by Jan Morris
Holy experiences
Consider this family of Irish people, sitting beneath a canopy in the drizzle of a Marian shrine in County Waterford. The image of the Virgin is not very old, but stands strangely half in shadow on a rock wall in a frond-filled grotto, with a stream running below. During the last few months it has repeatedly been seen to move of its own accord, and to be transfigured. Sometimes its face changes into that of Christ, and sometimes it apparently comes to life–early last night, a bright-eyed lady at the gate tells me, she met the Virgin walking silently by the stream. The family sits there, mother, father, adult son and daughter, in a determined common trance, their eyes fixed immovably upon the statue on the rock–willing it to move, praying for a manifestation, clutching rosaries, lips moving sometimes but bodies still as images themselves. They were like addicts at a gaming table. The rain fell all around.
Sacred memories
I went to the 300th-anniversary march of the Prentice Boys in Londonderry (aka Derry), by which the Protestant Orange Order remembers a famous victory over the Catholics, and never did I see such a variety of remarkable faces, pinched, florid, genial or fierce beneath their bowler hats or tam-o’-shanters. Never were pipe-and-drum bands more fervent. Never was I in a crowd so absolutely united in its bigotries. Thirty thousand Orangemen took part in the march, and for five hours an air of perfervid dedication enveloped the city. There were tiny boys of three or four marching with the rest. There were half-crazed bass drummers and clown-like drum majors, juggling their batons, balancing them on the ends of their noses, strutting and gesturing like circus performers. There were ranks of stern elderly men, bowler hatted, some carrying swords, all swathed in the regalia of the Orange Order. Halfway down the procession the hero of the day, a large Presbyterian clergyman, came swaggering by with a cohort of aides, smiling here and there and cheered along the way like a dictator moving among his adoring subjects. Hour after hour the beat of the drums reverberated, and when I left Derry the Orangemen were still streaming across the Craigavon Bridge, banners flying, drummers prancing, strutting infants, determined old men in medals and bowlers marching in steadfast line abreast.
Reciprocal ill will
I can see to this day the face of a Benedictine monk I encountered at the Bavarian monastery of Andechs. In his late twenties, I would guess, he looked more like an interrogator than a confessor, far more accusatory than forgiving. Tall, thin, pale, unsmiling, cold eyed, pious as all hell, when I asked him the way to the monastic cemetery he did not at first reply at all, but simply turned his cod-like features upon me with raised eyebrows. When at last he gave me a curt and loveless answer I hardly had time to thank him (not that I was planning to be very fulsome about it) before he turned on his heel with a flounce of his cassock and disappeared inside the church. I hope he choked on his vespers.
‘Oes heddwch?’
Assembled on stage at the National Eisteddfod, the great cultural festival of the Welsh nation, are the Bards of the Druidical Orders, a strange conclave of eminent citizens, doctors and philosophers, writers and politicians, dressed in long hooded robes of white and grey. They are presided over by sages and attended by nymphs in green, by matrons with horns of plenty, by harpists and by trumpeters, and they are there to honour the victor of a poetry competition. The winner’s identity is a secret, but he is sitting, we know, somewhere in the audience around us. A hum of excitement and speculation accordingly fills the pavilion. Strange preliminaries occur on the stage: harpists pluck arcane strains, elves dance, a gigantic sword is half drawn from its sheath, then majestically slammed home again. ‘Oes heddwch?’ cries the Archdruid. ‘Is there peace?’ ‘Heddwch!’ thunders back the audience, and the trumpets blow their fanfares, and gathering their robes about them a deputation of Druids gravely leaves the stage to summon the victorious poet to his honours. The organ thunders. A spotlight plays at random over the auditorium. The television cameras are poised in their gantries. The audience strains forward in its seats. Presently the light steadies itself, sweeps deliberately along the seats, and falls at last upon the person of the winner–who, blushing with pride and self-consciousness, and pretending hard to be astonished, allows himself with mock reluctance to be led away by the Druids, up through the huge applauding crowd, up through the reverberating organ music, to the throne that is, for those few moments, the very crucible of Wales. Some years ago I was a member of that Druidical delegation, the man who drew the great sword from its sheath was a famous rugby player and my son Twm was the poet.
