by Jan Morris
The spy’s discomfort
Roller skating was then all the rage around the Lake of Geneva. Whole families skated along the promenade. Dogs rode about in rollered baskets and youths whizzed shatteringly here and there, scattering the crowds with blasts of the whistles that were held between their teeth. I lunched with a spy of my acquaintance. What kind of a spy he is, who he spies for, or against, I have never been able to discover, but he has all the hallmarks of espionage about him, divides his time between Switzerland and the East, wears raincoats and speaks Greek. We ate little grilled fish at the water’s edge and discussed the state of the city. Uncomfortable, he thought it, and getting worse. Security getting tougher? I conjectured. Banks turning difficult? Opposition hotter? No, no, he said testily, holding his hands over his ears, nothing like that: only those damned roller skaters.
Admiral’s walk
Split in Croatia is a naval base, and when I was driving out of town I stopped at the traffic lights near the fleet headquarters. A very senior naval officer started to cross the road. He was loaded with badges, braid and medal ribbons, but wearing as I was a floppy old hat and a less than spotless blue shirt, just for fun I saluted him. His response was Split all over. First he faltered slightly in his steady tread. Then he brought his hand to the peak of his cap in a guarded and cautious way. And then, as the lights changed, I started forward and he scuttled with rather less than an admiral’s dignity to the safety of the opposite pavement, he turned round, all rank and propriety discarded, and shared my childish laughter.
True gents
At Three Rivers, stopping for a hamburger, I found that I had locked my car keys in the boot. Small-town Texas swung instantly to my rescue–well, eased itself slowly off its cafe stools, tipped its Stetsons over its eyes, strolled into the car park and stood meditatively eyeing the problem, saying things like Huh or Kindova problem there. In easy stages they approached the task, sniffing it, feeling it, and when in the end they got the hang of it, enlarged the right aperture, unscrewed the right screws, and found that the keys were not in the boot at all, since I had left them on the Dairy Queen counter, they seemed not in the least disconcerted. Deftly reassembling the mechanism, tilting their Stetsons back again, they drifted back into the cafe murmuring, ‘You bet, lady, any time.’
The Low Riders
In Santa Fe the Spanish culture is relentlessly pressed upon by all the influences and temptations of the American Way. Often in the evenings the cultists called the Low Riders cruise through town. They are the public faces, I suppose, of young Hispanica, and as they drive slowly about the streets in their weirdly low-slung limousines, wearing wide hats and dark glasses, radios booming, unsmiling, proud, stately one really might say, who knows what resentments or aspirations of their race they are trying to declare?
The call of conscience
On the Bund in Shanghai one evening a youth with the droopy shadow of a moustache confronted me with a kind of dossier. Would I go through his examination paper for him, and correct his mistakes? But I had been pestered by students all afternoon, and I wanted to go and look at the silks in Department Store No. 10. ‘No,’ said I. ‘I won’t.’
At that a theatrical scowl crossed his face, screwing up his eyes and turning down the corners of his mouth. He looked then, with that suggestion of whiskers around his chin, like a Chinese villain in a bad old movie, with a gong to clash him in. I circumvented him nevertheless and, ah yes, I thought, if the Gang of Four were still around, you would have me up against a wall by now, with a placard around my neck and a mob to jeer me, not to consult me about participles.
But my conscience pricked me, and I went back and corrected his damned papers after all.
A lesson
I helped a blind lady over a street crossing near the Gare de Lyon. She looked particularly irritable, cross and demanding, but though born and bred in the 12th arrondissement, turned out to be diffidently gentle. It was a lesson to me not to misjudge the hard-mouthed, sharp-eyed, fast-shoving, middle-aged Parisian housewife. I took the lady first to the post office, then to the pharmacy, and when I left her she said: ‘Now I give you back your liberty.’
