Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pig's blood. Some of them can be brought to confess that bathrooms are not really bath-
rooms at all, and that one does not stroll into a restroom to find people stacked in bunks
sound asleep. They might even cease to shriek hysterically at the smell of cigarette smoke,
though this usually takes a decade or so of intensive de-purification. There have been sug-
gestions that this process could be speeded up by herding all visiting Americans into con-
tamination camps, where they would be coated in cow shit and exposed to a range of non-
lethal viruses in order to accustom them to the mind-shattering notion that germs and dirt
are a regular part of everyday life. Europeans might receive exactly the opposite treatment
when they land in New York.
Physical appearance in Britain is deeply conditioned by class. There is a certain kind
of tall, stooped, willowy, long-faced, chinless, floppy-haired aristocrat who could not pos-
sibly be mistaken for a mechanic even if he were to wear oil-stained overalls and brandish
a wrench. Centuries of fine food and selective breeding play their part in producing this
physique, though so occasionally does a spot of incest. Hugh Grant could not possibly be
from the working-class—not just on account of his accent, but because of his physiognomy.
There is a working-class, North-of-England face which is different from a middle-class,
South-of-England one. Jeremy Irons could not hail from anywhere north of Oxford, and
Albert Finney is unlikely to come from the so-called Home Counties around London. Bob
Hoskins looks like a Cockney as well as talking like one. Prince Charles could not be a
Texan, though if the Texans wanted to take him in, there are those among us who would
have no principled objection.
I was once on an escalator in the London Underground, puzzling yet again over signs
reading “Dogs Must Be Carried,” and wondering whether I would be arrested for not
clutching a spaniel to my chest, when I noticed a middle-aged man on the escalator opposite
standing just behind a young soldier in uniform. The middle-aged man was stout and ex-
pensively dressed in a camel-hair overcoat, with swept-back grey hair and a rubicund coun-
tenance. Having eyed the soldier's back for a few moments, he murmured, “Put your cap
on, Private.” The soldier turned, glanced at him for no more than half a second, and replied,
“Yes, sir.” He then took his cap from his pocket and put it on, and the middle-aged man fell
into some good-humoured conversation with him about where he was stationed.
It was clear that the two men did not know each other. But it took the private only the
blink of an eye to recognise that despite his civilian dress the man behind him was a high-
ranking army officer, and it took me only about the same time. It was not just his straight
back, air of authority and imperious accent which gave him away. He had the face of a
British colonel or major-general, rather as many Oxford and Cambridge academics have
the mild, unused, ascetic faces of Oxford and Cambridge academics. He also had the voice
of a high-ranking military officer, which in Britain is different from the voice of a banker
or a bishop. If I myself had told the soldier to put his cap on, even though I looked fairly
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