‘Ah,’ he said, in a pleasant voice, ‘Nous partagerons cette cabine.’
‘Oui, M’sieur,’ I answered.
‘Oh – you are English? You desire that berth? Very well. I too live in London. I have lived there for years.’ It is curious how nearly all foreigners have.
He then unpacked his hair-brushes, a bottle of Bond Street hair lotion, a tweed cap with cast-iron creases in it, and a large assortment of coats and ties, obviously purchased at discreet establishments in Hanover Square and Jermyn Street. He immediately changed his clothes, a process which he repeated at intervals of two hours during the entire voyage. His time on deck was occupied in playing turkey-cock to the one or two doubtfully good-looking ladies on board. When they retired to be sick, he paced up and down like a gobbler in an empty hen-run. His manner towards myself came to resemble more and more that of a man doing his duty by his butler’s son. He asked continuously whether I was not feeling sick, evidently hoping that I was, so that he might display his advantage over me. But he appreciated the open window; and he washed extensively; so that I forgave him everything:
The meals were excellent, and with free wine, were included in the fare. On the first evening I had the good fortune to seat myself next the only Englishman on board, a Mr Galbraith. He had a wife, came from Co. Carlow, lived in Lincolnshire, spoke with a Manchester accent and had travelled extensively ‘representing his firm’, in almost every country in the world. He would, in fact, have been in India now, but for the ‘kiddies’. He wore a thin cloth suit of neat Glen Urquhart checks and a Homberg hat that was too small for him; though when casually loafing about deck, he appeared in a blazer of soft, blue material. Though his business in life was to put through contracts in all parts of the globe, he spoke not a word of any language but his own, with the exception of a few self-conscious syllables of restaurant Italian. We discussed Ireland. I made him talk of his travels. He knew South America intimately and said that I ought to go on one of the big liners to Buenos Aires – within two days’ time a Sports’ Committee and an Entertainments’ Committee had been formed on board – and everything was organised. It was different from the Andros.
There were two families of Levantine Americans on board, fat flabby couples, one of which maltreated its children. The other appropriated my deckchair and pinned its card thereto. This I threw into the sea, and in its place pencilled initials of my own. The remainder of the first-class passengers seemed composed of honeymooning couples, the men of which omitted to shave and wore pince-nez, while the women emerged every day in new and ill-fitting ‘creations’. It was pretty to watch their gambols as they slapped one another’s thighs at table and greedily eyed each successive dish as it moved gradually towards them.
The incidents of the voyage were few. I read a book by Baroness Von Hütten named ‘Candy’; and another by Robert Hugh Benson, called ‘An Average Man’, which I found on board and eventually stole in exchange for several others. This work describes with almost painful accuracy the hold which the Roman Catholic Church can obtain upon people suffering from a drab and riftless round of life; and how the sudden access of material interests can dispel this curious influence, as inexplicable as that of women. For the rest of the time I gazed at the horizon.
We passed the Straits of Messina at dawn, and the Straits of Bonifacio in the evening. Stromboli, which lies a little North of Sicily, presented an appearance of exquisite symmetry: a huge flat-topped cone rising the colour of bloom on ancient chocolate, from the deep blue of the Italian sea. Giant furrows, caused by the lava, showed in dark relief in the brilliant sunlight. At the foot of the island, infinitely small, clung the specks of a little white village. And above floated the curves and wreaths of fat, white, downy smoke, shading gradually away like strands of unspun silk into the blue.
The morning of the fifth day dawned to find us battling against rain, wind and a choppy sea, along the forbidding crag-strewn coast of Southern France. By degrees the twin spires of the Church of Notre-Dame de la Garde took shape, faintly black in the greyness, dominating from their eminence the whole, vast town of Marseilles. It was an hour or more before we had negotiated the various moles of the harbour. Galbraith and I waited until the ship was almost empty, took one last look at her wild boar mascot, and stepped ashore into an enormous warehouse, where we placed our luggage in the hands of a Cook’s man. Galbraith, being unable to utter more than the word ‘combien’, and that with no great certainty, insisted on my bargaining with each cabman in turn; so that some time elapsed before we reached the Hotel Splendide. We then went shopping, as he wished to buy some scent for his wife. Having done so, we drank vermouth. It seemed odd to be sitting at a café now beneath a grey sky, with spits of rain falling on the pavement, and a cold autumn breeze beginning to shake the leaves from the plane trees. After lunching to the strains of a pretentious though melancholy band, we went to see a film, depicting Laura la Plante in a fast motor-boat drama. Five o’clock found us at the station and the Cook’s man giving us our tickets and helping us into our carriage.
