MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE steamer which crosses three times a week from Folkestone to Ostend is called the ' London-Istanbul'—a title which is ambitious rather than marine. It is a pleasant Belgian boat, having none of the rubber-carpeted splendour of ' Golden Arrow' days, but trying in its cosy way to comfort and appease. The deck-chairs on the lower deck are entwined with farm tractors, those first swallows of Britain's export drive ; the bar in the smoking-room is rendered glorious to British eyes by many packets of matchboxes alternating with bottles of vermouth ; the gangways and saloons are panelled in acacia wood, interspersed with framed photographs of the cities of Flanders and Brabant. It cannot be said that this Channel passage is either quick or comfortable. The days when passports were required only for travellers to Turkey or to Russia seem as distant to us as those Edwardian afternoons when lovely ladies would loll in victorias, a tiger seated with crossed arms upon the box. Yet Folkestone harbour even in those days was not a wharf in which the departing or the returning Englishman could take . pride ; even then this miserable jetty seemed too narrow, too un- protected, too forlorn. Today, when one has to queue up for pass- port-control, and has again to queue, even when leaving the country, for a customs examination, the inclemency of Folkestone jetty strikes to the marrow of the bones. But at last one leaves at the time appointed, and at last, after thirteen hours or so, one arrives ; and the authorities, in their patient if over-worked way, do all they can to protect the passengers against unnecessary or unexplained delays. As evening wanes the hotels and casinos of Ostend rise suddenly above the yellow Channel waves, and as one approaches nearer one observes that their cupolas are twisted, and their facades shattered and exposed. And in the end one climbs into the long- distance tram which takes one from the sea to Brussels. It is a congested conveyance, but at least it works. That is the first and most striking impression which Belgium conveys ; the impression of an active and ingenious people determined to return to the
normal.
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