The Swiss Tour

The School tour this year started according to the usual routine— the departure in the small hours, the bus across a deserted early morning London, the very English breakfast of a popular restaurant, the comfortable, pleasant journey to Dover. The Channel crossing was forecast by "The Times" as "rough", but turned out to be good after all, especially as we travelled in a one-class ship. The journey from Ostend to Basle, by night, lingers in the memory for the hardness of the seats and the frequency of the irruptions of officials in uniforms blue, uniforms brown, uniforms grey, and even no uniforms at all. However, the boys met them all with the formula "billet collectif". while the "chef du groupe" had rarely to do more than wave a document at them. A further break in the monotony occurred when our coach began to emit clouds of steam, and whether it was for that, or for some other mechanical trouble, we were all tipped out into a foot of snow somewhere in Alsace, and left to find seats elsewhere. A party of Italian miners being repatriated was in like case, but somehow seats were found for most, and padded ones at that. As a consequence, we were late at Basle. Here, however, the S.T.S. representative was waiting for us, and he proved to have everything admirably under control, negotiating customs and passport officials, French and Swiss alike, with such speed that the tail of the party had difficulty in keeping up. Nor was that all, for when we found our coach on the train for Montreux to be at the back, he had the train pulled up to us instead of our having to walk the length of the platform. The remainder of the journey, through the limestone region of the northern Jura, with caves, gorges and overhanging cliffs, and then along the shores in turn of Lakes Bienne, Neuchatel, and Geneva, was sheer delight. We now first met the wonderfully sunny weather which was to be with us for the remainder of the holiday, and nothing could have given us a more favourable welcome to Switzerland.

We reached Montreux in mid-morning, and went up to the Hotel Montbrillant by bus. The hotel advertises itself as being set in mountain meadows and as being connected with the town by a tramway. The former statement is an exaggeration, though perhaps a pardonable one, while the latter is in essence true, but the tram service proved infrequent and expensive, and few of us used it after the first day. The advantages of the hotel lie, in fact, in its delightful situation, for most of the rooms have balconies commanding views of the Rockers de Naye, Dents du Midi, and Dent d'Oche, and in the pleasant friendliness of its atmosphere. We enjoyed the food, and found Madame always most willing to meet our requests.

On the day after our arrival we walked to Chillon, using the high road, which commands views over Montreux and the Lake. It was a 40

brilliant morning, and the familiar advertisements, with their bright blues, became invested with an air of verisimilitude. Chillon itself is not to be described in a sentence, for it offers an embarassment of riches : those whose interests run to the macrabre could gloat over the gibbet and the dungeon approached through a crack in a rock, the naturalists saw great crested grebes and buzzards, the literaryminded could contemplate the prison of Francois de Bonnivard and try to recall their Byron, and these are but the subsidiaries, for, as it has been observed, "Chillon is a truly medixval building, in that it sufficed for the whole life of a community. It was a fortified palace, comprising within itself barracks, law-courts, prison, chapel and treasury." Outside was a shop with the finest collection of woodcarvings that we saw anywhere. We were, needless to say, late for lunch.

In the afternoon we went by bus to the mountain village of Charnpery. It was our first experience of driving over Swiss mountain roads. The driver took hair-pin bends with a disconcerting nonchalance and comforted us by explaining that the driving wheel was, contrary to normal continental practice, on the right, so that he could easily see when he was near the edge of a precipice. The bus, a Saurer (Swiss made : we noticed the factory, later on, not far from Geneva, on the lake-side) was, he assured us, of 110 h.p., and had a puzzling array of levers, which, apparently, gave a separate braking system and a second range of gears. At any rate, normal brakes and gears were rarely used. Champery itself is not quite unspoilt—there are a swimming pool and some tennis courts down in the valley— but nevertheless is charming, with its traditional-style wooden buildings and mountain setting. We crowned the day with a trip to Planachaux by teleferique. Feelings were perhaps a little mixed as the party entered the car and went swinging away over the tree-tops, but the best moments were when a wall of rock appeared in front, and it seemed obvious that the best to be expected was that it would only rip the bottom out of the car, giving a chance of survival to those who could cling to the roof and sides. The car, of course, repeated its usual performance, and cleared the cliff with ease. At the top were wide views and much snow. We enjoyed both.

On the Friday we went by rack railway to the top of the Rochers de Naye, over 7,000 feet. There had been an unusually heavy fall of snow for the season, and the snow-plough had stuck a few yards from the top. Men were digging it out while we were there, and the snow must have been over ten feet deep. As we went through the clouds the glare caused some trouble and some of us began to see our colleagues delicately outlined in yellow. At the top the difficulty was not so bad, but still serious enough for some to spend precious

* Russell, "Switzerland", Batsford.

