Allegorizings

  And there, in that very use of it, its virtuosity is illustrated. I am employing it in that sentence because I intend the remark to be surprising, amusing and perhaps a little ironic. But in just the same context it could also express shock, or dismay, or contempt, or ridicule, or just exclamation—“Dear God! The Nijinski of grammar!” I even find it useful as a sort of emollient; thrown into a letter of reproach, it can soften the temper of everything, adding an ameliorating flicker of amusement or complicity. In short, you can do almost anything with the exclamation mark. You can triple or quadruple it if you want to express hilarity, or, especially if you are in grade ten, emphasize your undying devotion to somebody. Spaniards turn it upside-down, and print it one way at the start of a sentence, the other way at the end. In some countries it stands, all by itself, as an extremely effective all-purpose traffic warning, and artists of comic strips long ago recognized its explosive effect, especially in combination with multiple asterisks.

  For me, though, it is above all a thing of beauty. There it stands now, top left on my computer keyboard, and it makes all else look vulgar, especially that bloody b.

  Scots in a Train

  WHERE ARE WE? The train is spotless, bright and fast. The youth who comes round with the food trolley sounds exquisitely educated. The ticket collecter is urbanely courteous. All the other passengers are equally charming, and smile happily if you smile at them. Where in the unlovely world are we? We are in the blue-and-white electric train that runs every fifteen minutes between Glasgow and Edinburgh, the principal cities of one of Europe’s most civilized small countries, Scotland.

  SUCH TRAVEL BONHOMIE is rare these days, and it arises perhaps from the famously celebratory character of both cities. At the great Edinburgh Art Festival, for instance, hordes of artists, writers, actors, comedians, pundits and musicians perform, squabble, philosophize and pose until the dawn breaks. At Glasgow thousands of enthusiasts, boisterous and sentimental, gather for the international piping festival, and then too the last drone of the bagpipes will not fade away until long after the pubs have closed. The nature of these jamborees, the one so cerebral, the other so visceral, says a lot about the nature of Scotland, and so do the cities themselves.

  Edinburgh is the Scottish capital, and looks like it. Grey, elegant, castle-crowned, it is just made for kings and glory. It is the seat of the national Parliament, its daily newspaper is called simply The Scotsman, Scottish flags fly all over it and when I bought a little volume there called 100 Best Scottish Books I was only mildly surprised to find that the titles listed included Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Holy Bible.

  In Glasgow I would be more likely to find 1000 Best Glasgow Jokes or Your Wee Dictionary of Glaswegian. Glasgow is like a City-State, staunchly parochial in its prides, feisty in historical attitudes. For years the most popular exhibit in its Museum of Modern Art was a figure of Queen Elizabeth II, crowned and ermined, smoking a fag and holding the morning’s milk bottles under one arm, the day’s tabloid under the other.

  But both are very ancient cities, both unmistakably Scottish, and they complement each other in an ornery kind of way, so that it is easy enough to imagine the young avant-gardists getting pissed in Glasgow, the hearty pipers soaking up post-deconstructionist reggae in Edinburgh.

  “ARE WE NEARLY THERE?” The universal cri de coeur is politely expressed on the Scotrail express, and easily answered. Bless you, chick, we are already there. Scotland itself exists in the balance between its two splendid cities, and all around us as we speed towards one or the other, everything Scottish accompanies us: the mountains and the lochs, the great ships and the kilted soldiers, heather and whisky and Adam Smith and the red-nosed comics of tradition—all are with us already, my love, all around us, as the train speeds on and that obvious young Master of Arts (a very good second-class degree, without a doubt) offers us another slice of cake from his trolley.

  Paradise Somewhere

  IF PARADISE IS the stuff of the conventional promise, all sweetmeats and complaisant houris, then I certainly have never experienced it. But a nirvana of a different kind I did transiently enter long ago, when I was on my way back to Kathmandu, in Nepal, out of the Himalayas. I was travelling with a Sherpa friend of mine. His name was Sonam. We had come out of the mountains fast, and when we got down into the foothills I began to feel ill and weak—the reverse of altitude sickness, I suppose. The monsoon had broken upon us, and the endless rain did not help, but “Come with me to my home village,” Sonam said, “and we will make you better.”

