JOHN MASTERS

Pilgrim Son

A PERSONAL ODYSSEY

To the bone of England, which bred us,

and the star of America, which led us

First published in Great Britain by MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD 1971

© 1971 by Bengal-Rockland

Portions of this book first appeared, in slightly different form,

in Holiday and Esquire,

and are printed here by kind permission of those magazines.

FOREWORD

In two previous volumes of autobiography Bugles and a Tiger and The Road Past Mandalay, I told how an English schoolboy became a professional officer of the old Indian Army, and how the young soldier matured as an officer and as a human being in the flames of the Second World War. In Pilgrim Son I shall try to tell how and why this English fighting man became an American writing man. In the course of the telling I hope to open to the British reader a view of America by a man who was not visiting it but living in it; and to the American reader something of that special insight into one's own country given only to foreigners.

Two words of warning and explanation: first, in the writing it has often been difficult to decide, as between English and Americans, who is 'we' and who is 'they'. The reason for the confusion, of course, is that my position and points of reference changed, but gradually, so that until the end of the time covered in this book I was always aware of being two people, of standing in two places, of being 'we' and 'they' simultaneously. So forgive me; the confusion is a part of the tale.

The other point is that I am preparing this book for simultaneous publication in Britain and the United States. Readers who find me explaining matters they already understand perfectly well should pass on a few lines: the explanations are muttered asides for the benefit of those ignorant fellows the other side of the Atlantic.

To avoid unwarranted intrusions into other people's privacy I have disguised a few names and other tell-tale circumstances.

J.M.

Santa Fe,

New Mexico

Chapter One

Barbara and I settled ourselves more snugly in a nook among the lifeboats. Tarifa Point passed on the starboard side, the mighty mass of Djebel Musa fell back to port and the Empress of Scotland surged out into the Atlantic. Three more days to Home.

Home... Home? I repeated the word to myself with alarm. Was England really Home, after five generations of service in India? My great-great-grandfather had gone out in 1805 and now it was 1946. 141 years behind and only three days in front, for surely there would be no return. I didn't know much else, but I knew that. So I was at an end, just as we had passed through the Mediterranean; but I was also at a beginning... the Atlantic spreading ever wider ahead and to both sides. Browning's poem ran in my head and I recited it aloud:

Nobly, nobly Cape St Vincent to the north-west died away; away;

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;

Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;

In the dimmest north-east distance dawn'd Gibraltar grand and gray;

'Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?' — say,

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God and praise and pray,

While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

After a while Barbara said, 'The point now is, how can England help us.'

She was right. I and a few million others had been helping England for seven years, but now we were lost, and we needed help. For most, it was because they had known only war, and it had passed. For me, it was because I had known only Imperial India, and it was about to pass. What would become of us?

The Atlantic swell deepened and lengthened and the Empress's stays creaked as she plunged into the north-west. Three days, I thought again. Well, no use worrying. I'd just have to stand ready for anything, mentally armed at all hours against whatever might befall, ready to protect and advance my own and my little family's future.

Barbara said, 'Don't forget to write to the Rawal when we get settled. He wanted to keep in touch.'

I nodded. For us, the world began to turn upside down in the Rawal's little house in Joshimath, but we had not realized it then, seeing only the enormity of the message on the newspaper he was holding out to us:

ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN.

That was August 19, 1945, for we had been trekking in the Garhwal Himalaya, and for weeks had heard no radio and seen no papers. I remember the Rawal pressing us to stay for tea and cakes. Were we not hungry and tired after our long walk down the valley from Tapoban? With regret we refused, for we had much to think about and, bowing, left him. A slight, dark man from South India he was one of the holiest men in India, for until recently he had been the head priest of the temple at Badrinath, the most sacred of the several sources of the Ganges.

We walked slowly up to the dak bungalow. Until half an hour earlier we had intended to camp the night on the lawn there, spend the next day stocking up our food supplies, and then trek up to the Bhyundar Valley, known for self-evident reasons as the Valley of Flowers. There, 14,000 feet above sea level, we hoped to spend three or four days. Then we would return over the mountains to Ranikhet, taking about two easy weeks on the trail. In Ranikhet we would be reunited with our little daughter, whom we had left there in the care of friends. For me, the next item would have been a return to the war. I had been offered the chance to raise and train a new Indian airborne brigade. It was hard to guess where it might be sent when it was ready — Malaya, probably, if that was not in our hands by then; Sumatra, perhaps; or China; possibly the Japanese homeland. For political reasons we would want to have Indian troops associated with the final battles there.