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francs on sun-glasses, which were precisely three times the price charged at the bottom—a ready-made example for an economist studying monopoly prices. We had a few glimpses of the Dents du Midi through breaks in the clouds, but to the East, where the Jungfrau and Monch are visible on a good day, it was never clear enough. However, the snow was hard, the slopes steep, and an oil-skin cape formed a most efficient sleigh, and that was compensation enough. On the return journey we left the train at Caux, and walked back— some through Glion, and some a longer way through Les Avants. The route in each case was through some most attractive woodland in the earlier part and by roads and paths overlooking Montreux and the Lake in the latter. Not an inch of the way was flat, and no one stayed up very late that night.

We made two town visits during the holiday—to Lausanne on the Saturday and to Geneva on the Monday—Lausanne with Le Grand Pont, a fair, its Italianate University buildings, its Cathedral stripped of its altar and with half the seating reversed to face the mid-nave pulpit, its shops eager to sell us pistols, and with tea on the nineteenth floor of the Hotel Metropole; Geneva with its guide and his long story about the Swiss Admiral and the British Minister of Food (the Swiss Admiral has no fleet, you understand) when we were all hot and longing for a long, cool drink at a very attractive outdoor restaurant not fifty yards away, its five bridges and lovely lakeside position, its Cathedral with the School badge on one buttress, its old quarter with memories of Calvin and Knox, its Hotel de Ville where the Geneva Convention was signed, its remarkable memorial—twentieth century— to the Reforming leaders, amongst whom Cromwell represents militant Protestantism in England, its views of Mont Blanc, its happy combination of busy-ness with lack of rush and bustle.

On the Sunday we took "our" bus over the pass to Morgins, a road which would have been hair-raising to us three days before, and then on into Haute Savoie. Morgins itself lacks interest, but the journey from there into France through Chatel is through some of the best mountain scenery we saw. We had lunch in a very crowded room in a little restaurant at Abondance, a little town which lies at the foot of a mountain wonderfully austere in its bareness. But what we all remarked most was the change in atmosphere—the untidiness, the lack of paint, the air of living hand to mouth. We felt all too clearly that we had come from a rich country to a poor. The Gorges de la Dranse, leading down to Thonon-les-Bains, provided us with a new type of scenery, with the road cut into the cliff, which often overhangs, and with the little river tumbling over boulders far below on the other side. We did not stop at Thonon, nor for long at Evian, for it was very much out-of-season, and we had few French francs anyway. Our journey back lay by the lakeside, and at St. Gingolph we stopped to visit a local celebrity, M. Paturel, maker of "perles du

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lac". The process, as he explained it, consists of making a coating liquid from sardine skins (four tons of sardine (sic)—and Lake Geneva sardines are the best, of course !—provide about a pint) into which a moulded bead is dipped, five times, seven times, ten times, twentyfour times—the more times, the more expensive. The product is certainly attractive, and as it was possible to buy for a few shillings, and reduced prices were offered freely, no doubt a number of Peterite mothers and sisters, if not other less closely connected ladies, are now trying out the inventor's claim that his "pearls" neither wear nor peel.

Our last day was by bus over the Col des Mosses to Châteaux d'Oex, Saanen and Gstaad, and back through the Gruyeres valley, Bulle and Vevey. It is with a deep sense of frustration that one attempts a journal of a Swiss mountain holiday, and it is perhaps at this point in the School tour that the pen seems least able to describe or even do bare justice to the Swiss landscape. It is idle to try to describe the Diablerets, Tornettaz and Gummfluh as we saw them, under ideal conditions. A list must suffice. Saanen and Gstaad are in German-speaking Switzerland, and there seemed a subtle difference of atmosphere. In Gstaad, for example, some of the buildings have the attractive painted designs on the walls that one associates rather with the Tyrol. The Gruyeres valley provides a gentler, but not gentle, landscape, and the little town itself, clustering round its castle on a hill-top, must be one of the least spoiled in Europe. The tourist seems to obtrude little, though no doubt he comes in his thousands, and apart from the sale of a few postcards and the presence of a few cars, there is little to destroy the atmosphere of the time when most of the houses were built, in the 1560s and '70s. The women still do their washing in a trough alongside the village shrine, the castle courtyard is still much as it was in the days when tournaments and, later, plays, were given there. Gruyeres is famous, too, for honey, cheese, trout and cream—"one of the best eating grounds of the country". But, alas, francs were running out, and we had to be content with tea, tea of the worst Continental kind, tea made in glasses with the leaves enclosed in a patent metal container intended to make just one cup (or glass !) and then to be thrown away. However, we were able to visit a cheese factory in the little village of Vaulroz, near Bulle, and some of us came away with a slice of the real Gruyere. None of this cheese is, incidentally, made in Gruyere itself, and we were told that there are now no factories working in Bulle. They seem to be mostly small village affairs, and the one we visited seems to have been typical—four cheeses a day, using 750 litres of milk. Cheeses are kept for six months and are turned daily. Now the mathematicallyminded can turn the litres into pints and decide how many cheeseturnings there are per day. The cheese itself is mild enough, and did not justify somebody's comment that it would declare itself in the Customs. The level of humour was, indeed, remarkable throughout the trip. For example, one day it was sufficient to convulse the 43

company for one rather senior member to be asked if he had heard about the man who caught his finger in the shutter of a camera and died of exposure. It is understood that this was not unconnected with his reply when wakened at 11-45 the night before to be told the witticism.

