by Jan Morris
In the park
I woke early and walked across Chowringi into the green of Calcutta’s Maidan, before the sun rose and the heat haze fell like a web upon us. It was lovely then in the park. Rooks cawed, kites hung, sparrows pecked, smiling pi-dogs padded by. Here and there across the grass white figures moved or loitered, and whenever I paused I was sympathetically accosted. ‘What you are seeing is the Theatre, built in honour of our great poet Rabindranath Tagore.’ ‘If I may say so you would be more comfortable where there not so many ants.’ Or: ‘Wouldn’t you like a game of golf? I am teaching golf, you see. Here are my golf clubs.’
Tradition
‘Does he, do you think,’ tactfully inquired the Bishop of Barrackpore, ‘expect a T-I-P?’ But no, my guide was not ready for one yet, having high hopes of further services to be performed, so I joined the bishop on his verandah, where during a lull before evensong he was eating peanut butter sandwiches with a kind Anglican lady in blue. He was all an aficionado of the tradition could ask: cassocked, distinguished, fatherly, concerned about that T-I-P. Soon, he told me, he would be retiring. Going home? I wondered, but as the lady replaced the tea cosy with a significant air he answered me in grave italics: ‘Staying in India–for ever.’
At evensong we sang the hymn that says the Lord’s throne shall never like earth’s proud empires pass away, and as I left the cathedral a Balliol voice called kindly across the transept–‘I say! Excuse me! You do know where we are, don’t you, if you’re coming to the children’s dance drama in the parish hall?’
Arrival of the tourists
Down in the harbour of Capri I can see the morning vaporetto from the mainland, still hazy about the funnel, and here flooding into the piazza, pouring out of taxis, out of buses, out of horse carriages, out of the steep funicular that runs up from the waterfront–wearing floppy straw hats and rope-soled shoes and pink jeans and multifarious bangles–festooned with cameras, inquiring the price of swimsuits, unfolding maps, touching up their lipsticks beneath the campanile–talking German, English, French and every variety of Italian–young and old, blatant and demure, strait laced and outrageous, earnest and frivolous and thrilled and sick-to-death-of-it-all–here past my cafe table streams the first quota of the morning’s tourists.
Teatime in Old Chicago, 1950s
I love to watch the customers at a carriage-trade Chicago restaurant at English Teatime, with Jasmine Tea and Toasted Muffins beside the goldfish pool. Its children behave with almost fictional decorum. Its daughters wear pearls. Its young mums look as though they have come direct from committee meetings of charitable balls. Its husbands look as though they keep fit by riding hunters through parks before breakfast. Its grandmothers, best of all, talk in throaty turtle voices, as though the words are being squeezed out from beneath the carapace and they are heavily loaded with inherited gewgaws, and are inclined to call the waitress ‘child’, as though expecting pretty curtseys in return. ‘Would you care for some more Jasmine Tea, Mrs Windlesham? Do you desire another Toasted English Muffin?’ ‘Why thank you, child–how pretty you are looking today!’ ‘Thank you, Mrs Windlesham, it’s always a pleasure to serve you and the members of your family.’
A separate sphere?
One evening at Akureyri, on the northern coast of Iceland, I heard the sound of solemn singing from a restaurant, and peering through its door I saw that a large party was in peculiar progress. I felt as though I were looking in at some utterly separate sphere of existence. There the Icelanders, men and women, sat in ordered ranks, their arms linked around the long tables, and as they sang what seemed to be some kind of sacramental anthem they swayed heavily from side to side in rhythmic motion. The sight of them gave me a queer sense of secret solidarity. Everybody clearly knew the words of the song, and the whole assembly seemed to be in some sort of arcane collusion. I noticed that if ever I caught an eye, as the celebrants sang and swayed there at the table, after a moment’s puzzled focusing it abruptly switched away from me, as if to dismiss an illusion.
‘Are they?’
