The difference between a traveller and a tramp is that the former usually comes back.
My returns to the USSR from the UK (prior to my defection) had been bitter. For the first couple of weeks, unwilling to face the gloomy Soviet reality, I chose to look down at my shoes while trudging through the all-season grey slush of the Moscow streets and whispering to myself a rhyme by the acclaimed late-19th century Russian poet Nikolay Nekrasov. He wrote it on his return from Europe in June 1857. Here it is in my unrhymed translation: “Returning from Konisgberg / I approached the land / Where they don’t like Gutenberg / And find taste in dung. / I drank a strong Russian ‘infusion’, / Overheard familiar four-letter words, / And some ugly muzzles / started flashing past my eyes...”
Despite the instinctive traveller’s dislike of a comeback as the end of an adventure, until recently I had always rejoiced at returning to the UK, which has been my on-and-off home for the last 30 odd years. My recent returns to Blighty from France—which I visit often—however, were different. Below is a brief description of a typical comeback.
My Toyota gets stuck in a queue even before it drives off the ferry in Newhaven (or Dover, or Portsmouth). Surrounded by other cars on Deck F (or E), it is trapped inside the dark ferry’s belly for almost an hour in a truly international traffic jam, which begins in the English Channel and continues as far as East Anglia, with the A23, M23 and M25 chock-a-block for miles on end. It takes me over five hours (instead of two, promised by my non-updated and hence over-optimistic sat nav) to creep home along the bumpy and potholed motorways, scrupulously littered at the wayside. The contrast with clean and smooth French roads could not be greater.
On French motorways, you are never more than several miles away from an aire de services, or road stop, all of which are spotless—with trees and grassy lawns, picnic tables and sterile toilets, in which calming stereo music is played. Their cleanliness is astounding. In some, you could safely eat from the floor (not that anyone would be tempted). Outside, there’s an abundance of poubelles (waste bins), against which a secret vendetta has been waged in Britain, where they keep miraculously vanishing from streets overnight, or—in the latest Soviet-style craze—chained and padlocked shut, with the sign “Commercial Waste. Not for Public Use”.
Back in the UK, after hours of driving (or rather crawling), I have to make an emergency stop at a petrol station to use an invariably filthy public toilet and to buy some water and snacks. The approaches to the station are garbaged to the fly-tipping point.
Finally back home, I realise that the “ready meals”, acquired at the petrol station, are well past their use-by date, and reek of petrol. Luckily, in the boot of our car I find a couple of no-longer-super-fresh yet still crisp and enjoyable baguettes, bought in France that very morning at a roadside boulangerie. There’s also some French cheese and a bottle of red wine, all of which make our homecoming a tad less gruesome.
I start my first morning back at home with picking up junk food wrappings and empty bottles, dropped by passing pedestrians, from our tiny front garden...
Ilya Ilf, a Soviet satirist who was active in the 1920s and 1930s, once wrote in his notebooks: “It is commendable to fight for cleanliness, but it is often much more effective just to sweep the floor!” In France, it seems, rather than campaigning, as we like doing in the UK (presently, there’s a campaign to start regarding rivers as living beings and to assign some “human right”’ to them, but wouldn’t it better to stop polluting them first?), they simply sweep the ground, making sure that there are plenty of poubelles around, and that motorists do not chuck rubbish out of car windows. As a result, the country—which for years had been known for its lack of hygiene and, according to a vintage Baedeker ”Handbook to France”—was characterised by “shameful defectiveness of the sanitary arrangements”, has become an epitome of tidiness, where the notorious open-air urinals are as rare as unpolluted chalk streams in England.
God knows how and why that striking turnaround happened. Some government politics could have been at play. But one word that inevitably comes to mind is “self-respect”!
Just as theatre starts with a cloakroom (pace Stanislavsky), a proud country begins with clean rivers, roads and motorways. And with spotless “cloakrooms”, too!
There was a point during my latest sojourn to France when I momentarily came to doubt the country’s all-permeating cleanliness. Near Cherbourg, our car was overtaken by an adroit yellow van. When it was about 100 metres ahead, an empty beer can was tossed out of its front window onto the gleaming motorway surface.
“See, the French are as bad as us!” I said triumphantly to my wife. Then the speeding van in front of us slowed down. It had UK number plates!
