Europe in the Looking Glass (4 page)

WHEN WE LEFT ENGLAND
, the fashionable intelligentsia were all preparing their descent on Salzburg to attend the Mozart Festival, the production of which had been entrusted to M. Reinhardt. Either for the sake of their musical education, or simply for the purpose of meeting various friends, David and Simon had also decided to honour this feast in the musical calendar with their presence. In any case we left Nuremberg at half-past ten on Saturday morning for Austria.

David had arranged to lunch with a Hungarian baron, who, despite the fact that he himself possesses large estates in his own country and his wife in hers, which is Roumania, was spending the summer in Munich. Unfortunately we arrived an hour-and-a-half late, and he was gone. David telephoned his apologies to his mother. On the way we had had our first puncture, and had taken some time to change the wheel, as we were unable to find the jack. This had been strapped under the bonnet. Later, while travelling at sixty miles an hour down a very long stretch of straight road, a large white cock had stalked sedately out in front of us and emitted a sharp ping as we cut off his head with the front number-plate. At Ingolstadt we had crossed the Danube.

The main streets of Munich are magnificent. Their architecture is contemporary with that of the English Regency, the golden age of town planning. The architect who built them, under the auspices of King Ludwig, did not allow pediment and ornamental pillar to play so prominent a part in his design as in the English style, and favoured the purely Greek cornice ornamented with small upright acroteria in the shape of
oriental fans. It is to be hoped that the destinies of the city are not ruled by a County Council and an Office of Works that are intent on destroying any national monument that happens to rest upon a lease.

We lunched, half fainting, at the best hotel, and had a ham omelette and some Rhine wine.

We left at about three o’clock and began ascending the mountains, eventually coming down on Wasserburg, which resembles from above a miniature Venice, being situated on several islands in the middle of the Inn, which here broadens to the dimensions of a small lake. We had reached the very centre of the town, when another puncture occurred beneath the spreading trees of a little triangular green. The whole population poured out like an audience from a burning cinema, until we were encircled by a pushing, chattering crowd, which pressed so close that it was impossible to turn the jack or fix the wheel without jolting some inquisitively bent bare knee that might have seen anything from two to eighty summers.

From Wasserburg we ascended steadily, and the cottages and churches developed eaves and onion domelets in the
Austro-Swiss
manner. A mile from the frontier the petrol gave out. Recourse was had to the spare tank; and the suitcases, books, and hats were strewn all over the neighbouring fields in our enraged efforts to unearth it. At this moment another car appeared. Alarmed at the scene of wreckage, it stopped to enquire and stayed to chat. The driver, enveloped like the rest of his party in a white dust sheet, said that his name was Tomaselli. He commended us by note to the proprietor of the Hotel de l’Europe, where, we told him, we had engaged rooms. David believed him to be a famous Italian singer; while I had an idea that he was a well-known racing motorist. It turned out that he kept a café in Salzburg. The proprietor was rather sniffy.

At the frontiers, which were divided by a wooden bridge that spanned a rushing river, we were obliged to wait an hour, while David attempted to argue back the exorbitant deposit that he had paid on the two spare outer covers at Hamburg. The head
official then discovered that there was not enough money in the office to meet the demand. He promised to have it ready on Monday. Meanwhile Simon and I walked backwards and forwards over the heavy wooden planks of the bridge. There is something absurd about a land frontier. The guards seemed to know all the local residents as they walked across the bridge driving animals, or on their way to visit friends. The Austrian
douanier
was at a village dance and had to be fetched. He was so anxious to return that he did not examine our trunks, though astonished at their quantity. We assured him that they contained nothing but clothes.

The first thing that we were told on at last reaching Salzburg was that the Festival did not begin until Wednesday. David was furious, Simon indifferent. Personally, after driving six hundred and fifty miles in the last three days I looked forward to a quiet weekend.

That evening after dinner, we went out into the garden and watched some dancing on a tiled floor laid down beneath the trees, from which depended large and unbecoming electric light bulbs. The band was not expert, and the atmosphere not unlike that of a provincial palais-de-danse on a Monday afternoon.

The next morning we were awakened by the incessant shunting of trams at the station over the road, varied by the strains of a numerous brass band, which paraded the streets with sabbatarian exuberance from 9 till 12. David turned over and went to sleep. Seizing sketch book and pencil, I rose out of bed, and seating myself on the balcony, revenged myself on Salzburg with an uncomplimentary drawing of the station and one factory chimney.

