Chapter 2 - Norway to Italy

The only Norwegian women we saw were of the hotel staff and we were impressed with their graceful movements. Next morning we were called at five o'clock and after a delicious breakfast boarded our coach for Sola Airport again, where a Skymaster awaited us for the remainder of our flight to Africa. The airline we were travelling by was Braathen's South American and Far East Airtransport whose abbreviation is S.A.F.E. and the large and luxurious 'plane and competent crew gave us every confidence.

The two Norwegian air hostesses were pretty and charming and impersonal. They instructed us to fasten our safety belts on taking off, put out cigarettes, chew chewing gum and plug our ears with cotton wool, which latter we found a great help to our discomfort, as we had all experienced a feeling of pressure and deafness on landing at Sola. The chewing gum had not a nice flavour but we got quite fond of it and chewed steadily like a herd of cows at the appropriate times.

On over the patchwork quilt of Holland and France to Italy and Rome! Now at last I was going to see one of my dream cities. We felt very sick coming down, but whether it was due to the unusual method of travel, or the fact that we had been eating chocolate, drinking brandy and partaking of a substantial lunch, I could not say.

We arrived about five in the evening and the coach drive to the Hotel Royal allowed us glimpses of this most wonderful city. It was much as I had imagined, colourful and grubby, noisy and excitable. The Colloseum huge and ancient and almost too accessible, tight on the roadway, looming in the dusk. Beautiful, grubby children in almost non- existent shorts or skirts sprawled on the pavements. We passed a donkey pulled cart in the curved basket canopy of which lay a man asleep, graceful as the Adam of Michaelangelo's 'birth of the World' .

In the windows of a tall grim official looking buildings could be seen a black-haired senora taking her 'smalls' off the drying string. Every where in the streets bicycles laden with crossbar and pillion passengers tore past in and out of the clanging, swaying tramcars, which were packed inside and garnished outside with home-going people. A new President had just been elected and that night the statues were to be floodlit on his honour. We were delighted, for the statuary was one of the sights which interested us and normally it would have been too dark to see.

The rooms in our hotel were large and solid with shuttered verandahs from which we could glimpse other verandahs where some of the home life of Italy was being enacted. I forbore to look until I remembered that we were no longer in a reserved Britain with our very cautious private lives! As we had to leave early in the morning, we hired a car to take us around Rome for a quick glimpse, and although we had not time or knowledge enough to appreciate to the full all that we saw, most of the floodlit statuary and fountains were like a dream of beauty, the Fontana Trevi with the green and orange of the ancient stone glistening in it's cascade of water under the delicate gleam of the young moon.

St. Peter's courtyard was empty and sombre and we stood on the wide entrance steps watching the cross on its dome with the crescent moon exactly above it, and faintly in the distance the only sound, an Italian tenor voice singing some haunting wistful melody, There were few people about and our taxi took us to a plateau overlooking the city and surrounded by a parapet, where we sat for a time enjoying the warm night air, and looking down on the myriad lights. Reluctantly we assigned Rome to some future fortunate time when we might be able to carefully assimilate it's beauty and study it's ancient heritage, We had seen during the afternoon, shops with goods not to be bought in Britain, tasted the creamy Italian ice-cream, sipped a drink at a pavement cafe, and enjoyed the milling noisy crowds. There was so much more to see and do, but we were only en route!

Next morning early our trim air hostesses rounded us up and took us back to our Skymaster, which now seemed homelike and secure, and we were soon in the air again, Italy below us, the Miditerranean a wash of blue deepening to turquoise, edged with frothy white against the rocky coast, with here and there a streak of strong, warm orange blending into the coast line, and the islands of the Mediterranean standing out in strong sun and shade amid the richly coloured water.

The 'delicious breakfast' is what I remember best. A massive table laden with plates of fish in cream sauces and acres of fried, poached and scrambled eggs, and thick white bread with farm butter and jams. The Skymaster was a very superior 'plane after the Dakota. It had four engines and comfortable seats and although not pressurised had more space and was quieter. The piston engines droning for many hours at a time was very soporific.