Text 4. Nightmare of the monster cities

It is a sweltering afternoon in the year 2000, in the biggest city ever seen on earth. Twenty-eight million people swarm about an 80-mile-wide mass of smoky slums, surrounding high-rise of power and wealth.

One-third of the city’s work-force is unemployed. Many of the poor have never seen the city center. In a nameless, open-sewer shanty town, the victims of yet another cholera epidemic are dying slowly, without any medical attention. And from the parched countryside a thousand more hungry peasants a day pour into what they think is their city of hope.

That nightmare of the not-too-distant future could be Cairo or Jakarta or any of a dozen other urban monsters that loom just over the demographic horizon.

Already Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai are among the largest, most congested cities on earth.. Over the next two decades, they – and many others- are expected almost to double in size, generating economic and social problems that will far outstrip all previous experience.

Just 30 years ago some 700 million people lived in cities. Today the number stands at 1,800 million, and by the end of the century it will top 3,000 million – more than half the world’s estimated population.

The flood of “urbanities” is engulfing not the richest countries, but the poorest. By the year 2000 an estimated 650 million people will crowd into 60 cities of five million or more – three-quarters of them in the developing world. Only a single First World city –metropolitan Tokyo, which will have 24 million people is expected to be among the global top five; London, ranked second in 1950 with ten million people will not even make 2000’s top 25.

In places where rates of natural population increase exceed three per cent annually- meaning much of the Third World – that alone is enough to double a city’s population within 20 years. But equally powerful are the streams of hopeful migrants from the countryside. More often than not , even the most appalling urban living conditions are an improvement on whatever those who suffer them have left behind.

What confronts and confounds urban planners is the enormity of these trends. There have never been cities of 30 million people, let alone ones dependent on roads , sewer and water supplies barely adequate for urban areas a tenth that size.

The great urban industrial booms of Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sustained the cities that they helped to spawn. But in today’s swelling Third World cities, the flood of new arrivals far outstrips the supply of jobs – particularly as modern industries put a premium on technology rather than manpower. So it will be virtually impossible to find permanent employment for 30 or 40 per cent of the 1,000 million new city dwellers expected by the year 2000.

Optimists maintain that runaway urban growth can be stemmed by making rural or small-town life more attractive. Some say that the trend is self-correcting, since conditions will eventually get bad enough to convince people that city life is no improvement after all. But pessimists see a gloomer correction: epidemics, starvation and revolution. In the end, both sides agree that the world’s biggest cities are mushrooming into the unknown.

( Newsweek International)

TEXT 5. THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN AT 18

Jack Higgins left school at 15, later became a teacher, then a university tutor before succeeding as a writer and becoming a millionaire. “The Eagle Has Landed” appears next month in its original unabridged form. A new hardback “Touch the Devil” comes out in October. Higgins also writes under his real name ,Harry Patterson. He lives, in much luxury, in Jersey. Here he talks to Pamela Coleman.

I wish I had known at 18 somebody like I am now at 53 , an older person with hard-won wisdom to whom I would have gone for advice.

As a teenager, I was written off as an oddball. Coming from the docks of Belfast and living in a back-to-back in Leeds I was thought of as “Daft Harry” because of my obsession about becoming a writer. I had pretensions to being a kind of Ernest Hemingway. I wish I’d known my limitations.

I wish I had known that you are capable of anything at 18. I was a teenager in the days before teenagers were invented – when it was a handicap to be young. You were “nowt but a lad”, held back because you were only 18, 20 or whatever. There were no popsingers speaking for younger people then. It was before John Braine, who’s a friend of mine, wrote “Room at the Top” before the Angry Young Man thing took off.

Getting a safe job, earning a steady wage – that was the philosophy of life. It was a philosophy based on the parents’ attitudes. So I went into a succession of boring clerical jobs. I wish I hadn’t wasted my energies in so many directions before I finally got to grips with writing.

I wish, for instance, I’d had the guts to try to become an actor. I was quite good, I used to act at the Civic Theatre in Leeds as an amateur and longed to try my luck with a seaside repertory company. But when I talked about it to friends – who were all office workers, shop workers – they’d say : “Ooh no”.

I wished I’d known at 18 that other people’s opinions were nothing like as important as I thought they were. For me it’s what I think that’s important, and I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. In writing, for example, I had to learn to trust my own judgment. For years I earned modest sums and my first real break didn’t come till 1971, with a thriller called “The Savage Day” based on the Irish troubles. Everyone I told thought it was a terrible idea for a book, but I went ahead and wrote it. It got to number ten in the best-seller list without any fanfare of publicity.

When I suggested writing about Winston Churchill spending a quiet weekend in the country when German paratroopers drop in to kidnap him, my publisher said it was the worst idea he’d ever heard. But I was so hooked on the idea, I persisted. That was “The Eagle Has Landed”, which created publishing history.

