Some other time, let us discuss maps and their enchantments, the roads long blocked, the railways which once wound merrily down the valley and are gone, the knack of reading contour lines, the beautiful way the Swiss show mountains, the curious Soviet maps of enemy countries, sometimes more accurate than our own, the beautiful old Ordnance Survey of Britain, with its cover showing a hiker looking down from a hill upon a wooded valley—and its Irish equivalent in which the Protestant and Catholic maps of the border regions differ subtly from each other.
But today we have guidebooks and timetables, those unrivaled truthful gateways to other days and other worlds. Here, with its cover of faded red and lettering which was once gold, I will begin with the 1893 Handbook For Travellers to Russia, Poland and Finland, including the Crimea, Caucasus, Siberia and Central Asia published by Mssrs. Murray. This is the Russian Empire as it once was, despotic, Orthodox, anti-Semitic and bureaucratic. Its advice to Jews or Roman Catholic priests intending to visit the Tsar’s territory would once have been useful, if dispiriting. In both cases, special permission is required. “Alien Jews may only visit Russia with the sanction of the Minister of the Interior, which must be sought by petition, Exception to this rule is, however, made in favour of foreign Jews distinguished by their position in society, or by their extensive business transactions.” Its original owner, perhaps a survivor of the Crimean war forty years earlier, has penciled notes of how many rubles and kopecks he spent on train fares as he made his uncomfortable way to Sevastopol and Balaclava. One feels for him, especially after reading this warning; “Without wishing to detract from the merits of the best hotels mentioned in this Handbook, it is right to advise the traveller to be provided, when travelling in Russia, with remedies against insects of a vexatory disposition.” Perhaps this is why it makes no mention of the Hotel Bug, named after the principal river, now one of the main hostelries in the fine and history-crammed frontier city of Brest-Litovsk.
Or what about Baedeker’s 1936 guide to Germany, a special edition published for the famous Nazi Olympic Games (by Charles Scribner’s sons in New York, and by George Allen and Unwin in London), with its excellent maps of Danzig and Koenigsberg, cities which you will no longer find in any atlas. If you wish to know where the Adolf Hitler Strasse or Platz once was in any major German city, I can tell you. But in the Nuremberg of 1936, you needed to take the Number 9 tram to the “huge area now being laid out for the mass demonstrations and march-pasts of the National Socialist Party,” adorned with bronze eagles twenty-three feet high. In Munich it is noted that “passers-by salute” as they make their way between two “temples of honour” containing the remains of what it calls the “martyrs’ of Hitler’s failed putsch of 1923.” And salute they mostly did, if they knew what was good for them. Or else they went round by another route. The father of a friend of mine, passing this way around 1937, either had not read the guidebooks or fancied an adventure, for he did not salute, and was duly beaten up and flung into a cell for the night, despite being English.
On the outskirts, in Dachau, the Hotel Zieglerbrau and its rival, the Hotel Hoerhammerbrau, are recommended to visitors to this “old market town” on the edge of a marshy district “now mostly drained.” But that is all. At Weimar, the lovely old Elephant Hotel, on the market-place, is recommended—but no mention is made of rougher accommodation at Buchenwald a few miles outside the town, among the oak and beech woods where Goethe once walked and mused. Uniquely in any such book, a guide is offered to converting Fahrenheit temperatures into the Réaumur scale. Someone must still have been using it. In a “historical note,” it is pointed out (without details) that “new laws dealing with German citizenship” were passed on September 15, 1935. On the same day, the swastika flag was officially adopted. In a matter-of-fact passage, the book explains that “The German Reich, previously a democratic Republic in accordance with the Weimar Constitution of August 11, 1919, is now, since the Constitution was altered by the laws of 1933 and 1934, a totalitarian state.” It is oddly shocking to see a word now always used in criticism employed as if it is a neutral and dispassionate technical description. Travelers are also advised that the “German salute” or “Hitler-Gruss,” defined precisely as “the raising of the right arm, accompanied by the words ‘Heil Hitler’” has “since 1933 largely superseded the practice of hat-raising.” It is “compulsory for officials” and “compulsory for everybody when the national anthems are played.” Helpful information is provided on how to find the grave of the Nazi hero Horst Wessel.
But in many rambles through the book, I have yet to find any occurrence of the word “Jew.” And while the reference for Weimar is thick with mentions of places where Goethe and Schiller lived and wrote, that for Dusseldorf makes no mention of the great poet Heinrich Heine, who once lived in that city. Behind the cheery tunes of tourism you can detect much grimmer music, and a deadly silence beyond that.