Small change
There is a Sydney street group called the Aussie Small Change Brass Band which might well represent the city at ceremonial functions, so alive is it with the authentic Sydney mixture of fun, fizz and chutzpah. Its players are three very small boys in very large hats, with two trumpets, a tuba and extremely powerful amplifiers, and I can tell you they play ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ like nobody’s business.
Incidental music
I was driving down the Adriatic coast from Istria to Montenegro, and I was playing a recording by Vladimir Ashkenazy of Mozart’s 22nd piano concerto. It seemed to me that the vivacious allegro movement of this work absolutely suited the swashbuckling landscape of karst, sea and island through which I was passing, and I drove down the magnificent coast road playing the tape repeatedly, laughing and singing out loud. In the course of the journey I gave a lift to a frail and elderly Montenegrin traveller, wizard-like with stick and black coat, and when towards the end of the journey, Ashkenazy still playing, me still singing, in the delight of my mood I narrowly escaped head-on collision with a convoy of armoured cars, this delightful old worthy seemed to find it just as funny as I did.
The Algerian gardener
The Algerian gardener at our hotel in the Midi was extremely tall and cadaverous, and his eyes blazed deep in their sockets. His luxuriant sideburns, however, gave him a noble scholarly aspect. He was like a professor in some medieval academy of Islam. As he trundled his barrow about, I used to think, surely he was debating within himself subtle mathematical formulae, or composing Sufi couplets? Once I got up at the break of day, when the place was deserted, and I came across the gardener feeding a black and white cat. He stood very erect above the animal, having placed a grisly dish of offal before it, and I heard him murmuring endearments to the creature. They sounded stately endearments–Koranic, perhaps–and he stood there gauntly as the sun rose behind him, looking down at the cat and murmuring. The cat kept circling around his feet, casting glances at the food, rubbing its head against the man’s ankles until it felt it had paid its proper respects. Only then did it fall, with snarls and rendings through its purrs, upon the unlovely victuals.
The matter with me
‘Wazzamatterwidyou?’ hissed the angry cab driver, as I stumbled bemused across 45th Street. ‘Hey, you in the green hat,’ shouts the policeman from his horse, ‘can’t you see that signal?’ ‘You must wait for the green,’ says the passing lady slowly and sympathetically, assuming I speak only Welsh or Lithuanian, and am new to the mysteries of science. But it takes time to readjust, when you return to Manhattan from idler climes.
To touch the owl
I notice that for mistily religious reasons women in Dijon touch the little figure of an owl in the rue de la Chouette as casually as they might pull on a glove–except that, since it is perched rather high on a wall, small ladies have to jump a bit to reach the bird, and children have to be lifted one after the other, their mothers never interrupting, all the same, the flow of their own conversations.
The friar’s warning
At the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo the desiccated corpses of generations of citizens are on display, guarded by friars and climaxed by the body of a child labelled BAMBINA–SLEEPING BEAUTY GIRL. ‘Be very careful,’ one of the friars said in a flat sort of voice when I left this macabre exhibit–‘watch out for robbers.’ I thought there was a queer, occult look in his eye, and hardly had I left the sacred premises than two t
hugs on a motorbike snatched my bag and left me destitute.
One can always tell
If the hitch-hikers are American I generally stop for them. One can always tell. They try harder for their lifts, holding up well-lettered destination signs and offering ingratiating smiles. They are in the lift-getting business, and they do the job properly. When they are on board they generally work for their keep, too. They tell me all about themselves, they learn all about me, they may give me a brief lecture upon the social customs of my own country, or kindly correct me when I appear to be going the wrong way. They are usually willing to oblige, too. ‘Are you going to Scotland?’ one young man asked me when I stopped for him just outside London. ‘No, I’m going to Wales.’ ‘OK, make it Wales’–and I drove him all the way to Bala, and left him smoothly chatting up the farmer’s wife at a bed-and-breakfast place.
