Jan Morris’s last book is a vade mecum to treasure

Jan Morris, in all her incarnations, was always able to evoke a place and a moment like no other. As James Morris, the only journalist to cover the first successful ascent of Everest in 1953, he described Edmund Hillary returning from the summit as

huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakably assured, his energy almost demonic… It was a moment so thrilling, so vibrant, that hot tears sprang to the eyes of most of us.

Morris, who died last year, was married to Elizabeth Tuckniss for 71 years and had five children, one of whom died in infancy. She transitioned to live as a woman in 1964, one of the first high-profile people to do so. Her subsequent memoir, Conundrum, was a bestseller. My admiration for her writing has always been unbounded, but I did wonder what to expect of this strangely titled posthumous work. It turned out to be a gem: a series of enchanting, immaculately crafted vignettes interpreting her travelling life. Each short essay left me gasping or laughing with delight.

They were conceived as allegories, as ways of bringing more meaning than appears on the surface to seemingly mundane stories. In the introduction, which she calls ‘Pre-mortem’, she describes the book as being ‘roughly assembled… around a theme of travel’. And it is a sort of charming vade mecum, a slim volume to carry with one when visiting some of her favourite places. What better way could there be of opening one’s eyes to the beauty, interest and humour of a landscape and its inhabitants than to read one of these sharp, perspicacious snippets?

Persuaded by Elizabeth to take a vaporetto in Venice for the first time, having always previously splashed out on ‘impeccably varnished water-taxis which, for a notorious fee, would whisk me without hassle to the quayside of my hotel’, she splendidly captures both the glorious chaos of Venetian public transport and the feelings of someone having a major holiday grump:

Humping our bags in the gathering dusk, tripping over ourselves, fumbling for the right change, dropping things all over the place, with our tickets between our teeth, we stumbled up the gangplank on to the already jam-packed deck.