We had an early dinner. At Avignon a Frenchman and his wife joined us and proceeded to sleep in the other two corners. I got out at every opportunity to take the air.
We reached Paris about half past seven next morning and Galbraith hurried off to catch the half past eight train, as he was going to a theatre that night with his wife. I went to an hotel and had some breakfast, then delivered the cat and its message to the Armenian dealer, and walked down the Rue de Rivoli. In a window I saw Oliver Baldwin’s new book, ‘Six Prisons and Two Revolutions’, and bought it. Catching the 12.30 at the Gare du Nord, I read it with interest – another testimony to the Betrayal Era in English statesmanship.
The channel steamer took less than an hour to cross. On board, as always, was one of those people with whom it is never quite certain whether one is on speaking terms or not. He was bringing over to England a patent device for transforming bottles of sparkling wine into syphons, once they had been opened. He had been spending a month in Paris and said that as far as he could see the French cocotte was beginning to find a dangerous rival in the American girl-tourist.
‘Even in Paris?’ I answered.
‘Good gracious, yes! Why, the other night, for instance, James and I were sitting in the lounge, when…’
At Dover, our heavy luggage being registered, we had no trouble with the customs. We reached Victoria about seven. At eleven o’clock my trunk arrived, and I took it to the Paddington Hotel, which was full. After enquiries at several others, the Great Central Hotel at Marylebone offered me a camp-bed in a bathroom. I was thankful to accept it. My train reached home early next day, and it was with a feeling of supreme content that I motored down the avenues of the forest, with the morning sun falling through the beeches on to bracken already beginning to turn yellow.
Two months later I met David and Cartaliss over a cocktail. They had had a cold and adventurous journey home and had been delayed for a week in Belgrade. Finally they had broken down at Folkestone. Simon had plunged immediately into his obscure groove of life east of Piccadilly Circus. Cartaliss was off to Paris. I seized a minute on a foggy afternoon to walk with him round Oxford. The lights were beginning to come out. The decaying stone of the colleges, with tired figures wandering to their after-football baths, loomed sadly through the mist. Cartaliss said that he had never imagined that any place could be so Gothic. Then we drove out in the dark to a small raftered inn on the Upper Thames and had a drink of beer by the light of an open fire. From outside could be heard faintly the everlasting rumble of the weir. I had stayed here once in early childhood. The sheets on the bed had not been clean and my mother had had them changed. The world seemed larger now than it had done then in 1909. Private school, public school, university, intermittent trips abroad, intermittent Wiltshire; and last of all this tour had all intervened. Leaning forward to warm my hands over the logs, I experienced a new pride of race: the pride of being, as well as English, European
.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Robert Byron was born in Wembley in 1905. He was educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, from which he was sent down with a third class degree for his persistently unruly behaviour. In 1925 he embarked with two friends on a car journey to Athens, a trip he would detail in his first book Europe in the Looking Glass (1926). In 1929 Byron became a correspondent for The Daily Express, and in 1933 published First Russia, Then Tibet based on his experiences of travel those countries.
It was also in 1933 that Byron set off on a ten-month trip across the Middle East and South Asia with his close friend Christopher Sykes. The resultant book The Road to Oxiana (1937) is considered to be not only Byron’s finest, but one of the pre-eminent works of travel-writing in the English language. It was to be Byron’s last major work. By the time he returned to Britain in 1936 the clouds of war were already gathering. He attended the 1938 Nuremberg Rally with Unity Mitford out of interest, but was no admirer of Nazism, which he described as ‘intellectual and spiritual death’.
In February 1941 Byron was on board the SS Jonathan Holt when it was torpedoed in the North Atlantic en route to Cairo. Although officially a special correspondent for the BBC’s Overseas News Department, rumours persist that he was involved in espionage on behalf of the Allied war effort. Byron was among fifty-two passengers and crew members lost; his body was never recovered.
Jan Morris was born in Somerset in 1926, living and writing under the name James Morris until undergoing sex reassignment surgery in 1972. Morris was educated at Lancing College and Christ Church College, Oxford. Having served in the Second World War, Morris became a foreign correspondent and was the first journalist to report the success of the 1953 British expedition to climb Mount Everest. She has published over forty books on a variety of subjects, and now lives in Wales.