Marvellously goes the elk meat
My favourite place for a Christmas meal is the Operakällaren restaurant in Stockholm. There the restaurant’s famous house aquavit is poured most generously by merry waiters of the old school, and everyone soon gives the impression of being acquainted with everyone else. Marvellously goes the elk meat, swiftly pass the herrings, one great salmon succeeds another on the buffet, and very soon I find myself on familiar terms with the Swedes at the next table, complimenting them on their fluent English, admiring little Eva’s Christmas frock or little Erik’s smart bow tie, exchanging grandmotherly confidences with Mrs Andersson, toasting them one and all with yet more aquavit. Stockholmers are not especially religious people, and I like to think they have been eating those Baltic herrings, downing those fiery liquids, since the days of the pagan kings.
The red tarboosh
Andrew Holden was one of the very last British officials of the Egyptian government, still a highly respected functionary of the Ministry of Finance when Egypt had long recovered its independence. By the time I knew him he was near retirement, but he still went to work each morning by tram, clinging to the outside like any other Cairene if he could not get a seat. The amiable Egyptians, helping him up the step, would make sure he had a place on the rear platform, where he could hang on to the pole, and there I can see him now as the tram swayed and clanked its way into town, so scholarly looking in his spectacles, so slight, so incongruously at ease–and on his head, tilted at a jaunty but not ostentatious angle, the red tarboosh which was the only badge of his commitment.
Dance music
One evening I came across a dance in a Cretan courtyard. The lights were very bright there. The deafeningly amplified music was a quavery sort of oriental theme. A high gate closed the yard, but along the wall of the road above, from windows and shadowy terraces all around, a crowd of villagers watched. Beneath the lights inside, a long circling line of Cretans, men and women, danced a strange dance. I was bewitched. Gracefully, jauntily, thoughtfully, swankily, the dancers tripped their complex steps, and the music blared through the pergola. Round and round they went, to and fro, and sometimes the man at the head of the line, detaching himself momentarily from the rest, threw himself into a spasm, leaping, kicking his feet together, twirling about in an ecstasy of conceit and accomplishment, before the convulsion left him and he subsided into the music’s rhythm. When I tore myself away the half-tone music of the loudspeakers tracked me far into the night.
The three days
One of the most demanding of Irish pilgrimages takes the faithful to a grim island in Lough Derg, a remote and dispiriting mountain lake, where they endure a three-day fast, a twenty-four-hour vigil, barefoot peregrinations over stony tracks and the compulsory recitations of 63 Glorias, 124 Creeds, 891 Paternosters and 1,458 Hail Marys. I was once at a wedding at Drogheda, away on the east coast, when I heard a woman ask a worldly young guest with a carnation in his buttonhole and a glass of champagne in his hand where he was going for his holidays that year. I expected Mykonos or Barbados, but no. ‘I thought of giving myself’, he said, ‘the three days at Lough Derg.’
At a Breton window
My small daughter and I looked up from the waterfront of Douarnenez, in Brittany, to see an old woman smiling down at us from an open window. She had a shawl around her shoulders, her face was infinitely wrinkled, and her smile was so kind that it seemed to be reaching us from different times altogether–from before the Fall, perhaps. ‘I want that lady,’ my small daughter said.
Do I know her?
Now and then I chance to see in real life one of those nameless and numberless actresses of television, encountered in the Underground, perhaps, or browsing at a bookshop. At first I think I really know her. Who could she be? Is she a publisher, or a fellow author? Did we meet on an aircraft, or at a literary festival somewhere? Like one of those nagging fragrances one cannot place, or a tune whose words we can never quite remember, her presence tantalizes and disturbs me. But then with a touch of melancholy I realize that I know her only by proxy, through the medium of the TV screen. Some people in these circumstances introduce themselves anyway, and perhaps one should: I sometimes notice that if I chance to catch the woman’s eye she will give me one of those closed-lip actress’s smiles, turned up a little too resolutely at the corners of the mouth, as if she is dying to be recognized.