But now Barbara said, 'I suppose the war's over, then?'

We were at the dak bungalow. To the north, cut by the trench of the Vishnuganga Gorge, the Himalayas walled the horizon, from the square bulk of Kedarnath on the left to the feathery Mana Peaks on the right. Such long views were rare; usually it was just the clouds billowing around us, and the slanting rain. Almost any other time of year would have been better for our trek, but the beginning of August was when leave was offered to me, and I needed it, and took it. I had been in action, with a short break for intensive training, for a year and a half. The rainy mountains had their discomforts, but after months crouched in slit trenches with radio sets buzzing around me and shells bursting above, months of driving dusty tracks lined with menacing red MINED signs — this, to be with Barbara, physically exhausted but unafraid, was heaven.

Barbara said again, 'The war's over... isn't it?'

'I suppose so,' I said.

I didn't really believe it. When the war began I was twenty-four years old, a lieutenant, the adjutant of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Prince of Wales's Own Gurkha Rifles, then stationed on the western frontier of India. Now I was thirty, a lieutenant-colonel, and my last job had been as G.S.O.1 (Chief of Staff) of the 19th Indian Infantry Division in action in Burma. The Burma campaign was over, but the war? Impossible. It had been the background of my life for six years. More — the foreground, centre, wings, stage, lighting, everything. Also the past, and the future.

But Barbara was right. If the war wasn't over yet, it soon enough would be. This new bomb marked the end of the war as definitely as it marked the end of an era.

'We must get back to Ranikhet,' I said.

Barbara thought there was no urgency now. Let us just go on walking, climbing, searching for flowers, stalking the Himalayan pheasant across the gigantic slopes, laughing with chance-met shepherds by day, and by night with our porters round the camp fire. But I insisted that we return to Ranikhet. Now I sensed that the world would begin to turn upside down. The war might be over, but there would be other crises growing to face me, my family, my regiment, and my country. We must turn back. Tonight we would celebrate the simple fact of survival.

The porters straggled in and I told the jemadar to buy a goat, or, if he couldn't get one, a sheep. They were Nepalis — fellow citizens of the Gurkhas with whom I had served for eleven years; but these were hereditary porters, Dhotials from the western part of Nepal. Only one was an ex-soldier (by giving a false tribe and caste he had got into the Gurkhas), but they all spoke Gurkhali, and danced the same Gurkha dances as the men of my regiment and sang the same songs, and accompanied them on the same little drum, the inadal. We had got on well together, and this night we all ate and drank a great deal, and afterwards they asked many questions. The end of the war did not interest them much, but the bomb did, and they asked me more about it than I could answer. A few attempts to understand the theory of relativity and a pragmatic knowledge that E equals mc^2 make a weak base from which to explain nuclear fission to men who have never seen a train, a plane, a radio, or the workings of electricity.

I did not sleep. I had eaten well, but... The atom bomb was wonderful, but... The war was over, but... I felt lonely, and anxious.

The next morning we set off for Ranikhet. On the second day we camped again on the Kuari Pass, and in the afternoon came out of our tent to look at the view. The thought that it might be for the last time oppressed me, and I felt much as another officer of Gurkhas felt, when he crossed this same pass eighty years earlier. By an eerie chance this man, Donald Macintyre, V.C., had actually raised my regiment in 1857. Returning from his last hunting trip into Tibet before retirement, he wrote:

During the day the clouds had been dull and lowering, veiling the mountain-tops deeply in mist, but towards evening they began to lift and disperse, and never in my wanderings over many parts of the globe have I seen anything to equal the marvellously grand and expansive panorama which the rising curtain of sun-illumined, rose-tinted vapour gradually disclosed to view. It was indeed a splendid final transformation scene, so to speak, in this vast theatre of nature I was leaving, and will ever remain deeply engraved on my memory. Eastward, to the right, over a rugged foreground of huge fragments of grey rock, and the irregular line of pointed plumes of the dark-green pines shooting up, tall and straight, from the mountain-side below, rose the noble snow cone of Doonagiri in bold relief against an intensely blue firmament; whilst the more distant crest of Kamet (25,400 feet) reared itself among a medley of frozen peaks, glaciers, and vast untrodden snow-fields lying in dreamy magnificence away northward. Nearer, and more westward, across the profound hazy depth of the intervening valley of the Doulee, mighty phalanxes of rock-panoplied giants, mantled in violet, purple, and blue, and helmeted with eternal snow, stood resplendent in the golden glory of the sunset, keeping watch, as it were, around the sacred precincts of the Badrinath shrine lying latent in one of the deep dark gorges below them. (The good general's prose has become a little violet and purple itself; but I cannot blame him. The prospect from the Kuari Pass is so inhumanly grand that one loses one's human faculties, the power of expression first.)

