Current Literature
IN The Wind in the Bus-Tops (Methuen, '7s. 6d.), Mr. C. P. Hawkes gives us forty " variations on London airs from East to West." He not only knows London intimately, but, with imaginative sympathy and exquisitely dry humour, probes to those inner realities of which bricks-and-mortar -and human bodies are but the visible shells. He suggests, for example, the emotions of a pink-faced constable from the country during his first hour on Metropolitan point-duty, or invests with significance the gesticulations of six very different types of people using six adjoining telephone call boxes at a Tube station. Though himself but in his early forties, he finds the parties of our Bright Young People very dull, and is never happier than when, say, the sight of a saddle- shop in Long Acre reminds him of the more leisurely and intimate days when petrol was not ; when Swan sang his homely duet with Edgar, and " Limited " did not glare in
brazen letters on the vast emporiums of the Combines. Whatever his theme, Mr. Hawkes brings to it the same sensitive powers of interpretive insight or reminiscence, and his book should hold its distinctively whimsical niche in the vast library of London literature.
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