Holiday

Said a London chimney sweep: "Don't fence me in. I want to get to the sea and breathe."

Thirty million other Britons, straining to shake off the psychological soot of war, were set for a whopping vacation binge. Brighton, finally rid of barbed wire and pillboxes, was triumphantly ready for the Easter trade. Yachts and motorboats, many of them veterans of Dunkirk, were fought over by sea-hungry landlubbers. Butlin's popular seaside camps, the workingman's country clubs, had more customers than they could handle. While most people wanted to get out of the city, some provincials wanted to get into it: Thomas Cook & Son offered an eight-guinea ($34) junket to London, complete with guided tour of the bombed areas.

Famous vacation trains, like the Cornish Riviera Express (nonstop London to Plymouth) and the Golden Arrow (London to Dover and Paris), were running again. Ex-R.A.F. pilots swarmed into the air-taxi business and got as much as -L-50 ($200) for a flight to France (prewar British Airways price: a little over -L-4). Britain's passport office was issuing a thousand passports a day, and hundreds of jealous wives wrote in, asking that their husbands' applications be refused; the wives suspected that the bounders merely wanted to visit wartime girl friends on the Continent. The Government did not encourage all this holiday hubbub, either, but for once Britons heeded neither their wives nor their Government. Each week, Cook's alone received 100,000 bookings for trips abroad.

Even Bedsheets. Of all European countries, France was most enthusiastic in welcoming tourists and foreign exchange. Railways were mending their torn roadbeds, the glamorous Blue Train to the Riviera was back in service, nightclubs now got enough electricity to stay open till dawn, and the municipality of Nice grandly announced: "Our hotels are ready, our guests will lack neither bedsheets nor tablecloths." But about half of France's hotels were still closed, and many of the rest were filled with Frenchmen who wanted a vacation themselves. The beaches of Normandy and Brittany were still dotted with maverick German mines.

But even in countries like Switzerland and Sweden, which had not been disfigured by the war, something was wrong. British tourists now had little money to spend abroad (their Government allowed them to take only -L-75 each), and they were pale and poorly dressed. They betrayed an un-British and rather pathetic greed for unrationed food and clothes. The Continent's professional hosts decided sadly that it would not be a real tourist season until the Americans came along.

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