Posted on 11/12/2017 10:13:57 PM PST by topher
[p. 19]
She chuckled again as she remembered her first encounter with the ticket people. The elderly booking-clerk at Mullers, the travel agency in the Haymarket, was quite certain she was mad. It seemed in all his years of advising upon the pleasures of foreign travel he had never heard such an outrageous demand. Had he not just finished patiently explaining the cheapest boat fare to any portion of China was ninety pounds? Had he not pointed out, in passing, that although the cheapest and quickest route was overland through Europe, Russia and Siberia to Tiensin via the Trans-Siberian railway -- the fare for this journey being only forty-seven pounds ten shillings -- it was quite impossible to travel by that route? Yet this young person facing hime across the counter had chosen deliberately to misunderstand his words. She thrust three pound notes across at him, said shed have a ticket on the railway, and would he please accept this on account? He had tapped his slender fingers on the counter and adjusted his pince-nez to regard her more closely. A journey round the globe, a safari in Africa, a discreet week-end in Le Touquet; they call be managed, but this ... this!
[There was a war raging between Russia and China]
"We do not," the clerk had replied, choosing his words with the pedantic care of the extremely irritated, "like to deliver our customers dead!"
Chapter Two, p. 23
Expedition "Gladys Aylward" assembled on the platform at Liverpool Street Station on Saturday, 18th October, 1930. It must be numbered amongst the most ill-equipped expeditions ever to leave the shores of England, possessing in currency exactly ninepence in coin and two-pound Cook's travellers' cheque. The cheque was sewn carefully into an old corset given to the expedition by its mother, in the severe belief that even horrible foreigners would not dare to pry too closely into such an intimate, and intiidaing, feminine accessory. The corset was a treasure-house. It contained, besides the teavellers' cheque, her Bible, her fountain pen, her tickets and her passport.
The book explains what happened along the way.
There is also a Hollywood movie about this, but the book is so much better!
The movie, which has Hollywood fiction is Inn of the Sixth Happiness
The two excerpts I have chosen should show how she had the faith of a mustard seed in her expedition/adventure.
Matthew 17:20
Mark 4:31
Luke 17:6
I love the movie. I shall find the book to read. Thanks.
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