Salon life
A Jewish acquaintance of mine in Delhi, being a passionate horsewoman, established a sort of lien upon the social loyalties of a whole covey of equestrian maharajas, polo players to a man but as fascinated by the personality of their hostess as they were by her love of horses. They became a kind of salon. They used to sit in her drawing room, itself a strange and wonderful melange of cultures, or sprawl on the lawn with long cool drinks, hanging upon her every word: dark mustachioed military figures, handsome but rather running to plump, and in their midst that small vivacious woman bestowing a chaff here, a compliment there, like a Jewish maharani herself.
Days of liberty!
I chanced to arrive in Paris when a student rebellion was reaching its climax, and was astonished to find the students surging to and fro between their makeshift barricades, handkerchiefs over their mouths, throwing things now and then and shouting slogans. They were all that old people dreamed themselves to have been when they looked back to their days of liberty, the days when they had causes to throw bricks for, when to be alive was grand enough, but heaven itself was to be young, radical, brandishing a stick and shouting a slogan in Paris!
Harry’s Challenge
I had a pre-Christmas luncheon at Harry Ramsden’s Fish and Chip Shop at Guiseley, where the menu was dominated by Harry’s Challenge, a fish-and-chip dish so gigantic that if you got through it you were given a free pudding and a signed certificate. All the customers were the real thing–not another outsider among them, only celebratory office parties hilarious over Harry’s Challenge, and amiably extended families with grandmothers in hats, and burbling children with hand-held video games, and not a few stout parties who would have done better to cut down on the steamed ginger pudding. At one o’clock precisely there arrived outside the front door the Scissett Youth Band of Huddersfield, to serenade us lustily with all the old carols–none of your fancy ecumenicals–setting many a sensibly shod foot tapping to their rhythms and inciting me, as an inveterate whistler, to join in messily over my mushy peas.
In other circumstances
Trams are essential to the character of Vienna, but there are some places where they run against the flow of the traffic, and are likely to murder you. When I nearly lost my own life to one of them–‘Quick! Comes the tram the other way!’–sympathetic onlookers were quick to reassure me that Dr Kurt Waldheim himself had almost died a similar death (although that was of course, they respectfully added, before he became president of our republic…)
Below the ships
The longest escalator in Europe plunges beneath the Kiel Canal to take pedestrians to the other side. I stood there one morning looking down this dreadful shaft, which was all empty, dark and rumbling, wondering if anybody eve
r used it, when a cheerful girl rode up behind me on a bicycle. Without a pause she tucked the bike under her arm, so to speak, and launched herself upon the moving staircase. I stood there watching her go. Down and down into the dark she went, all alone, smaller and smaller, clutching her bicycle, until she disappeared into the hole beneath the Kiel Canal. Above her the ships sailed on.
Colombian coffee
I once sat for half an hour over a coffee at a pavement cafe in Buenaventura, Colombia, and never did I see a more piteous and dispiriting citizenry pass by, in the sticky blaze of that tropical afternoon. A mutilated beggar crawled about my feet, silently holding out his hand. A shoeshine boy with a withered arm sat listless at the pavement’s edge. A few tattered black men slouched about the surrounding tables. Two small boys played football with an old tin in the street. Sometimes a grey figure in white ducks shambled into the cafe, reaching into his money belt for the price of a brandy, sometimes the beggar scuttled off like a huge black crab towards some new arrival, and sometimes the waitress, with a clang of her bangles, screamed some raucous incantation into the kitchen. All around was filth, heat and degradation, malformation and truncation, stumps of arms and crooked arms and scabbed dry lips.