  The village was only a few miles off our route, and it was called Chaunrikharka. At the time I only knew of it by the sound of it, because I had never seen the name on a map, or read any reference to it. In those days I doubt if any European had ever set foot in the place, and to this day it remains in my mind hardly more than a mellifluous suggestion, with a name that sounds lovely but is the very devil to spell.

  Like most Sherpa villages then, it was just a cluster of small huts surrounded by potato fields and gardens, with nothing in the way of a focus, no school or public temple—nothing to make a hard fact of it, as it were, as against a blurred recollection. We got there at dusk, and to me it all seemed just a misty sort of somewhere. A great snow peak rose somewhere above the village. A tumbling river rushed somewhere below. Sonam’s family house was somewhere in the middle of the place, and he led me to an upstairs room somewhere in the shambled wooden structure, unrolled my sleeping-bag for me somewhere on the floor and introduced me to my one experience of paradise—somewhere, somewhere or other, in the Himalaya foothills of Nepal.

  The long room was very dark, and at one end of it was the Sonam family shrine. A dozen small images of the Buddha stood there in an alcove, attended by flickering butter candles, and as I remember there was no other furniture. Everything was woody, smoky, creaky, flickering and inexact. Outside the rain fell steadily, with a heavy swishy noise, and I soon fell into what I suppose now was a feverishly debilitated sleep. When I woke up next day the first thing I saw was that shrine, gently luminous in the morning light, and I found myself almost hallucinatorily happy. It was still raining, but life was in full fling all around me. Outside my door the fields stood green, fresh and gleaming in the wet, and a marvellously suggestive vegetable smell reached me—part fertile, part rotten, part bitter, part sweet, past its best but already renewing itself, like a subliminal and oddly comforting text of existence. The river still rushed, but mingled with its noise was the hilarious laughter of children, the shrill merry gossip of Sherpa women, the clatter of pans and the cheerful voice of Sonam, clumping up the outside steps to see how I was.

  Was it two nights I spent there? Was it two years? It might have been either, because time lost meaning for me in Chaunrikharka. All the many Sonams visited me in my convalescence, some young and rosy, some extremely old, sometimes singly, sometimes all at once, feeding me roast potatoes and dosing me with the powerful white liquor called rakhsi, which plays a happy part in the Sherpa culture. Strangers sporadically appeared at my open door to peer kindly and wonderingly at me. The rain hissed and clattered, on the fields and on the roof, and the women talked and talked downstairs.

  And always, throughout my stay, those serene images of the alcove looked gently back at me, and the candles flickered, guttering when a gust of wind blew through or under my door. I heard not a harsh word. I saw not an unfriendly face. I grew to love the spatter of rain on the roof, and the scents of woodsmoke and vegetables, and the bright inquisitive eyes of the innumerable grubby brown infants invited in by junior Sonams to take a look at me.

  When I was better they showed me around the fields, and took me to the roaring river, and introduced me to the neighbours, who completed my cure with lavish tin mugs of rakhsi. When the time came to resume our journey, a covey of urchins came with us for the first few hundred yards, prancing and tumbling and laughing all around us, and I thought they provided a properly dream-like envoi to a transcendental interlude.
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  For more than fifty years I half-wondered if my stay in the somewhere of Chaunrikharka was a purely imaginary enchantment, born by fever out of exhaustion. It was only the other day that, examining a new map of eastern Nepal, I discovered for certain that my momentary paradise had existed, east of the Dudh Kosi river, west of the snow peak Gonglha, due south of Phakdingma.

  Three

  Smug revenge upon the merry

  On to Maturity!

  OH, THE JOYLESSNESS of the word “maturity”! Nobody ever cried “On, on to Maturity!,” with a reckless flourish of flags or opinions. Nobody ever wrote that to be mature was perfect heaven. During my time in journalism, when the trade was politer than it is now, the word “mature” went with “ample” (meaning fat), “attractive” (meaning plain) or “vivacious” (meaning garrulous), in the news-room vocabulary of euphemisms. In the wider social world, it spoke of settling down, early nights, the pram in the hall, prudence, mortgages, reality and common sense. President Truman of the United States, tiring of the mature reflections of his financial advisers—“On the one hand, Mr. President, but then again, on the other . . .”—said that what he wanted was a one-armed economist, and I know just what he meant.

