More about Stella Benson’s travel nightmares

The novelist Stella Benson travelled the world. She saw some beautiful buildings and scenery, she gained a variety of new experiences and she met some interesting people. Travelling provided her with plenty of good material for her writing, but she paid a high price in suffering, discomfort and danger.

She turned some of her bad travel experiences into good stories and treated them lightly, presenting them in her articles as amusing and interesting adventures, evidence that she was doing something exciting with her life, rather than as the ordeals and nightmares that many of the incidents undoubtedly were.

This article contains a few more examples of her experiences and some thoughts about the issues that the accounts of her journeys raise. I wonder why she would put herself through so much; I also wonder how much of it she did in the right spirit, as opposed to just going through the motions. I wonder whether she thought that it was all worth it. 

In Stella Benson’s own words

“Nobody but a true fool tries to cross the United States in a Ford car in the middle of winter."

“Also we had another loss. Money in an inner coat pocket is safe enough in circumstances that permit a man to stand dry and upright as his Maker intended him to stand. But tip that man in and out of a Ford foundering in floods, load him with wet kit-bags, bend him like a hairpin, bereave him of hope and dignity—and where is that money at the end of the day? Where indeed is it? We had nothing now but a few dollars, which I found, sodden, in my breeches pocket.“

“Arriving that evening at a small cheerless hamlet, cold, soaked and exhausted, we were given a room full of holes, through which the draughts whistled... We were soaked, shivering, and sad.“

Stella Benson and some travel nightmares

In addition to being a novelist, Stella Benson was a travel writer.

Despite her poor health, she took on many challenging journeys. She wrote articles about her travels and later compiled them into books. She also logged everything in her diaries. These records give many examples of the dangers and difficulties that she met and the risks that she took while on the road.

There is one particular episode that looks like a nightmare scenario to me. It has some familiar elements.

The walking tour nightmare

While Stella Benson was exploring the US in 1918, a new female friend in New England proposed a walking tour.

The final leg involved walking 18 miles through the night to catch a train at 05:30.

They left very little margin for error, which was a big mistake. They got lost and went several miles out of their way; it took a while to find someone to put them back on the right road. At 4:00 am they still had six miles or so to go. The backwoods people were infuriatingly unhelpful: no one would give them a lift.

They had only 15 minutes left when they met a man in a milk cart. They offered him money to turn round and take them to the station; after pondering for a while, he refused. Then they met a man in an empty car and waved and shouted. He slowed down a little then laughed, told them to get off the road and drove on.

When they were one mile from the station, they heard the puffing of the train and saw smoke; they gave up, assuming that they were too late. They walked slowly towards the station, feeling awful because after all their efforts they had missed their train.

When they were within 100 yards of the station, they noticed that the train had backed in again. They made one last, desperate, torturing effort, running as never before, and reached the platform only to see the back of the train disappear round the bend.

“Defeated and robbed of pride we threw ourselves on our backs in mid-platform.”