A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby Read Online Free Page A

letter-box, in its pristine magazine form. To me, turning its pages in SW 13 was rather like being taken to the top of a mountain from which the world could be seen spread out below, a much more interesting world than the one my father read bits out about from his
Morning Post
to my mother while she was still in bed, a captive audience, sipping her early morning tea.
    Lands and Peoples
was addressed to ‘The Generation whose business it is to save Mankind’ – mine presumably, although I had no suggestions to make about how it should be done. ‘We are marching,’ Mee wrote, an incurable optimist, apparently envisaging a pacific version of the Children’s Crusade, with the children waving white flags instead of brandishing crucifixes, ‘towards a friendlier and better world, a world of love in place of hate, of peace instead of war, and one thing is needful – an understanding of each other … it is the purpose of this book so to familiarize us with the lands and peoples of the world that we can cherish no ill-will for them. We are one great human family, and this is the book of our brothers and sisters.’
    I never read the text. All the efforts of what was presumably an army of experts in their various fields, painfully adapting their ways of writing to render them intelligible to infant minds, were totally wasted on me. All I did, and still do, for I still have the six volumes, was to look at the photographs, of which there were thousands in black and white besides the seven hundred or so in colour, and read the captions and the short descriptions below them of a world which, if it ever existed in the form in which it was here portrayed, is now no more. What I saw was a world at peace, one from which violence, even well-intentioned sorts, such as ritual murder and cannibalism, had been banished, or at least as long as the parts kept coming.
    In Merrie England, donkeys carried the Royal Mail through the cobbled streets of Clovelly, milkmaids in floppy hats churned butter by hand in the Isle of Wight, swan uppers upped swans on the River Thames, genial bearded fishermen in sou’westers mended nets on the Suffolk coast, town criers rang their bells, and choirboys wearing mortarboards, using long switches, beat the bounds of St Clement Danes.
    In the Land of the Cymry, which is how
Lands and Peoples
described Wales, ancient dames wearing chimney-pot hats stopped outside their whitewashed cottages to pass the time of day with more modern, marcel-waved neighbours, and cloth-capped salmon fishers paddled their coracles on the River Dee.
    In Bonnie Scotland, brawny, kilted athletes tossed the caber, border shepherds carried weakling lambs to shelter from the winter snows, women ground corn with stone hand-mills in the Inner Hebrides and, far out in the Atlantic, on St Kilda, the loneliest of the inhabited British Isles, men wearing tam-o’shanters and bushy beards were photographed returning homewards with seabirds taken on its fearsome cliffs.
    In the Emerald Isle, bare-footed, flannel-petticoated colleens drew water from brawling streams, or knitted socks in cabins in Connemara, while little boys in the Aran Islands wore skirts to protect them from being kidnapped by the fairies.
    Further afield, as I turned the pages, covering them with Bovril (for one of my greatest pleasures was to go to bed early with
Lands and Peoples
and at the same time eat Bovril sandwiches), I came upon Czechs and Slovaks and Hungarians wearing embroidered petticoats irrespective of sex, and incredible hats – in Rumania there were men who wore garters with little bells on them, who looked like sissies to me. I also saw fellers of proud giants in the Canadian forest; savages of New Guinea – their hair plastered with grease and mud; Jews in Poland – a new state with a glorious past; sun-loving Negroes in South Africa; happy Negro children romping in the ‘Coloured Section’ of New York; Kirghiz tribesmen on the ‘Roof of the World’;