  With maturity we enter the lecture hall of academe, its truest dwelling place and to my mind the most dread of chambers. Here the meridian torture awaits us, even those who, like me, are experienced at reading frivolous novels while the presiding sage drones on (for however hardened we are, however thick-skinned, still we cannot help feeling the bloodless disapproval of the other people in the row). Maturity in the lecture kind is the devil’s smug revenge upon the merry.

  Of course the adjective “mature” need not be pejorative. Applied to wine it speaks of mellowness, sublety, ease and grace. But even then it is not for me. The wines I like best are young, sharp and mischievous, the sort that ought really to be warmed a bit, except that I cannot wait—wines beneath the notice of the connoisseurs who, in the infinite complacency of their analyses, are the very essence of the mature. “You may not appreciate it now,” I hear one such savant telling some brash young adolescent, “but you will appreciate its grandeur when you are older.” When he is more mature, the old fraud means, when the sap is subsiding, when the first fine rapture has been dullened by maturity . . .

  What about a mature cheese? It tends to stink. Or a mature judgement? It takes an age to ripen. Mature students go to lectures. When a bill matures, you have to pay it. There was a famous actor called Mature, when I was immature myself, and I am surprised that he never chose a nom de théâtre for himself. Perhaps only family loyalty dissuaded him from an immortality with more panache—the name was doubtless fine for his dad George Marcellus Mature, cutler, of Louisville, Kentucky, but surely not for Victor Mature, film star, of Hollywood, California . . . !

  In short, I do not like the adjective “mature,” because I resent the noun it has bred. Maturity! Maturity! Did ever a heart thrill to the sound of it, still less the meaning? There was a time when I actually congratulated myself on becoming mature, earning the respect of my experience, and throwing off the callowness of youth. No longer! Give me callowness every time, give me fizz, give me irresponsibility, and if ever I feel maturity creeping in, crack a bottle, put out more flags and ring the bells!

  Steamboat Pleasures

  IF EVER YOU pine for the old bourgeois pleasures, genteel, discreet, complacent and in my own case fondly imperialist pleasures, get you to Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, and board one of the five glorious paddle-steamers which have been sailing those waters since the early years of the last century.

  Make straight for the dining saloon, and there over a cup of coffee you will be eased into nirvana. Port and starboard the mountains rise above the lake, dappled even in summer, with recalcitrant patches of snow. The woodwork creaks around you, the pistons pound below, the paddles gently swish, there is a faint smell of engine oil and presently a breathy blast of the ship’s horn tells you that you are approaching the little lakeside resort of Weggis.

  Relax. No hurry to finish your coffee. Weggis is a very haven of those patient bourgeois pleasures, and the captain of the Schiller (319 tons, built in 1906) will be tolerantly smiling down at you from his bridge when you are the last to disembark, before with another toot of the siren his ship swims like a punctual swan away.

  WE CALL IT Lake Lucerne, but it is really Vierwaldstätter See, the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, and it lies in the very heart of the virtual Switzerland we are seeking: not the real Switzerland, an immensely competent and hard-headed little State, equipped with every modernity. but the Switzerland of our more languid fancies, where ships’ captains wave goodbye from the wheel-houses of centenarian steamboats, amiable porters greet you at the doors of unostentatiously comfortable hotels, and distant music sounds from municipal bandstands on Tuesday mornings.

  It is quite likely to be gypsy music of some kind, but played in a decidedly un-Romany manner—no foot-stampings here, no cries of ecstasy or final triumphant waving of fiddle-bows. The audience is attentive, appreciative, even affectionate in its responses, but certainly not reckless. Average ages are high in Weggis, and the prevailing temper is kind but undemonstrative.

