Who does not like looking out of the window while being in a bus?
Does what it says. All footage shot from windows of London bus. There’s something about sitting on a bus watching the world outside carrying on, oblivious to its audience. No footage of tourist attractions but simply life on London’s pavements and streets from angles that only double decker buses give you. Anonymous and never quite sure of what you are going to see, it is one of the city’s pleasures for those with time to while away.
Nicely shot and cleverly edited to synchronise with the steady but infectious soundtrack. The slow motion and use of reflections in the bus windows also combine to give the video a dreamlike quality.
“The old euphoria of the traveller, a sensation I’d almost forgotten in the forest, was stealing over me—that keen expectation of something happening soon, something fascinating.”
“Lazy, that’s your trouble” announced Emily Hahn’s surveying partner while she was studying engineering. This memoir, however, reveals that Hahn was anything but.
No Hurry to Get Home opens with chapters focussing on Hahn’s childhood years. Hahn reveals that at an early age the urge to get away was manifested itself in running away from home, probably as a result of a “hangover” from reading books with protagonists who “scorned the stale air of indoors”.
Following Hahn from this early experience through her upbringing in St Louis and Chicago in the first two decades of the 20th century, we encounter a father who was careful to ensure that his daughters conversations about clothes remained practical and never became vanity and sisters who were competitive and poached boyfriends. Hahn moves on to encounter the male chauvinist environment of engineering school and the joys of drinking homemade gin during Prohibition.
Hahn’s first real travel experience was a road trip heading West across the States in a Model T Ford in 1924 when such a journey involved “virtuous, healthy discomfort” because of the lack of roadside services and “people still behaved as if motoring was a passing fad.” The trip changed Hahn who became increasingly restless and recalled thinking:
It was awful to think of everybody in that big place getting up at the same time every morning, taking the same bus or streetcar to work, doing the same things every day at the office. Where in the world were people who did things simply because they wanted to—because they were interested? Did no one ever strike out along new paths?
Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic inspired Hahn to new challenges and she quit work and headed West again to become a Harvey Girl.
Subsequent chapters follow Hahn around the world as she travels to the UK and Africa before heading to Japan and China, where she stayed for 8 years and was at the time of the Japanese invasion and the first part of the Second World War before she headed back to the US.
Hahn is humorous and candid without being sentimental as she encounters the Kurtz-like anthropologist, Stewart, in the Belgian Congo, makes her way overland to Lake Kivu with a party of bearers, is confronted by racism in Dar es Salaam and recounts a Japanese air raid while she was in China. In one of the best known essays, The Big Smoke, Hahn recounts her experiences with opium (“I was quite determined. It took me a year or so to become addicted, but I kept at it”).
Throughout, Hahn reveals common travellers’ preoccupations: communicating with home, the joy of first travel, conversations with other travellers, doubts about the suitability of traveling companions, concerns about the creeping commercialisation of popular travel destinations and the nuisance travellers can be to their families and friends when they return from travels full of anecdotes and extravagant habits.
No Hurry to Get Home was originally published as Times and Places in 1970. Originally intended to be an autobiography, the introduction records how Hahn’s enthusiasm for the project waned as she became preoccupied with new projects but had spent the advance.
The end result became an anthology of articles which had been published in the New Yorker, the magazine to which Hahn contributed over a period of 70 years (as a staff writer for more than 40 of those). The chapters in No Hurry are therefore stand alone which makes it an an ideal collection to dip in and out of.
Hahn’s surveying partner at engineering school might have perceived recycling previously published pieces as a further example of laziness. That, however, would be grossly unfair. During her prolific career, Hahn wrote more than 50 books on a variety of subjects and made her final contribution to the New Yorker at the age of 96. Selecting previously published pieces was simply a way of meeting a commitment. In many ways, a memoir made up of pieces published in the magazine with which Hahn was linked throughout her professional life is a fitting testament and an ideal introduction to Hahn’s life and travels.
The New York Times obituary of Emily Hahn is here. Read more of Emily Hahn’s work in the New Yorker archives, here.
Following the success of his childhood memoir, Cider With Rosie, Laurie Lee was a best selling author as well as a poet, musician, artist and scriptwriter by the time As I Walked Out was published in 1969 as the second part of his autobiographical trilogy.
In an interview with Phillip Oakes for the Sunday Times in 1969, Lee commented:
If you’ve written one reasonably good book, why try to follow on? There’s no real point. You’re not proving anything. The only argument for it is that what I have to write seems to fall naturally into a trilogy. Childhood, then discovering Spain, then the civil war. (published in the Sunday Times on 30 May 2010)
As Robert Macfarlane noted In an article for the Guardian in 2014, there are similarities between As I Walked Out and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Time of Gifts. Both journeys began within a year or so of each other, 1934 and 1933, respectively. War awaited both authors at the end of their experiences and both accounts were published later in the authors’ lives; As I Walked Out in 1969 with Time of Gifts following in 1977.
In As I Walked Out, Lee describes how he left his village of Slad in Gloucestershire to busk his way along England’s south coast before stopping to work in London. After several months in London, Lee departed for Vigo in Spain where he began a six month journey on foot across the plains and sierras to Madrid and then on to Andalusia before reaching Almunecar as the storm of the Civil War was about to break.
In its review of As I Walked Out in 1970, the English Journal concluded that “This is a book for an adolescent its itchy feet and a bent for vicarious living” (English Journal, 1 May 1970).
In a sense that is fair. Writing these memoirs was, in Lee’s words, “a celebration of living and an attempt to hoard its sensations”. What he achieves is a vivid evocation of youth, loss of innocence and youthful travel. Lee’s style is poetic but eloquent and economical rather than florid or ornate. His phrases are well turned and he uses striking imagery.
Lee recalls what it was like to be young, to be in no hurry and feel no pressure (“never in my life had I felt so fat with time”). He remembers his youthful energy and physical strength and describes them in a way that only someone who has started to miss them could.
Lee also captures the pleasures of travel: the thrill of waking up in a place which holds no memories and has an unfamiliar language and likening it to being reborn; the unease of arriving somewhere at night; the unexpected moments which make one think of and miss home; the innocent ignorance and the feeling of independence and the satisfaction of having no plan but choosing one’s own path and making a journey happen.
At the centre of this is Lee the wandering violinist, the “prince of the road, the lone ranger“ developing a “taste for the vanity of solitude”, and it never occurring to him that others may have done this before him.
By the time As I Walked Out was published, Lee’s Spain was already changing. Retracing his journey for the BBC in the 1960s he lamented:
I remember Segovia as a place of ragged almost oriental poverty, where a stranger’s face was a matter of unusual interest. Tourism has changed all that. But the old relationship between host and visitor has been corrupted and cheapened. Tourism always corrupts and no country can stand against it.
Lee realised how fortunate he had been, reflecting in the book that:
I was a young man whose time coincided with the last years of peace, and so was perhaps luckier than any generation since. Europe at least was wide open, a place of casual frontiers, few questions and almost no travellers.
Laurie Lee and As I Walked Out were the subject of an episode of Travellers’ Century, a BBC Four documentary series presented by Benedict Allen:
As I Walked Out One Midsummers Morning is also available in ebook format as part of Red Sky at Sunrise, which contains all there instalments of Laurie Lee’s autobiography:
