I (Frank Fenner) recently watched a television documentary on the Australian SBS of the fish markets in Bombay, which showed the fantastic crowds of men and women, many carrying baskets of fish on their heads. This reminded me that Father and Mother made their overseas trips long before television showed us how people in different parts of the world lived. Even the glimpses of London that Australians received were in magazines such as The Illustrated London News. This needs to be borne in mind when reading their initial reactions to Colombo and London, set out below; there were similar reactions to Aden in the 1931 diaries.
I am a bad hand at recalling dates, but I shall never forget 5/8/31. It seems to me that for years I have been preparing and arranging for August 5 as for the end of everything; the end of the world. And I can still remember how I, how both Peggy and me, just hung out to that date, so run down and so dead tired that we thought we should never get untired anymore.
And now August 5 has come and has gone, ‘tis ever so far away in time, just as our dear home and family and friends are distant in space. I am scribbling this on the afternoon of August 6 lying on my back in the cabin and we are out upon the Great Australian Bight somewhere in the Roaring Forties and the little bit of sea I can see through the porthole is most unquiet and the decks are deserted. The sea and a high proportion of the passengers are heaving away most industriously. Poor old Peggy is very ill, and hasn’t eaten or drunken anything all day. She is still in bed and is patiently waiting for whatever may be the end. Our greatest anxiety, the five dear kids and home, will I am sure be in safe keeping with Miss Hawson and Stella and with all the friends who have volunteered to keep an eye here and there.
Peggy’s birthday. Many happy returns of the day. Today has been like no other day of the 17,520 days which I have lived. My mind reels before the idea of putting anything on paper about it that could be at all adequate. It would really be much wiser to make no entry at all. But Hartung says ‘Go on. Write it up.’ So I shall put down the inadequate words, and leave most that really matters unsaid.
Kerr Grant thinks that to an Australian, or to anyone from the colder less peopled lands, the first day at Colombo gives something that can never be repeated. I quite believe it, though the whole world lies ahead, and only Colombo is behind, and so little behind at that, that the smell of Colombo is still with me. That smell! The most powerful and all-pervading thing in all Colombo. It may be incense, or it may be the frangipani flowers and the innumerable other incredibly brilliant flowers, or it may be from trees, or damp earth and mould, or it may be a human emanation from these teeming myriads of people, a few of whom and a glimpse of whose life we have seen today.
It is perhaps the most close-packed series of experiences that I shall ever enjoy as new things in any one day. For Peg it has been the most outstanding of birthdays. It has overcome her. She dropped on the bunk in her clothes after dinner and there she is now, fast asleep. This seething, selling, begging, smiling, pleasant people, this mass of humanity spawned by a fertile soil, a hot sun and abundant rains, this race of courteous thieves and robbers, takers and getters. These altogether charming people, raucous robbers and all, in all their indescribable variety of form and colour, of clothes and caste, and race and religion. Men, hundreds of them, like beautiful bronze Gods; most shapely and beautifully coloured muscular bodies. The sweetest little girls, and the loveliest brown-eyed babies. Hartung and I were two whites in a crowd of jabbering slim-bodied brown men. They didn’t gather round us, but we had to steadily ignore them or we should have been surrounded out of pure curiosity. Little kiddies crowded round us with hands held out for a penny—‘Master’, ‘Sahib’ and so on, to attract you. I think the outstanding human thing that remains in my mind is a myriad of outstretched pink palms, upturned for whatever ’Master‘ might be pleased to give. Hundreds of people have written all this down in their diaries and in published books before, with far more knowledge and art and insight than I have. Nothing I can write will really state the case in reality for those for whom this diary is being written. So I give it up.
From the point of view of economic and human geography, the experience of today has become a part of me and will never cease to colour and to affect what I say and do regarding man and his reaction to his environment.
It is seven o’clock Sunday evening in this great city and I sit down before our gas fire in our comfortable and cheap room at Endsleigh Street, WC1 and prepare to make a few inadequate entries in this diary. However, I must try to keep up daily entries, for the sake of preserving memories of this trip and for those for whom this is written, and to make up for the long letters we are not writing, and are not going to write.
Having been only thrilled by Colombo, and Suez, and Aden and Cairo, and Port Said and Malta and Granada and Gibraltar, I casually remarked to Peggy ’I expect a thrill also awaits us in London.‘ But I really did not think that cold, foggy, stodgy London could have much that was thrilling. For did we not already know Melbourne and Sydney! Ye Gods! Well, as I have said, it is useless to attempt description. It can’t be done. Traffic! Strewth. It’s marvellous. We ride everywhere we can on the motor buses, on the tops of the buses. And you whiz along at 30 mph and you get where you’re going very cheaply, and see the street at the same time. Traffic jams are quite common. But they clear up in no time once the way is open. The drivers are miracles.
The London policemen and the London bus conductors are as wise and as pleasant and obliging as everyone has said they were. We ask scores of questions every day and scores of others we don’t ask, and try to find our way about in this stupendous maze and whirl of life by means of things learnt from the guide books—often with disastrous results in long walks.
Home. We slept till eight. Up and about. Off to church at St Clement Danes. This was a rich and wonderful experience. Old Samuel Johnson always attended there. He was a bigoted, dogmatic old Londoner. I am more sympathetic with his opinion than I was. It must be a great thing for Londoners to have this great city as their own. It is a most stimulating place—stimulating thought and memory, and the climate is bracing and stimulating too. I have walked miles and miles today, and seen hosts of things, but am not tired. The evening meal, which is here called ’supper‘ on Sundays, is at eight o’clock.
I sit here in the Imperial Hotel, at six o’clock, bright sunlight, wishing it was dinner time as I am very hungry, not having had anything since breakfast. But I see that dinner is not till 6.30 while lunch ceases at 2.30. In America, how different. Not only, from San Francisco to New York, is the food much more abundant, more varied, and more perfectly cooked and served, but the eating houses are always open and the eater is always welcomed and well treated. In this hotel management business, including lighting, plumbing, food, and service, the States (and Canada too) just leave this country standing. Compared with what we generally saw and enjoyed in the States, from California to Washington, the general conditions of London hotels is not far beyond the Noah’s Ark stage.
We have wandered on the continent for seven weeks, from capital to capital, from school to school, museum to museum, crossing frontiers and passing terrifying customs, packing, unpacking, and repacking, changing our currency and customs. And we had never really had a REST. We left London seven weeks ago! Dieppe, Paris, Basle, Zurich, Ragatz, Leichtenstein, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Linz, Vienna, Budapest, Balaton, Graz, Villach, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Venice, Lake Garda, Verona, Padua, Milan, Chartreuse, Genoa, Nice, Monte Carlo, Grenoble, Geneva, Dijon, Paris, Liège, Aachen, Hannover, Hildesheim, Braunschweig, Hameln, Berlin, Prague, Nuremberg, Rotenburg, Spangenberg, Hersfeld, Ziegenhain, Frankfurt, Geneva, Montreaux, Interlaken, Rhone Glacier, Lucerne, Basle, Calais, London.