Climbing the Stairs (3 page)

There there are the country pubs. Everyone makes such a thing about country pubs. When you go into one every face looks up at you and you get a vista of blank faces turning towards you. They
know you’re a stranger to the place and they want to keep you feeling that way. You walk to the bar thinking you’re a kind of leper.

The country’s very nice if you like being next to nature but I hate nature.

Some people say what interesting faces country people have got; what thinkers they must be. But I know what they’re thinking. You’ve only got to look at the expression on their faces
to know what they’re thinking – bugger all. Or nothing worth thinking about, like the crops, the farm and is it going to rain and looking up at the sky and musing about it. Of course
it’s going to rain. It always does in the country. At any rate it does when I’m there. And another thing they’re thinking is – what the devil are you doing down there? What
are you after? Thoroughly suspicious they are. And even if I don’t know what they’re thinking I don’t want to know. I don’t go for a holiday to sit and wonder what people
are thinking. I go to enjoy myself.

The alternative was to go to a big town like Bristol, London, or Edinburgh.

I like big towns because you’re anonymous there. I like to be anonymous. I don’t want the spotlight on me. Well, I didn’t then; I don’t mind it so much now. In any case I
hadn’t got many clothes to wear and not much money so I wanted to be anonymous.

I like to be in a crowd so that nobody notices you from the rest. I feel at home in a crowd and I feel at home amongst all the things that are made by man. I like everything that’s machine
made and man made. I like shops. I like cars. I like the new lighting that they’ve installed. I like everything that’s mechanically made. I like things that have all been made with
somebody’s brain, by man’s ingenuity, and it increases the stature of man to me – because after all’s said and done we’re only midgets here and we’ve only got a
very short tenure of life on earth, so I think that anything that anyone’s done to enhance life here is interesting and worthwhile. People keep saying that in spite of all these inventions
people are no happier, but how can they tell? They don’t know how happy people were that are dead and gone.

Anyway, while we were still wondering about what town to go to I had the marvellous idea of going abroad.

Of course Albert wasn’t keen because he doesn’t like changes. He likes things to go on in the same old way, and the very thought of going abroad, different food, different people and
you can’t speak a word of the language – and no country’s like England. I could see these thoughts going round in his mind. I mean there’s not another country in the world
that’s as good as ours.

It was the same when he joined the RAF during the war. He didn’t fancy travelling all over the world. As it turned out he didn’t have to. All the time he was in the Service he only
saw one aeroplane – and that was on a scrap heap. He was in the RAF for four years – never got off the ground, and never got any farther than Yorkshire.

He had a marvellous job there. He used to go out and pick up matchsticks and barely did a stroke in the whole of the four years. Four years’ rest it was. When they got tired of doing
nothing they used to shovel the coal from one heap and put it in another heap.

But he’d heard about abroad – that it was the land of vice and the food was terrible. That they ate snails and slugs. That it was uncivilized and that the people all wore little
grass skirts. He wasn’t at all happy about the idea.

Anyway I sent to several travel companies for their brochures – you know the sort of things. They’d pictures of glamorous people in the most beautiful clothes and others lying about
on the beaches with a lovely sun tan. It never rains in any of those brochures and there’s never a word about what you do if it does.

One or two of the holidays we thought were marvellous but then we found out that they wanted about five hundred pounds for those. There really wasn’t a lot of choice. We only had the fifty
pounds from the pools though we thought we might scrape up another ten pounds – that was as much as we could do in the time available to us. So after we’d got through the brochures
about three times we finally settled on a holiday that was twenty-four pounds each for ten days.

For that we would have five days in a place on the very tip of Holland so that we could make trips into Germany and Luxembourg and Belgium and we would have four days in Paris. This sounded a
good bargain so we paid the deposit and then we tried to save up as much as we could.

