Dubuque to London

by RICHARD BISSELL

WELL it was a great trip and don’t let anybody tell you they are not eating in England because they are hardly doing anything else. They are eating a breakfast suitable for a Missouri river deckhand plus fried potatoes on request; and in order to warm up for dinner, two hours after lunch they have lea at which each participant is required to eat six pieces of Hovis, live tea cakes, a small jar of marmalade, and a quart of tea or else go stand in a corner. An hour and a half later, after studying the latest archaeology Hash in the London Illustrated News, they don the tweeds and call for the roast beef, Brussels sprouts, and trifle. There is another so-called vegetable called Savoy greens, which my advice on this subject is, Look Out! I just checked on the scales and I find I put on ten pounds. Maybe it was the trifle.

Trifle is a dessert made out of everything left in the icebox on Salurdny night, with whipped cream on top of it, or maybe smot hered in some custard or unclassifiable sweet sauce. Then after the trifle you have to eat a “savory” or get throwed out of the dining room. The savory is some melted cheese on toast or sardines on fried bread, or maybe sometimes it consists of a guessing contest and whoever guesses what is in it gets a free six monlhs’ subscription to Britannia and Eve.

In London, soups of all kinds can bo purchased fearlessly. Once outside the city limits, however, a grim soup picture develops. Provincial soups in England bear magnificent titles: Potaye Alexandra, Potage Empereur,Potage Antoinette,Potage Henri IV, Potage Chartṙeuse de Parme,Potage Nuit d’ Amour, etc. One calls for them jovially, after a bracing afternoon out shooting gorse in the bracken, only to receive, in each case, a plate of gravy-colored, rather adhesive mix, suitable for gluing up parcels for Boxing Day. However, you don’t necessarily have to eat the soup; you can have a side dish of sprouts instead.

On the other hand the beef is tremendous, and the English have mastered the art, unknown in ibis republic, of cooking a minute steak rare. And in London you can get an entire meal with nothing, absolutely nothing, dunked in sauce bear noise. This may startle New Yorkers accustomed to eat ing in the costly gloom of the East Fifties, but I can prove it. In fact, the eating places in London are of top quality, and the besl thing about it is, when you have finished a nice lunch a surly waiter does not hand you a hill for $18.00.

Now I don’t like to bring up the subject of money, as it is a vulgar American trail and very alien to my refined nature, but oh boy, you can sure live cheap over there in Albion. And in style. Even in the crummiest little country towns, the waiter that brings you that glue soup has on a white tie, and he will open your bottle of Bulmers with all the flourishes of the wine steward at the Savoy unleashing theMoët ef Chandon,

But on that money angle again, it’s really a killer. I got a first-class haircut in the St rand the other day for two shillings, or 28 cents. That alone is enough of a reason to look for a cosy Hal in Belgravia.

Speaking of flats in Bclgravia brings up t he painful subject of English interiors. And lampshades. Aftor two days in London I decided to get a bowler hat, a pinch-waist black suit, and an umbrella, take some voice lessons so I could be understood, and settle down for ten years of punting on the Thames and a quiet annual holiday at Bovril Regis.

I visualized myself having “good talk” at my club over a cold bird (orwith a cold bird), and even toyed with the idea of joining Her Majesty’s forces and becoming a Group Captain. But after a month I began to study the Cunard sailings and wonder what was doing on 44th Street.

“What’s the matter?” says the wife. “I thought you were planning to enter Eton next fall.”

“It’s the lampshades,” I said. “I can stand the pink ones with the lace, and the ones with colored bits of glass in them, but the ones with the beaded fringe are driving me out. A shame, too, what with the haircuts and all.”

“You’re too sensitive,” she said. “Have another Gin and It or a lemon squash and you’ll feel fit straightaway, old boy.”

Well it’s not only the lampshades, it’s also the furniture. Two awful facts govern English furniture. One is, they have discovered how to make veneer furniture in seventeen contrasting shades of inlay, with Moorish hardware. The other is that no building in England has ever been built with a closet in it and I defy anybody to design a handsome wardrobe, especially in multicolored veneers. Add to this the fact that the average Englishman’s idea of a dandy picture on the wall is a thatched cottage and a rose garden, or an old mill, or a picture called “Chums,” and you can see why they had to give up India. I guess maybe I didn’t get to see the right people, I don’t know, but in addition to living with it I made an exhaustive study of furniture in the store windows and if anybody wants to do a show laid in the home of a prominent Peoria plumber in the year 1924 why I know where they can get the stage sets real cheap without hunting around the storage warehouses in South Chicago.

