The travel book that goes nowhere

It’s unusual to come across a travel book that includes very little travelling in it.Bedpans and Bobby Socks describes what happens when a group of British nurses leave the austerity of post war Britain to work as nurses in the United States. They buy an old car, a 1949 Ford V8, and set off on trips to Niagara from their base in Cleveland. Once they get a taste for the road, they decide to travel to the west coast and back, paying their way with stints by working at hospitals along the route.  Six of them plan to travel, in two cars but – at the last minute – one decides to get married, so the remaining five cram into one car and set off.

Their route takes them to Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City and San Francisco via a massive detour into Canada and along the Alaska Highway. Then it’s a side journey to New Orleans, a trip to Mexico, and eventually back to Cleveland via St Louis.

That’s an impressive road trip by any standards. Anyone who’s hired a roomy Avis car and followed a Rand McNally route across the States will know that, after a few weeks of Interstates and Highways, you’ve seen enough for one year. What must it have been like for five girls squashed into a beaten up car with a tendency to break down?

We find out very little about the road itself. Yellowstone is dismissed in a sentence, An ice field in the Canadian Rockies creaks and sighs like a door that needed oiling. Arizona is a ‘straight desert road’, Texas ‘nothing but gravel and sand’. Louisiana does rather better, with four sentences. So what actually happens? The girls make friends along the way, with flurries of romance, and they get jobs. Most of it is pretty trivial stuff.

But therein lies the book’s attraction. If you’ve had enough of ‘hilarious’ adventures, where every minor scrape and incident is magnified into high drama, as though the author were a worthy successor to Eric Newby, then this understated book is well worth a look. It makes easy bedtime reading, and it really is good fun.

A bumpy ride with John Steinbeck

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about John Steinbeck’s account of his foray into the Soviet Union, in A Russian Journal. Having seen what he thought of the USSR, I wondered what he would make of his homeland. So I turned to Travels with Charley.

After spending ten years living in Europe, Steinbeck returned to the United States and, in an effort to re-connect with the land and its people, set off on a three months road trip in a state of the art campervan, accompanied by his French poodle, Charley. Starting in New York, he travels to Seattle, then down to California and home via Texas and New Orleans.

The result is an uneven book. By the half way point in the text he has reached no further than Chicago. Then follows a rush to the west, reflections on the California of his youth, and finally his thoughts about Texas and racial segregation in the deep South. Descriptions of scenery is sparse to say the least. He marvels at the richness of Wisconsin and, in the failing light of evening, sees the Bad Lands of North Dakota as the Good Lands. But red tape bars him from Niagara and he hardly gets to see Yellowstone. Charley is spooked by the roadside bears and he beats a rapid retreat.

As Steinbeck discovers, travelling in a campervan is a solitary experience. You only get to meet people when you come to a halt. So, although he has his encounters – with truckers, mobile home dwellers, Canuk potato pickers – for much of the time he has only himself, and the irrepressible Charley, for company. Not that this can prevent his descriptive genius from shining through. He ‘whitened his sepulchre’ to attend a church service led by a hell and brimstone preacher, gets into a tangle with customs officials when attempting to enter Canada, and brushes with a monosyllabic state trooper in Maine.

Usually he reserves judgement on the people he meets, but his patience is tested to the limit by his experience of racial hatred in New Orleans; first the taxi driver who blames everything on the Jews for stirring things up, and the women who line up to hurl abuse at the children arriving for school. Finally he loses his cool with a man to whom he has given a lift, and he unceremoniously kicks him out of his van. Steinbeck has reached the end of his tether, and he is glad to head for home.

In the course of his travels, Steinbeck gets to reflect on the experiencing of visiting places. What one person will see from one perspective, another person will see quite differently. As for revisiting your past, you can experience it only through the spectrum of memory. In travelling with Steinbeck, we get to see the country through his eyes. What we get is hardly a comprehensive guide, but there’s rarely a dull moment.

Travels with Steinbeck

Ever since being forced at school to read The Grapes of Wrath, I vowed never to read John Steinbeck again; not unless I wanted to be really depressed. But the other day I was looking for a travel book to read. The bookshop had its ‘hilarious’ self-satisfied accounts of house moving to Tuscany, and superficial jaunts of the sort that would make Wilfred Thesiger turn in his grave. But I was looking for something different.

 

I then came across A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck. It was certainly different. Just as the Iron Curtain was falling across Eastern Europe, Steinbeck travelled through the Soviet Union, accompanied by a war photojournalist, Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Stalingrad, the Ukraine and Georgia, observing the lives of ordinary men and women. Frustrations abound. Aeroplanes fail to arrive or are hopelessly late, people who promise to meet them fail to turn up, there are barriers of language and the inevitable bureaucracy. At the same time, they are treated with extraordinary generosity wherever they go.

 

Steinbeck and Capa rile each other, and lose their tempers with the unfortunate translator who is assigned to accompany them. They complain about the sheer exhaustion of eating, drinking and travelling to excess. Their journey is set against the background of devastation caused by war, and there are poignant moments. In Stalingrad a child is seen visiting his father ever day – at the cemetery. A shell shocked girl emerges from a hole in the ground that she has made her home.

 

Inevitably, Steinbeck’s compassion for the people shines through at every turn, as does his sense of humour. His car is falling to bits, but it is a superb water heater. Orders are orders and must be obeyed; it is easier to change a sentry than to change the sentry’s orders. Meanwhile, Capa’s photographs capture the lives of the people, harvesting, dancing, wrestling, queuing, and hanging washing amidst the war torn rubble.

 

This is more than a travel book. It is an insight into a past world, and into the mind of an exceptional writer.