The Peripatetic Reviewer

London.—We did go down to Kew in lilac time, and it proved to be just about every other time too. For the English spring, which had been held back by a long drought and a north wind sweeping in from the sea, suddenly capitulated; there was a spate and then, after three days of flooding May sunlight, every bud in ihe place exploded. So we had the lilacs—and standing near them was better than Chand No. 5 — and ihe azaleas, and the rhododendron, and the flowering crab, and the tulips, and the bluebells, ihe wisteria, and the while arabis; and such profusion coming all at once almost made you overlook the beauty of the great elms and chestnuts and beeches, the most venerable of which go back to the early 1700s. The vistas are the glory of Kew Gardens: the long sweeps of shaven turf, framed either side by tall grass and bluebells, with the great trees standing out like giant bouquets.

We went down to Kew in the Underground in half the time and one fortieth of the price it would have cost us in a taxi. My first impulse in London is to use those ubiquitous shiny black taxis for every mission; but actually once you gel the hang of ihe Underground, ihe buses, and the launches on the Thames, you find yourself covering the distance more swiftly and much more economically than if you were in the little bandbox. London traffic is almost as congested as that in New York, and a1 the getaway hour Friday afternoons taxis and cars creep along, “nose to tail” as the British say, with t he bobbies in their long white gaunt lets performing a slow-motion ballet at each sticky corner. Allow yourself a minimum of forty minutes from your hotel to any railway station on a Friday afternoon; and if you are caught short, don’t stand waving frantically, but, like the White Rabbit, go underground.

There are certain occupational slowdowns in the London streets quite unlike anything we have on our side. For instance, when the Guard changes at Buckingham Palace a company of Guardsmen immaculate in their scarlel tunics, while belts, and bearskins marches confidently into the thoroughfare, arms swinging, but tons agleam. It is preceded by a band blowing away full lilt, and before and beside it is a flutter of mounted police. The traffic, of course, comes to a complete halt until the procession is well launched, and on the day I am describing, the troops were followed — in low gear — by two large military lorries marked Band Capes. No one tried to pass I his array; it was as slow and sacred as a funeral. My taxi was part of the hoi polloi that followed after, and my driver was not impatient, just amused. “Are they armed?” I asked. “Have they ever been known to shoot anybody?”

“I can’t rightly say,” he replied. “But see, it is t he police who arc in a panic getting them back and forth.”

When he spied ihe lorries he laughed. “Look at that — two lorries carrying their capes in case of rain!" You can understand why the English taxi drivers don’t move with as much nervous exasperat ion as ours.

Nor the truck or pleasure drivers in ihe country. Even the well-traveled roads are narrow by our standards — narrow, hedge-banked, and full of curves. You seldom average better than thirty miles an hour even on long runs, and only then if you take advantage of the straight old Roman roads. But it is a pleasure to go no faster than (his, for you have so much to look at, and when you overtake a lorry or a short-winded English jalopy, a hand reaches out the right-hand window and beckons you on as soon as it is safe to pass. The driver will wave you back if it isn’t. This civility is fundamental in British driving. The slower driver seeing you in his mirror will always relay you ahead.

Americans taking out a visitor’s license (cost, 5 shillings) should join either the RAG (Royal Automobile Club) or the A A (Automobile Association): each maintains hundreds of uniformed motorcyclists who patrol all the main roads, saluting you as you pass (which is reassuring) and pausing to aid you if you’re lost or in trouble. I motored well over a thousand miles in the southern counties and in Wales, and I never saw a single accident or altercation. There arc three reasons why the British motorists don’t kill each ot her as frequently as ours do. The first is the fundamental civility I have mentioned; the second is the fact, that they are content to drive more slowly; and the third is economic: a car is much harder to possess there, and accordingly it is more precious to keep — intact. There are fewer accidents and virtually no car graveyards, those grisly American reminders of what can happen at the point of impact.

But the British roads were laid out for Roman foot soldiers, farm carts, or stagecoaches, and only a few have been widened. This makes for “nose to tail" driving and, on bank holidays, for goodnatured immobility. I was in the thick of it over Whitsun. Thousands upon thousands of little cars, black, dark blue, or gray; beetling red buses chartered for a company picnic or by bird watchers or by cricketers in blazers (I counted seven buses in a row, and there was no passing them!); a community of trailers (the English call them “caravans” and rent them weekends) making for a campsite in the New Forest; motorcyclists, muffled men and women in white crash helmets, cutting their noisy diagonals in and out; and bicyclists beyond counting. There are bicycle clubs, in uniform with rucksacks, stretched out two abreast; there are athletes, with their hairy legs and low handlebars, pumping along like six-day racers; there is the family bike with mother and the twins in the sidecar; there are tandems for lovers; and there go the Major (Ret.) and his lady in her cycling costume—a mustard beret, mustard jacket, and suede mustard shoes — bound for a spot of tea at Runnymede. All this on a two-way road. When the leading bus driver stops to refresh himself with a pint of bitters, everyone stops; and miraculously, the horns don’t blare forth impatience.