Every evening at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul a string trio plays, attentively listened to by the German package tourists at their communal tables, and gives the place a comfortable, palm-court air. Two elderly gentlemen in Gypsy outfits are on piano and accordion, and they are led by a romantic Gypsy fiddler, adept at waltzes and polkas. I was sitting there one evening when suddenly there burst into the room, driving the trio from its podium and severely disconcerting the hausfraus, a team of ferocious Anatolian folk dancers, accompanied by a young man with a reedy trumpet and an apparently half-crazed drummer. The dancers were fairly crazed themselves. Apparently welded together into a multicoloured phalanx, they shrieked, they roared with laughter, they leapt, they whirled, they waved handkerchiefs–a performance of furious bravura, leaving us all breathless and aghast. They were like so many houris, come to dance over the corpses on a battlefield.
They withdrew as abruptly as they had arrived, and in the stunned hush that ensued I turned to the Americans at the next table. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘I’m glad they’re on our side!’ But a knowing look crossed the man’s face. ‘Ah, but are they?’ he replied.
Tyrant
A terrifyingly ambitious, inexhaustible girl supervisor works at one of the downtown McDonald’s of Manhattan. Over the serving counter one may see the glazed and vacant faces of the cooks, a black man and a couple of Puerto Ricans, who appear to speak no English; in front that small tyrant strides peremptorily up and down, yelling orders, angrily correcting errors and constantly falling back upon an exhortatory slogan of her own: C’mon, guys, today guys, today…The cooks look back in pained incomprehension.
Divine merriment
We find ourselves lost on the edge of a deserted traffic junction somewhere east of Kranj, Slovenia. Helplessly we consult our map, hopefully we look for somebody to ask the way, and presently there somehow seem to sidle into our company half a dozen Slovene men and a very talkative Slovene woman. Between us we speak five languages, but we are fluent only in our own, and gradually our discussions descend into farce. It’s that way, for sure, no it’s the other, they haven’t been through Preddvor, no, no of course they haven’t, they came the Cerklje way–they should go back the way they came then, they should have gone by Duplice–no, no, no, look here, look at the map–and so, as the map gets more and more crumpled, the arguments louder, the languages ever more incomprehensible, we subside into impotent merriment, shake hands with each other, clap one another on the back and, chuckling still, go our various ways. We ourselves are no wiser about our situation, so we leave the car on the grassy verge and go for a drink instead.
God habitually smiles upon Slovenia, and sometimes he laughs out loud.
Violetta down under
Go to La Traviata at Sydney Opera House and, my, what a robust Australian chorus will be attendant upon Violetta in the opening act, their crinolines and Parisian whiskers delightfully failing to disguise physiques born out of Australian surf and sunshine–while even La Traviata herself, as she subsides to the last curtain, may seem to you the victim of some specifically Australian variety of tuberculosis, since she looks as though immediately after the curtain calls she will be off for a vigorous set of tennis with the conductor, or at least a grilled lobster with orange juice and caramel.
The Leading Citizen’s lesson
‘Have your fun, Jan,’ said the Leading Citizen. ‘Sure thing, this is a Fun Town, but what we especially do not like is these comparisons with Sodom and such. What people forget is that here in Las Vegas we have a thriving civic-minded community. We have 130 church buildings, Jan, in this city of ours. I think I could safely say that you won’t find a more lovely home environment anywhere than some of our high-grade home environments here. What I want you to remember, Jan, is this–the Spanish Trail came this way, right over this very spot, before the game of roulette ever entered the Infant Republic–that’s what I always tell people like you, who come i
nquiring–before the game of roulette ever entered the Infant Republic of the United States!’
The Very Reverend
Almost at once I met the Dean of Wells, actually in the shadow of Penniless Porch. Eton, Oxford and the Welsh Guards, he was not hard to identify. With a splendid concern his voice rang out, as we sat there watching the citizenry pass by. ‘Good morning, good morning! Lovely day! What a success yesterday–what would we have done without you? Morning, Simon! Morning, Bert! Morning, John! (John Harvey, you know, our greatest authority on church architecture…)’In his cathedral, I was later disconcerted to learn, they habitually call him ‘Father’, but I certainly could not complain about his authenticity qua Dean.