I guess I am giving England a hard time here but don’t get me wrong — I just like to have a little fun.

I really love the place and I think it’s a shame about Margaret, and the new budget has got me into an uproar. Nobody is shoving you around all the time over there and everybody is so polite and helpful that after a while you begin to get lonesome for a good insult. And you might live thirty or forty years in England without anybody ever telling you a joke about Brooklyn.

Their taxicabs are marvels. In the Darwinian sense of adaptation to environment they are perfection. You can get in without fracturing your skull or crushing your bowler, the seats are elegantly upholstered, the driver is separated from you by glass panels (and does not look and act as though he just graduated from San Quentin or talk like he was practising up for an audition for John McNulty), and they can turn around on a dime, or perhaps on a half crown.

You automobile fans, go to England and you will flip. Such elegance! These amorphous beetles that Detroit has been shoving into the craw of the American public are dry fodder indeed when compared to the classy iron you see around London. I must add, however, that at the automobile show at Earls Court it was all too obvious that in a grim play for the World Market ($ $ $), almost all the European manufacturers have plunged beetlewards. But there is still an abundance of automotive glamor on the streets.

And before I went over I thought the English were busted. Maybe they are, but I never saw anything like the Rolls-Royces, the Bentleys, the huge Daimlers. And certainly never, in New York or any place, have I seen so many chauffeurs. When I remark on this, everybody is giving me different explanations. It seems these cars belong to “the wrong people.” (Who in hell are the wrong people?) Or it seems they belong to “movie people” (oh now, come off it, you chaps, the combined U.K. film industry only turns out one picture per annum, judging by their export business). Or to people who are “not eckshully rich in paounds, but . . .” (But what? lire, rubles, piastres?) So I can’t figure it out; the whole bloody town is filled with hot shots putting on the dog, and they all talk with English accents too, so they can’t very well be from Dallas. I wish I could figure out how to go broke like that and I’d have it made.

Strange, though, the contrasts. I had lunch with a prominent and successful businessman. He was dressed fit to kill in the English manner, the restaurant was elegant, and the bill for lunch was about three pounds, with the wine. (Boy, I’m wined up to the ears. If I never see another bottle of Moselle, hock, claret, or champagne, it will be OK with Richard. And I’ve heard enough for the time being about whether the 1947 is as soul-satisfying as the 1949.)

After lunch my friend asks me would I like to come back to his office. So we popped into a 1946 Austin cab with a leather Victoria top and off we went.

The building he was in resembled a rooming house in an abandoned section of Pittsburgh. A microscopic series of smudged letters painted on the door jamb so you wouldn’t notice them announced that a business firm was within. The staircase was dark and quite spooky. His office was a shambles. The way you tell who is president of an English firm is, he has the desk. The others work on discarded card tables or empty tea chests. They keep the invoices in a candy box. The switchboard girl works in a closet with a twenty-five-watt bulb to cheer her on. They wash the windows for every Coronation. The toilet is in a building down the streel.

Well under conditions like these, in the semidarkness, this man and his partners conduct a famous business known to all Englishmen and even some Americans and others. That’s character for you. Maybe that’s how they pay for the RollsRoyces. I’ll say one thing, the electric company is not getting rich off these London offices.

This passion for low wattage appears to be a national characteristic. I was driving my taxicab around out in the country (yes, I bought a taxicab, but that is another story, which I have sold to the Encyclopœdia Britannica) —anyway I was driving my taxicab and it began to get dark so I turned on my parking lights but nobody else did. I’m telling you it was pretty terrifying hurtling alqng those country roads in the deep dusk with cars zooming all around unlighted. Finally when it got pitch dark everybody turned on their parking lights and I turned on my headlights so I could see where the hell I was and spot the cyclists, dogs, road signs, holes in the road, and the Dickens characters trudging on the shoulder. Well I soon realized this was not cricket, because quite a few of the other cars used their “hooter” (klaxon) at me as they passed, to express disapproval. And when an Englishman bears down on his hooter it means his soul has been tried beyond endurance, and his most basic beliefs and dearest principles are at stake; for the English are not a nation of horn blowers any more than they are a nation of name-callers, nose-punchers, or are addicted to habitual rudeness and gratuitous insult. (Like some places I know, no names mentioned.) So I turned off my headlights and drove on. My wife says I look very distinguished with white hair.

