London for Beginners

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 58, 2 August 1940, Page 5

London for Beginners

WONDER if those of you who have been there found, as I did, that at first you were quite unable to respond to London. At first you can not feel anything at all about it. It is as though you lay on some lonely beach and were bowled over by wave after wave of confusing impressions. You look dumbly at St. Paul’s or Fleet Street or Buckingham Palace without really seeing them at all. The streets are merely unreal and bewildering, the voice of London so loud that you scarcely hear it. You are bemused and muddle-headed. Some New Zealanders that I have met have become out.of temper. with London because it did not immediately register a neat impression that they could write down on a post-card and send home. Some of these disgruntled people are young men, who, with a baffled look in their eyes, will tell you angrily that Waipukurau, or Paraparaumu will do them. I remember one such young man who had lost his.way at Hyde Park Corner because he had foolishly neglected to notice that Knightsbridge is really a continuation of Piccadilly. The discovery enraged him. "I reckon," he said, "I'll get eowt of this. These people don’t know they’re alive.’ But in three months’ time he was writing home to explain why he had paid no visits to his country relations. There were still things, he said, that he wanted to see in London. And in six months he was talking of the opportunities there were for New Zealanders in what he now called The Old Town. He had served his ‘bewildering apprenticeship and like Apulius’s hero, had eaten rose leaves and was no longer a golden ass. (Ngaio Marsh, "London for Beginners," 3YA, July 18.)