  It is true that small boys sometimes somersault into the lake from the steamer landing, when the Schiller, the Uri (built 1901), the Unterwalden (1902), the Gallia (1913) or the Stadt Luzern (1928) is nowhere about. True, too, that sometimes shoppers and secretaries trundle insouciantly past on roller-skates, and stalwart soldiers of the Swiss Army clump through town in their camouflage gear and big boots. But the general mood of the place is placid, or perhaps valetudinarian.

  Certainy Weggis is very concerned with health. “Wellness” is its leitmotif—in English, and with capital Ws. There are Wellness hotels and Wellness restaurants, Wellness diets, Wellness habits, and everywhere there are Wellness people walking, in varying degrees of exertion, with those Nordic walking poles. Believe me, by the time you have been in Weggis for a day or two you are likely to be either lying on a chaise-longue at the lake’s edge, wiggling your toes (if it is a Tuesday) to the beat of The Merry Widow from the bandstand, or are ambling the foreshore on your Nordic walking poles.

  Or eating. Sad to say, probably not fish out of the lake—even the Vierwaldstätter See can be polluted—but robust healthy meals with lots of vegetables, and good Swiss wine to go with them. The local people seldom seem to be fat, and this I attribute partly to the diet, partly to the lovely mountain air, and partly perhaps to Nordic walking poles.

  AND PARTLY TO the atttitude of meticulous regularity that comes with those ancient steamboats. The church bells of Weggis ring comfortingly throughout the night from the fourteenth-century tower of the parish church, but during the day it is the arrival of the steamers that gives the town its reassuring sense of order. Not all the ships of the Schifffahrtsgesellschaft des Vierwaldstättersees are venerable paddle-steamers: some are sleek modern motor vessels with Klaxon horns and revvable engines. They are the sounds and suggestions of the steamboats, though, that dictate the life rhythm of Weggis, its citizens, and not least its visitors.

  There you are, recumbent in the garden of the Beau Rivage Hotel, say, which has been attending to our needs under one name or another since the early seventeenth century. All is calm, all is Swiss, ducks doze upon the jetty, and at one o’clock somebody is going to bring you an omelette to eat in the multicoloured gazebo at the water’s edge. You are half-asleep, perhaps, awaiting the gentle summons to your victuals, but just before the moment arrives you hear the chunk-chunk of paddles, and a thoughtful touch of a steam-whistle, and almost simultaneously three things occur: the church clock strikes one, the Stadt Luzern docks, and a sweet soft voice says your omelette awaits you.

  In between the hours, too, the impeccable coming and going of the steamers is like some pledge of eternity. At summer weekends the Vierwaldstätter See is a restless pageant of water life. Hundreds of yachts are tacking all across th
e lake. Speedboats scud about. Excursion boats are jammed with tourists. Anglers are out there with their rods and nets, and everywhere small white pleasure craft with parasols are sidling along the wooded shorelines below the mountains. But among them, every now and then, there stalks one of those grand old ships, stately and silent in the distance, with a rim of white around its prow, the faintest shimmer of heat haze from its rakish smokestack, and a constant, purposeful flurry of foam beneath its paddle-boxes, as though Time itself could not deter its passage.

  FOR THE GREATHEART paddle-steamers of Lake Lucerne are not only splendours in their own right; they are integral to the ethos of the Vierwaldstätter See, to the ethos of precise respectability that we have come here to enjoy. Long after you have left the lake, when the corrosion of the great world is all around you once more, you will still hear their sirens sounding, see their captains lordly on their bridges, and remember the delicately fattening sweetness of the cakes in their saloons.

  Mark Twain, that old river pilot, undoubtedly responded to their magic, even then—he thought a steamboat voyage on Lake Lucerne “almost the perfection of pleasuring.” And perhaps Kipling the romantic had an echo of them in his mind, as I do now, when he wrote about those imperial paddle-wheels chunking from Rangoon to Mandalay.

  Invisible Loyalty

  IT WAS ALLEGORY with a vengeance when, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cartographers of the European Union decided that Wales did not exist, and struck it (inadvertently perhaps) from the map. For Welsh patriots of my persuasion, though, no worries. We know that since the beginnings of history ours has been, as often as not, a country of the mind, a homeland of the imagination, a love-land if you like, impervious to the vulgarities of map-makers and politicians.