26. London

The huge city gets bigger and bigger. Every year thousands and thousands of people from Ireland, Wales and Scotland will take the one-way train to the capital.

Many of them think that the streets of London are covered with gold, that they only have to pick it up to become wealthy and rich. True, there are high wages in London, people of the same professions earn more money there than anywhere else in Britain, but the cost of living is high, too. And life is not much more attractive in the South-east of England than any­where else.

George Londoner gets up at six o'clock five times a week. He is to be at his office in the City at nine. He rushes to the bathroom, dresses quickly, has breakfast, gets his car out of the garage and drives some miles to Caterham Station, Surrey, where he leaves it and takes the train to the City.

In the South-east of England 700,000 other commuters will travel daily to Central London in the morning and back to their suburbs in the evening. They will lunch in crowded restaurants, small pubs, in canteens, or may eat their sandwiches in their offices or in parks. Every week-day they will spend three to four hours in crowded buses, undergrounds, trains and cars.

Do they like this kind of life? Of course they don't. An official report says that 42 per cent of men working in London would leave the South-east if they could find good jobs in the West. But can they? Before the Second World War the City of London was a place filled by small offices, huge warehouses, wonderful old churches, little corners and narrow streets. Then came the blitz and quite a number of these went up in the air. So much of what was left has been swept away by large new office buildings round St. Paul's Cathedral that the face of the City has completely changed. These huge new buildings draw the commuters from the suburbs to the City which has a day population of 440,000 and a night population of only 5,000. So the dream of thousands of Londoners, the dream of going West and leaving the capital, will never come true, for the new big office buildings in Central London will never be empty and won't let them go.

27. A Letter from America

June 21,1971

Dear Mother,

I always knew that many things in the USA were better and bigger than anywhere else. I knew that the USA has as many motorcars as Britain has inhabitants. The highest building in the world is the Empire State Building in New York. The largest hotel is the Hilton in Chicago with 3,000 rooms. The Pentagon in Washington, the USA Department of Defence, employs about 30,000 people and has 44,000 telephones, and the world's biggest railway station is the Grand Central Terminal in New York, etc., etc.

But the other day something surprised me. The dog cult has always been looked upon as the Englishman's special craze. Dogs' cemeteries are taken care of from the south of England to the north of Scotland. The bulldog is a national symbol. Even American friends told me, "You English are crazy about dogs." I proudly agreed.

But then I read in the newspapers that we British were no longer leading the world in the dog craze. Statistics tell me that Americans are twice as crazy. Another of our proud titles gone to America!

Over here there are 28 million dogs, against four million in Britain. Of course America has a bigger human population, but it's not seven times as big. One British family in four has a dog. Over here there is one in every second household and the numbers are still going up. Seven out of every ten American dogs are blue-blooded.

Dogs service firms where dog sitters and dog walkers have become new so professions, where dog shoes, dog coats and dog suits are bought, where the pets are given their baths and special food, can be found in every quarter of any town in the States.

Dog food factories are doing wonderful trade. Their TV advertisements are almost non-stop. The amount of space given to dog foods in the super­markets is larger than anything known in Britain. Dogs are the number one customers of the American tinned food industry.

While in Britain more and more smaller dogs are preferred, the Americans want to have bigger and bigger ones. Favourites are the Great Danes, St. Bernards and the Old English Sheepdogs. Here again everything is bigger than anywhere else.

Well, Mother, it's no use giving your dachshund more food. He hasn't a chance against those American superdogs.

Your loving son,

John