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Title: Thrilling Cities
Author: Fleming, Ian [Ian Lancaster] (1908-1964)
Author [preface]: Anonymous
Date of first publication: 1963
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Jonathan Cape, 1963
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 7 April 2016
Date last updated: 7 April 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1313

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

About ten paragraphs into the first chapter, describing his
flight from London to Beirut, Fleming mentions that "My neighbour
told me he liked sweet things. When I got to Los Angeles I must
be sure and not forget to eat poison-berry pie." 'Poison-berry' is
likely to be how Fleming transcribed 'boysenberry': he had heard
the word pronounced, but not seen how it was spelt.

In Chapter X, in his account of Vienna, Fleming mentions
"the _Atm Kmmission_, as the Viennese call it, with the secret
intention of making sharp fun of it."  The printed edition uses
macrons (hyphen-shaped horizontal bars) rather than circumflex
accents in Atm Kmmission, but these could not be conveniently
reproduced in this ebook.

The printed edition included numerous photographs, which could not
be included in this text-only ebook, and in any case were still
under copyright and could not be used. None were taken by Fleming
himself. You can easily find excellent photographs of the various
cities in their Wikipedia entries, and in the Wikimedia Commons.








Thrilling Cities

Round the world with Ian Fleming--even on paper the prospect is
enticing.  Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles and Las
Vegas, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples,
Monte Carlo--these are his 'thrilling cities'.  He writes about them
brilliantly, impressionistically, as no one else would or could,
ostensibly for our entertainment yet not without giving us the benefit
of some expert observation.

'All my life', he says, 'I have been interested in adventure and,
abroad, I have enjoyed the _frisson_ of leaving the wide, well-lit
streets and venturing up back alleys in search of the hidden authentic
pulse of towns.  It was perhaps this habit that turned me into a writer
of thrillers, and, by the time I had made the two journeys that
produced these essays, I had certainly got into the way of looking at
people and places and things through a thriller-writer's eye.'

It is not a habit commonly shared with more ordinary or leisurely
travellers.  Their interests have been studied in supplements of
'Incidental Intelligence' to each chapter.  Idiosyncratic information
is therefore included in a most original and exciting travel book.




Thrilling Cities

IAN FLEMING



JONATHAN CAPE

THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON





  _The Adventures of James Bond_
  Casino Royale
  Live and Let Die
  Moonraker
  Diamonds are Forever
  From Russia With Love
  Doctor No
  Goldfinger
  For Your Eyes Only
  Thunderball
  The Spy Who Loved Me
  On Her Majesty's Secret Service

  _In preparation_
  You Only Live Twice

  _Also by Ian Fleming_
  The Diamond Smugglers



  Printed in Great Britain by
  Billing & Sons Limited, Guildford and London
  on paper made by John Dickinson & Co.
  and bound by A. W. Bain & Co. Ltd, London




Contents

Author's Note

I  Hong Kong

II  Macao

III  Tokyo

IV  Honolulu

V  Los Angeles and Las Vegas

VI  Chicago

VII  New York

VIII  Hamburg

IX  Berlin

X  Vienna

XI  Geneva

XII Naples

XIII Monte Carlo




_Author's Note_

There is very little to say as an introduction to this book that is not
self-evident from its title, but there are one or two comments I would
like to make on its origins.

These are thirteen essays on some of the thrilling cities of the world
written for the _Sunday Times_ in 1959 and 1960.  Seven of them are
about cities round the world, and six round Europe.

They are what is known, in publishing vernacular, as 'mood pieces'.
They are, I hope--or were, within, their date--factually accurate, but
they do not claim to be comprehensive, and such information as they
provide is focused on the bizarre and perhaps the shadier side of life.

All my life I have been interested in adventure and, abroad, I have
enjoyed the _frisson_ of leaving the wide, well-lit streets and
venturing up back alleys in search of the hidden, authentic pulse of
towns.  It was perhaps this habit that turned me into a writer of
thrillers and, by the time I made the two journeys that produced these
essays, I had certainly got into the way of looking at people and
places and things through a thriller-writer's eye.

The essays entertained, and sometimes scandalized, the readers of the
_Sunday Times_, and the editorial blue pencil scored through many a
passage which has now been impurgated (if that is the opposite of
expurgated) in the present text.  There were suggestions that I should
embody the two series in a book, but I was too busy, or too lazy, to
take the step until now, despite the warning of my friends that the
essays would date.

I do not think they have dated to any serious extent and, rereading
them, they seem, to me at any rate, to retain such freshness as they
ever possessed.  The cities may have changed minutely, this or that
restaurant may have disappeared, a few characters have died, but I
stick to the validity of the landscapes, painted with a broad and
idiosyncratic brush, and I have embellished each chapter with
stop-press indices of 'Incidental Intelligence' which should, since
they were provided for the most part by foreign correspondents of the
_Sunday Times_, be of value to the traveller of today.

Nothing remains but to dedicate this biased, cranky but at least
zestful hotchpotch to my friends and colleagues on the _Sunday Times_
in London and abroad, and particularly to a man called 'C.D.', who
pulled the trigger, and to Mr Roy Thomson who cheerfully paid for these
very expensive and self-indulgent peregrinations.

I.L.F.




Thrilling Cities



I _Hong Kong_

If you write thrillers, people think that you must live a thrilling
life and enjoy doing thrilling things.  Starting with these false
assumptions, the Editorial Board of the _Sunday Times_ repeatedly urged
me to do something exciting and write about it and, at the end of
October 1959, they came up with the idea that I should make a round
trip of the most exciting cities of the world and describe them in
beautiful, beautiful prose.  This could be accomplished, they said,
within a month.

Dubiously I discussed this project with Mr Leonard Russell, Features
and Literary Editor of the paper.  I said it was going to be very
expensive and very exhausting, and that one couldn't go round the world
in thirty days and report either beautifully or accurately on great
cities in approximately three days per city.  I also said that I was
the world's worst sightseer and that I had often advocated the
provision of roller-skates at the doors of museums and art galleries.
I was also, I said, impatient of lunching at Government Houses and of
visiting clinics and resettlement areas.

Leonard Russell was adamant.  'We don't want that sort of thing,' he
said.  'In your James Bond books, even if people can't put up with
James Bond and those fancy heroines of yours, they seem to like the
exotic backgrounds.  Surely you want to pick up some more material for
your stories?  This is a wonderful opportunity.'

I objected that my stories were fiction and the sort of things that
happened to James Bond didn't happen in real life.

'Rot,' he said firmly.

So, wishing privately to see the world, however rapidly, while it was
still there to see, I purchased a round-the-world air ticket for 803
19s. 2d., drew 500 in travellers' cheques from the Chief Accountant
and had several 'shots' which made me feel sore and rather dizzy.
Then, on November 2nd, armed with a sheaf of visas, a round-the-world
suit with concealed money pockets, one suitcase in which, as one always
does, I packed more than I needed, and my typewriter, I left humdrum
London for the thrilling cities of the world--Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo,
Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York.

On that soft, grey morning, Comet G/ADOK shot up so abruptly from the
north-south runway of London Airport that the beige curtains concealing
the lavatories and the cockpit swayed back into the cabin at an angle
of fifteen degrees.  The first soaring leap through the overcast was to
ten thousand feet.  There was a slight tremor as we went through the
lower cloud base and another as we came out into the brilliant sunshine.

We climbed on another twenty thousand feet into that world above the
cotton-wool cloud carpet where it is always a beautiful day.  The mind
adjusted itself to the prospect of twenty-four hours of this sort of
thing--the hot face and rather chilly feet, eyes that smart with the
outside brilliance, the smell of Elizabeth Arden and Yardley cosmetics
that B.O.A.C. provide for their passengers, the varying whine of the
jets, the first cigarette of an endless chain of smoke, and the first
conversational gambits exchanged with the seat-fellow who, in this
instance, was a pleasant New Zealander with a flow of aboriginal jokes
and nothing else to do but talk the whole way to Hong Kong.

Zrich came and the banal beauty of Switzerland, then the jagged
sugar-icing of the Alps, the blue puddles of the Italian lakes and the
snow melting down towards the baked terrazza of the Italian plains.  My
companion commented that we had a good seat 'viewwise', not like the
other day when he was crossing the Atlantic and an American woman came
aboard and complained when she found herself sitting over the wing.
'It's always the same,' she had cried.  'When I get on an aircraft all
I can see outside is wing.'  The American next to her had said,
'Listen, Ma'am, you go right on seeing that wing.  Start worrying when
you can't see it any longer.'

Below us Venice was an irregular brown biscuit surrounded by the crumbs
of her islands.  A straggling crack in the biscuit was the Grand Canal.
At six hundred miles an hour, the Adriatic and the distant jagged line
of Yugoslavia were gone in thirty minutes.  Greece was blanketed in
cloud and we were out over the Eastern Mediterranean in the time it
took to consume a cupful of B.O.A.C. fruit salad.  (My neighbour told
me he liked sweet things.  When I got to Los Angeles I must be sure and
not forget to eat poison-berry pie.)

It was now two o'clock in the afternoon, G.M.T., but we were hastening
towards the night and dusk came to meet us.  An hour more of slow,
spectacular sunset and blue-black night and then Beirut showed up
ahead--a sprawl of twinkling hundreds-and-thousands under an Arabian
Nights new moon that dived down into the oil lands as the Comet banked
to make her landing.  Beirut is a crooked town and, when we came to
rest, I advised my neighbour to leave nothing small on his seat, and
particularly not his extremely expensive camera.  I said that we were
now entering the thieving areas of the world.  Someone would get it.
The hatch clanged open and the first sticky fingers of the East reached
in.

'Our Man in the Lebanon' was there to meet me, full of the gossip of
the bazaars.  Beirut is the great smuggling junction of the world.
Diamonds thieved from Sierra Leone come in here for onward passage to
Germany, cigarettes and pornography from Tangier, arms for the sheikhs
of Araby and drugs from Turkey.  Gold?  Yes, said my friend.  Did I
remember the case brought by the Bank of England in the Italian courts
against a ring that was minting real gold sovereigns containing the
exactly correct amount of gold?  The Bank of England had finally won
their case in Switzerland, but now another ring had gone one better.
They were minting gold sovereigns in Aleppo and now saving a bit on the
gold content.  These were for India.  Only last week there had been a
big Indian buyer in Beirut.  He had bought sacks of sovereigns and
flown them to a neighbouring port where he had put them on board his
private yacht.  Then he sailed to Goa in Portuguese India.  From there,
with the help of conniving Indian frontier officials, the gold would go
on its way to the bullion brokers in Bombay.  There was still this mad
thirst for gold in India.  The premium was not what it had been after
the war, only about sixty per cent now instead of the old three hundred
per cent, but it was still well worth the trouble and occasional danger.

Opium?  Yes, there was a steady stream coming in from Turkey; also
heroin, which is refined opium, from Germany via Turkey and Syria.
Every now and then the American Federal Narcotics Bureau in Rome would
trace a gang back to Beirut and, with the help of local police, there
would be a raid and a handful of prison sentences.  But Interpol, he
urged, really should have an office in Beirut.  There would be plenty
to keep them busy.  I asked where all the drugs were going to.  To Rome
and then down to Naples for shipment to America.  That's where the
consumption was, and the big prices.  Arms smuggling wasn't doing too
well now that Cyprus was more or less settled.  Beirut had been the
centre of that traffic--mostly Italian and Belgian arms--but now there
was only a trickle going over, and the sheikhs had enough of the light
stuff and wanted tanks and planes, and these were too big to smuggle.

We sat sipping thin lemonade in the pretentious, empty airport with
scabby walls and sand blown from the desert on the vast, empty floors.
The doors had been locked upon us and our passports impounded by surly
Lebanese police.  Flight announcements were first in Arabic--the
hallmark of a small state playing at power.  It was good to get back to
one's comfortable seat in the Comet and to be offered chewing gum by a
beautiful Indian stewardess in an emerald sari with gold trim--not only
the 'magic carpet' routine but necessary to cope with our changing
groups of local passengers.  We soared up again into the brilliant
night sky and then there was nothing but the desert and, forty thousand
feet below, the oil wells flaring in the night.  (My neighbour said
that the lavatories at Beirut had been dreadful.  He added that in an
Iowa hotel the lavatories were marked 'Pointers' and 'Setters'.)

I had armed myself for the flight with the perfect book for any
journey--Eric Ambler's wonderful thriller _Passage of Arms_, a proof
copy of which had been given to me by Mr Frere of Heinemann's for the
trip.  I had only been able to read a few pages and I was now
determined to get back to it.  I offered another book to my neighbour
but he said he hadn't got much time for books.  He said that whenever
someone asked him whether he had read this or that, he would say, 'No,
sir.  But have you red hairs on your chest?'  I said that I was sorry
but I simply must read my book as I had to review it.  The lie was
effective and my companion went off to sleep hogging more than his
share of the arm-rest.

Bahrein is, without question, the scruffiest international airport in
the world.  The washing facilities would not be tolerated in a prison
and the slow fans in the ceilings of the bedraggled hutments hardly
stirred the flies.  Stale, hot air blew down off the desert and there
was a chirrup of unknown insects.  A few onlookers shuffled about with
their feet barely off the ground, spitting and scratching themselves.
This is the East one is glad to get through quickly.

Up again over the Arabian Sea with, below us, the occasional winking
flares of the smuggling dhows that hug the coast from India down past
the Aden Protectorate and East Africa, carrying cargoes of illegal
Indian emigrants on their way to join fathers and uncles and cousins in
the cheap labour markets of Kenya and Tanganyika.  Without passports,
they are landed on the African continent anywhere south of the Equator
and disappear into the bidonvilles that are so much more hospitable
than the stews of Bombay.  From now on, we shall be in the lands of
baksheesh, squeeze and graft, which rule from the smallest coolie to
the Mr Bigs in government.

Ten thousand feet below us a baby thunderstorm flashed violet.  My
neighbour said he must get a picture of it, groped under his seat.
Consternation!  A hundred and fifty pounds' worth of camera and lenses
had been filched!  Already the loot would be on its way up the pipeline
to the bazaars.  The long argument with the chief steward about
responsibility and insurance went on far across the great black vacuum
of India.

More thunderstorms fluttered in the foothills of the Himalayas while
B.O.A.C. stuffed us once again, like Strasbourg geese, with food and
drink.  I had no idea what time it was or when I was going to get any
sleep between these four- or five-hour leaps across the world.  My
watch said midnight G.M.T. and this tricked me into drinking a whisky
and soda in the pretentious airport at New Delhi where the sad Benares
brassware in unsaleable Indian shapes and sizes collects dust in the
forlorn showcases.  Alas, before I had finished it, a pale dawn was
coming up and great flocks of awakened crows fled silently overhead
towards some distant breakfast among the rubbish dumps outside India's
capital.

India has always depressed me.  I can't bear the universal dirt and
squalor and the impression, false I am sure, that everyone is doing no
work except living off his neighbour.  And I am desolated by the
_outward_ manifestations of the two great Indian religions.  Ignorant,
narrow-minded, bigoted?  Of course I am.  But perhaps this extract from
India's leading newspaper, boxed and in heavy black type on the back
page of the _Statesman_ of November 21st, 1959, will help to excuse my
prejudices:


10 YEARS' PRISON FOR KIDNAPPING

_New Delhi, Nov._ 16


    A bill providing deterrent punishment for kidnapping minors and
    maiming and employing them for begging, was introduced in the Lok
    Sabha today by the Home Minister, Pandit Pant.

    The bill seeks to amend the relevant sections of the Indian Penal
    Code, and provides for imprisonment extending up to 10 years and
    fine in the case of kidnapping or obtaining custody of minors for
    employing them for begging, and life imprisonment and fine in the
    case of maiming.--P.T.I.


Back on the plane, the assistant stewardess wore the Siamese equivalent
of a cheong sam.  Five hours away was Bangkok.  One rejected sleep and
breakfast for the splendour below and away to port where the Himalayas
shone proudly and the tooth of Everest looked small and easy to climb.
Why had no one ever told me that the mouths of the Ganges are one of
the wonders of the world?  Gigantic brown meanderings between walls and
islands of olive green, each one of a hundred tributaries seeming ten
times the size of the Thames.  A short neck of the Bay of Bengal and
then down over the rice fields of Burma to the heavenly green pastures
of Thailand, spread out among wandering rivers and arrow-straight
canals like some enchanted garden.  This was the first place of really
startling beauty I had so far seen and the temperature of ninety-two
degrees in the shade on the tarmac did nothing to spoil the impact of
the country where I would advise other travellers to have their first
view of the true Orient.  The minute air hostess, smiling the first
true smile, as opposed to an air-hostess smile, since London, told us
to 'forrow me'.

In spite of the mosquitoes as large as Messerschmitts and the wringing
humidity, everyone seems to agree that Bangkok is a dream city, and I
blamed myself for hurrying on to Hong Kong.  In only one hour, one
still got the impression of the topsy-turvy, childlike quality of the
country and an old Siamese hand, a chance acquaintance, summed it up
with a recent cutting from a Bangkok newspaper.  This was a plaintive
article by a high police official remonstrating with tourists for
accosting girls in the streets.  These street-walkers were unworthy
representatives of Siamese womanhood.  A tourist had only to call at
the nearest police station to be given names and addresses and prices
of not only the most beautiful, but the most respectable, girls in the
city.

Back in the Comet that, after six thousand miles, seemed as fresh and
trim as it had at London Airport, it was half an hour across the China
Sea before one's clothes came unstuck from one's body.  Then it was
only another hour or so before the Chinese communist-owned outer
islands of Hong Kong showed up below and we began to drift down to that
last little strip of tarmac set in one of the most beautiful views in
the world.  It was nearly five o'clock and just over twenty-six hours
and seven thousand miles from London.  Twenty minutes late!  Take a
letter please, Miss Trueblood.

      *      *      *

"Is more better now, Master?"

I grunted luxuriously and the velvet hands withdrew from my shoulders.
More Tiger Balm was applied to the finger tips and then the hands were
back, now to massage the base of my neck with soft authority.  Through
the open french windows the song of bulbuls came from the big orchid
tree covered with deep pink blossom and two Chinese magpies chattered
in the grove of casuarina.  Somewhere far away turtle doves were saying
'coocoroo'.  Number One Boy (Number One from among seven in the house)
came in to say that breakfast was ready on the veranda.  I exchanged
compliments with the dimpling masseuse, put on a shirt and trousers and
sandals and walked out into the spectacular, sun-drenched view.

As, half-way through the delicious scrambled eggs and bacon, a
confiding butterfly, black and cream and dark blue, settled on my
wrist, I reflected that heaven could wait.  Here, on the green and
scarcely inhabited slopes of Shek-O, above Big Wave Bay on the
south-east corner of Hong Kong island, was good enough.

This was my first morning in Hong Kong and this small paradise was the
house of friends, Mr and Mrs Hugh Barton.  Hugh Barton is perhaps the
most powerful surviving English taipan (big shot) in the Orient, and he
lives in discreet accordance with his status as Chairman of Messrs
Jardine Matheson, the great Far Eastern trading corporation founded by
two energetic Scotsmen one hundred and forty years ago.  They say in
Hong Kong that power resides in the Jockey Club, Jardine Mathesons, the
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and Her Majesty's Government--in that
order.  Hugh Barton, being a steward of the Jockey Club, Chairman of
Jardine's, Deputy Chairman of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and a
member of the Governor's Legislative Council, has it every way, and
when I complained of a mildly stiff neck after my flight it was natural
that so powerful a _taipan's_ household should conjure up a comely
masseuse before breakfast.  That is the right way, but alas how rare,
for powerful _taipans_ to operate.  When, the night before, I had
complimented Mrs Barton for having fixed a supremely theatrical new
moon for my arrival, I was not being all that fanciful.

Apart from being the last stronghold of feudal luxury in the world,
Hong Kong is the most vivid and exciting city I have ever seen, and I
recommend it without reserve to anyone who possesses the fare.  It
seems to have everything--modern comfort in a theatrically Oriental
setting; an equable climate except during the monsoons; beautiful
country for walking or riding; all sports, including the finest golf
course--the Royal Hong Kong--in the East, the most expensively equipped
racecourse, and wonderful skin-diving; exciting flora and fauna,
including the celebrated butterflies of Hong Kong; and a cost of living
that compares favourably with any other tourist city.  Minor
attractions include really good Western and Chinese restaurants, exotic
night life, cigarettes at 1s. 3d. for twenty, and heavy Shantung silk
suits, shirts, etc., expertly tailored in forty-eight hours.

With these and innumerable other advantages it is, therefore, not
surprising that the population of this minute territory is over three
million, or one million more than the whole of New Zealand.  The fact
that six hundred and fifty million communist Chinese are a few miles
away across the frontier seems only to add zest to the excitement at
all levels of life in the colony and, from the Governor down, if there
is an underlying tension, there is certainly no dismay.  Obviously
China could take Hong Kong by a snap of its giant fingers, but China
has shown no signs of wishing to do so, and when the remaining forty
years of our lease of the mainland territory expire, I see no reason
why a reduced population should not retreat to the islands and the
original territory which we hold in perpetuity.

Whatever the future holds, there is no sign that a sinister,
doom-fraught count-down is in progress.  It is true that the colony
every now and then gets the shivers, but when an American bank pulled
up stumps during the Quemoy troubles in 1958, there was nothing but
mockery.  The government pressed on inside the leased territory with
the building of the largest hospital in the Orient and with the
erection of an average of two schools a month to meet the influx of
refugees from China.  The private Chinese and European builders also
pressed on, and continue to press on today, with the construction of
twenty-storey apartment houses for the lower and middle classes.
Altogether it is a gay and splendid colony humming with vitality and
progress, and pure joy to the senses and spirits.

Apart from my host, my guide, philosopher and friend in Hong Kong, and
later in Japan, was 'Our Man in the Orient', Richard Hughes, Far
Eastern correspondent of the _Sunday Times_.  He is a giant Australian
with a European mind and a quixotic view of the world exemplified by
his founding of the Baritsu branch of the Baker Street
Irregulars--Baritsu is Japanese for the national code of self-defence
which includes judo, and is the only Japanese word known to have been
used by Sherlock Holmes.

On my first evening he and I went out on the town.

The streets of Hong Kong are the most enchanting night streets I have
trod.  Here the advertising agencies are ignorant of the drab fact,
known all too well in London and New York, that patterns of black and
red and yellow have the most compelling impact on the human eye.
Avoiding harsh primary colours, the streets of Hong Kong are evidence
that neon lighting need not be hideous, and the crowded Chinese
ideograms in pale violet and pink and green with a plentiful use of
white are entrancing not only for their colours but also because one
does not know what drab messages and exhortations they spell out.  The
smell of the streets is sea-clean with an occasional exciting dash of
sandalwood from a joss-stick factory, frying onions, and the scent of
sweet perspiration that underlies Chinese cooking.  The girls, thanks
to the cheong sams they wear, have a deft and coltish prettiness which
sends Western women into paroxysms of envy.  The high, rather stiff
collar of the cheong sam gives authority and poise to the head and
shoulders, and the flirtatious slits from the hem of the dress upwards,
as high as the beauty of the leg will allow, demonstrate that the sex
appeal of the inside of a woman's knee has apparently never occurred to
Dior or Balmain.  No doubt there are fat or dumpy Chinese women in Hong
Kong, but I never saw one.  Even the men, in their spotless white
shirts and dark trousers, seem to have better, fitter figures than we
in the West, and the children are a constant enchantment.

We started off our evening at the solidest bar in Hong Kong--the sort
of place that Hemingway liked to write about, lined with ships' badges
and other trophies, with, over the bar, a stuffed alligator with an
iguana riding on its back.  The bar belongs to Jack Conder, a former
Shanghai municipal policeman and reputed to have been the best pistol
shot there in the old days.  His huge fists seem to hold the memory of
many a recalcitrant chin.  He will not allow women in the bar
downstairs on the grounds that real men should be allowed to drink
alone.  When the Japanese came in 1941, Conder stayed on in Shanghai,
was captured and escaped.  He took the long walk all the way down China
to Chungking, sleeping during daylight hours in graveyards, where the
ghosts effectively protected him.  He is the authentic Hemingway type
and he sells solid drinks at reasonable prices.  His bar is the meeting
place of 'Alcoholics Synonymous'--a group of lesser Hemingway
characters, most of them local press correspondents.  The initiation
ceremony requires the consumption of sixteen San Migs, which is the pro
name for the local San Miguel beer--to my taste a very unencouraging
brew.

After fortification with Western poisons (I gather that no
self-respecting Chinese would think of drinking before dinner, but that
the fashion for whisky is invading the Orient almost as fast as it has
invaded France) we proceeded to one of the finest Chinese locales, the
Peking Restaurant.  Dick Hughes, a hard-bitten Orientalogue, was
determined that I should become Easternized as soon as possible and he
missed no opportunity to achieve the conversion.  The Peking Restaurant
was bright and clean.  We consumed seriatim:

  Shark's fin soup with crab,
  shrimp balls in oil,
  bamboo shoots with seaweed,
  chicken and walnuts,

with, as a main dish,

  roast Peking duckling,

washed down with mulled wine.  Lotus seeds in syrup added a final
gracious touch.

Dick insisted that then, and on all future occasions when we were
together, I should eat with chopsticks, and I pecked around with these
graceful but ridiculous instruments with clumsy enthusiasm.  To my
surprise the meal, most elegantly presented and served, was in every
respect delicious.  All the tastes were new and elusive, but I was
particularly struck with another aspect of Oriental cuisine--each dish
had a quality of gaiety about it, assisted by discreet ornamentation,
so that the basically unattractive process of shovelling food into
one's mouth achieved, whether one liked it or not, a kind of elegance.
And the background to this, and to all my subsequent meals in the East,
always had this quality of gaiety--people chattering happily and
smiling with pleasure and encouragement.  From now on, all the meals I
ate in authentic, as opposed to tourist, Chinese or Japanese
restaurants were infinitely removed from what, for a lifetime, had been
a dull, rather unattractive routine in the sombre eating-mills of the
West, where the customer, his neighbours and the waiters seem subtly to
resent each other, the fact that they should all be there together, and
very often the things they are eating.

Dick Hughes spiced our banquet with the underground and underworld
gossip of the colony--the inability of the government to deal
drastically with Hong Kong's only real problem, the water shortage.
Why didn't they hand it over to private enterprise?  The gas and
electricity services were splendidly run by the Kadoorie brothers,
whose record had been equally honourable in Shanghai.  There was a
grave shortage of hotels.  Why didn't Jardines do something about it?
Japanese mistresses were preferable to Chinese girls.  If, for one
reason or another, you fell out with your Japanese girl, she would be
dignified, philosophical.  But the Chinese girl would throw endless
hysterical scenes, and probably turn up at your office and complain to
your employer.  Servants?  They were plentiful and wonderful, but too
many of the English and American wives had no idea how to treat good
servants.  They would clap their hands and shout 'Boy!' to cover their
lack of self-confidence.  This sort of behaviour was out of fashion and
brought the Westerner into disrepute.  (How often one has heard the
same thing said of English wives in other 'coloured' countries!)

The latest public scandal was the massage parlours and the blue cinemas
(with colour and sound!) that flourished, particularly across the
harbour in Kowloon.  The _Hong Kong Standard_ had been trying to clean
them up.  The details they had published had anyway been good for
circulation.  He read out from the _Standard_: 'Erotic dailies
circulate freely here.  Blue films shown openly.  Hong Kong police
round up massage girls.'  The _Standard_ had given the names and
addresses: 'Miss Ten Thousand Fun and Safety at 23 Stanley Street, 2nd
floor.  Business starting at 9 a.m....  Miss Soft and Warm Village ...
Miss Outer Space, and Miss Lotus of Love at 17 Caf Apartments, Room
113, ground floor.  (Opposite the French Hospital.  Room heated) ...
Miss Chaste and Refined, Flat A, Percival Mansion, 6th floor (lift
service).'  And more wonderful names: 'Miss Smooth and Fragrant ...
Miss Emerald Parsley ... Miss Peach Stream Pool (satisfaction
guaranteed),' and so forth.

The trouble, explained Dick, was partly the traditional desire of
Oriental womanhood to please, combined with unemployment and the rising
cost of living.  Increase in the number of light industries,
particularly the textile mills, the bane of Lancashire and America,
might help.  Would I like to visit the latest textile mill?  I said I
wouldn't.

It was a natural step from this conversation to proceed from the Peking
Restaurant to the world of Suzie Wong.

Richard Mason, with his splendid book _The World of Suzie Wong_, has
done for a modest waterfront hotel what Hemingway did for his very
different Harry's Bar in Venice.  The book, though, like _A
Many-Splendoured Thing_ by Han Suyin, read universally by the literate
in Hong Kong, is small-mindedly frowned upon, largely I gather because
miscegenation with beautiful Chinese girls is understandably an
unpopular topic with the great union of British womanhood.  But the
Suzie Wong myth is in Hong Kong to stay, and Richard Mason would be
amused to find how it has gathered depth and detail.

It seems to be fact, for instance, and perhaps the only known fact,
that when he was in Hong Kong Richard Mason did live in a waterfront
establishment called the Luk Kwok Hotel, transformed in his book into
the Nam Kok House of Pleasure, where the painter, Robert Lomax,
befriended and, after comic, tender, romantic and finally tragic
interludes, married the charming prostitute Suzie Wong.

As a result of the book, the Luk Kwok Hotel, so conveniently placed
near the Fleet landing stage and the British Sailors' Home, has boomed.
Solitary girls may still not sit unaccompanied in the spacious bar with
its great and many-splendoured juke-box.  You must still bring them in
from outside, as did Lomax, to prevent the hotel becoming, legally, a
disorderly house.  But the whole place has been redecorated in deep
battleship grey (to remind the sailors of home?) and one of Messrs
Collins's posters advertising Richard Mason's book has a place of
honour on the main wall.  Other signs of prosperity are a huge and
hideous near-Braque on another wall, a smart Anglepoise light over the
cash register, and a large bowl of Siamese fighting fish.  (It is also
a sign of fame, of which the proprietor is very proud, that the totally
respectable Prime Minister of Laos and his Foreign Minister stayed at
the Luk Kwok on a visit to Hong Kong.)

If you inquire after Suzie herself, you are answered with a melancholy
shake of the head and the sad, dramatic news that Suzie's marriage
failed and she is now back 'on the pipe'.  When you ask where you could
find her, it is explained that she will see no other man and waits for
Lomax one day to return.  She is not in too bad a way, as Lomax sends
her regular remittances from London.  But there are many other
beautiful girls here just as beautiful as Suzie.  Would you care to
meet one, a very particular friend of Suzie's?

I don't know how much the sailors believe this story, but I suspect
they are all quite happy to put up with 'Suzie's friend', and I for one
greatly enjoyed exploring the myth that will for ever inhabit the Luk
Kwok Hotel with its neon slogans: 'GIRLS, BUT NO OBLIGATION TO BUY
DRINKS!  CLEAN SURROUNDINGS!  ENJOY TO THE MAXIMUM AT THE LEAST
EXPENSE!'

Dick Hughes misunderstood one author's delighted interest in the
brilliance of another author's myth, and protested that there were far
better establishments awaiting my patronage.  But by now it was late
and the after-effects of jet travel--a dull headache and a bronchial
breathlessness--had caught up with me, and we ended our evening with a
walk along the thronged quays in search of a taxi and home.

On the way I commented on the fact that there is not a single seagull
in the whole vast expanse of Hong Kong harbour.  Dick waved towards the
dense flood of junks and sampans on which families of up to half a
dozen spend the whole of their lives, mostly tied up in harbour.  There
hadn't used to be any seagulls in Shanghai either, he said.  Since the
communists took over they have come back.  The communists have put it
about that they had come back because they no longer have to fight with
the humans for the harbour refuse.  It was probably the same thing in
Hong Kong.  It would taken an awful lot of seagulls to compete for a
living with three million Chinese.

On this downbeat note I closed my first enchanted day.

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

_Hotels_

By tradition and probably correctly, the _Peninsula_ (the '_Pen_'), on
the Kowloon peninsula, is regarded as the Number 1 hotel for visitors
to the colony.  It now has an annexe, _Peninsula Court_.  Rates are
from HK$70 (single) to HK$100 (double).  Very colonial, comfortable,
proper.  It is generally booked fully for months in advance.  Next come
the _Miramar_ (behind the Peninsula geographically, but livelier and
overtaking it by enterprise and expansion) and the _Gloucester_ (on the
island).  _Miramar_ rates range from HK$36 to 75; the _Gloucester_,
HK$40 to 75.

If you are holidaying, the _Repulse Bay Hotel_, across the island and
fronting a reasonable beach, is recommended.  (HK$30 to 95.)  This is
set in lovely gardens and the local beauties, wives and concubines
offer a dazzling display at the Sunday afternoon tea-dances.  The food
is better than at the _Peninsula_ or the _Miramar_.  But it takes half
an hour to cross the island to the business, shopping and social centre
of Hong Kong (officially called Victoria).

The _Luk Kwok_, Suzie Wong's original official address, encourages a
livelier clientele.  Single room (an interesting aspiration), HK$11;
double (virtually _de rigueur_), up to HK$35.

(For comparison, a Chinese can get a bed of a sort in a wooden hut or
'garage', shared with half a dozen companions, in the industrial areas
for HK$8 (10s.) a _month_.)


_Eating_

For Western food, the _Marco Polo_ in the _Peninsula Court_ is the most
expensive restaurant and can sometimes be the best.  _Gaddi's_, off the
_Peninsula_ ground-floor marble lobby, is also recommended.  On the
island, the _Parisian Grill_ (the 'P.G.') is the oldest and best-known
restaurant, jam-packed at lunch; but standards and prices at _Jimmy's
Kitchen_ and the _Gloucester_ (now operating a rejuvenated kitchen) are
roughly equivalent.  _Maxim's_ and the _Caf de Paris_ charge slightly
more.  More Chinese go to _Maxim's_ than to the 'P.G.', and there is
dancing in the evening; Hong Kong's feminine elegance glitters at
_Maxim's_ at the cocktail hour.  You can get bear's paw--overrated--at
the _Gloucester_.  (N.B.  The best and biggest martinis in the colony
are served in the Mexican bar in the _Gloucester_.)

All visitors want to eat on the floating restaurants at Aberdeen.  As
this venture involves a forty-minute taxi haul from Victoria, the
earnest diner might care to break his journey at the _Repulse Bay
Hotel_ and brace himself with a few shots on the veranda around sunset
before tackling the next fifteen-minute stage to reach the floating
restaurants at twilight.

Dinner at the _Carlton_, four miles out of Kowloon on the main road to
the New Territories, unfolds one of the world's most memorable
panoramas: the jewelled lights of Kowloon, the harbour and the island.


_Chinese food_

The range and quality of Chinese cuisine in Hong Kong are matched only
in Taipeh.  Beggar's chicken at the _Tien Hong Lau_ in Kowloon is
incomparable; if possible, it should be ordered the day before.  Peking
duck is the speciality of the _Princess Garden_ in Kowloon and the
_Peking Restaurant_ on the island.  The _Ivy_ (on the island) serves
exotic Szechuanese-style food.  The _Caf de Chine_ serves
Cantonese-style dishes in two huge connecting dining-rooms on the top
floor of a ten-storey building in the heart of Victoria.  A regular
wealthy Chinese visitor from San Francisco always goes to the _Tai
Tung_ for one special dish which he claims is unequalled anywhere else:
roast sucking pig _ la Cantonese_.  Everyone has his favourite.  You
can feast cheaply at the lot.


_Night Life_

Generally, night life in Hong Kong is much as anywhere else.  There are
twenty-five registered night-clubs, some of which tolerate second-rate
floor shows on the dreary Asian circuit (Singapore--Kuala
Lumpur--Bangkok--Hong Kong--Manila--Tokyo).  None are in the same class
as the Tokyo night-clubs, and chauvinistic Hong Kong apologists, with
desperate parochialism, are compelled to find compensation in the proud
boast that the local night-clubs don't close until two a.m., while the
lights go out reluctantly in the Tokyo cabarets (but not the bars) at
midnight.

The dance-hostesses are on call--which does not mean by telephone, but
by personal arrangement--at seventy-six 'ballrooms'.  The prettiest
girls and the best bands tend to be in places like the _Tonnochy
Ballroom_ and the _Golden Phoenix_ (on the island) and at the
_Oriental_ (in Kowloon), where most of the patrons are Chinese and no
hard liquor is served, only tea, soft drinks and melon seeds.

There are 8,000 registered hostesses, whose company (financed by a
coupon system) ranges from 60 cents to HK$5.50 per twenty minutes.  At
the _Tonnochy_ or the _Metropole_ (where you should ask to study the
telephone-directory-like album, which shows the photographs and names
of available hostesses), an hour's dancing will thus cost HK$16.50
(just over 1).  Most of the girls in the higher-priced ballrooms are
glamorous and English-speaking and, subject to financial adjustment
with the proprietor, will gladly leave the ballroom and accompany a
visitor to a night-club; this invitation, of course, gives them great
face.  The tourist has the patriotic satisfaction of knowing that the
colony's government collects ten per cent tax on every dance-girl's
coupons.

There are scores of brash and noisy bars along Lockhart Street and in
Wanchai and North Point (on the island) and throughout the back lanes
of Kowloon, some of which, when the navies are in port, are a dim echo
of Shanghai's old Blood Alley.

Although not featured in the prim official tourist handbooks, small
sampans at Causeway Bay (on the island) offer a mild variation of the
old Shanghai and Canton flower-boat entertainment as once available in
the dear dead days before the coming of Mao Tse-Tung.  A curtain gives
the passengers privacy from the pilot, and the sampan either drifts
with wind and current in seclusion, or moves, as desired, to floating
markets and teashops and rafts of singers and musicians.  (Tariff:
about HK$1 an hour or up to HK$10 for the night.)




II _Macao_

Gold, hand in hand with opium, plays an extraordinary secret role
through the Far East, and Hong Kong and Macao, the tiny Portuguese
possession only forty miles away, are the hub of the whole underground
traffic.

In England, except between bullion brokers, nobody ever talks about
gold as a medium of exchange or as an important item among personal
possessions.  But from India eastwards gold is a constant topic of
conversation, and the daily newspapers are never without their list of
gold prices in bullion, English sovereigns, French Napolons and louis
d'or, and rarely a day goes by without there being a gold case in the
Press.  Someone has been caught smuggling gold.  So-and-so has been
murdered for his gold hoard.  Someone else has been counterfeiting
gold.  The reason for this passionate awareness of the metal is the
total mistrust all Orientals have for paper money and the profound
belief that, without one's bar or beaten leaf of gold concealed
somewhere on one's person or kept in a secret place at home, one is a
poor man.

The gold king of the Orient is the enigmatic Doctor Lobo of the Villa
Verde in Macao.  Irresistibly attracted, I gravitated towards him, the
internal Geiger-counter of a writer of thrillers ticking furiously.

Richard Hughes and I took the S.S. _Takshing_, one of the three famous
ferries that do the Macao run every day.  These ferries are not the
broken-down, smoke-billowing rattletraps engineered by whisky-sodden
Scotsmen we see on the films, but commodious three-decker steamers run
with workmanlike precision.  The three-hour trip through the islands
and across Deep Bay, brown with the waters of the Pearl River that more
or less marks the boundary between the leased territories and Communist
China, was beautiful and uneventful.  The communist gunboats have given
up molesting Western shipping and the wallowing sampans chugging with
their single diesels homewards with the day's catch, the red flag
streaming from the insect-wing sails, were the only sign that we were
crossing communist waters.  At the northern extremity of Deep Bay lies
Macao, a peninsula about one-tenth the size of the Isle of Wight that
is the oldest European settlement in China.  It was founded in 1557 and
is chiefly famous for the first lighthouse built on the whole coast of
China.  It also boasts the graves of Robert Morrison, the Protestant
missionary who compiled the first Chinese-English dictionary in 1820,
of George Chinnery, the great Irish painter of the Oriental scene, and
of the uncle of Sir Winston Churchill, Lord John Spencer Churchill.  It
is also noted for the gigantic ruins of St Paul's Cathedral built in
1602 and burned down in 1835; and finally--save the mark!--for the
largest 'house of ill-fame' in the world.

So far as its premier citizen, Dr Lobo, is concerned, the most
interesting features of Macao are that there is no income tax and no
exchange control whatever, and that there is complete freedom of import
and export of foreign currencies, and all forms of bullion.  To take
only the case of gold bullion, it is, therefore, perfectly easy for
anyone to arrive by ferry or seaplane or come across from Communist
China, only fifty yards away across the river, buy any quantity of
gold, from a ton down to a gold coin, and leave Macao quite openly with
his booty.  It is then up to the purchaser, and of no concern
whatsoever to Dr Lobo or the chief of the Macao police, to smuggle his
gold back into China, into neighbouring Hong Kong or, if he has a
seaplane, fly off with it into the wide world.  These considerations
make Macao one of the most interesting market-places in the world, and
one with many secrets.

As we came into the roadstead, we were greeted by a scene of great
splendour.  The sun was setting and in its pathway lay a spectacular
fleet of many hundreds of junks and sampans at anchor.  This caused
much excited chattering amongst our fellow-passengers and it was only
on the next morning, when this fleet and other fleets from the outer
islands were spread all over the sea, now under the _rising_ sun, all
heading for the mouth of the Pearl River, that we learnt the answer.
The Sea Fishing Co-operative of Communist China had ordered all
fishermen to a great meeting at which new fishing laws were to be
promulgated--matters such as that the smaller junks should fish home
waters within a certain radius, while the larger junks and sampans
would be confined to the more distant fishing grounds.  It all sounded
very orderly and sensible, and very un-Chinese.

The Portuguese Navy, represented by a small Kiplingesque gunboat with
one gun behind a square shield (surely a gatling!), stood guard over
the interior harbour, but no courtesies were exchanged with the
_Takshing_, nor could there have been, for the signal halyard had been
run from the short mast to the muzzle of the main armament and was now
hung with the crew's variegated washing, from which it was discernible
that Persil appeared to have been but sparingly used for the Navy's big
wash.

The waterfront was an astonishing mixture of rotting godowns announcing
in sun-faded letters that they were, for instance, FABRICIA DE AGUAS
GASOSAS or the KWONG HUNG TAI FIRE-CRACKER MANUFACTURING COMPANY,
interspersed with the ruined faades of once grandiose private houses
ornamented with the most exquisite, though dilapidated, baroque plaster
and stonework.  The whole town is like this, a jumble of eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century highly ornamented European styles,
gimcrack modern ferro-concrete, and spruce, hideous villas.  Half the
streets are cobbled alleys and half wide, empty modern highways at
whose pretentious crossings an occasional rickshaw waits for the otiose
traffic lights to change to green.  In short, the place is as
picturesque as, and deader than, a beautiful graveyard.

We repaired to the Macao Inn on the junction of the waterfront and the
Travesso do Padre Narciso.  There we met 'Our Man in Macao' and drank
warm gins and tonics under a banyan tree while I enlightened myself
about the four Mr Bigs--who, with the Portuguese Government in the
background, control pretty well everything that goes on in this
enigmatic territory.  In America these four men would be called the
Syndicate, but here they are just friendly business partners who
co-operate to keep trade running along the right channels.  They were
at that time, in order of importance, the aforesaid Dr P. J. Lobo, who
looks after gold; Mr Foo Tak Yam, who concerns himself with gambling
and associate activities, which may be broadly described as
'entertainment', and who owns the Central Hotel, of which more later;
Mr C. Y. Leung, a silent partner; and Mr Ho Yin, the chief intermediary
for trade with Communist China.

The fortunes of these four gentlemen rose during and after the
war--during the war through trade with the Japanese who then occupied
the mainland, and, after the war, during the golden days when the
harbour of Macao was thronged with ships from Europe smuggling arms to
Communist China.  Those latter days had turned Macao into a boom town
when a single street running half the length of the town, the 'Street
of Happiness', had been one great and continuous street of pleasure and
when the nine-storey-high Central Hotel, the largest house of gambling
and self-indulgence in the world, had been constructed by Mr Foo to
siphon off the cream of the pleasure-seekers.  Those golden days had
now passed.  Communist China was manufacturing her own weapons, the
Street of Happiness had emptied through lack of roistering sailors, and
now pleasure, devoted only to the relaxation of Hong Kong tourists, was
confined to the Central Hotel.

Having got all this straight in our minds, it was obvious to Dick and
me that only one question remained: where to have dinner before
repairing to the Central Hotel?  We were advised to choose between the
Fat Siu Lau, the 'Loving Buddha', in the Street of Happiness, noted for
its Chinese pigeon, or the Long Kee, famous for its fish.  We chose the
Loving Buddha, dined excellently and repaired to the Central Hotel,
whose function and design I recommend most warmly to the attention of
those concerned with English morals.

The Central Hotel is not precisely a hotel.  It is a nine-storey
skyscraper, by far the largest building in Macao, and it is devoted
solely to the human so-called vices.  It has one more original feature.
The higher up the building you go, the more beautiful and expensive are
the girls, the higher the stakes at the gambling tables, and the better
the music.  Thus, on the ground floor, the honest coolie can choose a
girl of his own class and gamble for pennies by lowering his bet on a
fishing-rod contraption through a hole in the floor on to the gaming
tables below.  Those with longer pockets can progress upwards through
various heavens until they reach the earthly paradise on the sixth
floor.  Above this are the bedrooms.  In the pursuit of information
which would be in accordance with the readership of the _Sunday Times_,
it was a matter of course that, very soon after our arrival at the
Central Hotel, Dick Hughes and I should take the lift to the sixth
floor.

The sixth floor was spacious and well-lit with the sort of
pseudo-modern decor you would find in a once-expensive French caf that
is on the way downhill.  Across the entrance hall was the gambling hell
to which we were drawn by the rattle of dice and the cries of the
attractive, as it turned out, feminine croupiers.  Here we found
fan-tan being played, and a rather complicated dice game known as
hi-lo.  Having read about fantan in my Doctor Fu-Manchu days, when I
had assumed that this must be the most sinful game on the face of the
earth, I made straight for the fan-tan table, changed a hundred Hong
Kong dollars (about 6 5s. 0d.) into counters and sat firmly down at
the sparsely occupied table next to the 'dealer', an almond-eyed witch
in a green cheong sam.  On the other side of the table, beside the rack
of chips, stood a similarly dressed girl with an air of authority.  It
was she who ran the game, while the girl on my right went through the
necessary motions.

I must say that the adventure books of one's youth do give one false
impressions.  Fan-tan is simply a rather pretty, childlike way of
inevitably losing your money.  To begin with, the odds are 10 per cent
in favour of the house compared with about 1-35 at roulette, and
anybody who gambles at those odds is either off his head or a Chinaman.

The game proceeds as follows: in the centre of the table is a square of
painted wood divided into four compartments, marked 1, 2, 3 and 4, and
you place your bet on one of these numbers.  The croupier has in front
of her a large pile of two or three hundred small white plastic
buttons, a species of inverted brass goblet, and a thin wooden wand
about two feet long.  When the bids have been placed, she muddles the
inverted goblet around in the pile of buttons, pushes it out in front
of her, well away from the original mass of buttons, and lifts it away.
Shen then takes her wand and delicately separates the buttons, four by
four, from the pile heaped in the middle of the table.  The winner is
he who has guessed that at the end of her separating of these buttons,
four by four, she will leave either one, two, three or four buttons
behind.  If you have bet on the correct remainder you are paid two to
one, less 10 per cent.  The girl then rakes in the central pile of
buttons to join the mass in front of her, muddles them all together and
squashes her goblet once again down in amongst them.

