A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  I tapped the curator, rather gingerly, upon the shoulder. The museum was fine, said I, but was there no one in the town who actually remembered those old times, when the plutocrats and warmongers battened themselves so shamelessly upon the spa? The churl thought long and deep before replying, and then told us with a grin that there was somebody, in that very house – none other than the woman who had owned the place and occupied it in greedy ease and luxury, until the advent of the People’s Government. Like a huge shambling bear he led the way, down the steep staircase among the prints, until we stood again in the hall of the house, beside the entrance. This woman, explained the curator, was permitted to live in a room in the basement, in return for keeping the place clean: and opening a door he shouted hoarsely down the basement stairs. At first there was only silence. The curator bellowed again, in a harsh imperative, and presently there was a sound of movement below. A cough, a rustle, laboured footsteps up the stairs; and there emerged into the hall beside us an old woman, dressed almost in rags, wiping her hands on her skirt. Her face was blank and quite impassive. Her movements were oddly stiff, as though she had had a stroke. Her skin was dirty and her hands were rough and crooked. She looked like some spiritless old animal, a broken pit pony, a lame and useless sheepdog. ‘Here she is,’ said the curator, gesturing her roughly into the hall. ‘Ask her what you want.’

  I was embarrassed, and angry with the man, and wished I had never summoned the old lady into this cruel limelight: but my guide smiled at her with sudden unexpected kindness, and I asked her my one question. Did she happen to remember, out of all the foreign visitors to Marienbad, all the eminent men and dazzling women who must have crossed the corridors of her life – did she happen to remember Admiral Jack Fisher of the Royal Navy?

  A glimmer entered her eye, and warmed, and flourished, and very nearly sparkled: and turning her head stiffly to look at me, and straightening her drab-cottoned back, she answered in a perfect, clear-cut Edwardian English. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Jacky Fisher! Jacky Fisher! What a face that man had!’

  So I shook her limp soap-coarsened hand, walked out of the museum into the cold fog, thought how lasting was the glow of a good man’s fun, and ended my visit to Marianske Lazne.

  Forty years later I re-told this tale in a capricious book about Admiral Fisher, a jeu d’amour called Fisher’s Face. A relation of the old lady read it, and wrote to tell me that the communists hadn’t really treated her so harshly after all.

  Poland

  Poland was the most restless and exciting of the satellite countries, but this made it all the sadder to experience. This essay may have been made the more unhappy because during my stay in Warsaw, the capital, I had made a fool of myself by illegal currency conversions, and half-expected to be plunged into a Polish gaol at any moment.

  Seen across the hours from a hotel window in the depths of winter, Warsaw could only be Warsaw, for nowhere else on the face of the earth breathes quite the same fusion of atmospheres. Room 221 in the Bristol Hotel is heavily but quite cosily Victorian, with a wicker mat hung in incongruous ornamentation on one wall and a bright if unadventurous abstract on another. Outside the door two dear old pudgy housemaids sit habitually on the floor in white caps, aprons and carpet slippers, sibilantly gossiping, and down the corridor the immense glass lift, like a cage for a phoenix, slides in magnificent lurches to the foyer, its voyagers slipping a few zlotys to the operator as they leave. There is a violent smell of cooking on the landing, and downstairs you may just hear the tapping of a progressive American playwright’s typewriter – he spent last evening with a group of eminent sociologists, and is busy working up his notes.

  It is a fusty, old-fashioned, plush but mournful hostelry, but outside the window Warsaw is nothing if not spacious. The sky is grey, immense, and unmistakably central European. The snow lies thick and sullen on the broad streets. Down the hill only a thin winding stream of water forces a way through the frozen Vistula. The air, to a visitor from England, seems slightly perfumed with petrol and boiled potatoes, but feels nevertheless like country air, blown out of forests and endless plains and Carpathian ravines; and when you first lean from your window in the icy morning you will hear the clatter of horses’ hooves and the triumphant crow of a cold but irrepressible cock. Below you then the first citizens of the morning intermittently appear: an elderly lady with a jolly black dog, a covey of merry schoolchildren, entrancing high-boned faces peering through their fur hoods like fox cubs through the bushes. Long carts full of snow go by, with a column of big lorries, and even an antique barouche trundles with creaks and squeaks towards its cab-rank; and presently Warsaw is wide awake, the sun is wanly shining, and the observer in Room 221 can watch the world of the Poles pass by.

