Our weather is composed of samples.
Our coinage system is a practical joke.
Nobody, whether in street, train or tube, ever enters in conversation with you. If by any chance they do, they grouch all the time about the Government and the general management of the country.
Let us take the eats and drinks first. There is no ice-water. I admit it. I am sorry, but there it is. There never was much, but now that ammonia is mostly commandeered for munition work, there is less than ever. As a nation we do not miss it. In this country our difficulty is not to get cool, but to keep warm. Besides, it is possible that our moist climate, and the absence of steam-heat in our houses, saves us from that parched feeling which I have so often experienced in the United States. Anyway, that familiar figure of American domestic life, the iceman, is unknown to us. We drink our water at ordinary temperature—what you would call tepid—and we keep our meat in a stone cellar instead of the ice chest. As for ice-cream and soda-fountains, we have never given ourselves over to them very much. As a nation, we are hot-food eaters—that is, when we can get anything to eat! We are living on strict war rations here, just as you are beginning to do in the States. So you must forgive our apparent want of hospitality.
III. The Land We live in
Next, our cities. After your own straight, wide, methodically-numbered streets and avenues, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the rest must seem like a Chinese puzzle. I can only say in excuse that they have been there a very long time, and the people who started in to build them did not foresee that they would ever extend more than a few blocks. If Julius Cæsar had known that London was ultimately going to cover an area of seven hundred square miles, and house a population of seven and a half millions, I dare say he would have made a more methodical beginning. But Julius Cæsar never visited America, and the science of town-planning was unknown to him.
The narrow, winding streets of London are not suited to trolley-car lines. This fact has given us the unique London motor ’bus, driven with incredible skill, and gay with advertisements. There are not so many of these ’buses to-day as there might be, and such as there are are desperately full. But—c’est la guerre! Hundreds of our motor ’buses are over in France now. You will meet them when you get there, doing their bit—hurrying reënforcements to some hard-pressed point, or running from the back areas to the railhead, conveying happy, muddy Tommies home on leave.
And while we are discussing London, let me recommend you to make a point of getting acquainted with the London policeman. He is a truly great man. Watch him directing the traffic down in the City, or where Wellington Street, on its way to Waterloo Bridge, crosses the Strand. He has no semaphore, no whistle; but simply extends an arm, or turns his back, and the traffic swings to right or left, or stops altogether. Foreign cities, even New York, are not ashamed to send their police to London to pick up hints on traffic control from the London “Bobby.” Watch him handle an unruly crowd. He is unarmed, and though he carries a club, you seldom see it. If you get lost, ask him to direct you, for he carries a map of London inside his head. He is everybody’s friend. By the way, if he wears a helmet he is one of the regular force. A flat cap is a sign of a “Special”—that is, a business man who is giving his spare time, by day or night, to take the place of those policemen who have joined the Colours. But, “Regular” or “Special,” he is there to help you.
There are no skyscrapers in England. The fact is, London is no place for skyscrapers. It was New York which set the fashion. That was because Manhattan Island, with the Hudson on one side and the East River on the other, is physically incapable of expansion, and so New York, being unable to spread out, shot upwards. Moreover, New York is built on solid rock—you ask the Subway contractors about that!—while the original London was built on a marsh, and the marsh is there still. So it will not support structures like the Woolworth Building.