After a Mexican dinner
Theatrical characters, it seemed to me, filled the main square of Oaxaca when we strolled down there for a drink after dinner: nut-brown women cloaked in red, and dapper old gents with silvery moustaches, and gaggles of students like opera choruses, and small policemen with nightsticks, and rumble-tumble infants everywhere, and a blind guitar player doing the rounds of the coffees shops, guided by his urchin familiar, and a gringo hippie or two, and barefoot families of peasants loaded with shopping bundles and making, I assumed, for the mountains. The faces were mostly dry and burnt. The movements seemed kind of airy, as though tending towards weightlessness. Among the trees some children were blowing up long sausage balloons and letting them off with a squirt of air into the night sky, where they rotated dizzily off into the darkness like so many flying serpents.
Harry’s
It was in 1946, when the war in Europe was hardly over and Venice was still under the control of the Allied armies, that I first poked my nose through the doors of Harry’s Bar in Venice. I was in my twentieth year, and did not know what to expect. The room was smallish and unexpectedly cosy. At the tables were smoky looking, hooded-eyed, tweedy, sometimes hatted, heavily made-up but rather weatherbeaten persons I took to be members of the Italian aristocracy. Sitting at the bar were three or four officers, the British looking disconcertingly suave to me, the Americans dauntingly experienced. The conversation was low but intense, and everyone looked up as I made my entrance. The officers looked up in a cool, officer-like way, holding their glasses. The patricians looked up patricianly, rather disappointedly, as though they had been hoping for better things. But it was the contact I made with the three pairs of eyes behind the counter that I remember best–the eyes of the boss sitting behind his cash till, the eyes of the two busy barmen in their white jackets. The expression in their gazes seemed to me generic to the place. It was at once interested, faintly amused, speculative and all but collusive. It put me simultaneously at my ease and on my guard, made me feel in some way a member of the establishment, and has kept me going back to Harry’s from that day to this.
Only in London
I was sitting over my croissant and the morning paper in a coffee shop in Marylebone High Street when a tall elegant man in late middle age walked stiffly in and ordered a cup of coffee. He wore a long dark coat and a trilby tilted over his brow, and I rather think spectacles were inclined towards the end of his nose. He looked to me as though he had enjoyed perhaps rather too good a dinner the night before, but he emanated an air of unconcerned, if not actually oblivious, composure. I put him down for some mildly eccentric and very likely scholarly earl, of the Irish peerage, perhaps, and thought to myself that only in London could one still see such a genial figure, at once so urbane and so well used, more or less direct from the eighteenth century.
‘Know who that was?’ said the proprietor, when the man had walked perhaps a little shakily out again. ‘That was Peter O’Toole. Remember him in Lawrence of Arabia?’
No thanks
I went to a place on the Rio Grande which was, I was told, a favourite place for illegal immigrants to cross into the United States. There were a few houses nearby, grazed about by goats, guarded by many dogs, but I found it a chill and spooky spot. It seemed full of secrets, and sure enough one of the neighbours told me that almost every night of the year people from the south clandestinely crossed the river there, and crept damp and dripping through the shrubbery into Texas. ‘You see that forest there,’ my neighbour said, pointing to a confusion of shrubbery beside the water. ‘I’ll bet you there’s people laying there this very minute, waiting for dark, bad men some of them, from far, far away.’ I peered at the bushes through my binoculars, hoping to see glints of weaponry, the smoke of marijuana rising, blackened faces peering back at me through the leaves.
All seemed deserted, though. ‘Want to go over and see? See if there’s men there now?’ asked my informant helpfully. ‘No, thanks,’ I said.
Glaswegians
George Square in Glasgow has a family feel to it. People talk to each other easily on benches. People share gambles, compare prices, take their shoes off to give their poor feet a rest. The five-year-old boy riding his motorized buggy around the benches smiles indiscriminately at us all as he blasts past yet again, and his father proudly tells us how much he paid for the machine. Sitting there among those citizens, looking at the civic statues, cursing the buggy boy, while the big buses slide around the square and the City Chambers look paternalistically down at us, I seem to feel a comforting sense of community. Ay, well, responds a freckled woman sitting beside me, that’s all very well, but life’s not all statues in George Square–and what’s a wee bairn doing with a contraption like that anyway, he’ll do himself a damage in the end.