  It is not altogether a drab world, for the Poles have forced many concessions out of their communist masters. The citizenry that now pours down the pavement is not badly dressed – colourlessly, perhaps, by Western standards, but well shod and warmly coated. Sometimes a young beauty steps by almost ludicrously glamorized, slinking skilfully in the Bardot manner, in the finest nylons and the most preposterously frivolous of fur hats. Sometimes a peasant stumps down the street in thick but threadbare serge and mighty boots. Mostly the people look less arresting than workmanlike, as though they are more concerned with keeping warm and getting to the butcher’s first than with turning heads or charming the boss’s daughter.

  The shops across the way might not win prizes in Fifth Avenue or Regent Street, but have more sparkle to them than you might expect (weary though the queue may be at the grocer’s, and tiresome the shortage of meat). A surprising variety of inessential imports glitters bravely among their displays – American cigarettes, French sardines, Hawaiian pineapples, Florida fruit juice, tinned coffee from England, tea from Madras, olives from Argentina, things that look like bottled gooseberries from Bulgaria, Chinese jams (in bottles shaped like illustrious mandarins of the eighth degree). A bright parade of foreign books shines in the bookshop down the road, from a picture book of Oxford that almost breaks the homesick heart to an empirical range of American paperbacks. You can even buy French perfumes in Warsaw, if you happen to prefer them to the local product, and have an indulgent husband.

  The cars that pass in increasing but still moderate profusion mostly look beetle-backed and froward, but now and then one of the smart new Russian limousines appears, not a bit socialist-realist, and sometimes an opulent Mercedes-Benz slides by, or a delicate Fiat. Agatha Christie is probably on at one of the theatres. You can read the Manchester Guardian at the Grand Hotel. The buses are made in France. Just down the road is the headquarters of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Nostalgic you may be for Tom Quad or Times Square, but in Warsaw there are still tenuous links with home.

  And even from Room 221 you can see something of the character of the Poles, for they move with a special kind of vigour, almost jaunty, and they have strong and interesting faces. Warsaw is haunted always by sad memories, but there is nevertheless a liveliness, a jollity, a gaiety in the air that springs only from the hearts of the Poles. A gleam of wrinkled humour lightens the eye of the elderly chambermaid when she arrives, some hours after lunch, to make your bed. Polish conversation, for a visiting Briton anyway, is infinitely easy, entertaining and somehow familiar. Sometimes in the street below a rip-roaring jovial drunk will stagger through the snow, bawling witticisms and singing bawdy songs. They are not an aloof, remote or inscrutable people, the Poles; they might do well, I sometimes feel, in Ireland.

  At other moments, though, Warsaw feels a long, long way from Galway; and as the evening draws on, and the progressive playwright closes his typewriter and leaves for a seance with seven eminent philosophers, you may notice a stream of citizens moving intently towards the church which, with its twin angels sustaining the cross on its golden ball, stands in ornate confidence beyond the park. They walk with an air of functional resolution, very different from Ballycommon on Sunday morning, and slip into the churc
h hurriedly, as though they have work to do there, crossing themselves for all the world as a worker clocks himself in at the factory; and if you are patient you will see them emerging again a few moments later, buttoning up their coats, putting on their thick gloves, and hastening away towards the trolley-bus. They look as though they have stopped at a petrol station to get fuel for the evening; and they even remind me – not with irreverence, only sympathy – of addicts on a lost weekend, stocking up at Joe’s Bar on Fourth Avenue.