The journey back need not be dwelt on at length. At Lausanne our coach was reserved for "L'ecole", but as a Swiss school from St. Maurice also arrived, no one knew which "ecole" was meant and we all bundled in together and travelled in some discomfort as far as Neuchatel, when they got out. Our progress at Basle was as efficient as on the way out, and we left there at 5-30 p.m. on a 144 hour run to Ostend. This gave us some daylight each end, so that we caught a glimpse of the Vosges and Black Forest, and, later, of the flat, intensively cultivated Belgian countryside, and the Belfrey and Cathedral of St. Sauveur at Bruges, so familiar to those on last year's trip. A number of the party slept in some comfort on the luggage racks, but in spite of all, this stage of the journey is very tedious. To give it its due, the train pulled in to Ostend Quay on time to the minute. The Channel crossing was good, the journey from Dover to London most comfortable—it was a surprise to most of us to learn that second-class travel is still possible in Britain. There was a fishand-chip tea in London to make us feel really back home, and we dispersed on reaching York at about 10-30.

If it is possible to comment on the trip in one sentence, it is perhaps to say that it will be very difficult in future years to find a centre comparable with Montreux for an Easter holiday.

THE CHATEAU DE CHILLON

On the morning of the fourth day of the Swiss Tour the School party visited the Château de Chillon. Setting off about 9-30 a.m. our route took us through the grounds of the Château de Chatelard, which is well situated on the top of a small hill, near our hotel. The road led us upwards along the hillside, from where we were able to get a very good view of Montreux, with all its vineyards, spread out by the side of Lake Geneva, glinting in the morning sun. On the far side of the Lake, the sun was casting beautiful shadows on the snow-capped mountains, and several boys took the opportunity of taking photographs.

Several of the party stopped to watch the ascent of one of the cars on the steep funicular railways which are to be found around Montreux, but eventually the whole party arrived at the Château de Chillon at about 11-0 a.m. The entrance fee was paid by the "Black Bag", and crossing the moat by means of the covered-in oak bridge, we entered the Château. The tickets had a plan of the castle printed on them in four different languages—French, German, Italian, and English. The water in the moat was more than six feet deep in places, and was as clean and clear as crystal. 44

The Château, which stands on a rocky islet, dates back to the eighth century, and is in a remarkable state of preservation. In places the walls rise sheer out of the water, but elsewhere can be seen the rock on which the Château is built. The Château, with its short conical-roofed towers and small leaded windows, looks very picturesque as it stands like a small jewel set in the midst of the mountains; but a second look will show the strength of its walls, its ramparts, and the neat, compact way in which it was built to withstand attack.

The party went first to the guard room where some old guns remain, and several boys found the visitors' book very interesting. We then passed on through the arsenal, where the munitions were stored, to the dungeons, where Bonnivard, the character in Byron's poem, was imprisoned. The pillars in the dungeon were scratched with names of prisoners, and there was a mark, on one wall, which was possibly a bloodstain. The gibbet in the next cell was also a centre of interest, and one person went down into a dark, dank, subterranean cell.

From the prisons the party went on to the Hall of the Chatelain, where many different types of cooking utensils and kitchen equipment were on view round the walls. From here we passed through a ceremonial hall, bedrooms, and guestrooms, to the armoury, where many different kinds of weapons could be seen, and, if no one important was looking, tried out. It was in this room that an Olavite, on a previous School trip, had rolled a big stone cannonball across the wooden floor and brought the warden running up the narrow stairs in anger.

We went through many more rooms, including the chapel, the Baron's hall, and the torture chamber, and explored a few of the small defence towers, until we finally reached the refuge tower. The steps up to the top were very narrow and worn, but it was well worth the climb since the view from the top, over the lake to the mountains, was exceptionally beautiful. When we reached the courtyard again most boys "crept into the crypt", which consisted of many dark, twisting passages cut out of the rock on which the Château is built.

By now we had seen all the Château, and as it was nearing dinnertime we decided to return to the hotel after what had been a very enjoyable morning excursion.

B. POTTER.

THE ROCHERS DE NAYE

On Friday morning we met at the station for the mountain railway in the centre of Montreux at about 10 o'clock. Soon we were on our way to the Rochers de Naye, several miles from Montreux and some 7,000 feet above sea level. From the train we caught some glorious glimpses of the lake and the mountains on the other side. The train made its way up the mountain slopes, going through many 45