The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

LONDON, which has just survived the coldest spring since 1892, is wearing a new look, some, though not all, of it appealing to those who remember the old. I had my first glimpse the afternoon of my arrival as the bus from the airport swung us through Chelsea. Toward us, mincing, came a young thing practiced in the arts, whose black hair was piled as high as a busby. She was wearing a reefer coat with a black velvet collar, black skintight slacks, razor-pointed flats, and she was waving languidly a cigarette in a long black holder.

She put me on the alert, and I have been making note of other strange types ever since. I think you see the best assortment in the small pubs and restaurants of Chelsea, but I ceased, for the time being, to speculate about Les Girls when our bus got jammed in a bumper-to-burn per ice floe that looked as if it would never melt. The cars on the London streets have noticeably increased in the past year, and they are larger cars — the Mercedes-Benz is larger, the Rolls-Royces are larger and more numerous — whereas the streets are precisely the same size, all of which adds up to more congestion. The main arteries like Piccadilly and St. James’s are now one-way, and this means faster movement except at peak hours. It also means greater danger to the pedestrian, especially if he is American and accustomed to looking to the wrong side when he starts to cross the street. To save our skins, the County Council has inscribed in large black letters at the pedestrian crossings, “Look Right” or “Look Left.” Be sure you do.

In the late winter, when the buses went out on strike, commuting was done by train, car pool, taxi, and every form of wheeled vehicle, and the traffic tie-ups were the worst in London’s memory. A friend of mine left his office in the City at 8:00 in the evening, bound for his home in Surrey, twelve miles distant. At 10:45, he and the man who was driving had crawled ten of the twelve miles. At this point the driver turned off, and my boy did the last two miles on foot, reaching home and hearth at 11:20.

Town and county seem acutely aware of the increasing congestion, and tunnels, such as the one which has been completed at Hammersmith, and a greater one, which will be at least another year in building at Hyde Park Corner, are a partial answer. Bypasses are the only way of preserving the more famous of the old market towns such as Cambridge, Exeter, and Andover, with their narrow streets, where the old shops and cottage fronts seem to close in on each other and where the ancient bridges are too lovely to destroy. As for the throughways, by 1970 there will be a network of them as capacious as “M. 1” reaching all the way from London to Wales. Two hundred thousand trees and shrubs, including 40,000 oaks, 40,000 beeches, and 32.000 ashes, are being planted this year to make the motorways blend into the landscape. They are four-lane, almost as wide as the Maine or New Jersey turnpike; the only difference, as far as I could see, is that the British set no speed limit. The Jaguars and Bentleys go just as fast as the drivers dare, and the smaller breeds keep to the left. I am told that the only time M. 1 has ever been crowded was on opening day, when everyman and his wife went out in his car to test the new speedway, and children standing on the overpasses dropped ice cream cones into the open convertibles.

With all this building going on, there are bound to be roadblocks where the traffic slims down to one lane and where each driver must wait for his turn to thread the needle. The English road manners are still the best in the world, so much more quiet and orderly than the chaos in Paris or the hullabaloo in Rome with the Fiats and motor scooters. In England the lorry driver still extends his arm and beckons you forward when there is an open stretch, and if you hear a horn or hooter blowing in anger, it is either a member of Parliament in a hurry or an American who thinks he is back home.

In view of all this traffic, it seems to me the more remarkable that people can produce a fourday demonstration as impressive as the Aldermaston March over a weekend as busy as Easter Bank Holiday — more than 20,000 persons marching in protest to demonstrate their abhorrence of the bomb and their demand for a ban. Half of them were under twenty, striding along with prams, babies, knapsacks, from Aldermaston through Reading and on to the final speechmaking in Hyde Park on Easter Monday. Elder adherents joined them along the way. The police goodnaturedly shepherded them through the holiday traffic, and huge crowds which lined the London streets looked on in sympathy.

The skyline is changing, and for the worse. I remember the ambitious plans which were projected in the lobby of the London County Council in 1943; the more feasible they then seemed because the Blitz had destroyed so much. But very little of what was erected followed that dream. I remember how St. Paul’s was uncovered by the bombing and how for a time one saw it as Wren intended, from an open level approach. But before the war, this was the most expensive real estate in the British Isles, and as business and values returned it was natural for the great cathedral to be enclosed once more, with due conservatism.

What is unnatural is the appearance in London of the New York skyscraper. Despite the zoning laws, exceptions are being made, and in almost every case there are defacements. They were begun on the south bank of the Thames with the excuse that the shore was so unsightly that any new building would be an improvement: this let in the Shell-Mex skyscraper, which now sits like a huge waffle iron above the once-lovely view down St. James’s Street to the Palace. This was followed on the north bank by the thirty-four-story Vickers building, which overshadows the Abbey and Houses of Parliament and, of course, cuts off the river view for many who used to enjoy it. Why should a multistoried Hilton be given a special permit in Park Lane, except for the prestige and profit of Mr. Hilton? And why should the next skyscraper be allowed to climb up over Buckingham Palace, except to give a stenographer’s-eye view of the doings of the royal family down below? Is London really so crowded for office space that the English must commit all the blunders we have made, including the emulation of the boring monotony of Park Avenue?

Not to close on a sour note, let me pay an old debt ol gratitude to an English institution that never changes — the London taxi, which one can enter without bruising a kneecap, denting a hat, or ripping a pocket. The London taxi is the most comfortable, inexpensive, and civil ride in Lhe world.

EMLYN WILLIAMS, as the name suggests, is of Welsh origin. We know him for his plays and, more recently, for his admirable recitations and impersonations of Dickens and Dylan Thomas. How he emerged from the rural poverty of his native Flintshire and from the formidable density ol the Welsh tongue to his self-possession in English and to his imaginative grasp of acting and playwriting is the gist of his early autobiography, GEORGE (Random House, $5.95).

The cross which young Emlyn, the eldest of three brothers, had to bear was his father. Richard Williams the elder — £’Dic” to the countryside — had run off to sea as a boy and there acquired a fathomless taste for the bottle and the fellowship that goes with it. When he came ashore to marry his Mary and set up in the grocery business, he needed his lubrication, and it seemed that he would have the best of both worlds when he made his bid for the White Lion Inn, which dominated the village ol Glenrafon, a row of fourteen stone cottages. As the owner of a pub he was in his native element, but the trouble was that he drank with the best of them and did not always collect. Mary, tightlipped, fended for the boys and for nine years fought a losing battle which left its scars on them all. But during World War I, when Die should have been down and out, he recovered, and as a steelworker made a new home for them. Sober again, he had the gratification of seeing his eldest shoot ahead.

The delight in this book is the emergence of young George— he was christened George Emlyn — from a shy, inhibited Welsh youngster to the prizewinning scholar of Christ Church. For this successful evolution he has three women to thank: Annie, who came to the pub as a housemaid when she was thirteen and whose warmth and world of imagination he shared until she was driven away by his father; Sarah G. Cooke, whose prize pupil he was and whose vibrant, probing teaching made him fit for Oxford; and Mary, his brave, silent mother, who put the steel in him. His boyhood and adolescence are the best of it. At Oxford he overacted, had his infatuations with the stage and elsewhere, and missed the First he should have had. Some of the gaiety comes through, but the artist in him was formed before that.