Our Gracie
On a bus in Capri I chanced to meet, I can’t remember how, a man who introduced himself as Boris Alperovici, the third husband of Gracie Fields. She was a famous star of the past, a Dame of the British Empire–‘Our Gracie’, formerly a household name in her native England but by then somewhat forgotten. She was living in elderly retirement in her villa on the island. Boris took me along to visit her, and she received me graciously, and told me anecdotes of her theatrical life, and had coffee served to me by her seaside swimming pool. It was just as though the old lady were some great Hollywood actress at the height of her career, and she evidently enjoyed it as much as I did. When I got back to Britain I was surprised to meet other people, too, who had chanced to encounter Signor Alperovici on the Capri bus, but couldn’t quite remember how, and had sat drinking coffee at the feet of Our Gracie.
The exchange
Wandering around the purlieus of the High Court in Madras, I took out my tape recorder to remind myself of some of its architectural peculiarities. At once I heard an admonitory clapping of hands, and a policeman with a nightstick beckoned me over.
‘What have you got there? What is this machine?’
‘It’s a tape recorder.’
‘What are you doing with it here?’
‘I am reminding myself of some architectural peculiarities.’
‘How do I know it is not a bomb?’
‘You can speak into it yourself.’
‘What shall I say?’
‘Anything.’
‘I cannot think of anything to say.’
‘Sing a song then.’
‘What kind of a song?’
‘A Tamil song.’
‘Very well, I will sing you a very old Tamil song, a tragic song’–and half closing his eyes, and assuming an unmistakably tragic expression, there in the sunshine outside the court in a high wavering voice he sang several verses of a very, very old Tamil song. I played it back to him.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘now you have my voice. What will you give me in return?’
But, bless his heart, I was gone by then.
Temper of the South
The temper of the South is inescapable in Houston. You can sense the swagger of it in the postures of the cattle people come into town for dinner or convention: hulking rich men in Stetsons and silver belt buckles, paunchy with their generations of beer and prime steaks, lacquered observant women in bangles, talking rather too loud as Texans are apt to, the wives greeting each other with dainty particularities (‘Why, hi, Cindy. My you’re looking pretty!’) the husbands with spacious generics (‘Well, boy, what’s things like in East Texas?’)
And you can sense the poignant charm of it in the faded white clapboard houses of the Fifth Ward, stilted above the dust of their unpaved streets. There the black folk still idle away the warm evenings on their splintered porches, as in the old story books; there the vibrant hymns still rise from the pews of the Rose of Sharon Tabernacle Church; there the garbage still blows about the garden lots, and you may still be asked, as I was, if, ‘Say, ain’t you Miss Mary’s daughter from the old store? Bless your heart, I used to be one of Miss Mary’s best, best customers…’
Monty
Late one evening during World War II I was walking up Arlington Street towards Piccadilly when there emerged from the door of the Ritz General Sir Bernard Montgomery (not yet a Marshal or a Lord). A policeman saluted as he scuttled down the hotel steps and into his waiting staff car, but I thought there seemed something almost furtive about his movements. I expect he was really in haste to get back to the War Office, or even into battle, but if he had been another kind of general I would have guessed he was hurrying to an assignation down the road in Soho!
Confrontation
Through the crowd waiting for their luggage at the Toronto airport carousel there staggered ever and again a middle-aged woman in a fur hat and a long coat of faded blue, held together by a leather belt evidently inherited from some earlier ensemble. She was burdened with many packages elaborately stringed, wired and brown-papered, she had a sheaf of travel documents generally in her hands, sometimes between her teeth, and she never stopped moving, talking and gesticulating. If she was not hurling questions at expressionless bystanders in theatrically broken English, she was muttering to herself in unknown tongues, or breaking into sarcastic laughter. Often she dropped things; she got into a terrible mess trying to get a baggage cart out of its stack (‘You–must–put–money–in–the–slot.’ ‘What is slot? How is carriage coming? Slot? What is slot?’) and when at last she perceived her travelling accoutrements–awful mounds of canvas and split leather–erupting on to the conveyor, like a tank she forced a passage through the immobile Canadians, toppling them left and right or barging them one into another with virtuoso elbow work.
I lost sight of the lady as she passed through customs (I suspect she was involved in some fracas there, or could not undo the knots on her baggage), but she represented for me the archetypal immigrant, arriving at the emblematic immigrant destination of the late twentieth century, and I watched the confrontation with sympathy for both sides.
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 dis
concerted. 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.