ANOTHER VOICE
The hideous dangers awaiting those who stir abroad
AUBERON WAUGH
I first went to Corfu 26 year ago, when it was most easily approached by the ferry from Dubrovnik in Croatia or from Bari, in southern Italy. Even then its calm and beauty were beginning to be disturbed by swarms of young English people, like myself, mostly from the universities, who disrupted the peasant economy and swam in their underwear. When I revisited it a few years ago on a Swan Hellenic cruise out of Venice headed for the eastern Mediterranean, it had gone the way of so many Greek islands, whose charm is no longer discernible under the seething mass of British and German workers taking their well-deserved holidays or spending their cruelly insufficient dole money in the sun.
Perhaps it is right that improved safety measures will be a monument to these unfortunate holidaymakers from Manches- ter. But God is not mocked, and I would be ready to wager that within 18 months there will be another such tragedy, whether it involves passengers being burned to death on take-off, as here, or dropping like so many Icaruses from the sky as the result of some malfunction in the air, or crashing hideously at their aero- planes prepare to land. By then, perhaps, the only monument left to these Manches- ter victims will be in the airline's assertion that the new accident was the result of a two million to one chance, or five million to one.
My point is that however many noughts one chooses to add to the figure, it spits in the face of commonsense to suppose that these vast engines, packed with British holidaymakers, can hurtle around the world at 30,000 feet without something occasionally going wrong. No doubt a higher proportion of travellers was drowned at sea in earlier centuries, or captured by pirates, murdered by bandits, fell victim to the plague, was eaten by dragons or turned into stone by malevolent old women, but the simple truth is that travel has never been without its attendant dangers, and never will be. In the age of mass travel and mass communications, accidents are liable to be peculiarly horri- ble and peculiarly vivid.
It is this simple truth which is in danger of being lost in the euphoria of a British working class which for the first time in its history can now afford to spread itself, its tastes and appetites, over a large part of the world's surface. A better monument to these unfortunate victims, to the heroism of Miss Joanna Toff, lovely 27-year-old air hostess and the initiative of the purser in saving so many lives, is to be found in the reminder that travel is dangerous.
Let us look at some of the dangers which these new travellers so blithely ignore. If they had reached Corcyra and crashed there, the survivors would have faced the horrors of a foreign hospital. If the plane had landed safely, without being hijacked by some political zealot from the Middle East, or blown up by some animal activist protesting about the trade in Canadian seal skins, they would still have faced the dangers of gyppy tummy, from the un- familiar food, of sunburn and heatstroke — even possibly of bandits, if they had been so unwise as to venture into the interior of the island.
The whole of abroad is strewn with dragon's teeth. In Spain, holiday-makers are mugged and given poisonous cooking oil to eat. In the south of France, they are burned to death in forest fires, in Italy and Austria poisoned by anti-freeze in the wine. They are cheated by devious fore- igners who take advantage of their lack of formal education every time they change money. Even if they can escape the fore- igners, they are likely to be assaulted and stabbed by their fellow-countrymen who see abroad as a good place to get drunk.
The best monument, memorial or legacy of these tragic moments at Manchester Airport would surely be if some would-be travellers were made aware of the dangers and decided to stay in England. There is nothing wrong with Blackpool, and it would be absurd to pretend that Pepsi Cola and chips consumed on the beaches of the Aegean broaden the mind more than the same fare taken without the attendant dangers in Lancashire's premier resort.
It is too early to apportion the blame or estimate the odds against Friday's spec- tacular train crash, when an express from Liverpool to Euston ran into an express from Euston to Manchester. Various les- sons emerge, among them how extraordi- narily close Manchester and Liverpool are to each other. I made this discovery ten years ago, but others may not have realised it. Whenever I travel by train (as seldom as I can manage) I wonder who my fellow travellers are, and how they can possibly afford the fare. The Daily Mail identified two survivors from the stricken Liverpool express. One was Mr Christian Potthoff- Sewing, aged 26, from Lewes, in Sussex, described as an economist. He was in the buffet car with his colleague, Jan Bajorek, from Orpington, when the accident occur- red. I wonder why they were travelling so far. If they wished to water themselves, they could easily have gone to Brighton or Newhaven, or Seaford — scarcely a stone's throw for Potthoff-Sewing and not much further for Bajorek. As the English grow stupider, less disciplined and more incom- petent, even train travel is bound to become more hazardous.
An official of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents last week announced that driving standards in Bri- tain were so 'abysmal' that for many motorists the driving licence was no more than a 'licence to kill others'. The official, called Mr Geoffrey Large, who is Rospa's assistant director of road safety, was re- buked by a junior transport minister, Mr Peter Bottomley, who pointed out that whatever one's personal views, the plain truth was that our casualty rate was lower than almost all other developed countries. In this great Large-Bottomley confronta- tion, I tend to side with Bottomley. Rospa has become another of those unpleasant, strident, near hysterical pressure groups, like Ash, the RSPCA, NSPCC and BMA, which should be contradicted, put in their place and generally reviled whenever possible. But it is good to be reminded that even motoring in England is not without its attendant dangers. The great message of our times, which should be taken up by every responsible person in Princess Anne's so-called media, is that if people are not prepared to face up to the very real and hideous dangers of travel, they would be well advised to stay at home.
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