By Jumbo Jet

To Cold Pees

And Porridge

From JUDY TUDOR . in London

Like the advertisements say— BOAC takes good care of you on all six continents. Nevertheless, most of the weary passengers who dis embarked at their destination after the airline’s recent official Jumbo-jet inaugural, Sydney-London, would have settled for fewer continents on the way; or at least fewer stops on them.

Among the passengers were 60-odd free-riders—representatives of Press, radio, TV and tourist organisations, from Australia, Fiji, New Hebrides, Samoa and other South Pacific countries. I was one of those guests.

The new BOAC service from Sydney calls at Darwin, Hong Kong, Delhi, Teheran, Beirut and Frankfurt—a schedule designed with inter-Asian traffic potential in mind rather than for the comfort of those passengers who, if they have any sense, or whose hurry isn’t desperate, will break their journey somewhere along the way.

Apart from the preliminaries in Sydney and the schmozzle at the London end—which includes an hour’s wait for luggage, or more if you are unlucky—it’s an elapsed time of 36 hours, most of it with one’s backside glued to a seat.

However, few of the free-riders are novices at the game. They know what economy-class air travel is all about; that in airline economics, space is money and you get what you pay for. They also know that no 14,000 mile inaugural undertaken under lATA rules for free-riders which allow no break of journey, can be a rest cure. But few who were invited turned down the offer and, in the event, the flight turned out much like expected. But plus.

The plus consisted of the Jumbo itself, which is too big for its own good in airports not yet geared to handle them, including London’s Heathrow, at the moment still in a shambles of rebuilding. In this depart ment, Sydney’s Mascot and Fiji’s Nadi can show the rest of the world a great deal about how to handle these air giants.

Either because of novelty or because in this route BOAC has got itself a gold-mine, the aircraft was, with its free-riders, filled to capacity.

The difficulty may be imagined of getting 300 people off and on at way-stops where the plane is anchored

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up to a quarter of a mile from the terminal.

This problem was solved in the majority of places by—for security reasons—not letting passengers off at all although this solution compounded another. As soon as the aircraft came to a halt, passengers got up and crowded the aisles, taking the Jum bo’s greatest selling point—“room to move about”—literally at its pro moter’s word.

At the same time, gangs of air port staff invaded the plane to service the monster, so the whole thing be came a heaving mass of passengers stretching their legs or trying to put their heads out the doors to breath some unprocessed air; of people cleaning carpets or lavatories or gathering rubbish; of ground crew and crew filling huge steel contrap tions with used food containers and bottles, and taking on new food and drink. Even with the passengers kept on board, few turn-arounds were ac complished from woa-to-go in less than two hours.

Those paying passengers who could, broke their journey at Hong Kong.

But they were replaced by 90 other bodies. We soldier on and the real tedium begins. By then night has descended, and when flying ever west ward it stretches away interminably into a dawn that never seems to come. Bemused by the 6,000 miles already covered, torpid in the warm air, claustrophobic by the continual presence of 6 ft passengers on either side, you are borne on and on and on.

The second “dinner”, if you are ready for it; the headphones which, once plugged in, produce on seven channels anything from English humour to “gems from stage and screen”; the movie which is enjoy able if you can master the sound system and no one taller than 5 ft sits in front of you—all this only seems to add to the strange sense of euphoria that grips you as you bore on into the tunnel of night.

But finally you do emerge from it into the Mediterranean dawn, at Beirut. And here, mercifully, you are allowed to disembark into buses, are whisked across the tarmac past a company of soldiers mounting a guard for some Arab big-wig, and are herded into a dark terminal in the process of rebuilding, by a frantic little Lebanese ground hostess who seems to fear bombs, hi-jackings and varied abominations.

Twenty minutes later you are

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herded back again but not before you are gone over for weapons by the same frantic girl using a clicking device like a giant bottle opener.

Rather like a wash-room lady who keeps a saucer full of 20-cent pieces in full view to encourage other patrons, a brass bowl stands at her elbow and in it is a short, curved, elaborately scrolled dagger.

Next stop Frankfurt; foggy, wet, gloomy, where we stay on board “for security reasons”. London, by con trast, has hazy blue skies and thin, pale-gold sunshine, last remnant of the test autumn for years.

The sun of course does not last.

It is succeeded in the following weeks by spasms of rain, sleet, white frost, black ice on the roads, more sun, snow and fog, because this is England in November and early December, and Mr. Heath has not been able to change that.

Nor anything else, as a natural bom conservative I’m reluctantly bound to say.

England after a generation of social security and soft living, goes on her inevitable way—goes according to some people to perdition or the Common Market or perhaps both.

There are just more people, more motor traffic, more congestion and a fantastic jump in the cost of every thing from pins to porridge in the three years since I was last here.

Officially the UK’s galloping inflation is blamed on the sudden hike in wages and salaries in the 1969-70 period.

Unofficially, people believe that the change to so-called decimal currency has had a lot to do with it.

As the French found out a long time ago, all Englishmen are mad— but never more so than in their awful new money, with 100 New Pence to the £, nothing to take the place of the old 10-bob note except a six sided coin, which is almost indistin guishable from the 10-penny piece and therefore the delight of taxi drivers and others who operate in the dark—and all of it requiring extra large pockets and purses to accommodate the quantities of change you are forever being lumbered with.

This is bad enough; but worse is the fact that the coins are not called new pence, or pence, but “pees”. A newspaper is now four pees; a gallon of petrol 35 to 37 pees (equivalent to 70 odd Australian cents); fares on the underground come in five pees, 10 pees or 15 pees. I’ve always thought Australians took the prize for reducing the language to the lowest common denominator. Somehow I d thought better of the English, up till now.