It is a pretty, restful game containing only one point of interest.  A
third, or not later than half-way, through the separating of the pile
of buttons, the experienced fan-tan player, or certainly the organizing
croupier, will hold up one, two, three or four fingers to predict the
winning figure although perhaps fifty buttons have still to be
separated and these are still piled up in an apparently unfathomable
muddle, some on top of others and most of them overlapping.  While I
duly and happily lost my hundred dollars, enjoying the gentle ritual,
the authoritative girl opposite was never wrong in divining the winning
number from the piled-up jumble.  It was quite uncanny, and the girl
smiled appreciatively at my polite applause.

After Dick and I had had enough of this dainty piracy, we repaired to
the neighbouring hell to try our fortunes at the more adult game of
hi-lo.  This is a game played at a long table with a green baize board
marked out in various sections rather in the fashion of American craps.
Behind this sits the usual beautiful croupire (if that is the feminine
for croupier) with, in front of her, a shining aluminium contraption
which looks like a cross between a pressure-cooker and an atomic
war-head but is, in fact, a locked container containing three dice.
When, after a good deal of mumbo-jumbo, she shakes the apparatus and
removes the lid, the game is completed and up to a maximum of three
sixes, or eighteen, and a minimum of three ones, will be displayed by
the dice.  So far as the even chances are concerned, you can either bet
on the numbers three to eight inclusive, which is 'lo', or ten to
fifteen, which is 'hi', the number nine in the middle being zero.  On
these you get even money odds.  You can also bet on single numbers from
three to eighteen and various combinations, such as three of a kind, or
a sequence.  If you have bet on 'hi' or 'lo' and three of a kind turned
up, you have lost.  These nuances are complicated and I could not work
out the odds in favour of the house.  It seemed easier to stick to 'hi'
or 'lo', which I did until a further hundred dollars of the _Sunday
Times's_ money had gone down the drain.

An interesting feature of the hi-lo gambling hell is that half-way up
the wall behind the players there is a crow's-nest in which a small
Macaon sits.  When the croupiere is about to raise the fateful lid, she
presses an electric bell which rings in the room and also in the
various nether gambling hells down the building.  In these, gamblers of
lesser degree have been staking on similar tables.  When the lid is
lifted, the man in the crow's-nest relays the winning number down to
these tables and also to electric indicators in the dance halls where
gamblers can place their bets with the hostesses.  Thus the dice I was
watching on the sixth floor were vital for the many games being played
throughout the Central Hotel.

Having educated ourselves in these matters, Dick Hughes and I repaired
to our sixth-floor dance hall to see how Mr Foo was handling the second
human vice.  The place had a central, well-lit dance floor and a
well-disciplined eight-piece 'combo' playing good but conventional
jazz.  In the shadows round the walls sat some twenty or thirty
'hostesses'.  Dick and I arranged ourselves at a comfortable banquette
in the sparsely frequented room and ordered gins and tonics and two
hostesses.  Mine was called Garbo, 'same like film star,' she
explained.  She wore a pale-green embroidered cheong sam and a 'Mamie
Eisenhower' bang rather low on the forehead.  She had the usual
immaculate ivory skin and the conventional 'almond' eyes which were
bright with intelligence and a desire to please.  Rather startlingly,
she appeared to have black lipstick but, as my eyes grew accustomed to
the light, this turned crimson.  Dick's girl was a trifle older,
perhaps thirty-five, wore a beige cheong sam, and was more forward and
vivacious than Garbo.  They asked for lemonades and, for a while, we
made the usual rattling, gay, and highly artificial night-club
conversation.  When, in my case, the springs threatened to run dry, I
fell back on that hoary gambit of reading my partner's hand.

Through experience in this science, dating back to my teens, I have
acquired a crude expertise in palmistry and, with my first
pronouncement that Garbo had three children, I hit a lucky jackpot.
The two girls chattered excitedly and, realizing with awe that her hand
was being held by a great soothsayer from the West, perspiration rose
in Garbo's palm and she was hard put to it to keep this dew at bay with
a paper napkin.  In the reverent hush that ensued, looking alternately
into the dewy palm and the reverent almond eyes, I solemnly warned her
that her heart was not ruled by her head, that she had artistic
leanings which had not yet come to fruition, that she would have a
serious illness when she was about fifty, and finally, provocatively,
that she was inclined to be under-sexed.  This last pronouncement was
greeted with much hilarious protestation which drew two more girls to
our table and involved me in a further hour of miscellaneous
prognostication and consumption of gins and tonics.

We then danced for a further hour, during which Garbo told me that I
looked like Stewart Granger and danced like Fred Astaire.  She also
said that I was the perfect type of English gentleman and very
'humourlous' which, thinking she had said 'humourless', came as a dash
of the good old Western cold water to which the Englishman is
accustomed.  But the small cloud was soon dispersed by further
happy-talk and, by the end of the evening, I felt that I was the
greatest factor in Anglo-Oriental relations since Lieutenant Pinkerton.

The evening, the reader will be relieved to learn, ended decorously in
a minor snowstorm of twenty-dollar notes and protestations of undying
love, and Dick and I left the magnificent Central Hotel on a wave of
virtue and euphoria, showering blessings on Mr Foo and his much
maligned nine-storey palace of ill-fame.

This was my first experience of Oriental Woman, and this, and my
subsequent investigations, confirmed the one great advantage she
possesses for Western Man.  Oriental ladies have an almost
inexhaustible desire to please.  They also have the capacity to make
the man not only suspect, but actually believe, that he is in every
respect a far more splendid fellow than in his wildest dreams he had
imagined.  Not only that, but the women of the East appear, and in fact
actually are, grateful for one's modest favours, with the result that
every meeting with them leaves one in good humour and with a better
opinion of oneself.  However ill-founded this feeling may be, how very
different from the knocking we all get in the West where women--and
this applies particularly to America--take such a ferocious delight in
cutting the man down to size!  'All you want is slaves,' I hear the
friends expostulate.  'Well, er...' one mumbles, 'not absolutely.  It's
not exactly slavishness.  It's just well, er, the desire to please.'

But I must not allow impious comment to get mixed up with sacred fact.

The next morning I was awakened by a European clang of cathedral bells
and a thin, distant tucket of military bugles, and we girded ourselves
for luncheon with Dr Lobo.  Ever since _Life_ magazine cast a shining
light on Macao in 1949, the Doctor has been very wary of writers and
journalists, but the magical name of a friend in Hong Kong had opened
even this door for us, and in due course we were picked up by a
powerful-looking 'secretary' in a battered brown Austin.  We had spent
the morning observing a communist co-operative hard at work across the
river, admired the awe-inspiring faade of St Paul's Cathedral upon
which the Japanese Christian stonemasons had sprinkled plenty of
dragons and flying skeletons amongst the angels, and taken note of the
hospital founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1906.

Neither the Austin nor the battered Chevrolet in which we later left to
catch our ferry, nor the Villa Verde, which belonged to some tropical
Wimbledon, suggested that Dr Lobo was worth the five or ten million
pounds which with he is credited.  At first sight, the Doctor, in his
trim blue suit, stiff white collar and rimless glasses, looked like the
bank manager or dentist (in fact he started life as an oculist) one
would have found in the more benign Wimbledon.  Dr Lobo is a small,
thin Malayan Chinese with a pursed mouth and blank eyes.  He is in his
early seventies.  He greeted us carefully in a sparsely furnished
suburban living-room with a Roman Catholic shrine over the doorway, a
large, nineteenth-century oleograph depicting heaven and hell, and a
coloured reproduction of a famous picture I could not place--a woman
with bowed head swathed in butter-muslin, who was either Faith, Hope or
Charity.  A powerfully-built butler, who looked more like a judo
black-belt than a butler, offered us Johnny Walker and we launched into
careful conversation about the pros and cons of alcohol and cigarettes,
neither of which, Dr Lobo said, appealed to him.

A spark of animation came into Dr Lobo's eyes when I said I heard that
he was an amateur composer of note.  The Doctor said he had been a
violinist and had given concerts in Hong Kong.  But he was certainly,
he vouchsafed, no Menuhin or Heifetz.  Nowadays, when he had time, he
did indeed try his hand at composing.  I asked if we might hear
something.  Readily Dr Lobo handed us a gramophone record entitled
'Gems of the Orient', privately recorded by His Master's Voice.
Meanwhile he busied himself with a large gramophone.  The titles of Dr
Lobo's compositions were 'Souls in Sorrow', 'Passing Thoughts', 'Waves
of the South Seas', 'Lilies of the Mountains' and 'Lasting Memories'.

The Doctor put 'Waves of the South Seas' on the gramophone and turned
various knobs, which resulted only in a devastating roar of static from
a concealed loudspeaker.  More knobs were turned and still the static
hooted and screamed.  Dr Lobo shouted through the racket that there was
something wrong.  The secretary was sent off to fetch the house
engineer.  Dick and I sipped our whisky and avoided each other's eye.
The engineer arrived and repeated Dr Lobo's previous motions.
Identical hullabaloo.  The engineer conjured with the back of the
machine while we looked on politely.  Dr Lobo adopted the familiar
expression of the rich man whose toy is kaput.

In due course the thin, wavering strains of a tune containing vague
echoes of 'Tales of the Vienna Woods', 'In a Monastery Garden' and
'Rose Marie' fixed expressions of rapt attention on all our faces.  I
shifted my posture to the bowed stance with eyes covered which I adopt
for concert and opera.  There was nothing to do but think of other
things until both sides of the longest player I have ever heard had
been completed.  Dick and I made appreciative grunts as if we had come
back to earth, speechless, from some musical paradise.  I muttered
something about 'remarkable virtuosity' and 'many-sided talent'.  And
then, blessedly, luncheon was served.

Dr Lobo's dining-room was lined from floor to ceiling with cabinets of
cut glass that winked painfully from all sides as if one was sitting in
the middle of a giant chandelier.  The tepid macaroni and vegetable
soup promised an unmemorable meal, so I politely got on to the topic of
gold.  Yes, indeed, it was an interesting business.  Did I know the
Bank of England and Messrs Samuel Montague?  Such nice, correct people
to deal with.  No, he hadn't actually got an office in Europe.  A
manufacturer of baby powder represented him in those parts.  The Doctor
himself had never been farther abroad than Hong Kong.

I pressed on about gold.  As I understood it, I said, Macao had been
excluded by Portugal from the Bretton Woods monetary agreement which
tied most of the other countries in the world to a gold price of $35 an
ounce.  Since, for instance, the Chinese price is around $50 an ounce,
there was obviously a handsome profit to be made somewhere.  Was I
correct in thinking that Dr Lobo bought gold from, say, the Bank of
England, at $35 an ounce and then sold it at a premium to anyone who
cared to buy; how it then left Macao for the outside world being none
of his business?  Yes, agreed Dr Lobo, that was more or less the
position.  Nowadays the business was difficult.  Before, when the
premium over the official gold price had been higher, it had been more
interesting.  Smuggling?  Yes, no doubt such a thing did take place.
Dr Lobo smiled indulgently.  The people in these parts liked to have a
small piece of gold.  If they bought gold in Macao, I insisted gently,
how did they get it out?  Dr Lobo's face went blank.  These were
matters of which he knew little.  He had heard that they sewed single
coins into their clothes and hammered thin plates of gold which they
could carry in their belts.  There had also been a case where some cows
had been found to contain gold.  The bamboo that is so much a part of
sampans, for instance, is conveniently hollow.  Was I interested in cut
glass?  All this glass had been a hobby of his late wife's.  It was
Stuart glass, the best.

How, I persisted, was the Indian market in gold nowadays?  'I hear it
is not so good,' said Dr Lobo.  Nowadays the Indians were poor.  They
had no foreign exchange with which to buy gold and nobody wanted the
rupee.  Previously, he understood, large fortunes had been made from
selling gold to India, but nowadays, the eyes twinkled frostily, it was
perhaps more profitable to buy newspapers.  Yes?  This neat reference
to the change of ownership of the _Sunday Times_ showed that Dr Lobo
had his wits about him.

I allowed myself also to become personal.  Dr Lobo was reputed to be a
very rich man.  Was he not frightened of being kidnapped?  I had heard
that much of this had been going on in Singapore and also in Hong Kong.
Had there not been a recent case...?  This was clearly a subject which
had had Dr Lobo's close attention.  He became more animated.  'I have
precautions,' he said.  'I take care.  We have excellent police in
Macao.'  The business in Hong Kong had been foolish.  The family had
received an ear and had gone to the police.  This was an error.  They
should have paid the ransom money.  As it was, the head of the family
had never been seen again.  Very foolish!  Had this, I asked, been
anything to do with the Tongs or Triads, criminal brotherhoods that
operate in every Oriental town?  That was possible, thought Dr Lobo.
He had heard that these people were very powerful, particularly in the
opium traffic.  Opium was a very sad business.  Dr Lobo became eloquent.

'It is a terrible thing, Mr Fleming.  These people give all their money
for opium.  Soon they lose their interest in food and then in women.
They become sexless, neuter, and waste away.  It would be much better
if they drank beer, even too much beer, as I believe is sometimes the
case in your country.  But what do you think of my coffee?  This is my
own coffee from my estate in Timor.'

The conversation petered away into polite inanity and it was nearly
time for Dick and me to take the ferry.  But first, said Dr Lobo, we
must see his radio station.  We went out into the garden and there
indeed was a concrete building the size of a squash court, which is
Radio Villa Verde, dispensing, amongst other things, entertainment to
the inhabitants of Macao.  We went in and saw the operator on the other
side of the big glass window putting a record on.  The Chinese girl at
the control desk jumped up and bowed, her earphones still on her ears.
The radio station seemed to me a wonderful adjunct to a man dealing in
the bullion markets of the world.  Good communications are the sinews
of successful business.  I said so.

Dr Lobo looked pained.  'This station is only for entertainment, Mr
Fleming.'  I said, yes, of course, and we stepped out and turned our
backs on the innocent building to have our photographs taken with Dr
Lobo by the secretary, and a copy of 'Gems of the Orient', inscribed
with best compliments, presented to us.

My last sight of the enigmatic Dr Lobo, as we rattled away in the
ancient Chevrolet, was of a small, trim figure cutting short the last
wave of his hand as he turned and, flanked by the powerful secretary
and powerful butler, disappeared back into the villa.  What had I
learned of Dr Lobo, the gold king whose name is whispered with awe
throughout the East?  Absolutely nothing at all.  What do I think of Dr
Lobo?  I think that while there may be unexplained corners in his
history, as there are in the histories of many a successful
millionaire, he is what he appears to be: a careful, astute operator
who has chosen an exotic line of business which may have caused a good
deal of pain and grief in its retail outlets to the regret, no doubt,
of the wholesaler.  The respectability of all ageing millionaires is
now his, together with the laurels of good citizenship--a doctorate of
sciences unspecified and, two weeks after I left him, his appointment
as Chairman of the Municipal Council of Macao, a post equivalent to
mayor.

Commenting on his last appointment, the _China Morning Post_ spoke of
him as:


    Probably the best known local man who retired from public service
    about three years ago as head of the Economics and Statistics
    Department of Macao.  It was thought then that Dr Lobo would at
    last be able to enjoy a well merited rest.  On the contrary he has
    been recalled to public duty ... Dr Lobo's long experience in
    administrative matters and his natural knack for getting things
    done, should see him through with flying colours.

    Good show!


Dr Lobo's fellow-member of the Syndicate, Mr Foo, has not fared so
well.  Since I left his establishment of a thousand pleasures, the
Tongs have been after him.  As the local press reports:


    A group of terrorists, calling itself the Fa Mok Lang Group, after
    writing blackmailing letters to Mr Foo, placed three bombs in the
    lavatories of the mezzanine restaurants of the Central Hotel,
    having previously thrown leaflets from the roof of the hotel urging
    gamblers and pleasure seekers not to go into the hotel any more
    'because the hotel was menaced by bomb explosions'.


There are always interfering busybodies around when someone tries to
give the common people a bit of fun.

      *      *      *

On our way back to Hong Kong, and in the ferry, recalling Dr Lobo's
mention of the Tongs, now known as Triads, and musing over their
possible connection with the smuggling of gold and opium which are more
or less interconnected, I asked Dick Hughes, who knows the answer to
everything in the Far East, what the Triads really amounted to, and
this is the gist of what he told me.

There are scores of Triads, or secret Chinese blood societies, in Hong
Kong, mostly concentrated in the Kowloon district, and their members,
ranging from pimps and shoe-shine boys to businessmen and teachers, run
into tens of thousands.  Originally the aims of the Triads were
laudable and patriotic.  Members were rigorously tested, sworn to
unselfish brotherhood and dedicated to moral and religious principles.
But the process of degeneration has been profound.  Politics, then
squeeze and conspiracy, and finally crime, rackets, extortion,
blackmail and smuggling have debased the high ideals of the early
Tongs, just as the semi-religious Society of Harmonious Fists (_I Ho
Chuan_) of A.D. 1700 became the horrendous Boxers of 1900.

The Triads are not banned in Macao, and Dick hazarded the suggestion
that Dr Lobo and other members of the Syndicate were probably forced to
pay them protection money.  (No doubt Mr Foo failed to pay up and was
punished with bombs in the lavatories of his Central Hotel.)  But they
are illegal in Hong Kong, where they flourish underground with secret
signs and passwords and iron rules of punishment and vengeance.  The
old membership identifications, a cash coin or a cotton badge, have
gone, but nowadays one member can distinguish another by the manner,
perhaps, in which he lights a cigarette or sets the teacups before a
visitor.

The largest and most powerful of the Hong Kong Triads today is the
formidable '14 K', so called because the ancient Canton address was
Number 14 in Po-wah Road, with the 'K' added later for 'karat' of gold
in memory of a bloody pitched battle over 'protection' against a rival
Triad whose members likened their strength to local but softer gold.
'14 K' dates from the seventeenth century, but was rejuvenated and
developed by General Kot Sui Wong as a secret agency of the Kuomintang.
He was deported from Hong Kong to Formosa in 1950, but returned
incognito to the colony and, before he died in 1953, re-activated all
eighteen groups of the redoubtable '14 K' which now has an estimated
membership of eighty thousand divided into mellifluously named
sub-branches.

For instance, Dick Hughes explained, the 'Sincere' sub-branch of '14 K'
is a strong-arm gang who protect squatter areas in Kowloon.  The
'Filials' have about fifteen thousand members who specialize in the
drug and prostitution traffic.  These two gangs were chiefly
responsible for the rioting, bloodshed, looting and arson in the recent
Kowloon riots.

The initiation ceremony into '14 K' lasts all night and involves the
novices in an elaborate ritual handed down through the centuries.  The
'Ten Precious Articles', which figure in the initiation, include a red
lamp (to distinguish true from false), a red pole (for punishment), a
white paper fan (to strike down traitors) and a peach-wood sword
(representing a magical blade which has the power to decapitate enemies
when merely flourished in the air).  Joss-sticks are lighted on an
altar before which the aspirants swear thirty-six death-binding oaths
and drink from a bowl containing sugar, wine, cinnabar, blood from a
beheaded rooster and a drop of blood from the middle finger of the
novice's left hand.  After election, the new members hurl their
joss-sticks to the floor with the demand that their own lives be
similarly extinguished if they break their oaths.  There is a
picturesque variety of death-penalty methods, ranging from the
meticulous 'ten thousand knife cuts' to the imponderable 'exposure to
thunderclaps'.  The rivalry, terrorism and intrigues of the different
Triads are the explanation for nearly all the mysterious stories of
officially motiveless murder and assault in the Hong Kong press.
Recently there was unusual co-operation between the Hong Kong police
and the communist authorities following a Triad murder in the colony.
An elderly Triad leader was stabbed in the back after a friendly game
of mahjong.  The killer, from a rival Triad, timed the murder so that
he could catch the midnight ferry to Macao.  The Hong Kong police
vainly pursued the ferry in a motor launch and then alerted the Macao
police, but the man managed to cross over into Communist China for
sanctuary.  Within a week, the communists, having seen the man's
photograph in the Hong Kong press, located him and returned him to
Macao, where the murderer committed suicide.

Like the Mafia, Dick explained, the Triad member never squeals and
thus, for the running of smuggling channels, the Triads provide an
almost limitless army of reliable couriers for the dispersal, through
Hong Kong to the rest of the Orient, of the gold bullion quite legally
purchased from Dr Lobo.  Only a couple of years ago, one of Jardine
Matheson's most respectable cargo and passenger ships had been arrested
in Calcutta where the police found 200,000 worth of solid gold neatly
inset and over-painted by a passenger in the woodwork of a cabin.  The
gold was on its way into India.  Although arrests were made, the highly
indignant firm of Jardines (or rather their insurance company) was
fined 100,000 by the Indian Government for inadequate protective
devices and for acting as a carrier, at however many removes, of
smuggled gold.  As a result, Jardines have had to organize their own
security service to supplement the incredibly active and ingenious Hong
Kong Customs and Police Department.

I asked Dick how Dr Lobo, in the face of the Triads, managed to bring
his gold bullion into Macao without its being hijacked in transit, and
Dick explained about Len Cosgrove and his ancient Catalina amphibian.
I was later to meet Len Cosgrove (in Jack Conder's bar, of course) and
I was greatly taken with him.  He is a Scot, another Hemingway
character, generally known as 'Cos', a small, tough, cheerful
individual who can stand your hair on end with his stories of authentic
derring-do.  He was in the R.A.F. during the war and drifted into civil
aviation and then into this perilous job of ferrying fortunes in gold
bullion from Singapore to Dr Lobo's vaults in Macao, expecting to be
cracked on the head by a crew member or shot down by communist planes
on each trip.  And with these lone jobs, as he explained to me, things
could go wrong.  An Australian friend of his, also flying a Catalina,
had been paid by a Chinese syndicate to fly a huge cargo of opium from
Singapore to Macao for onward smuggling into Communist China.  At the
point of no return from Singapore he had flown into the edge of a
monsoon and had had to keep going.  With his fuel almost exhausted, he
came over the islands to find Macao harbour completely obscured by low
cloud.  He came down through it and found himself almost on top of one
of the neighbouring communist islands with a bad swell running.  At
this moment one of his engines failed and he decided to ditch, got the
angle wrong and buried his nose in the sea.  The plane slowly broke up
and, as the communist gunboat appeared, he was horrified to see the
canisters of raw opium bobbing about in the waves.  He and his
navigator spent two years in a communist jail, came out, and died of
their experiences.  Cos was very matter-of-fact about the hazards of
his profession, but also understandably tight-lipped--not necessarily
because of the secrets he knows, but because, when the last five years
of his contract have run out, he wants to write his memoirs.  I shall
look forward to them.

The next few days in Hong Kong were more respectable than the Macao
interlude--golf at the Royal Hong Kong Club a few miles from the
communist frontier, where the rattle of Bren-guns at the ranges and the
occasional passage of a tank are apt to disturb one's swing, and where
the huge cartwheel hats of the Haka women, plucking weeds out of the
greens with their finger-nails, form a useful back wall for the topped
approach; a morning in Cat Street, the Portobello Road of Hong Kong,
where I found no difficulty in rejecting the assorted chinoiserie of
ten centuries; dinner one night in an enchanting Sea Palace amidst the
myriad sampans that pave the fishing port of Aberdeen; and a final
fling on the Hong Kong racecourse from the luxurious fastness of the
Jardine box.  This must be one of the most splendidly equipped
racecourses in the world, with overall closed-circuit television
coverage giving instantaneous photographs of the entire race, the
latest totalizator (at least 30,000 is bet on each race) and modern
moving staircases to each floor.  There, with the help of Jardine's
know-how and a place accumulator, I recovered my and the _Sunday
Times's_ losses in the gambling hells of Macao.

And then it was time to go, on an evening of brilliant stars, to make
the next leap, in Comet G/APDO, over Formosa and Okinawa, to Tokyo.

I have seldom left a town with more regret.


INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

The _Bella Vista_ is the best hotel to stop at.  Ask for a double room
with veranda overlooking the wide sea-approaches to the Pearl River,
which are alive day and night with fishing-junks hastening to and from
Canton.  (Tariff: HK$45 a day.)

Best place for eating: the _Macao Inn_ on the Avenue of the Republic,
not far from the British Consulate and the residence of Mr Foo Tak Yam,
the gambling king of the colony.  Ask for the special baked or grilled
Macao pigeon, or select from a wide range of peppery Portuguese dishes,
including African chicken (baked in coconut).  Excellent cheap, light,
dry Portuguese wines.

The gambling tables are open day and night at the _Central Hotel_.  The
cricket-fighting season is held in the autumn.  There is a Grand Prix
motor-race early in November.

(Travel agencies at the leading Hong Kong hotels will buy your return
ferry ticket to Macao and will also secure your passport visa for you.
There is no need to change your Hong Kong dollars for Macao patacas;
Hong Kong money has the same exchange rate and is as interchangeable as
English money in Dublin.)




III _Tokyo_

I was full of reservations about Japan.  Before and during the war they
had been bad enemies and many of my friends had suffered at their
hands.  But many other friends whose opinions I value love the country
and its people, and my comprador, Richard Hughes, who came with me in
the Comet and who, being an Australian, should have been predisposed
against Japan, was totally enamoured of it.  There was nothing to do
but clear my mind of the splendours of Hong Kong and prepare myself for
a great deal of hissing and bowing.

We had a happy landing.  Japanese friends of Dick Hughes were at the
airport to meet him and I was at once taken with 'Tiger' Saito,
editor-in-chief of _This is Japan_ the massive and beautifully produced
annual which the privileged receive through the Japanese Embassy around
Christmas time.  He was a chunky, reserved man with considerable stores
of quiet humour and intelligence, and with a subdued but rather tense
personality.  He looked like a fighter--one of those war-lords of the
Japanese films.  He had, in fact, been a judo black-belt, one rank
below the red-belt elite, and there was a formidable quality about him
which I enjoyed.  We crowded ourselves into some kind of a car and
hurtled off into the night.  It was an hour's run through endless and
very depressing suburbs (Tokyo, with a population of nine million, is
the largest, and incidentally the most expensive, city in the world).
It had been a four-and-a-half hour flight from Hong Kong.  It was one
o'clock in the morning and everyone was chattering about people I
didn't know.  I began to long for bed and solitude.

Dick had tried to get us into a Western hotel, but on top of hordes of
American tourists attending the fashionable autumn or Chrysanthemum
Season, six hundred delegates for a G.A.T.T. conference had descended
on the town and Dick had finally had to accept rooms in a Japanese inn.
'They're wonderful,' he enthused.  'Much better than those ghastly
Western hotels.  You'll really be seeing the Japanese way of life.'

We bumped and clattered through darkened side-streets, stopping every
now and then to verify our whereabouts and consult about the next
turning.  My depression grew.  In due course, down a rutted lane, there
was a glimmer of light coming from a pagoda-form entrance.  We piled
out.  Immediately there were two wide-awake, bowing women in full
traditional dress on the doorstep.  A polite rattle of Japanese ensued.
Behind the _porte cochre_ were the dwarf shrubs and firs of a tiny
Japanese garden and the outlines of some kind of a villa.  My
companions seemed excessively cheerful.  I fixed a Japanese grin on my
face and followed them to the front door and, for the first of many
times, took off my shoes at the threshold and tried to stuff my feet
into Japanese-size slippers.

Inside, it was very light and gleaming with polish and cleanliness.  I
slip-slopped up a short shiny staircase and was shown, with many smiles
and bows, through a sliding partition into one of those rooms you see
in Japanese prints.  There I was left alone, staring at my suitcase,
while Dick's voice boomed happily down the corridor and the rustling
sound of awakened sleepers reached me through the walls.

I hate small, finicky, breakable things, and I am slightly over six
feet tall.

My room appeared to be made of plywood and rice-paper.  The floor was
carpeted with black-edged oblongs of rush matting that reminded me of
uninscribed mourning cards.  In the centre of the floor, or rather on
it, was the spotless bedding, a thin feather mattress, sparkling sheets
and a silken eiderdown.  Behind the small, hard pillow was a child's
teapot, a glass with a wooden cover, a small lacquer box containing
toothpicks and a bed light.  Next to this, against one wall, was a very
broad red lacquer table about one foot off the floor.  Above this hung
a scroll depicting a wispy landscape and opposite, in the corner, was
what appeared to be a large earthenware waste-paper-basket filled to
the top with fine grey ash in which were stuck two iron styluses and a
kind of iron comb.  In the corner opposite on the floor stood a tall
rough pottery vase containing a spindly branch encrusted with small red
berries and a much shorter branch of dwarf chrysanthemums.  Having read
a B.O.A.C. leaflet about Japanese flower arrangement, I assumed that
these twigs held some gracious message which was hidden from me.  The
only other furniture was a narrow shelf against one wall which held a
lacquered box containing a stylus and a bottle of sepia ink and, on the
floor, a telephone balanced precariously on a black lacquered mushroom.

I moved gingerly round the walls looking for cupboards amongst the
anonymous maze of what turned out to be plastic rice-paper and thin
battens of three-ply.  One of these revealed a wardrobe containing one
coat hanger and an extra roll of bedding.  Another partition concealed
a blessed basin with running water.  I looked again at my bulky
round-the-world suitcase standing obscenely in the midst of this
delicate chamber and, aching with the gorilla stance that was necessary
because of the low ceiling, I slumped down on the exquisite red lacquer
table and cursed gently but fluently.

Dick appeared, happy and boisterous.  'Where the hell do I put my
clothes?' I said.  'What the hell's that waste-paper-basket full of ash
for?  And, anyway, where's the lavatory?'  Dick looked grieved at this
Western outburst.  He meekly showed me across the corridor to an
odd-looking hole-in-the-floor contraption.  'But there's a Western one
downstairs,' he said.  'Next to the Japanese bath.'

'What the hell's a Japanese bath?'

'Oh, haven't I told you?  You've got to wash outside and then get into
the bath.  There may be other people in it but you don't have to bother
about them.'

'Thanks very much.'

'Perhaps you'd better put your clothes on the table.  The barrel with
the ash in it is for a charcoal fire.'

I said, 'Thanks very much,' again, furiously, and we parted for the
night.

I will pass over the further tribulations I suffered in my dainty,
willow-pattern bird-cage.  I took a sleeping-pill, composed my aching
limbs amongst the bedding on the floor and went to sleep trying to
remember the full details of Saki's 'Barbary Apes Wrecking a Boudoir'.

Dick had told me to clap my hands if I wanted anything.  The next
morning, awakened by a mild earthquake that rattled the hotel like a
dice-box, I did this until I got bored with it and then padded
downstairs and, in sign language and pidgin English, extracted a
promise of breakfast from the bowing and giggling maid.  She was so
amused and happy about everything that I was at once filled with a good
humour which remained with me for the rest of my stay in Japan.  I even
got to like my idiotic, damnably pretty little room, and somehow
learned to contort my limbs into a painful approximation to the lotus
position on the many occasions when I had to eat meals off foot-high
tables.  All in all, I can warmly recommend the Fukudaya Inn (it means,
for what that is worth, 'Rich Ricefield'), not far from the British
Embassy.  May its dwarf pine trees never grow smaller!

With only three days in Japan, I decided to be totally ruthless.  I
told Dick that there would be no politicians, museums, temples,
Imperial palaces or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies.  I wanted, I
said, to see Mr Somerset Maugham, who had just arrived and was
receiving a triumphal welcome; visit the supreme Judo Academy; see a
Sumo wrestling match; explore the Ginza; have the most luxurious
Japanese bath; spend an evening with geishas; consult the top Japanese
soothsayer; and take a day trip into the country.  I also said that I
wanted to eat large quantities of raw fish, for which I have a
weakness, and ascertain whether _sake_ was truly alcoholic or not.
Thanks to Dick and Tiger Saito, I achieved all these ambitions to the
full, with the exception of the Sumo wrestling bout which I was only
able to see on television.

We started off with Mr Maugham.  We happen to be friends.  Our
friendship is largely based on the fact that he also wishes to be
married to my wife, and he is always pleased to see me if only to hear
news of her.  We met at the Imperial Hotel and had a cheerful and
excellent luncheon, through which Mr Maugham alternately crackled with
malice about our friends in London and purred with pleasure at his
first visit to the East for thirty years.  After luncheon we repaired
to the Kodo Kan gymnasium and judo academy for a most memorable
experience.

Briefly, judo is a philosophy, or way of life, and ju-jitsu is an art
of self-defence based on judo.  I have always been vaguely interested
in the subject since, at Eton, two vast sergeant majors used to give
exhibitions of throwing each other about with flicks of the wrist.
Tiger Saito, who is an excellent photographer, accompanied us, and the
head of the establishment showed us round--Mr Maugham, Mr Alan Searle,
his secretary, Dick Hughes and myself.  The Academy is a very large and
imposing building.  The ground floor is devoted to miscellaneous
classes.  There was a room where fifty young men were practising
breakfalls, another where foreigners, four Americans, a Frenchman and a
Turk, were trying various holds while awaiting their teacher, and
another room for the girls, who obligingly staged a mock fight, which
was not as exciting as it sounds.

Then up to the next floor and to an astonishing scene.  Here, in one
vast hall, upwards of two hundred individual bouts and classes were in
progress.  Black-belts were two a penny, but what fascinated us all was
the class for children between eight and ten being conducted by a
famous red-belt aged about sixty.  As it might have been at some
sporting event in an English school, half a dozen doting mothers sat on
a bench and watched their sons with a mixture of pride and anxiety as
they wrestled together or had lessons from their teachers.

But what held our whole attention was the wise old red-belt teaching
leg and kick routines to a tough, lively little boy of ten.  Between
these two all the traditions were strictly adhered to--the courteous
bow before the lesson and after each surrender, and the smiling
concentration.  For perhaps ten minutes the red-belt tried to teach the
little boy one particular backward hack which sweeps the legs of the
opponent from under him and can only be defeated by various
counter-moves.  Again and again the red-belt swept the little boy's
legs from underneath him and, while holding the lapels of his wrestling
robe, collapsed him gently, but not too gently, on the floor.  And
again and again the little boy was up and trying again, hacking bravely
at the back of the red-belt's bulging calves with the inside of his own
small leg.  At last he got it right and, in acknowledgment, and by no
means with false theatricality, the red-belt measured his length, got
to his knees, bowed to his vanquisher and they started again.

What was so splendid about this scene was its entire seriousness.  The
old champion, without mockery, fell to the ground because the little
boy had got the gambit absolutely right.  He wanted to demonstrate to
the little boy that, in ju-jitsu, no matter how inferior your size,
Jack can bring down the Giant-killer.  It was an exquisite scene, and
Tiger Saito took a photograph which caught Mr Maugham exclaiming at its
beauty.

The fag end of the afternoon I spent with Japan Air Lines, whom I had
chosen to carry me on to Hawaii because I was already reluctant to
embrace the West again and wished to leave myself in Oriental hands for
as long as possible.  It was only as my ticket was being made out that
I realized I would be flying the 'Willow Pattern' route on Friday the
13th.  But what matter!  In a book of mine, _From Russia, With Love_,
when my hero, James Bond, arranged to fly to Istanbul, there is the
following passage:


    The day before, when he had left M. and had gone back to his office
    to arrange details of his flight, his secretary had protested
    violently at the idea of his travelling on Friday the 13th.

    'But it's always best to travel on the 13th,' Bond had explained
    patiently.  'There are practically no passengers and it's more
    comfortable and you get better service.  I always choose the 13th
    when I can.'


I felt I must try and keep up with my hero and it was not until dinner
that night, when I mentioned the coincidence to Dick Hughes, that he
looked thoughtful.  'I suppose you realize,' he said, 'that you'll be
crossing the international date-line and running into another Friday
the 13th.  Double Friday the 13ths don't sound so good.'  I laughed the
detail away and forgot about it until the next morning at ten o'clock
when I was waiting in the ante-room of the most famous fortune-teller
in Japan, Seki Ryushi, with a charming interpreter friend of Tiger
Saito's called Chin Chan.

I am not particularly interested in having my fortune told, but I am
rather intrigued by fortune-telling and all matters connected with
extra-sensory perception.  Moreover, Dick had fascinated me with true
stories of Oriental soothsaying and I was determined to see what it was
all about.  We were waiting in the sitting-room of Mr Seki Ryushi's
house.  There were no tokens of his trade except a vast reading-glass
in a wooden frame and one of those china skulls you find in junk shops
with the brain-pan marked off in segments entitled Love, Future,
Intelligence, etc.  When, after a polite interval to show how busy he
was, the soothsayer appeared, I was not greatly impressed.  He looked
far too happy and well-fed for a man who should be in communion with
the spirits of darkness, and his eyes twinkled merrily from behind
rimless glasses.  We squatted down opposite each other across the
inevitable low table and bowed as if we were about to start a wrestling
match.  I was asked to write down my name and age, and did so.  The
soothsayer gave the script a cursory glance and went into a long
conversation with Chin Chan about how clever he was.  He had forecast
Eisenhower's successes at the last two elections and also the outcome
of his various illnesses.  When the Duke of Windsor married Mrs Simpson
he had prophesied that they would have a long and happy marriage.  I
said a mental 'humph', rearranged my already aching limbs and waited
for him to start on me.

In due course he picked up the large reading-glass, asked me to
approach my face and examined it, inch by inch.  At the same time, I
examined his and saw nothing but happy birdlike eyes and evidence of a
rather hasty shave in those difficult corners just below the nose.
There was a lengthy exchange with Chin Chan, which in due course was
interpreted, to the effect that I was a man of very independent spirit
who should always walk alone and never go into partnership.  This
sounded rather like the sort of stuff I had told Garbo in the
night-club in Macao.  There was to be no improvement.

It took nearly an hour and a half for the great seer to tell me that I
was in a particularly golden period which would end around the middle
of March, but that the whole of the next ten years was going to be
quite splendid for me.  I would live happily until I was eighty.  I
would certainly be back in Japan before next May (most unlikely, and I
wasn't), I must not be so 'obstinate' towards my wife, and I looked
more like my mother than my father.  There was absolutely nothing else
that I can remember and the only piece of information for which I was
grateful, with my double Friday the 13th round the corner, was the
prognostication about the wonderfully lucky period I was now traversing.

Rather pointedly perhaps, I asked Mr Seki Ryushi if he could tell his
own fortune.  He said he couldn't.  When he wanted to know anything he
asked his close rival, Sozan Takashima, who always gave him the correct
answer.  I should have asked him if he could tell Mr Takashima's
fortune with equal success, because the fates were already plotting the
terrible end to Takashima's life which was just approaching.  About two
weeks after my interview, the following story appeared in the local
press and I quote it in its entirety:

FORTUNE-TELLER COULD NOT FORESEE OWN DEATH.

_Tokyo, November_ 25_th_


    A famous Japanese fortune-teller could not foresee his own fate.
    He was surprised this morning by an assassin who stabbed him to
    death with a knife.

    Sozan Takashima, 71, Japan's most famous fortune-teller, who has
    been doing a thriving business, was slain by a young colleague in
    the same profession, Toshiyuki Domoto, 24.  The motive was
    professional jealousy.

    Domoto also stabbed the old diviner's 40-year-old son, who is also
    practising the arts of divination, injuring him
    critically.--France-Presse.


This curious coincidence, in retrospect, adds point to what was
otherwise a rather wasted morning.

The night before, Dick and I had consumed large quantities of raw fish
in a restaurant off the Ginza, which is one of the great pleasure
streets of the world, and even larger quantities of _sake_, a heated
rice-spirit to which I took rather too enthusiastically, and now,
nursing something of a hangover, I was looking forward to the healing
properties of the most famous Japanese bath-house, the Tokyo Onsen.  We
went there after another delicious meal which included quails cooked in
raw quail's egg (Mrs Elizabeth David, please note!) and it was indeed a
remarkable experience.

Many Japanese have no baths in their houses and the two or three
bath-days a week at the public baths are great occasions.  I can now
well understand why.  At the desk on the first floor of the large,
rather drab, building, I paid fifteen shillings and was then taken in
hand by the prettiest Japanese girl I was to see during the whole of my
stay.  Her name was Baby and she was twenty-one.  She had the face of a
smaller, rather neater, Brigitte Bardot, with black hair in a B.B. cut.
She wore nothing but the shortest and tightest of white shorts and a
white brassiere.

She led me by the hand down a corridor to a small room divided in two.
The ante-room contained a dressing-table laden with various oils,
powders and unguents and a chair for my clothes, which she prettily
asked me to remove.  It was obviously no good being demure about this,
so I obeyed her and she took my suit and brushed it and hung it up on a
hanger.  She then took me by the hand into the interior half of the
room, where there was a large wooden box with a hole in the top--a
one-man Turkish bath--into which she placed me.  She then closed the
top and, after some pleasant but rather stilted conversation, coquetted
with her hair-do in a looking-glass.  After a quarter of an hour in the
very hot box, she raised the lid and helped me down on to the spotless
tiled floor, and bade me sit beside a sunken blue-tiled bath on a small
stool, when she proceeded to give me an energetic shampoo and scrubbed
me with soap and a loofah from top to toe.  Well, almost, that is.  She
avoided the central zone and handed me the loofah with a dimpling, 'You
do body.'  She then poured wooden pitchers of water over me to clean
off the soap and guided me down the two steps into the deep, oval bath,
the very hot water in which comes from natural hot springs.

Ten minutes of this and then, when she had towelled me down, I was
bidden to lie on a high massage table where she proceeded to massage me
thoroughly and expertly--none of that effleurage, but the really deep
massage for which the Japanese are famous.  I may say that any crude
Western thoughts I might have entertained during these processes were
thoroughly washed from my mind by the general heat and exertions I was
put through, but that is not to say that I was not vastly stimulated
and intrigued by the whole performance.  Thinking that she might find
my reserve rather ungallant, I asked her if she didn't occasionally
have 'bad men' who suggested 'bad things' to her.  The message, not
perhaps unexpected, got through.  She answered with a bewitching but
quite neutral politeness that such people went to other places, places
on the Ginza.  The Onsen was only for 'gentremen'.  There was no hint
of a rebuke in her attitude.

In the East, sex is a delightful pastime totally unconnected with
sin--a much lighter, airier affair than in the West, where I fear that
this account of my Japanese bath may shock.  But in fact there was
nothing in the least shocking about it, and when we went to the desk
and said a happy and friendly goodbye there was already a slim,
serious-looking Japanese waiting to take my place.  It was really
rather like going to the dentist.  Pleasanter, of course.

I spent the afternoon walking the length of the Ginza, window-shopping
and wondering, as I do whenever I walk down a great shopping street,
who buys all the cameras, sun glasses, wristwatches and fountain pens
that seem to infest the world.  But I hate taking photographs and,
having taken them, hate looking at them, and since I already possess a
wrist-watch and a fountain pen, my purchases were confined to one
dramatic Kabuki print of a man being beheaded.  Mostly I just walked
and looked at the people, and repelled the ubiquitous pimps offering me
a variety of pleasures down to one or two that I couldn't even
understand.

The first thing that struck me was how gay and purposeful the young
Japanese are, and how healthy a rice diet must be.  They move at an
astonishing speed compared with the easy stroll you will normally see
in the comparable Piccadilly or Champs-Elyses crowds.  And how bright
all their eyes are, with the sort of intelligent brightness you see in
small animals!  Very few of the men wear hats and would look rather
foolish if they did so, and yet you never see a man with a hair out of
place or with curly or unruly hair.  It is all a sea of black shiny
heads upon which, Gulliver-like, the Westerner looks down.  They are
rude and rough to each other on the streets, in sharp contrast with
their good manners when at rest.  They bump and jostle without apology
and apparently without offence.  The eyes of the women are not
almond-shaped.  It is the tautness of the Mongolian fold of the upper
eyelid that appears to slant the eye, and I learnt later, from Tiger
Saito, that facial surgery to remove the Mongolian fold and widen the
eye is immensely popular all over the country.  The girls are aping the
West in countless other fashions.  Long legs have become desirable, and
those hideous wooden clogs have been exchanged for stiletto heels.  The
Eastern hair-dos, which I find enchanting, are going out in favour of
permanent waves and other fuzzy fashions.  Traditional dress--the
kimono and the obi, the complicated bundle of silk in the small of the
back--is disappearing fast and is now worn, so far as the towns are
concerned, only in the family circle, together with the giant cake of
hair and monstrous hair-pins in the Madame Butterfly fashion.

The Japanese are not, in fact, yellow-skinned.  The colour ranges from
ivory to a light sunburnt brown, and many of the women have natural
pink in their cheeks.  The men and women are specklessly clean and so
are their houses and belongings, though how they manage it in Tokyo,
amidst the blown dust of the ubiquitous construction work, I cannot
imagine.

The endless taxis drive like hell, particularly the small Renaults,
known as Kamikazes.  But the taxis are well driven and I never saw one
even graze another.  They are the only taxi-drivers in the world who do
not expect, or get, tips, and, in fact, there is practically no tipping
whatsoever in Japan, though in hotels ten per cent is added to your
bill.  Dick Hughes was firm with me about this and insisted that we
should always tip modestly.  The tip, he said, was, in most cases, the
difference between whether a man could have one or two meals a day, for
in Japan the fight for existence is quite terrifying.  Walking down the
Ginza and occasionally going into a shop was evidence of this--a
plethora of shop assistants.  At least one, and often three, bell-boys
to open the doors in hotels.  Ten pimps where, in Paris, there would be
one.  This is due to the appalling overcrowding in the country, which
has a population of ninety million with the lowest death-rate in the
world--a population that increases at the rate of a million and a half
a year, despite the number of recorded abortions (which are legal) of
about the same number annually.  This density of population was
certainly brought home to me that afternoon on the Ginza, and finally,
battered and exhausted, I repaired to my dainty inn to complete my
toilet for a night out with the geishas.

I should at once make a point clear about geishas and I will quote from
an official guide-book to make it: 'Most foreigners do not have a
correct understanding of the geisha,' says the guide.  'They are not
prostitutes.'  I will quote again, this time from Dick Hughes, who
warned me, 'To tell you the truth, the whole of this geisha business is
a bit of a bore.'

'Gei' means art and 'sha' person, and geisha is, in fact, a form of
artist, meticulously trained in dancing, playing a kind of flute and
drum, conducting tea ceremonies and arranging flowers.  In addition,
she should be good-looking, vivacious and an expert conversationalist.
She usually has a wealthy protector, whose mistress she may be, but she
lives in a geisha house, which is a kind of seminary in which half a
dozen girls live, supervised by a kind of Mother Geisha.  You do not go
to a geisha house to be entertained by geishas.  You go to a private
room in a restaurant--in our case a fish restaurant hard by the
Shinbashi Bridge over the Sumida River, which, to my surprise, as I did
not know Tokyo was on a river, bisects the town.

Tiger Saito, our host, had chosen a beautiful room, similar in most
respects to my hotel room, looking over the river and, shortly after
Dick and I had groaned and creaked ourselves into a near-lotus
position, the three geishas trooped in in full regalia, knelt in turn
at the head of the table and bowed first to our host and then to us.
Then they sat down between us and set to pouring egg-cup-sized bowls of
hot _sake_ for us in a never-ending succession.  I say 'never-ending'
because, as soon as you put your little bowl down, it has to be filled
again.  Short of throwing the bowl out of the window, there is no way
of halting this chain delivery until the flagon is empty or you fall
over.

