When The Going Was Good [antikvár]

Preface The following pages comprise all that I wish to preserve of the four travel books I wrote between the years 1929 and 1935: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-two Days and (a title not of my own choosing) Waugh in Abyssinia. These books have now been out of print for some time and will not be reissued. The first three were published by Messrs Duckworth Co., the fourth by Longmans, Green Co. There was a fifth book. Robbery under Law, about Mexico, which I am content to leave in oblivion, for it dealt little with travel and much with political questions. 'To have travelled a lot,' I wrote in the Introduction to that book, 'to have spent, as I have done, the first twelve years of adult life on the move, is to this extent a disadvantage. At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the moon, or some such place, to recapture the excitement with which one first landed at Calais. For many people Mexico has, in the past, had this limar character. .Lunar it still remains, but in no poetic sense. It is a waste land, part of a dead or, at any rate, a dying planet. Politics, everywhere destructive, have here dried up the place, frozen it, cracked it, and powdered it to dust. In the sixteenth century human life was disordered and talent stultified by the obsession of theology; today we are plague-stricken by politics. This is a political book.* So let it lie in its own dust. Here I seek the moon landscape. From 1928 until 19371 had no fixed home and no possessions which would not conveniently go on a porter's barrow. I travelled continuously, in England and abroad. These four books, here in fragments reprinted, were the record of certain journeys, chosen for no better reason than that I needed money at the time of their completion; they were pedestrian, day-to-day accounts of things seen and people met, interspersed with commonplace information and some rather callow comments. In cutting them to their present shape, I have sought to leave a purely personal narrative in the hope that there still lingers round it some trace of vernal scent. Each book, I found on re-reading, had a distinct and slightly