In late May we flew to London, to touch base with family, both living — my sister — and passed on — our annual pilgrimage to my parents’ graves in Dorset. I spent a day in the BBC Written Archives in Reading, searching for traces of S. Rajaratnam’s broadcasts during the Second World War, and finding transcripts, correspondence, and more, leads which I’ll probably never follow fully, but are intriguing to know of. 

Again I felt that strange sensation of moving into the different world of the archive, taking the train to Reading early in the morning and then a bus into the suburbs, skirting the edge of town where the rows of houses ended and the freshly plowed fields began. Everything had that lushness of early summer, the new twigs and leaves on the trees brushing against the top of the double-decker bus, a sound and sensation that I remember from childhood journeys at this time of year. In the air I could see large hawks hovering, with deeply indebted V shaped tails, black against the overcast sky. 

The archive itself was next to Cavendish Hall, the site where the BBC used to monitor world radio broadcasts from. It’s a whitewashed residential bungalow, outside the main complex on a quiet street next to a school, and across the road from a chapel. I arrived a little early and pressed the intercom to get access. There was a desk to sign in, with an old-fashioned ledger. The place reminded me of a doctor’s surgery from the 1960s; linoleum on the floors, a waiting room, and two other rooms, one for microfilm, and the other for consulting documents. You chat with the archivist, try to get a sense of what more possibilities there might be. And you’re also conscious that places like this will slowly vanish. If the BBC could obtain the funding, all the microform and the paper files could no doubt be digitized and placed online. It would be much more convenient for researchers to access, just as researchers can now access most of the private papers at ISEAS from half a world away. Each year digitization creeps on; I myself will explore the possibilities of having the transcripts I’ve found published online. Yet there’s something very appealing about these small archival spaces and the communities they support; there’s serendipity that comes through going there, and following down leads and making connections, the conversations with other scholars over lunch, and even slowness of the journey there and back that somehow promotes thought. You slow down and in doing so enter this other world.

As I write now we’re in Europe, and a self-directed tour of the heart of the continent, from Brussels to Vienna to Prague and then to Berlin, and then back to Brussels. As there often is for me now in my early sixties, there’s a sense of a folding over of time, of retracing a journeys from years ago. After I graduated from university in 1983, and later, after I returned to the UK from China in 1987, I crossed the Iron Curtain to what was then Czechoslovakia to join other young people from different on work camps organized by Service Civil International. Workcamps may sound alarming in a contemporary context, but they were simply a two to three week residency in which we worked on a social project together. On my two visits to Czechoslovakia, we stayed in workers’ dormitories and refurbished museums in small towns in Moravia and Bohemia. On my second trip I took a cheap flight to Vienna, and then hitchhiked across the border, passing through checkpoints and then getting lucky enough to be picked up by a driver in a clattering,rear-engined Skoda, who took me to the market town where we were gathering for the camp. I was a day early, and so I spent a night at the inn in the market square. The only common language I shared with the innkeeper, the bar staff, and the local population who gathered to drink Pilsner in the evening, was the fragmentary German I had studied for two years in school a decade before. 

I don’t remember too much about the town itself: the museum was an old stately home that had been expropriated from its former owners after the war. One of the young Czechs who hosted us was a weaver who took us to his workshop, full of beautiful abstract modernist hangings. We attended a heavy metal concert, and then one of the workshop leaders took us on a short day’s pilgrimage to a festival at a Catholic shrine in the middle of the countryside. In Prague, we visited her and her husband’s apartment: they had a bookcase full of books, with copies of novels by Czech exiles such as Milan Kundera on the shelves, their spines camouflaged in thick brown paper. For me, having only ever known a divided Europe as a child and a young adult, the opening of the Hungarian border and the fall of the Berlin Wall would later come as a sudden shock; I’d only then look back and read the signs of change into my own experiences in Czechoslovakia. After the work camp we stayed a few nights in Prague, and I came back to Vienna via Bratislava. A day or two later, I took the train to the south to Graz, and a second work camp, renovating a women’s centre. And then, I remember working my way back via train through Europe, staying with a friend in Amsterdam who’d I’d met in Czechoslovakia. 

What’s different in travelling now? On the train from Vienna to Prague we encountered two young men who seemed barely out of their teens, travelling on Interrail passes just as I had done over forty years before. Part of the change, then, is no doubt ageing. In my travels in Europe in the 1980s, I slept in train seats, curling up effortlessly and sleeping through the night. Now, even the top bunk of a relatively luxurious private sleeping compartment was unable to offer me a good night’s sleep. We’re wealthier, and money buys a certain distance — fast trains and boutique hotels. But I still like simply walking in cities, and hopping onto public transport and then off again, rather than taking organised tours by bus. In Vienna there were unexpected discoveries: talking Mandarin with a woman from near Shanghai who was fronting a Chinese restaurant, finding a sidewalk cafe whose youngest customers seemed to be in their early eighties, smoking stylishly, and making their way through alcohol and sugar saturated lunches with bravado. Walking in the Prater, under a seemingly endless avenue of horse chestnut trees, and then returning by bus, through a younger and rawer part of the city to Karl-Marx-Hof, the mother of all public housing estates, a Tiong Bahru on a massive doses of steroids and then some. 

Travelling with a partner you know well and whose company you enjoy also gives distance; this is something that has changed about me. But there’s also something that has changed in the external environment, with than ongoing compression of time and space that’s a central characteristic of modernity. Web sites, our online travel plan and tickets, Google maps, and the constant flow of data to my handphone make everything available: I have a helicopter view of my location, with no real possibility of getting lost. As with the digitized archive, it makes everything efficient. We leave the train station and know which bus or tram to hop on, and the exact time when it will arrive. In the bus itself, a screen and an electronic voice count out the stops until we need to get off. Translation apps make communication effortless, and English speakers are everywhere. All this makes travel easy. And yet there’s something missing, something to be said for that old slowness, of being immersed in a new cultural context, struggling with other languages, without the possibility even of an international phone call, without social media, the internet, or CNN, with only a poste restante address to connect you to the outside world. Something like the world of that little archive in Reading, an isolated island now, a tiny holdout of a vanishing past that was once to only world you knew.