My geisha was called Masami, an enchanting girl of about thirty with
straightforward good looks lit with that sincere delight in your
presence and in the evening that, as I have said, one finds in Eastern
girls.  Dick's geisha had neater limbs but was otherwise similar,
whereas Tiger's neighbour was a woman of an entirely different quality.
She was perhaps forty years old, with an oval, heavily made-up face and
the tower of black hair one knows from Japanese prints.  She had a
queenly poise, hooded eyes, and features of almost reptilian
impassivity which occasionally dissolved into expressions of surpassing
wit and malice.  She was the most formidable feminine personality I
think I have ever encountered.  One's eyes were constantly attracted
away from one's more conventional neighbour, for all her pretty ways,
to this glittering she-devil across the table.  She spoke no English,
although she seemed to understand it, and I suspect that most of her
rapier-like asides to Tiger, which always dissolved him in laughter,
consisted of scathing comments on the boorish manners, uncultured
habits and loathsome appearance of the two hulking red-faced pigs on
the other side of the table.

We consumed, in between gallons of _sake_, various enchanting fish
courses, including a kind of thick eel soup that was out of this world.
All Oriental dishes are made to look as delightful as they taste, and
very often it seemed desecration to disturb the still-life arrangement
on one's plate with its minute attention to colour and arrangement.
Needless to say, I had no hesitation in desecrating the lot.

I am not usually considered to be a great hand at tossing the
conversational ball around, but I think on this occasion I can justly
claim to have made the party go.  I achieved this miracle by
challenging my geisha to choose from her limitless repertory, which, I
told her, her intricate education must have furnished, one really
brilliant remark.  'That is what I have always understood geishas are
for,' I teased her.  'I've come half-way round the world to hear what
you are going to say.'  At this, our two geishas burst into peals of
laughter and even the Empress opposite allowed herself a wry titter.
'Come, come,' I urged.  'Just one brilliant aphorism.'

I knew what was coming and my mind was working furiously.  Sure enough,
after a great deal of badinage, I was challenged to say something
brilliant first.  I held up a hand and composed my features into what I
hoped was a Confucian pattern.  'The only good chrysanthemum is a dead
chrysanthemum,' I intoned weightily.  The giggles were doubtful and the
eyes round and rather uncertain.  In Japan, the winter is known as the
Season of the Chrysanthemum and what I had said was a slap in the face
to a great slice of Japan's myth.  The Empress, her eyes glittering,
spat out some words at Tiger who translated: 'She asks why you say
this?'  I looked benignly at the Empress.  'Because,' I pronounced,
'until the chrysanthemums die, the roses cannot begin to bloom.'  At
this, I admit, rather elephantine profundity, there was a moment's
pause for station identification with the Empress and then, at her
reluctant nod of approval, excited applause and expressions of
admiration which culminated in my geisha seizing my hand and saying I
might kiss her, which I did.

Much gratified by a social success which had previously evaded me, I
commanded our two geishas that they should now go through their paces,
upon which they rose giggling and disappeared out of the room, Dick's
to return quickly with a drum and some sort of a triangle which she
proceeded to clonk and ping in a corner of the room, while mine brought
in a drawing-block and paints with which she executed a bamboo sketch.
I asked her to balance the black bamboo with some profound saying in
the blank space on the right.  'You must paint it in your own blood,' I
said.  'The red will complement the black.'  After more screams and
giggling protestations she used a pale crimson to write in the
ideograms which translate as follows: 'The younger bamboo grows higher
than the older bamboo, but the younger will sustain the older.'  We all
applauded vigorously, but I privately judged myself the winner by a
nostril.

As a compliment to my dictum about the roses, Masami then painted a
rose for me, upon which she wrote the pretty, if rather froward
conceit: 'My garden faces East but it is open to all.'

All this, what with compliments and other miscellaneous graciousness,
had taken longer than it sounds, and it was now time for the party to
break up with expressions of esteem and affection and giggling kisses
given and returned.  (The Empress's cheek was like ice, and the peck
she returned was somewhere outside my right ear.)  And then, as the
fans fluttered prettily from the three butterfly figures, the
elephantine Westerners, exuding _sake_ and beautiful thoughts, were
borne happily off into the night.

There remained only our expedition into the countryside and, since our
route was a conventional one and almost ruined by rain, I will be brief
about it.

Accompanied by Tiger Saito, we left by a routine express for Yugawara,
about ten miles south of Mount Fujiyama which was invisible in the low
cloud.  Our objective was a modest Japanese inn, frequented only by
Japanese, and the conventional Japanese bath, the three of us together
in the small, roastingly hot, round pool.  We then drove over the
mountains in mist and pouring rain to a renowned tourist hotel at
Miyanoshita, whose lately-deceased manager had been President of the
International Moustaches Club and where I was delighted to find, in a
prominent position on the wall, a photograph of a great-uncle of mine
whose two-foot moustaches terrified me as a child.  Then to Yamato and
back to Tokyo by the most beautiful train I have ever travelled in--a
streamlined aluminium affair in bright orange that looked as if it
belonged to Mars, but in fact was operated by the Odawara Express Train
Company, a private enterprise which, with its soft, piped music and its
pretty girls in claret uniform dispensing tea and Japanese whisky (very
good, though I, a Scot, say it), could teach British Railways a thing
or two.

And then it was time to pack and say the fond goodbyes, and after a
last and, to me, rather melancholy banquet of raw fish and martinis
with my Orientalist guide, philosopher and friend, Dick Hughes, the
taxi dashed through the suburbs of Tokyo to catch the plane that would
take me, in one hop across the Pacific, to Honolulu.

As the travelogue would put it, Sayonara Japan!  Aloha Hawaii ... on
double Friday the 13th!

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

_Hotels_

Whatever season you visit Tokyo, cable your accommodation reservations
well in advance, and reckon on spending double your normal budget while
you are in the most expensive city in the world.

The _Imperial Hotel Annexe_, to which the reckless always flock, will
cost 6,000 yen (6) a day, but you can get into the original _Imperial
Hotel_, which many people prefer anyway in the autumn and spring, when
bedroom air-conditioning is not required, for two-thirds that price.
For 3,000 yen you can get a good enough room at the _Shiba Park Hotel_,
near by and also operated by the _Imperial_.  The _Nikkatsu_ is almost
as expensive as the _Imperial Annexe_ but more liberal and tolerant
in--shall we say?--its policies.  Because of the demand, there is a
take-it-or-leave-it indifference at the reception desks in most of the
big hotels.

Recommended compromises may be found within fifteen minutes' taxi drive
from the Ginza and the heart of down-town Tokyo.  One such is the
_Matsudaira_--up to 4,000 yen a day for a small air-conditioned suite.
The _Matsudaira_ has an elegant swimming-pool, is quiet and discreet
and caters for foreign airline crews on overnight stop-overs.
Japanese-style inns of good quality like the _Fukudaya_ usually require
an introduction for a _gaijin_ (foreigner).

With the next Olympic Games in the offing, there is a boom in Tokyo
hotel-building, so new names will be rising and maybe old names will be
becoming less autocratic.


_Eating_

Tokyo, to quote an old Zen proverb, is a veritable paradise for
gourmets.  Japanese beef, fish, eels, fruit, mushrooms and vegetables
are unexcelled anywhere, and Hiroshima oysters are reminiscent of
Colchester's.  Eat your fish Western-style in either of the three
Prunier restaurants (in the _Tokyo Kaikan_, the _Imperial_, or opposite
the _Asahi_ newspaper office), in either of the two _Tsujitome_
restaurants (operated by maestro Kaichi Tsuji of Kyoto) or in the
celebrated _Shin Kiraku_ or _Kinsui_ (both at Tsukiji).  The _Crescent_
is currently the most fashionable--which is also to say, the most
expensive--Western-style dining-room in the city.  That old Oriental
delicacy, _smorgasbrod_, is served lavishly in the _Viking Room_ at the
_Imperial Annexe_.  In a city distinguished for its peerless Kobe or
Matsuzaka beef, the _Foreign Correspondents' Club_ will serve you a
superb steak if a member can get you a seat at lunch-time, but a
visitor may prefer the authentic Japanese _Ogawa-ken_ restaurant, where
you are invited to press your finger into the steak before choosing: if
the impression made by your finger lingers, the steak is ready for the
cook and the table.

Don't confine your experiments in the wide and rich field of Japanese
cuisine to the tourist's stand-bys: _sukiyaki_ and _tempura_.  The
first is an indifferent beef stew which the Japanese seldom bother to
eat themselves; the latter is just deep-fried fish, which is tasty
enough but not outstanding.  If you must try it, _sukiyaki_ is
available at any Japanese-style restaurant; the best place for
_tempura_, among hundreds of good places, is the _Hashizen_ in
Shimbashi.

You do not need to be daringly venturesome to try _yakatori_, which is
charcoal-grilled chicken or duck, interspersed with green pimento and
Japanese onions, and spiked _ la brochette_ on bamboo needles.  There
are as many cheap and gay _yakatori_ restaurants and bars in the
swarming labyrinth of alleys around the Ginza as there are _tempura_
and noodle shops.

Be certain not to miss the magnificent _supponnabe_, or snapping
turtle, which is combined soup and flesh cooked at the table in private
rooms at a celebrated restaurant behind the Ginza.  (Addresses are
almost impossible to give in Tokyo but your hotel will write the
location of any of the Tokyo restaurants mentioned for your
taxi-driver.)  Only the poor in spirit will refuse to taste _sashimi_
(sliced raw fish); only the deficient in taste will refuse to repeat
the order.  And, as is well known to all Tokyo old hands, no one ever
has a hangover, no matter what his excesses have been, if before going
home he halts briefly and happily at a reputable bar for some _sushi_
(rice topped with raw fish).

For the truly adventurous, the ancient and famed _Momonjiya_ restaurant
still serves roast monkey, monkey brains and wild boar; there are
haunts near the Tsukiji fish-markets that specialize in the delicious
blow-fish, which can be prepared only in registered kitchens because it
contains a deadly poison; and, finally, the _Taiko_ restaurant (next
door to the _Show Boat_ cabaret) offers, very frankly: 'Soup with
sexual organs of ox and cock; sliced pork ovary with mushrooms; and
sweet and sour sexual organs of ox--all 300 yen (6s.).'  These last
_entres_ are described delicately as 'Tonic Dishes'.


_Night-clubs and Night Life_

Tokyo is a wide-open city--except that there is no gambling.  There is
an embarrassing choice of night-clubs, embarrassing in price as well as
in variety.  The _Copacabana_ is probably the best; it is run by the
handsome and redoubtable Madam Cherry, who recruits most of her
luscious hostesses from Kobe--in Western opinion, the cradle of the
most beautiful Japanese girls.  (The Japanese say that the most
beautiful come from Hokkaido and Niigata.)  The company of a hostess in
the night-club puts you back 1,000 yen (1) an hour.  A foot-loose
visitor will get more incident, value and variety for his money by
roaming the colourful legion of little bars in the crowded,
lantern-hung lanes around the Ginza.  The names are immaterial because
these little bars ceaselessly rise, fall and change hands as the
shifting coteries of sincere Japanese drinkers lurch to new
surroundings and find new bottles and new faces.

Two notable and intimate cabarets which should be visited and compared
are _L'Espoir_, controlled by Beautiful Crystal, an elegant former
dancer, and _Osome_ ('Modesty'), controlled by Dawn of Love, a
voluptuous former geisha from Kyoto.  Both these cabarets compete for
the patronage of Tokyo's smart intellectual set, writers, artists and
politicians (men only, of course).  _Gaijin_ are discreetly and
carefully screened.


_Hints for_ Sake-_drinkers_

Don't be fooled by the apparent mildness of good _sake_.  _Sake_ has an
alcoholic content of twenty per cent.  It should be drunk warm, with
food, and is much better for serious drinkers when poured into
no-nonsense thick china mugs instead of the conventional porcelain
thimbles, which smack of the tea ceremony to good flagon-men.  _Sake_
continues to ferment with age and does not keep much longer than a year
even when bottled and sealed.  Nor does it travel well.  So there are
no such things as _sake_ cellars or _sake_ vintage years.

There is a delicate sweet _sake_, _amakuchi_, and also a more robust
dry _sake_, _karakuchi_.  Tokkyu means 'special class'; _ikkyu_, 'first
class'.  Any type of _sake_ from the Okura Company, especially _tokkyu
Gekke ikan_ ('Laurel Crown'), is excellent; these brewers are purveyors
to the Imperial household.  Another top brand is the Kikumasamune of
Nada (_karakuchi_), which goes well with grilled fish and octopus, but
_not_ with _tempura_.

_Tokkyu_ Taruhe (_karakuchi_) from Yamagata is the Burgundy of _sakes_,
and has too much body to accompany _sashimi_ (raw fish).  With
_sashimi_ take very warm _ikkyu_ Taiheizan (_amakuchi_), which has a
delicate pine tree aroma.  _Tokkyu_ Ryozeki (also from Akita) is
another _amakuchi_ type _sake_ which can be recommended.  Order
Kembishi _sake_ with _tempura_.  When you sample blow-fish the
barkeeper should thrust a fish-fin into your china mug of _karakuchi
sake_.

Don't drink _sake_ with Western food and don't drink _sake_ after plain
rice has ended a Japanese meal.  Officers of the pre-war Imperial
Japanese Navy preferred cold _sake_ as a summer drink to beer.  Today,
young Japanese, to the regret of the old samurai class, are turning to
Japanese-type whisky instead of _sake_.




IV _Honolulu_

'Have a good fright.'  The pretty hostess bowed demurely as I left the
unfortunately-named 'Final Departure Lounge' of Tokyo Airport and
walked out towards the sturdy, four-engined DC-6 of Japan Air Lines,
Flight 614, for Honolulu.  It was ten-thirty in the evening of Friday
the 13th and, thanks to the international date-line, we were due at
Honolulu before we had started--at two thirty-five on the afternoon of
Friday the 13th.  That double Friday the 13th!  Here we go!

I rather enjoy flying.  I like the comparative privacy and quiet of the
hurtling cocoon (now bouncing as well as hurtling as we battled with
the fringes of Typhoon Number Twenty, cosily dubbed 'Emma', which at
that moment was causing havoc around Okinawa), where one can sit and
read books and write up one's notes while people come and cosset you
and positively beg you to drink champagne.  And Japan Air Lines, as I
had expected, had, to an exquisite degree, the desire to please--almost
too much of it.  With the suspicion born of Scots ancestry, a tiny mite
of mistrust built up just above the level of consciousness as gift
after gift 'With the compliments of Japan Air Lines' was heaped upon
me.  The usual travel folder, of course, but also a sandalwood scented
fan, an expensive black moire silk box containing masculine cosmetics,
and finally a thing called a Happi Coat.  This was a sort of
waist-length kimono in black and white with a vast red ideogram on its
back, which I assumed meant 'Happiness'.  Most of the American
passengers put this on, but none of the Japanese, and not I, who
decided to save it up as a round-the-world present for somebody.
Drinks were brought and a midnight snack, and then it was time to climb
into a comfortable bunk and say my thanks and farewells to the Orient
before, via a deep sleep, preparing my mind for the impact of the West.

About four hours later we were almost exactly at the point of no return
between Tokyo and Honolulu, and around 2,000 miles out across the
Pacific.  So far as I was concerned, I had just about passed my
half-way flight distance of 22,696 miles around the world.  I was
awoken by the authoritative voice of the captain.  'Ladies and
gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.  There has been an explosion
in number three engine and a fire, which has been got under control.  I
have no hydraulic pressure.  We have altered course for Wake Island
where I shall carry out a no-flap landing at an unusual altitude and
faster than is the custom.  We shall then be towed to the airport.  I
have made many three-engine landings and also many without hydraulic
pressure, so--see you on the ground!'

Thinking, so much for a double Friday the 13th!  I dressed and climbed
out of my bunk to the ground.  People were sitting very still and
looking straight in front of them.  The steward and the pretty
stewardesses in their kimonos looked as impassive as the Japanese are
supposed to look.  The steward bustled up and moved a Japanese from my
seat and apologized.  The passengers from the front of the plane had
been moved to the back while the fire-fighting went on.  I gazed out of
the window at the dead, blackened engine that now drooped somewhat from
the horizontal.  A beautiful dawn was coming up over the cloudless
horizon.  We had come down to about ten thousand feet and the flat calm
looked positively inviting.  I remembered Monsieur Bombard's
instructions about survival at sea.  One must not struggle, but remain
calm and conserve one's energies, floating as much as possible.  The
salinity of the Pacific, I guessed, would be a help.  I had laughed
when the steward had demonstrated the inflatable life jackets.  'This
is your life vest,' he had said.  'This is your front-side and this is
your back-side.  There is a whistle to blow and a light to shine.'  Now
I tried to remember the further instructions and, above all, not to
inflate the thing until one was outside the aircraft.  We hummed
sturdily on, the aircraft vibrating slightly because of the
unco-operative number three engine.

Half an hour later and there was suddenly a big, four-engined
air-sea-rescue plane with a yellow nose and yellow tail, belonging to
the U.S. Air Force from Wake, only fifty yards away to starboard.  She
stayed there, dead steady, ready to throw out life rafts.  A quarter of
an hour later, far below us, just above the surface of the sea, two PBY
amphibians of the American Navy were shadowing us ready to come down on
the surface and pick up the bits.  I felt greatly reassured and,
remembering my soothsayer's happy predictions and trying to forget the
double Friday the 13th, I shaved and had coffee.  There was a crackle
from the Tannoy and the calm voice of the captain came to us again:
'This is your captain speaking.  To lighten the plane, I am about to
dump fuel, so there will be no smoking please.'  (As if she had heard
the announcement, the air-sea-rescue plane edged away from us.)  'This
aircraft will be unserviceable for many days.  I have been in touch
with our Tokyo headquarters and a relief plane is already on its way.
Not much further to go!'  We all continued to stare straight in front
of us.

In due course, there was the blessed island of Wake, a tiny coral
island fringed with surf and with a big, shallow, pale-green lagoon in
its centre.  We circled gently several times, losing height, and then,
only just above sea level, came in at a good 200 miles an hour.  We hit
the runway smoothly and the captain juggled with his engines to keep us
going straight.  We did a few mild zigzags and then came to rest with a
screech from the tyres.  The fire engines and ambulances swept down on
us and then the blessed hatch opened and we were back on terra firma.

The man who achieved this satisfactory climax was Captain Stuart Baird
of Balboa, California, a United Air Lines pilot loaned to Japan Air
Lines.  I salute him.

Wake Island, which is an important aircraft staging-point, is notable
for having absolutely no air-conditioning.  I had always assumed that
the first civilizing benefits Americans brought to newly acquired
overseas territories were Coca-Cola, corned beef hash, and canned air,
in that order.  It was about ninety-five degrees in the mosquito-netted
Quonsett huts that are the only buildings on Wake, and we spent an
exhausting day nodding enthusiastically as successive ground and crew
personnel came up and assured us how lucky we had been, Bud.  Wake is
one of the homes of the Pacific albatross, now so much disturbed, I
believe, by the aircraft that they are in danger of extermination, but
it was too hot to go and visit their haunts in the mangroves at the
other end of the island.  Instead, I slept gratefully in the spare crew
quarters and gossiped with a man with a spotted dog who was in charge
of quarantined animals--mostly monkeys and parrots en route for the
States after being collected in the East by tourists.  He told me that,
though he liked life on Wake, there was nothing to do there but
skin-dive and teach parrots in transit dirty words to shock their
American owners.

At eight o'clock that night, the relief aircraft from Tokyo arrived
with a director of Japan Air Lines who was extremely nice and polite
and thanked us all 'for our co-operation', though how we were to have
done anything but sit tight and co-operate was not made clear.  More
unguents and scented fans, fresh Happi Coats and then we were out of
the second Friday the 13th and drowsily bound for Honolulu.

      *      *      *

After the zest and delight of Hongkong and Tokyo, I had been dreading
impact with the West, but Honolulu let me down comparatively softly.
To begin with, I had always thought those famous leis you see in the
Matson Line advertisements in American magazines were made of coloured
paper.  But I discovered with pleasure that they are not, and when I
descended from my aeroplane, I was presented with a handsome and very
fragrant garland of white ginger and Vanda orchids.  (I later
discovered that the tariff for these leis is: orchids $3, frangipani or
ginger, $1.50.)  Seven o'clock in the morning, dyspeptic and unshaven,
with U.S. Immigration and Customs in front of you, is not the best time
to be garlanded with flowers, and when, inside the airport, I found the
wash-rooms inscribed '_Kane_' for men and '_Wahime_' for women, I
anticipated that all this aloha stuff might quickly pall.  But I must
admit it was a relief to get to the Moana Surf Riders' Hotel, walk
again on carpet instead of on the highly polished wood floors of Japan,
and rediscover the comforts of a Western hotel bedroom and bath.

The last time I had been in Honolulu had been in 1944 when I had done a
brief spell with the Office of Naval Intelligence in Pearl Harbor.
Then there had been no leis and the Moana and its neighbouring Royal
Hawaiian had been Naval headquarters, camouflaged in black and green.
But now, stepping out on to my balcony directly above the centre of
Waikiki Beach, with Diamond Head glittering in the sun to my left and,
in front, the first surf-riders coming gracefully in towards me on the
creaming breakers, it was impossible to recall the days when Honolulu
had been a fortress and Pearl Harbor a mass of unsalvaged wrecks.  Yet
behind this tropical tourist faade, Hawaii is still, after Okinawa,
America's forward naval base in the Pacific, the advance post for the
Early Warning Defence System and, at this very moment, the centre from
which the cones from the latest guided missiles were in the process of
attempted recovery.  And, since my last visit, Hawaii had come of age.
She had become the fiftieth State of the Union and her population of
over 600,000 had almost doubled since 1944.

It will certainly double again before long, because the islands, of
which there are eight in the group, with an area of 6,500 square miles,
are becoming a tourist resort and retirement paradise second only to
Florida.  This is not surprising.  The islands possess real beauty and
an average, year-round temperature of 75.  (Half-way through November,
the board on the life-saver's cabin on the beach below my room says:
'Air 78, Water 75.')  And jets do the 2,000 miles from the mainland
in about five hours.

For a European, the main disadvantage of the place is the high-pressure
tourist atmosphere and the uniformity of the tourist and retired
population--the men either bulging or scrawny, the women unshapely,
blue-rinsed, rimless-glassed, and all with those tight, rather petulant
mouths of the pensioned American.  If they were dressed in fashions
seemly to their age-group, these elderly hordes would fade into the
background; but, to me, there is something infinitely depressing in
thousands of sixty-eight-year-olds in Hawaiian or any other fancy
dress--the men with aloha shirts and slacks or, worse, knee-length
shorts; the women in over-decorated straw hats and ghastly Mother
Hubbards known as 'muumuus', or other hideous confections described in
the shops as 'holokus', 'flounced holomuus' or, for the cocktail hour,
'sheath tea-timers'.  On the beach, as I was later to observe, these
elderly ghouls looked even worse without their muumuus--huge,
blue-veined, dimpled thighs, scrawny necks and sagging bosoms garlanded
with leis, their broken-down, spavined spouses trailing behind carrying
the coconut mats, the sun oil, the bath robes and the _Wall Street
Journal_.  And, alas, in this and in other similar resorts, there are
so few young people to relieve the eye and restore one's faith in the
human race.  The young people cannot afford the fare or the cost of
these resorts.  If I were a Sheraton or a Hilton, I would reserve a
proportion of my hotel space for young and attractive people and put
them up for next to nothing, both to gladden the eye of the more
hideous customers and perhaps to shame them into dressing their age.

Having had breakfast and thought these harsh thoughts, I decided to get
some of the bile out of my system on a surf board.  By now the whole
sea in front of me, to about half a mile out where the waves began to
gather, was crowded with flying figures and, though I had never tried
the sport before, the guidebook I had purchased at the airport said
that if I could swim and ride a bicycle I could learn to surf.  'South
Sea Scotty' Guletz, who wrote the guide, was, in my case, mistaken.

I hired a beautiful pale-blue board.  It was the Malibu model, made of
balsa wood and coated with fibreglass.  It cost one dollar per hour.
The board is about ten feet long and weighs thirty-five pounds.  I
found that even to lie on it and paddle with both hands out towards the
distant starting point was no mean feat, and I was several times
capsized by the waves before I even got to the fringe of the riders.
(I later discovered that the beach-boy should not have hired me a surf
board without having some assurance that I could handle it,
particularly since the son of an American admiral from Pearl Harbor had
been killed the week before in a welter of crashing boards capsized by
a particularly gigantic wave.)  However, knowing nothing of this, I
paddled on through the speeding experts who bore down on me with every
wave, and in due course I was the requisite half-mile from the shore.
I lay for a while and admired the beautiful distant hills and the
whizzing sunburnt nymphets flying laughing by, Venuses on the
half-shell, pursued by sleekly fat Hawaiian beach-boys, and tried to
keep out of the way of their hurtling boards.

This surf-riding elite, composed of local shop-girls and boys from the
town who seem to have nothing else to do from dawn till dusk but ride
the waves, reminded me of those other superior beings you admire from
afar at other resorts--the aristocracy of ski-teachers, golf and tennis
pros and the like, whom the tourist sucks up to and the women tourists
pay for lessons and dance with in the night-clubs where, in their own
element, they can get on equal terms with the gods.  Here, 'On the
beach at Waikiki', they were just like those other elites all over the
world, getting by on those years of practising some modest expertise,
carefree and apparently far removed from the stresses and strains of
the common herd, and all, perhaps, with that sad ambition to marry a
rich tourist.

These were sour thoughts from the envious mind of a duffer.  After
watching, for the hundredth time, men pick up girls on their shoulders
and carry them effortlessly towards the shore while others pirouetted
on their boards and others whizzed in balancing on one leg, I made
several attempts to emulate the novice's art of just covering a hundred
yards on the stomach.  But, after suffering many bruises and being
several times half-drowned, I paddled back ignominiously towards the
shore and just had enough strength left to heave the thirty-five pounds
of balsa wood up the golden sand to its garage.

The world had shaken gently to herald my arrival in Japan and now, to
greet me in the West, it erupted with equal gentility.

Kilauea, on Hawaii Island, is the most active volcano in the world.
That morning it erupted violently, firing a flaming column of lava a
thousand feet into the sky--the highest lava-toss it has ever achieved.
It maintained this fiery fountain throughout my visit, having
previously remained semi-dormant since 1868.  At lunch-time that day,
over a 'Paradise Slenderama Salad', an eyewitness urged me to fight my
way on to one of the many planes of Aloha Airlines that were taking
tourists to see the sight.  'It makes the Fourth of July look like a
lighted match,' said my informant.  'You'd better go quick.'  I said of
course I would.  I didn't.  I was tired of aeroplanes, and this
terrestrial blow-off seemed to me an aspect of the private life of the
globe into which it would be 'bad joss' to pry.

Instead, as a holiday from the sight of my fellow creatures in muumuus
and aloha shirts, and rejecting the Sheraton Hotel's invitation to
complimentary hula and cha-cha lessons, a flower-arrangement class, and
an open duplicate bridge tournament, I went to the Honolulu Zoo.  I
like zoos and I think this is the prettiest I have ever seen.  It
wanders all over the Kapiolani Park below Diamond Head and is
surrounded by a thick, twelve-foot-high hedge of syringa in bloom--an
excellent deodorizer of zoos.  Here there were cassowaries, emus, a
fine Gibbon ape hurtling round its cage as if desperately trying to run
away from its shadow, an angelic Diana monkey sitting on its hands, a
young black leopard with soft and beautiful golden eyes, brown and
white pandas no bigger than large cats, formidable Great Black
Cockatoos and a unique cageful of Birds of Paradise.  All these were a
rest to the eyes, not excluding the Great Green Iguana, and I stayed
there till dusk.  Outside the gates, the evening paper posters were
saying: 'Oahu Barmaid Claims Rape.'  I was back in the world again!

My hotel had been invaded by six hundred prize-winning staff members of
the General Electric Company.  They wore leis and sat attentively at
long tables under the giant banyan tree in the patio of the Moana,
listening enraptured to a Hawaiian guitar 'combo' accompanying a
Hawaiian song-bird in a grass skirt.  In my youth, to the exasperation
of my family, I had had a weakness for the Hawaiian guitar and I played
records of the Royal Hawaiian Serenaders when I should have been out of
doors killing something.  I even went so far as to have lessons with
the instrument from an Italian woman in Chelsea.  Listening now to the
boinging and moaning, I appreciated my family's exasperation.  Now the
plaintive music sounded like the sort of background stuff that
accompanies 'The Teenage Monster from Outer Space' or the dream
sequences in films about lunatics and drunkards, and I would have
howled like a dog between gulps of my Old-Fashioned had it not been for
the earthy voice of the Sheraton Hotel coming at frequent intervals
over the loudspeaker system: 'On the beach at Waikiki--when you
belonged to me.' 'Mr Fratinelli, please.  Telephone call for Mr
Fratinelli.' 'I have a call for Mrs Finkleberg.  Mrs Finkleberg,
please.'  The guitars whoinged and zinged like a badly sprung mattress.
I slunk to my room.

From a long list of local restaurants, readers of my books will
understand that I immediately settled on 'M.'s Smoke House'.  M., if I
may be allowed the digression, is my fictional head of the Secret
Service.  How like the cunning old rascal, I thought!  Here he is,
quietly salting away Secret Service funds to build up a nice
hard-currency nest-egg to supplement his pension.  I took a taxi down
town and asked the driver about the place.  'Real good eats,' he said
appreciatively.  'You want to go to the mezzanine--place they call the
Cheerio Room.  Best steak and lobster in town.'

'But who is this chap, M.?'

The driver shook his head doubtfully, 'Don't rightly know.  Never seen
him.'

It fitted perfectly!  Sly old devil!  There was probably some American
cutout who acted as the front.  But, alas, it was the week-end, and
M.'s place, cunningly situated between the Chamber of Commerce and the
Bank of Hawaii, was closed.  Regretfully I retired to the Sorrento
Spaghetti House (in America, when in doubt, I always go to an Italian
restaurant) and consumed spaghetti Bolognese with garlic, and a bottle
of 'domestic' Chianti.

Back in my hotel bedroom, I looked out at the sea which lay like
gunmetal under a crescent moon.  One or two night surf-riders were
still at it on the darkened creaming waves.  Far below me, on the
moon-burnt beach, an elderly woman, probably a General Electric
cashier, was holding up her muumuu while the small waves washed her
feet.  She looked forlorn and unloved in this place of the eternal
honeymoon.  The next day, probably, she would be back in Seattle, Iowa,
New Orleans.  Now, in the path of the moon and with the gay flambeaux
and the crooning guitars behind her, she was having her last paddle.
She seemed to represent the tragedy of all ended holidays.  I drew the
jalousies and went to bed.

Going round the world too quickly is like attending a series of dinner
parties and leaving with the soup.  Beneath the surface, Hawaii is
ruled by the five great sugar and pineapple families (Hawaii produces
seventy-five per cent of all the world's pineapple), and queen of this
benevolent syndicate is one powerful old lady.  I had a letter of
introduction to this lady and I would dearly have liked to explore
where-power-resides in this very prosperous fiftieth State of America.
Instead, I drove to the other side of the island and had lunch with the
informative British Consul and his family, and then had to catch my
plane for Los Angeles.  Without many regrets.  The Hawaiian Islands
are, as I have said, of great beauty and, since Captain Cook discovered
them, we should have clung on to them as the 'Sandwich Islands', which
Captain Cook named after the Earl of Sandwich.  But we had presumably
not enough people for these small and distant territories and America
(shame on her!) annexed Hawaii some sixty years ago.  Now Henry Kaiser
(he of the Liberty Ships) is in the process of re-annexing them from
America for tourist development.  The result is that while the outer
islands are still comparatively unspoilt, the main island of Oahu,
containing Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, is just another reservation for
the pensioners and the 'alimoners'.

These factors made it all the more reassuring to get back into the
gracious arms of Japan Air Lines, whom I had once again (who will blame
an airline for one burned-out bearing?) chosen to carry me farther and
who, after a good night's rest (but I do urge J.A.L. not to give one an
omelette stuffed with mushrooms and chopped onions for breakfast),
deposited me shortly after dawn at the thunderous airport of 'The
Angels'.

And now for the full solar-plexus blow of the West!

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE


    Hawaiian legends say that clever MENEHUNES inhabited these islands
    before the Polynesians arrived, about 900 years ago, and that these
    wise 'little folk', or pixies, still live in isolated valleys and
    hidden forests.  They came out to work when needed.  We have chosen
    MOKI the MENEHUNE to be your guide in Hawaii, for who could better
    qualify?

    There are a few ancient grass huts here and there which old
    Islanders cling to, along with old legends and traditions--but for
    modern humans, here are a few elegant substitutes for the old grass
    shack:

    The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Moana, Surfrider, Biltmore, Edgewater,
    Princess Kaiulani, Reef, Breakers, Hawaiiana, Hawaiian Village,
    Halekulani, The Palms.

    All these hotels are at Waikiki, all of them are either right on
    the beach or so near that a few steps take you to those articles
    you came for--sand for lolling and the sea for swimming!  Their
    prices range from $6 to $16 for single rates, and from $7.50 to $28
    for a double, European plan.  The Royal Hawaiian's rates are on the
    American plan, so they are between $32 and $50 a day, double.

    Smaller hotels?  Certainly!  Here are a few around the Waikiki area:

    Coconut Grove, Aina-Luana, Coco Palms, Hale Kai, The Islander,
    King's Surf, Hotel Kaimana, The Kahili, Leialoha Hotel, Lewers
    Apartment-Hotel, Pau Lani, Royal Grove, Waikiki Studio Apartments,
    Comstock, Hotel Pacific Polynesia, with rates from $4.50 to $12.50
    per day, double, or weekly rates from $30 to $50.

    Of course hotels are not limited to Waikiki.  You can stay at the
    Alexander Young Hotel in down-town Honolulu, or the Thailiana Hotel
    near the town of Kailua across the Pali.  There is Cullen's Ranch
    at Hauula, too, if you want a view of lush open spaces.



TO DINE WONDROUSLY


    What sort of food do you like?  Chinese, Korean, sea food?
    Japanese, American, broiled?  Hawaiian, Italian, French-fried?
    Natural fruit-of-the-land such as menehune eat?

    Name your gastronomical delight--we'll show you where to find it!
    All the Waikiki Hotels have panoramic dining-rooms, panoramic from
    up-above looking down, or from the beach-front looking out.  If you
    notice the food at all with all this soul-filling nectar around
    you, you'll find it delicious.

    Then, we'd give you a gentle shove in the direction of Fisherman's
    Wharf for delicacies of the sea; Canlis's Broiler where you throw
    your glasses to the winds, so you can't read the prices but can see
    enough to relish the juice-oozing thick broiled steaks; The Gourmet
    with its Parisian atmosphere and fancy menu.

    Then to Trader Vic's for that South Seas dash; Queen's Surf for
    dining on wave-washed moonlit nights--if there's a dram of romance
    in your soul; The Tropics, both at Waikiki and off the Ala Moana,
    for melting broiled meats; Waikiki Sands for the most reasonable
    and varied salad bar in town; Wagon Wheel for fair-priced American
    fare; Waikiki Lau Yee Chai and Wo Fat's down town for the acme in
    Oriental dishes; the Korean Kitchen for you-know-what.

    There's M.'s Ranch House in Aina Haina and M.'s Smoke House down
    town for charcoal specialities; Rocco's Farmhouse for Italian food;
    Giro's and Alexander Young Hotel's Hob Nob in downtown for American
    food, and Chez Michel's near Wahiawa give you ragout and crpes
    suzette--trs magnifique!



In default of a private eye such as Dick Hughes for the Orient, and
despite the painful quaintness of the style, I can do no better than to
quote these brief extracts from the comprehensive _Hawaiian Guidebook
for Visitors_ by Scotty Guletz (South Sea Scotty).

It accepts no advertising, which is a recommendation, and can be bought
anywhere in Hawaii for one dollar.




V _Los Angeles and Las Vegas_

The Yellow Cab driver was smoking a big cigar at eight o'clock that
morning.  He didn't want to talk.  Neither did I.  I sat and glumly
watched the procession of gas stations and hot-dog stands on the hour's
drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel which is still, despite the modern
attractions of the Beverly Hilton, the friendliest hotel in Hollywood.
I noted the 'Squeeze Inn.  Steaks!' the 'Golf!  Stop and Sock!!!', a
driving range, and the 'Sunset Pest Control' hard by the famous Sunset
Boulevard.  Also, via a detour, I renewed my acquaintance with
America's Waugh Memorial, the cemetery immortalized in _The Loved
One_--and then to yet one more hotel bedroom, the basket of fruit in
cellophane from the manager, and the din of the telephone.

As all foreign authors know, Hollywood likes to have first bite at
anyone who is 'new' and even moderately successful, and at
twelve-thirty I was having lunch in the Brown Derby with a producer who
wanted to make a fortune out of me in exchange for a glass of water and
a crust of bread.  I was treated to the whole smart rag-bag of show-biz
pressure-talk in between Eggs Benedict and those eighty per cent proof
dry martinis that anaesthetize the uvula.  'We gotta see which way the
cookie crumbles, Iarn.'  (There are only first names in Hollywood.)
'Now don't get me wrong, you got a good property there.  Don't throw it
away for peanuts.  As we say, "If you want to throw snow on a stove,
don't bellyache if it melts."'  'Let's play this by ear, Iarn.'  'Of
course you want to make money.  Who doesn't?  But they say around here:
"A Jew worries how much money he's going to lose, an Englishman how
much he'll make, and the American how much _you'll_ make."  Now, at our
studios, we want everybody to make money.  How would it be if...'  And
so it went on, a mixture of hollow bonhomie combined with ultra sharp
horse-trading.

In due course, I fought my way out of the place and went far down town
to visit my old friend, Captain James Hamilton, Head of Intelligence of
the Los Angeles Police Department.  Since I was last there five years
ago, the Police Department has been torn down and rebuilt in marble,
but Captain Hamilton has constructed for himself a replica of his
former office, a grey box with no ornament but a heroin pedlar's pair
of scales and a new acquisition--a map of Sicily.  This seemed a
curious decoration for a police chief's office and I asked him about
it.  He produced a large plan which looked rather like those charts of
an atom being split.  The inter-connected circles contained Italian
surnames.  'I'm really going after the Mafia,' explained Hamilton.  'We
keep on having trouble from them.  A man, an Italian, gets bumped off
for no reason at all.  Two years later, it appears he was one of the
killers of another Italian in Chicago and, in the mobese for murder, he
"had to be hit" for some reason of Mafia politics.  Things like that
keep on cropping up.  I'm going to go on plotting these Mafia families
and then, after somebody's uncle has somebody's cousin bumped off, I'll
have something to start a case on.'

I had always thought that the power of the Mafia in America had been
ridiculously exaggerated by writers and reporters, but when, a year or
so before this, the New York police had rounded up the big Mafia
conference at Appalchin I had been inclined to change my views, and
Captain Hamilton's serious approach to the problem made me think once
again.

This solid bit of police intelligence work in progress is typical of
Hamilton.  He is a powerfully built, good-looking man of Scottish
ancestry, aged about fifty-five, and he has held his post in the second
biggest Police Department in America for some ten years.  He has often
been used by Erie Stanley Gardner as a source of police material and
also by the late Raymond Chandler.  Dragnet was written around the Los
Angeles Police force, and Hamilton provided much of the material and
vetted all the scripts.  When I had last visited him, five years
before, he was finishing an operation to rid Los Angeles of big
out-of-town gangsters who were trying to muscle in on the territory.
He had told me that the Los Angeles police were capable of looking
after local crime, but what they feared were hook-ups with Chicago and
New York mobs which would make his task infinitely more difficult.  So
he put his territory out of bounds to the rest of the American crime
syndicates.  The way he did it was to have one or two innocent-looking
plain-clothes men posted at the airport and the railroad station.  (No
self-respecting gangster would travel across America by motor car.)
These detectives were armed with concealed cameras in a book, an
overnight bag, or some such innocent object.  On the arrival of a plane
or train, they watched the passengers and took photographs of any
suspected or known criminal.  Once identified, the man would be
followed to his hotel or apartment building.  From then on he would be
'leaned upon'.  The process of 'leaning on' an undesirable is
extraordinarily effective.  Whenever Mr X left his room, he would find
two plain-clothes detectives walking at either side of him at his
elbow.  If he went into a drugstore for breakfast, the men would sit on
either side of him and order the same breakfast as he did.  If he took
a cab, the detectives would follow and, when he got out, range
themselves again alongside him.  The same thing would happen at lunch
and dinner.  Not a word would be spoken and the man would not be
molested.  After as little as twenty-four hours of this treatment,
added to the certainty that his telephone was being tapped, the
gangster would have had enough of it and leave town.

But now, Hamilton explained to me, things were not so easy.  The mob
was back in Los Angeles, but this time in the labour protection racket.
He opened the drawer in front of him and passed over a hundred-dollar
bill.  'That was stuffed in one of my men's pockets yesterday by this
guy.'  He had the police card on his desk.  Attached to it was the
usual harsh police photograph.  It showed a glowering man with an
Italian name.  He had a string of convictions for carrying arms,
violence and manslaughter, but his latest description was 'labour
organizer'.  'It's the same old story all over the country, but without
the sub-machine guns', explained Hamilton.  'Protection, extortion,
sabotaged machinery, a fire in your factory.  All under the cloak of
the labour unions.  And, of course, the dues are collected by men like
that'-s-he pointed to the photograph--'and after they've had their cut
the rest goes to the big union bosses who send their kids to Columbia
and Vassar.  They've put away the pineapples and choppers.  Nowadays,
crime's gone respectable.'

'Los Angeles has become a Mecca for the dregs of civilization.' Who
said that?  Not Mr Khrushchev, who was given a most unfriendly welcome
by the town.  Those are the words of the Chief of Los Angeles Police,
W. H. Parker, faced with an annual increase in crime which is
positively staggering, with burglary, grand larceny and rape, for
instance, over one hundred and fifty per cent up over the 1950 rate.
Crime, says the Chief of Police, has increased six times as fast as the
total population of Los Angeles city and twice as fast as all business
activity in Southern California.  But the worst of it, said Hamilton,
was narcotics, and the increase in juvenile crime by around fifty per
cent.  Of the latter, the forthright Chief of Police has written:


Crime among youth is encouraged and nurtured by:

1. The decline and fall of mid-Victorian values in Anglo-American
civilization, leaving the individual to mature in a society that fails
to establish a clear moral definition of right and wrong.

2. The direct influence of adult criminality or, in other cases, by a
passive contempt by a large section of our adult population for law and
order.

3. The increasing emphasis of our society upon not only materialism,
but upon _materialism without effort_.

4. A cultural imbalance between Man's advancement in technology and a
commensurate level of conduct.  Thus we are attempting to substitute
scientific proficiency for social responsibility.


These are strong words.  I dare say we in Britain would second them.

But to return to narcotics.  Captain Hamilton said that the F.B.I. had
estimated that in Los Angeles County alone there were six thousand
confirmed dope-addicts and that the number was now increasing at the
rate of one thousand a month.  These staggering figures (there are four
hundred and forty-two registered drug-addicts in the whole of the
United Kingdom) are due to the almost wide-open supply of narcotics
over the Mexican border, only some hundred and fifty miles away.  There
was no way of controlling this traffic, said Captain Hamilton.  Every
week-end, ten or twenty thousand motor cars cross the frontier for the
Mexican horse-races.  To search this vast number of cars was an
impossibility.  The Mexican Government refused to do anything about
their poppy-growing industry, which was the source of the opium and
heroin.  'What the hell do they want all those poppies for in Mexico?'
said Captain Hamilton angrily.  'Table decoration?  It's time the State
Department did something about it.'  His only hope, he said, was to
make drug-peddling so hazardous that the market would dry up.

'But how the hell are you going to do that?' he asked.  'My department
has to look after four hundred and sixty square miles of territory with
a police force that has increased seven times less than the increase in
crime.  We've 1.88 police officers to every thousand population.  Add
to that the biggest traffic-policing job in the world and you can guess
how many men we've got to spare for the narcotics business.  Last year
the number of narcotic arrests was five thousand seven hundred.  We
seized hundreds of pounds of marihuana, cocaine, heroin, opium, peyote
and the rest.  But that's a drop in the ocean.  With this spread down
to the teenagers (we arrested around two thousand of them for narcotic
violations in 1958), what the heck do the citizens expect us to do?
Nobody likes arresting juveniles--it's a last resort.  But somebody's
got to keep an eye on these kids and save them from themselves.  Their
parents won't do it.'

Hamilton explained: 'You see how it is.  You have a couple with
children.  The father goes out to his business and comes home whacked
in the evening.  The mother wants to earn a bit of extra money, so she
takes some light work in a near-by factory.  There she's got plenty of
company and new friends and some simple manual task that's a million
times easier than looking after a bunch of squawking kids--you know
what hell they can raise.  So the kids are looked after by neighbours
and baby-sitters and, when they are around ten years old, they just go
out on the streets.  Then they get caught up in the local teenage
gangs, start smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor.  Then one of the
older boys says, "Why not try a puff of this?  It really sends you."
Then, a bit later, the older boy says, "You can make good money
peddling these around your school."  And there you are!  The circuit's
complete.'

It all made very clear sense to me, and I said so.  So what was he
doing about it?

Well, said Captain Hamilton, he had tried the obvious
course--penetrating the rings by stool-pigeons.  He had taken young
trainees straight from the Police Academy and had them taught all the
tricks and lingo of the narcotic traffic, fixed them up with dirty
lodgings and off-beat clothes and had sent them into the Los Angeles
underworld like ferrets after rabbits.  In due course these lads moved
from one pedlar to the next until Hamilton had organized a big swoop
and had got one hundred and twenty-six drug-pedlars under arrest.  Then
had come the pay-off.  Thanks to a famous case, The People _v._
McShann, of October 1958, in America the prosecution must disclose the
identity of an individual when he is a material witness.  The judge
ruled accordingly in this instance.  To save the lives of his
stool-pigeons, Hamilton had had to withdraw the charges against ninety
out of the one hundred and twenty-six traffickers.  This McShann
decision effectively prevents the police from using undercover agents
to ferret out crime.  Other recent court decisions restrict the police
in searching a suspect before he is arrested, wire-tapping, or
installing dictographs.  Suspects may now make one private telephone
call from jail, as opposed to the usual police call to the arrested
man's attorney, employer or relative.  This allows one member of a
crime ring, in the course of a seemingly innocent conversation, to
alert all the rest of his gang.

Hamilton had, of course, known the McShann decision before he brought
his case and, to dodge the decision, he had arranged that, after a
stool-pigeon had obtained the address of a trafficker, he would pass
the address back to headquarters and the actual purchase of narcotics
would be carried out by an ordinary plain-clothes detective.  Even this
had not succeeded.  The judge had still ruled that the original
informant, the stool-pigeon, should be produced in court.