Because I left school at 15 with no School Certificate I thought I was a failure, but I think now that being a school drop-out was probably a good thing. It made me an instinctive writer. I think too much education can be a disadvantage. Universities are full of professors and academics who want to write but can’t. I wish I’d known that at 18. When I pulled Dostoevsky’s “The House of the Dead” off a library shelf as a lad I read it simply because I enjoyed the story, not because I’d been told to read it.

But at 18 I longed for a piece of paper that said I was intelligent. I got it eventually when I was 31 after taking a double honors degree through night-school and correspondence courses. It didn’t mean much , apart from involving my career prospects. I became a lecturer in a polytechnic and finally a tutor at Leeds University. It was an ego trip more than anything else. Recently I had my IQ tested – it is 147, just short of Mensa. I realized that the truth was, I always was a clever idiot who didn’t fit into the system and whom the system didn’t recognize.

At 18 I went into the Horse Guards on National Service and was stationed in Berlin. The Cold war had just started and we had to patrol the borders. Occasionally a shot was fired – a close friend of mine was shot in the stomach and died at my side.

For me life has been disappointment in general terms, which may sound surprising. I thank God for my wife, Amy, and four marvelous kids, but life is life, in spite of success. The total sales of my books are now well over 100 million. When “Eagle” was number one in England and number one in America , I never thought my success would continue. Since then I’ve had six more number ones. I’ve climbed my personal Everest. And so what? I realise I’ve been driven by a terrible desire to achieve. That desire made me a workaholic. I didn’t have time for hobbies, so now that I do I find there’s nothing I really want to do. I tried karate for a year and thought “ What am I doing that for?” Then I tried being very healthy and running everywhere and weight-lifting.

These days I get invited to Buckingham Palace garden parties and lunch with Princess Margaret and to talk to Prime Ministers. I feel as though it’s all a mistake.

So what? Is a phrase that has figured rather largely in my life. I’m glad I didn’t know at 18 that when you’ve got to the top of the peak you’re left with an emptiness.

TEXT 6 LIFE ISN’T A REHEARSAL , YOU KNOW

Several years ago while sheltering from a typhoon in a sleazy motel in Cincinnati I came across a tattered beer-stained notice pinned to a wall above a public telephone. It read simply: “This isn’t a rehearsal. This is Life. Don’t miss it”.

It was a message which has ghosted through my life ever since. How many of us can honestly claim not to have mortgaged our lives to some future dream, a dream which as likely as not will never be realized?

We live life on the never-never: telling ourselves that just as soon as we have got past this or that particularly onerous chore or stage we will be able to devote our energies to what we really want to do.

I must admit to being a master of the art of the never-never. Daily I say to myself that as soon as I have finished this or that script, or article or paid off my overdraft, then I will really start to live.

It is I believe a delusion I share with the great hopeful majority, and a delusion it is dangerous to harbor, because each of us knows that tomorrow never comes.

For some I suspect that this life-long planning for the future is a way of procrastinating: a get-out for not having the will, talent or nerve for trying something new and discovering oneself to be a failure.

How many people have I met who have told me about the book they have been planning to write but have never yet found the time? Far too many.

This is Life, all right, but we do treat it like a rehearsal and , unhappily, we do miss so many of its best moments.

We take jobs to stay alive and provide homes for our families always convincing ourselves that this style of life is merely a temporary state of affairs along the road to what we really want to do. Then at 60 or 65 we are suddenly presented with a clock and a couple of grandchildren and we look back and realize that all those years waiting for real Life to come along were in fact real life.

In America they have a saying much ridiculed by the English : “Have a nice day” they intone in their shops, hotels and sandwich bars. I think it is a wonderful phrase, reminding us, in effect, to enjoy the moment: to appreciate this very day.

How often do we say to ourselves , “I’ll take up horse-riding (or golf or sailing) as soon as I get promotion” only to do none of those things when promotion comes. When I first became a journalist I knew a man who gave up a very well paid responsible job at the Daily Telegraph to go and edit a small weekly newspaper. At the time I was astonished by what appeared to me to be his complete mental aberration. How could anyone turn his back on Fleet Street for the parish pump? I wanted to know.

Now I am a little older and possibly wiser, I see the sense in it. In Fleet Street the man was under continual pressure. He lived in an unattractive London suburb and he spent much of his life sitting on Southern Region trains.

In Kent he became his own boss, lived within minutes of the office in a very pretty village and found his life enriched tenfold. His ambition for advancement in his carrier had been smothered by his enjoyment of the life he was leading. His life stopped being a rehearsal and becoming a real thing.

I am not suggesting that this would suit every one of us. Unhappily it wouldn’t suit me. But in many ways I consider that man in Kent to be one of the luckiest chaps I know.

I am not advocating that one should live for the minute in any hedonistic sense. That isn’t the answer. But it is, I hope, an exhortation to some degree of self-fulfillment. Whatever you want to do, do it now; because , no matter how old you are , it’s later than you think.

(Ray Connoly. )