Note: This week’s interview consists of excerpts from a long panel discussion conducted for BBC radio. My thanks to the fellow researcher and collector who kindly sent me the transcript.
The Travellers in Towns
Ian Fleming, Norman Lewis, and Peter Duval Smith (Transmitted August 2, 1960 on the BBC Home Service)
PETER DUVAL SMITH: The travellers here tonight, Ian Fleming, Norman Lewis and myself, don’t entirely go along with people like Sir John Hunt and Wilfrid Thesiger that the most interesting places in the world to spend one’s travelling time are the North Pole or the middle of the Arabian Desert. I think perhaps we prefer to travel for people, for new friends, for new drinks and new food, and these sort of things are to be found in towns, I think. And I think that we agree that we prefer to go to towns rather than to explore. How do you go about, Ian Fleming, finding a new town and getting yourself into it?
IAN FLEMING: Well, I think if you take the ordinary town—Orleans, Hamburg, Vienna, anywhere you like—the first thing to do when you arrive in a town is to buy the ordinary town guide and town plan, and spend half an hour perhaps over dinner, over a drink, having a look at it and more or less getting your bearings; basing yourself on your hotel so that you won’t lose yourself when you start to get back. Generally, in all these towns are various landmarks—a river or a hill or a cathedral—and you can get yourself more or less straight on the thing. You can see the business centre, and the entertainment centre and the theatre and the suburbs.
From the point of view of the ordinary traveller arriving in a town, perhaps he’s had a puncture or something and he doesn’t know where to go, I think that one of the great things to remember is that the railway station, of course, is the centre of any town. And around that will be more or less the main centre of life of the city. And if in doubt, I think the thing to do is always to make for the railway station, and if in doubt about a hotel to stay in a station hotel…[places] where the commercial travellers come and they demand cleanly things, rather like Le Routier in France, where you get the minimum of everything but it’s fairly solid and good.
SMITH: I think another point about arriving into an unknown town is how to find anywhere good to eat. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got in your pocket; how does one go about getting a good meal?
FLEMING: Well, I think the thing to do really is to go to the fattest man or woman you can see and say politely, ask politely without looking at their fatness, where is the best place to eat, with a lot of “if you please,” and “thank you very much” and so on and so forth. Well, you can be pretty certain that if anybody is fat and has a cheerful face they’ll know the answer.
SMITH: Well, what if you’re in a country where the food is bound to be appalling?
FLEMING: When I’m stuck I always ask for three fried eggs.
[Peter Duval Smith discusses his experiences in Macao]
FLEMING: Did you go to the great house of pleasure, the Central Hotel?
SMITH: Oh yes, yes.
FLEMING: I rather like the idea that the—it’s what, seven or eight storeys high as I recall it. Big skyscraper. And the quality of the pleasures increases with the price according to the storey. You started off in the sort of low coolie area, the gambling and the girls and everything else, and then you went higher and higher and higher till you reached the final courtesan on the seventh floor.
Oh, I think Macao’s got a great future, but unfortunately it’s very far away.
SMITH: Well, perhaps that’s as well.
FLEMING: I think that to exchange one’s ordinary comfortable nest for something that’s really foreign, I think perhaps for a short time—probably a flight to Naples—gives one the original smell of being abroad more than anything, any other town that I know of. I think to fly from England to Naples, be suddenly thrust into this extraordinary world of people who cheat one, thieve from one, overcharge one, are rude to one, it has the authentic smell of the first place one ever went to when one perhaps crossed the Channel to Calais and was completely confused and got into trouble with the porters and so on.
They’re great experts in Naples at covering up those ghastly sea fish that they make one eat the whole time, sort of spiny…
LEWIS: Yes, Norman Douglas used to complain of them. They’re all bones.
FLEMING: Absolute muck, yes. But of course they’re great experts at really sort of shredding up the foreign tourist. I mean, I have great affection for Naples, because it’s a very beautiful place and there are wonderful things to see around—like Paestum and Herculaneum and Pompeii and Ischia and Capri, with Gracie Fields. But of course, they’ve got this business of eviscerating the tourists to a fine art.
But I rather like the story which is often repeated, about the ordinary G.I. in those days—the days you were referring to—who used to go wandering off into the back streets of Naples in search of pleasure, and he would be sold a bottle of hooch by some of the local gangsters and fall down insensible and then be carried off on a handcart into the background somewhere amongst the alleys and simply put up for auction as he stood or as he lay, with wrist-watch, wallet…and simply put up for auction.
The highest bidder would buy him. A big man with plenty of his clothes and belongings, and then after having stripped him and taken his belongings, he’d be carried off to a vineyard in the background and put to work until he dropped and be thrown back into the harbour. They’re real rapscallions.
SMITH: Well, what do you chaps do about languages? What does one do when one doesn’t know the language?
FLEMING: Well, I’ve got French and German. But I’m absolutely sunk anywhere south. I think the thing about language, which obviously is an appalling obstacle to all kind of travel, is that in England, where there are the most stupid sort of insular collection of people living on this this tiny little place, one must teach children languages. I think languages are absolutely essential to extend one’s life outside this little place that we live in.
SMITH: Well, how dearly one would like to be really bilingual in English and French.
FLEMING: Yes, one must have one other language. I mean every child must have one other language, and it ought to be made compulsory by law. To expect other people to understand English really is terribly—well, it’s not only insulting…you get stuck. In a place like Naples you get absolutely stuck, if you don’t know some Italian…We must learn languages. Some kind of language.
But of course, to get on in a town you—nowadays in a foreign town there’s nearly always, particularly near a railroad station there’s nearly always interpreters, people who can explain this, that and the other. It’s no good going to taxi-drivers, they know nothing at all.
SMITH: Of course, what you get if you don’t know languages, is only boring conversation. I mean, almost anybody is prepared to talk to you endlessly about your father’s name and your mother’s name and your job and things like that.
FLEMING: “How interesting, you come from England and do you know somebody who lives in Greenwich?”
SMITH: Yes. The gap between that and a real conversation is a terribly long way and it means knowing the language quite well.
FLEMING: I think people ought to learn—linguaphone records or any of these things—they ought to learn basic phrases. They’ll be much happier if they do.
SMITH: But which towns do you really hate?
FLEMING: Well, I think really—I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m afraid that I’ve taken very much against New York, now. I’ve been there many, many times since the war and I think the town is rapidly going downhill. It’s not only the fact that all the beautiful bits of New York are being torn down—the nice old brownstone houses—but the sort of manners of the people are very abrupt and rough…You’re an out of town man and alright, you ask the way, well you don’t know the way so why the hell should they answer, and they say sorry, bud…you know, and sort of go on their way.
But I must confess that I was in Moscow in 1939, and I do really think that Moscow is the dullest, flattest town in the world. It’s rather like Manchester on a sort of wet Sunday night.
SMITH: Worse than New York?
FLEMING: Worse than New York.