Hamilton quoted two typical cases of over-humanized law from an address
given by Virgil Peterson, Director of the Chicago Crime Commission, to
the American Bar Association.  (The Commission is the heir to the
famous 'Secret Six' formed by Chicago businessmen to combat Al Capone
and his rivals.)  In the first case, an officer testified that he was
on his regular beat as a motor-cycle cop when he received a radio call
reporting a burglary in process in an apartment building.  He
immediately went to that address.  Upon finding nothing suspicious on
the first floor, he went to the second floor where he saw two
suspicious-looking men coming towards the stairway leading through the
hall.  He questioned them and observed that the pockets of one of them
were bulging.  Upon searching the two men the officer found a bracelet,
camera and cigarette case engraved with the initials of the victim
whose apartment had just been burgled.  All the property recovered had
been stolen from that apartment.  When the men were taken to court, it
was ruled that the police officer did not observe the men in the hall
committing any crime, nor did he know that, in fact, a crime had been
committed.  Therefore, arrest and search were 'unreasonable'.  The
police evidence was suppressed and the two burglars were turned loose.
One of them had a record going back twenty years with a total of
thirty-nine arrests, a number of which were for burglary and possession
of burglary tools.

On that very same day, June 4th, 1958, two officers who were on routine
patrol saw a black Ford coming out of an alley running parallel to a
bowling establishment.  The officers did not then know that the bowling
alley had been burgled, but the black Ford made a sharp turn at a high
rate of speed and their suspicions were aroused.  They gave chase and
succeeded in forcing the Ford to stop.  One of the men in the Ford
tried to run for it while his confederate remained crouched on the
floor of the car.  On searching the Ford, the officers found 2,455
dollars and some cheques, as well as a sledge-hammer, crowbar and two
guns.  Again the court, applying the Federal exclusionary rule of
evidence, held that when the officers stopped the Ford they did not
then know, in fact, that a crime had been committed and, since they did
not observe the defendants violate the law, the arrest, search and
seizure were unreasonable.  The police evidence was suppressed and the
two burglars were turned loose.  Both had previous criminal records.

These two extraordinary cases rest on Justice Frankfurter's famous
Mallory decision when a convicted rapist appealed to the Supreme Court.
This opinion states that: 'The police may not arrest upon "mere
suspicion", but only upon "probable cause" ... The arrested person may,
of course, be "booked" by the police but he is not to be taken to
police headquarters in order to carry out a process of inquiry that
lends itself, even though not so designed, to elicit damaging
statements to support the arrest and ultimately his guilt.'  On this
decision, Mallory, a confessed and convicted rapist, was turned
loose--as were the burglars mentioned above.

Hamilton said there were countless similar cases of this nature where a
known criminal was protected by an overall humanizing of legal
procedure which, while entirely desirable in the protection of the
innocent from wrongful arrest, search, etc., was, in effect, giving
criminals almost limitless sanctuary.  'If the courts go on leaning too
far backwards to maintain theoretical individual rights,' said
Hamilton, 'we shall end up by tying the hands of law enforcement so
tightly that we shall destroy the first law of the individual--the
right of self-preservation.'

'Here in America,' he said, 'we have got these problems--a vast
narcotics industry that's ruining our youth, teenage gangs, the Mafia,
the big crime syndicates, graft of every kind and description--what
amounts to a soaring crime wave--and the police are being told to do
something about it.  And what happens?  A good officer makes an arrest
of a criminal with a record as long as your arm and next thing he's
pounding a beat for the rest of his life because of some crazy court
decision.  Everybody's in favour of the rights of the citizen, but that
doesn't mean that the drug trafficker should have super-rights.  It
don't make sense.'

I said we also had our troubles in England.  There had recently been
the case of a man called Podola who had shot a policeman and, because
he had got a black eye in the course of his arrest, had almost been
made into a public hero.  It seemed to me there were periods when the
liberal spirit got a little bit out of hand.  On this diplomatic note
we parted company and Captain Hamilton sent me back to the Beverly
Hills Hotel in a prowl car on whose radio I listened to a pair of
police helicopters regulating the traffic on the famous Los Angeles
Freeway over which, with its connecting roads, 630,000 vehicles would
have travelled during this twenty-four hours.  It seemed to me that
Captain Hamilton and the rest of his department had one hell of a
problem fighting crime and the legislature at the same time.  As the
movie mogul had remarked earthily to me at lunch regarding some similar
dichotomy: 'You can't sit on two chairs with one bottom.'

      *      *      *

At night, from an aeroplane, the great gambling resort of Las Vegas
looks like a twinkling golden river in the black vastness of the Mojave
Desert across the high Sierra from Los Angeles.  Alongside the ranks of
slot machines in the small airport is an automatic machine that, in
exchange for a dime, gives you a quick shot of pure oxygen if you apply
your face to a rubber mouthpiece.  This, according to the machine,
stimulates, calms the nerves, and gives you encouragement.  You need
all of that if you are going to take on the casinos, who pay taxes on a
declared profit of $80 million a year but are believed to bring in a
further $450 million that somehow don't get included in the accounts.
I duly indulged with no perceptible result and proceeded to the
Tropicana (happily placed on the corner of Bond Road and the Strip),
the latest of the million-dollar hotels that has sprung up on the
famous Strip.

It was ten o'clock at night and the casino, so arranged in all the
Strip hotels that you cannot move in any direction without passing
through it, was crowded.

It was nearly midnight and I was exhausted after my two high-pressure
days in Hollywood, but I was determined to test out my luck.  I changed
two five-dollar bills into the single silver dollar cartwheels that are
the common currency of Las Vegas and walked boldly up to a dollar
machine.  There is every shape and size of slot machine in Las Vegas,
and the different models swallow anything from a dollar down to a
copper cent.  This one had a particularly intimidating expression.
Heat radiated from its brilliant coloured lights and from its
disgusting machinery, but I thought it looked a worthy opponent for my
strong right arm.  It offered a series of odds ranging up to a jackpot
of $150, and this small fortune suggested that it had been set for a
formidable percentage in favour of the House.  A House can set these
machines to pay any percentage it wishes and they can be adjusted
daily.  Normally the percentage is around ten per cent to the House
but, if a particular establishment is doing badly, a row of machines
can be adjusted to pay a small percentage in favour of the customer.
The news of this bonanza row gets round Las Vegas like lightning and
the slot-machine addicts pour in and fill the establishment up until,
at dead of night, the mechanics come and readjust the odds and the
House gets back into the money again.

I squared up to my monster and fed it ten single dollars.  With each
pull of the handle lights blinked and the stars, oranges, plums and
those three rosy cherries whirred merrily.  Then would come the heavy
clonk as my dollar fell into the damnable iron belly and that deep,
metallic sigh that meant a nil return.  In this way I disbursed very
quickly all my ten dollars and said to myself: 'I told you so.  This
machine has an evil face.  It's an evil machine.  Try and get your
money back on a quarter dollar machine.'  I duly changed a further ten
dollars into quarters and warily examined the ranks of quarter
machines.  Two of them had rather pretty, friendly faces, and, sure
enough, the first of these started to dribble coins back at me.  (In
view of what is to come, I record the fact that the machine is the Star
Chief, number 306/301 in the Tropicana Hotel and it announces in large
letters 'Joker Wild with all winning combinations.  Seventeen ways to a
jackpot.')  I scrabbled these out of the iron mouth and suddenly,
remembering some bowdlerized Nannie's dictum of childhood, it crossed
my mind that it would be lucky not to scrabble them all out but to
leave one behind 'for the pot'.  At once there came more and healthier
dribbles and my right-hand trouser pocket began to get heavy.

Suddenly the handle stuck.  A stony-eyed deputy sheriff with a pistol
hanging from a belt lined with brass cartridges came up.  He gave one
glance at the machine and said, 'You forgot to put a quarter in.
Funny.  Our machines don't work until you put money in them.' I
swallowed the sneer with good grace, and, now inspired, began playing
both the two friendly-looking machines, one with each hand.  Now they
both started sicking up coins for me.  By some miracle I had obviously
struck a couple of one-armed bandits that were really 'hot', and then,
in quick succession, came not one, but two $25 jackpots and coins
fairly vomited out of the machines and even spilt over and rolled on
the floor.  My right leg was almost anchored to the floor by its burden
of silver, and people at neighbouring machines were beginning to stare
at me--the man with the golden arm.  But now the machines were going
cold and only an occasional triple cherry came to cheer me.  Wisely,
and fearing for the seams of my trouser pocket, I went back to the old
grannie at the caisse (no doubt the old girl had lost her pension at
the machines and 'Gamblers Anonymous' had converted her from felon into
wardress) and unloaded my hundredweight of silver in front of her.  She
poured the coins into a perforated aluminium soup plate, pressed a
button and the coins whirled and disappeared down a hole.  Numbers
appeared on the machine and she paid me seventy dollars.

I was so encouraged by my good fortune that I asked for ten dollar
cartwheels to have a last crack at the great iron stomach of my
original enemy, the dollar machine.

One by one they boinged down into the monster's bowels with only two
cherries, plus one orange, to slacken the brute's appetite.  But I now
felt confident.  I somehow knew that, by leaving one coin in its iron
mouth, I was going to hammer this hideous robot.  And then, suddenly,
there they were!  The three silver stars on a green background eyed me
with their three sparkling eyes.  There was a great healthy rattle into
the cup, but not the glorious flushing I had expected.  Uncertainly I
put my hand into the awkward shark's mouth.  There couldn't be more
than fifteen dollars there.  Had the beast defeated me after all by
cheating?

But suddenly the same deputy sheriff with the big gun was at my elbow.
'Hold it, mister,' he said sharply, 'don't move.'  I almost expected
the crash of a gun butt against my skull for having tried to beat the
syndicate, but he merely grunted, 'It's O.K., you hit it.  Now leave it
alone.'  I respectfully stood back and, feeling pregnant with luck,
attacked the next-door machine.  It swallowed six dollars
indifferently.  Then there was my hard-eyed acquaintance back again.
He handed me a parcel of notes.  I counted them.  They came to a
hundred and thirty-five dollars.  'But it says a hundred and fifty
dollars,' I complained.  The man produced his shark-like sneer.  He
gestured towards the iron mouth.  'You've got the rest in there,
mister.' 'Oh yes, sure,' I said, glad that the colloquialism had come
out pat.  I clawed out the rest of the money, changed the cartwheels
with grannie and went off jubilant to bed.

I had had three jackpots.  I had positively hammered the syndicate.  I
spread the money on the bed and counted it.  Two hundred and ten
dollars.  Whoever said the Las Vegas machines were crooked?  The whole
place was a mechanical Christmas tree!  The telephone suddenly jangled.
It was 2 a.m.  Was the syndicate after their cut?  I lifted the
receiver.  A drunken, plaintive voice said, 'Is that you, Mamie?'  I
said sharply, 'No, it isn't, it's her husband,' banged down the
receiver and, pleased with my all-round brilliance and _savoir-faire_,
went to bed after washing the filth of the United States currency off
my hands.  I had taken on the one-armed bandits and, by golly, I'd
licked them!

Some of the hotels and casinos of Las Vegas are owned in a considerable
proportion by gangster money.  These syndicates, as they are politely
named, are four--Texas, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago.  The equally
powerful Miami gang has no money to spare from the equally lucrative
hotel and gambling investments to be found in Florida.  Much conspiracy
is involved in the whole operation and the operations of each hotel,
plus gaming house, are shrouded in secrecy.  Unobtrusive security
arrangements are everywhere, from the numerous house detectives and
deputy sheriffs to the handling of the million or two dollars that flow
into the Strip every day of the year.  From time to time, while play is
at its height in a casino, if you are observant, you will notice a
quiet flurry of movement in and around the tables and slot machines.
The collection of the 'boxes' is going on and the management is very
much on the alert.  The 'boxes' are the treasure chests beneath each
table and inside each machine that collect the money and, from time to
time during the day (play goes on all through the twenty-four hours),
these 'boxes' are whisked away behind the bars of the cashier's
department and thence to the accountancy rooms in some remote corner of
the building.  In a well-protected room in this department, the money
is then counted in the presence of a representative of each of the
major stockholders in the hotel and then, at carefully changed and
staggered hours, an armoured car drives off from the back of the hotel
to deposit the money, or at any rate a proportion of it, in the bank.
This well-oiled piece of machinery operates behind the red plush and
sparkling chandeliers of the 'front of the house' and it is almost
imperceptible.

Suspected cheating by croupiers or customers is also kept under the
closest possible observation and one hotel, the one run by the
Cleveland mob, has closed-circuit television which, if the smallest
suspicion is aroused, surveys the games through dummy ventilation and
lighting fixtures in the ceiling above the table.  Occasionally, as I
recounted to everyone's disbelief in a book called _Diamonds Are
Forever_, punishment has to be meted out to a croupier.  Several years
ago a motorist coming down the highway on the outskirts of the Strip
saw something pink sticking out of the sand amongst the cactus and
tumbleweed.  He stopped to have a closer look.  A naked arm was
sticking out of the ground and the hand was clenched on three aces.
When the police came and dug, they found the man who belonged to the
arm.  He was a well-known card-sharp who had tried to 'take' one of the
poker games that are run in a famous down-town casino.  The warning, of
course, got around quickly.

I have a contact in Las Vegas, a man who works for the Chicago mob as
one of the 'front' men in a leading hotel and it is he who is my
informant in these matters.  We renewed acquaintance on this trip and
he gave me a copy of his own private hints on gambling which he
reserves for his friends.  Since they make sense and since some of my
readers may occasionally visit a casino, here they are:


HOW TO GAMBLE SENSIBLY


    First you must get a strong grip on yourself and defeat the inner
    voice.  You can't beat Aristotle, but you might--just might--trick
    the old boy.  _You can control the psychology that is working
    against you_.

    Decide the maximum amount you will lose and stick to it!  If you
    violate this rule, nothing can help you except Fort Knox.  It's
    better to divide your amount by days so that you can't lose your
    maximum for the whole visit the first day and have to wrestle
    psychology for the rest of your visit.

    Now, here's the hard part: decide the maximum you will win and
    stick to it; this prevents your becoming a jazzy chass [a term of
    contempt describing a winner who is trying to get rich].  If you
    follow these two rules, you're well on the way to having fun
    without pain.

    When you're ready to play, watch the game for a while.  Games run
    hot and cold--that is, for short stretches the house will win or
    lose fairly steadily (naturally winning more than they lose)--try
    to sit in a game on a 'cold' dealer or croupier, when he turns
    'hot' go to another table.

    Your wins and losses will follow unpredictable cycles.  Do not
    double when you lose--double when you win.  Your possibility of
    winning twice in a row is greater than winning after a loss.  [I
    doubt this.  The table has no memory.  F.]

    Set a maximum you will lose on each table.  When you lose it, go to
    another table.  If you get ahead, put aside some pre-decided
    portion of your winnings, and if you get down to that, quit the
    table and go to another.  This process will limit your loss on each
    table and, if you hit a streak of luck, will let you get away from
    the table ahead of the game (maybe, perhaps, could be, could not
    be).

    Above all else, if you catch yourself making a bet and thinking of
    the things you could buy with the amount of the bet, QUIT!  Never
    let the amount you are betting become large enough to be important
    to you!

    Nothing or no one can give you a system for winning; but if you
    follow these simple rules you can control your losses and enjoy
    your visit.


I spent the rest of the next day doing a slow crawl of the fabulous
hotels and enjoying every fabulous sight, from the garage that offered
'free aspirin' to the Wee Kirk o' the Heather with its wishing seat,
and the neighbouring Hitching Post with its wishing well, where you can
get a quick Nevada divorce.  I also noticed the 'Cambridge Institute of
Sleep Education.  "Learn While You Sleep".'  (On the corner of Maine
and Fremont, in case I have any students among my readers!)  I won my
lunch at the Golden Nugget, my favourite down-town casino, which, in
addition to every kind of gambling game and device, has a Dow Jones
ticker and a Scoreboard giving the result of all major sports
throughout the States.  There the sheriffs have flatter stomachs and
the atmosphere is Western and gas-lit.  It is a real pro place and the
customers are pros--crew-cut desperadoes with Western hats and
incipient stomachs, Cubans and Mexicans with sharp clothes and
toothpicks rolling along their teeth, and the usual mob of blue-rinsed
women tugging away at the machines, their sharp, greedy eyes watching
the whirring plums and cherries as if they hated them.  These
caricatures of humanity carry their coins in children's buckets and it
is them, and not the big gambler, the syndicates love.  Inevitably, so
long as they play, they will leave their ten per cent behind, whereas
the big gambler at the crap table might get hot and take the syndicate
to the cleaners, as did one young G.I. who achieved fifteen straight
passes at craps--a momentarily bitter experience for the House, but one
that has turned out to be the finest bit of promotion work Las Vegas
has ever achieved.  (Incidentally, if you can master the game, craps is
by far the fairest game to play in an American casino.  The House's
edge is only 1.41 per cent, whereas in American roulette, with two
zeros, the House's edge is 5.26 per cent for even-money bets, compared
with the European single zero wheel where the odds are only 1.35 per
cent against.)

For those who seek further and more expert information on gambling
odds, I commend an article in the _Saturday Evening Post_ of November
21st, 1959, by Professor Philip Fox of the University of Wisconsin, who
has really taken the subject apart.  Two interesting quotations from
the Professor's article which I noted down are: 'People lose the
ability to discriminate when they are confronted by vast numbers.  They
have no concept of what 1,000,000 really means.  Maybe I can dramatize
the difficulty by pointing out that 1,000,000 days since the birth of
Christ will not have been recorded until A.D. 2738.'  The next is:
'When I see a "student of form" poring over a dope sheet, I recall a
remark made by the late Colonel Edward Bradley who bred four Kentucky
Derby winners: "There are fifty-four different ways the best horse in a
race can lose honestly."'

That evening I had an excellent dinner at the Thunderbird and then a
crack at the black-jack at the Desert Inn, by far the nicest hotel in
Las Vegas and full of action.  Black-jack is our old vingt-et-un of
childhood days, but here it is played for large stakes by the grown-ups
with a seven per cent take for the House.  The green baize cloth is
sternly inscribed 'Banker must draw on 16 and stand on 17'.  I lost
twenty dollars quickly and happily.  Happily because the table was a
happy one and the dealer, crew-cut and horn-rimmed, was rather
charmingly cynical about the game and his customers.  I then moved on
to another table where the dealer looked tougher but stupider.  I
doubled up, had a whisky 'on the house' from a pretty girl with very
little on, and made fifty dollars.  On that, I wisely closed my
gambling season, and after a short night's sleep at the Tropicana, left
by United Air Lines for Chicago.

After paying all overheads, I had hammered the syndicates for one
hundred dollars and three stolen ash-trays!

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

Los Angeles--or correctly, El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los
Angeles de Portucula--is blessed with first-rate hotels,
apartment-hotels and motels.

Good restaurants abound, from the expensive to medium-priced, from
gourmet class and expense-account category to the family trade.

Among the top hotels are the _Statler-Hilton_ in down-town Los Angeles;
the _Hotel Ambassador_ with its two-acre lawn fronting one of the
world's busiest thoroughfares, Wilshire Boulevard, running east to
west, sixteen miles, from Pershing Square to the Pacific Ocean (in the
Ambassador is the _Coconut Grove_, one of the best night-clubs in L.A.,
and three good restaurants); and the _Town House_.

The _Beverley Hills Hotel_, on Sunset Boulevard, has the atmosphere of
a luxurious country club; excellent service and run by Mr Stuart
Hathaway, who visits London and the Continent every year--'to see
hotels and improve our own.'

The _Beverly Hilton_, gay, smart, smooth, is the newest in Los Angeles
County and is a show-place.  The restaurants, _L'Escoffier_ on the roof
with a superb view of the city and the ocean and the mountains, the
_Rathskeller_, and the _Traders_, are first class.

Next to the _Rathskeller_ is the _Red Lion_, a Beverly Hills version of
a pub, with tartan-covered walls, a fireplace, and a very good lunch in
comfort and quiet.  No women are permitted in the Red Lion until after
3.30 p.m.

The _Beverly Wilshire Hotel_, also on Wilshire Boulevard, has been
refurbished by the proprietress, Mrs Evelyn Sharp, and has a
magnificent coffee-shop, with drugstore attached.

Along Sunset Boulevard, towards the Ocean, is the _Hotel Bel Air_, in
the form of a long hacienda with bungalows attached, set with gardens
and patios.  It is one of the most charming hotels in the Southern
California area--and expensive.  Royalty and ex-royalty, like Princess
Soraya, like it.  It is secluded, private, and tranquil, has an
excellent restaurant and very good service, and a good bar with three
knowledgeable bartenders.

The Sunset Strip, a section of Sunset Boulevard between Hollywood and
Beverly Hills, is the night-spot and cabaret and coffee-house area.  At
the night-spots, it is wise to inquire as to the couvert and minimum,
otherwise the bill may be smashing.

Los Angeles is not a night town, although tourists can find whatever
they want, from girls to grog, even on the Strip which is policed by
the Sheriff's Department as it is in the Los Angeles County area.

The top entertainers and the revues are in Las Vegas, where the money
is and where the hotel casinos can afford the investment because the
people gamble as well as gambol.

Disneyland and Marineland should be included in the grand tour, and at
both places there are good restaurants.

One spot, the _Malibu Sports Club_ restaurant, on the Pacific Coast
Highway, is fascinating--it is on a fishing pier and you dine right
over the ocean.  At sunset, it is superb; by moonlight, romantic; and
the cuisine is de luxe.  It is run by a bon vivant and gourmet, Henry
Guttman, also an actor-singer of parts.

      *      *      *

Las Vegas, world's gambling capital--and the sky's the limit, from a
dime in the one-armed bandits up and up--is a fantastic caravanserai.

Smack in the middle of the desert, on a plateau, with a superb backdrop
of mountain peaks, Las Vegas offers tourist, visitor and gambler an
incomparable variety of motels and hotels.  The hotels are super
gambling casinos.  As you enter and walk through the foyer, batteries
of slot-machines beckon.  Twenty-four hours a day there is the click of
chips, the clink of silver dollars, the cacophony of the machines and
the overtone of piped-in music.

In the vicinity of hotel or motel, there is never tranquillity or
silence.  Silence in Las Vegas scares folks.

But in the air-conditioned luxury suites of the _Tropicana_, the
_Desert Inn_, the _Dunes_, the _Sands_, the gaudy _Flamingo_, the
sprawling _Sahara_ (Marlene Dietrich's pied--terre in Nevada), the
_Riviera_ and the _Thunderbird_, the music can be muted, and from a
colossal chaise-longue you can watch British and French show-girls
sunning and frolicking in antiseptic sunshine in the late afternoon,
around vast Roman swimming-pools, or revel in superb sunsets painting
the peaks in purples and crimsons and ochres.

Each hotel has an identity and atmosphere.

The _Sands_, noted for summit meetings of the Group, formerly the Clan,
headed by Mr Frank Sinatra, a director, often aided by Messrs Dean
Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr, Joey Bishop and composer Jimmy
Van Heusen--well, the _Sands_ is always jumping.

Noted for a fine cuisine, the _Copa Room_ is a surprisingly spacious
cabaret, with week in, week out, a top show.

The _Tropicana's Theatre Restaurant_ is as well equipped as a West End
theatre, currently sports the Folies Bergre Revue, 'direct from Paris'.

The _Dunes_ boasts of Minsky's Follies of 1961 starring the renowned
ecdysiast, Lili St Cyr, a charming, stately blonde who reads Proust
while taking a bubble bath in public.

At the _New Frontier_ there's a revue, 'Oriental Holiday', with scores
of nude Nipponese, and the Imperial Japanese Dancers, in costumes
ceremonial and abbreviated.

Girls, the long-stemmed type, are very popular in Las Vegas; a show is
considered incomplete without at least a score of them.

'The cash customers like 'em,' says Mr Ben Goffstein, the _Tropicana's_
boniface, a former Manhattan newspaperman who, after a quarter of a
century on the Las Vegas plateau, knows what the customers like.

The Strip, a short stretch of the highway which ribbons through the
desert and cleaves Las Vegas, gleams and glitters at night with the
neoned hostelries and gambling casinos.  During the day it is dusty and
pallid.

The night is beneficent to Las Vegas.  Against the vast black velvet of
the heavens, star-gleaming, there is a carnival quality about this
incredible oasis, incongruously named after the swamps which once were
near by.

Recommended and expensive is the _Aku-Aku Restaurant_ in the grounds of
the _Stardust Hotel_.  Dinners Oriental and Polynesian  la carte, from
6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Recommended anywhere in Las Vegas are steaks, provided you will be
specific to your waiter or chef, like 'charred both sides' or 'just
rare' or 'medium'.  Without exception, the restaurants provide
charcoal-broiled steaks, and without exception, a steak and a salad,
cheese and coffee is enough.

The California varietal wines are pleasant.  The blazing heat of summer
seems to affect imported wines and in any case, Nevada is a hard-liquor
drinking state.

Recommended too, the fishing on near-by Lake Meade, and water-skiing if
you have the energy.

N.B. For the shallow pocket, down town is more rewarding than up town.




VI _Chicago_

The early papers were saying 'Great Lakes Freeze as Cold Snap Hits'.
It had been summer all the way from Hong Kong, but now I was travelling
back into winter and the prospect was depressing.  The United Air Lines
plane levelled out over the Hoover Dam and we made for the Great Divide
and the Middle West across Utah and Colorado, Nebraska and Missouri and
into Illinois, white with snow, while I consumed Old Forrester on the
rocks and an early Nabakov, just published in the States, _Invitation
to a Beheading_, which reminds me that, on my entire trip round the
world, I never saw a single other passenger reading a book in any of
the many planes in which I travelled.  Everyone read magazines or
studied business correspondence, or just sat and looked out of the
window at nothing.  One further small literary aside: on no airport
bookstall after Zrich did I see a single British magazine or newspaper
of any kind, though everywhere there was _Time_, _Life_, and
_Newsweek_.  Come to think of it, we have no publication in England
that could stand up to the remarkable technical job these publications
do in covering world affairs from the American viewpoint.  They are a
splendid show-case for the American way of life--whatever that
hackneyed slogan means--entertaining, splendidly illustrated, and
remarkably frank about the dark side of America.  Musing on the
subject, it seemed to me that only a revamped version of the
_Illustrated London News_ could possibly provide comparable reading
matter with an English and Commonwealth slant for the foreign traveller.

Chicago Midway Airport is one of the most congested in the world and
one of the most dangerous.  (A four-engined freight plane crashed into
a neighbouring housing estate two days after my own landing and, when I
came to leave, planes were queueing nose to tail and taking off at
minute intervals.)

I should have taken the helicopter (chopper or whirlybird in the
vernacular) to Meigs Airfield on Chicago's lake front, but I did not
know about the service, and it took me an hour, through some of the
grimmest suburbs in the world, to get to my hotel, where, for the
second time in succession--the same thing had happened at Las Vegas--I
was shown at first attempt into an already occupied room.  The
much-vaunted American efficiency should look to its vaunt.  When I had
got to the correct room, I picked up the telephone and asked what the
time difference was with New York, which I wanted to call (in fact, it
is one hour ahead).  The girl said she didn't know but would ask the
supervisor.  The supervisor also didn't know and connected me with long
distance.  Believe it or not, the long distance operator also didn't
know and offered to put me on to the Weather Bureau!  I finally gave up
and called New York anyway.

In Chicago, I had put myself in the hands of _Playboy_, the new
magazine sensation that has already passed _Esquire_ in sales.
_Playboy_ is a highly sophisticated cross between _Esquire_ and
_Cosmopolitan_, with a pinch of _New Yorker_ and _Confidential_ added.
It is housed in the smartest modern newspaper building I have ever seen
and peopled entirely by the prettiest girls in America and some of the
brightest young men.  My photograph shows the bearded editor, Ray
Russell; Charles Beaumont, one of America's newest novelists and a
passionate writer on motor racing; and the back of the head of the
prettiest private secretary in the world.  She is just taking a note of
what I wanted to do during my brief stay--learn about crime in Chicago
today, pay a sentimental visit to some of the geographical high spots
of the Capone era, and--no doubt to the reader's surprise--spend one
whole afternoon in the Chicago Art Institute.

My next visit was to Ray Brennan, the famous crime reporter of the
Chicago _Sun-Times_, who was to instruct me on item one.  Ray Brennan,
for thirty years one of the toughest men on America's crime beat, knew
all the answers.  Yes, of course Chicago was still riddled with crime,
he said.  But, as with Los Angeles, nowadays the gangster preferred to
operate without guns.  The labour rackets were just as effective and,
on the face of it, law-abiding.  The Mr Big of Chicago was now a
certain Tony Accardo.  Marshal Caifano was another big shot.  Paul 'The
Waiter' Ricca had temporarily left the stage to serve three years for
income-tax evasion at Terre Haute, the country club of American
prisons.  Number four was Joey Glimco who was Hoffa's local
representative and head of the taxi-cab union.  All these men had acted
'The Great Stone Face', i.e. pleaded the fifth amendment, before the
Federal Grand Jury investigating organized crime in Chicago.

Tony Accardo, openly described in the newspapers as 'Crime Syndicate
Kingpin', is a typical example of the new-fashioned mobster.  He is
handsome, well-dressed, well-educated and an excellent golfer.  He
lives in a large mansion in the smartest section of River Forest, the
fashionable suburb of Chicago.  He gives generously to charities and
takes his wife and children regularly to Mass on Sundays.  His famous
Fourth of July parties are attended by leading citizens including
high-up politicians, and he had just completed a European tour to
London, Venice, Rome and the Riviera with his wife, giving interviews
to the local press as if they had been Chicago's mayor and mayoress.
An interesting feature of this semi-royal tour was that his companion
throughout the tour was a Lieutenant Anthony Degrazio of the Chicago
Police Department, who, not long before my arrival in Chicago, had been
charged by his furious Department with 'conduct unbecoming an officer
and disobedience--consorting with a known criminal'.  Civil service
proceedings against him were then under way.

Marshal Caifano, 'convicted auto thief and bank robber', has an equally
respectable front: in his case, the famous Tam o' Shanter Golf and
Country Club, whose election committee were perhaps ignorant of the
fact that Caifano was arraigned as a suspect in the Chicago
gangland-style killing of Francis 'The Immune' Maritote and Charles
'Cherry Nose' Gioe in 1958.  When F.B.I. agents were working a close
tail on Caifano during the recent Chicago crime hearings, one of them
joked: 'We were sticking so close to Golfer Caifano that we were
worried one of us might get killed by his back swing.'

Paul 'The Waiter' Ricca, having chosen jail in preference to
deportation to Italy where he has been under sentence for two murders
ever since he fled to America, also has a fine mansion on Bonny Brae
Road, River Forest, and some idea of his financial standing can be
gained from the government claim for nearly $250,000 unpaid taxes.

These were the sort of men, said Ray Brennan, who now ruled Chicago
gangland.  I asked if he could give me a typical example of the sort of
operation from which nowadays the mobsters made their millions.  The
steady income, said Brennan, came, of course, from drugs, prostitution,
and gambling, all of which were rife in the town and particularly in
the neighbouring territory of Cicero, a great battlefield in the old
Capone days.  But, like everywhere else in America, it was labour and
similar rackets that were most popular.  'Give you an example,' said
Brennan.  'An operation we call "The Sweetheart Arrangement".  So you
open a new bar, Fleming's Bar, down on Blank Street.  So a union comes
along and you've got two or three help, so you have to buy union cards
at five dollars a month to cover those three help.  They don't pay
anything and they don't get any benefits.  The money just goes back to
the mob.  Then another branch of the mob comes along, the caterers or
the wine merchants, all owned by the mob.  So you have to buy your wine
and your steak, even your olives, from one of these suppliers.  You say
you won't do it?  I'll tell you what happens.  The mob owns the police
captain of your district, pays him perhaps $100, $200 a month, and
every bar is covered by hundreds of by-laws--lighting, heating,
fire-escape regulations and so forth.  Well, there are dozens of ways
you can break any of those without knowing it and the captain will have
your joint closed down.  Even better, you're serving at your bar and a
fellow with a beard comes in and asks for a Scotch.  You give him the
Scotch and he drinks half of it.  In comes a cop who has been waiting
for just that.  The guy with the beard is sixteen years old, a minor,
and you'll be in real trouble for serving liquor to a minor.  The gang
has got plenty of these bearded teenagers available and they just
planted one on you to teach you not to be troublesome.  And so it goes
on.  You're just little people.  The bigger ones have fires and
sabotage and strikes if they don't pay up or deal through the merchants
they are told to deal through.  Quite simple really.  If you manage to
dodge these troubles and you're going ahead and doing good business,
the mob comes along and says they'd like to invest--just twenty-five
per cent maybe.  But of course they don't actually put up any money.
They just get the twenty-five per cent.  So there you are, ending up as
an employee of the gangs, a front man for a mob enterprise.'

Brennan agreed that of course plenty of violence still went on.  'Give
you an example.  Only last month a man called Richard Hauff who's got a
golf club around here and is a bit of a mystery man about town, was
pistol-whipped one evening while he was out on a midnight date with a
hoodlum's ex-wife.  A few minutes later the police picked up for
questioning a certain Cosmo Orlando who used to own the Melody
Casino--a local honky-tonk.  Orlando's an ex-convict.  The police found
him hiding in bushes a block from the beating up.  You know what his
alibi was?  He said, "I was out for a walk."  Not so long before that,
a man called Carlo "Bananas" Urbaniti got five years for the possession
and sale of heroin.  He and two F.B.I. agents called Love and Ripa were
all wounded in a gun battle when the G-men raided a River Grove tavern.
Around about that time a certain Joseph Broge, a so-called beer
distributor, was ambushed and shot down.  Turned out he had been
distributing pornographic gramophone records for a company belonging to
a certain Sam Giancana who was once Capone's chief gunman.  We get
something like that from time to time, but it's nothing like the old
days when there were pitched gun battles going on all over the town.'

Brennan had just written the life story of Roger 'The Terrible' Touhy
of the famous Touhy Gang that had brewed beer in Prohibition days and
had stood up to all the other gangs, including Capone's.  Touhy had
been mixed up with Jake 'The Barber' Factor, now a real-estate operator
in California and at one time wanted for extradition to England for a
two-million-pound stock swindle.  Touhy was arrested, falsely he says,
for the 'kidnapping' of Factor and he had just cleared himself of that
charge and of the remainder of his ninety-nine years' sentence.  He
came out of jail the day after I left Chicago.  Brennan's book, _The
Stolen Years_, brings back all the gun-smoke scent of the blood-stained
'thirties in Chicago.

The next day, with two friends from _Playboy_, I took a car and we
revisited some of the famous gangster black spots of the era.  The
first on our list was the Cathedral of the Holy Name on the steps of
which a gangster in search of sanctuary had been shot down in broad
daylight.  Opposite the cathedral was the site of O'Bannion's famous
flower-shop on the corner of State and Superior.

O'Bannion was the victim of a famous handshake murder.  He was clipping
the stems of a bunch of chrysanthemums in the florist's which was the
cover for his bootlegging and hijacking operations, when a blue sedan
stopped outside the entrance and three men came in.

'Hallo, boys, are you from Mike's for the wreath?' O'Bannion held out
his hand.

'Yes,' replied the leading man, firmly grasping the hand.  'We are.'

The negro porter who related this then heard six deliberate shots and,
after a pause, the finishing shot through the head.

O'Bannion's funeral was the greatest gangster funeral ever seen.  The
body was borne through the town in a solid silver coffin resting on a
bed of roses; twenty-two bearers carried floral tributes, and they were
followed by a famous jazz band which played hymns during the
procession.  Ten thousand mourners attended the funeral, at which the
finest wreath, costing a thousand dollars, came from the man who had
ordered the killing, Al Capone.

The property has not flourished since O'Bannion's day.  Now it is half
a deserted parking-lot and half a grimy rooming-house whose ground
floor is devoted to the Cappa Club for Young Christian workers.

We proceeded to Wabash Avenue, between State and Michigan, where Big
Jim Colossimo had the warehouses where the hijacked whisky was taken.
Now the warehouses have gone, and instead there is the Three Minit Car
Wash, the Thompson Electric Company (truck parts), Madam Eden,
Phrenologist, and the Sun-Kist Lanes Bowling Alley, together with a
small shop advertising 'Live Bait, Nite Crawlers'.  But behind this
block, the El still crashes by on its way to the famous Loop in central
Chicago, and the police sirens distantly wail.  It is an area full of
ghosts.

Then to the site of the famous garage where the St Valentine's Day
Massacre took place at 2108 Clark Street, another grimy neighbourhood,
with the garage area replaced by the Belle Vue Hand Laundry and
Balaton's Barber Shop.

After killing off the O'Bannion gang, Al Capone went for Bugs Moran and
his mob, and seven of them were the victims of the famous St
Valentine's Day Massacre: they were machine-gunned in a garage by three
mobsters dressed in police uniforms, though Bugs Moran himself was not
among the dead.

Opposite, the grimy lace curtains in the windows were drawn as they
must have been when the gunmen, disguised as police, peered from behind
them, their tommy-guns at the ready, as they watched for Bugs Moran's
gang to come to their last rendezvous.

The Biograph on Lincoln Avenue, where John Dillinger was shot down, is
unchanged, with dusty naked lights in the roof and round the small
central box office where Dillinger bought the tickets for himself and
the famous Girl in Red who had informed on him to the police and knew
that he would die as soon as the film was over.  While the film was
going on, police surrounded the cinema with orders to shoot to kill
and, when Dillinger and the Girl in Red came out, she dropped her bag,
stopped to pick it up, and Dillinger walked into the flaming guns.  He
shot back and got into the little alley next door.  He was finally
killed in the mouth of the alley and the second telephone post in the
alley still has the bullet holes of the killing.  The girl got a
$30,000 award 'for information' and Dillinger's gang never caught up
with her.

Today it is still a meagre, depressed area with its 'Biograph Barber
Shop', 'Schneider's Tuxedos' and 'Valentine Pest Control' staring from
across the road at the fateful cinema, outside which the crowd had
fought for a scrap of the great killer's clothing or a lock of his
hair.  Two hundred dollars was bid for his silk shirt, and for days
afterwards scraps of paper 'stained with his blood' were sold outside
the Biograph for a dollar apiece.  Today the old Biograph, dingy in its
black and red paint, clamours for you to 'See our laff and thrill
show'.  This place, too, is haunted.  It was time for a drink.

That afternoon, to wash the smut of ancient crime out of my mind, I
repaired to the Chicago Art Institute.  I had been there once before
when it firmly established itself as my favourite picture gallery in
the world.  Here, if you like the French Impressionists, there is
everything--rooms full of Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, with at least
twenty superb examples of each.  The Toulouse-Lautrecs are as fine as
any in the world and the Czannes and Gauguins, let alone the Picassos,
are of a quality not to be seen at the Jeu de Paume, and possibly not
even in Russia.  It was a Saturday afternoon, but the spacious,
beautifully-lit gallery was almost empty, though the Christmas-card
shop on the ground floor was crowded.  This was the first really
peaceful time I had had to myself for three weeks, and I made good use
of it before getting back to my accustomed beat--dinner with my
newly-found friends in the famous Pump Room of the Ambassador Hotel and
a visit to the hottest strip-tease in town at the Silver Frolics, a
display in a large ballroom, full of commercial travellers and other
businessmen, of positively exquisite boredom and lack of finesse.

And so, my brains boiling with a fine confusion of impressions, to bed.

(Ten days later, in London, editing these notes on Chicago, I read in
the evening paper that, while I was editing them, Roger 'The Terrible'
Touhy was ambushed and killed by two gunmen dressed as policemen in
West Side, Chicago.  He and a retired police sergeant, with whom he had
spent the night discussing Brennan's book, were mown down from behind
by five sawn-off shotgun blasts.  Touhy had been released from prison
on November 24th after serving twenty-six years.  Somebody from the
blood-stained Capone era has a very long memory indeed!)

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

_Hotels_

Reservations should be made in advance, for ever since the days of
Abraham Lincoln Chicago has been inundated with conventions and
conferences.

If the aim is somewhere central, the big hotels in the area of the
Loop--like the _Palmer House_, the _Sheraton_, the _Pick-Congress_, the
_Sherman_, the _Sheraton-Blackstone_--would be the obvious choice.  To
give an idea of price range, a single room at another of these Loop
hotels, the Conrad Hilton, can be had for $7 to $17 a day.

Rush Street, on the Near North Side, is the centre of Chicago night
life, and the _Ambassador Hotels_ (the _Ambassador East_ and the
_Ambassador West_) are within easy range of it.  Expect to pay about
$15 for a single room in these quietly expensive five-star hostelries.

_Executive House_, where prices for a single room start at $12,
overlooks the Chicago River, which flows backwards through the city; it
has attractive modern furniture and a generally new look.  In the same
bracket is the _Drake Hotel_ (starting price $9).

Newspapermen favour the _St Clair_, which is not extravagantly priced
and houses what is probably the most handsomely-appointed Press Club in
the United States.  This is one block off elegant Michigan Avenue, and
near it is the _Eastgate_, another comfortable place to stay.

People who bring their cars would be well advised to put up at a motel.
The _Lake Tower Motel_ is conveniently placed in the middle of town,
while a good one on the north side is the _Sands_.  To the south, there
is the 50_th-on-the Lake Motel_.  Advantages of staying in a motel
include the absence of a tipping line.


_Restaurants_

Chicagoans boast that their restaurants of many and varied
nationalities enable a visitor to 'eat around the world' without
leaving the city.  This is true, and Chicago's Chinese and Japanese
restaurants are probably the best in America outside San Francisco.

At the _Azuma House_ one can sit on cushions, having removed one's
shoes, round a table where excellent sukiyaki is prepared _sur place_.
The _Shangri-La_ offers a lavish Cantonese menu.

At the _Epicurean_, chicken paprika and other Hungarian dishes attract
many musicians and artists: the host calls himself the Strudel King.
In most American cities you can find a moderately-priced Italian
restaurant where that vast wheel, the pizza pie, is consumed by a
single customer with ease and relish; the Chicago specialists are at
the _Pizzerias Uno_ and _Due_.  You can have cocktails outdoors at
_Riccardo's_ sidewalk caf and restaurant, which has Neapolitan food
and singing waiters.  Also recommended is _El Bianco_, featuring a
cheese and _antipasta_ trolley.

The _Red Star Inn_ is German, with a long and not expensive menu which
includes stuffed young goose.  A modest place where you bring your own
wine is the _Caf Azteca_, where, as one would expect, the food is
Mexican.  Don't miss _Jacques' French Restaurant_, where you dine
outdoors in summer.

Among the de luxe restaurants, the most fabulous is the Pump Room at
the _Hotel Ambassador East_, which is supposed to recall Beau Nash and
eighteenth-century Bath, but throws in waiters bearing flaming food on
swords and Gertrude Lawrence ice-cream, _flamb_ at your table.

Also extremely expensive but smaller and more intimate is the _Red
Carpet_, whose cuisine is mostly French with a Haitian accent.

If among-the-tables musicians are no objection, try _Sasha's_, a small
place with a daily 'gourmet's choice'.  This is fairly new, and so is
_Maison Lafite_, which also offers exotic dishes, mostly French.

Just one whiff of that vast butchery, the Chicago stockyards, is enough
to make a sensitive person abjure meat for ever.  Yet the _Sirloin
Room_ at the _Stock Yard Inn_ is listed among the thirty best
restaurants in America.  You mount the 'steak throne', pick the piece
you want, and put your brand on it.  The raw meat is then cooked the
way you like it, and if this is _bleu_, better specify very, very rare.
Not surprisingly, there are many other Chicago restaurants which
specialize in steak.

With its splendid waterfront, Chicago also has first-class 'seafood'
restaurants, and one of the best is the _Cape Cod Room_ at the _Drake
Hotel_.

The three best-known resorts for dinner, dancing and cabaret are the
_Empire Room_ in the _Palmer House Hotel_, the _Chez Paris_, where you
can hear such celebrities as Nat 'King' Cole, Sammy Davis Jr and that
lugubrious girl Keely Smith, and the _Boulevard Room_ at the _Conrad
Hilton_, where there is usually an ice show.

Among the smaller clubs are the _Orchid_, where Frances Faye may be
singing about her strange friends; and _Mister Kelly's_ or the
_Cloister_, where you can savour the gibes of Mike and Elaine or Mort
Sahl.  Another choice spot is the _Junior Room_ at the _Black Orchid_,
which, like the others, is on the Near North Side.

Something special, requiring a member's key to get in, is the _Gaslight
Club_, where nude portraits enliven the Victorian decor and you can
enjoy, if such is your taste, the society of advertising executives on
lavish expense accounts.

Jazz buffs make for the _Blue Note_ and the bands of such leaders as
Basie and Duke Ellington.  For Dixieland music, go to _Jazz, Ltd_.
There are many others, Chicago being a well-known centre of the art.

Late-late-late snacks are served until six in the morning at the
_Tradewinds_, where stage, sporting and other notables meet in the
small hours.


Chicago's major sightseeing targets are detailed in the guide-books,
but do not overlook the Chicago Historical Society in Lincoln Park,
which not only specializes in local lore but also dramatizes American
history in an interesting series of period rooms.  Above all, don't
miss the Chicago Art Institute.  It has the finest French
Impressionists outside Russia.

A leisurely drive along the twenty-five miles of magnificent lake front
is an absolute must.  Those who go night-clubbing should stay up long
enough to see the sun rise over Lake Michigan.




VII _New York_

I enjoyed myself least of all in New York.  It was my last lap and
perhaps I was getting tired, but each time I come back (and I have
revisited the city every year since the war) I feel that it has lost
more of its heart.  Steel and concrete, aluminium and copper sheathing
for the new buildings, have smothered the brownstone streets that had
so much warmth in the old days.  The whole of the beautiful Washington
Square area has disappeared, and up town the new resettlement
areas--vast blocks of tiny apartments for the negroes and the Puerto
Ricans--have now overwhelmed the old happy sprawl of Harlem.

There are still thrilling moments--when your taxi goes over the hump on
Park Avenue at 69th Street and the lights turn to red and you pause and
watch them all go green the whole way down to 46th, your heart turns
over for New York.  But this is an architectural, a physical, thrill.
Go into the first drugstore, ask your way from a passer-by, and the
indifference and harshness of the New Yorker cuts the old affection for
the city out of your body as sharply as a surgeon's knife.  It is
partly the hysterical pursuit of money, the fast buck, that chills, but
it is also the disdain of the New Yorker for the guy who doesn't know
his way about, who isn't on the inside.

In New York you don't get politeness unless you pay for it.  Here, the
tipping system has gone mad.  You are ruled by the head waiter, the
bell captain, the reservation clerk, the credit manager and the
black-market theatre-ticket operator.  They are the Establishment, and
you must be 'in' with these people or you will sink without trace.
And, of course, in New York the expense-account aristocracy have
increasingly ruined one's old haunts, deflating the quality of the food
and inflating the prices.  (At Christmas-time and New Year, for
instance, fifty-dollar bills are slipped into head waiters' hands all
over America so that they will 'look after you' in the following year.)
The latest expense-account joke is that two businessmen are having
luncheon together.  When the check comes, one man says, 'Give me that,
I'm on an expense account, it's deductible.'  The other man quickly
snatches the check from him, 'No you don't.  I'm on cost-plus.  I can
make a profit on it.'

