Mecca For Travellers, Heal And Armchair

. SK the bulk of travel-conscious Australians and New Zealanders, either at home or domiciled in the lands, which single place they itch wander to. and nine out of 10 nes London will figure in the answer.

Colin Simpson, who needs no intro ction to Pacific readers for his idam” series and other books and 10 is probably Australia’s foremost ivel writer, in his just-issued, perbly illustrated and produced (with lour) “Wake Up in Europe”, puts his iger on it thus: “When you come to England from ance—or from Holland, as I did first April—it is a crossing from what is foreign to what is familiar; for, ough the eye may be seeing it for e first time, the mind has known ach of it for years. ‘The sky over London was grey and izzling. That was what you expected ndon weather to be like —and it In’t matter. Nor did it matter that, >m the plane, the vast sprawl of e city looked murky-grimy. Grey ,s in the image; some grime was part d pigment of the picture you had the great city of London. What ittered was that London should be e the London you had for so long iked forward to meeting and recog ung. ‘The pleasures of recognition began, • me, in the bus from the airport the KLM terminal. There they were :he pubs called the Horse and aches, the White Hart, the Royal ,k, and the Hampshire Hog. There

they were—the big red double-decker buses with destination signs that said Tunbridge Wells and Twickenham and South Kensington. There they were —the boxy black London taxis, the stations of the Underground, the news vendors selling the “Evening Standard”.

“It didn’t have to be beautiful to be wonderful, it didn’t have to be the London of Westminster Abbey and Berkeley Square—not yet. I felt absurdly gratified at just running through ugly Hammersmith and down Kensington High Street, and greeting Guinness posters, as I came into London on that drizzly late-afternoon of an April that had forgotten that April was supposed to be spring. Not that that mattered either. The part of the Browning lines that mattered was the *. . . to be in England’ part. I was surprised that it mattered so much.

“Nowadays Australians and New Zealanders speak of ‘going to England’ rather than, as formerly, of ‘going Home’. Yet, though we had built our own place and put down our own roots, there was still this strong realisation of Britain as the home of our fore bears, the source of our national being, the big tapestry backcloth to our own small history, the place where the concepts of justice and government we held to were germinated and grown.”

WAKE UP IN EUROPE (published by Angus and Robertson, Ltd., Australian price 37/6) will be reviewed in January

“Pim”.