; but there it is. It has always seemed definitely to me the wrong size. Ashamed of my perverted ideas, I keep silent.
Now into the waiting train at Haidar Pacha, and, when at last the train starts, breakfast – a breakfast for which one is by now quite ravenous! Then a lovely day’s journey along the winding coast of the Sea of Marmora, with islands dotted about looking dim and lovely. I think for the hundredth time that I should like to own one of those islands. Strange, the desire for an island of one’s own! Most people suffer from it sooner or later. It symbolizes in one’s mind liberty, solitude, freedom from all cares. Yet actually, I suppose, it would mean not liberty but imprisonment. One’s housekeeping would probably depend entirely on the mainland. One would be continually writing long lists of grocery orders for the stores, arranging for meat and bread, doing all one’s housework, since few domestics would care to live on an island far from friends or cinemas, without even a bus communication with their fellow-kind. A South Sea island, I always imagined, would be different! There one would sit, idly eating the best kinds of fruit, dispensing with plates, knives, forks, washing up, and the problem of grease on the sink! Actually the only South Sea islanders I ever saw having a meal were eating platefuls of hot beef stew rolling in grease, all set on a very dirty table-cloth.
Come, Tell Me How You Live Page 2