England is a nation of shopkeepers, so some humorous lad has stated, and, I might add, the shops are always closed. That’s the way it seems anyway when you want to buy something. I walked three miles the other night after the theater, trying to buy some cigarettes, and never succeeded. The pubs are one of the civilization’s crowning glories but they never seem to be open when you need refreshment and companionship, and if they are, you no sooner get your mild and bitter and begin to run up a good score on the dartboard but the barmaid announces Closing Time, and you are out in the street leaning against a lamp post with nothing to do. If England wants more dollars I figure they could pick up quite a few by giving the thirsty Americans time enough to get warmed up before turning out the lights and sending them into the streets where they just obstruct the view. If you go into a tea shoppe at 3:17 P.M. and there is a house rule that they serve tea at 3:30 you could give them all the dollars in Fort Knox and not get any tea until 3:30 because it is not 3:30 yet and in fact it is only 3:17 and no tea is served until 3:30. This perplexes the crude American mind no end.

The theater is another area in which one finds oneself frequently at a loss for adjectives. I saw a musical comedy playing to a packed house in which the hero had on a blue flannel jacket and white flannel trousers, and sang love duets with a soubrette who had no vocal cords against a background of paper roses. Punch recommends this show, which could not play twenty-four hours anyplace but in England, as the equivalent of Current and Choice. There was so much exposition in the dialogue that they had to cut the jokes in order to get the curtain down on time. Whimsy is applauded by the critics, and causes ecstatic giggles and wriggles in the audience, and if you haven’t got whimsy you might as well turn in your shoes and go out for the chess team. In spite of this they seem to adore our “noisy,” “brash,” “blatant” American charades, and the queue for Pajama Game extends from St. Martin’s Lane down to the fountains in Trafalgar Square. And you couldn’t ask for better theater in the grand style than that at the Old Vic. The theaters themselves, too, strike a more civilized note than ours, what with tea served at the intervals, a handy bar on the premises, etc. I love those prices for orchestra seats also, and there’s no place in the world so wonderful as the interior of the Lyric at Hammersmith, and oh well, let’s face it, I even like the paper flowers and the singers who can’t sing.

So finally my wife came around to the pub and told me that our house out in Norwalk, Connecticut, had been washed into Long Island Sound and was headed for Block Island and she thought we’d better go home. The pub had been open for over an hour and was closing anyway, so I said OK.

We stopped in Shannon and I bought a necktie and some genuine Irish linen articles for which I have no need.

“I can’t wait to get home,” said wife.

“I am with you 100 per cent on that thought,” I said. “I love England but Oh You Kid.”

About three Heublein’s cocktails later we were back in the land of the free at good old Idlewild.

After I had explained to the customs man that my London taxicab was not hidden in my suitcase but coming by ocean freight he let me go, and the porter took me to a cab. I gave him a dollar for his trouble. No thanks for tip.

We got to Grand Central. I gave the driver six dollars for the fare and a dollar for himself. No thanks for tip.

A colored man took my bags 130 feet to a baggage locker. I gave him a dollar (seven shillings, that is). No thanks for tip.

I stepped over to the information bureau and asked for a Burlington timetable.

“We don’t keep timetables on every road in the country,” he said.

Outside, I asked a handsome policeman in white gloves if he happened to know what time the Metropolitan Museum opened on Sundays.

“I ain’t no information booth,” he said.

“He says he’s not an information booth,” I said to my wife. “Funny, I’d have sworn he was one.”

“Well, let’s go home and see the kids,” my wife said.

“OK, but I’ve got a call to make first,” I said.

“Now what?”

“I’m going to call the Cunard Line. I wonder when the Mauretania is sailing,” I said.