I love a long train journey. My longest, so far, was Barons Court to Shanghai in 2013; starting on the Piccadilly Line in London and ending on the maglev train (268 mph) to Shanghai airport.
Yesterday Michael Binyon wrote in The Times about thirteen trains going half way around the world, some of which he has been on. He romanticises the Moscow to Beijing train: “your new Russian friends in the compartment will probably be plying you with vodka and endless questions about England”. I remember sharing my first class compartment with a friend who, when he wasn’t sleeping or drinking, had time to read a few chapters of The Pickwick Papers. We did make friends on the train because a first class compartment had a ‘phone charger but there were no Russians, except surly staff. Only tourists take the train as Joanna Lumley discovered when she made a documentary about the trip and had to take local trains to meet the locals.
Virginia Cowles was a traveller, a travel writer and an all-round good egg. She took two years off (1942 – 1943) from being a war journalist to be an assistant to John (Gil) Winant at the American Embassy in London. Before that she covered the Spanish civil war and Finland en route to WW II. Her account, originally published in 1941, is a series of richly embroidered accounts of what is now history. She describes people not politics and she does it like a cinematographer. It is a Very Good Read.
These days foreign correspondents of either sex dress alike in khaki, trousers and desert boots. Virginia, born in Vermont in 1910, started in journalism writing about fashion and gossip. Not a great preparation for meeting Mussolini, Hitler and Churchill. I am on the way to Madrid with her. She has packed a small suitcase with three wool suits, a fur jacket, high heels and a typewriter. What else does she need? Burke’s Peerage, of course.
If you want to know more (an hour) listen to this.
Point of detail. I actually read the whole of Pickwick Papers ( second time round after fifty years) between London and Beijing on that memorable journey, the only book I read on my kindle before it self destructed.
But why did she have a paperback volume with the title “Schweppes Ginger Ale”?
As nobody has replied to George, I will make a guess. The picture wasn’t taken in the Spanish civil war. The paperback is some annual reference book like Whitaker’s Almanack. Old editions of Whitaker and Burke, etc have advertisements although, in hardback, not on the spine.
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Regards
(In this context) Stoker