  Then the night falls on Warsaw, chill and early, and the dim lights of eastern Europe reluctantly awake. The view from your balcony grows grim and depressing, with the presence of the harsh frozen Vistula always behind your back and only a trickle of prepossessed traffic enlivening the streets. The coffee-shops and restaurants hide their identities behind curtains and closed doors, and few bright lights entice you towards the theatres. The thump of a jazz band may reach you across the snow, but the city feels obscurely muffled and padded, and the gaunt square buildings of the new Warsaw lie there unsmiling in the cold.

  Raise your eyes above the rooftops, though, above the angels with their golden ball, and there you will see the big red light on the Palace of Culture and Science, presented to Poland by the Soviet Union, and towering above this grey city like a vast watchman in the dark. And perhaps at the same time if you listen hard enough, closing your ears to the clang of the trams and the rumble of the passing cars, you may hear from some distant student attic the thin thrilling strains of a Chopin polonaise, riding the cold night air like an invocation.

  But probably not. I must not romanticize. ‘Room service? A cup of coffee, please, two aspirins, and a cable form. That’s it, bless you, Room 221.’

  The Bristol Hotel is now once again a splendid five-star international hotel. Then it was so immured behind the Iron Curtain that one day during my stay in Room 221 the management asked me if I would write a publicity brochure for it. I did.

  The Cold War gave birth to a whole new genre of spy fiction and film, and we newspaper correspondents all saw ourselves somewhere in their pages or sequences. On a journey to Budapest once I was asked by a friend to take a package of books to a diplomat serving in one of the embassies there. I did not ask what the books were, and asked no questions either when it was suggested that I hand them over at a rendezvous in the middle of the Chain Bridge, linking Buda and Pest across the Danube. It was just like a movie. Promptly at the appointed time I set off across the walkway of the bridge, and presently I became aware of a particular figure approaching me from among the pedestrians from the other end. I saw both of us as it were through a long-focus lens, shimmering a little, the distance distorted as we neared each other. We met. We exchanged compliments. We shook hands. I handed over the package, and to dark portentous music – all drums and cellos – I returned to the Buda shore as the credit titles rolled.

  The Sixth Fleet

  One of the great power factors of the Cold War was the American Sixth Fleet. Its 50 ships, 200 aircraft and 20,000 men constantly roamed the Mediterranean, supplied directly from the United States and constantly shadowed by Soviet ships. For the Guardian I was flown one day to the brand-new carrier Saratoga (65,000 tons), then one of the most powerful warships afloat.

  The captain of the Saratoga, a tall, lean man of ecclesiastical bearing, sits in a raised, padded armchair on the port side of his bridge, rather as though he were having his hair cut or being inducted to his see; and thus, by looking through the tilted glass windows to the flight deck beneath, he can survey an historical phenomenon.

  The wide air-conditioned bridge is calm and muffled. The Mediterranean is blue and ancient. Away to the west a destroyer steams in placid escort, now and then winking a signal lazily. Behind the carrier a solitary rescue helicopter rides in constant watchful station. But beneath his windows the captain can see the big jet bombers which, at the drop of a hat or a gauntlet, can whisk a hydrogen bomb at 1,000 miles an hour to the soil of Russia itself, and which thus makes the Saratoga and her sister ships of the United States Sixth Fleet the most extraordinary instruments of war ever devised.

  It is a big, brassy, extravagant, glittering affair, the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. ‘This ship,’ says the publicity officer of the Saratoga, handing you an information folder, an honorary crew membership card, and a flying helmet, ‘has enough paint on her to redecorate 30,000 average American homes. If you turned her on end she would reach to the eighteenth floor of the Empire State Building. There are two thousand telephones on board, three escalators, three soda fountains, nine barbers’ chairs and 3,676 trouser hangers. We generate enough electricity to service a city the size of Pittsburgh, an industrial city in the state of Ohio. We air-condition enough air to supply twenty theatres the size of Radio City music-hall. Every evening there are eleven film shows on board. Our machines peel a thousand potatoes an hour. You can order a motor-scooter in the ship’s store.’

