It begins the moment you set foot ashore, the moment
you step off the boat's gangway. The heart suddenly, yet vaguely,
sinks. It is no lurch of fear. Quite the contrary. It is as if the life-
urge failed, and the heart dimly sank. You trail past the
5 benevolent policeman and the inoffensive passport officials,
through the fussy and somehow foolish customs - we don't really
think it matters if somebody smuggles in two pairs of false-silk
stockings - and we get into the poky but inoffensive train, with
poky but utterly inoffensive people, and we have a cup of
10 inoffensive tea from a nice inoffensive boy, and we run through
small, poky but nice and inoffensive country, till we are landed
in the big but unexciting station of Victoria, when an inoffensive
porter puts us into an inoffensive taxi and we are driven through
the crowded yet strangely dull streets of London to the cosy yet
15 strangely poky and dull place where we are going to stay. And
the first half-hour in London, after some years abroad, is really a
plunge of misery. The strange, the grey and uncanny, almost
deathly sense of dullness is overwhelming. Of course, you get
over it after a while, and admit that you exaggerated. You get
20 into the rhythm of London again, and you tell yourself that it is
not dull. And yet you are haunted, all the time, sleeping or
waking, with the uncanny feeling: It is dull! It is all dull! This
life here is one vast complex of dullness! I am dull! I am being
dulled! My spirit is being dulled! My life is dulling down to
25 London dullness.
This is the nightmare that haunts you the first few weeks
of London. No doubt if you stay longer you get over it, and find
London as thrilling as Paris or Rome or New York. But the
climate is against me. I cannot stay long enough. With pinched
30 and wondering gaze, the morning of departure, I look out of the
taxi upon the strange dullness of London's arousing; a sort of
death; and hope and life only return when I get my seat in the
boat-train, and hear all the Good-byes! Good-bye! Good-bye!
Thank God to say Good-bye!