The remainder of our Sunday we spent in the conventional manner. During the afternoon Simon and I wrote letters to our mothers; and later, when the heat had abated, we set out for our Sabbath walk. We had intended scaling one of the mountains with which the town is oppressively overhung. The hotel advised us to take a tram to Plazl for this purpose. We did so, and it set us down in the middle of the town, by
the river. Passing through an archway we began the ascent of a steep and rocky footpath, on the right-hand side of which, set back in wire-faced grottos cut out of the cliff, were twelve life-size ‘Stations of the Cross’ in hideously realistic painted plaster. The path continued, until we were suddenly confronted by a wooden door labelled in Gothic ‘Mozart’s House’. Turning back precipitately, we wandered disconsolately about the suburbs in company with many others – courting couples, happy families, and grand-dads and -dams. It was still extraordinarily hot. Persevering, we reached the country, and giving up the idea of mountains, sank into a primitive beer-garden. The inn-keeper, in shorts and a Tyrolese hat, was talking to a friend, in the same costume, smoking a long and curly German pipe. Two or three Alsatians loafed about, free from their daily labour of drawing little hand-carts. A buxom gal brought us beer and was forced to accept our German money in payment. We sat beneath a chestnut tree and felt very happy. Then we walked home. Simon, in neat plus fours and loud
chocolate-and
-white stockings, was an object of admiration. The plus four has ‘caught on’ in Germany and Austria, and bank clerks wear it.

That evening we again watched the dancing in the garden. It was enlivened by a Viennese waltz, to which everyone danced the old six step with a little hop in the middle – all except one exclusive party who sat ostentatiously aloof until the next
foxtrot
. This party contained amongst others a handsome old man in a white moustache, who was referred to as the Baron, and an extremely good-looking woman, with copper, shingled hair, and a tight-fitting dress of red and gold. In my eyes, however, their pre-eminence in the world of fashion was dissolved when next day I found the woman’s portrait peering slyly from the window of the local photographer.

On Monday morning I visited the cathedral and also an unusual Gothic church supported by high, thin, round pillars like factory chimneys; then breakfasted in the Residenzplatz.
This is a large open space with an elaborate fountain in the middle; to one side is the Residenz, a long, creamy and very simple baroque building with an archway in the middle; on another the cathedral; and flanking it, a tall tower and a shady row of chestnut trees. From the former there suddenly issued a melancholy, quavering old tune, wafted on the hot, still air by an ancient peal of bells. Everyone showed great interest and looked up, though there was nothing to see. This was followed by an organ recital in the cathedral, where I was able to get cool, until two enormous women, smelling of dentifrice, came and sat down on top of me. On the way back David picked me up in the car.

After lunch we left for Innsbruck. Though both Innsbruck and. Salzburg are in Austria, the geographical vagaries of the district make it necessary to pass over a tongue of Germany if a hundred-mile detour is to be avoided. This meant, therefore, returning along the road by which we had come and crossing four separate frontier barriers. Naturally the money equivalent to the Hamburg deposit, promised on Saturday night, was not ready, and there was a delay while it was fetched. During this we talked to one of the German guards. He said that he had been in prison for three-and-a-half years at Dorchester. It was a source of tremendous pleasure to him to talk about it. He had had to work; the English were good fighters in the trenches; it was all over now, and must never happen again. He spoke not a word of English. The Austrian sentries wear khaki, the Germans bottle-green.

We passed at first through gigantic mountains. The road wound up their pine-covered declivities, until it was impossible to look over the side of the car without feeling dizzy. The colours were attractive, though not beautiful; very rich green grass fields, usually perpendicular, on which could be seen men hanging by one hand and reaping with the other; then the
pinewoods
, a deeper, blacker green; and at the top, great white faces of rock stretching up into the blue sky, very little of which was visible. Some of the summits were snow-covered.

The fact that this was the Tyrol was emphasised by a special local customs barrier, which charged a pound to let Diana enter the province. The delay enabled us to have a drink of soda water.

We reached Innsbruck as it was growing misty. The town lies at the foot of enormous mountains. It is uninteresting and almost squalid, catering for native as much as foreign tourists. It has the same atmosphere of bustling trippers as Keswick, the centre of the English mountain district.

The hotel, the Tyrolerhof, smelt strongly of rice pudding, and was adorned with clocks under glass shades. After a long, late dinner, we were sitting half asleep in the reading-room, when it was invaded by some forty American women, each one with a voice like a surgical knife, accompanied by two men and a boy. While I was reaching for my spectacles which were on the table, a member of the party neatly slipped herself in between my upraised knees and the seat of my armchair. She was middle-aged with a strong, efficient face, and had had, I hope, an unhappy married life. She wore a toque adorned with flattened pansies. The men proceeded to make speeches, setting forth the course of action for the morrow, like Roman generals ‘exhorting’ their troops. As the ceremony continued, we laughed so much that we had to retire. A woman had sat next to us at dinner in a dress of cheap, brown tussore, printed with green and yellow boxes in perspective, so that she might have been covered with angular warts. These danced before my eyes long into the night.

