TRAVEL IN BRITAIN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25881, 27 June 1945, Page 4

TRAVEL IN BRITAIN

THE SIXTH YEAR OF WAR NORMALITY AMID CHANGE By H. V. Morton (Broadcast in the 8.8. C. overseas short-wave service) I supose you sometimes wonder what it’s like to travel on the English railways in this, the sixth, year of war. Well, I can give you a fairly good idea because I’ve just got back from County Durham. I had to go up there quite suddenly and unexpectedly on pr vate business, and I can assure you I simply jumped at the chance of this, novel experience. I arrived at King’s Cross a good hour before my train was due to leave, and even so I was only just in time to get a seat in what had once been a first-class restaurant car. You can’t imagine what King’s Cross looks like in these days; soldiers, sailors, and airmen everywhere, green Commando berets, black berets of the Royal Armoured Corps, maroon Airborne berets, sailors wheeling trucks piled with kit bags and hammocks, girls in khaki and blue, and, of course, a great crowd of civilians carrying their own luggage, all storming the trains and some of them glad to get “a seat on a suitclase in the corridor. A Commando Captain Sitting opposite to me was a pretty little freckled red-haired Scotswoman with a baby girl of three, and also a weary-looking air force officer. Next to me was a dashing captain of Commandos wearing the Africa Star, a priceless character who turned out to be a compromise between Bulldog Drummond and Brigadier Gerrard. We" all became frie'rtdly when the little Scotswoman tied a bib round the baby’s neck and produced two thermos flasks. From one she produced milk; from the other a mash of spinach, potato and carrot covered in gravy (which made the Commando shudder!), ending up with a spoonful of rosehip syrup. Watching the child receive spoonfuls of food sat all sorts of people furtively fumbling for their packets of sandwiches, for of course, you can’t get anything to eat on a train you. A stately woman in a blue you. A stately women in a blue uniform with an impressive gold monogram on her shoulder straps (the Commando whispered to me that she wag a “Queen B of considerable magnitude”) was the first to surrender to the pangs of hunger. She shyly produced a bottle wrapped in newspaper, and, with a rather pained expression,' poured milk into a bakelite cup"while a colonel opposite to her shamelessly opened a bag full of spam sandwiches, but lower down the car a fine red admiral glared over The Times with an expression which told us that he would rather die of starvation than nibble sandwiches in public. I gave in very quickly, and found in my packet two wedges of veal and ham pie. The Commando whipped out a clasp knife, and we shared the pie together. I gathered that before the war my companion had been planting coffee in Kenya, sisal in the Belgian Congo, and at the same time shooting up the wild animals of Africa in true Commando style. He had served in Greece, Crete, and the Africa landings, and thought that everything was a ’“jolly good show” and that the old Boche was pretty nearly done in at last (and about time, too), and served him jolly well right. As for the Japs., well, he’d tell me exactly what he thought of 'them, but I’m glad to say that his ringing voice was slightly toned down by a girder bridge. Wax-time Countryside As the train rushed on to the north the placid-looking English countryside unrolled, field lying against field, ploughed and sown for the harvest, a very different countryside from the rabbithaunted pastures of peace-time. We saw little villages clustered round their churches. And, to look at them, you d think they’d never heard of the Home Guard and road blocks. Then wed flash through a town, grim and shabby and unpainted, and even at a casual glance a bit blasted by bombs; long lines of unpainted rolling stock in the sidings, permanent-way men leaning on their picks, and feminine figures in oily blue overall's standing near the cleaning sheds. Then a brief glimpse of houses and smoking chimneys and off into the country again. Later that evening, long after dim-out, I changed at a station well beyond York where X had an hour to wait for a local train. The Commando also had to wait there. " I say, what about a snifter? ’ he said. So we left our luggage in charge of a girl in the blue serge uniform of a porter and went out into unlit streets to find an hotel. Sitting in the bar, very gloomily, was one man, a major. He was angry. .. “ It’s an absolute scandal,” he said. Catterick’s the last place on earth, yet they make it even more difficult to get at by sending off the train five minutes before the London train arrives." Then he looked -closely at the Commnado and jumped off his stool. “Freddie!" he said, “ what on earih are you doing here? 1 thought you’d been shot.” Those old comrades literally rushed into each other’s arms, for the last time they had met was in Crete! I left them locked in reminiscence, and as I went out I heard Freddie say: “But. by jove, old boy. it was dashed good partridge shooting, wasn’t it? ” At the end of a long and weary journey in a local train I found the car I had ordered and, sitting ■ inside, was a man I had never seen before. The driver asked me if I minded giving him a lift to a village we would pass through. I said I should be delighted, and off we went. On the way he told me he was a local builder who had been directed to do bomb damage repair in London. “ D 6 you mean to tell me they’ve taken you from Durham to repair houses in London? ” “Aye,” he replied, “ an’ they need everybody they can get.” Every six weeks, he told me, they give him week-end leave. Early Morning Tea! At last 1 arrived at a little country hotel which once specialised in fishermen and tourists. Except that it was empty, it was very little changed. A boots aged about 14 took my bags. A waiter aged about 70, and wearing a gallant but slightly disreputable dinner jacket was waiting up for me. “ You can have Scotch broth and rabbit pie,” he said. And when I had finished the youthful boots came up to me, “ Please, sir,” he asked, “ would you like early morning tea? ” What a grand country this is, isn’t it? It takes more than a war to shake us! And before I went to bed I walked out under the hotel porch and sniffed the good clean cold North Country air. I could see the gigantic forms of old beech trees in tire park opposite. Owls were calling. And the air was full of a wonderful sound; the steady, gentle murmur of a broad river flowing over its rocky bed. I know this river. It is not slow and smooth like a river of the south. It is quick and wild and the colour of amber. There are deep pools in it where the salmon lie. And the night wind coming through the trees was blowing straight from Scotland. “ O lovely North Country of England, I said to myself, “ with your stone walls and your hills, and your splendid people, how grand to meet you once again! ’ Then I went to bed.