I Like Cities
By ANGELA MILNE LL travel is exciting—think how you feel when the road sign shows you have crossed from Surrey to Kent—but the most exciting of all, to me, is not foreign scenery but foreign cities. Any concentration of streets and people has a travel-magic which I can recapture on a fine London morning by walking east from Holborn Underground. Perhaps this particular bit of shops, office windows and traffic made a special impression on me at eighteen, when I came to live and work in London; but the early morning sensation it gives me also takes me back to New York, which is the only foreign city 1 have done any actual living in and to which I dream, chronically and yearningly, of returning.
A really far-out tourist agency would offer living, as opposed to merely staying, in the city of the traveller's choice; would have on its books a range of small, cheap, scruffy, indigenous fur- nished flats where, instead of lording it with plush carpets and plated coffee-pots, the tourist could taste the reality known at home and Miraculously found, slightly and delightfully bent, in foreign parts. A mystery landlord with a name and guessed-at face to loom whenever You drop a plate; the grocer, your grocer, hand- mg over the crazily brand-named packets; the bangs in the flat overhead, the drill of milk and newspapers and how the front door opens —all these simple things, when they happen in the magic ambience of Abroad, have the interest and colour of a familiar picture hung on a new Wall. To appreciate a place properly one should, of course, always contrive to be in love while there, ere, but if this cannot be managed, then to live the sort of life where you can listen for- lornly to the radio while eating ,finned macaroni cheese on a wet Saturday gives you associations almost as intense.
No doubt you could capture a country's essence by living domestically in rural sur- roundings, too. I can imagine, for example, the extreme reality of renting a cottage up a moun- tain, but here the very grass and stones might sometimes make you feel the similarity to home scenery, while what I find so fascinating about a foreign city is that everything about it is different, even the likenesses increasing the difference just as uniform clothes accentuate the wearer's individuality. I think that perhaps in a modern city in the far east of Russia, a con- glomeration of concrete, steel-framed windows, rectangular shop-fronts, neon lighting and the rest of the standard trappings, the people using them would look more excitingly strange than had would out in the primitive dwellings they had been moved from. One obvious difference is language, but per- sonally I do not find this fascinating. It is fun to try to read a language you hardly know, to deduce the shop signs and the official instruc- tions and plough through the newspapers; it is .4,11 very good for you, and rewards you with that glorious moment when you get back and see In a flash, in that first bit of English print °A hoarding or notice-board, what an uncouth mixture our language is of harsh consonants and clumsily combined vowels. But there is no fun (ask any mother with a foreign help who won't play) in trying to speak to someone across the language barrier; it cuts out shades of mean- ing and throws you back to earliest childhood or to prehistory. Polyglots may think differently, but perhaps 1 speak for a lot of travellers who can get by in French and bless their Latin (which in extremities they sometimes yearn to break out with in speech) when I say that the day of a universal language cannot come too quickly for me. Apart from the larger issues— like the fact that it is more difficult to be enemies with a country speaking your own tongue, or the speculation on how General de Gaulle would feel about us if his country was not language- proofed against the full blast of transatlantic culture—there is the simple truth that it is jollier to be able to talk to people than to make contact by means of three fought-for mimed-out words.
Perhaps all this is why my chief unreached goal, apart from San Francisco and all the place- names I never took that' bus to in the States, is Australia, which is nearly as far away and English-speaking as you can get. I can't envisage anything more exciting than to walk beneath the Southern Cross down a neon-lit skyscrapered traffic-gulf, hardly different from London's new look yet full of people moulded by a climate and scenery totally the opposite of ours. This is how you come to know a country's inhabi- tants; by noticing how they have responded to the mass pressures of civilisation in the way they greet a stranger or treat women, in the puddings they like (what Covered Wagon history resides in the American dessert!) and the shoes they make and buy.
If I were a teenager I would be raring to plant myself in a city abroad for a year or two, work- ing in an office, going home to a bed-sitter, fitting in with the milling life, learning the language if necessary and with the speed of youth, feeling no. more lonely than many young people do in London. As I am not, and the chances that I will ever take my washing to a Rio de Janeiro launderette or scramble eggs in a wrong-sized saucepan in Hong Kong grow yearly thinner, I find comfort in the fact that any city other than your own is a foreign city; I kindle, motoring along an unknown English road, to the first straggle of villas heralding the tangle of urban goings-on; I revel in the restaurant meal, in buy- ing a pair of stockings or the local paper, in hearing the accent and reading the street-names and signposts. (`Local colour' is too weak a phrase to describe the thrill of recognising what Keats called the identity of a thing or place.) Manchester : now there's a place I haven't got to yet. Perhaps the South will move to the North and take me there, feeling as eagerly adven- turous as any young thing heading for a job abroad. Meanwhile, now I live in the country, I can always get a tourist's kick out of London, which offers a new skyscraper a week, and in its voices, newspapers, clothes: faces, street- names, shop-signs and scope for sociological brooding gives me as I saunter the pavements (no need really to bother with Holborn Underground now) almost the delightful feeling that I have saved the fare to Manhattan and wholly the sensation that I am indulging in my favourite kind of travel.
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