Nor will you find any such indication at Tottenham, or Balham, or at Upper Clapton; new streets; new shops; new houses; travel by what road you choose through any of the London suburbs: you will find everywhere the same cross-roads, with their policemen, and their electric cars; and the white sham stone-fronted cinema; and the local empire, and the long stretch of detached and semi-detached villas, with their garages and garden plots, very pleasant, very clean, very comfortable: cheap amusement and good amusement; such as grandparents knew not. But that sense of antiquity; those reminders in the gables at street corners of other men and other fortunes, that is lost to us. The old streets and the old buildings are being swept away. History in London can only be found in the places where one cannot afford to live, and the places where one would not want to live. We have no eternal landscape to speak to us of the passage of human life. We have no equivalent for the Sussex Downs; the Downs that have hardly altered since the Romans camped on them. We have neither the modesty nor the pride of heritage. Family feeling dies where there are no family seat and no family possessions. We are parvenus, we townsfolk. It is only through a detaching of ourselves from our surroundings, through travel, or the company of books, most particularly, perhaps, through moments of intense self-realisation when we are in touch with eternal instincts or eternal forces, that we recover our sense of values, that we see ourselves simply as part of a pattern, a footfall in the sound of passage. And it may have been that it was in search of some such amulet that Clifford Bax and I set out last April across the North Sea to Norway. A long journey it was, with a good twenty-four hours of open sea, twenty-four hours in which to wonder what crazed splendour, what folly of irresponsible ambition, urged our Viking forefathers to desert their sheltered fjords in those flat-bottomed, high-prowed craft of theirs. A long unheroic journey on my part, at any rate. I lay supine and neither stirred nor ate, consoling myself as best I might with Geoffrey Moss’s entertaining if scandalous _Sweet Pepper_. It was worth it, though, that harassing, exacting journey, for the sake of the two hours of quiet passage in the late evening through the fjords. There is no country that welcomes its guests less ostentatiously than Norway does, that stands more simply on its own attainments. There is no parade of harbours and high buildings and imposing statues. Just the long stretches of receding waterways, motionless, many coloured waterways, green and grey and purple; a purple that shimmers now and then to the rich transparent red of Homer’s sea, Homer’s wine-coloured midland sea; the fading waterways, and about them the long, endless, low-crested circling hills. Hardly a sign of life, only now and then below the promontories of rock, a warning light, and near it on the land some small wooden house.