My attitude was perhaps soured by the fact that there were only three
days to go before Thanksgiving, when all America eats turkey with
cranberry sauce, and my name was mud throughout the country because Mr
Arthur S. Flemming, U.S. Secretary of Health, had announced the week
before an almost nation-wide ban on the sale of cranberries.  This
fantastically unpopular pronouncement by the Food and Drug
Administration had been due to the fact that two shipments of
cranberries from the Pacific North-West crop were found to contain a
residue of a chemical weed-killer, aminotriozole, which can cause
cancer in rats.  Hundreds and thousands of pounds of cranberries and
cranberry products were seized, and no cranberries could be sold unless
they had been cleared by laboratory tests.  So this certainly wasn't a
good time for any Fleming to be around in the United States.

In addition, New York, and indeed the whole of America, was traversing
yet another of those troughs of moral depression and self-chastisement
they have suffered so frequently since the war, starting with the
McCarthy scandals, then the revelations about Murder Inc., the Little
Rock affair, the ghastly wave of juvenile crime, Mr Sherman Adams of
the White House and the Affair of the Vicuna Coat, the Teamster Union
hearings with their appalling revelation of rackets all through the
labour world, the smashing success of Russia's sputniks, and now,
finally and worst of all because it struck at practically every home in
America, the television scandals and the confessions of Charles van
Doren, a national hero.  These confessions and the wholesale
revelations of dishonesty in other branches and amongst other local
heroes in the television business hit America in her conscience as hard
as when the Chicago White Sox were accused of taking bribes to lose the
1919 baseball World Series.  Then, it is said, a small boy went up to
his hero, an outfielder, 'Shoeless Joe' Jackson, and pleaded, 'Say it
ain't so, Joe.'  Now the whole nation was making the same plea to its
current idol; but it was so, a thousand times so, and America was
beating its collective breast so dismally that one felt it only needed
a scandal at the heart of the White House or in the hierarchy of the
Roman Catholic Church for the whole nation to commit _hara-kiri_.

No nation likes to be held up before the world as a pack of fools and
crooks, and everyone I met seemed to have a load of guilt and
foreboding on his shoulders already sore from self-flagellation.
'There's worse to come yet,' they were moaning on Madison Avenue, the
home of the television and advertising moguls.  'They're investigating
the ratings systems now.  After that they're going to get after the
local station heads.  If you give a disc jockey a hundred bucks a week
payola to plug just one record, how much do you think the station head
pulls in for closing his eyes to it?  And think of all the other
programmes that are subject to plugging.  I can tell you, Iarn, if you
want to get any programme, a detective series say or a variety show, on
to these local stations all over America, you've got to square the
station head first or he'll take your rival's programme and get squared
by him.  Payola accounts for upward of twenty-five per cent of the
network's overheads.'

The same psychology showed itself in occasional bitter, self-defensive
cracks at England.  'Glad to hear your country's getting back on its
feet, Iarn.  But I hate to say this, and don't misunderstand me.  That
paying-off of your debt to the International Monetary Fund, you know,
that last 360 million.  Well now, don't misunderstand me, but running
this country costs around $81 billion every year and that 360 million
you turned in would be just about enough to run the United States for
one day.'

But what was riling New York particularly when I went through was a
lengthy indictment, 'The Shame of New York' for which America's
reputable liberal weekly the Nation had cleared one whole issue.  'The
Shame of New York' was an investigation by two journalists of repute,
Fred Cook and Gene Gleason, into the rackets behind New York municipal
government.  Written with vitriol and apparent authenticity, the
authors had taken New York apart, from the Mayor down to the cop on the
beat, starting with the interesting statistics that there are an
estimated nine million rats in New York compared with the eight million
population (two citizens were actually gnawed to death by rats in
1959), and that the city's police force of twenty-four thousand men is
an army larger than the military forces of many Latin American
countries.  There is not room here to give more than a specimen quote
of the eighty-page indictment, but this, from the introduction, is
typical:


CITY WITHOUT A SOUL


    The illnesses of New York are many and they run deep.  The
    ruthlessness of large-scale redevelopment, cloaked under the
    laudable aim of slum clearance, is only one of many cankers.
    Wherever you turn, there is crime.  Some sections of the city are
    veritable jungles, the streets unsafe at night, the more remote
    sections of beautiful parks unsafe even in the day-time.
    Periodically, youthful gangs explode in violence that makes
    sickening, sensational headlines.  There are gang fights, muggings,
    rapes in the schools, murders.  It is commonplace for a horrified
    Press to blame these excesses upon the especial 'depravity' of the
    new, rising and degenerate generation.  But it is perhaps even more
    reasonable to view them as the expressions of a sick society--as
    the kind of outbursts that are inevitable in a city that, in many
    respects, has lost its very soul.


And this, a few lines later on, from a Tammany Hall veteran who talked
to the authors:


    Every town has its Tammany Hall.  I'm no lily, but this is the
    limit.  I've never seen it so bad in a lifetime of politics.  You
    ask me what's wrong with Tammany Hall?  The Mafia.  The underworld
    and the leaders they control--and a Press agentry that makes a fool
    of Lincoln's statement that you can't fool all of the people all of
    the time.

    If it is not Frank Costello today, it is whoever can make it pay
    for the privilege of making book, numbers, pimping, selling junk
    [dope] or anything else that is illegal.  Today, if a political
    boss arrived at his office and found that in his absence the Mayor,
    the Governor and Genovese [Vito Genovese, often called the
    kingmaker of gangdom], had phoned, he would call Genovese back
    first.

    Like anywhere, the little guy in the street wants a ticket fixed.
    Or maybe he wants to get on or off a jury.  But he's paying one
    helluva price for it in the long run.  Can't they see the fantastic
    and open connections of politics with the mob?  It doesn't make any
    difference what the party is.  I can name you one election in this
    town some years ago where all the top candidates were controlled by
    the mob.  One was owned by Thomas (Three-Finger Brown) Luchese; one
    by Costello; one by Genovese.  The mob couldn't lose.  They had it
    sewed up.


Well, there it is--New York as seen by two New Yorkers.  Perhaps my
instinct that the town was rapidly losing its heart hadn't been so
wrong.

The truth of the matter is that the East sharpens one's mind about the
West and, by comparison with the Orient, I had learnt and sensed in Los
Angeles, Chicago and New York that America is temporarily in poor
health and she is very conscious of the fact.  Her scientific know-how
has been shown up by the Russians, her industrial know-how by the six
months' steel strike and by the Teamsters and other union
investigations, and now her private morals have suffered under the
microscope of the television investigations.  What is the matter?  I
suppose, and many intelligent American writers support my suspicion,
that she has four basic troubles--first, the collapse of the family
unit which today hardly exists in American towns; secondly, Momism and
the vast economic power (via alimony, inheritance and other factors)
held by women in America; thirdly, self-hypnotism about the 'American
way of life', a concept which needs drastic re-examination by those who
invented the slogan; and, fourthly, escapism and flight from reality,
whether this takes the shape of the television myth and the enchanted
world of the ad. man which seek to show people as better than they know
perfectly well they are, or of such escapist drugs as the tranquillizer
pill, the fat blue sleeping-pill, and the psychoanalyst's couch.

On this latter point, the abdication of free will to the chemical
companies, Mr Dan Jacobson had an interesting comment on drugs in a
recent issue of the _Spectator_.  He wrote:


    Surely, it is clear that what the totalitarian state tries to do to
    its citizens is something very similar to what the drug-taker is
    doing to himself.  He is denying his self the right to its own
    misery, its own happiness, its own unpredictability; he invades
    himself with a weapon from outside, and destroys what is most
    spontaneously alive and sentient within him.

    Perhaps the inviolability of the individual is a nineteenth-century
    superstition, and we are all going to end up, as Aldous Huxley has
    prophesied, drug-addicts of a kind; perhaps the totalitarian State
    of the future will realize how much more easily it can bring about
    its aims through the judicious use of tranquillizers and
    stimulants, rather than through mass-rallies and death-camps.


Whatever is going on in American society, those who love America and
have many American friends can only mourn the way the world's stripling
'most likely to succeed in the class of 1900' and heir to world
supremacy is growing up.  Fortunately the country has a strongly
beating heart and, once you have that, the marginal frailties, if taken
in time, can be quickly subordinated.  If taken in time!  But the
watching grandparents are worried and the body-snatchers sharpen their
knives.

These are depressing reflections, but they are widely shared in America
where, as I have said, they create an atmosphere of deep malaise from
which I was glad to escape; and, anyway, I was longing to be off on the
last lap.  Rather sadly I repaired to the oyster bar in Grand Central
Station and consumed with relish perhaps the only dish that has
maintained its integrity in the New York of my experience--creamed
oyster stew with crackers, and Miller's High Life beer--and then I was
off to Idlewild.  It was time for home.

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

_Hotels_

(_Out-of-date and uninspired, I fear--as would be a year-old guide to
any capital city._)

We all know about the _Waldorf-Astoria_, roosting-place of kings,
queens, presidents and press lords; and the _Pierre_, where Barbara
Hutton is to be found when in New York; and the now overrated _St
Regis_, where Edith Sitwell and her brothers stay; and the _Plaza_,
whose wedding-cake style (_circa_ 1907) did not deter the late Frank
Lloyd Wright from living there.

The _Stanhope_, opposite the Metropolitan Museum, is a less obvious
choice, although it is also a five-star hotel, where a single room
costs something in the area of $16 a night.  Mrs Jesse Sharp, who owns
it, aims to give the kind of service you expect in London but seldom
get in New York, and guests who indicate the time of their arrival are
even met at the pier or airport.  A quiet, immensely dignified place
where you get individual, tender, loving care.

The _Carlyle_, also up-town on the East Side, and also five-star, is
another hotel of character; it has preserved its decorum in spite of
the unaccustomed publicity which hits it during the occasional visits
of the President and his entourage.

In the same general area is the _Volney_; as this hotel has been for
years the home of Dorothy Parker, it must be beyond criticism.
Five-star, of course.

Mention of Dorothy Parker recalls the days of the celebrated Round
Table and Alexander Woollcott at the _Algonquin_.  This is a good place
to stay if you wish to be within strolling distance of Broadway
theatres.  Sir Laurence Olivier lives at the _Algonquin_ when he is in
New York, and so does Terence Rattigan.

This is not quite so outrageously expensive as some, and neither is the
_Warwick_, which is also convenient for the theatre.  Remember, in
telling taxi-drivers to go to the _Warwick Hotel_, that although the
second W is silent in English, it is pronounced in American, otherwise
utter confusion will result--say 'Worwick'.

A modest-looking hotel down town on East 39th Street is one of the most
expensive: this is the _Tuscany_, which is considered more chic than
the huge places that resemble Grand Central Station at the rush-hour,
and pay you about as much attention.  Rates here are from about $17 to
$22 a night for a single room, but that includes a colour TV set and a
refrigerator.

The _New Weston_ is less expensive and more conveniently situated for
the Fifth Avenue shops, but it is infested with English people.

Really cheap hotels are generally unappetizing, but a pleasant one,
with single rooms (with bath or shower) ranging from $5 to $10 a night,
is the _George Washington_, on the fringe of Greenwich Village near
Gramercy Park.  Right in the Village, the _Van Rensselaer_ is another
good choice among less expensive places.


_Restaurants_

There are so many restaurants in New York that probably the best way to
choose is to walk slowly until you see one you like.

One of the most expensive, where the French food is superb, is the
_Chambord_, unpretentiously situated on Third Avenue.  The bill for
dinner for two, with aperitifs and wine, will probably run from about
$30 to $60.  Serious eaters also frequent _L'Armorique_ on Second
Avenue.  For sumptuous decor, magnificently embossed menus, big-name
clients and grandly expensive dishes with resounding classical names,
try the _Forum of the Twelve Caesars_.

This is very, very expensive, and so is the _Four Seasons_, launched by
the same company, with opulent settings (changed four times yearly) to
match the impressive bronze Seagram Building where it is situated.
Here, too, is the _Brasserie_, more moderately priced, and open for
twenty-four hours daily.  Another experience not to be missed is
luncheon or late dinner at the '_21_' _Club_.  Fashionable and also
madly expensive places where one goes to see and be seen are the
_Colony_ (not to be confused with the _Colony Club_) and _Le Pavilion_,
where the celebrated Henri Soul provides exquisite food.

On the moderate side, a good place for lunch is _Le Chanteclair_, where
you will find Stirling Moss and other racing motorists when they are in
New York.  For tremendous portions of Italian food, try _Leone's_: it
is not far from Madison Square Garden, and boxers and other sporting
characters frequent it.  Two very pleasant French places are _Le Moal_
on Third Avenue (Normandy and Provenal cuisine) and _La Toque
Blanche_, near United Nations.  A really cheap French place is the
_Champlain_, on the West Side not far from Rockefeller Center; it is
packed full and terribly noisy, however.

If you are looking for a not too expensive place for after-theatre
supper, think of _Sardi's_: although familiar Broadway faces are on
exhibit and most of the menu is not cheap, there are reasonably priced
choices among the snacks.

Every visitor should try a delicatessen at least once, to sample the
American way of life.  The _Stage Delicatessen_ is full of Broadway
characters and also of the exuberant talk of the owner, Max Asna.  When
broke, there is always the automat of _Horn and Hardnut_, and
_Glorifried Ham'n Eggs_.


Outside of _El Morocco_ and the _Stork Club_ (both for dancing) and the
_Copacabana_ (where there is cabaret), and the rest of the well-trodden
night-spot trail, one might try Julius Monk's _Upstairs at the
Downstairs_ and the _Downstairs at the Upstairs_.  Both these
whimsically-named joints are under the same roof on West 56th Street:
go to the _Downstairs_ for sophisticated songs at the piano, and to the
_Upstairs_ for a full-length revue.  No dancing, but drinks and/or
supper.

For jazz, there is the famous _Birdland_ on Broadway, and the equally
celebrated _Jimmy Ryan's_ on West 52nd Street, among many others.  For
the rest, it depends on who is currently performing.  There may be
somebody interesting at the _Blue Angel_ or the _Embers_.  In Greenwich
Village, I would pick the _Bon Soir_, especially when Mae Barnes is
singing there, or the _Village Vanguard_, which was the jumping-off
place for Harry Belafonte, and, more recently, Miriam Makeba from South
Africa.

In the small hours, one of the noted bars on Third Avenue is in order.
Say _Costello's_ near 44th Street, or _P. J. Clarke's_, where a
hamburger tastes good at about 3.30 a.m.


If you make the mistake of omitting the trip to the top of the Empire
State Building as being too banal for your notice, look down on the
city from a helicopter, price five dollars.  Poets read every night at
2 a.m. at the _Seven Arts Coffee Gallery_, a 'beat' haunt near Times
Square.  And don't miss Staten Island, which has a shabby, run-down
charm and is reached by New York's best bargain, a five-cent ferry from
the Battery.

      *      *      *

So that was that.  I had gone round the world in thirty days, and all I
had to show for the journey was a handful of pretty light-weight
impressions and some superficial and occasionally disrespectful
comment.  Had I then, have I today, no more serious message for Britain
from the great world outside?

Well, I have, but it is only a brief and rather dull exhortation to our
young to 'Go East, young man!'  See the Pacific Ocean and die!

It was a source of constant depression to observe how little of our own
influence was left in that great half of the world where we did so much
of the pioneering.  I cannot remember meeting a single Briton all the
way from Hong Kong to New York, with the exception of the British
Consul in Hawaii.  Of course, Japan was conquered and occupied by the
Americans, and American culture, communications and trade have almost a
monopoly of the Pacific.  They are even penetrating Australia, our last
and, because of the miracle of her athletic prowess, most glamorous
bastion.  But it is a measure of our surrender that there are, I think,
only three staff correspondents, excluding Reuter, covering the entire
Orient for the British press, and our trading posts are everywhere in
retreat.

So a trip round the world, however hasty, brings home all too vividly
the fantastically rapid contraction of our influence, commercial and
cultural, over half the globe, and our apparent lack of interest in
what can broadly be described as the Orient.

Can this contraction be halted or even reversed?  Only, I think, if the
spirit of adventure which opened the Orient to us can be rekindled and
our youth can heave itself off its featherbed and stream out and off
across the world again.

One way for a young man to do this, if he hasn't got the _Sunday Times_
behind him, is to take a job as a steward or deckhand in a ship, any
ship, and go and see the other side of the world for himself.  Travel
broadens the mind and it is broad minds we need in a world that is so
very much broader than the posters of travel agents suggest.

After this trite little homily, back to the _Sunday Times_.

My series, as I have said, entertained readers of the paper and, since
it is in the nature of good editors to flog a successful formula until
it is well and truly dead, in the spring of 1960 I was cajoled into
taking to the road again, but this time round a narrower circuit--round
the thrilling cities of Europe.




VIII _Hamburg_

She was a big girl with a good figure.  She wore nothing but a frilly
white bathing-cap and short black bathing-trunks.  During the fight in
the pool of peat mud she had become streaked with the stuff, and one
wondered how she would ever get clean again.  With a ferocious shout of
'Huzza!!' she put her head down and charged the smaller girl with
ferocity.  The smaller girl gave a realistic 'Ouch!' as the bathing-cap
hit her square in the stomach, she then described an elegant cartwheel
over the larger girl's head and fell with a dull squelch into the black
morass.  There was clapping and cat-calling from the predominantly male
audience.  The referee, a girl in gold lam, began to count.

It was two o'clock in the morning in Hamburg.  I was in the inner heart
of the notorious St Pauli night-club district.  This heart is
appropriately called 'Die Grosse Freiheit'--the Great Freedom--and in
this small area survives the last bastion in Europe of 'anything goes'.

I had come here by way of Ostend, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Haarlem,
Wilhelmshaven and Bremen on the first leg of what was to be a
six-thousand-mile tour of the thrilling cities of Europe.

Appropriately enough, as I thought, Europe had greeted me with
flowers--so many flowers that in the end one was almost sickened by the
profusion of graceful stalks bowing to the northern, Simenon weather
and by the eternally smiling faces.

Rotterdam was in the grip of the spring _Floriade_ and then, from
Leiden well past Haarlem, the thousands of acres of tulip and hyacinth
fields spread their patchwork quilt over the dull landscape.  Even the
rubbish heaps in the fields were composed entirely of flower petals,
and the Belgian cars driving back after the week-end were decked in
huge garlands of red, yellow and 'black' tulips.  It is the
predominance of these harsh colours in the fields--the acres upon acres
of red, yellow and deep purple--that tire the eye and the senses.  The
occasional fields of cream and slate-blue hyacinths are a relief, and
in individual nurseries there are, of course, all the rarer varieties
down to the tiny striped and spike-leaved tulips, but the great masses
of colour in these strong tones are exhausting.

From there on (why do Dutch cows wear overcoats?[*]), northwards over
the wonderful sixteen-mile dyke across the Zuider Zee, one enters the
beautiful lost worlds of Friesia and Lower Saxony, and I kept always as
close as possible to the coast to savour the forlorn,
riddle-of-the-sands atmosphere and to get a glimpse of the chain of
West and East Friesian Islands--signposts towards that group of
names--Wilhelmshaven, Bremen, Bremerhaven, Cuxhaven, the Kiel
Canal--which possess that authentic ring of ill omen for anyone who has
served, however briefly, in the Royal Navy.


[*] A correspondent suggested it is to identify and protect a cow in
calf.


The last time I had paid serious attention to these island
names--Wangerooge, Spiekeroog, Norderney, Borkum--was when, as a young
lieutenant R.N.V.R. in the Naval Intelligence Division in 1939, I had
studied them endlessly on Admiralty charts and put up a succession of
plans whereby I and an equally intrepid wireless operator should be
transported to the group by submarine and there dig ourselves in, to
report the sailings of U-boats and the movements of the German fleet.
Everything in those foolhardy minutes on Admiralty dockets was thought
out, everything provided for.  There would be a pedal generator for the
wireless set, we would live on shellfish, my excellent (as I claimed)
knowledge of German would be enough to bluff our way out of trouble in
case some inquisitive fisherman turned up.  What nonsense they were,
those romantic Red Indian day-dreams so many of us indulged in at the
beginning of the war--to blow up the Iron Gates on the Danube, to
parachute into Berlin and assassinate Hitler, and all the rest!  When I
ordered a drink amongst the gaunt, endless ruins of Wilhelmshaven on my
way to Hamburg, the contrast between the waiter's Low German and my own
Bavarian-Tyrolean mixture told me just how long I would have survived
on Wangerooge!

These war-time memories, that one had thought banished for ever in
1946, come back in a town like Wilhelmshaven where the giant U-boat
pens still clutter up the harbour front, and where vast chunks of
blasted concrete lie among tangles of rusted metal.  One seems still to
hear the ghostly strains of 'Wir fahren gegen Engel-land' whispering of
the days before the bombs, the days of Iron Crosses, of daggers of
honour and of secret weapons that would win the war for Germany.  And
then one hears the giant whistle of the bombs that shattered the dream.
It was good to escape these ghosts for the warmth and life of Hamburg.


When the referee had counted to nine, and the taller woman was standing
facing the audience with her hands clasped victoriously above her head,
silently the smaller one got up from the mud, took two large handfuls
of the stuff, crept up behind her adversary and crammed them down the
seat of her bathing pants.  With a howl of delight from the audience,
the fight went on until, appropriately, the smaller girl tripped the
larger, who measured her length with a terrific explosion of mud
fragments which caused the front row of spectators to pull over their
heads the sheets with which the thoughtful management had provided
them.  The bout was awarded to the small girl, a stage was slid over
the huge bath of mud and we proceeded to the bucolic pleasures of 'They
also sin in the Alps', described aptly as a 'Sex Nacht revue'.

All this and much more, until four o'clock in the morning, takes place
in the Bikini, but the hardy night-hawk has still got a choice of some
twenty other haunts from the Galopp, where semi-nude women ride horses
round and round a small ring, through Casanova with its 'Strip-tease
Explosiv', and an indeterminate Lokal advertising in English, 'You get
here the strongest beer of the world', the Aladin where guitars twang
softly all the night, to the Erotic, and on beyond.

The Erotic (_Sinnlich!  Schamlos!  Sundig!_--Sensual, Shameless,
Sinful) concentrates on giving value for money, and four shows are
displayed more or less at the same time.  First, on a small stage,
there is conventional strip-tease backed up by a semi-transparent panel
in the wall through which the performers may be seen clothing
themselves before their appearance.  At each interval there is a serial
semi-blue film depicting pretty girls with nothing on cavorting on a
rocky seascape which might be somewhere in the south of France, but is
more probably in the Baltic.  And, for good measure, an assortment of
full-size colour photographs of nudes are shown on an adjoining panel
in the wall.  All these you can see for about five shillings while an
agreeable half-hour passes.

Now all this may sound pretty devilish in cold print on a Sunday
morning in England, but in fact, except to the exceedingly chaste, it
is all good clean German fun.  People are cheerful.  They laugh and
applaud and whistle at a kind of erotic dumb crambo which is yet
totally unlascivious.  Everybody wandering up and down the garish,
brightly lit alleys seems engaged in a light-hearted conspiracy to
_pretend_ that 'anything goes'.  When you have been into one night-club
you have got the tone of all of them, and the tone is a homely and
harmless 'good time' to be topped off perhaps by a visit to the
Zillertal, a gigantic Bavarian beer hall with a brass band that blows
and beats to crack the windows, where everyone's eyes are glazed with
beer and where the waitresses scream dramatically as they get pinched.

For those who are not finished off by these pleasures there is the
Blauer Peter, which does not open until four o'clock in the morning and
closes, roughly, at midday.  Here you can enjoy really hot jazz by
small combination bands, as you also will at the New Orleans which
specializes in Dixieland jazz.

If you are in search of sin more solid than these naiveties, you walk
across the broad street of the Reeperbahn (Ropemakers' Walk) and up
Davidstrasse, past the bogus-Dutch block of the police station that
cuts into the pretty faade of the St Pauli theatre.  Fifty yards up
this street on your right you will find a tiny alley protected from
prying eyes by a tall wooden barrier bearing the words 'Adolescents
forbidden'.  When you go through this, you are greeted by a most
astonishing sight--the brilliantly lit alley, blocked also at the other
end, is thronged, like a long stage or narrow piazza, with strolling
men.  At first sight, the neat, three-storied houses on both sides of
the alley are like any others except that they are all brightly lit as
if for a gala occasion, but when you stroll down the alley you find
that the bottom floors have been turned into wide show-cases elegantly
furnished and decorated to resemble small parlours or drawing-rooms,
and, in each show-case, sitting in comfortable chairs or lounging on
chaises-longues, are girls of varying ages and charms, all scantily,
though not immodestly, dressed.  These girls are, to put it bluntly,
'for sale' at a price, I am reliably informed, of twenty Reichsmarks.

This street is no guilty hole-in-the-corner business such as we know in
England, but a brightly lit, colourful, gay place of pleasure and
laughter.  During my visit (purely in the interests of sociological
research!) there was not a drunken man to be seen, and if there had
been I gather he would have been thrown out of the street by the two
policemen who stand nonchalantly by the entrance.  Some of the girls in
the show-cases looked pretty bored with the whole procedure, but most
of them smiled and chatted away or got on with their knitting or petit
point with studied nonchalance.  The street, I gather, operates
throughout the twenty-four hours, with a population of some three
hundred girls who do six-hour shifts.  The street and the houses are
spotlessly clean and medical supervision is very strict.

Prostitution is not legal in the rest of Germany, but Hamburg, after
brief enslavement under Hitler, is once again a 'Free City' and a law
unto itself.  Far from being shy about St Pauli and the Davidstrasse,
it is extremely proud of its liberal attitude towards the weaknesses of
mankind.  It is not in the least impressed that France and, more
recently, Italy have outlawed prostitution and driven it underground
with the inevitable results--protection rackets, disease and
squalor--which we know so well in England.  The Hamburg patriarchs,
with a tradition of enlightened municipal government dating from
Charlemagne who founded the city in A.D. 811, cannot understand that
two great nations such as France and Italy, so proud of their social
and cultural freedoms, should have allowed two blue-stocking women,
Marthe Richard, Minister of the Interior under the first post-war
French government, and Signora Merlin, an Italian Senator, to dictate
the morals of two such 'passionate' peoples.  In Hamburg, normal
heterosexual 'vice' is permitted to exist in appropriate 'reservations'
and on condition that it remains open and light-hearted.  How very
different from the prudish and hypocritical manner in which we so
disgracefully mismanage these things in England!

I was altogether immensely impressed by Hamburg, which is now one of my
favourite cities in the world.  Perhaps I was favourably conditioned
through staying at one of the few remaining really great hotels in
Europe.  This is the Vier Jahreszeiten (no connection with Herr
Walterspiel's excellent establishment in Munich) on the Inner Alster,
one of the two fine artificial lakes that add so much to the beauty of
the heart of the city.  It was built, or at any rate modernized, around
1910--the golden age for hotel design--and the rooms and bathrooms are
solid, comfortable and elegant, with good period furniture which
spreads lavishly down the corridors and into the public rooms.  The
cooking in the grill room--there are also a restaurant and a basement
_Keller_--is first-class German, which at its best is as good as there
is, and the wine list has everything.  The chef even makes his own
smoked salmon, but this is of course the region for sea fish and eel
(eel soup is the speciality of Hamburg).  I can particularly recommend
the crayfish tails with dill sauce and buttered rice, and the saddle of
venison with smitane sauce and cranberries.  But what makes the Vier
Jahreszeiten outstanding is, as in all great hotels, the quality of the
service.  Here and in other good out-of-the-way hotels as yet unsullied
by the tourist smear, 'service' is not yet a dirty word, and in these
days to be surrounded by helpful, friendly faces is a luxury without
price.  Hamburg is particularly blessed in this respect because the
Hamburger is a most excellent person, solid, friendly and cheerful, and
apparently with a soft spot (Hamburg has been the most important
harbour in the Continent of Europe for several hundred years) for the
foreigner.

Traditionally democratic, there is yet a powerful aristocracy, or more
properly elite, of reserved and ancient families in Hamburg.  Without
titles or other marks of nobility, they are generally accepted as being
the 'City Fathers', with a patriarchal concern for Hamburg more
powerful and effective than the municipal government.  And how pleasing
it is to be in a city which is really proud of itself, proud of its
flag, which until a hundred years ago, was better known overseas than
the flag of Germany, proud of its dislike of the Prussians and its
mistrust of Hitler, proud of its shipyards and of the way it has
rebuilt itself after the war!  And how well its town-planners are
working, and what a contrast with some of the modern hideosity of the
new Berlin!  Here they are still rebuilding individual homes and modest
apartment houses close to the earth, and not giant steel and glass
structures that would ruin the character of the city.

Hamburg suffered terribly during the war.  It was a comparatively easy
target from England.  Because of its naval importance, it always had a
high priority from the Admiralty, and it was, to the delight of the
scientists who advised on 'bombability', terribly combustible.  Nearly
fifty per cent of its dwellings--a quarter of a million of them--were
annihilated, fifty-five thousand people were killed and hundreds of
thousands wounded.

Over a period of nine days, from July 24th to August 3rd, 1942,
occurred the great incendiary attacks called the Katastrophe.  In these
nine days, forty-eight thousand people were killed.  People escaped
from their burning houses and crumbling cellars into the streets only
to stick immovable in the softened asphalt until this also caught fire,
so that thousands of people out in the open were burnt to death in
rivers of flame.  For a whole week after the _Katastrophe_ the sun was
unable to penetrate the smoke.  After this, three-quarters of a million
people left the city and lived for months in the surrounding fields and
woods.  Learning these grisly facts I remembered how, in those days,
studying the blown-up photographs from the Photographic Reconnaissance
Unit and reading the estimates of damage, we in the Admiralty used to
rub our hands with delight.  Ah me!

At the end of the war Hamburg was saved by its patriarchs.  On Hitler's
orders the town was to be defended to the last brick and demolition
charges to implement the Fhrer's scorched-earth policy were installed
on a huge scale.  Bremen did the same and was almost totally razed to
the ground, but at the last moment the Hamburg patriarchs overrode the
local Gauleiter and his henchmen and engineered the surrender of the
town.

In 1946 the Allies completed the work of the bombs by destroying the
slips in the great harbour and blowing up the yards and floating docks.
Destruction was only halted when the town council pleaded that further
explosions would breach the Elbe tunnel.  Long arguments ensued and
were only brought to a close by a sporting gesture from the British
Consul, who took a chair to the centre of the Elbe tunnel and sat on it
smoking his pipe at the moment when the final explosion was due.  But,
for reasons which I could not discover, the demolition was again
postponed and finally cancelled, though the British Consul remains a
local hero to this day.

A tour of the harbour, where the names of Blohm and Voss, Howaldt and
Deutscher Werft, the great shipyards where the U-boats were repaired
and refitted, and where the Bismarck was built, brought back the
war-time ghosts.  But now the thirty-one miles of piers (the harbour is
sixty-two miles up the Elbe from the sea) and the giant floating docks
are ninety per cent effective again after the clearance of some three
thousand wrecks, and the great shipscape is full of drama.

The weather prevented a day trip to Heligoland to visit the bird
sanctuary, or to Sylt, half of which is still an R.A.F. establishment
and the other half the largest nudist colony in the world (an
intriguing combination!).  Here on Sylt, at a certain point on the
beaches, is a notice saying 'Nature Colony' and from there on it is an
offence to wear clothes.  A Hamburg friend who occasionally visits the
place gave me a delightful picture of well-bred Hamburg citizens with
no clothes on greeting friends with painful clicks of the heels and
gracious 'Kss' die Hand gndige Frau's'.

Half-way down the Elbe there is an establishment which is apt to cause
confusion and embarrassment to visiting ships and particularly to units
of foreign navies.  Here some enterprising innkeeper has set up
'Welcome Point Schulau' with a large coffee house and tea gardens.  The
Hamburgers come here to watch the ships sailing in and out of the river
and the innkeeper has devised a private welcome system.  As soon as an
arriving ship comes within range, huge loudspeakers blare out three or
four bars of the _Flying Dutchman_, followed by further bars of 'Stadt
Hamburg', a local folksong.  The ship is then greeted in German,
followed by her native language, and the welcome is closed by the
national anthem of the ship's country of origin, followed by a few more
bars of the _Flying Dutchman_.  At the beginning of the national anthem
the Hamburg flag on top of the coffee house is dipped.  Much the same
rigmarole is followed for departing ships.  Ships' captains who have
been through this before now merely wave a cheerful hand, if that, but
units of the Royal Navy have been known to go through frenzied
counter-gallantries with hastily mustered hands standing to attention
and every kind of ceremonial refinement--all much to the delight of the
paying customers ashore.

Other pleasures of the city are Hagenbecks Zoo--built in 1884 and the
first zoo without fences--a feature of which is the circus-animal
training school, where you can judge whether this science involves
cruelty or not; the 'Planten un Blomen' (Hamburg dialect) Park, which
is an enchantment; the Church of England, appropriately situated in the
middle of St Pauli, where a resident English chaplain has officiated
since 1612; the Hamburg History Museum, where there is the longest
model railway, scale 1/32, in Europe; the Modern Art Gallery,
outstandingly well designed and containing an exciting collection of
Impressionists and modern pictures (I just missed a much-lauded Hans
Arp exhibition); excellent theatres (they gave the premiere of Lawrence
Durrell's _Sappho_ here); the Hansa Theater, the premier variety house
in Germany, where drinks and snacks can be served during the show at
all of the four hundred and eighty seats; several excellent restaurants
headed, for me, by Ehmke, and, lower down the list, Onkel Hugo's in St
Pauli, which is a good starting-point for the night life.

There is much literary and artistic activity in the town, which is the
headquarters of the great post-war publishing empire of Springer; and
Hamburg is the centre of the modern German film industry, at whose
extensive studios Paul Rotha is now filming the life of Hitler with,
surprisingly enough, the full collaboration of the Soviet Government,
who have made available to him all their rich documentation on the
subject.

One small point for the gastronome: you will be unable to find a
hamburger in Hamburg--chopped steak is known there as Deutscher steak,
and you would be considered eccentric if you were to slice open a roll
and stuff your Deutscher steak inside it in the fashion of American
hamburgers.

A last word of reassurance on the night life of Hamburg on which I may
be thought to have dwelt immodestly and too long.  The local guide-book
says, 'The greatest charm St Pauli offers is that here you can watch
people of all nations amusing themselves as they do at home.'

Ahem!

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

_Hotels_

Five-star: Undoubtedly the best is the world-famous and dignified
_Vierjahreszeiten_, the _Four Seasons_, in the Neuer Jungfernstieg.
Hamburg's patrician families also swear by its cuisine, its grill and
its snack bar, the _Condi_.  The other main five-star hotel in Hamburg
is the _Atlantic_, overlooking the Alster at its wateriest; it is more
pretentious, but has superb service.  The British Control Commission
used it as a transit hotel after the war, but that has not affected its
quality today.  I recommend also the _Baseler Hospiz_, on the
Esplanade, comfortable, quiet, small and reasonably unpretentious.  Its
one hundred and ninety-eight rooms mostly have baths or showers.
Rebuilt since the war-time bombing.  Food is good North-German style,
no frills, but wholesome and appetizing.  Medium priced.

One-star: _The Park Hotel Beyer_, on the Blumenstrasse, a quarter of an
hour from the centre of Hamburg, quiet, comfortable and small.  Room
prices range from 13 Marks (1 1s. 0d.) for single room without bath to
40 Marks (3 4s. 0d.) for double room with bath, both without
breakfast.  Cheaper but brasher and noisier is the newly-built Hotel
_Im Parkhochhaus am Dammtor_, Drehbahn 15, in the centre of the city.


_Restaurants_

Five-star: _Lembcke_, on the Holzdamm 49, near the _Atlantic Hotel_.
Famous for the quality of its meat; popular with the local theatrical
community, a sort of Hamburg Caf Royal as it used to be, with a touch
of neo-Victorian or neo-Wilhelmian about it.  As an alternative the
_Kleine Fhrhaus_, Harvestehuder Fhrdamm on the Alster.  One of
Hamburg's fashionable restaurants, patronized by all the visiting
_Prominenz_.  Another old-fashioned and excellent restaurant on the
Gansemarkt in the town centre is _Ehmke_.  Speciality: oysters.

One-star: I can recommend the_ Fischereihafen-Restaurant_, on the Neuen
Fischereihafen in Altona, right on the fish harbour itself.  Small,
popular with food-lovers, fairly inexpensive.  Speciality: Hamburg
crayfish and eel soups, and a sort of Hamburg _bouillabaisse_.


_Night-clubs_

Five-star: For dancing, used by the jeunesse dore of the patrician
families: the _Riverside_, Alster Arkaden.  Usually a first-class band.
Owned by an Italian.  Excellent food, no floor show but usually
frequented by lots of pretty girls.

One-star: The Reeperbahn has everything to offer, from the big, breezy
strip-tease girl-shows at the _Trichter_ and the _Allotria_ to quieter
dance-hall places like the _Caf Lauser_, where the dancing partners
are the prettiest in Hamburg but only dance with the customers if
invited to.  It is different at the _Caf Keese_ where ladies can make
the running and male guests have to take the floor when asked.

Out-of-the-Way: The _Glocken-Kate_, Eichholz 15, an unusual but popular
night-spot visited mainly by Hamburg people.  The owner, an ex-ship's
cook, puts on nightly performances on a remarkable one-man band, a sort
of Madame Tussaud orchestra of dummy figures playing different
instruments and all done by means of strings, ropes and pulleys.
Absolutely no deception!  A sort of Dali-ish nonsense which appeals to
the Hamburgers.




IX _Berlin_

Every capital city has its own smell.  London smells of fried fish and
Player's, Paris of coffee, onions and Caporals, Moscow of cheap
eau-de-Cologne and sweat.

Berlin smells of cigars ind boiled cabbage, and B.E.A. dropped me into
the middle of the smell on the kind of day I associate with this
lugubrious city.  The sky was asphalt-colour above the asphalt-coloured
town, and the Prussian wind, as sharp as a knife, blew the rubble dust
into one's eyes and mouth.

Berlin was fifty per cent destroyed during the war as part of the great
_Strafe_, the great corporal punishment meted out to the people who
have caused more pain and grief in the world than any other nation in
this century.  Around eight million Germans were killed in the last war
and, in West Germany alone, there survive nearly three and a half
million victims, maimed, widowed and orphaned, drawing war pensions
amounting to over four billion D-marks annually, and the reverberations
of the tremendous thrashing Berlin received still hang on the air.

As I walked and drove through the West Sector and the East, noting the
smattering of new buildings and the rather meagre and sham-looking new
streets and housing projects, I was accompanied by the echo of vast and
shattering explosions, and expected at any moment to see the town
crumble away again in smoke and flames.

The tidying up goes on apace, but there are still acres and acres that
will have to be knocked down before there can be any real impression of
a new city rising from the ruins of the old.

This is very much more so, of course, in the Eastern Sector, where
remembered death and chaos and, worst of all, present drabness hang
most heavily on the air, and where there is no speck of colour or
glitter in the cleaning up that has already, with typical Russian bad
taste and skimped workmanship, been achieved.  This contrast with the
West is underlined by comparison between the two great Berlin streets,
Kurfrstendamm in the West and Under den Linden in the East.

The former, though only a shadow of its old self, is brightly lit and
thronged and busy.  Its rather uninteresting shops are wide open to
business and the cafs are crowded.  But Unter den Linden now contains
only a handful of drab, makeshift shops against a great backdrop of
ruins, and the new lime trees are skimpy and stark.  Few people are
about and few cars and, as in all the Eastern Sector, one wonders where
in heaven everybody is.

The seventy million cubic metres of rubble in Berlin are gradually
being made into mountains, which then will be turfed and have trees
planted on them.  These mountains are known as _Monte
Klamotten_--Rubbish Mountains--and the total operation is known as
'Hitler's Collected Works'.

There are also the flattened plains, from which the new buildings are
gradually rising to give living-space and work-room to the two and a
quarter million West Berliners, and I spent some time visiting the more
publicized of these new erections, notably the Hansa Settlement and the
Corbusier 'living unit' built more or less on his 'Modulor' system, and
vaunted as the 'new face' of Berlin.

This 'new face' is the 'new face' we are all coming to know--the
'up-ended-packet-of-fags' design for the maximum number of people to
live in the minimum amount of space.

This system treats the human being as a six-foot cube of flesh and
breathing-space and fits him with exquisite economy into steel and
concrete cells.  He is allotted about three times the size of his cube
as his 'bed-sitter', once his cube for his bathroom and once for his
kitchen.  So that he won't hate this cellular existence too much, he is
well warmed and lighted, and he is provided with a chute in the wall
through which he can dispose of the muck of his life--cartons,
newspapers, love-letters and gin bottles--the last chaotic remains of
his architecturally undesirable 'non-cube' life.  These untidy bits of
him are consumed by some great iron stomach in the basement.

Having taken a quick and shuddering look at Corbusier's flattened human
ants' nest in Marseilles some years ago, and having visited his recent
architectural exhibition in England, I had already decided that he and
I did not see eye to eye in architectural matters, and I am glad to
learn that the Berliners, however anxious to clamber out of their ruins
into a new home, are inclined to agree with me.  When they heard of his
plan and were later sharply lectured by him on the life beautiful, they
christened him the 'Devil with Thick Spectacles', and his
two-thousand-person apartment house--if it can be so called--is still
ungratefully known as the 'Living Machine'.  Much to his rage, their
chaotic wishes partially triumphed over the symmetrical bee-ant
mathematical principles on which his mumbo-jumbological Modular system
is based.  This system lays down, in part, that the correct height of a
room shall be a six-foot man with his arm raised straight above his
head (try it!).  Corbusier complained that the increase in height from
2.26 metres to 2.50 metres that the Berliners forced upon him had
painfully upset what he describes as his 'architectonic masterpiece',
and he was even more bitter when the authorities decided that his
'living units' were, in fact, not the 'paradise for children and
mothers' which he claimed they were, and turned them into apartments
for bachelors and childless couples.  The shop centre which he wished
to place in the middle of his sixteen storeys was put down on the
ground floor, which spoilt 'the grandeur of the entrance hall'.

The argument was a wonderful example of the eternal struggle between
the designer-planner and the awkward human being who would rather be
called a 'square' than a 'cube'.

One feature of this giant 'Living Machine' amused me.  Not knowing what
to do with all the entrails involved in the heating and water systems,
the designer had been forced to let them pour out on the ground in a
tangle of aluminium snakes.  Corbusier made the best of the mess by
enclosing the whole untidiness in a kind of glass house, so that the
inhabitants may proudly watch the workings of their 'Living Machine's'
stomach.

The Hansa quarter on the edge of the Tiergarten, the big central
open-air space of Berlin, was thrown open to a 'Living Machine'
competition amongst the world's finest architects, and it is depressing
to see that the German, Israeli, French, Italian, Swedish, Finnish,
Danish, Swiss and American architects have all plumped for variations
on the 'packet-of-fags' motif, with the addition of a couple of truly
startling churches and a conference hall, christened the 'Pregnant
Oyster' by the ungrateful Berliners.

That all these buildings strike me and most Berliners as quite hideous
cannot alter the fact that only by these vertical means could the
government of West Berlin have managed to tuck away nearly half a
million inhabitants in something over ten years, and one only has to go
over to the Eastern Sector and drive down the pretentious
turn-of-the-century Tiflis-style Stalin Allee to accept the fact that
all the 'new world', independent of nationality, is getting more and
more hideous every day.

I was accompanied on this architectural foray by 'Our Man in Germany',
Antony Terry, sometimes in company with his wife, Sarah Gainham, the
noted thriller-writer and correspondent for the _Spectator_.  Between
them, they know most of Germany, and certainly every inch of Berlin,
and in Terry's Volkswagen we proceeded on a series of splendid zigzags
between pleasures and duties which, for the sake of brevity, I will
cannibalize into a rather haphazard catalogue.

Queen Nefertiti, for instance, rescued from the coal-mine at Eisenach,
where she and most of the German art treasures spent the war, is now
back in the Dahlem museum, her proud, smiling lips looking as kissable
as ever.  Hitler's bunker in the Eastern Zone finally resisted all
attempts by the Russians to blow it up, so it has now been converted
into a hillock of rubble and will soon be a pretty green mound in the
middle of a children's playground.  The ruins of the Gedachtnis-Kirche
rise, and will apparently for ever rise, like a huge ugly thumb at the
top of the Kurfrstendamm--gloomy memorial to yet another war.  The
church's aesthetic shape could be greatly improved by a few more
artistically sited explosions.  The grim ruin will be somewhat cheered
by a carillon of six new bells, for which Prince Louis Ferdinand, the
last of the Hohenzollerns and grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm, has composed
a melody.  The Stauffenberg memorial, a naked youth in bronze,
commemorating the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, stands in
the gloomy, cavernous courtyard of Hitler's Army and Navy
Communications Centre, against a background of massive chunks of
reinforced concrete that will for ever resist the demolition experts.
The porter, Knoeller, who was there at the time of Stauffenberg's
execution, showed us the spot where he had stood facing the firing
squad.  'No,' he said, 'there were no bullet holes in the walls; all
such executions were carried out against a background of broken rubble,
so that the masonry should not show evidence of the shooting.'  This is
a particularly haunted area of Berlin, hard by the Landwehr canal, into
which the body of Rosa Luxemburg was thrown after she and Karl
Liebknecht were captured and shot, 'while trying to escape', by the
Brigade Ehrhard during the Spartakus rising of 1919.

The Hotel Adlon, where I had revelled before the war, is in the Eastern
Sector and is now only Number 70A, Wilhelmstrasse.  Nothing remains of
the former glory, about which a whole book has been written, and you
enter the surviving bullet-marked three storeys through the old
servants' entrance.  We had cups of thickly-grained coffee in the
'restaurant', a kind of tatty 'good-pull-up-for-carmen' with the beige
wallpaper and dusty potted cacti that are the hallmark of Russian
restaurant decor.  The only other guests were a peaky, taut-skinned
little man with a compulsive, hysterical face, obviously an informer or
a black-marketeer, whispering to a prosperous-looking businessman while
his tow-haired mistress (we assumed) sipped her Caucasian Burgundy.

The Pergamon Museum is perhaps the only real 'must' in the Russian
Sector.  Here, in great majesty, have been reassembled the famed
classical treasures of Germany, recently handed back by Russia.  Here,
in particular, is the Pergamon Altar Frieze, assembled in one vast hall
against an architectural background of great splendour.  As the
Michelin guide would say, it is definitely 'worth the detour'.

Incidentally, this splendid museum is noteworthy for one particular
piece of Communist nonsense.  Throughout, the exhibits are not dated
'B.C.' but 'v.u.Z.' (before our times), and 'A.D.' is not given at all.

From these grandeurs to the Alexanderplatz for a nervous glance at the
East German Secret Police Headquarters, hard by Gnther Podola's old
private school and the grimy house where he spent much of his youth.
On the other side of the square are the remains of Hitler's notorious
Secret Police Headquarters.  The whole area, for me, was full of past
and present screams, and we scurried off across the frontier to the
friendly lights and busy turmoil of West Berlin and a _Molle und Korn_
(boilermaker and his assistant) of beer and schnapps.

