Travels with Myself and Another (40 page)

With Gregory Hemingway in Idaho, 1941

Seven

NON-CONCLUSION

Amateur travel always used to be a pastime for the privileged; now it is a pastime for everyone. Perhaps the greatest social change since the Second World War is the way citizens of the free nations travel as never before in history. We have become a vast floating population and an industry; we are essential to many national economies not that we are therefore treated with loving gratitude, more as if we were gold-bearing locusts. People of all categories and ages travel with assurance. The grocer and his family are off to the Canary Islands to sunbathe and swim; the hairdresser is going to Seville for the bullfights; elderly ladies in drip-dry cottons have left their gardens for a coach tour to look at tulips in Holland; football fans in yelling hordes follow their teams from country to country; Icelandic housewives charter a plane to shop at Marks and Spencer where they find Arab housewives in
yashmaks
similarly engaged; Americans overload their own National Parks and resorts, fly by millions to Europe, inundate Mexico. Are we having the time of our lives?

I have seen many people who looked as if they were on their own kind of horror journey. Men with lightless eyes carrying parcels for voracious wives; how cheap these leather wallets are in Florence, this pottery in Oaxaca, these cuckoo clocks in Berne. Groups, in museums and palaces, cowed by guides, their shoulders drooping, their feet swollen. Friends and lovers in shrieking quarrels on that dreamed-of visit to a romantic city, Amsterdam, Venice, Bangkok. Weary queues in railway stations, pushing their luggage ahead inch by inch. Couples grey and silent with melancholia in any foreign hotel dining room. Young parents, laden with small children toys nappies bottles, scouring the streets for a bed and breakfast refuge. They were all pleasure-bent but seek and ye shall find does not necessarily apply to travel. Once safe again at home they could forget how awful some, much or most of it had been, bring out their souvenirs, their photos, their edited memories, and plan another holiday.

No sight is better calculated to turn anyone off travel than the departure lounge of a big airport. It’s like the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me . . . your huddled masses” and let them wait. If attendance at airports was compelled by law we would protest in marches, demonstrations, picket the White House and Parliament, take the case to the World Court, write to
The Times,
raise the roof. Of our own will we sit there, knee to knee, with our hand luggage and duty-free plastic bags around us, deafened by announcements, wan and palely loitering for anywhere from one to ten hours. We look beaten, exhausted, sick of the whole thing. Then the flight is called, we make the interminable trek to the departure gate, we clamber and crush into a bus or if lucky walk straight on to the aircraft. Inside the plane, our faces change, we toss jokes about, laugh, chat to strangers. Our hearts are light and gay because now it’s happening, we’re starting, we’re travelling again.

In temporary furnished quarters at
Claviers, Spetsai, Comino,
Icogne, Naxxar, Antigua, Ta’Xbiex,
Lindos, Symi, Marsalforn.
1975-1977