On one highway leading out of London, the pilgrimage I have been describing was halted for a stretch of seven miles. No one frothed at the mouth; there were no fist fights. Instead, missionaries from an association favoring wider roads went up and down the line distributing leaflets. The traffic jam was in the lane headed south and all on one side of the solid white line. I rubbed my eyes when I saw coming up the free side, London bound, a stagecoach and four. The driver was an old pro; the man with the horn blew lustily to attract our attention; and on the side of the coach was a sign reading, “Let’s Widen Our Roads! Time We Moved Out of the Stagecoach Age.” The old leathery vehicle rattling by the paralyzed motorcade was greeted, as they say in Parliament, with cheers and catcalls.

West minster Hall

At a dinner party my English hosts asked me what I considered the most impressive single building in all England. The question was a poser. I thought of Knole House, which is the magnum of all country places; I thought of the Tower and St. Paul’s; I thought of Hampton Court and Windsor; I thought of Great Court, Trinity, particularly dear because of my residence there in 1922-1923; I thought of Westminster Abbey with its murmurous epitaphs, and then I thought of Westminster Hall, and that was it. We went to see it that very evening after Parliament adjourned —for we had been dining in Commons — and in the half-light it had an awful majesty, so vast, so high, and so silent. It was finished in 1099, and William Rufus held his first court there. For centuries it was the seat of England’s law, the chief court in the realm, and those great oak rafters overhead hold the echoes of tile most passionate trials in history. This is what makes the hall impressive. Richard II was tried here, and here Edward Coke, Attorney for the Queen, pressed the fateful charges against Essex and Guy Fawkes. Charles I met his fate in this great room. And here Sir Thomas More, Thomas Campion, and Warren Hastings stood up to their accusers.

The night we were there, men were still at work preparing a black oak beam for insertion in one of the arches overhead. The huge timber from the New Forest, seasoned for twenty years and weighing I know not how many tons, lay on trestles, and the places where it was to be curved and carved were chalked on its surface. From the light in the scaffolding sixty feet above us I could see where it was to go in. I thought of the decades of labor which raised the original timbers into place, and wondered how many of them are still sound. Our small voices were swallowed up in the vast ness as those more pleading and more angry must have been in times past. This hall holds a quiet brooding.

The South Counties

I find the trans-Atlantic flight leaves me fairly spent for the first three days, and for those in a like state I recommend some mild or sedentary pleasures in town for the first week. Go to see the summer exhibit at the Royal Academy or spend an hour and a half in the stateliness of Apsley House, the beautiful mansion at Hyde Park Corner which a grateful nation bestowed upon Wellington and which has only recently been open to the public; visit Mr. Trumper’s Toilet Saloon on Curzon Street to have your hair cut and your head rubbed; look in at Leader’s, the theatrical agency in the Royal Arcade, to see if Mr. Forester can make reservations for The Chalk Carden, by all odds the best-acted play in town.

Lord Nelson was much in my thinking this trip, for I was absorbed in a manuscript which is being readied for his two hundredth anniversary. This little admiral, only five feet four, with his enormous dedication and his scars: the sight gone from his right eye as the resull of one head wound; his right sleeve empty — “the Fin,” as the sailors on his flagship used to call it, for his stump would stir with excitement when he went into action; and the shock of hair low on his forehead half concealing the sear of the Nile. How superb he was at sea and how vulnerable ashore! It would be well if you could get to Portsmouth to spend two enchanting hours aboard his flagship, the Victory, with its one hundred guns. There you see his cabin, see where he dined and slept, and where he died. You see the gun deck with the great monsters rolled in, and you can imagine what the pounding must have been like at the range of fifty yards.

From London I headed south on a series of pleasant forays which blended past with present.

I paused in Slockbridge to pay my respects to the River Test, certainly the most famous and exacting trout stream in the world. Touch your hat as you pass the little old inn whose bay window bells out into the highway, for this is the site of the Houghton Club, dry-fly anglers par excellence.

As I approached the great Salisbury Plain, I went back to the days of the First World War when Ian Hay was writ ing about The First Hundred Thousand, that valiant volunteer army which did its training here. The Salisbury Cathedral has the most satisfactory facade of any in the Isles, and I cared not one whit that an exact replica of it in spun sugar was now “on exhibit at the Chapter House. The confection had been whipped up by an army corporal, but the original was good enough for me, and I gazed at it to my heart’s content from the natural windows which the town and the Close provide. Salisbury has character and gentleness; and the bridges over the Avon are as lovely today as they were when Constable painted them. Salisbury is also your headquarters for Stonehenge, and Mr. R. J. C. Atkinson’s book about that prehistoric monument is the most illuminating I have read, He gives the evidence for the sequence of building, and shows where the si ones came from and the techniques used for transporting, tooling, and creeling them.

From those ancient nnstories it is like dancing in the sun to go to Bath. Hath is the best preserved of the Homan ruins, and there are courteous volunteers who will guide you to the famous sites and tell you what a Roman country house might have been like when the legionnaires came here on leave. Hath is the most photogenic little town in Britain. The Crescents, the Baths, the Pump Room take you back to the Prince Regent and Beau Brummel, to an age of leisure and indulgence which Jane Austen came here to write about, in Sotthanyer Abbey. Save your colored films for Hath.

On the way back to town pause at Runnymede and Windsor Great Park. At Runnymede you will find one of the most searing memorials of the last war: the monument bearing the names of the 20,000 British aviators whose bodies were never found, whose graves were never known — a touching reminder of what England still owes to them.