We didn’t go out anywhere. We became practically teetotallers. Believe me I wouldn’t want a holiday every year if you’d got to be a teetotaller to have it. A lot of people do
that. They save up their money so that they can have one big fling. I daresay we could have had a much better holiday that way, but just imagine being miserable for fifty weeks so that you can have
two weeks’ holiday. Then perhaps it rains all the time or the holiday doesn’t go, like jelly that never sets.

In any case I think that if you’ve had a miserable fifty weeks you’ve probably lost the capacity to enjoy yourself. But we didn’t mind too much because we’d got this lump
sum and we felt it wasn’t too long to wait and that we were going to do something entirely different.

We felt really adventurous. Talk about Captain Cook and his voyage round the world or Christopher Columbus discovering America – the thought of Mr and Mrs Powell going abroad knocked them
into a cocked hat. We were quite the big noises in our neighbourhood.

On the great day we had to be at Liverpool Street Station at eight o’clock in the morning. This meant we had to put up for the night in London and that was nearly disastrous. It cost three
pounds ten for the two of us. We thought it was ruinous – absolute robbery. We had to do it because we couldn’t get to Liverpool Street at eight o’clock otherwise.

We got there about quarter past seven – all eager and agog. We had a terrible job finding our party. We thought our party would be the only party. We didn’t realize that we were a
very small cog in a large wheel and that there were lots of other parties – much bigger parties – parties going on things with names like The Hook Continental. We didn’t do
anything like that. We had just an ordinary old train down to Harwich.

Finally we found our party and we got on the train. And then we met the courier. Oh, what a charming man that courier was! Of course we didn’t realize then that charm was his
stock-in-trade, that it was a facade and there was nothing behind it, just all charm.

He spoke to us individually and held my hand. He was a very handsome man – I felt quite thrilled. I felt more thrilled too because incidentally the others were rather elderly – I
think I was about the youngest, or looked the youngest anyway. And I was certainly the liveliest. And he sat down and held my hand. (It was a long time since any man had held my hand apart from my
husband and that was old hat.) He gazed into my eyes and I felt he really cared about me. I didn’t intend to throw my cap over the windmill or anything – not that the opportunity ever
arose. He told us various funny little anecdotes about other trips he’d been on and things like that. You know how charming people can talk. If you try to analyse it it’s all so light
that it just goes away in a puff of smoke but when they’re telling it to you it seems so interesting. And he was good-looking, too, which made all the difference because after all if
he’d had a face like the back of a bus charm wouldn’t have got him anywhere. But with charm and good looks and that lovely public-school accent . . .

Now there’s a swindle for you – that public-school accent that takes you in to start with. It gets you anywhere – if you haven’t got two pennies to rub together that
public-school accent sees you through.

As he moved from table to table on the train everybody was saying, ‘Oh, isn’t he a charming man!’ We were properly taken in by him.

Then he told us not to buy anything on the Continent without telling him.

‘You’re bound to want to bring back a piece of jewellery or some perfume,’ he said. ‘If you want anything just let me know and I’ll tell you the shops to go to and
mention my name and you’ll get it cheaper.’

We swallowed this because you think, what would he tell you it for if it wasn’t true? We found out later.

We eventually reached Harwich and got on the boat to go across to the Hook of Holland. The sea was rough and it was a terrible boat. There was nowhere to sit and you couldn’t even get a
place to hang over the side and be sick. At last I found somewhere and just lay there hoping to die.

Albert was fine – never turned a hair. And what particularly grieved me was him coming back from the bar saying, ‘Do you know how much whiskies cost in there? About a third of what
we pay at home and it’s a bigger measure.’

What a time to choose to say a thing like that when I was calling for the angel of death. I felt so ill and every time I went to the lavatory to be sick they’d just let me be sick and then
turfed me out again.

It was a horrible boat – not enough room, no chairs, no nothing. Mind you, even if it had been comfortable I couldn’t have enjoyed it.

The funny thing was when we eventually got to the Hook of Holland I felt as right as rain again. It amazed me that Albert wasn’t disturbed at all because he wasn’t any more used to
it than I was. He said it was because he’s got a placid disposition that it didn’t upset him, that because I’m always so eager and excited and never keep calm it happened to
me.