Over this 'traveller's joy', beneath the infra-red heaters of the Caf
Marquardt, we watched our neighbours consuming the economic 'one cup of
coffee and seven glasses of water' of the old-time caf squatters, and,
outside, the dangerous traffic hurtling up and down the Kurfrstendamm.
Antony Terry said that Germany has the highest traffic-accident rate in
the world--more than double the English figures.  The Germans, anyway a
hysterical race, are now almost maddened by overwork--particularly in
the management class.  They spend their days in their offices and then
roar off down the autobahns.  They fall asleep at eighty miles an hour,
and their cars tear across the middle section, head-on into cars in the
opposite lane, or dive off the shoulders of the roads into the trees.
To prevent this, the drivers munch Pervitin or Preludin to keep
themselves awake, thus submerging their exhaustion and heightening
their tension.  Heart disease, accelerated by over-eating food cooked
in the universal cheap frying-fat, carries them off in their early
fifties, and the newspapers are every day full of those black-bordered
memorial notices saying that Herr Direktor So-and-so has passed away
'at the height of his powers'.

Antony Terry drives ten thousand miles a year on the autobahns and,
referring to our M1 and our hunger for more super highways, he doubted
whether such panaceas would reduce our accident rate.  These huge
roads, he said, create their own type of accident and, by building
them, you only replace one kind of accident with another kind.  People
get semi-hypnotized and doze off at the wheel.

After a couple more 'boiler-makers' we went on to the Ritz, one of the
half-dozen first-class restaurants in Berlin, with a menu in eight
languages.  There, over a wonderful dinner, Terry passed on the gossip
of the day--how the famous publishing house of Ullstein had just been
bought by Springers, the great post-war publishing phenomenon; of the
_Reptilienfonds_, the reptile or slush fund of the West German
ministries for what is comprehensively known as 'Middle Eastern good
relations'--the providing of suitable feminine entertainment for
visiting heads of minor states; of the fact that there was no beatnik
movement in Germany because there were now no traditions to revolt
against; of the small importance of the _Halbstarke_, _Zazous_, or
teddy boys in Germany; of the complete standstill in all literary and
artistic progress of any kind since Hitler because of the absence of
Jews, the former leaven in the heavy German bread, and of the greatly
exaggerated hullabaloo recently created, largely by newspapers wanting
'a story', about the resurgence of Nazism and anti-Semitism.

And so for a brief tour, which ended at four o'clock in the morning, of
Berlin night life.

It is certainly not what it used to be in Berlin, though there is still
the emphasis on transvestism--men dressing up as women, and vice
versa--which used to be such a feature of prewar Berlin.  Now, at the
Eldorado, for instance, and the Eden (where a home-made bomb went off,
wounding three guests, ten minutes after we had left) some of the
'women' are most bizarre.  The one I particularly took to, a
middle-aged flower-seller such as you might see sitting beside her
basket of roses in Piccadilly Circus, is known as the
'_Blumenfeldwebel_'.  'She' had been a corporal in a Panzer division
and has an astonishing range of Berlin/Cockney repartee.  Some time
ago, when a famous English film producer was working in Berlin, she
attached herself so closely to him that she was finally given a walk-on
part in the film, and all she was interested in now was to try and get
over to England to get another job from him.  Another startlingly
beautiful 'woman' had been an under-officer in charge of a military
clothing store; but the most startling was 'Ricky Renee', an American
aged twenty-five who was born in Miami, had only a modest success as a
male tap-dancer and decided to turn 'woman'.  He has been so
sensational in his new role that he even appeared as a woman in a
strip-tease act in the Italian film _Il Mondo di Notte_.

The 'waitresses' were most ingenious at serving one while somehow
keeping their huge hands and feet out of sight and modulating the deep
tones of their voices when they took your order, but otherwise they
were buttressed, bewigged and made-up as extremely handsome and
decorous 'ladies'.

Two of the other night-clubs were also splendidly Germanic--the famous
_Resi_, a vast hall where nothing happens except that there are dial
telephones on the tables so that you can communicate with any girl who
takes your fancy round the room, and a 'cabaret' which consists,
uniquely, of a giant waterworks which shoots dancing jets of coloured
water into the air to the accompaniment of the 'Dance of the Bumblebee'.

The other night-club, even less inspiring, consisted of a smallish area
with a sawdust ring in the centre containing two plump and docile
horses.  In between drinks, one was permitted to mount a horse and trot
it a dozen times round the ring--a remarkable way to pass an evening.

Espionage is one of the main industries of Berlin--East and West--and I
spent most of one day exploring the fringes--the centre is far too well
protected--of the great spy battle of which Berlin has been the
battlefield since the end of the war.  I concentrated on one great
independent operator--a notorious middleman who sells his
'informations' for whatever sum whichever of the Western secret
services will pay.  I will call him O.  He lives in the leafy suburbs
in a monstrous Hansel and Gretel villa whose innocence is only belied
by the spy-hole in the front door.  He is a small, plump, amused man
(all such agents have a humorous, ironical attitude towards what they
describe as 'the game') with the perfect command of languages that
comes probably from a Slav origin.  He chain-smoked Muratti filter
cigarettes with the first gold tips I have seen for years.  He was as
apparently open-handed and ready to gossip as any civilized man who has
plenty of small 'informations' which sound secret but are not, and he
correctly assumed that I would be tactful and not probe too deeply
behind the gossip.

'You must understand that it is all getting so much more difficult, Mr
Fleming.  My friends [spy-talk for his Western employers] are more
selective and the opposition's security is now very good.  There have
been fifteen years to indoctrinate the Eastern Sector in security and
now anything which is important, any secret, is cut up into slices--the
tactics, location, technique, finance, personnel behind, let us say, a
chain of missile bases--and possession of one slice of knowledge in
each of those departments of knowledge is confined to a small cell of
people--only those who have to be in the know.  This makes for
confusion and bad liaison on the project, since there is bound to be
overlapping between these realms of knowledge, but it also makes for
very tight security.  Then if there is a leak, that leak can be traced
to one cell of about five people.  After that there are the
investigations--background, friends, bank account, the usual things,
and then there is the execution.  So penetration is most difficult and
dangerous.  And then there is the question of the payment for
informations.  In the good old days one could offer refuge in the West
and money and good living and the "democratic way of life"--freedom and
all that.  Today it is not so easy, and everyone is surprised that
Soviet and East German officials and officers and so on are not
bringing over informations in exchange for these things.  Such a
misunderstanding is foolish.  The answer is that in the East people no
longer want these things.  Life is very much better now in the Soviet
bloc.  To the intelligent people, the people we would like to come
over, the future with Communism looks just as good, if not better, than
life in Europe and America.  Such people are not attracted to
democratic chaos.  They think we over here are making a hash of things
in the name of Democracy.  They greatly prefer the symmetry of
Communism and the planned economy--particularly when the plans seem to
be successful.  And--the sputnik and so on have helped here--they are
quite sure they are on the winning side, that Russia is stronger than
the West.  These people are realistic.  Why should they exchange these
solid things for the trashy "comforts" of the West where they would
have to start all over again, suffer from the homesickness which they
have so strongly, and perhaps be traced and shot for treachery into the
bargain?  No, Mr Fleming, we must admit that the millions of dollars
spent on propaganda--the huge transmitters, those ridiculous leaflet
balloons and so on--are wasted money and effort at this moment.
Successful propaganda only comes from strength.  To offer people better
shoes and clothes, and jazz, is not enough.  And, of course, you must
remember that the youth in the East, the German youth, is now almost
fully educated in Communism.  He is sixteen years old and Communism is
all he knows.  If his parents tell him otherwise, they are being as
old-fashioned as children all over the world consider their parents.'

All this suggested to me that O. would soon be out of a job, but he
explained that in espionage Parkinson's Law operates with particular
zest.  There were some ten thousand Communist agents now in Western
Germany, he said.  They were concentrated in many hundred
organizations, divided again into cells.  Against this army, a huge
counter-intelligence army had to be arrayed.  Then, with the increased
difficulty in penetrating the East, a larger force of specialists had
to be employed by the West.  Thus, to gain a smaller bulk of Eastern
'informations', many more Western spies were required.  But on both
sides the whole business had become far more professional.  There was
not the old free-for-all of the happy ten years after the war, when a
huge game of grown-up cops and robbers was being played across the
frontiers, and kidnappings, murders and 'traitors' were the order of
the day.  Had I, for instance, ever heard the true story of the 'Great
Tunnel'?  That had been a lark, all right.

I said I had read some scraps about it in the papers at the time--in
1956--but the story had been played down, I had supposed, for security
reasons.

O. laughed.  'More probably embarrassment,' he said.  'You can't be
insecure about a story the Russians published in all their papers, with
pictures of the tunnel and the English equipment.  The Russians even
took all the Western correspondents out in buses and took them down the
damned thing to see for themselves.  It was really a marvellous affair.
This is how it all happened.

'Some time in 1955 your intelligence people were looking at the town
plan map for Greater Berlin when some bright communications man spotted
that the main trunk telephone cables between East Berlin and Leipzig at
one point passed underground only about three hundred yards from a
bulge in the American sector.  Others of your people worked out that
these cables would be carrying the traffic between the headquarters of
the East German Army at Aldershorst and Zossen, East Germany's
Aldershot, so to speak.  There was even more excitement when it was
proved that a Russian official teleprinter cable was another of the
lines.  So your people got together with the Americans and plans were
made to tap these cables by digging a tunnel under the fields from a
near-by American radar station as far as the Schnefelder Chaussee,
under which the cables ran.  Obviously it was a terrific technical job,
and a very tricky one because all the time Russian patrols were passing
along the road, and the security aspect in the American sector was
another problem.  I believe there was a bad moment when the peasant who
owned the field began cutting his corn and the watchers in the American
sector saw that the roof of their tunnel had made a ramp right across
his field that was even more obvious when he put the land under the
plough again.  However, he didn't seem to mind then, although it's
amusing that after the whole thing blew up, so to speak, the peasant
sued the Americans and the innocent Russians for ruining the subsoil of
his field, and trespass and Heaven knows what all.  Anyway, the tunnel
was finished and the line tapped and hundreds of batteries of
tape-recorders were plugged in to the lines and operated for months all
through the twenty-four hours, and hundreds of British and Americans
were employed translating all the wonderful stuff they must have got
out of the tunnel.

'Then, of course, the inevitable happened.  The stretch of road where
the tunnel met the cables was always kept under watch, and one day the
watchers saw one of those usual telephone repair gangs arrive in a
lorry and start lazily digging up the vital few yards of road.  There
was nothing to do but evacuate as quickly as possible, and no time to
dismantle the rooms full of machinery underground.  Two or three of the
personnel were left to listen behind the door of a compartment and they
heard the amazed comments of the workmen, who had apparently just
chosen that particular spot to look for a fault in one of the cables
caused by a rain-water leak.  Then the game was up, and lorry loads of
Russian experts and troops with tommy-guns arrived and blocked off the
area and started their investigations.  The whole story was given to
the press and worked up into a big scandal, involving the Americans, of
course, and also the British, because all the technical machinery was
marked "Property of the G.P.O."!  All the Americans could do to save
their faces was to put up a notice in the tunnel directly under the
frontier line saying, "Beware.  You are now entering the American
Sector."  They even forgot to turn off the electric light in the tunnel!

'Anyway,' concluded O., 'those were the great days.  Now, both sides
are more "_korrekt_"--and of course no one wants any untidy scandals in
the spy war while Summits are the order of the day.  But that doesn't
mean,' he laughed, 'that in Greater Berlin today there isn't one whole
division of Allied spies on one side of the frontier and one whole
division of Communist spies on the other.  It is still a very big and
important business.'

O. then handed me a copy of a hush-hush East German intelligence
document giving the complete 'family tree' of the secret service
organization in the Ministry for State Security in East Berlin, from
which I note the existence of two interesting departments, _Abteilung_
4, 'For military espionage and deception in the NATO forces in West
Germany and in NATO headquarters in Paris', and _Abteilung_ 8,
'Diversion and sabotage, preparations for "X" Day', and over this
parting gift we said goodbye.

I left Berlin without regret.  From this grim capital went forth the
orders that in 1917 killed my father and in 1940 my youngest brother.
In contra-distinction to Hamburg and to so many other German towns, it
is only in Berlin and in the smoking cities of the Ruhr that I think I
see, against my will, the sinister side of the German nation.  In these
two regions I smell the tension and hysteria that breed the things we
have suffered from Germany in two great wars and that, twice in my
lifetime, have got my country to her knees.  In these places I have a
recurrent waking nightmare: it is ten, twenty, fifty years later in the
Harz Mountains, or in the depths of the Black Forest.  The whole of a
green and smiling field slides silently back to reveal the dark mouth
of a great subterranean redoubt.  With a whine of thousands of
horsepower, behind a mass of brilliant machinery (brain-children of
Krupp, Siemens, Zeiss and all the others) the tip of a gigantic rocket
emerges above the surrounding young green trees.  England has rejected
the ultimatum.  First there is a thin trickle of steam from the rocket
exhausts and then a great belch of flame, and slowly, very slowly, the
rocket climbs off its underground launching pad.  And then it is on its
way.

Yes, it was obviously time for me to leave Berlin.

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

_Hotels_

Five-star: For comfort and a bit of the solid, efficient, old-style
atmosphere and service one remembers from pre-war, though in modern
streamlined form: _Kempinski_, Kurfrstendamm (West Berlin's
Piccadilly), corner of Fasanenstrasse and the centre of what night life
there still is in the Western sectors.  Plushier, even more five-star,
ultra-modern and with _square_ beds (you can sleep any way round you
like) is the _Hilton_.  Its rooms look out over a wonderful all-round
view of the grey bomb-battered city.  Those sleeping on the lower
floors are awakened early by strange birds squawking in the city's zoo
just below.

One-star: For those seeking to recapture the Berlin atmosphere of 1945
amid the ruins I suggest one of the small, reasonably priced one-star
hotels just by the former Anhalter Station.  This is in the waste-land
of rubble that was once Berlin's business centre and was flattened in
the final battle for the city.  It is a few yards from the Russian
sector--though still firmly in the West and a quarter of a mile from
the Potsdamer Platz, the East-West sector border trouble spot.  One of
these 'atmosphere' hotels on the Soviet sector border is the
_Alemannia_.  The Volkspolizei here is within shooting distance but
doesn't.  One-star but clean.  One can eat there too, simple Berlin
kitchen.  Less exciting: the _Astoria Hotel_ near the Zoo in the
British Sector (Fasanenstrasse) is small but efficient.


_Restaurants_

Five-star: Renowned for Oriental chi-chi of every kind and for its
famous customers, the _Ritz_ in the Rankestrasse (centre of town).  For
good, clean, appetizing, reasonably-priced food of the Berlin type: the
_Aben_, at the Halensee end of the Kurfrstendamm, much patronized by
the gourmets among the British regiments stationed in Berlin, or the
_Berliner Kindl_, where Berliners of all classes go for a good meal in
the evening, with beer.  Chinese food, for those who like it, in at
least five excellent restaurants of this type, the best undoubtedly the
_Lingnan_, Kurfrstendamm, the _Canton_, Stuttgarter Platz, and the
_Hongkong_, next to the _Maison de France_, Kurfrstendamm.  For
Swabian cooking (richer and more seasoned than Berlin food) in an
old-fashioned, restful background with a zither-player who specializes
in the _Third Man_ theme and Viennese 'Schrammel', there is _Kottler's_
in the Motzstrasse, and Berlin gourmets swear by _Schlichte_ in the
Martin Luther Strasse.  Despite its austere furnishings and
rather-too-bright lights, _Schlichte_ undoubtedly has wonderful cuisine.

For 'British, Americans and French only' (still respectfully 'messieurs
les allies' in four-power Berlin), the _Maison de France_, a reasonably
priced official French restaurant where the food is not over-good but
there is dancing and a pleasant enough atmosphere, and a good bar with
an excellent barman who knows his stuff.  Anything from Amer Picon
('pour les fivres nvralgeuses des colonisateurs') to Scotch.
Cheapest possible French-owned student-type restaurant with excellent
freshly cooked food, though atmosphere ever so slightly Frenchily
grubby: the _Paris_ in the Kantstrasse, across the road from the West
Berlin opera house and near the university and zoo.


_Night-clubs_

West Berlin's night spots are not what they were in the gay,
spendthrift post-war years, but they do offer some interesting
sidelines such as transvestism.  One of the two main night-clubs of
this type is the _Eldorado_, Martin Luther Strasse (U.S. sector), which
presents transvestism as a sort of joke, with the floor show taking the
mickey out of itself.  The _Eldorado_ is definitely one- or two-star in
its prices, but fairly respectable; one could almost take the family
there and not know the 'girls' are not what they seem unless one knew
it beforehand.  Prices: entrance charge 1s. 8d., Scotch (nip) 5s. 10d.,
French brandy 4s. 2d., beer 3s. 4d.  Turkish coffee (pot) 3s. 4d., wine
about 1 a bottle.

Five-star (but not expensive): the _Old-Fashioned_, admission only
after knocking three times and asking for Franz Schubert (the owner, no
relation of the other Franz Schubert); dancing, excellent Italian band,
quite a lot of pretty girls among the customers.  Patronized by
whatever society is left in the Four-Power City.  The _Cherchez la
Femme_: little _bote_ in the Fasanenstrasse, semi-nude dancing of a
strictly respectable type and occasionally neo-strip-tease act.
_Charly's_, Wittenbergplatz, plushy _bote_ for dancing only, to
juke-box (latest Berlin craze); fashionable with Berlin's moneyed
jeunesse dore at the moment, but not expensive.  _Badewanne_ (the Bath
Tub), Nrnberger Strasse, jive cellar, good to look at for a few
moments, popular with visiting theatrical personalities, cheap and loud
but bursting with Berlin vitality.  _Resi_, in the Hasenheide in one of
West Berlin's toughest, most working-class districts; recent statistics
show that seventy per cent of its customers are foreigners.  Most
popular of all Berlin mass entertainments.  A vast palais de danse with
telephones and pneumatic-tube postal service connecting the hundreds of
tables, so that strangers can make dates or pass anonymous compliments.
_Remde St Pauli_, near the zoo, centre of town in British sector;
noisy, raucous, slap-and-tickle sort of show, based on Hamburg's
Reeperbahn, with 'underwear displays' (ladies _and_ gents), and girls,
girls, girls (on the stage, no hostesses).  Like the Resi, it has
reasonable prices.


_Out-of-the-way_

_Rififi_, open twenty-four hours a day for the younger generation of
Berliners to spend their spare time with juke-box and jive.  The
dancing is not for visitors unless they are expert too, but it is worth
seeing once, on a visit.  The customers (and the busty proprietress)
could have come out of the film _Rififi_, but visitors are treated
kindly and otherwise ignored.




X _Vienna_

After Berlin it was good to be back in the car again and to be
hammering out the miles across the German heart-land, bright with
spring.  Driving a fast car abroad is one of my keenest pleasures--the
eight o'clock departure with some distant luncheon stop as target, the
intermediate pause for 'elevenses' on the shady terrace or under the
fruit trees of a _Gasthaus_, the good moment when the target is reached
and luncheon comes with a schnapps and a beer to wash it down.  And
then the shorter run in the afternoon to the chosen hotel, the walk
round the village or town, dinner and a deep sleep after planning the
next day.  What is so pleasant is that, combined with the delicious,
always new sights and smells of 'abroad', there is a sense of
achievement, of a task completed, when each target is reached without
accident, on time and with the car still running sweetly.  There is the
illusion that one has done a hard and meritorious day's work (few women
understand this--perhaps, poor beasts, because they have been only
passengers).  Every touring motorist knows these sensations and I
expect, for all of us islanders, from the first cobbled kilometres at
Calais, Boulogne, Ostend, to the sad day when you re-embark as the
lucky ones' cars are being unloaded, Continental touring is one of the
most delightful experiences in our lives.

I drive a Thunderbird.  I make no apologies.  I bought my first, the
lovely two-seater, four years ago and it did 50,000 fast miles without
so much as a bulb fusing.  So I bought another, the four-seater, and it
had only done 1,000 miles when I started from Ostend.  Blithely I had
ordered all the gimmicks--automatic gears, power steering, power
brakes--and at first I hated and feared these devices which seemed to
give the car power over the driver instead of the other way round.  But
by now I was already used to them, and I had regained authority over
the fifty-horse-power, seven-litre engine, and could almost--you never
quite can with these damnable 'aids'--make the car do what I wanted.
Of course it is a marvellous car for fast touring--very comfortable,
roomy, and as quick as hell.  Ninety miles an hour with a reserve of
thirty was a comfortable touring speed on the autobahns, and the
kilometres clicked by like the leaves of a book until one could
gratefully drift off into the winding side roads of the countryside
chosen for luncheon or the night.  For that is the way to treat the
autobahn--as the quickest way between beautiful places off the beaten
track.  That day I did Hamburg to Kassel for luncheon and then slipped
off on to the 'romantic' road from Bad Herzfeld to Wrzburg,
Rothenburg, Dinkelsbhl and Augsburg, staying the night in the heart of
this beautiful region.

It was here, after leaving the autobahn, that one met with the things
dear to the lover of Germany and Austria--the vast dandelion meadows,
the delicious smell of dung and sound of sawmills in the little
villages, and the dreaming spires of small churches.  The spring had
been wonderful at home, but how fortunate to be able to pursue it
northwards and catch all the fruit trees in bright bloom again!  It
crossed my mind that one day one should start with the spring in
southern Spain and drive slowly northwards, perhaps even as far as
Moscow, living with it all the way.

But then the next day one was on the autobahn again, flying on to
Munich and Salzburg, engaged simply in covering the kilometres in order
to be in Vienna by the evening.

Driving six hundred miles in a couple of days, which my programme
demanded, one gets to think a good deal about the actual business of
driving a motor-car.  The Germans are the most dangerous motorists in
the world.  The year before, 13,500 Germans had been killed on the road
and just under half a million injured.  These are terrible figures
among a population of fifty-two million, and nobody knows what to do
about it.  It is no good building 100 m.p.h. roads and putting a 50
m.p.h. speed limit on them, and anyway the German statistics showed
that the majority of accidents were caused at speeds between 30 and 50
m.p.h.  Germanic tension and hysteria, plus that basic inferiority
complex which makes every German insist that only he has the right of
way, lie somewhere behind these tragic statistics, but here, and along
the autobahns of Italy, I had some autobahn thoughts which may be worth
passing on.

First of all, your driving mirror (surely not 'looking-glass' in this
context, Miss Mitford!) is almost as important as your windscreen, and
the slower your car the more you must watch what is coming up behind
you.  Flashing headlights, which I hope British manufacturers will soon
fit, with a button on the tip of the indicator arm, are far more
effective than horn-blowing, for so many small cars on the autobahns
drive with the windows nearly closed to keep out the wind-howl.  Above
all, it is wise to assume that people will behave oddly at the
_Ausfahrts_ and _Einfahrts_ where there are joining roads.  Personally,
among the Herrenvolk--the Herren in their Mercedes or Opels, the Volk
in their Wagens--I found road-discipline excellent, and I only saw one
accident, a Volkswagen crumpled like a paper bag being craned out of a
hedge-row by the rescue service; but everywhere on the cement surface
there are those terrible graffiti of the skid-marks, where, on a
perfectly straight stretch of road, something has gone terribly wrong
for someone.

As one drives along, one muses about automobile design and one wonders
why certain minor refinements are not universally adopted.  If America,
for instance, fits all her cars with double headlights side by side,
are they perhaps better than English and Continental single headlights?
Is France right to insist on yellow headlights?  If not, why do they do
it?  Does a hanging chain behind really help car sickness?  If the
chain, for reasons of insulation, is compulsory on petrol lorries in
Austria, why not in other countries?  Why in England do we have bend
and corner signs with 'bend' and 'corner' written underneath, when the
rest of the world seems to manage without these childish explanations?
Why do we not adopt the international sign for a skidding road?  Why do
the A.A. routes remain so stuffy and old-fashioned, and confine their
comments to 'fast, undulating road', 'well-wooded countryside', and
interminable lists of churches?  Fortunately nowadays every motorist
abroad picks up, from Shell, B.P. or Esso, the excellent free maps and
regional guides whenever he fills up with petrol, but it is surely time
for the A.A. to apply some of their overflowing revenue to hiring a
small team of first-class travel writers to improve the content and
style of their touring routes!

By far the most impressive car on the autobahns was the Volkswagen.
These miracle cars seem to thrive on speed, and they hammer along at a
steady 80 m.p.h. with, according to all accounts, astonishingly little
driver fatigue.  It is extraordinary to think that England was offered
the Volkswagen business as part of reparations.  A delegation (one can
seen them!) was sent out by the British motor industry, lavishly
entertained, and, after a cursory glance over the main factory, agreed
that cars with engines at the back had, in the eyes of Coventry, no
future, and went home.  Out of pity for this ugly duckling, and to
provide employment, the British occupation authorities placed an order
for 20,000 cars to put the business on its feet again.  Today (1959)
they are turning out nearly 4,000 vehicles every twenty-four hours, and
last year they exported 404 thousand.  The business has just been
turned into a public company with a capital of 50 million, and the
break-up value of the concern and its assets are estimated by the
Deutsche Industrie Kreditinstitut at 125 million.  Credit for the
basic design belongs to Dr Porsche, father of the present head of the
Porsche sports-car business.  To eliminate any 'bugs' in his design he
had the original prototypes tested to destruction in the Austrian Alps
by relays of S.S. men.  He was, incidentally, like the inventor of the
first automobile, an Austrian.  I wonder what the British motor-car
delegation think of his invention today!

Whenever possible I follow great rivers on the wrong side.  I keep, for
instance, to the west of the Rhne and off the fast, murderous N7.  So,
with the Danube, I crossed over at Linz and, after a short patch of
attractive, though dangerously narrow minor road, got on, at Grein, to
the beautiful 'wine road' that hugs the north shore of the Danube more
or less all the way into Vienna.

I had not been to Vienna, seriously, for thirty years.  It is not one
of my favourite cities.  I learned German in the Tyrol from Mr Ernan
Forbes Denis, husband of the famous novelist Phyllis Bottome, and then
honorary Vice-Consul for the Tyrol, based on Kitzbhel.  They were both
ardent students of the great psychologist Alfred Adler--Phyllis Bottome
wrote Adler's life--and I learned far more about life from Ernan than
from all my schooling put together.  But living in the Tyrol for so
long made me such a devoted lover of the Tyrolese that I took against
the brittle and, it seemed to me, artificial gaiety of the Viennese and
their much vaunted _Gemtlichkeit_ which I translated, and still
translate, into a mixture of shallowness, cynicism and untidiness.  (I
have been back to the Tyrol countless times since those early days and
I am confirmed in the opinion that they are my favourite people in the
world.)

Returning to Vienna after so many years' absence, I found two great
changes for the worse: the appalling congestion and noise that have hit
all the capital cities (they have a good name for the
motor-scooter--_Schlurfrakete_--Spiv-rocket), and the collapse of the
pulsating intellectual life that was one of the great delights of
Vienna before Hitler marched in.

I remember, in those days before the war, reading, thanks to the
encouragement of the Forbes Denises, the works of Kafka, Musil, the
Zweigs, Arthur Schnitzler, Werfel, Rilke, von Hofmannstal, and of those
bizarre psychologists Weininger and Groddeck--let alone the writings of
Adler and Freud--and buying first editions (I used to collect them)
illustrated by Kokoschka and Rubin.  As I remember it, all these and
many others made of Vienna a kind of Central-European Left Bank into
whose fringes it was delightful to penetrate.  In those days there
seemed to be countless small satirical cabarets frequented by these
people where, for a few Shillings, one could boast of having rubbed
shoulders with genius.  All this has utterly gone (though the
Simplizissimus cabaret still has some of the sharp, destructive
Austrian wit); and what has come musically out of Vienna, the city of
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Schubert, Strauss and Lehar, in the
last twenty years?

The intellectual demise of Vienna must, as must that of Munich and
Berlin, be put down to the wholesale departure of 200,000 Jews who,
whatever else their failings--and the race is generally considered to
have shown itself in poor colours at this confluence of Slav and
Central-European Jewry--create an atmosphere in which the intellect
appears to flourish astonishingly.

I doubt if Vienna will ever regain her Bohemian atmosphere.  With the
total absence of an aristocracy or of any other elite (except for the
ski champions), the Austrian bureaucrat, who is essentially a small man
waiting for his pension, has complete control of the country.  There is
not a single Austrian millionaire, and not even a _nouveau riche_
clique to provide artistic patronage.  Moreover, neutrality does not
create a stimulating atmosphere, and there are no tax benefits in
Austria as there are in Switzerland to attract the modern intellectual
exile.  Nor does Vienna seem to regret her abdication from the world of
the spirit.  Although she has produced two Nobel Peace prizewinners and
twelve Nobel prizewinners in medicine, physics and chemistry, how many
of these people worked or received encouragement within their own
national frontiers?  It was an Austrian who constructed the first
typewriter, another who invented the sewing-machine, another who
constructed the first automobile, and another the first incandescent
gas-mantle, to say nothing of the Kaplan turbine and the slow-motion
camera.  But who _developed_ these things?  Certainly not the
Austrians.  The truth is that the Austrian of the cities is a wonderful
shrugger of shoulders, a witty denigrator, a man who really means it
when he says, 'What does it matter?' 'Who cares?'  And basically he
hates all modern inventions and 'progress' for the simple reason that
Franz Joseph hated them.

It is of course in this splendidly frivolous attitude to life that lies
the real 'charm' of Austria for the visitor, and the despair of
governments.  By comparison with Italy, France and Switzerland, for
instance, how wonderful it is to be in a beautiful country whose
inhabitants are so incompetent at extracting money from tourists, who
make it a matter of personal pride not to cross the streets by the
zebra crossings, and who mock at every effort by the government to make
Austria into a great nation again!

I had an interesting talk with the Chancellor and Leader of the
People's Party, Dr Julius Raab, on this point.  He was justifiably
proud that Austria had now overhauled Switzerland and was third after
France and Italy in the European tourist stakes.  At the same time he
and the Foreign Minister, Dr Kreisky, who also kindly received me, were
inclined to be portentous about Austria's place in the world and the
seriousness of her 'mission'.  I suggested that, apart from the low
cost of living, it was the beauty and frivolity of Austria that
visitors enjoyed, and that perhaps the pursuit of a higher political
and strategic status for Austria might be of less importance to the
well-being of her people than more hotel bedrooms and the completion of
the Vienna-Salzburg autobahn, then being lethargically stitched
together like some Irish road project.  My unstatesmanlike suggestions
were greeted with polite but non-committal nods and, in the case of Dr
Kreisky, a man of great intelligence and with an outstanding record of
resistance to National Socialism, with a switch of the conversation to
the possibility of the Atomic Control Commission making its
headquarters in Vienna alongside the International Atomic Energy
Agency, which is now housed there.  Fortunately, in a country where the
state subsidy for the Opera House is rather more than the entire budget
for the Foreign Service, we tourists have not much to fear from the
consequences of such leaden prospects.

Most of the delightful myths about Vienna are just myths.  The town is
not built on the Danube, the Danube is not blue (on inquiry, Chancellor
Raab said that once in his life, under a bright blue sky, he had in
fact seen it blue), and Viennese girls are not a tenth as beautiful as
English girls.  It is most unlikely that they would be.  Vienna is a
fantastic _macdoine_ of races, with a basic stock of Poles, Czechs,
Hungarians, and Rumanians and a strong Jewish strain.  This, with the
possible exception of the Hungarians, is not a promising stud from
which to breed beautiful women.  They have been made to sound beautiful
by Viennese music and song and by the faulty memories of our
grandfathers.  In fact, they are attractive, amusing, forthcoming and
fairly chic.  They also fall deeply, slavishly, in love and have a
powerful weakness for young Englishmen, as Austrians have for young
English girls--a very happy state of affairs between friendly nations.

Viennese night life is not, and never has been, what it is cracked up
to be.  With the exception of the Heurigen wine gardens and Stuben, it
is as dull and stereotyped as most night life.  I have never
particularly liked gipsy music being played in my ear, but you can
still find a few virtuosos in Vienna, notably at the Monseigneur Bar.
Anton Karas, surely one of the luckiest men in the world, continues to
make a fortune out of his 'Zum Dritten Mann', where he 'ziths'
energetically at his zither every night for the benefit of American
tourists who often insist on having their photographs taken seated
behind his instrument.  At the Heurigen, life on the outskirts of
Vienna amongst the vineyards continues to delight, and in May when I
was there, with the lilac and fruit trees in bloom, it was as easy to
drink pints of the young and dangerously acid wine under the moon, with
an accordion being played in the background, as it must have been for
generations.  Here, in Grinzing, with the accordion or violin sobbing
and the local Tauber tearing at your heart-strings with those 'moon'
and 'June' themes which work so magically when they are in foreign
languages, with a Paprikaschnitzel inside you and your twentieth
Viertel waiting to be drunk, the dream sequence continues to unroll
with a smoothness and a temporary truth that remain proof against
cynicism and worldliness.

Other material pleasures are the Hotel Sacher (now sold out of the
Sacher family), which remains one of the best hotels in Europe, and
Demels, the high temple of Viennese pastry-making.  Demels recently won
a court case against Sachers to allow them to manufacture the famous
Sacher Torte, originally invented by a Sacher chef for Metternich.
Here 'all Vienna' come for their 'elevenses', and the place is loud
with 'Kss' die Hand's' in the best Viennese tradition.

No doubt I should have visited the Opera and the picture galleries in
Vienna, but I did not do so; I prefer Nature to Art, and I concentrated
on the Vienna Boys' Choir and the Spanish Riding School after a day
spent visiting the Iron Curtain on the far side of the Neusiedler See,
the home of strange migratory birds from all over Europe.  I last
visited the Iron Curtain in Macao on the other side of the world, and
this section is no more inspiring--the great, empty, marshy plain of
the Hungarian puszta and, across it, striding away to distant horizons,
the twelve-foot, bulky, barbed-wire fence punctuated by watch towers.
It all seems out of date, melancholy and rather silly--silly until one
hears of the occasional Hungarian who is still found at dawn, hanging,
riddled with bullets, in these wires where the searchlights have caught
him, and when one remembers the 180,000-strong herd of men, women and
children who came stumbling across this empty plain a few years ago.
Then it becomes vastly depressing, and we scurried away to the near-by
village of Bruck, where there is a stork's nest on every chimney and a
wonderful wine restaurant; and we drowned our depression to the
phrenetic sobbing of one of those eternal gipsy bands.

The Vienna Boys' Choir--there are, in fact, three of them, but one is
generally travelling abroad--sings every Sunday in the Hofkapelle.
Here, after battling up the narrow stairs, clutching your tickets, and
being shown to a seat from which you can see neither any part of the
choir nor the Mass that is being held far down in the body of the small
church, you must just sit and forget the tourists around you, close
your eyes and listen to the piercingly beautiful voices against the
full orchestra and organ.  You must close your eyes to appreciate the
mysterious poignancy of these boys' voices, because the mixture of
church service and tourist attraction, though it has to be, is an
unfortunate one.  When people have paid for a ticket for any kind of
performance, they seem to think they have also bought the right to
behave as they please.  Even during a church service, the loud
whispering, particularly in a language I will not designate, the
standing up to see better, and even, in the case of a man in front of
me, the chewing of gum, is part of the tourist smear that is rapidly
desecrating the remaining beautiful places and occasions in the world.
And there is absolutely nothing to be done about it.  If you want to
hear the Vienna Boys' Choir, you have to hear it with around two
hundred other people who have also paid to get in.  Since quite a few
of these people are only collecting the occasion, like a postage stamp,
to stick in their albums when they get home, you cannot expect them to
pay more than cursory attention to what is going on.  At the end of,
for them, an exhausting hour during which they are longing for a
cigarette, you must patiently submit to being swept up with them and
pushed off back down the narrow stone stairs so that they may be just
in time to 'do' the Spanish Riding School next door--the second 'must'
for a well packaged Sunday in Vienna.

As for my own visit to the Spanish Riding School, I was more fortunate.
There was to be a special night performance on Monday evening for which
I was lucky enough to get a ticket.

I am not greatly interested in horses.  Our brief friendship terminated
when, at the age of about twelve, I was allotted a hireling with a
large, red, chocolate-box ribbon on its tail to denote a kicker, and
was sent off complaining, with my elder brother, Peter, to a near-by
meet in Oxfordshire.  I stood well away from the meet and was given a
wide berth by the rest of the hunt.  Unfortunately, when the Master and
the hounds set off, they passed close to my beast, who immediately
waded in backwards with hooves flying.  My diminutive heels and light
switch had no effect, and the furious bellows of the Master and
whippers-in--'Get control of your animal, damn it!'--only made me rein
the monster in and accelerate its backward progress.  We scythed our
way through the hunt, kicking the Master's mount and one or two hounds
on the way, and were only brought up by a clump of gorse.  We waited, I
pale and trembling, and my monster sated--a dreadful Bateman
cartoon--until ordered home, 'until you can learn to ride'.  Since that
day, and after equally horrible experiences in the Cavalry School at
Sandhurst, I have profoundly agreed with whoever said that horses are
dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle.

But the Spanish Riding School is something different.  It is the most
graceful exhibition of sheer style in beautiful surroundings to be seen
anywhere in the world.  And on this occasion I took trouble, in the
stables and from the writings of the present commandant, Colonel
Podharsky, to find out more about it.

The Lipizzans date from 'Caesar's snow-white steed which Hispania did
him send'.  Further developed from the original Arab strains during the
occupation of Spain by the Moors, the breed was introduced into Austria
in the sixteenth century by Maximilian II.  The basis of the present
stud was established about that time in the village of Lipizza, near
Trieste, whence the stud influenced horse-breeding throughout the
Danubian monarchy.  At the peace treaty after the First World War, this
Lipizza stud was divided up between Austria and Italy as part of
reparations, the one hundred and nine horses allotted to Italy
returning to Lipizza, and the eighty-nine horses for Austria going to
Fiber in Styria.  Today, the Lipizza breed has six dynasties of
stallions dating back to the following sires: Pluto, Conversano,
Neapolitano, Favoury, Maestoso and Siglavy; and, though extensive
breeding of Lipizzans still goes on in Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia and
Poland, the paramount Austrian stud remains at Fiber.

The fate of the stud during the last war was fraught with drama.  In
1942 the stud was ordered from Fiber to Hostau in Czecho-Slovakia, and
there they were joined by the stud from Lipizza to form, for the first
time since 1919, a united Lipizzan stud with about three hundred and
fifty horses.  But, as the war went worse for Hitler and the Russian
front approached Czecho-Slovakia, it looked as if the end had come.  At
the last moment, in March 1945, occurred what must have been a romantic
and moving sight.  The whole stud, together with its baggage train of
original uniforms and equipment, trekked hundreds of miles between the
armies to St Martin in Upper Austria.  The sight of these beautiful
white stallions wending their way towards the west must have lifted the
hearts of many.  In the midst of shot and shell, the Riding School at
St Martin awaited the arrival of the American forces, fortunately in
this sector commanded by General Patton, who was himself a great
horseman and had been a member of the United States riding team at the
Olympic Games in 1912.  He took the stud under his protection and, in
due course, its homeward trek continued back to Fiber.

The height of a Lipizzan is between 14 and 15.2 hands.  At birth the
horses are black, but their colour changes through grey until they are
white at the age of about four years, by which time they have completed
their basic training in the three essential paces, walk, trot and
canter.  Only the stallions are used for performances in the Riding
School, and then only for about a quarter of an hour's performance by
each horse, with a maximum of forty-five minutes' daily training, to
avoid taxing their powers of concentration and restraint.

The Riding Hall itself, seen at its most wonderful at night when the
two vast chandeliers each blaze with a hundred lights, was built in
1735 by the younger of the Fischer von Erlachs, masters of the baroque
period.  The only touch of colour in the hundred-yard-long white hall
is the wine-red plush on the balustrades, and I am not being irreverent
when I say that the classical virginity of the interior reminds me of
my favourite church in the world, the white baroque interior of the
Frauenkirche in Munich.

This beautiful Riding Hall, fortunately undamaged in the last war, was
also used, under Maria Theresa, for tournaments, carousels, great balls
and fancy-dress carnivals of fantastic splendour.  In 1814, Beethoven
conducted here his monster concert of over a thousand musicians, and
this was the scene of the first assembly of the Austrian parliament in
1848.  (History does not relate that, with the advent of the Nazis,
this graceful virginal hall was used as a temporary prison for many
thousands of Jews, men, women and children, who were crammed in here
for days without food or sanitation during the 'cleaning-up' of Vienna.)

But now these beautiful and hideous memories are gone, it is eight
o'clock in the evening and the lights along the walls and in the giant
chandeliers are blazing.  The far double-doors under the portrait of
Charles VI on a Lipizzan stallion are thrown open and eight of the
beautiful horses, their riders ramrod-straight (their motto is 'Ride
your horse forward and keep it straight'), pace majestically in and
line up facing the royal box.  The brown tricorns are raised and
replaced over the serious, dedicated faces with one straight-arm sweep,
and then, as the hidden orchestra strikes up Reidinger's 'Festive
Entrance', horses and riders proceed to the first number--'All the
Paces and Movements of the High School'.  The riders in their
chocolate-brown redingotes, white breeches and tall black boots to the
knees, double rows of brass buttons flashing, and themselves wooden and
expressionless, are toy soldiers, and the horses have all the soft,
silken, plump appearance of other nursery toys.  You notice that, for
the first easy exercises, the control on a snaffle is light as the
limping trots and sideways chasses gradually smudge the neatly raked
field of sawdust and tan bark.  Then come the more difficult 'Levades'
and the 'Piaffe at the Wall', and, while you are still watching these,
in a far corner, one stallion does a sensational 'Capriole'.  Now you
notice that the curb is being used.  The horses are reined in tautly so
that the proud curve of the neck is still further arched, there is a
fleck of foam on the jaws, and here and there a brown eye shows white
with concentration and nerves.  But immediately after something
difficult, the rider relaxes his horse and allows him to float
gracefully the full length of the hall in the beautiful prancing trot
that I find the most effective pace of all.

And so act follows act, with 'Work in Hand', 'Pas de Trois', and 'Work
on the Rein', until the grand finale of the 'School Quadrille', when
the eight horses perform solemn and rather slow arabesques to Chopin
and Bizet.

By this time, impressed and delighted though one may be by the
discipline and authority of the whole performance, one does rather long
for a vulgar touch of the Aldershot Tattoo when perhaps the horses
might be allowed one single splendid gallop.  But that only shows what
a Philistine one is in these matters.  Exuberance is not permitted in
this dedicated world, and in due course, to the rousing strains of the
'Austrian Grenadiers', the team once again line up, the tricorns are
gracefully held out and replaced, and silently, almost funereally, the
beautiful horses file out again under the clock until the last clink of
spur and bit has disappeared.

After these various elegant pleasures I had one last rendezvous in
Vienna--an incongruous one--with the International Atomic Energy Agency
installed here in 1956 by the United Nations.

I am allergic to almost every form of international agency, conference
or committee.  Having worked briefly in the League of Nations around
1932, I believe that all international bodies waste a great deal of
money, turn out far too much expensively printed paper, and achieve
very little indeed.  So it was with a jaundiced mind that I made an
appointment to visit the _Atm Kmmission_, as the Viennese
call it, with the secret intention of making sharp fun of it.
Unfortunately I fell into the hands of Dr Seligman, formerly head of
the Isotope Division at Harwell, and U.K. representative at the
I.A.E.A. since its foundation, who completely took the wind out of my
sails.  Dr Seligman is one of those intelligent, humorous,
liberal-minded scientists (he reminded me of Sir Solly Zuckerman) who
makes science understandable to the layman, and, with a nice mixture of
irony and enthusiasm, he completely convinced me that the Agency, which
has a modest budget and staff, was doing something really important
very well.

I personally leave it to others to worry about the Atomic Age.  It
seems to me too late in life for this layman to concern himself with
such a vast and inchoate subject, but I accept the fact that atoms are
here to stay and I now realize that, while a few years ago every small
country simply had to have its own national airline, now every small
country has to have its nuclear reactor, allegedly at any rate for
peaceful purposes.

It is to control the demand and safe supply of these reactors and to
teach the operators to work them without blowing up the world that the
Atomic Energy Agency has been set up, and I can now appreciate that the
existence of such international security measures is absolutely vital
to all of us.

What happens is that an underdeveloped country wishing to develop the
peaceful uses of atomic energy (and they all do) needs outside help.
This is provided by the Agency in the form of a mission which examines
the requirements of each country in respect of nuclear physics, raw
materials, reactors, the medical uses of isotopes, and the briefing of
nuclear personnel.  Such missions, for instance, visited India,
Indonesia, Thailand and Ceylon in 1959, and there are other similar
missions in various parts of the world at this time.  Purchases of
nuclear equipment, the training of staff, etc., are then carried out
through the Agency, and member governments supply the goods and any
necessary personnel, presumably in accordance with their individual
economic strategies.

Thus the Agency--in which, by the way, the Soviet Union participates
with, to me, a rather suspect enthusiasm--can keep track of all power
reactors and nuclear material throughout a large part of the world.

In addition to this police activity, the Agency makes independent
studies of health and safety techniques including waste
disposal--thankless tasks, but surely vital ones.

To give one rather dramatic example, there is a matter on hand at the
moment (1959) in the Agency described as the 'Vinca Dosimetry Project'.
On October 15th, 1958, there was a brief uncontrolled run of the Vinca
Zero power reactor in Yugoslavia which exposed a number of operators to
considerable radiation.  The exposed men were flown immediately to the
Curie hospital in Paris and there treated by new methods of
counteracting radiation injury which apparently aroused keen attention
in the scientific and medical worlds.  Meanwhile, in the following
April, the Yugoslav reactor 'went critical', as they say, again, and
unknown elements in the control of such emergencies were revealed.  As
a result, the Agency in Vienna decided that a full-scale reconstruction
of these dangerous circumstances should be undertaken whereby the
precise doses and distribution of neutron and gamma rays to the
originally injured men could be established in the interests of
radiation safety.

Yugoslavia has agreed to this project and many nations are
participating, including the United Kingdom, who loaned the heavy water
needed to restart the reactor, and the United States, who provided,
from Oak Ridge, four plastic phantoms filled with a salt solution
which, in the experiment, will suffer various dosages of radiation.

Dr Seligman confirmed what the Foreign Minister adumbrated--that the
Atomic Energy Control Commission, for so long a subject of debate at
Geneva, would, if and when East and West can agree to its creation,
also have its headquarters in Vienna.  It is odd to think that such a
pretty, frivolous city is becoming the headquarters for such solemn and
ultra-modern undertakings.

Musing on these incongruities, I left the city of romantic dreams and
took off for the Semmering Pass and the beautiful road through the
Alps, for Salzburg, Innsbruck and points west.

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

_Hotels_

Five-star: Still the best is _Sachers_, just the same as ever,
wonderful service and food, hard to get into unless you have influence
or can book well in advance.  Even if you cannot manage to get a room
there, _Sacher's Blue Bar_ and _Red Bar_ are Vienna's meeting-places
for a pre-dinner or pre-opera drink.  The original chocolate
Sachertorte cakes are to be had on the premises, the same recipe as
Emperor Franz Joseph liked, although discerning Viennese prefer the
Sachertorten you get at the old-fashioned coffee-shop of _Demel_, a few
streets away in the Kohlmarkt.  Alternative five-star hotel: the
_Ambassador_ (but known to the Viennese as the 'Kranz') on the Neuer
Markt, back of the Krntner Strasse.  Ask for one of the rooms where
the walls are lined with thick red silk.  Excellent restaurant.