THE DAY OF OUR DEPARTURE
from Innsbruck was to prove the most harassing twelve hours of the whole tour. It was only the persistence of David, who argued without ceasing in French and German from twelve o’clock midday until eight at night, that prevented the complete collapse of all our plans.

An hour’s driving brought us to the Italian frontier. The road ascended the mountains in a series of alarming bends, each of which disclosed a drop of five hundred to a thousand feet as we skidded round the outside edge. However, we reached the Brenner Pass, four thousand feet up, without changing gear. Here it was as pleasantly cool as Innsbruck had been hot and dusty. Earlier in the morning I had visited the cathedral and purchased a belt. Unfortunately this was incapable of refined adjustment, and it threatened either to cut me in half or let my trousers drop to the knee.

The Austrian barrier was passed with little difficulty. We drove brightly across the 100 yards of no-man’s land and stopped before the Italian. Here was a great to-do. A very new marble monument, about the size of a pillar-box, enclosed in a quadrangle of railings, proclaimed that this was now Italy. Upon its face was the following inscription:

Further on stood an enlarged
chalet
, festooned with green, white and red flags. The pole across the road was painted in similar colours. And two upstanding flagstaffs wafted their triumphant nationalism from mounds on either side of it.

The customs men in their grey-green uniforms and Robin Hood hats, small, surly and very dirty, contrasted strongly with the benign Austrians, who still stood looking after us from the threshold of their office door. Our passports having been examined, one of the officials stepped on board and we drove through the barrier and down to the customs house, which was at the railway station on the left of the road. There was a train in at the time and we had to wait our turn. I changed my kronen into lire and Simon and I drank two pennyworth of red wine in the third-class waiting-room. Everyone to whom we spoke a syllable of Italian answered in German, and vice versa.

Suddenly we saw David hurrying towards us. They were refusing to let us pass without paying the full deposit on the car – in the neighbourhood of four hundred pounds. The reason was that the preliminary declaration by the customs of the country of origin had not been filled in. This was the fault of the leaden-headed official who had arrived two hours late at Grimsby. We all three returned to the breach; but it was useless. The man waved his printed instructions in our faces. We left the office, and jumping into Diana, raced back to the barrier on bottom gear, making a great deal of noise to show our annoyance. The sentries seemed to resent such peculiar behaviour, as if our return were due simply to English eccentricity. They re-stamped our passports, and we passed on to the Austrian barrier, still on bottom gear, although the road sloped downhill. We were in despair. All our letters and the Greek
laissez-passer
were waiting in Rome; and here we were apparently condemned either to return to England or remain north of the Alps for ever.

The Austrians, however, took a different view. Declining to reduce their books and our passports to confusion, they ridiculed the Italians and their tawdry frontier decorations flapping in the wind a hundred yards up the valley.

‘Since they’ve come this side of the mountains they’ve been above themselves,’ they said – Austrian interests having suffered considerably in the Brenner district when the northern frontiers were revised. And so, in revenge for the Great War, the Austrians, with complete irrelevance, plastered their stamps and signatures on the
Carnet
in the place of the missing Grimsby declaration.

Much amused we crossed the strip of neutral territory once more. This time the Italians made no attempt to conceal their disgust at our reappearance. For the third time they befouled our passports and their own registers, and with the same official on board we drove down to the customs once again. The officer was not deceived; nor was he amused. He insisted that we must have the English voucher.

Could we telephone to the embassy at Rome, we asked?

Certainly; if he received orders from his finance minister to let us through, he would do so. The Embassy could no doubt make the necessary arrangements. Meanwhile, we must move the car back again behind the barrier.

To this last request David would not accede; and taking Simon, who hates scenes, by the arm, he walked up the road to the
chalet
, which combined the functions of public house, post-office and barracks, to telephone. I remained in the car.