These are strange countries, though in some ways not as strange as the unbombed, largely car-free land described in my 1920 Blue Guide to England. It is my country as it has ceased to be. Peace and repose lurk within its pages. If the reader is not careful, he can disappear into them for hours. Currency notes, this volume assures the reader, may be exchanged for gold at the Bank of England, and there are still twelve pennies in the shilling. “Strangers accustomed to warmer houses than those of England must be on their guard against chills and colds . . . the alleged reserve of Englishmen is not necessarily crustiness, but often arises from a half-shy impulse to understate rather than overstate goodwill.” Visitors from the U.S.A. are warned in a glossary that the word “bug” in England means only a bed-bug (a phrase it coyly says is “not for ears polite”). It also warns that “mad” means “insane” and not “angry” and that “homely” does not mean “plain looking.”
But let us now turn to my 1939 guide to the Isle of Wight, that miniature paradise of rural England, reachable only by a brief but inconvenient sea-crossing, where as a small boy I spent several summers in a world which now seems to me like a child’s adventure story. I have earlier guides to the same island, in the days when Queen Victoria had a holiday home there, and everyone had still heard of Tennyson, who once had a house there high above the sea. It has photographs of views which are described as “pretty peeps,” featuring ladies with large hats and parasols. But this edition, published a year before the Fall of France, contains a fascinating picture of the beach at a place called Bembridge, near where we used to stay. It is captivating for me because, although it was taken in the days of empire and steam, the children in it, their clothes and hair and general appearance, look like my own generation, and their parents look like my parents. Yet it predates my life by twenty-five years. There is a yacht race, and a cooling breeze obviously blowing, reminding me of how chilly even our summers could be, and of how we didn’t mind. It confirms my impression that those of us brought up in the naval and military classes of seventy years ago were in fact raised, in most respects, as if it were still 1935. There is, as far as I know, no research which supports this, but it is true. I come from further down and further back than my birth certificate says I do. And the guidebook, truthful because it is not trying to deceive anyone in the future, confirms this.
In these volumes I can find all manner of wonderful indicators that they illustrate a lost world, especially the plentiful literary and historical references, which assume a knowledge of the English past and culture which nobody now living possesses. The description of every town provides not only the names and locations of churches, but the times of their services. The reader is warned of the forgotten practice of “early closing day,” generally a Wednesday or Thursday, under which the shops closed for the afternoon so that their staff could take time off to make up for working on Saturday afternoons. This was part of an era, which I still just remember, when many still went either to work or school on Saturday mornings as a matter of course.
If I ever tire of such things, there are the timetables, especially a tattered Thomas Cook’s Continental Railway Timetable of long ago, in which my wife and I plotted countless journeys mainly south and east across the mighty continent now prosaically called “Europe.” Ah, here is the Rome Express, by 1974 just a trio of matte grey Italian State Railways coaches, hitched to the Paris train at Calais, but in which—provided we did not get left behind while trying to buy newspapers or wine—we would go all the way from our northern mists to the Eternal City. To many of you, these would be just pages of figures and squiggles. To me they are the key to a memory of the world before blandness and uniform design made everything moderately comfortable and odor-free, and you could no longer open the windows.
Among the first Italian phrases I learned was “È Pericoloso Sporgersi,” the Italian for “It is Dangerous to Lean Out of the Window,” which of course it was, but we all still did it, especially on days of blasting heat when the train was running slowly above a stream among wooded hills. Where were we? I had no idea. In fact I remember peering at the signs of a station through which we rattled as we curved along the Ligurian coast and crying out, “We seem to be somewhere called Uscita!” I only later deduced (for every station had the same signs) that this was the Italian for “exit.”
These voyages would begin by crossing the channel, and then the mixture of apprehension and excitement as the filthy-tempered French porters in their berets and horizon-blue overalls appeared from somewhere on the ship, having mysteriously boarded the second we docked—and we were out of the miniature toy trains and narrow fields of England, and among the great clangorous carriages and locomotives of France, Germany, and Italy. Here and there among these complex tables of vast journeys are the enticing knife-and-fork symbols which one meant “restaurant car.” In the train that ran across East Germany to West Berlin you got a Communist Speisewagen, run by the old Mitropa concern, lovely greasy plates of schnitzel and potatoes, and cloudy glasses of left-wing beer, as the dusk settled over Saxony Anhalt and the cobbled empty roads led to grey-painted half-lit villages in a landscape that looked even colder than it was, until total darkness fell somewhere near Griebnitzsee before we burst into the showy, faintly desperate brilliance of West Berlin. Or the train from Budapest coming up through Dresden on its way to Berlin, where you could get goulash and plum brandy, amid fake veneer bulkheads and red carpets. Or the stew and dumplings , and great quantities of pilsener, served by slow, fat Czechs. Or the stately French restaurant cars, smelling of hot olive oil, in which we so often spent the very last of our francs, careful not to miscalculate. Or were the picnics better, the quiche Lorraine and the big bottle of rough red wine bought in a panic at the buffet at Metz as the whistles blew and the doors began to hiss shut? But I clambered aboard in time, breathless but triumphant, and in a way, that snatched supper, eaten as we rolled, not very fast, towards Paris along the moonlit Marne, was the best of all. You can’t do any of it now. But I can, just by opening a faded old red book.