We trekked on south. Day after day the triple peaks of Trisul, their snow plumes blowing away to the north, gradually swung away and behind us on our left hand. Day after day the porters trudged into camp sweating and slow, their neck muscles bulging, to lower their 80-lb loads from the headband on to a tree stump. One day we found wild strawberries by a hidden waterfall, and one night we heard the sawing of a panther near the tent. Every day we were attacked by leeches, and twice we passed flocks of pack sheep trotting down from Tibet, each animal loaded with 20 lb. of borax. The rains slackened, the sun shone, and on September 7 we reached Ranikhet. We had been out 33 days, had walked 203 miles, and had climbed 52,000 feet. Susan, aged one, greeted us with momentary alarm, then delight, and we enjoyed a short, lazy domesticity.

The war indeed over, my airborne brigade died stillborn, and within a week I received an order posting me to General Headquarters of the Army in India. By early October we were installed in a comfortable bungalow on the outskirts of New Delhi. It had thick stone walls, a wide verandah, half an acre of lawn, several shade trees, and some imposing castor oil bushes. Since India was still in the throes of war austerity we managed to run it with only seven full time servants, plus two or three part-time, and an orderly lent to me by the 9th Gurkhas, who were in Delhi Cantonments. From here I bicycled two miles to work every morning. In the cold weather I often bicycled home for lunch, but when the temperature reached the 90s I gave that up. I had a good job, with good pay, but decided that we — just — could not afford a car. This gave me an odd feeling, because in 1939, as a bachelor adjutant, I had also had a good job with good pay... and had decided that I — just — could not afford a car.

Eight cities of Delhi spread over the plain beside the river Jumna, the latest being Imperial New Delhi of Sir Edward Lutyens, finally completed in 1930. The others are scattered about it, ruins of stone and rubble among the dry fields and scrub desert. In the day of the new city's completion the then-Viceroy had shown the visiting Clemenceau its wonders, and at the end had asked the old Tiger what he thought of it. Clemenceau replied. 'Magnificent! It will certainly make the finest ruin of the lot.' And, because there was so little of the bustle and movement of modern life, New Delhi already gave the impression of being deserted and in decay. A few tongas, a few bicycles, a few taxis, passed up and down the wide roads. A few pedestrians walked under the trees planted at their verges. It was as if a handful of eccentrics had decided to live in a museum.

The principal buildings, of a pink sandstone, are big in size and mongrel in design, for the architect tried to weld together the Hindu and Muslim traditions, even as the Government tried to weld together the Hindu and Muslim peoples. He was also determined to fit in somehow those classic Greek formulae which the West regards as the only ones suitable for these monuments to man's importance. The results are unfortunate. To a man standing on the King's Way, a wide unpeopled avenue sweeping up from the Indian Arch of Victory, the buildings of the Secretariat outline the sky and the moving cloud background in a fine lift of Doric simplicity. Behind, above and to the sides a rash of turrets and domes and things like stone sun helmets pimple this firm line. I think it would have been better for us English to have bowed no whit to India and built like honest alien conquerors, as we had done in Calcutta a century before. There, the principal buildings of authority are great foursquare Georgian houses with high ceilings and thick walls. They look out on English lawns shaded by Indian trees and lit by English flowers. They have become a part of India as the new capital never will, for they are unselfconsciously at ease while New Delhi fairly creaks with the cerebration and uncertainties of the latter-day Empire which built it.

My work lay in one of the huge Secretariat buildings, where I was in charge of M.O.1 (Section One of the Directorate of Military Operations, General Staff). My responsibilities were actual operations of war, and the military aspects of foreign policy. G.H.Q. India had not held control of the war against the Japanese since South East Asia Command had been set up two years earlier, so the 'operations' part of my job meant in practice only action against the tribes of the North West Frontier, and the fundamentals of operational planning. At this period, when we were not fighting a war (even the Frontier was quiet) but trying to tidy up after one, the 'policy' side was more interesting. For example, the Government of India received a query from the British Government in London: What are India's views on the future of the Burma-Siam railway, built by the Japanese during their occupation of those countries? The External Affairs Department, which had received the query, sent a copy to every branch of the Government which might be remotely concerned, and asked for their comments. In the Defence Department this memo ended on my desk.