Anyway when we arrived at the port there was a coach waiting to take us across to this place on the very other side of Holland where we were staying – Walkenberg.

About halfway across we stopped at a place where our courier had an arrangement – where we could get coffee and cakes cheaper. So we all piled out of the coach like a flock of sheep with
him at the head of us. We must have looked a very motley collection buffeted by the storm at sea. And most of us were elderly, what I call good elderly people. You could tell that never in their
lives had they deviated from the straight and narrow. In we went and Albert and I had two cakes and a cup of coffee each – and we paid in francs.

I couldn’t work it out there and then but when we got back in that coach I did and I said to Albert, ‘Do you know what that cost us for two cups of coffee and four cakes? It cost us
twelve and six. Good God, if that’s the kind of place where he’s got an arrangement I shudder to think what it’s going to cost us anywhere where he hasn’t.’

We got to Walkenberg and the hotel where we were going to stay at eleven o’clock that night. And the brochure had said that when we reached there a warm welcome would await us. Not only
did no warm welcome await us – no kind of welcome at all awaited us. There was simply nobody there. Empty hotel.

We were stuck down one end of the dining-room and the courier plonked forms in front of us which we had to fill in and sign. We never saw the proprietors. And Albert and I weren’t even in
the hotel – we were in an annexe on the other side of the road. At the time we couldn’t have cared less. We were so excited about being abroad we didn’t mind where we slept.

But it just shows what kind of party we were with – they all went to bed. They come abroad and on the very first night there they go to bed at eleven o’clock – just because
they are used to doing it. Well, we didn’t.

We went and found our room and put our things in and went off down the sort of main street and found a place where people were sitting outside and we sat there drinking beer until two
o’clock in the morning. Although we were so tired we had to prop our eyes open, we were determined to be able to say that we were drinking beer there at two o’clock in the morning.
Fancy the others going to bed. Aren’t the English people terrible? They’ve got no daring in them.

All right the beer was horrible stuff like – well, it’s like water compared with English beer. I agree they’ve got wines that we haven’t got and it’s cheaper but
their beer’s no good at all. And Albert’s a beer drinker. During the course of our holiday he got so fed up with not having a decent beer that he asked for a Guinness. He only did it
once. They charged him eight and six for a glass of Guinness. They said they had to import it. No wonder nobody ever gets drunk over there because although the places are open all day you could
drink that beer till you floated in it and it wouldn’t do anything for you.

Still we made out we were living it up. We wrote back most glowing accounts of sitting outside this place drinking beer at two o’clock in the morning. We were frozen to death. It was cold
and the beer was weak but we didn’t write about that.

That was our first night there.

The idea of course of staying at this place at the very tip of Holland was to make coach trips into Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium. And that was another stupid thing in the brochure. You had
to write and say just where you’d like to sit in the coach. I chose two numbers in the middle. Well, when the coach arrived at the hotel it was already half filled with people from another
tour and they weren’t going to shift for us. We just had to sit where we could. And didn’t some of the others moan. Albert and I didn’t because we didn’t really care that
much. It was only a small thing.

This first day we went into Germany and the brochure said, ‘Germany with its lovely castles and a trip down the Rhine – a visit to the Drachenfels and Cologne with its wonderful
cathedral.’ And we had a packed lunch. Oh, those packed lunches! Salami sausage, strong salami-sausage sandwiches and an orange – and we got the same every day. I couldn’t eat the
salami and I couldn’t even eat the bread because it was so tainted with garlic.

So off we set on our coach ride and the first stop was what they called the Drachenfels. It’s seven hills in a row supposed to look like a dragon. Well honestly you’d have to be as
blind as a bat to ever think it looked anything like a dragon. It didn’t compare with our South Downs. Just seven little lumps. The top one was very high admittedly but I couldn’t see a
dragon anywhere. When we got there there was a little railway that ran up to the top of this highest lump and the courier said we were all going to go up in it.