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Jane Austen Love and Friendship Fay Weldon
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Emily Brontë Poems of Solitude Helen Dunmore
Mikhail Bulgakov Fatal Eggs Doris Lessing
Mikhail Bulgakov The Heart of a Dog A.S. Byatt
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Miguel de Cervantes The Dialogue of the Dogs Ben Okri
Geoffrey Chaucer The Parliament of Birds
Anton Chekhov The Story of a Nobody Louis de Bernières
Anton Chekhov Three Years William Fiennes
Wilkie Collins The Frozen Deep
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Gabriele D’Annunzio The Book of the Virgins Tim Parks
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy: Inferno
Dante Alighieri New Life Louis de Bernières
Daniel Defoe The King of Pirates Peter Ackroyd
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Charles Dickens A House to Let
Fyodor Dostoevsky The Double Jeremy Dyson
Fyodor Dostoevsky Poor People Charlotte Hobson
Alexandre Dumas One Thousand and
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George Eliot Amos Barton Matthew Sweet
Henry Fielding Jonathan Wild the Great Pete Ackroyd
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Popular Girl Helen Dunmore
Gustave Flaubert Memoirs of a Madman Germaine Greer
Ugo Foscolo Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis Valerio Massimo
Manfredi
Elizabeth Gaskell Lois the Witch Jenny Uglow
Théophile Gautier The Jinx Gilbert Adair
André Gide Theseus
Johann Wolfgang The Man of Fifty A.S. Byatt
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E.T.A. Hoffmann Mademoiselle de Scudéri Gilbert Adair
Victor Hugo The Last Day of a Libby Purves
Condemned Man
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Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Martin Jarvis
Franz Kafka The Trial Zadie Smith
John Keats Fugitive Poems Andrew Motion
Heinrich von Kleist TheMarquise of O– Andrew Miller
Mikhail Lermontov A Hero of OurTime Doris Lessing
Nikolai Leskov Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Gilbert Adair
Carlo Levi Words are Stones Anita Desai
Xavier deMaistre A Journey Around my Room Alain de Botton
André Malraux The Way of the Kings Rachel Seiffert
Katherine Mansfield Prelude William Boyd
Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology Shena Mackay
Guy de Maupassant Butterball Germaine Greer
Prosper Mérimée Carmen Philip Pullman
Sir Thomas More The History of Sister Wendy
King Richard III Beckett
Sándor Petöfi John the Valiant George Szirtes
Francis Petrarch My Secret Book Germaine Greer
Luigi Pirandello Loveless Love
Edgar Allan Poe Eureka Sir Patrick Moore
Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock Peter Ackroyd
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Antoine-François Manon Lescaut Germaine Greer
Prévost
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Alexander Pushkin Dubrovsky Patrick Neate
Alexander Pushkin Ruslan and Lyudmila Colm Tóibín
François Rabelais Pantagruel Paul Bailey
François Rabelais Gargantua Paul Bailey
Christina Rossetti Commonplace Andrew Motion
George Sand The Devil’s Pool Victoria Glendinning
Jean-Paul Sartre The Wall Justin Cartwright
Friedrich von Schiller The Ghost-seer Martin Jarvis
Mary Shelley Transformation
Percy Bysshe Shelley Zastrozzi Germaine Greer
Stendhal Memoirs of an Egotist Doris Lessing
Robert Louis
Stevenson Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Helen Dunmore
Theodor Storm The Lake of the Bees Alan Sillitoe
Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilych
Leo Tolstoy Hadji Murat Colm Tóibín
IvanTurgenev Faust Simon Callow
Mark Twain The Diary of Adam and Eve John Updike
Mark Twain Tom Sawyer, Detective
Oscar Wilde The Portrait of Mr W.H. Peter Ackroyd
Virginia Woolf Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches Doris Lessing
Virginia Woolf Monday or Tuesday Scarlett Thomas
Emile Zola For a Night of Love A.N.Wilson
Copyright
Published by Hesperus Press Limited
28 Mortimer Street, London W1W 7RD
www.hesperuspress.com
This edition first published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2012
This ebook edition first published in 2013
All rights reserved
Foreword © Jan Morris, 2012
Designed and typeset by Madeline Meckiffe
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–78094–071–7
Morris, Jan, Byron, Robert, Europe in the Looking Glass
Europe in the Looking Glass Page 21
