Contact! by Jan Morris

they be exterminated too? He gave an angry tug at his beard and threw me a look of piercing and bloodshot intensity. ‘The same,’ he hissed through the last of his teeth. ‘The same again!’
    Home are the hunters!
    I first went to Kuwait in the company of a sheikhly hawking party, returning home from a desert sporting expedition. Splendid were the caparisons of those haughty Arabian sportsmen, and their eyes were cold and heavy-lidded. They wore magnificent flowered gowns, and crossed bandoliers,and daggers, and spotless headdresses, and golden swords; and big black lackeys carried their peregrine falcons, hooded upon their pedestals; and a brass band puffed away on the airfield at Kuwait when this gorgeous crew, looking slightly airsick, staggered on to the ancestral soil.
    The quarry clerk
    I was only just in time to meet Bob Owen of Croesor, in northern Wales, before he died in 1962, and I am glad I didn’t miss him. He had worked as a clerk for a local quarry company for more than thirty years, a small man with a high wrinkled brow, a white moustache and bushy eyebrows, respectably dressed when I met him in jacket, waistcoat and unassertive tie. He was a tremendous talker, a chain smoker and a chapel goer of strong views, and when his quarry work ended he had become a writer and lecturer well known throughout Wales. He took me to the small square house where he and his wife lived and, merciful heavens, the moment he opened the front door for me I found myself hemmed in, towered over, squashed in, squeezed down by an almighty multitude of books. They filled every room of the house–he had amassed more than 40,000 books and pamphlets, many of them rare and valuable. He was born, he told me, in a very small nearby cottage, nicknamed Twll Wenci, and people used to call him Bob Twll Wenci–Bob Weasel’s Hole.
    Pretty children
    In the mountain resort of Flims I saw three small Swiss girls on their way home from school. They looked like modernistic elves, with bright-coloured rucksacks on their backs, and they were burbling brightly to each other as they climbed the hill to their homes above the town. They paused for a bit of gossip and leg-swinging at a bench beside the road, and when they got up to go one of them, meandering off by herself, chanced to leave her sunglasses on the bench. In a trice the other two, laughing and giggling, threw them on the ground and stamped them into pieces before my eyes, alternating kicks in the prettiest way.
    Lese-majesty
    â€˜Yeah,’ said a woman loudly and complacently, stepping back from a china cabinet during our guided tour of the White House. ‘Just what I thought– chipped !’
    A hated man
    Soon after World War II a friend was driving me one day along an Oxfordshire lane when we saw a picturesque sight in front of us. A fine four-in-hand was running along at a spanking pace, driven by an elderly gentlemanly looking coachman on his high box. ‘D’you see the man driving it?’ said my host. ‘That’s Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the most hated Englishman alive.’
    â€˜Bomber’ Harris! The man who had unleashed his vast fleets of thudding black aircraft, manned by crews from every corner of the old British Empire, to devastate half Germany and kill scores of thousands of German civilians! I stared rudely at him through our rear window, as we left those trotting horses behind, but he looked a jolly enough old fellow, up there behind the reins.
    America, America!
    I once came into Pier 86 on the liner United States , the fastest ever built, and I watched the faces of the passengers around me, waiting for the gangplank to open as the ship’s band subsided into a last medley of patriotism–‘America, America’, ‘Dixie’, ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and one or two stirring marches I failed to recognize. Trilly secretarial voices rang, as those grand old tunes reverberated, jewelled