One-star: _Hotel Austria_, in the Wolfengasse, off the Fleischmarkt,
near the Danube Canal.  Comfortable, cosy and old-fashioned but quite
efficient in a restrained, never-get-flustered Viennese sort of way.
It lies in a narrow alley and is nearly opposite one of Vienna's oldest
restaurants, the Griechenbeisl.


_Restaurants_

Five-star: Again, _Sachers_ is hard to beat, and its superb cuisine has
quite recovered from the days fifteen years ago when it was a British
officers' and Control Commission canteen, and the best it could turn
out was baked beans and dried-up rashers on toast, with NAAFI tea.

_Am Franziskaner Platz_ and the _Drei Husaren_ in the Weihburggasse.
But the Viennese leave the five-star restaurants to the foreigners and
prefer picturesque one-star places like the _Weisser Rauchfangkehrer_
(the White Chimney-sweep) in the Rauhensteingasse, where one sits in
niches and drinks the eternal white wine from the vineyard slopes of
Gumpoldskirchen, just outside Vienna, and listens to sentimental piano
music.  Its good family cooking is much more like real Vienna than any
of the five-star places.  Viennese gravitate between this and places
like the romantic candle-lit _Kerzenstberl_ in the Habsburger Gasse
and the _Lindenkeller_ in the Rotenturmstrasse.


_Night-clubs_

Five-star: _Maxim_, which has a floor show and girls which remind one
of Berlin in the good old naughty days before World War II.  It is far
and away more sophisticated than anything one can see in the
_spiessbrgerlich_ Berlin night life of today.  Likewise _Eva_, an even
more intimate night-club of the same somewhat exotic type.

One-star: A spot of history is attached to the _Fatty George_ in the
Peters Platz.  It was called the _Oriental_ during the war and was much
used by the Gestapo to trap unwary German soldiers on leave and
recovering from the rigours of the Eastern front into 'careless talk'.
Microphones were fitted behind all the seats.  In those days the owner
was a character named Achmed Bey whose name still brings tiny frissons
to the Viennese.  Today the _Fatty George_, run by a coloured
band-leader, is rather more harmless and is dedicated to the blaringest
rock and roll.  For those who prefer songs sung in Viennese dialect as
well as to dance, there is _Marietta's_.  One of the present-day
cabaret stars in _Marietta's_ fled to Britain and served in the Pioneer
Corps during World War II to avoid being sent to a Nazi concentration
camp.  Though the foreigners like the night-spots, Viennese prefer to
sit in Heurigens and drink wine and sing nostalgically their
traditional songs.  These places are all pretty cheap.  The claim to
fame of the _Esterhazy Keller_, apart from the fact that all its wines
come from the Esterhazy estates, is that it is in a thirteenth-century
cellar so deep in the bowels of the earth that not even the invading
Turks nearly four hundred years ago dared to descend into its murky and
sinister depths.  Another city-centre wine cellar of equal antiquity is
the _Urbani Keller_ in Am Hof, which has wonderful wine but where the
musty smell reminds one nostalgically of the tunnels of the
Metropolitan Railway between Baker Street and Finchley Road.


_Out-of-the-way-and-not-to-miss_

In scarcely any guide-book and hardly known about even by life-long
Viennese is the quaint Clock Museum in the Neuer Markt, right in the
centre of Vienna.  Its aged but charming owner, who has presented it to
the City Administration and has stayed on to run it as a hobby, is so
passionately fond of his collection that he only opens the exhibition
on one or two days a week and spends the rest of the time pottering in
the deafening all-pervading ticking and chiming that fill the room from
the thousands of clocks and watches.  The collection includes some
clocks with moving pornographic faces that are kept in a special locked
cabinet and only shown to adults.  The _pice de resistance_ is a vast
clock that was built by a monk several hundred years ago and shows
every movement of the tide and phase of the moon until A.D. 4000, and a
lot of other relatively useless but charming information.




XI _Geneva_

To include Geneva among the thrilling cities of Europe must seem to
most people quixotic.  What about Paris, Istanbul, Venice, for
instance?  Well, Paris is too big, Istanbul is too Asiatic, and Venice
is a clich.  It had crossed my mind to write a joke essay on Venice
and discuss the town without ever mentioning the canals, the gondolas,
the churches or the piazzas.  With a straight face, I would concentrate
on the artistic purity of the railway station, the workings of the
stock exchange, the intricacies of Venetian municipal finance, the
history of the municipal waterworks and power station.  I might even
have found an erudite explanation in Venetian folk-lore for calling
such a very small bridge the 'Bridge of Size'.  But apart from
perpetrating what, at the best, would have been a pretty damp squib,
there is absolutely nothing to say about Venice.  It is there, and all
that one can tell people is that they should go and see it for
themselves.  Instead I chose Geneva, clean, tidy and God-fearing, a
model city devoted to good causes--the city of Calvin, of the Red
Cross, and of the United Nations.

For to me Geneva, and indeed the whole of Switzerland, has a Georges
Simenon quality--the quality that makes a thriller-writer want to take
a tin-opener and find out what goes on behind the faade, behind the
great families who keep the banner of Calvin flying behind the lace
curtains in their fortresses in the rue des Granges, the secrets behind
the bronze grilles of the great Swiss banking corporations, the hidden
turmoil behind the beautiful, bland face of the country.

As soon as you get over the Arlberg Pass and down into the Vorarlberg
(which, incidentally, voted to become a Swiss canton in 1919 but was
snubbed by Switzerland), everything is changed.  Even the yodelling is
different.  In Austria and Bavaria, yodelling is light and airy and gay
and mixed up with romance.  In Switzerland, the yodel has deep
undertones of melancholy that sometimes descend into an almost primeval
ululation akin to the braying moan of the Alpenhorn--an echoing plaint
against the strait-jacket of Swiss morals, respectability and symmetry.
For the solidity of Switzerland is based on a giant conspiracy to keep
chaos at bay and, where it blows in from neighbouring countries, or
pollinates within the frontiers, to sweep it tidily under the carpet.

Switzerland is one great 'Mon Repos' and, to keep this European pension
spick and span so that, apart from other considerations, the rates at
the lodging-house can remain high, the Swiss Government--which is more
of a management than a government--and all the Swiss people labour
constantly to keep up a front of cleanliness, order and impeccable
financial standing.

This cultivated innocence seems, to the traveller arriving from
happy-go-lucky Austria, to verge almost into infantilism in the
Swiss-German cantons where the linguistic use of the diminutive rings
almost like baby-talk.  The diminutive suffix 'li' is everywhere, from
the _Brli_, _Mdli_ and, of course, _Khli_ (boys, girls and cows) to
the famous _Msli_, the nature food with which Dr Bircher-Brenner
endeavoured to save the life of Sir Stafford Cripps.  My favourite is
_Kelloerettli_, a derivation of quelle heure est-il? which is
Berner-Swiss for a watch.  With surroundings clean as the whistle of a
Swiss train, soothed by the clonking of the cow-bells, besieged by
advertisements for dairy products and chocolate, and with cuckoo clocks
tick-tocking in every other shop window, the visitor to Switzerland
feels almost as if he had arrived in some gigantic nursery.

In many other respects it is a great refreshment to arrive in
Switzerland from any other country in Europe.  Here at last you do not
have to lock your car when you leave it on the street.  There are no
beggars, pimps or gangsters.  Super petrol from the pump really is
super.  Privacy is respected and there are no gossip-writers.  The
lavatories are spotless and the waiters and shopkeepers have that
desire to please that is only genuine in a really thrifty nation.  In
exchange for this cleanliness and orderliness, you yourself must, of
course, conform by also being clean and orderly.  Swiss management and
officialdom are extremely managerial and officious, and to slip up
chaotically by parking your car in the wrong place, leaving the
smallest scrap of litter, or failing to have the right kind of ticket
on a train may lead to positively magisterial retribution.  For the
thwarted or affronted Swiss readily goes, as the psychologists say,
'into paroxysm', as any member of the British Ski Club who has offended
the guard on a Swiss train will agree.  These states of paroxysm--the
reaction of the symmetrist to chaos--are signs of the deep psychosis
that results from restraint.  They are the lid blowing off the
pressure-cooker.  Statistically, further symptoms show themselves in
the suicide rate, where the Swiss stand fifth in the whole world, with
nearly double the suicide rate of the United Kingdom; the divorce rate,
which is the fourth highest in Europe; and alcoholism, which, thanks to
a partiality for schnapps, is the prime cause of lunacy in the country.
In the latter connection, a friend of mine who lives in the old town of
Zrich tells me that, on Saturday nights, when the suburbanites and the
neighbouring peasants forgather for the weekly lifting of the
pressure-cooker lid, the night is made hideous by revellers who do not
just fall down when they are drunk but stand outside in the streets and
bay at the moon with terrible cries from deep down within their
frustrated libidos.

But these tragic manifestations are hushed up (you may not mention
suicide as a cause of death in a Swiss newspaper) for the sake of 'Mon
Repos', and other human frailties are kept tidy.  Extra-marital love,
for instance, though it may end in the divorce court, is usually
managed with great decorum.  It is an understood thing that the Swiss
businessman has a mistress, but it is also understood that the mistress
shall not be kept in the home town but established in a neighbouring
city which the businessman has reason to visit at frequent intervals.
And it is typical of Swiss values that Lotte or Lisa shall not be some
beautiful odalisque lounging all day on a satin chaise-longue while she
dips into a chocolate box and reads the fashion magazines.  The Zrich
businessman expects his loved one in Berne to earn money in a
respectable job, keep their love-nest spick and span, and prepare
dainty meals for him when he comes over for the night.  She must be a
good Swiss citizen as well as a good Swiss mistress.  Further, to tidy
up the whole picture, abortion is legal in most cantons, though here
again the process is respectably formalized.  The girl, of whatever
nationality, must first go to a G.P. who will certify that she is not
fit to bear a child because her blood pressure is too high or too low,
or because she is physically run down in one way or another.  The G.P.
will then recommend her to a gynaecologist who, in turn, will recommend
her to a clinic, thus spreading the risk and the responsibility--and,
incidentally, the financial reward which, through this triangular
co-operative, mounts to between 80 and 100.  Similarly with gambling.
The Swiss are not great gamblers (though I believe it was a Swiss who
invented the football pool system) except on the Stock and Bullion
Exchanges, but casinos have recently been permitted to operate in most
of the large cities on condition that boule only is played and the
maximum stake shall be five Swiss francs--two conditions that
effectively neutralize the vice.

Having thus fragrantized most of the common human weaknesses, there
remain money crimes, and these the Swiss have not wished to push under
the carpet.  Instead they have elevated the crime against the holy
franc to be the most heinous in their whole society.  They have done
this because they really mean it.  The Swiss franc is the idol at which
all Switzerland worships.  A friend of mine who has to listen to the
Swiss radio at frequent intervals tells me that there is no bulletin in
which francs or Franken do not feature.  Cantonal budgets are given
down to the last centime, as is the cost of a local library, a football
field, or a new apartment house (such local Swiss news is always given
before the foreign news of the day).  Since the greatest crime in
Switzerland is to do something wrong with money, the smallest burglary
is pursued relentlessly by the police, and the value of money is one of
the prime pillars of a child's education.  If you see a small crowd in
the street, it will not be in front of a shop window, but at the window
of a bank, all of which give Wall Street prices half an hour after the
opening and every hour thereafter.

This mania for money is not new.  The Genevese, Henri Dunant, invented
the Red Cross, but, in the process of promoting his humanitarian ideas,
he let the family business--textile mills in Algeria--go to pot, with
the result that he committed the gravest sin that Geneva can conceive
of--he squandered capital.  Years later, living a pauper's life in the
canton of Appenzell, he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize.
Immediately, though his bankruptcy was thirty years old, his creditors
attempted to have the prize seized in settlement of his debt.  Dunant
managed to stave them off, and when he died in 1910 he left the prize
money to charities rather than let a penny go to his family.

The thirst for money is, of course, the chief economic strength of a
country that is poor in natural resources and that has, broadly
speaking, only services to sell.  Originally the Swiss, who had as
ferocious a record for fighting as the Scots, hired out their various
cantonal armies as mercenaries (the Swiss Guards at the Vatican are the
survivors), but in this century they have turned their attention to
hotels and sanatoria (with the defeat of tuberculosis they are cannily
switching to the modern managerial diseases resulting from stress and
tension), and to the creation of the solidest banking system in the
world.

The great virtue of Swiss banks is that they are not only solid but
secret, and, in the vaults of Zrich, Basle and Geneva lie buried
clandestine fortunes worth billions upon billions of pounds.  The
reason why fugitive money, in its search for safe repose, has poured
into Switzerland in such a continuous torrent, particularly since the
war, is due to the sympathy of the government for money which is more
or less hot (if it was not, it would not be on the run).  In a Swiss
bank you may have an account or a safe deposit known only by a number,
and this number will be known only by you and by one single director of
the bank who may not disclose your identity even to his fellow
directors.  If, for instance, I. Fleming had such an account and a
friend were to send 100,000 to my Swiss bank for the credit of I.
Fleming, the bank would deny all knowledge of me and return the money.
But if the money were sent to account No. 1234, the receipt of the
money would be acknowledged in the normal way.  Only if criminal
proceedings are started against me in the Swiss courts by the Swiss
authorities can the director concerned be subpoenaed and made to reveal
the contents of my account or safe-deposit box.

To reinforce this device, heavy federal penalties were imposed by the
law of November 8th, 1934 (just in time, be it noted, to welcome the
flood of Jewish and German funds fleeing from Hitler), on any breach of
banking security.  I took the trouble to look up the relevant Article
47B, which lays down:


    Whosoever intentionally as organ, official, employee of a bank, as
    accountant or accountant's assistant, as member of the banking
    Commission, clerk or employee of its secretariat, violates the duty
    of absolute silence or the professional secret, whosoever seduces
    or attempts to seduce others to do so, will be punished with a fine
    of up to 20,000 Swiss francs or with imprisonment up to six months.
    Both penalties may be inflicted concurrently.


With these safeguards, and amid the silence of the fir trees that climb
the innocent Alps and whisper no secrets to the wind, it is no wonder
that Switzerland has been universally acclaimed the safe-deposit box
for the world.

The hidden riches of Switzerland cannot be estimated in millions or
billions, but _Pick's World Currency Report_ gave a clue in a recent
examination of the average per capita gold holding in all countries.
Switzerland easily leads the field with an average holding of 370
dollars of pure gold per head of the population--more than three times
the figure for the American citizen, Fort Knox and all.  (I do not wish
to give the impression that the Swiss are miserly.  Not only is the
government most generous in charitable donations abroad, but the
International Committee of the Red Cross and the League of the Red
Cross Societies, as well as the Swiss Red Cross, are heavily subsidized
by Switzerland.  Moreover, a host of semi-official and private Swiss
charitable organizations contribute vast sums annually towards foreign
charitable causes.)

It is not surprising that the protection and further accumulation of
this national fortune is an obsession with Switzerland, and the
emphasis on privacy and security in the country is perhaps as much to
attract money, for ever on the hunt for 'Mon Repos', as for the peace
and protection of the citizens.  The atmosphere of a well-guarded
bank-vault is strengthened by the continued maintenance of war-time
tank traps, camouflaged redoubts, and demolition chambers, not only all
along the frontiers but on many bridges and other strategic points
throughout the country.  (At an intersection on the main road from Nyon
to Geneva, for instance, there is a neat villa, window-boxes and, all
that reveals itself on closer inspection to be a mighty
stressed-concrete pillbox.)  Military service is compulsory for all
between the ages of twenty and sixty, and every soldier-citizen has to
keep his rifle with forty rounds at home so as to be ready to go out
and fight in the streets at a moment's notice.  Preparations for
emergency go to the point where every housewife is required to keep in
the larder iron rations, consisting basically of one litre of cooking
oil, two kilos of rice and two kilos of sugar per head of the
household, and to consume and replace these at regular intervals to
keep them fresh.  These measures, combined with a powerful, though not
very bright, police force, create a glowing picture of law, order and
security in a turbulent world.  Combined with the honesty, industry and
cleanliness of the Swiss, the impression on the foreigner and on
foreign capital is little short of paradisal.

Traditionally a haven for refugees from turmoil and persecution, modern
Switzerland has gathered to its bosom a new kind of refugee--the
fugitive from punitive taxation.  The political refugee still exists in
the form of fugitive royal families, Italian, Rumanian, Spanish and
Egyptian, together with a handful of sheikhs.  These sad orphans of the
world's storm, evicted from their palaces, have found shelter in the
Palace Hotels along the shores of Lac Leman, and there hold strictly
mediatized tea and bridge parties and are courted by the local snobs.

There are many cranks attached to this fusty world of ex-kings and
queens, including, in Lausanne, one bizarre sect, about thirty strong,
that worships our queen.  The members believe that Queen Elizabeth is a
descendant of the biblical King David, and that she will reign over the
world and bring about the millennium.  This world rule will have its
headquarters in Lausanne where the sect has set up a 'temple' over a
garage and decorated it with bright rainbow-coloured draperies and a
large red-leather armchair which is to be her throne.  A similar but
smaller chair awaits Prince Charles.  Members of the sect take it in
turns to fast for twenty-four hours at a time while awaiting Her
Majesty's arrival.  The leader, a certain Frederick Bussy, is a bearded
gentleman in his late forties who wears white robes embroidered with
the British royal coat of arms, and records the prophecies of the sect
on a dictaphone for typing and posting to world leaders.  Monsieur
Bussy is particularly proud that Her Majesty appears to take note of
his requests.  He told a reporter, 'We suggested Her Majesty should
choose King Edward's throne for her coronation and she did so.'

A host of British and American actors and writers are the Voltaires,
Rousseaus and Mesdames de Stal of today--Charlie Chaplin, Nol Coward,
Ingrid Bergman, Richard Burton, Peter Ustinov, Yul Brynner, William
Holden, Georges Simenon, Mel Ferrer and Audrey Hepburn among them.  I
stayed with Nol Coward near Montreux, and there my wife joined me.
Nol Coward is, besides being a friend, one of my heroes, and I was
disgusted by the hullabaloo in the press--but not, I think, among his
public--when some years ago, instead of allowing him to go slowly
bankrupt, his lawyer persuaded him to reside outside England and stay
alive.  I will not weary my readers with the details of his case, but I
have a basic alteration to propose in our tax laws which I will call,
so that it looks properly portentous on the statute books, the Quantum
of Solace Clause.  Briefly, this will allow tax relief to those who, as
judged by an independent tribunal, have given the maximum amount of
pleasure to their fellow citizens.  Most beneficiaries will, of course,
come from the creative arts--acting, writing, painting, music, etc--but
they will also come from sport, politics and medicine.  Such a clause
would, I believe, have the blessing of the general public, it would
greatly encourage the arts, and it would serve to keep creative ability
within our shores (copy to the Inland Revenue for action!).

Nol Coward arranged a dinner party for us with his neighbour, Charlie
Chaplin, and it was a dazzling experience to spend a whole evening with
the two people who have made me laugh most of all in my life.  Charlie
Chaplin lives in a handsome eighteenth-century house in a large,
well-treed park above Vevey, with furniture unremarkable but
appropriate, both comfortable and 'lived with'.  There is no pretension
anywhere except perhaps in the glasses at dinner.  Charlie Chaplin
hates them.  They are Venetian and spidery, with gold rims, and Charlie
Chaplin described how, on a visit to Venice, for all his efforts to
avoid the experience, he and his wife were gondolaed off 'to that
damned island where they blow glass'.  He blew realistically until he
was red in the face.  'And they made me, absolutely made me, spend
about a thousand dollars on this junk.'  He waved a hand.  I was
absolutely furious at falling into the trap.'  Much of the success of
the evening was due to Oona, his beautiful young wife, the daughter of
Eugene O'Neill.  She has borne him seven children in the seventeen
years of their marriage.  It is wonderful to see two people bask
unaffectedly in each other's love, and the relationship lit up the
evening.

Charlie Chaplin, in a plum-coloured smoking-jacket which, he said, he
wore because it made him feel like a millionaire, exuded vitality
tempered with the deprecation and self-mockery one expects from him.
After dangerously skirting politics over the matter of Caryl Chessman's
execution (though he was disgusted with it, Chaplin said that, by his
death, Chessman had achieved more for mankind than any other man since
the war), we got on to _Ben Hur_, which Chaplin, who practically never
goes to films or theatres and does not own a television set, had not
seen.  Chaplin immediately became airborne.  He was going to make a
really great film, it would be a mixture of half a dozen
spectaculars--_Ben Hur_, _Anna Karenina_, _South Pacific_ and others.
It would be _Around Romance in 80 Days_.  Certainly he would put in the
chariot race.  The villain with the big knives on his chariot wheels
would overhaul the hero, 'a chap called Gulliver or Don Quixote or one
of those'.  As the villain came alongside, the hero would nonchalantly
hold out a side of ham which the knives on the chariot wheels would cut
into thin slices which the hero would eat and gain strength so that he
would win the race.  All this splendid mirage was illustrated with
unceasing dumb crambo.

More seriously, he said that he would make one more 'Little Man' film.
My wife suggested that the theme should be 'the little man who had
never had it so good', and Chaplin seized the idea and tucked it away.
He next enlivened us with a graphic account of being invited by the
Duke of Westminster to a boar hunt in France, of the clothes he had had
to borrow and how his horse had run away with him.  And then he was off
again, brilliantly 'fed' by Nol Coward, into memories of his early
days on the boards in England, of the great actors and actresses he had
worshipped, and of his own struggles and first notices.

He is now writing his memoirs.  He works every day from eleven to five
and has finished nine hundred pages.  On that day, there remained only
twenty pages to go.  He complained of being bedevilled by his Swiss
secretary who constantly tried to improve his English.  He said he was
not surprised, as he had taught himself the language and suspected that
his secretary knew it far better than he did, but, even so, he liked
his own version and hoped that some of what he had actually written
would survive the process of editing by his publishers.  We all, of
course urged him to reject any kind of editorial censorship or
correction, but his modesty will, one fears, allow Big Brother's blue
pencil to wreak its havoc.  (How much better those who 'don't write'
write than those who do--Lord Attlee, Lord Moran, Viscount Montgomery
and, latterly, Ralph Richardson!)  The evening had to end.  It is
wonderful when one's heroes in the flesh are even better than in the
imagination.

It was the time of the Narcissus Festival, and the fields around Nol
Coward's house (which he has not, after all, called 'Shilly Chalet')
were thick with the flowers that were to line my route round
Europe--tulips in Holland, lilac in Vienna, narcissi in Switzerland
and, later, bougainvillaea and hibiscus in Naples.  Alas, I had to
forsake these innocent Alps (what is the definition of an Alp, by the
way, and when does an Alp become a Berg?) and spend my days in
Geneva--Voltaire's 'shining city that greets the eye, proud, noble,
wealthy, deep and sly'.

Geneva is far, far wealthier than it was in Voltaire's day when, as the
Duc de Choiseul, Madame de Pompadour's foreign minister, advised, 'If
you see a Genevese jump out of the window, jump right after him.  There
is fifteen per cent to be gained.'  Today, its economy bulging with the
wealth of countless international organizations and of big foreign
businesses attracted by tax advantages, such as Chrysler and Dupont,
with a quarter of its residents foreigners and well over a million
tourists every year, the town is bursting at the seams, and the small
population of true Genevese--about fifty thousand--have a hard time
trying to avoid being overlaid by the giant golden calf for whom,
originally with enthusiasm but now with very mixed feelings, they
provide pasture.

Parking a car in any city these days is almost impossible.  In the
centre of Geneva it is totally so.  Hunting round and round like a
mouse in a trap, it crossed my mind that, for the motorist, 'P' has
become the most desirable letter of the alphabet.  How blessed it is to
be able actually to stop and get out of the car and leave it without
the fear of a torrent of abuse when you return to it!  So far as Geneva
is concerned, the only hope is for them to build vast parking places
out over the famous lake.

This beautiful lake, plus the highest fountain in the world and the
Rhne that thunders so majestically through the town--all this and Mont
Blanc too, do not make Geneva a happy town.  The spirit of Calvin,
expressed in the ugly and uncompromising cathedral that dominates the
city, seems to brood like a thunderous conscience over the inhabitants.
In the rue des Granges adjoining the cathedral, the great patrician
families, the de Candoles, de Saussures, Pictets, set a frightening
tone of respectability and strait-laced behaviour from which the lesser
Genevese take their example.  The international set--the delegates,
staffs of the various organizations and staffs of foreign
businesses--do not penetrate even the fringes of Genevese society.
They even mix poorly among themselves.  The lack of adjustment between
the resident Americans, for instance, and Geneva life is such that a
booklet--an excellent common-sense one, by the way--has been prepared
at the behest of the President of the American Women's Club of Geneva
and the Chief of the Mental Health Section of the World Health
Organization, to prepare Americans coming to work in Geneva for what is
described as 'Culture Shock'--the impact of the European way of life on
an American.

The chief trouble is the language problem, closely followed by the
business of bringing up children.  In Geneva, as in the rest of
Switzerland, Swiss children have butter or jam for tea.  Swiss children
are not allowed to go to most films until they are eighteen, and even
the harmless Danny Kaye is forbidden to children until they are
sixteen, to be proved by the presentation of identity cards.  When a
Swiss child comes back from a party, he or she is asked, 'Were you
good?' whereas the American parent will ask, 'Did you have a good
time?'  The Swiss mother finds it difficult to make adult conversation
to a foreign mother because only in 1960, and by a very narrow
majority, did Swiss women obtain the vote, and then only in a minority
of the cantons.  Finally, the general values and moral judgments of the
Swiss have hardly developed since 1914, whereas the foreigners' have
been turned inside out by two world wars.

But, above all, it is the reserve of the Genevese that chills those
many Americans who so much want to be loved (the British don't
particularly expect to be liked, or are too obtuse to notice if they
aren't).  It was this reserve, this holier-than-thou attitude, that
Voltaire endeavoured to dynamite in his constant forays against
Calvinism.  Today it is only the giant scandal that can fracture the
smugness.  Fortunately, from time to time, the Lord who, I have always
believed, has little sympathy for Calvinism, visits just such a scandal
upon Calvin's present-day disciples.  The echoes of such a visitation
were still rumbling when I was in Geneva in May 1960--the case of
Pierre Jaccoud, Geneva's senior lawyer, head of the Bar Association and
chief of the all-powerful Radical Party in the town, and it was a real
grand slam in scandals.

The story is this: on May 1st, 1958, an elderly man, Charles Zumbach,
was found shot and stabbed in his house on the outskirts of Geneva.
His wife, on returning from a church meeting that night, was shot at
and wounded by the murderer whom she described as a tall, dark man
wearing a dark suit who had dashed out of the house and made his escape
on a black bicycle.  It was a headline story, but no headlines were
black enough for the sensational arrest of Matre Pierre Jaccoud a
month later on the charge of murder.

The scandal developed swiftly.  It was revealed that, shortly after the
murder, Jaccoud had gone to Stockholm and had his hair bleached, that
he had tried to take poison during the police investigation, and that
he had had a mistress, Linda Baud, a secretary at Radio Geneva.  All
this of one of Geneva's sons who had been nicknamed 'Calvin' at school
because of his puritanical nature; of a lawyer who had counted Aly
Khan, Sacha Guitry and I.G. Farben among his clients, of a Director of
the Conservatoire de Musique and of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande,
of a Municipal Councillor and Deputy of the Grand Conseil of
Geneva--worse, of a man who lived in a street that abutted on the rue
des Granges!

It turned out that Jaccoud had met Linda Baud, then in her twenties, at
an official dinner when, as his lawyer claimed, 'he was ready to love
like a schoolboy, never having loved as a schoolboy'.  The affair
lasted ten years, with passionate ups and downs.  His wife knew all
about it but did nothing for fear of offending the conventions, and,
when it ended, Madame Jaccoud, worn down by those 'meals heavy with
silence', took him back and the marriage was mended.

Unfortunately, in the summer of 1957, Linda Baud took another lover, a
young technician from Radio Geneva called Andr Zumbach, to whom, out
of jealousy, Jaccoud wrote anonymous letters.  They were sordid ones:


    I have heard that you are a friend of Linda Baud and feel you
    should be informed of what is going on.  After having been the
    mistress of a barkeeper, then of one of the employees of your
    organization, not to mention a number of other adventures, she has
    been the mistress of a married man for several years.  I have just
    heard that she has relations with someone very dear to me.  I saw
    them together on the 17th August and found by chance a most
    edifying photograph of the way they spend their time.  I am
    enclosing this photo.

    [Signed] 'SIMONE B.'


The photograph was one of Linda Baud naked which, she claimed, Jaccoud
had taken of her at pistol point one evening in the grimy little room
they had used for their affair.  Andr Zumbach accused Jaccoud of
sending these letters and the prosecution maintained that Jaccoud,
frightened by the accusation, had gone to Zumbach's home to kill Andr
Zumbach and get the letters back.  Surprised by the father, Jaccoud had
shot him and, panicking, had also shot the mother.

The trial, in March 1960, lasted three weeks and was enlivened by the
production of five hundred love-letters from Jaccoud to Linda Baud, the
discovery of a Moroccan dagger, showing traces of blood and liver
cells, at Jaccoud's home, and of a button, found on the scene of the
crime, of an English raincoat parcelled up in Jaccoud's apartment to be
sent to the Red Cross.  To heighten the drama, the Public Prosecutor
was a great friend of Jaccoud and they broke out into 'tu' in the
court--the court where Jaccoud himself had so often pleaded.  The judge
also knew the accused, and the defence lawyers were old friends.  The
Public Prosecutor himself admitted acquaintance with Linda Baud, and
the drama was intensified by the appearance of a famous Paris lawyer,
Ren Floriot, for the defence, who spread mud still more widely over
Geneva, to the fury of the inhabitants.

Finally, with the natural respect of the Genevese for authority, titles
and high society torn to shreds, Jaccoud was convicted and sentenced to
seven years, subsequently reduced to three.

Such cases--the Dubois espionage affair of 1957 was another one--burst
upon the Swiss scene with all the greater impact because, though sordid
crimes occur in every other country of the world, they really should
not disturb a society that has 'Mon Repos' as its motto.  These
scandals have no more impact abroad than any other headline murder
story, but, among the Swiss, it is as if a corner of the lid of the
great pressure-cooker had lifted to emit a poisonous jet of steam--a
whiff from the great cauldron of human chaos that is the supreme enemy
of the symmetry that is Switzerland.

Much, far too much, I fear, of what I have written will seem critical
of the Swiss and of their surpassingly beautiful country.  Yet it is
not my wish to be critical, but merely to examine, to look beneath the
surface of a country that holds so much more mystery than those that
wear their hearts and psychoses on their sleeve.  I was partly educated
in Switzerland--at the University of Geneva where I studied Social
Anthropology, of all subjects, under the famous Professor Pittard.  I
was once engaged to a Swiss girl.  I am devoted to the country and to
its people and I would not have them different in any detail.  But, as
I said at the beginning, Switzerland has a Simenon quality, an
atmosphere of still-water-running-deep, which is a great temptation to
the writer of thrillers.  If I have revealed a wart here and a wen
there and poked mild fun at the reserved, rather prim face Switzerland
presents to the world, this is because the mystery writer enjoys seeing
the play from back-stage rather than from out front, in the stalls.

To conclude, I will draw the veil aside from one last Swiss secret
that, amongst all, the world has perhaps found the most baffling: Swiss
cheese has holes in it because, in the process of making Gruyre and
Emmental, carbon dioxide is formed and, as the cheese solidifies, the
bubbles remain.

      *      *      *

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

_Hotels_

Hotels in Geneva are usually top-heavy with conference delegates.  This
applies even to winter-time and even to conferences no one has ever
heard of.

Luxury hotels are growing like mushrooms, but the _Richmond_ and the
_Htel des Bergues_ are particularly favoured by visiting high society
and statesmen, while the newer _Htel du Rhne_ is more frequently
chosen by business magnates and sheikhs.

For another type of luxury: quiet, remote lakeside setting and the
atmosphere of a country manor, there is the less-known _Clos de Sadex_,
near Nyon, twenty-five kilometres outside the town on the Route Suisse
leading to Lausanne, and therefore only recommended to the motorised.
The _Clos de Sadex_ is run by English-speaking Mr and Mrs L. de
Tscherner who have transformed their own home into a first-class
residential hotel and who loan their own motor boat for lake excursions.

A picturesque but not inexpensive retreat in Geneva itself is the
_Htel Lamartine_.  This is an 'authentic' chalet in its own garden at
Champel, chemin des Clochettes; it is mentioned in the Guide Michelin
and caters mainly for bed-and-breakfast customers.

Less money to spend?  There is a pleasant pub-style pension on the
lakeside a kilometre or so outside Geneva at la Belotte, chemin des
Pcheurs, the _Htel de la Belotte_.  A limited number of rooms and the
inconvenience of Sunday invasions of lunchers who come _inter alia_ for
_perches du lac_, a fresh-water fish speciality.


_Restaurants_

The gastronomic delights of Geneva are slightly overshadowed by the
vicinity--within fifty kilometres--of _Le Pre Bise_, one of France's
three best restaurants, at Talloires, just after Annecy.

Inside Geneva the _Barn_, quai de la Poste, is the uncrowned king of
local restaurants.  After that the choice is vast and interesting, and
advice will be tendered from every side.

For fondue bourguignonne, a local speciality, _Le Chandelier_, 23
Grande Rue, in the old city, ranks high.  This fondue consists of
portions of cut-up raw steak which you impale on a stick and cook
yourself in boiling oil and butter at the table.  It is served with a
variety of sharp sauces.

Cheese fondue is rarely served in summer and it tastes better in any
brasserie than in a restaurant.  I always feel that this
cheese-and-white-wine speciality takes the limelight from an even
tastier speciality: raclette.  Raclette is merely toasted cheese.  But
what toasted cheese!  The performance takes place at an open fire and
the chef scrapes the melted cheese straight from the fire on to a
numbered plate: yours.  You are automatically served with a fresh
portion on the same easily identified plate until you beg for mercy.
Raclette should be eaten in the mountains before the fresh cheeses and
the cows come down to the valley.  In Geneva the _Caf du Midi_, round
the corner from the _Htel des Bergues_, has a cellar, or carnotzet,
which specializes in raclette--if you can stand the heat.

It is cooler, less picturesque, and the raclette or fondue is just as
good when served in a caf called _Le Bagnard_, place du March,
Carouge.  The word Bagnard comes from Bagne cheese and not from a
convict past in the caf ownership.

I hope habitus will forgive me for giving away the name of a bistro
which serves excellent meals and charges according to the size of the
portion asked for: _Chez Bouby_, rue Grenus 1.

At the other extreme, as a preliminary to night-clubbing, the only
place where it is possible to dine to music and dance is the
_Gentilhomme_, which belongs to the _Richmond_.  (Incidentally all
restaurants, including the Barn, must be looked up in the telephone
directory for booking purposes under the word 'caf', for reasons
unknown.)

Night-clubs are numerous, cheaper than in England and as naughty as
those in Paris, hope the Genevese.

The _Bataclan_, run by Madame Irne, is famous for its strip-teasers.
The floor show here is one reason why German Swiss, less privileged at
home, find business visits to Geneva quite essential.

_La Cave  Bob_, in an old town cellar, also has strip-teasers,
chansonniers, and tries to be reminiscent of St-Germain-des-Prs.  The
_Moulin Rouge_ usually has extremely good attractions from Paris and
even New York.

With a star show, night-clubs charge an entry fee of up to ten francs.
Otherwise a whisky or a shared bottle of vin blanc can last you till 2
a.m. at a cost of about 10s. per person.  It is of course possible and
easy to spend more.




XII _Naples_

Olio Sasso!  Olio Sasso!!  Olio Sasso!!!  The monstrous autostrada
hoardings, demonstrating, even more forcibly than the Italians' total
lack of interest in their artistic and architectural treasures, that
Italy is a race of Philistines, flip by with the kilometres.  A tiny
dot in the driving mirror becomes an Alfa or a Maserati.  There is a
searing screech from double wind horns, the Gatling crackle of twin
exhausts from which the mufflers have been removed and, a few minutes
later, nothing ahead but the white, empty ribbon of the autostrada
vanishing into the glistening heat-mirage.

The sheer harshness of motoring in Italy shocked all the more after a
night spent in one of the few bedrooms attached to one of the three
greatest restaurants of France, the aforesaid _Pre Bise_ at Talloires
on Lake Annecy.  There, I am ashamed to say, an injudicious combination
of the Pere's _pat de foie gras chaud en crote_ followed by _gratin
de queues d'crevisses_ was too much for a stomach attuned for three
weeks to the milder pabulum of _Wienerschnitzel mil grnem Salat_.  But
I had not allowed this disgrace to diminish the enchantment of one of
my favourite beauty spots in Europe, and the slow meander through the
High Savoy and over the Mont Cenis pass, opened ten days before, and
the descent towards Italy through fields of gentians, alpine crocuses
and white and sulphur anemones, were a beautiful transition from the
douce north to the brazen south of Europe.  Then Turin, Milan and the
broad, silken ribbon of the Autostrada del Sole that hurtles the
motorist down south to Florence.  And there to be met by the full
impact of international tourism combined with the appalling tumult of
post-war Italy.

Florence was a rude shock, but Rome--in preparation for the 1960
Olympics--was worse.  The city may not have been built in a day, but it
has now been almost rebuilt in under two years, and we arrived in the
last stages of the pandemonium.  Bridges, by-passes, stadia and new
housing settlements, being rushed to completion in a turmoil of dust,
road drills and excavators, had converted the city into a maze of
closed roads, badly marked detours and axle-smashing craters.  Maddened
and confused, the great ants' nest of anyway hysterical Romans scurried
hither and thither amidst the welter of high-frequency horn and exhaust
notes trying to get where they wanted before the great boot of the
town-planners gave their nest another kick.  In the circumstances, the
foreign motorist could only make blindly for the Tiber and savagely
cling to it until, sweating and exhausted, he reached the blessed
darkness and peace of his hotel bedroom.

The whole of Rome, and of most other Italian cities, is a _zona di
silenzio_.  Frequent notices to this effect are, of course, a waste of
lath and paint.  The whole psychology of the Italian, particularly of
the Southern Italian, is based on _far figura_, to 'cut a dash'.  With
the advent of the motor-scooter, this posturing, previously expressed
through flashy clothes, exaggerated tones of voice, expressions and
gestures, has now been vastly reinforced by the attachment, apparently
to every Italian male, of a chattering two-stroke engine, an electric
horn and an exhaust pipe.  The use of these instruments, known as
_sputnikare_, gives him an even greater illusion of importance and
power.  The amount of noise he can make with his vehicle, particularly
via the exhaust pipe, has come in some obscure way to represent a
virility symbol, and for the police to pray silence is as vain as to
tell Italians not to lend grandeur and emphasis with their hands to the
simplest of conversations.

Italy, in 1959, had nearly seventeen million visitors, of which the
British furnished one and a half million.  In 1960, I understand,
bookings were considerably down on 1959, with Britain in particular
sounding the retreat, and the authorities were understandably worried.
Since Italy has now lost my own custom in the foreseeable future,
perhaps I can give her a word of advice.

It is not that the ordinary Italian, while loathing and despising all
tourists, milks him with the minimum of grace of the maximum amount of
money, nor that prices are ridiculously high for the services, and
particularly the food, available in most of Italy, but that sheer noise
and ugly chaos are literally driving the ordinary tourist to
distraction.

The problem is bad enough in most modern cities, but in Italy the
frenzied hysteria in the towns is definitely injurious to the health of
the northern visitor--to his senses and to his nerves.  As for the
spoliation of the architectural beauties of the country, I recommend
the minister concerned with tourism to visit Siena and there to note
that the perspective of the pink, shell-shaped piazza that has
enchanted for five centuries is now utterly lost since, amazingly, the
piazza has become a parking place for charabancs and motor cars.
Against such vandalism, of which every visitor has his pet example,
what can a small handful of archaeological custodians and museum
curators in Rome hope to achieve in preserving the beauties of Italy?
Only a lack of receipts at the turnstiles is likely to have any effect.

It was a blessing to hack one's way out of the suburbs of Rome and on
to the Appian Way for Naples--a beautiful road, through the Pontine
Marshes, that meets the sea at Terracina.  Ten miles farther down the
new coast road you come, after Sperlonga, to the first of several road
tunnels through the cliffs, and just before it, behind barbed wire, are
the excavations of Tiberius's grotto, which my wife and I were
determined to visit.  You are supposed to have a letter from some high
authority in Rome to gain access to the site, but the name of the
_Sunday Times_ worked with the guardian and we scrambled down through
the clumps of wild love-in-the-mist, and scuttling green lizards, to
the scene of the excavations and the hutments which house some of the
rich treasure-trove of sculpture--alas, all in fragments--recovered
since 1957 under the direction of Professor Jacopi.

The huge grotto that opens to seaward and that has now been completely
cleared of rubble is splendidly romantic--a grandiose water-folly
adjoining the foundations of what must have been a handsome belvedere
standing back from the shore-line of the graceful bay of Sperlonga.  In
the floor of the deep grotto there is a twenty-foot-wide circular
swimming-pool fed by a fresh-water spring.  In the centre of the pool
stands a square pediment that may have held an enormous group of
Laocon wrestling with his serpents.  One single marble leg of this
statue and bits of the serpents have been recovered, and the leg alone
is seven feet high.  Adjoining this circular pool are large fish-tanks
fed tidally with sea-water, and the custodian suggested, rather
fancifully perhaps, that these had contained the giant Moray eels to
which slaves were fed to improve the flavour of this famous Roman
delicacy.  The walk round the swimming-pool had been terraced with
bright blue mosaic, and statues are thought to have been arranged as
sculpture for the interior walls of the cave, while some may have stood
guard at either side of the entrance and on the headland to the east.
But these are nothing more than theories, for at some time the
beautiful cavern with all its elegant eccentricities was smashed to
fragments, perhaps with the advent of the Christians some hundred years
after the date that has been provisionally given for the creation of
the grotto.

I wronder if Tiberius really was such a monster as we have always
heard.  It seems that his memory aroused such loathing that even long
after his death people were still savagely smashing the vestiges of the
monuments he had left behind.  Were Tacitus, Suetonius and Juvenal, who
tore at him like maddened wolves, any more than high-class gossip
writers?  No doubt that is heresy.  But the fashion of giving
historical idols feet of clay makes me wonder if some of the
traditional villains don't deserve the opposite treatment.  Real
monsters are even more difficult to credit than real saints.  I was
still musing on this weighty theme when we arrived in Naples.

To the hardened traveller the almost bestial harshness of Naples comes
with nearly the same shock as one's very first visit to the Continent.
Here there still thrives the true 'foreigner'.  Here you are still
cheated, jostled, burgled and generally intimidated by the inhabitants
as you were at, say, Calais in your early teens.  It is as if, as you
arrive, the whole town licks its lips and says, 'Here he comes,' and
you are then set upon with a relish and an ingenuity which never
slacken until you have got away again with your life and the relics of
your purse.  During the war, Naples took on the whole might of the
American Base Headquarters in Italy and skinned it like a rabbit.
Submarine telephone cables across the Bay had huge sections cut out of
them for the sake of the copper wire, heavy tanks, crippled in the
taking of the city and temporarily abandoned, gradually melted away as
if they had been made of ice-cream, and the ordinary G.I. was skinned,
boned, consumed and spat out as if he had been one of those flannelly
Neapolitan fish they force you to eat in their restaurants.

The chief operators in this process of eviscerating the foreigner are
the packs of teenage delinguenti operated, Fagin-like, by older gangs,
that infest the poorer quarters of the city.  One particular trick they
had with the errant G.I. has a macabre genius that will forever haunt
me.  The G.I., preferably a negro, on pleasure bent, would be enticed
into some den and there sold a bottle of venomous hooch.  When he had
consumed this fire-water and fallen unconscious, the ragamuffins would
drag him out into an alley, put him on a handcart, and wheel him off
through the back streets to where the Fagins would be waiting.  The
boys would receive some small change for their trouble and the body of
the G.I., complete with clothes, wallet, wristwatch, etc., would be put
up for auction among the Fagin co-operative.  Sold to the highest
bidder, he would then be stripped of all his belongings and hustled off
into the hinterland where, when he recovered, he would be put to manual
work in some distant vineyard until, through undernourishment or some
other cause, he became useless.  He would then be banged on the head
and left somewhere down by the docks for the military police to collect.

Little remains of those golden days except the black market in
cigarettes, liquor, etc., still copiously fed from Tangier and Beirut,
and a thriving market in pornography.  Dirty postcards were offered me
at 9.38 one morning--a record in my experience.  There is also the
narcotics traffic to America which is so cunningly and successfully
manipulated that the Italian and American secret services can find
nothing better to do than put the blame, by rumour and innuendo, on a
gentleman called Mr Lucky Luciano.

Just before Raymond Chandler died, some eighteen months earlier, I
arranged for him to visit Naples and meet Lucky Luciano in the hopes
that Chandler, fast running out of a desire to write about anything,
would have his imagination stirred by the man who was the last
surviving fragment of the myth of the Al Capone era.  Chandler came
back to England convinced that Luciano had been framed by fellow
gangsters and offered up as a hostage for their own safety to the
Attorney-General, Mr Dewey.  Chandler, to my delight, became very
excited by this new view of Mr Luciano and sketched out to me the plot
of what might have been a most exciting play on the story of a wronged
gangster.  But he thought that Luciano had been so harshly treated by
fate that he decided to write to him to ask permission before embarking
on his project; however, Luciano never replied to his letters.  That
finished the idea so far as Chandler was concerned, but when I planned
to visit Naples I made arrangements through Mr Henry Thody, 'Our Man in
Rome', to meet Lucky Luciano and come to my own conclusions about him.

This was not an easy thing to do.  Lucky Luciano is leery of publicity,
perhaps because he modestly realizes that he is famous only in a role
which he would prefer to forget.  He is also tired of being pursued,
every time the American fleet is in, by gawking sailors who assure him
fervently that the only things they want to see in Italy are him and
the Pope.  But the meeting was arranged and the day after our arrival
Mr Luciano came to tea in the formal surroundings of the Hotel
Excelsior.

Lucky Luciano is a neat, quiet, grey-haired man with a tired,
good-looking face.  Whether he deserves the notoriety attached to his
name or not, he has certain physical characteristics which one
associates with men of power and decision--unsmiling, rather still
eyes, a strong, decisive jaw-line and a remarkable economy of movement
and expression.  We sat chummily in the corner of the vast lounge, my
wife, Mrs Lee Thody (a brilliant free-lance photographer who, thanks to
Luciano's trust in her, had been able to stage the tea party), Lucky
Luciano and myself, and the polite handing round of sugar and milk and
the dainty nibbling of biscuits amused me.  Mr Luciano's general
appearance of a minor diplomat or government official fitted in well
with this civilized ritual.  He was well dressed in casual grey tones,
white silk shirt and dark tie, and he was expensively, though
unobtrusively, barbered and manicured (by two barbers every morning, I
understand).  It was only when he talked that undertones of Runyonese
gave evidence of his past in Chicago.

