A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby

Before they left I asked them why I had not been sacked with the rest of them. Robbie only called you ‘old boy’ in moments of stress. He was reluctant to answer my question. He called me ‘old boy’ now.

‘Well, old boy, they did think about it but they decided that it cost them so little that it didn’t make any difference whether you stayed or not.’

I was furious. The Porter had been wrong and I hadn’t ‘ad it’. I was perhaps the only member of the staff who would have actively welcomed the sack. Wurzel’s was a prison to me. All the way home in the Underground I seethed … too unimportant to be sacked … At Piccadilly the train was full but the guards packed in more and more people. At Knightsbridge two of them tried to force an inoffensive little man into the train by putting their shoulders to the back of his head and shoving. Someone began to Baa loudly and hysterically. There was an embarrassed silence and nobody laughed. We were all too much like real sheep to find it funny.

At Hammersmith where I emerged sticky and wretched from the train, I found that we had been so closely packed that somebody had taken my handkerchief out of my pocket, used it, and put it back under the impression that it was his own.

I bought an evening paper. It had some very depressing headlines about the breakdown of Runciman’s negotiations at Prague.

The next day I went to Salcombe for my holiday. During that fortnight while swimming in Starehole Bay I dived down and saw beneath me the remains of the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie lying broken-backed, half buried in the sand.

On my way back to London there was an hour to wait for the connection at Newton Abbot, and wandering up the hot and empty street in the afternoon sunshine I went into a café and wrote to Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn for a place on one of his grain ships.

I never went back to Wurzel’s.

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