Wildlife
While searching unsuccessfully for kangaroos in the bush of Mount Ainslie, a wooded hill rising immediately above Canberra, I felt a sudden need to relieve myself. I was just doing so when I heard a padding and a shoving and a rustling through the bushes. Kangaroos at last? Very nearly. Crashing among the branches, as I was in the very act, a few feet away from me there appeared a very large, very bearded, white-shorted and energetically sweating Australian, doing his daily jog, I suppose, during the luncheon break from his duties as Executive Officer Grade Two in the Department of Inter-Administration. ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ was all he said, as he bounded distinctly roo-like past.
Two in the morning
At two in the morning I decided that enough was enough, and clambering upstairs I knocked upon the door of M. le Propriétaire’s private apartment. It sounded as though they were having a football match inside and, sure enough, when the door opened it was the hotelier’s three-year-old son, all flushed and tousled with hilarity, who first poked his nose through the crack. ‘A million pardons, madame,’ came his father after him. ‘How can you forgive us? We were having–how do you say it–a little practice match!’
Two Berlins
‘I’m the Boss’ was the first T-shirt slogan I saw, on the ample bosom of a housewife dancing a vigorous jig with her decidedly un-henpecked husband. East Berlin was having a public holiday, and at the hotel beside the lake several thousand citizens, great-grandmothers to babes in arms, were enjoying a family feast in the sunshine. How genially they laughed, danced, sang, drank their beer and ate their pickled pork knuckles! With what indefatigable smiles the two bands alternated, one with the old oom-pah-pah, the other exploring the less raucous fringes of rock!
That same evening, al fresco in the Grünewald woods on the other side of Berlin, I observed two middle-aged ladies, mother and daughter, perhaps, sharing delicate jokes over their asparagus, and balancing their purses carefully on the rims of their glasses to stop the chestnut blossoms falling into their wine.
Algérie Française
I stand in the big public forum of Algiers, outside the government buildings, watching the citizenry. The square is packed to suffocation, the crowd spilling away through the pleasant gardens, up and down steps, across neighbouring squares, until it peters away at its fringes into clutches of foot-weary housewives at the tables of deserted cafes. There stand the grim paratroopers, the high priests of mid-century Algiers, dressed in boots and camouflage suits, festooned with tommy guns, grenades and pistols, lounging about in attitudes fearfully tough and jungly, or swapping badinage with the crowd. There are the queer bigwigs of this confused and unhealthy city, hastening up the steps to the Governorate, or briefly appearing upon some flowered balcony: ramrod generals in kepis, greasy double-breasted politicians, wild creatures of the nocturnal right, bearded plotters or fanatic militarists. A sickly cheer greets a token delegation of Muslims: spindly old men with ragged robes and a covey of bewildered white-robed women, with a trilling of high voices and an arabesque of reedy clarinets. Before long that vast crowd, like so many maudlin drunks outside a saloon, is caught up in histrionics, swayed to a man by the querulous, pitiful passions of Algiers–until the whole assembly, with a roll of drums and a sting of hot tears, bursts into the ‘Marseillaise’, and for a moment all seems clear, all seems honourable.
Allegory in Amsterdam
Standing on a bridge in Amsterdam, I noticed a sleek tourist motor boat, all glass and chrome, gliding down the waterway with a warm hum of diesels. Inside it, snug behind the glass, sat five young Americans in bright open-necked shirts and jeans–servicemen, perhaps, from some air base. They all wore sideburns, and peered through their windows with an air of concentration; and as they passed slowly by, inspecting me, too, as though I were a medieval monument, they emanated a powerful sense of allegory. They were new men in a very old world. Their identity tags flashed at their necks like ritual amulets. They seemed to me like young priests from some distant cloistered seminary, on a mission of dogmatic inquiry.
All American
For me the All American has always been the city bus driver. Since I first saw him clicking that little lever above his change machine, to the tinkle of the nickels and dimes sorting themselves out–since I first heard his timeless response: ‘Yeah, lady, get out at City Hall’–since I first plucked up courage to ask him if he could manage change for a ten-dollar bill–ever since I first made his acquaintance he has exemplified for me The American. His slumped shirtsleeved posture over the wheel, the weary reach of his arm towards that change machine, the occasional cursing at a cab driver, the unflustered answering of questions as he drives, his eyes always flicking to the mirror–all are the hallmarks of a man who knows the world for what it is, knows his own city to be its epitome, and has no illusions left. ‘So it’s a big city? Sure it is. So they’re tall buildings? So?’
Dinkum Aussie
In Darwin you may meet the Australian male at his most confident, on the edge of the great Outback. He may be of any age, this dinkum Aussie. He may be a humdrum bank clerk, or a prospector driven wildly in from his shack in the wilderness to squander his money on drink and loose living. Whoever he is, he is magnificent to meet: as free a spirit as you can find in the world today, shackled by no inhibition of class or disadvantage, with little sense of thrift and still less of decorum, no agonizing reserve, no contempt, no meanness. It is as though he has been relieved of the burden of the centuries, strengthened and cleansed by the southern sun, and allowed to begin history all over again.
Suddenly there emerges…
Suddenly there emerges from some unexpected alley of Kyoto a vision of the legendary Japan–a geisha in all her plastered glory, moving fast and purposeful towards an assignation. Immensely tall is her mound of hair, jet black and shiny; her face is vivid with white and scarlet, her costume is gorgeous with silks, sashes, the gaudiest of clashing colours and the floridest of patterns; and as she hastens awkwardly down the street, embellished from head to foot with paint and brocade, she seems less like a living woman than some fabulous toy, some last masterpiece by Fabergé, enamelled like a queenly trinket, animated by ultimate refinements of clockwork.
A queen rides by
The people around you seem instinct with an air of happy collusion, as though they all know one another, and are linked in one long line of neighbourly acquaintance from Admiralty Arch to the Palace. The soldiers lining the street look fresh faced and rather touching, the policemen are properly genial, and presently you will see, undulating strangely above the crowd, the head of the Queen of England, in a tricorn hat. You can hardly see her horse for the people, but high above the soldiers and the policemen, as she paces grandly by, you may study her pale face–a sad, antique face, it seems to me at such a moment, young but tired, half commanding, half embarrassed, half person, half idea–a face lined with the blood heritage of Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, Roderigo the Cid, Barbarossa and her great-grandmother Victoria, Empress of India.
Satu
rday lunch in Hong Kong
There seem to be a couple of thousand tables at the restaurant, and at them in uproarious enjoyment sits a vast multitude of Chinese, in families running the gamut from infancy to old age. Nobody is alone. Nobody is silent. The noise is deafening, all that talking and laughter mingling with the clanking of plates, the shouts of waiters from one side of the room to the other, the occasional cries of babies, the sizzling of woks and the Chinese music blaring from hidden loudspeakers. In we go, extremely European, and it is like sitting on the edge of a maelstrom, as we vacantly study the enormous menu (bound in gold and scarlet). But we are offered encouraging nods and incomprehensible explanations from the family at the next table, and we smile ourselves in a baffled and innocuous way across the Chinese mass. In a daze we order, and as by a miracle our food arrives, piping hot and indefinable, and in no time at all we are slurping it happily away, all inhibitions lost, and nodding appreciatively to our neighbours as to the Chinese manner born.
Immigrants
Courtesy of the Department of Immigration, I once stood in the background of an immigration booth at JFK to watch passengers from Europe coming through, and it was revealing to see what emotions passed through their eyes when they noticed me there, looking I suppose like an unusually well-disguised Secret Service agent: suspicion nearly always, ingratiation very often, sometimes a hint of collusion, and occasionally a look I had never encountered before, which I took to be fear. Some of the new arrivals had clearly roistered their way across the Atlantic with champagne and canapés. Others, especially the mothers, the squirmy children, the stout beldames with swollen feet, arrived exhausted at that frenzied airport, into the glaring lights, the unremitting noise and movement of the New World; and as they looked wearily from the immigration officer to me, searching I imagine for some warmth of understanding in our faces, I sometimes thought I detected a flicker of regret in theirs. The officer treated everyone exactly the same, down to the badinage: ‘Oh, please don’t look at my picture there, I look terrible.’ ‘It’s like we always say, ma’am, if you look as sick as you do in your passport, you’re not fit to travel.’