'There is this man which I told you tries to frame me, which is this
man from the Narcotics Bureau.  I have the evidence of this frame
stamped by a judge of this court in Palma and in Catania which is where
the retrial takes place.  There is this mayor who is murdered which I
am supposed to have done, together with a kidnap in Tangier and a lot
of other stuff which is about people I never even heard of, and this
son of a bitch'--(embarrassed pause)--'if you'll pardon the expression,
this person says I am involved in these things, things I never even
heard of until I read them in the newspapers.  Well, you know what
happens?  The Italian police get to look into this frame which has been
dreamed up by the American Narcotics Bureau and I am asked to attend
the trial.  The judge which is looking after the case asks me if I know
anything about these things, and when I say no he says then you may
leave the court.  And then the prosecution gets up and asks three years
for this guy for perjury for trying to frame me, and the guy gets two
and a half years.  See what I mean?  These American Narcotics people
are always trying to frame me.  For why?  Which is because they can't
think of anyone else to frame for all the narcotics going into the
United States.  They are always making fools of themselves these
people.  How do you suppose I can live peacefully here in Naples, where
everybody knows everybody's secrets, if I am mixed up in things like
that?  I guess these guys is mad at me because I call them "the
bicarbonate policemen", which is because they are always getting guys
lined up on account they have been drug-smuggling, and they get an
agent to go to these guys to buy dope, and these guys take the money
and say thank you very much, and hand over a secret-looking packet, and
when the Bureau opens it up why it's just bicarbonate of soda.'

We all sympathized.  Then I asked wasn't it true that the bulk of the
drugs getting into America came from Italy?  No, said Lucky Luciano,
that was old hat.  Now, as he read in the papers, it was coming from
Mexico.  'And do you know what, Mr Fleming?  It's all the fault of the
American Government.  They are not handling this narcotics problem
right, which is why it goes on getting worse every year.  Washington is
spending billions of dollars every year trying to stamp out the
traffic, but that is not the way to stop it.  You have to realize, Mr
Fleming, that this stuff is expensive, you need maybe two hundred
dollars a week to get the stuff and who has that kind of money?  So the
mainliners have to steal or murder to get the money to buy the stuff.
So what ought Washington to do?  They ought to set up clinics all over
the country where you can register as a drug-taker like you do in
England, and go and get your dose for nothing, for free.  So every time
you go to the clinic, which has plenty of entrances so you won't be
recognized, you get tapered off a fraction, a very small fraction.  So
in the end you get cured, see?  The point is, Mr Fleming, that if you
can get your drugs for nothing, you won't have to rob or murder
somebody for the money to buy the stuff.  So the middlemen, the
traffickers, will go out of business, and then you have no
law-enforcement problem and no smuggling.  Ya see, Mr Fleming, it's
just the way you spend the money--on setting up clinics, or on
law-enforcement that cannot work and that only makes the problem worse.

I agreed that this made excellent sense and asked why he didn't put the
whole thing down on paper and send it to the President.  Lucky modestly
shrugged his shoulders and excused himself on the grounds that he had
not got all the figures and the details to back up his plan.  I urged
him to go ahead, and I still do so.  The idea of the 'Luciano Plan' to
beat the narcotics problem, in connection with which he was originally
sentenced and extradited from the States, seemed to me just the gimmick
to 'send' the beatniks and hop-merchants who are the main consumers in
America.

I then inquired why it was that all the great American gangsters, with
the exception of Legs Diamond and one or two others, were, and still
are, of Italian origin, and whether the Mafia operated as briskly in
the United States as it is alleged to do.  Rather speciously, I
thought, Mr Luciano lightly dismissed the whole idea.  It was just, he
said, that nowadays people in America seemed to have a down on the
Italians.  As for the Mafia, that was just something for the
journalists to write about.  Did it operate in Naples?  Mr Luciano
shrugged the whole existence of the Mafia away.  It was all boloney, he
said.  It was just to make the stories better for the journalists.

I personally feel that this total denial of the darker side of the moon
does not contribute to the dignified and highly respectable front that
Mr Luciano presents to the world.  He is, of course, right to try and
forget everything connected with the youthful way of life with which he
is credited, but to express ignorance of the daily face of
Italo-American crime is surely an affectation.  But no doubt Mr Luciano
is right in that an incautious word to a journalist, particularly
anything critical of his present habitat, might lead to exaggerated
headlines and a diminution of the genuine friendliness with which he is
regarded in Italy, and particularly around Naples, where he is well
known for an exemplary life and generous private gifts to charity.  His
one dream is to be allowed to get away from the Naples area where he is
confined and settle somewhere else where, above all other amenities,
there must be a golf course--a recreation he misses most of all.  Here
in Naples, since the death of a much-loved lady companion, he has
nothing to occupy his mind except three miniature Dobermann Pinschers
and watching his diet which, on medical advice, is exceptionally frugal.

I urged him to write his memoirs, but he said, sadly and truthfully,
that nobody would read them unless they were all about the bad things
in his life.  Nobody wanted to read anything good about him, although
the original case against him had now been proved to have been a frame
and he had received complete exculpation from the courts.

When we walked out together for Lee Thody to take some photographs, I
asked him for the name of the best restaurant in the town, and he said
'Angelo's'.  When I asked him about one in the yacht harbour in front
of the Excelsior, he said, 'Don't eat there.  The food's O.K., but
they've got a heavy pencil.'

I have no idea how to equate the nicely-spoken Signor Luciano of Naples
with the old-time Lucky Luciano of Chicago, but I did take pains to
check his present record in Italy and I found it so exemplary that it
is reasonable to suppose that any teeth he may have had in America have
been either drawn or self-extracted in exile.  In March 1958, for
instance, a magistrate's special commission in Naples considered a
police request from Rome that Luciano should be exiled from Naples to a
small island or mountain village, on the grounds that he was involved
in the international drug traffic.  The commission ruled that there was
no case against Luciano, who was 'a free citizen as has been proved and
conducts a perfectly regular life giving no grounds for censure'.  The
Public Prosecutor appealed against that decision, alleging that the
evidence against Luciano had not been properly weighed, but the Italian
Court of Appeals found 'not even elements of suspicion' against
Luciano, and that he was 'totally above suspicion of illegal
activities'.

Then, in March 1959, occurred the case which Luciano had described to
me.  The record says that the court found a certain Scibilia guilty of
damaging slander against Luciano and did indeed sentence him to two and
a half years' imprisonment.  Scibilia admitted he had sold false
information about Luciano to the American Narcotics Bureau in Rome 'to
earn a few pennies'.  This information was to the effect that Luciano
had ordered the 'disappearance' of an Italian mayor because he had
double-crossed him over a drug deal.

What will become of the man and the myth?  Apparently Mr Quentin
Reynolds has been writing a story round him for Universal Pictures.
How splendid it would be if the story could end with the adoption by
the United States of the Luciano Plan for defeating the drug-smugglers,
and with his triumphal return to America where, to the accompaniment of
those heavenly choirs Hollywood does so well, Mr Luciano could be seen
graciously accepting honorary membership of the Seminole Golf Club!
[Mr Luciano died, peacefully, in 1962.  I.F.]

Before closing this little chapter, I must record, out of all context,
a most extraordinary experience of our photographer, Mrs Lee Thody.  We
were talking about magic and superstition which, hand in hand with
ardent Catholicism, are the mainsprings of the Neapolitan spiritual
life.  The dark belief in these things, which the Church is quite
incapable of stamping out, is principally concerned with noting omens
towards a winning number in the Lotto, or State Lottery, which is the
passion of the Neapolitan.  The sorcerer king of Italy is a famous
soothsayer living in Rome called Francesco Waldman, and Lee Thody, who
was interested in these things, had recently written an article about
him.  After finishing the article she went back to the soothsayer and
said she would like to take some photographs of him.  He was very
reluctant to allow this, but when she pressed him he finally consented
while warning her that the photographs would not be successful on that
particular day.  Mrs Thody, who, as I have mentioned, is a professional
photographer of high repute, prepared her Leica with flash attachment,
but though she tried again and again the flash would not work, though
it had previously been in perfect order.  She accordingly changed to
her Rolleiflex and took several pictures.

The next morning she took the two cameras to her developer who, first
of all, checked the flash attachment to the Leica.  It worked
perfectly.  He then proceeded with the development of the Rolleiflex
plates.  They were completely blank!  Utterly bewildered, Mrs Thody
returned to the soothsayer, explained what had happened and asked for
another sitting.  He reminded her that he had said it would be no good
photographing him the day before, but said that it would be all right
now.  She took photographs of him with both cameras and they came out
perfectly.

From Naples southwards there is not only daemonology in the air, but
also an atmosphere of almost medieval savagery and barbarism, well
illustrated, I think, by this brief story of a recent occurrence in the
deep south.

A young farm labourer, Salvatori Funari, on his way to the fields,
always took the same path past a farmhouse inhabited by four brothers
and a younger sister, Antonina Guirlando, aged twenty-five.  Salvatori
used to wave to the girl as he went by in the morning and came back at
night, and one day went so far as to call out 'Buon giorno'.  Weeks
later the girl summoned enough courage to call 'Buon giorno' back.
Then the youth took to stopping by the garden fence and exchanging a
few words of village gossip, and this innocent habit went on for two
years without any closer relationship, except that the girl began to
wear her long black hair tied severely back, a local indication that
she was engaged.

One evening the girl was not in sight and Salvatori, on an impulse,
knocked on the door.  She opened the door, upon which he playfully
kissed her and went off happily home.

The girl reported the kiss to her brothers.  They spoke darkly of
family honour and at once called upon Salvatori, the four of them, and
told him that he had dishonoured their sister and must marry her.

Salvatori protested that he had done nothing dishonourable.  It had
just been a playful kiss and he was not yet old enough to marry.  The
brothers bought a revolver and gave it to their sister, and when
Salvatori passed next day and shouted 'Buon giorno', she shot him dead.

She protested to the police that Salvatori had dishonoured her, but the
police doctor confirmed that she was still a virgin and she was duly
committed for trial on a charge of murder, though I am ignorant of what
sentence she received.

Countless authors and sociologists have written about the stark, savage
country south of Naples where all vestiges of the twentieth century,
apart from an occasional Jolly hotel, have petered out, and we suffered
no temptation to explore farther than Paestum.  Instead we took the
well-beaten sightseeing route from one five-star spectacle to the next,
and on these I will briefly report.

Capri: This island of dreams, vanities and myths is still, though
probably not in summer, a place of enchantment and eccentricity, though
the bathing on the minute, pebbled beaches flecked with black fuel oil
is as hellish as ever.  It is an enchanting place to do absolutely
nothing whatever in except contemplate your navel, or other people's,
while trying to achieve a fashionable _tintorella_ (sunburn).  There
are only five possible excursions--to the north, south, east and west
or round the island in a boat--so, apart from getting sunburnt, people
have nothing to do but squeeze on to the tennis-court size piazza and
make, or fail to make, love.  The failing--the refusals, broken unions,
tears, recriminations--are the one source of energy on the island and
the one topic of conversation.  (Happy affairs are without interest.
Only bad news makes gossip!)  Thirty years ago, when I was last there,
Capri was a great place for homosexuals, but the Homintern has now,
lemming-like, left the island to seek greater privacy on Ischia and the
more southerly and smaller islands north of Sicily.  The only other
perceptible change is the establishment by Miss Gracie Fields of a
luxury restaurant and swimming-pool at the Piccola Marina of which she
is the queen.  Here, her privacy infested by every Tom, Dick and Ethel
from England, she holds friendly court, and she was kind enough to
invite us to luncheon.

Capri has always had at least one 'notable', a famous person, nearly
always a foreigner, whom every visitor wants to see.  Gracie Fields has
assumed the cloak of Axel Munthe and Norman Douglas and, apart from
Emilio Pucci, the fashionable couturier, she is today the local star--a
fame which this handsome, kindly, humorous woman from Lancashire wears,
as her admirers will guess, with casual equanimity.  She is happy there
from May to October, but complains of being bored to death in winter
when she takes flight for her old theatrical stamping grounds.  In the
winter, she laments, there is nothing to do in Capri but watch the
television.  'Boris [her charming and intelligent Russian husband] and
the cook are thrilled by it.  I like watching but I don't know what the
hell they are saying.  Boris begins to explain to me and by that time
the people on the screen are saying something else and I say what the
hell, it's a short life, and then we all go back to watching again.
No, I don't do much singing here.  Occasionally we have a wing-ding
when Sophie Tucker or someone else comes along, but there's plenty of
excitement.  Sometimes a smart yacht puts in with friends.  They come
ashore and so-and-so gets me alone and starts crying on my bosom and
saying her husband is trying to kill her.  You know what people on
yachts are!  Well, I am probably having dramas over something here, the
neighbours or rival restaurants or something, and someone is trying to
slay me, so I say to my girl friend, "It's the same thing all the world
over, dear.  Some man is always trying to strangle some woman.  Don't
you worry about it."'

Boris gave us wine from their own vineyard to drink--perhaps one of the
few bottles of true Capri wine on the island, for what is sold in the
shops is nearly always a blend.  He personally supervises the vintage
and I said I had always been curious to know if the wine really was
trampled by beautiful girls.  He said definitely not.  It was a
tradition in Italy that to use women was very dangerous.  During their
menstruation periods, they are believed to kill all growing things they
approach.  Even in Italian agricultural colleges, he said, girls were
not allowed to attend lessons on the farms or in the fields when they
were in this condition.  It was men who did the stamping of the wine.
They soak their feet in a solution of leaves and herbs that each family
keeps secret.  This is an astringent preparation that closes the pores.
At the end of the day they have to soak their feet in hot water to get
the circulation going again.

I asked him how their fine establishment on the beach was doing and he
said very well, though there were too many Germans who brought picnic
luncheons and ate them all over the place.  They also were constantly
arguing about the entrance fee.  There had been one extraordinary man
that week who had created a frightful row at the entrance.  He had
insisted on coming in, but had refused to buy a ticket on the grounds
that the Germans were much better soldiers than the Italians and had
lost thousands of lives fighting for Italy!  Boris had been called to
settle the row and had told the German that he could be Boris's guest.
This favour the German angrily rejected.  He would not buy a ticket nor
would he accept any favours from Boris.  He just insisted on getting in
for nothing on the grounds that the Germans were better soldiers than
the Italians.  When Boris had roared with laughter at this fantastic
attitude, the German had stumped off, muttering darkly.

We later encountered crowds of the Herrenvolk on the near-by island of
Ischia--ex-stormtroopers who had gone to fat which they were trying to
reduce by digging themselves graves in the radioactive beaches and
covering themselves up with the volcanic sand so that nothing showed
but rows of purple, sweating faces.  The Italians are, on the whole,
pleased to see them because, thanks to their frugality, they fill up
the smaller pensions and rooms-to-let, and from the war-time experience
of the two peoples they know a good deal of each other's languages.

A far more real pest of these regions is that new menace, the blaring
transistor radio strung over the shoulder while the vacant-eyed carrier
moons along hoping to _far figura_ with his or her dreadful one-man
band.  In fact he is sounding the modern leper's bell--'Keep away from
me, I am the world's chaos and malaise.'


Pompeii is still, despite hordes of tourists, pimps and guides, a very
great marvel.  We nearly killed ourselves there by refusing to hire a
guide or buy a guide-book.  We had forgotten how big it is and how
quickly the giant cobbles, rutted by chariot wheels, murder one's feet.

There was one local phenomenon, at the door of the far-famed Lupanar--a
totally unbribable custodian.  He refused entry to my wife and she had
to stand outside the little stone hovel with the wife of a Frenchman
while he and I were allowed to enter the house of pleasure with its six
tiny little bedrooms and the childish pictures high up on the walls to
show you how to make love--if you were the right shape and extremely
athletic.  The Frenchman was indignant that his wife was not allowed to
view the vaunted mysteries of this antique bordello.  He continued to
argue while the custodian endeavoured to shock us by translating some
of the vulgar graffiti on the walls, and explaining the much-flaked
little pictures.  'You see,' he said, his eyes gleaming, 'that is the
woman and that is the man!'  'Pah!' shouted the Frenchman.  'You think
I have come a thousand miles from Paris to see that?  Why, I was doing
it myself when I was sixteen!'  'But this, Signor, and this!' beseeched
the guide.  'Infantile!' shouted the Frenchman.  'These stupid Romans
had no idea how to make love.  And you mean to say you won't let my
wife see this nonsense!'  'Ah no, Signor, troppo pericoloso.'  'Merde
alors,' said the Frenchman, and we returned to our indignant wives.

Far more beautiful than anything in Pompeii itself is the near-by Villa
dei Misteri, only recently completely excavated.  This large and very
handsome dwelling was apparently dedicated to the mysteries of Dionysus
or Bacchus that had to be practised in secret because of the scandals
associated with them.  Here the pavements and friezes are astonishingly
well preserved, the latter, representing the initiation of a virgin
into the secret rites, being far finer and fresher than anything in
Pompeii.  It is said that these enchanting paintings, so light and
graceful, are copies of far greater originals that have been lost--no
doubt the victims again of the coming of the Christians.  This
beautiful shrine is off the tourist track, but visitors to Pompeii
would do well to cut short their rambles amongst those haunted ruins
and spend some time at this exotic and haunted place.

After this, Herculaneum held little interest except perhaps for those
for whom the first plumbing, central heating and double-storied
dwellings in history have a message.  I found the ruins gaunt and
melancholy, but the further excavations which have now been authorized
may produce something more beautiful than the Neptune pavement in the
women's baths which is all that impressed me.

Paestum, its splendid temples standing mutely and sadly beside the
shore, filled me, since I do not greatly admire huge ruins however
ancient, only with melancholy, but we were lucky to have luncheon at a
small, out-of-the-way seaside _albergo_--the Olympia--and it was there,
bathing on the vast, deserted beach, that we witnessed a most bizarre
natural phenomenon, the life-cycle, or most of it, of two dung-beetles
(? _Scarabaeus Stercorarius Paestanus_).

I was sitting on the edge of the dunes, when two medium-sized black
beetles appeared, laboriously pushing a ball of animal dung, about the
size of a ping-pong ball.  It seems that these were two female beetles,
for suddenly a much larger beetle erupted from the sand, dashed down,
wrested away the ball of dung, told one of the females to buzz off and
proceeded to roll the ball furiously along the sand followed by his
chosen wife.  He didn't push the ball with his nose, but, standing on
his fore-legs, propelled it along backwards with his hind-legs--a most
uncomfortable posture.

Fascinated, we watched this operation for about two hours as the
beetles scurried down towards the sea, their tiny tank tracks leaving a
spidery, Tachiste sketch in the soft dry sand.  The couple had many
adventures--falling down sandy ravines, scrabbling up great mountains
and around obstacles, and, all the while, through friction from the
spiky feet and the sand, the ball of dung was getting infinitesimally
smaller.

I explained to my wife that the whole picture was a clear
representation of our own existence.  There was I, laboriously
forwarding my career towards some unseen destination, while she fussed
around in my wake and occasionally got in the way.  The allegory was
all the more exact in that Mr and Mrs Beetle stopped every so often and
appeared to engage in a bout of fisticuffs or possibly love-display
before Mr Beetle got his head down again and took up his sisyphean task.

The sun was going down, but we still could not leave without witnessing
the end of this titanic pilgrimage.  For it was titanic.  The two
beetles had covered nearly a mile of beach--equivalent, presumably, to
a human being crossing all Europe on the run.  But now, perhaps because
the setting sun had lit up the line of sand-dunes and acacia clumps and
provided the horizon that so many insects rely on to assist their sense
of direction, the father beetle turned at last inland and hurried back
towards the dunes.

Once there, all became clear.  He heaved the ball of dung up the
shifting slope to a clump of grass, and there, carefully balancing his
ball on a small ledge of sand, began furiously to dig under the grass
roots.  At one moment the ball looked like slipping down the slope, but
the faithful Mrs Beetle, waiting at the entrance to the growing hole,
scrambled to the ball and held it steady.  After about ten minutes'
digging, Mr Beetle came back outside, collected his ball and accurately
rolled it through the mouth of his home.  Then he vanished after it,
followed by Mrs Beetle, and the sand fell down and closed the entrance.

We could only assume that now the two beetles would make love and bear
children, and that the ball of dung represented the hoard of food on
which the baby beetles would be nurtured until they could grow up and
go out into this great sandy world in search of another ball of dung
and another spouse--and so _ad infinitum_.

      *      *      *

Our last bit of sightseeing was to Cumae, just north of Naples and
adjoining Lake Avernus, into which, you will recall, the descent is so
facile.  Here is the grotto of the sibyl, and it was hereabouts that
Aeneas approached the infernal world over the Styx.  (I had not thought
about these things since, as a youth, I had had to write out hundreds
of lines of Virgil as a punishment.)  The grotto, hardly visited by
tourists, is a most doomful and awe-inspiring sculptured cave of Minoan
origin.  It is a hundred yards long, more than six feet wide and some
eighteen feet in height, and leads through various ante-chambers, lit
by great windows to seawards, to the circular inner chamber with a
connecting bedroom where the sibyl, no doubt a simple peasant girl with
the gift of second sight, was kept by her priests.  Along the walls of
the grotto are curious and unexplained channels in the sandstone and
these were perhaps acoustic devices to carry the voices of the priests
through the secret inner draperies when they had some sibylline
prophecy to announce to the crowds outside.  Other slots and holes in
the walls were presumably for curtain rods and draperies.

The atmosphere of this dark and ancient place is powerful but not
inimical.  One feels that many mysterious things were indeed enacted
here, but that they were for good and not for evil.  Apparently the
Christians, when they came, were also sympathetic and treated the
shrine with respect.  Otherwise one suspects they would surely have
destroyed it.

A couple of hundred yards from the hillock, on which stand the ruins of
the Temple of Apollo and the Temple of Zeus and beneath which is the
shrine, is a large tunnel through the mountainside leading down to the
neighbouring Lake Avernus.  This tunnel was used as an ammunition store
by the Germans, who blew up the central section during their retreat.

The whole area is amazing and made me wish for the first time in my
life that I had bent my head more faithfully to my _Aeneid_.

One final word to the visitor to Naples--don't bother to go up
Vesuvius, or at any rate not by the motor road.  There is absolutely
nothing at the top but a few muddy bubbles and wisps of steam coming
from the fumaroles in the crater, and anyway the volcano was due to
erupt again that year--an even stronger reason for leaving it alone.
But the reason I particularly counsel against it is that lava--that
beautiful word that is almost the name of a girl--is harsh, brittle,
smelly, black and, above all, immensely dull.  It is true that my wife
found a rare orchid on the lower slopes under the young umbrella pines,
but the great pile of dead lava that is Vesuvius oozes a kind of mental
depression that requires many drams of Lacrimae Christi, the wine grown
at the foot of the mountain, to repair.

I have tried to analyse the dismal effect Vesuvius had on both of us
and I think it comes from the fact that lava is totally lacking in
'anima', the quality that seems to inhabit all terrestrial materials
down to the comparatively friendly clinker of coal.  There may be
friends of lava whom I have offended by this indictment, and there may
be varieties of the stuff that can be put to some lowly purpose, such
as pumice stone for taking nicotine stains off your fingers, but in my
experience lava is the bottom stuff in the world.

The fact that Naples is largely paved with this hellish material and
that the town, inundated from time to time with fire and brimstone,
stands at a major gateway to the underworld, perhaps explains why this
exciting, rewarding, vivid city yet verges so nearly on the infernal.

It is, of course, only coincidence that Al Capone, on January 15th,
1899, first saw the light of day at Afragola, a suburb of Naples,
almost exactly half-way between the centre of Naples and the crater of
Vesuvius.



INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

NAPLES

_Hotels_

Five-star: _Hotel Excelsior_, _Hotel Vesuvio_, _Hotel Royal_, all on
the waterfront overlooking the Bay of Naples.  _Royal_, the newest with
attractive, brightly furnished, studio-type rooms and windows.

Two-star: _Hotel Torino_ (Via A. Depretis 123), and _Hotel Nuova Bella
Napoli_ (Piazza Garibaldi), by the central railway station.
Pensione-type, low-priced accommodation not recommended in Naples.


_Restaurants_

The American travel guide, Fielding, summed up Neapolitan cuisine: 'It
ranges,' he wrote, 'from high mediocre to just plain lousy.'  I cannot
improve on that.

Every visitor to Naples ends up at one of the three Santa Lucia
quayside restaurants, the _Transatlantico_, _La Bersagliera_, or _Zi
Teresa_.  There's nothing to choose between them.  Food is indifferent,
waiters rude, strip-lighting hideous, and musicians play non-stop,
except for a pause to push a plate in your face.

As good food as any in Naples, including sea-food specialities, such as
pasta with clam sauce (_spaghetti alla vongole_), _fritta mista_ (mixed
fried fish dish), is to be found in restaurants of the three big
hotels, _Excelsior_, _Vesuvio_ and _Royal_, with the _Royal_ especially
recommended.

If you have transport, it's worth the fifteen-minute drive to _Le
Lucciole_ restaurant at Capo Posilipo.  Lovely seaside position,
excellent sea-food.  If you are looking for a real Neapolitan _pizza_,
try _D'Angelo_--lovely view above Bay of Naples.


_Night-clubs_

Best advice about average Naples night-spots is--stay away from them.
Safest places are the _Royal Club_ (winter) and _Royal Roof_ (summer)
in the _Royal Hotel_, and the club in the _Hotel Vesuvio_.  The
_Caprice Club_ is also a normal night-club run on international lines.


_Things not to miss_

It is in every guide book, but some visitors unfortunately still miss a
visit to the Naples _National Museum_.  Unlike many of Naples
attractions, this is first class.  Contains finest of the treasures
excavated from Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Afterwards go for a real black Neapolitan _espresso_ coffee or an
ice-cream in one of the cafs in the glass-roofed arcade, the Galleria.
Here is real, living Naples, but watch your wallet and your handbags.

Colourful, too, is a visit to the fishermen's quayside at Mergellina, a
seaside suburb, where sea-food is eaten from open-air stands as
aperitifs--clams, mussels, sea-urchins, with Capri white wine.

      *      *      *

CAPRI

In good weather in the summer months Capri may now be reached in
twenty-five minutes by helicopter (seven services a day, 3 day
return), or hydrofoil boat, the _Aliscafi_, in thirty minutes, single
15s.  (ninety-minute boats, 3s. 6d. single).


_Hotels_

Five-star: _Hotel Quisisana_, _La Pineta_; at Anacapri, _Caesar
Augustus_ (April to October), built on sheer cliff-edge with fabulous
view over the Bay of Naples.  All one- and two-star Capri hotels are
comfortable enough for a short stay if the larger hotels are full.


_Restaurants_

_La Pigna_, _Da Gemma_.  Best restaurant, and you won't find it in most
guide-books but some of the best cooking south of Rome, is _Da Pietro_,
managed by a colourful Scottish emigrant, Gloria.  A stone's throw from
Gracie Fields' _La Canzone del Mare_, where food is good but very, very
expensive.  At _Da Pietro_ food and wine are good, reasonable;
specialities, cheese pancakes, sea-food salads, fresh grilled fish and
lobsters.


_Night-clubs_

_Number Two_, a damp, dank, jazz-smoke-filled cellar, nearest thing to
a Paris bote in Italy.




XIII _Monte Carlo_

'Neuf.  Rouge.  Impair et manque.'  The moment's silence, the rattle of
the losing chips being raked across the baize, the buzz of comment and
then the sharp French voices firing their next bets at the cold,
patient croupiers, and the echo from the croupiers to confirm the bets
and help them remember.  'Finale quatre par cinq louis.' 'La dernire
douzaine par cinq mille.' 'A cheval', Transversale pleine', 'Carr' ...
all the noisy abracadabra of one roulette table among six others.  And
then the hubbub from the chemin-de-fer, and the baccarat, and a whisper
of music from somewhere in the distant background.  And yet the
grey-haired, donnish-looking man I was watching never looked up or
seemed to pay any attention to what was going on around him.  He sat
very quietly and calmly at an empty chemin-de-fer table with his back
to the room and stared with a chess-player's concentration at a huge
sheet of paper spread out in front of him and occasionally jotted
something down on it or consulted a chronometer which stood beside it.

As I watched him, a woman in black satin, anywhere between fifty and a
hundred years old, with badly dyed hair and a care-worn face, broke
away from the nearest table and came and stood beside him.  He did not
look up as she opened her bag and put a handful of one- and
five-hundred-franc chips on the table beside the chronometer.  She
stood there obediently while he made a series of calculations with a
ballpoint pen.  Minutes passed.  The man made some more calculations.
He consulted the chronometer.  He selected some chips from the pile
beside him and said a few words without looking up.  She took the chips
and walked swiftly to the nearest table.  I followed her.  She put six
chips of a hundred francs _ cheval_ on 6/8, 10/11, 13/16, 23/24,
27/30, 33/36.  Or rather she said, 'Tiers du cylindre sud-est,' to the
croupier.  He didn't look up, but took the chips and placed them.  He
knew her voice.  Sixteen came up.  She was paid 1,700 francs on her
13/16 _ cheval_ and lost five hundred on the others.  She picked up
the chips and her stake and went back silently to the man with the
chronometer.  I moved away from the table so that I could have a last
look at them and fix them in my mind.  They suddenly looked tragic and
dedicated, like people who think the earth is flat.

I was screwing up my courage to go and talk to them when a girl's voice
containing in equal proportions sarcasm, curiosity, envy, and pleasure
at finding a friend from England, brought me back to earth.

'Well, I suppose you've broken the bank.'

'No,' I said shortly, although I was pleased to see her, 'I haven't.'

'Why don't you shoot out the lights with your .38 Police Positive with
the sawn barrel?  Then we could grab some chips and make a dash for the
door.'

I pretended not to hear.  She followed my eyes.  'What's that old man
doing over there?'

'He's working on a system,' I said.  'It's based either on astronomy or
the movement of the earth on its axis.  He's not interested in what
came up on the last throw.  He just backs a third of the board
according to the precise time of day.  He thinks the turn of the steel
cylinder is affected by magnetic fields, or gravity or something.  He
won handsomely on the only coup I watched.'

'He must be mad,' said my friend.  'All one needs is capital.  It's
hopeless playing with only ten mille.'  (It was the age of the old
francs.)

'Ten mille is a hundred even-chance bets at the hundred-franc roulette
table,' I said prosily.  'Nowadays all English people moan about not
having enough capital to gamble with.  It's just a question of what
units you bet in and how much you want to make.  You're just a
scattercash.'

'I suppose James Bond's got an infallible system,' she said frostily.
'Why don't you let other people in on his secret?  Tell me, or I'll
never speak to you again.'

This is the gist of what I told her--what I believe to be the only way
of gambling with a capital of ten pounds with a reasonable prospect of
making the price of a good dinner, with the pleasure of staking a bet
at many turns of the wheel and with the excitement of joining in that
technical expertise which is part of the attraction of a casino.

The first rule, I told her, is to get a seat at the roulette table.
This is achieved by getting to the casino early, say at nine o'clock in
the evening, or in the afternoon.  The formalities of getting into the
casino need not deter you.  All you need is your passport and a
respectable suit or frock (except at Deauville and the Casino de la
Fort at Le Touquet where you may have to wear evening clothes, in
which case there is Trouville, or the Casino de la Plage).  Do not
approach casinos with timidity or reverence.  They are simply
fruit-machines tended by bank clerks and mechanics.  Be relaxed and
confident.  They are very pleased to have you come in and will be sorry
to see you go.  You are one of the few people who take trouble and you
are going to win and stop when you have won.  You are a person of free
will and iron self-discipline who will beat the machine.

You enter the casino and sit down at a roulette table.  (If there is no
seat available, give one of the uniformed attendants a hundred or two
hundred francs and ask him to find you a seat, and one will be found.)
Remember: a seat at the table is essential.  Most people lose money in
a casino because their feet get so tired they decide to fritter away a
few chips and go to bed.  If possible get a seat opposite the even
chance, red or black, which you favour (because your hair or your eyes
are red or black, or for any other reason).  Settle yourself.  Take out
a card and a pencil and write the figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 down the page.
You have been to the caisse just inside the swing-door and in your
pocket or your bag you have ten pounds in chips of one hundred francs
each.  More than a hundred of them.  Comparative wealth, with the
minimum stake at a hundred francs.  Pay no attention to the strident
voices, gestures and emotions of the other players.  Observe the chaos
with interest and indulgence, secure in the knowledge of the symmetry
of your own deadly system.

Suppose, I explained to the girl, you have chosen red.  (You can choose
any of the six even chances and alter your choice at any moment if you
wish, but personally I prefer to espouse either red or 'impair', or
'passe', and stick with it all the evening.)  Your first bet, which you
place firmly on the big red diamond a few inches away, is the sum of
the top and bottom numbers on your list--5 plus 1, six chips of one
hundred francs each.  If you win, you cross out the 5 and the 1 on your
list, and your next bet is the sum of the remaining top and bottom
numbers of your column--4 plus 2.  Whenever you lose, the amount of the
loss is written at the end of the column.  Your next and subsequent
bets are always the sum of the top and the bottom numbers you have
_not_ scratched out.  When (and if) all the numbers are scratched off,
your win will amount to the sum of all the numbers in your original
five-figure column--fifteen hundred francs or one good dinner.

After successfully completing one round of the system you can, of
course, play it again if you want to spend longer in the casino, but
you should remember that the casino will beat you in the long run and
that the sooner you can collect your profit of fifteen hundred francs
and walk out the better.  Since, I said to the girl, you are a gambler
of free will and iron discipline it should be simple for you to resist
temptation and go home to bed and dream of the menu of the excellent
dinner the casino has just paid for.

Above all, you must be patient, have courage when the going is hard and
stick rigidly to your system and not fritter away chips on single
numbers which are the date, or the number of buttons on your dress, or
a message from another world.  You are a professional gambler out to
make a profit and get away with it.

I said to the girl, 'But of course no system at roulette is infallible,
and all of them, including this one, can be just ways of losing your
money slowly.  But on this system, even with a small capital, you will
only be defeated by long adverse runs, which are uncommon, or by the
downright bad luck of an unusual preponderance of the other colour
during the session.

'The main point about it is that, with this system, you get your
money's worth.  If you lose, you shouldn't lose quickly.  Its best
recommendation is that it is used by the little resident gambler in
French casino towns where the locals are allowed to play.  It's really
nothing more than a variation of the martingale or progression
system--a very gradual form of doubling up.  It's called the Labouchre
system.'

Later that evening the girl came up to me.  Her eyes were shining.
'I've won a fortune,' she said.  'Come and have a drink.'

'I told you it was a good system.'

'You and your system!' she said scornfully.  'I hacked away at it for
an hour.  I backed red and too many blacks kept on coming up.  Your
system's just another way of losing money, only it's much harder work.
Typical of James Bond to dream it up.  He just wants the agony to last
longer.'

'Well, what happened?'

'I was down to my last thousand francs and I said to hell with it and
put the thousand francs on my birthday.  And it came up.  What has
clever Mister James Bond got to say to that?' she said scornfully.

'He might be unkind and suggest that you backed a number right down at
the end of the last dozen,' I said curtly.

The night of this slightly fictionalized account of my first evening in
Monte Carlo I myself did badly.  I had taken all the necessary
precautions--noting the number of my hotel bedroom, remembering the
date of my wife's birthday and, most essential of all, rubbing the
horse's knee of the equestrian statue of Louis XIV in the hall of the
Hotel de Paris (all the bronze veneer has been rubbed off by
generations of the superstitious and the knee now gleams like gold),
but nothing had availed me.  I put my misfortune down to a state of
spiritual derangement caused by a group of noisy and mannerless Italian
businessmen who had put me off my psychological stride at
chemin-de-fer, and by the significant fact that, on sitting down to
dinner, the two knives to the right of my plate had been crossed--a
sure message that I would be out of luck that night.

I am not by any means a passionate gambler nor a very audacious one,
but I greatly enjoy the smoke-filled drama of the casino and the
momentary fever of the game.  The casino at Monte Carlo is not my
favourite.  For me the casino at Beaulieu has the greatest charm,
followed by Le Touquet, with, at the bottom of the list, Enghien les
Bains outside Paris, which has the unenviable distinction, for a
gambler, of making the highest annual profit of any casino on the
Continent.  The Monte Carlo casino is rather too much of a show-place
and there is a railway-station atmosphere about the vast gaming rooms
that, despite the glorious vulgarity of the decor (note, in the inner
_salon vert_, the naiads on the ceiling; they are smoking cigars), is
slightly chilling.  The intimate surroundings of the Sporting Club,
decorated, as the casino hand-out charmingly puts it, 'par les peintres
Warring et Gillows', are far preferable, but this select enclave has
strict winter and summer seasons and was closed at the end of May.

Part of the trouble with the Monte Carlo rooms is that they were built
in an age of elegance for elegant people, and the gambling nowadays has
the drabness of a Strauss operetta played in modern dress.  The
Italians, Greeks and South Americans, who are by far the richest
post-war gamblers, are almost totally without glamour and, if they
support beautiful cocottes in the true casino tradition, they leave
them at home so as not to be distracted from what used to be a pastime
but has now become a rather deadly business of amassing tax-free
capital gains.  Monte Carlo and its casino were designed for
flamboyants--for Russian Grand Dukes, English Milords, French actresses
and an occasional maharajah, but now the beautiful stage is occupied
only by the scene-shifters who have inherited it from a race of actors
that is bankrupt or dispossessed.

But the great money-making machine, tempering its rules of dress and
deportment, and importing crap tables and fruit-machines to suit the
modern taste, still hums efficiently and soullessly on--indifferent to
the pockets from which the money is mined so long as the yield remains
high.  I say 'soullessly' because the official policy of the casino
authorities seems to be to get down to business and forget the romantic
myth.  Nowadays, for instance, you cannot 'break the bank' at Monte
Carlo.  In the old days, each table started off with a large sum as
capital and when this was exhausted the bank had been broken and, while
more capital was fetched from the strongrooms, the table was draped in
a black shroud and remained _en deuil_.  Surely it was a pity to
discard this charming custom, and, with it, the glorious objective of
every gambler!

Then again, most of the romantic fables are nowadays frowned upon.  Of
course nobody ever shot themselves because of their losses at the
tables!  The Suicide's Leap, a vertiginous plunge from the top of the
cliff beside the Muse Ocanographique, is a fiction!  The Russian
destroyer captain who, having lost his own money together with all the
sailors' pay from the ship's safe, held the casino up to ransom by
training his ship's guns on it--that is nonsense!  Only a few
incontrovertible stories putting the casino in a rosy light are still
fostered, such as that the casino recently lost more than sixty million
francs in three days; that in 1952 an English couple won thirty million
francs in a week and were never seen again; and the history of Charles
de Ville Wells who inspired the music-hall song 'The Man who Broke the
Bank at Monte Carlo'.  The story of Sir Frederick Johnston also finds
its place in the authorized version, though it sounds highly
improbable.  This Milord, in 1913, when they still played with louis
d'or, was wearing a blazer with brass buttons.  One button broke off
and rolled under the table.  'Don't disturb yourself, Milord,' cried
the chef de parti, 'where does the louis go, on red?'  'Always red,'
laughed Sir Frederick, not knowing what it was all about.  He then left
the table and moved to another room only to be sought out by a huissier
with the news that he now had the maximum on red and that it must be
withdrawn in order not to hold up the game.  Milord had won 25,000
francs with a button!

Monte Carlo is full of these tales which find their way again and again
into books and articles about the casino.  The only one I could have
verified (but forgot to) is to the effect that, in the English church,
they only sing hymns with a number higher than thirty-six since
otherwise the congregation, it is said, quit the church at the first
organ note in order to dash to the casino and back the number of the
hymn.

I have always had a desire to examine the mechanics of a casino and,
with the help of Mr Onassis's staff, I gained access to the
engine-room, so to speak, of this famous gaming-house.

To the left of the imposing main entrance to the casino there is a
small door with nothing written on it, and through this you go down
flights of stone stairs into a maze of underground passages and rooms
that remind one of the back of a theatre.  The largest of these rooms
is the atelier where the roulette wheels are constructed and where all
the gambling equipment is repaired.  The chef d'atelier was an
attractive, youngish man with great enthusiasm for his work, though he
was totally uninterested in gambling and said, proudly, that he had
never hazarded a single franc.  That day he had three roulette wheels
for repair and these were draped in green baize while they 'slept'.  He
undraped one and lifted it from its spindle on to its die and explained
to me the extraordinary number of things that can go wrong with a
_cylindre_.  Everything to do with a roulette wheel is subject to
minute wear, the spindle obviously, but also the aluminium slots, the
brass bosses, the top rosewood level where the ball spins, and the
ivory ball itself, which, with use, gets smaller and smaller.  All
these points and many others come under daily review when at 9.30 a.m.,
half an hour before gambling begins, the chef and his team verify every
single piece of equipment in the gaming rooms--the croupiers' rakes,
the chemin-de-fer shoes, the diameter of the roulette balls and of,
course, the level of each table, which can be adjusted at the base of
the feet.

I asked about the croupiers' school, and the chef explained its
functioning.  Apparently examinations for the school are held at
irregular intervals.  A candidate must first pass a strict medical and
then come before an interview board which reviews his personal life and
that of the whole of his family, which must be above reproach.  He is
then put through tests for general intelligence, which must be above
the average, and for memory, which must be exceptional.  He should be
between twenty-three and forty, have long, supple fingers and be
extremely agile in his movements.  His speech must be correct and
without significant accent and he should have some knowledge of at
least one foreign language--generally either Italian or English.

As an additional and supreme safeguard, no candidate is considered
unless he has served for two years with the Socit des Bains de Mer,
either as a secretary, commissionaire, watchman or fireman, for
instance.

Having passed these preliminary examinations, he is put to practical
schooling under senior croupiers for six or eight months, with
intermediate examinations at the end of each month.  At the end of this
period he is put through a 'disaster course'--a horrifying experience
during which every conceivable complication and unexpected incident is
thrown at him.  He then has a second medical examination, and after
this a final trial in the public rooms.  This, apparently, is the most
anguishing experience of all.  The candidates, already wrought to a
high pitch of nervous tension and knowing that they are under
surveillance from half a dozen watchful pairs of eyes, occasionally
faint at the table and nearly always sweat so heavily that the
equipment, particularly the ivory ball, slips in their fingers.  If
they pass this final inquisition with success they are appointed
croupiers and probably continue in the metier, working six hours a day,
until they are sixty or sixty-five, when they are retired on a pension.
They work on a fixed salary and receive a percentage of the tips which,
on an average, doubles their monthly wage.

There are various conventions that the experienced gambler will have
noticed.  The croupier must refer to the roulette as 'le cylindre', and
frequently uses the term 'louis' when announcing bets, although this
piece of money has been out of currency for more than forty years.  He
must also remember that there are in theory no women at the table, and
that it is always, 'Messieurs, faites vos jeux.'  This tradition dates
from the time when it was considered inelegant to associate women with
the passion for gambling.

It is almost impossible for a croupier to cheat.  The last successful
cheat was before the war when two Italians bribed a croupier to mark
the cards at a chemin-de-fer table with dots of an ink that was
invisible except through specially tinted glasses worn by the Italians.
The cards were marked with tiny dots representing their face value and
this allowed the Italians, when they held the bank, to know the total
held by the punter--a knowledge that, from time to time in the game,
can be of decisive value.  The conspiracy was successful for several
weeks but was then uncovered by a suspicious chef de jeu who became
mystified when the Italians frequently 'stood' on four, for instance,
when the punter held perhaps a three or a two.

For me a strong rival attraction to the casino is the Muse
Ocanographique that adjoins the Royal Palace of Monaco.  This is now
in charge of one of my heroes, Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who is in
process of reorganizing and rebuilding it to be the greatest aquarium
in the world.  He took me round the new laboratories, now equipped with
every kind of modern instrument for measuring the physical qualities of
sea-water and other abstruse oceanographic problems, and I saw the
latest public exhibits which dramatically show creatures of the abyssal
depths phosphorescently illuminated against a dark-room effect.  Soon
he will announce a grandiose scheme for building, above sea-level and
adjoining the aquarium, vast tanks where dolphins will give public
performances (as they do, for instance, at Miami), and other
spectacular marine exhibits.

This fantastically energetic man engages each year on marine adventures
and exploits of which, alas, we hear too little in England.  In 1958 he
invented a jet-propelled underwater 'flying saucer' for submarine
exploration, and this is now being manufactured in small quantities.
Early in 1959 he was employed by the French government to survey the
submarine route for natural gas pipelines from Oran to Cartagena.  The
first pipes will continue across Europe to the Ruhr, and perhaps even
to England, bringing Sahara gas to revolutionize the power problems of
the whole continent.  Cousteau, who incidentally surveyed the Persian
Gulf off-shore wells for the British Petroleum Company, is technical
adviser for all underwater aspects of this six-hundred-billion-franc
pipeline plan.  Amongst smaller projects, he is now experimenting with
a collapsible ship made of nylon coated with plastic.  The prototype is
sixty-three feet by twenty-three feet and is powered by two 600 h.p.
diesels.  This deflatable vessel will be used in conjunction with the
diving saucer for short-term marine exploration wherever it is needed,
the entire equipment being transportable by air at short notice.

Unfortunately Cousteau's writing never catches up with all his various
projects and it is only now that he is considering a sequel to _The
Silent World_.[*]  Meanwhile he has formed his own film company (after
experience of 'show biz' in connection with his film of _The Silent
World_, he has called it Requins Associs, Sharks Ltd.) which is to
produce a television series of fifty-two films.


[*] _The Living Sea_, published in 1963 by Hamish Hamilton.


His company recently won a Hollywood Oscar for Cousteau's film _The
Golden Fish_.  This is the story of a small Chinese boy who wins a
goldfish in a lottery.  In his small room he already has a canary in a
cage and when he goes off to school each day the goldfish in its bowl
and the canary make friends.  A hungry black cat hears the canary
singing for joy over the acrobatics of the goldfish and we see him
climb in through the window just as the boy is leaving school.  As the
boy saunters home, the cat tries to get at the canary and, prepared to
sacrifice himself for his friend, the fish jumps out of the bowl on to
the table.  The cat leaves the canary and slowly stalks the fish.  Will
the little boy be in time?  No, he can't be!  Hurry!  Hurry!  The cat
picks up the fish in his mouth!  Disaster!  But, as the little boy
walks into the room, the cat reaches up and drops the goldfish back
into his bowl.

Cousteau's famous research ship, the _Calypso_, is now in Greek waters,
but the days of treasure hunts and archaeological discoveries are,
alas, over, and Cousteau's whole research programme is devoted to
scientific work.  But whatever he touches he infects with so much
brilliance and enthusiasm that a morning spent in his company is a
wonderful refreshment for the spirit--particularly when it is jaded by
the life of too many cities, however thrilling, in too short a time.

And then it was time to take off on the last lap along the screaming
hubbub of the Cte d'Azur, up through the olive groves of Provence, and
the mysterious maze of the Auvergne, to the soft Loire.  Then the long
straight hack across north-west France to the bustling little aerodrome
of Le Touquet.

One last delicious meal at the airport restaurant (five stars in my
personal good-food guide), the pangs of jealousy as the other cars come
off the planes to begin their holidays, and then the melancholy flight
back across the Channel.  How many excitements and alarums, how many
narrow squeaks, how many thrilling sights and sounds in those six
weeks!  What fun it all was!  What fun 'abroad' will always be!






[End of Thrilling Cities, by Ian Fleming]
