An old school-friend emailed me a hilarious article published in The Times of London a few days ago, called “Have Prejudice, Won’t Travel”. The writer, Ben McIntyre, argues that cheap and plentiful air travel “may be killing the planet, but at least it has finally killed off the sort of prejudice that was once the hallmark of the British armchair

traveller.”

The British, an island people once even more insular and suspicious of foreigners than the Maltese are today, now “wander in vast droves, and are informed about Abroad in a way that would have been entirely foreign to (their) grandparents”. Racism persists, MacIntyre writes, but gone is the fear of foreignness.

MacIntyre bases his article on three volumes of travel writing by an Englishwoman called Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer, which were published in the middle of the 19th century. From the safety of her drawing-room, she smothered the world and its peoples in a thick coating of prejudice, but the sum total of her foreign travel was one childhood trip to Paris and Brussels.

The Portuguese, she wrote, were “the clumsiest people in Europe” and “indolent, just like the Spaniards”. The Zulus were “a miserable race of people”. The Greeks did not “bear their troubles very well; when they are unhappy, they scream like babies”. Armenians “live in holes in the ground… because they hope the Kurds may not find out where they are”. Oddly, the Nubians come off the best, described by her as “a fine race… of a bright copper colour”.

People who were not Protestant, like Mrs Mortimer was, all got the same even-handed thrashing – Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus and “Mohammedans”. You could see her lips purse as she wrote of Catholicism that it was “a kind of Christian religion, but a very bad one”.

Mrs Mortimer’s xenophobic writing will be published this summer in paperback, under the title Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World.

Mrs Mortimer was a reflection of the times and the society she lived in, and those attitudes persisted right into the very recent past. In the early 1980s, I had an English boyfriend who was deeply suspicious of olives. I discovered this when a waiter placed a bowl of them in front of us in a bar, and he reacted as though he had been presented with a dish of deep-fried roaches in darkest Africa. That was a decisive moment in our relationship.

There is a very funny scene in the 1980s film Shirley Valentine, in which the eponymous Shirley goes AWOL while on holiday in Greece, escaping from her “steak and chips” husband. Sitting in a restaurant surrounded by English tourists eating egg and chips, she orders calamari rings. The camera hovers over the disgusted expressions of her fellow diners, who behave as though she is eating excrement.

The English – I should say “the English” rather than “the British” because they even despised their neighbours in Wales, Scotland and Ireland (to Mrs Mortimer, the Welsh “are not very clean”) – held Johnny Foreigner in disdain. “Don’t go abroad” King George VI once burst out, “Abroad’s bloody!” The author Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew – about whom she wrote much – did travel once, as an army officer during the Great War. “Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends,” she reports him as saying.

In the spectacular film Gosford Park, which was released a couple of years ago, one English snob turns to his weeping, distraught wife and hisses: “Would you stop snivelling? One might think you were Italian.”

In 1929, the Earl of Crawford, a Tory politician, declared: “I am a xenophobe, particularly as regards the French. I look upon France as a corrupt and corrupting influence, and the less personal intercourse between Britain and France, the better.” The records made available under Britain’s Freedom of Information laws revealed abysmal prejudice and ignorance at all levels – particularly in the files on soldiers who came from the darker-complexioned parts of the Empire, including Malta.

The MI5 officer who was responsible for interviewing suspected foreign agents during World War II wrote, and this in his official report: “Italy is a country populated by undersized, posturing folk.” We laugh at such ignorance, but while laughing, it should occur to us that this is how we speak about Africans. Just as the English have come a long way, so we might too.

The English were xenophobic to the extreme until, as MacIntyre points out, cheap air fares made it possible for them to travel often and widely. Far from breeding contempt, familiarity with Abroad dissipated it. The more they see of Abroad, the more the English now want to see, and the more they vie with each other in acquiring experience of Foreign Parts. Travelling has become a competitive sport. And olives are no longer on a par with earthworms cooked in batter.

All of this came to mind when somebody at a party the other night mentioned that the clue to the root cause of our problems with xenophobia and suspicion of those who are from a different country or of a different religion lies in the recently published survey result which claims that 47 per cent of the Maltese have never left the islands in their lives. A further sizeable percentage of the Maltese have gone away perhaps once or twice. In other words, well over half the population of Malta travels like Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer did 150 years ago: acquiring prejudices and suspicions from the safety of their living-room, while watching television and hearing snippets of international rumour and gossip. This is a fascinating parallel.

Of course, travel can also serve to heighten prejudice and dislike. My maternal grandfather, an inveterate and committed traveller who globe-trotted into his 80s, would never consider a trip to America though my grandmother’s entire family, her mother and brothers, lived in New York City. He had lived in America for several years as a young man before he married, and to him, it was a place of lynching, burning crosses on front lawns, and the Ku Klux Klan. And then, to top it all, the Great Depression began, and back he came. He swore never to return and nothing would make him change his opinion of the place. The first thing my grandmother did after he died was go to Manhattan, aged 80.

Of those Maltese who do travel, many do so – as one of my sisters put it to me – to reassure themselves how wonderful Malta is, “u li ghandna l-barka ta’ Alla”. They travel blind, taken in groups to see the sights and do the shopping, but picking up very little sense of the place or its people, returning to sigh with relief “Bhal Malta m’hawnx.” It’s all so very English.

To reap the full benefits of travel, you have to be open to experiences and equipped with a set of skills. This is crucial, because to those who have spent their entire lives on an island 17 miles by nine miles, Abroad can be frightening and bewildering. That’s one of the reasons why group travel is so popular with Maltese people. Even then, apparently it’s quite scary for some.

A person I know, years ago, was persuaded to go on a beach holiday to Tunisia with some friends. “How did you enjoy it?” I asked her eagerly when she came back, imagining tales of white sand and exotic markets, or even a holiday romance (when you’re drowning in marriage and babies, you tend to live vicariously). “I cried all the time and I wouldn’t leave my room, and all I ate was chips,” she said. “It was horrible. I will never go abroad again.” And she never did.