Benson then decided that she wanted to see the world. Her first stop was California, and she met many artists in San Francisco and Berkeley, including Witter Bynner and Ansel Adams. She took on a job at The University of California as a tutor, then as an editorial reader for The University Press. These experiences inspired her next work, The Poor Man (1922).
Her next travels took her to China, where in 1920 she met the man who would be her husband, James (Sheamus) O-Gorman Anderson, an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS). They married the following year. This was a complex relationship, but a very firm one. Benson followed Anderson through various Customs postings including Nanning, Pakhoi, and Hong Kong, even though her writings on China sometimes put her at odds with the Customs Service leadership (Anderson was theatened with dismissal if her writings touched on Customs affairs after one piece in The Nation in October 1927).
They had strong shared intellectual interests. Their honeymoon was spent crossing America in a Ford, and Benson wrote about this in The Little World (1925). They continued to travel throughout the rest of their lives.
CONTENTS
- Note
- Trippers
- Oldest Inhabitants
- The States-I
- The States-II
- The States-III
- The States-IV
- The States-V
- Japan-I
- Japan-II
- Manila-Macao-Hongkong
- Hongkong
- The Little Journey
- Peking-I
- Peking-II
- Peking-III
- Peking-IV
- Peking-V
- Old Armies and Old Emperors
- The Yang-Tse River
- India-I
- India-II
- India-III
- India-IV
- The States Again-I
- The States Again-II
- The States Again-III
- The States Again-IV
- The States Again-V
- Geography
- Angels in the Red Sea
- Picnic in Aden
- Yunnan-I
- Yunnan-II
- Yunnan-III
- Yunnan-IV
- Yunnan-V
- Yunnan-VI
- Yunnan-VII
- Pigs and Pirates
- Journey in Indo-China-Hanoi
- Journey in Indo-China
a selection from the first chapter: TRIPPERS
In Tintagel Cove the sea is as luminously green as though it had a light beneath it. The rocks above water are like leopards, streaked and spotted, and beneath the water they are like pale tremulous green ghosts. There is another ghost sometimes in the water; sometimes it comes to the surface and becomes a seal. The seal looks nervously this way and that; it looks first outward at the safe sea and then inward at the beach all flowered with the jumpers of charabankers. When it sees the jumpers it dives hurriedly and only reappears now and then to confirm its worst fears.
The broken indented outlines of King Arthur's Castle comb the mists which stream in from the sea. The Castle crowns a high solitary rock and there is only one way on to the rock. It is a steep way only to be followed by nimble trippers in single file.
This is a piece of pretence history and concerns the nimblest trippers of all. Being history it points no moral except the obvious moral that it is no wiser to be born within earshot of Piccadilly than without.
The nimble Piccadilly trippers were four in number and they got up at four o'clock in the morning of Bank Holiday. One carried a large bowl of Cornish cream; one carried a sack of saffron cakes, one a crate of pasties and the fourth was armed to the teeth. They were desperate persons and their names were Mirabeau and Mirabel, Justin and Justine. They belonged to the most subtle and insidious type of tripper. Justine and Mirabel wore neither orange jumpers nor bandanas. They were plain-clothes trippers and they were not only desperate but exceedingly supercilious.
