Travelling companion I
Graham Greene?s ?Travels With My Aunt? must rank as one of the author?s most enjoyable works. Anyone condemned to a sentence of desk slavery or a dull suburban existence, but secretly dreaming of a vagabond life, will relish Greene?s delightful tale of how retired bank manger Henry Pulling is persuaded by his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta to abandon his dahlias and travel with her from Brighton to Paris to Milan to Istanbul?
Along the way they mix with secret agents, smugglers, artists, hippies and Henry discovers that there is more to travel than just changing trains or planes:
?New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.?
As their Orient Express crosses borders, Aunt Augusta tells Henry about his uncle Jo:
?He made a substantial fortune as a bookmaker, yet more and more his only real desire was to travel. Perhaps the horses continually running by, while he had to remain stationary on a little platform with a signboard ?Honest Jo Pulling?, made his restless. He wanted to slow life up and quite rightly felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity. You have noticed it yourself , I expect, on a holiday. If you stay in one place, the holiday passes like a flash, but if you go to three places, the holiday seems last three times as long.?
?Travels With My Aunt? contains not a wasted word. Greene?s writing is elegant and artful and the book belongs in the library of every true traveller.
