A Traveller’s Life
A chronicle of travels, some homely some exotic, from the man who can make a schoolboy holiday in Swanage as colourful as a walk in the Hindu Kush.Eric Newby's life of travel began in 1919, on pram-ride adventures with his mother into the dark streets of Barnes and the chaotic jungles of Harrods, and progressed to solo, school-bound adventures around the slums of darkest Hammersmith. His interest piqued, Newby's wanderlust snowballed, and his adventures multiplied, as he navigated the London sewer system, bicycled to Italy and meandered the wilds of New York's Broadway. Whether travelling abroad as a high-fashion buyer for a British department store or for pure adventure as a travel writer, even when reluctantly participating in a tiger shoot in India, Newby chronicles his adventures with verve, humour and infectious enthusiasm.After nine years as the travel editor for the Observer, Newby reluctantly gave up the post, eschewing the new form of human-as-freight travel. However, this change was certainly no pity for his readers, as the latter-day Newby continued on his unwavering quest for fascinating detail and adventure wherever he roamed, whether on two feet or two wheels. ‘A Traveller's Life’ chronicles the incredible adventures of one of the best-loved tour guides in the history of travel writing.
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ERIC NEWBY
A Traveller’s Life
ToMy Fellow Traveller
Contents
1. Birth of a Traveller (1919)
3. Rings Around the Tombs in SW13 (1923)
7. Journeys Through Darkest Hammersmith (1928–36)
10. Something in West One (1936–8)
12. Snakes and Ladders (1939–42)
13. Love Among the Ruins (1942)
15. Conducted Tours with the Third Reich (1944)
17. Commercial Traveller (1946–54)
18. Travels in My Imagination (1947)
19. When Did You Last Cross the Oxus? (1956)
20. The Most Unforgettable Character I Never Met (1958)
21. A Visitor from Lhasa (1958)
29. Treetops, East Africa (1967)
31. The Pera Palace Hotel (1969)
32. A Journey in the Wilderness (1971)
33. Wimbledon to Italy by Bicycle (1971)
My first unaccompanied travels
Washing up in the port fo’c’sle
On the run in Italy during the war
Myself as fashion buyer, with Katharine Whitehorn (Desmond O’Neill)
On the island of Fara, Scapa Flow
Seen from the Istanbul Express, Bulgaria
Sheikh Ayid Awad Zalabin in Wadi Rumm
In the Pera Palace Hotel, Istanbul (Wanda Newby)
Myself relaxing at the Pera Palace Hotel
Bicycling from the Wash to Wimbledon (Chris Smith)
St Katharine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai
The favourite wife of Sheikh el Sheikh Abu Abdullah of the Umzeini Bedu (Wanda Newby)
This book is not an autobiography. It concerns itself for the most part, as the title suggests, with my life as a traveller in however modest a fashion from the time I was born more than sixty years ago.
Some of these travels were in distant places, in what used to be referred to as ‘foreign parts’. But this is by no means true of all of them, and some of them were very near home indeed, for I agree with Ogden Nash’s more or less unassailable definition of what constitutes a foreigner and what is a foreign part:
The place you’re at
Is your habitat.
Everywhere else you’re a foreigner.
If you can bring yourself to believe this, it takes a lot of the sting out of the cost of travel; and it is why I felt it reasonable to include my journeys through Harrods – a strange early adventure which befell me and my somewhat oversexed nurse while she was propelling me in a baby carriage through a London suburb – as well as an account of some equally bizarre excursions into the underworld of the London sewers by night while working as a fashion buyer of dresses, retailing at ten guineas and upwards, for a chain of department stores during the day.
The somewhat episodic nature of the book is because one cannot continue going round the world for ever without intermissions in which one tries to make money, licks one’s wounds, and re-equips oneself for further ventures. Even a traveller such as the Arab Ibn Battuta, born at Tangier in 1304 – perhaps the greatest traveller of all time who, in the course of his life, was estimated to have covered seventy-five thousand miles not counting detours, the only medieval traveller who is known to have visited the lands of every Muhammedan ruler of his time, quite apart from such infidel countries as Ceylon and China – was not always on the go, taking time off to get married here and there or to act as a counsellor of moderation to a mad potentate. In fact, travellers such as those who go into orbit and fail to come out of it, or travellers like the Jew who spat at Christ at the crucifixion and was condemned to wander the world for ever, can only be regarded as exceptionally unfortunate.
In his writings, the Venerable Bede compared the span of human life to coming out of darkness into a lighted hall and, having reached the end of it, finding oneself under the necessity of setting off once more into the all-embracing gloom. To me life has been more like one of those sections of autostrada on the Italian Riviera, on which there are lots of tunnels, some long, some short, with sunlit open spaces of varying lengths between them for which the darkness leaves one temporarily dazzled and often unprepared.
Why do people travel? To escape their creditors. To find a warmer or cooler clime. To sell Coca-Cola to the Chinese. To find out what is over the seas, over the hills and far away, round the corner, over the garden wall – with a ladder and some glasses you could see to Hackney Marshes if it wasn’t for the houses in between, in the words of the old music hall song, the writer of which one feels was about to take off.
