One That Can't Be Classified

It gets off to a slow start hut improves on longer acquaintance, this unclassiffahle hook, called “The Two of Us”, written by a young woman with the improbable name of Mercedes McCamhridge.

MERCEDES contracted a hasty war-time marriage, but when husband returned after it, they found they were strangers, in spite of the fact that they were parents of an infant son. The marriage fell apart at the seams, and in 1947 Mercedes decided to travel to get it out of her system.

She took five-year-old John along with her, and John becomes the gimmick of this story which is part travel book, part personal remin iscence and partly of the theatre and allied arts.

Mercedes, before her marriage, had made a name for herself in radio, with less successful sorties into the theatre and films, and the sensible thing, when the marriage cracked up, would have been to carry right on from there. Instead, she decided to travel around the world by the longest route for the least amount of money—something that requires the constitution of an ox, the disposition of an angel and a highly developed sense of ad venture at any time. Both Mercedes and John appeared to have these talents in full measure, running over.

This was 1947, a year when inter national travel had not recovered from war-time restrictions, and when people who did so merely for

pleasure were regarded as pests who should be sternly discouraged.

Mercedes and son, therefore, find themselves flying in beat-up old DC3’s whose doors falls off on take off; and on un-reconverted French steamships (as passagers de deuxieme classe, 50 to a dormitory), which the newspapers of the time were fond of calling hell-ships.

In such fashion they progressed down through the United States to Miami and beyond to the West Indies: and from Martinique 15 days across the Atlantic to Southampton and London, and from there to the Continent and back again.

According to Mercedes, whether you are facing the facts of life amongst 50 cabin mates—not more than six of them white, and all of them de deuxieme classe; or doing the art galleries of Italy; or the theatres of London; there is no more delightful travel-companion than a five-year-old boy.

There is not one five-year-old of our acquaintance whom we can tolerate for longer than a Sunday afternoon car ride, but that’s maybe because all of them have plain, ordinary parents and haven’t had the advantage of being brought up by an actress who, if the picture on the back of the book is any criterion, is quite a dish. (THE TWO OF US. Published by Peter Davies. Australian price, 20/-.)