A crowd of gesticulating little men gathered round, beseeching, commanding, cursing, whining and growling: the car must be taken back. I explained that I could not drive it. That made no difference. They produced a porter with a dropped lower lip who spoke almost less English than I Italian. The babel continued, until at length, bored, and unable to cope with their torrents of prayer and abuse, I produced my sketch-book, sharpened my pencil with an
expensive-looking
knife, the property of Simon, and with exasperating
deliberation proceeded to depict with meticulous care a group of pine trees that sprang from a hillock near the station. This infuriated them and they tried to snatch the book away, with the result that my pencil shot across the sky in a jagged curve that could not even have passed muster as a telegraph wire. My blood boiled in its turn. The porter being the ostensible excuse for using English, I rose to my feet and shouted so that crowds more came running out of the station. I roared that I could not drive the car, and that if I could, I should refuse; that I was not going to fetch my friends; and that I had not come half across Europe in three days to be ordered about by them.

Without understanding a word they fell back, and David and Simon returned to find me in peaceful possession. The post-mistress was at lunch.

Our midday meal we had brought with us in a bag. This we now ate in the post-office. Since the drive to Nuremberg, Simon had become wary and had insisted on the hotels supplying us with ham rolls. In spite of them he was miserable, cowed by the officialdom that David and I delighted to defy: he threatened to take the next train that passed through the station, wherever it went. We suggested that he should go to Rome for help. He said that he did not wish to arrive there in flannel trousers. Eventually, despite the assurances of the post-mistress that it was impossible, we got through on the telephone to the capital, but found that the Embassy was shut; it would not be open until five. Our difficulties were considerable, as I knew only a very little Italian, the others none, and the post-mistress equally little German.

At five we telephoned again, but this time were unable to get through. So, in desperation, we drafted a tear-stained telegraphic appeal to the ambassador, invoking any
wife’
s-sister’s
-mother-in-law’s-cat connections of the foreign office with whom we could claim the smallest acquaintance, begging him to insist on the finance minister’s despatching immediate instructions to the Brenner authorities to let us pass. We settled down to await events.

The inn displayed further evidences of the Italian pride of conquest. The word
Gasthof
, with which it was originally labelled, had been crossed out and
Albergo
painted by its side. Similarly,
Sala di Pranza
had been substituted for
Essenzimmer
. The soldiers were singing opera in hideous tones from the upper windows, from which their clothes were hanging out to dry. We began to hate the Italians. Everything seemed to irritate. A tablet on the outside wall recording the fact that Goethe had once laid his head upon a pillow in this very building increased our detestation of philosophy.

While we were thus pawing the ground, exacerbated almost beyond endurance, there arrived in this remote corner of Europe a certain officer of the Life Guards who once incensed the cheaper press by striking a policeman with the flat of his sword for not saluting the colours. The Life Guards are, it is said, more amusing than other regiments. The policeman at the time was holding up the traffic with one hand and directing it with the other.

At length David, goaded by the disappearing back view of the interloper, determined to make one more attempt to argue us through. The altercation lasted three hours in as many languages. We became so persistent that we were eventually ushered before the Chief. He pointed to the instructions on the
Carnet
, printed in every known language; he was helpless. Then David, who does not understand a word of Italian, drew a bow at a venture; he pretended to find a loophole in the Italian version, in the absence of a certain defining phrase that qualified the French and German. This idea seemed to have its effect upon the official. We pressed the point for half an hour; and at last, weary of our pertinacity, which threatened to keep him at his desk all night, he consented to risk his job, his life, his all, and let us pass. After another hour’s wait for a train, during which we drank our rejoicings in thick smoky
chianti
in the waiting-room, he signed the paper; we filed into the car; and amid torrents of rain, with the clouds obscuring the whole valley, we sped jubilantly down the road into Italy.
Darkness fell just in time to prevent our catching a glimpse of the Dolomites.

The tension and worry of the day had left us exhausted. We passed through many villages, in which the headlights flashed on German names above the shop windows, relieved occasionally by the Royal Italian Arms displayed over a
post-office
or on a flag.

We reached Bolzano at nine o’clock for dinner. The hotels did not look attractive and David drove straight through to Trento, another hour’s run, during which Simon and I slept. There we ate
hors d’oeuvres
and a ham omelette. David, who, in Germany, had never ceased telling us how he could not touch Italian food, busily licked every platter dry. At eleven o’clock we set out for Verona. At twelve we had a puncture in the narrow and now silent streets of Rovereto, to the astonishment of two old women who were sitting quietly talking at their front doors, when an enormous car drew up, blocking the whole of the street, and began to take itself to pieces at their feet. We reached Verona about half-past one, and had great difficulty in finding the hotel and awakening it.

The heat was intense and the rooms small and stuffy. Each grasping a bottle of mineral water, we fell into bed, scarcely able to undress. The mattresses were made of stone; the beds of tin, on which were painted sprays of roses and landscapes. But we slept the sleep of utter fatigue, and did not wake up until the sun began to pierce the green shutters of our windows late next morning.