Other people get publicity for their overseas trips, but my wife is disappointed about the low PR our last excursion generated.
It’s all contained in her “My Trip” journal, some 180 piping-hot-prose pages of the devastating doings of two Antipodeans who never turned at single head in Piccadilly and weren’t even worth a horse’s snort at the Trooping the Colours.
Yet, here and there is the drama—not high society, or name-dropping or garden partying, but rather timetable traumas, bus bungling and passport pyrotechnics; no leaping up in the best seats at Covent Garden and shouting “bravo” for some prima donna on the high C’s; but more likely an altercation at the strip-and-sip in Soho.
No hovering head waiter re- commending the hasty tasty at the Cafe Royal, but more of a stumbling into the cafeteria of some London railway station and meeting your gastronomic Waterloo while someone rushes over saying, “I’d know that accent anywhere” because he feels alone and has just been lost by British Rail.
Take the heading under HAR- RODS, in my wife’s diary:
“I said ‘I’m going to Harrods today’ and Max said, ‘You’ll go over my dead body’ and I said ‘Why not? We’ve still got some travellers’ cheques’ and he said ‘Travellers cheques are for. travelling so let’s be on our way’”
“So I made him take me to Oxford Street although he kept shouting ‘That’s the way with you women, you’re just down-right Selfridge.’”
Then there’s the entry TOWER OF LONDON: “He so embarrassed me by asking a beef- eater if he’d like an old battle-axe.”
And WESTMINSTER ABBEY: “I got an awful shock when a guide came up to me and said: ‘Have you seen the nave?’ I screamed, ‘Not for five minutes, what’s the beggar been up to now.’”
That gives you a small idea. It’s not a work of literature, my wife’s trip, but when we get into the English countryside and a village which we will call Slough-in-the-Wortle just for the hell of it, she goes into full flow about the watercress sandwiches and how Dick Turpin ravished a wench in the area.
There was a lot of it about then, watercress I mean, and things haven’t got any better.
There were a lot of martyrdoms we found, quite apart from those people who had faced Freddie Trueman. We did all the cathedrals and every book in my library has a holy book-mark.
We also have the greatest collection of pictorial tea towels from the Old Dart—abbeys, stately homes, romantic Wessex quotations from Thomas Hardy (remember, his wife was always saying “Kiss me”).
There was Stratfording the Avon and punting on the Thames, although the day I went there wasn’t a bookmaker in sight.
A nasty swan took to me at one river and I muttered “Swan Upping” fiercely under my breath.
My wife had a rapturous moment in 10 Downing Street. All she did was to give her surname in a husky voice. People came rushing with autograph books, Of course, coming from South Australia we know all about Maggies.
We went down to Brighton, to see the Royal Pavilion, which my wife thought was a Chinese take away, They got pretty shirty at the postcard counter but, after all, we were researching in depth and you can’t help getting out of it sometimes.
Then we went to Land’s End and my wife kept asking what the islands were in the distance and the guide told her. She seemed a bit annoyed, but if you ask a silly question you’ll get a Scilly answer.
Mind you, my wife loved the Cornish countryside and thought every man she met was Poldark and handsome.
We played golf in Devon, but had some difficulty with the Devonshire tees.
Still you can’t have everything, what with gazing at the dappled English countryside, knowing all the old inns and outs and observing the Morris dance, although I thought it was an awful lot of fuss to make over an old car.
Still we were normal, intelligent Australian tourists, in a country where they play football with no hands.
We didn’t get asked to that big place at the top of the Mall, or is it at the bottom? My wife left two pages for it. There’s the pathetic little entry: “Maybe next time”.
Still I kept her away from the expensive stores. Which was pretty Harrod of me!
Max Fatchen