  Nevertheless the fleet is in essence an austere conception. It is false to think of the Sixth Fleet, as the world usually does, as a close, grey, earnest phalanx of warships, steaming incessantly towards a false alarm. When the captain looks out from his barber’s chair he may see his attendant destroyers, and perhaps the humped, formidable silhouette of the fleet flagship, the cruiser Des Moines; but the rest of the ships may be anywhere, off Beirut, in Suva Bay, influencing people in Athens, scrubbing decks in Iskanderun or simply cruising, with the pilots leaping sporadically for their fighters, and the ships’ brass bands polishing their trombones.

  There is a touch of the theatre to the brilliance and sparkle with which the Saratoga is run – a brightness and bustle and enthusiasm to it all that can give you a distinct aesthetic pleasure. Above you the great grey radar installations revolve in silent grandeur, and a thin wisp of vapour emerges from the sunken funnel of the ship. The lean young sailors, in their jeans or overalls, crouch at their stations or lean over the rails with a certain angular elegance, as far removed from the homely postures of the British bluejacket as an avocado pear from a turnip.

  On the flight deck the air traffic officers stroll about in yellow sweaters, like impresarios or choreographers, and here and there you come across a couple of waiting pilots, draped in the elaborate trappings of their calling, with yellow life jackets and spherical helmets and close-cropped hair, like benevolent moon-men. Colour is everywhere on this ship, from the fluttering flags to the dazzling images painted on the aircraft. Every now and then, with a whirr of rotors, a shining helicopter drops in and settles itself fussily on the deck, and when it is time for a flight of aircraft to take off, as it very often is, then a new, bitter, theatrical excitement pervades the ship.

  A crowd of off-duty onlookers crowd the rail above the flight deck. A preparatory hiss of steam escapes from the catapults. Men in strange helmets or asbestos suiting appear on the deck or crouch in the catwalk. The loud hailers blare. The pilots scramble into their high cockpits. The captain rises from his chair and stands beside his window, and a first violent roar of jet engines reverberates through the carrier, obliterating the faintly perceptible pounding of its own engines far below. (‘This ship has seventeen decks,’ shouts the publicity officer indefatigably. ‘There are more than 7,000 coffee cups on board the giant carrier, which is named from a battleground in the American Revolutionary War.’)

  Then, with a shattering impact, they are away. Suddenly, as you stand bemused in the breeze, there screams into the corner of your eye a lean silver jet aircraft, violently projected at breakneck speed down the deck and into the blue: and in a moment there seem to be aircraft everywhere, some careering down the angled deck, some straight towards the bows, flashing and roaring and streaming away, as in the great spectacles of Chinese ballet the dancers hurl themselves with violent but impeccable precision across the stage. In a moment or two the whole flight is airborne, and dwindling towards Turkey.

  In fact they are going nowhere in particular this morning, these ballistic young men
hurtled off deck like cannonballs. Soon they will swing around and plunge back to the ship once more, to hitch themselves with a shudder and a terrifying jolt to the arrester wires stretched across the deck. A few moments more and they will be riding the escalator down to the air-conditioned wardroom, where iced tea and Time magazine and solicitous stewards await their arrival. If you stand with the captain on his bridge, though, while the ship steams swiftly on, while the publicity officer tells you about the garbage-grinders and the trash-burners, and a signal lamp flashes from the escort destroyer – as you stand there beside that courteous seaman in the heart of his great ship you may suddenly realize the meaning of that brief dazzling spectacle.

  The striking power of the Sixth Fleet is as subtle and sensitive as a panther’s, as responsive as radar, as cataclysmic as lightning: a flash, a blast of jets, a dozen young men hurtled brutally past you, and a terrible page of history can almost instantly be written. No wonder the captain of the Saratoga, as he returns to the seat of his command, has the air of a thoughtful but authoritative divine.

  Helsinki

  It was always a pleasure to leave the antipathies of the Cold War for neutral Scandinavia, but in a way it was always an anti-climax too. This essay records the first time I escaped out of Soviet Russia to the Finnish capital so close across the water, but it ends with an ambivalent twist.