Since I was dealing with matters of the highest policy, nearly everything I wrote was seen by my immediate boss (the Director of Military Operations), then by one of the Deputy Chiefs of the General Staff, then by the Chief of the General Staff, then the Commander-in-Chief. On really universal matters, it went to the Viceroy. Being that close to the centre of authority as a mere lieutenant-colonel had two sides to it. Officers of my rank in other sections could do much on their own authority; I could do practically nothing. On the other hand, my ideas were sure of a hearing, and there were really no boundaries to my thinking, since M.O.1 could initiate anything.

It was hard work, learning as I went. Since graduating from the Staff College in 1942, I had spent my entire time with troops, either in command or as an operations officer in the field. The largest formation in which I had served was a division, which contained about 17,000 men. The India Command contained over a million, and I was dealing with policy, not men. The problems were of a different kind from anything I had faced before. In the case of the Burma-Siam railway, for instance, the British Foreign Office was shortly going to be negotiating with Siam, and needed to know India's interests. The railway, the infamous Death Railway, had been built by the labour of prisoners of war (mostly British and Australian) 20,000 of whom had died on it under Japanese whips and starvation. It now formed a link which could carry rice from South Burma to the China Sea without the long haul round the Malay Peninsula. But its building had not been a proper economic venture: was it fair to allow it to compete with Indian shipping, and perhaps throw India lascars out of work? The materials belonged to someone — but to whom? They were certainly badly needed for the rehabilitation of India's railways, severely strained by the war. All this was of some peripheral interest to M.O.1, but I could rely on the civil branches to bring up these points. My thinking narrowed down to this: would the continued existence of the railway help or detract from India's ability to defend herself in a future war; or didn't it matter a damn?

To answer this sort of question (on one sheet of paper, with a six-hour deadline) I sometimes had to find and study files going back nearly 150 years, for there was a continuity of policy, and most of my problems had occupied wiser heads than mine. I would dig up minutes composed by Warren Hastings, Dalhousie, Dufferin, Curzon, Roberts, or Kitchener, and memoranda written by Chief Secretaries and lieutenant-generals long dead and forgotten. I would try to grasp the fundamentals behind what they had written, and then think whether political or military progress had vitiated the old position. I tried to weigh the present and future postures of the great powers, and of India's neighbours. Then I drafted; and, if there was time, sent the draft round to one or two other sections, including, almost always, the Financial Adviser. Then I pruned. Then I rewrote. Then my paper was typed; and then it went to my boss, Roddy McLeod.

Roddy was a bald, burly, youngish brigadier of Royal Artillery, with a bulging forehead, a magnificently incisive intelligence, a markedly abrasive personality, and a total inability to suffer fools gladly, or even glumly. Many in the army had an equal inability to suffer Roddy, but drive and sheer brainpower such as his don't often come with automatic charm and silk steering. Having my papers gone over by Roddy was rather like being bombarded by a howitzer at five feet range.

What does this sentence mean? He looks up at me. I have to agree, the sentence is woolly. Make it clear... Redundant. You've said this already. Another sentence to come out. Are you sure of this figure? Where's the authority? The Chinese didn't have any prisoners working on the railway, did they? Then don't mention them. Don't muddy the issue... This is babu-ese. Write English, for Christ's sake.

I return to my office, and re-draft the paper. Words come to have exact meanings, and the putting together of them becomes an art and a science.

The Chief doesn't have time to work out your meaning. You've got to make it clear.

I use fewer and fewer adjectives and adverbs, and aim at drafting a paper without any at all. I try to choose verbs that are forceful without being flamboyant, and will do the work of extra words.

Don't ask the Viceroy questions, Jack. Tell him the military alternatives and the probable consequences of each, with a single clear recommendation.

I found time to launch out on my own. I had fought on the North West Frontier, off and on, for four years before the war. Since then enormous changes had taken place in weapons, communications, mobility. Could we not now improve the old Frontier system? We were spending a hundred million rupees a year on the army up there. Surely there were too many heavy-footed soldiers, not enough reliance on the air, on the Scouts (tribal light infantry)? I worked on a plan which could save eight or nine millions, police the Frontier better, and increase local responsibility. But it would mean a major change in Frontier policy a change in the civil policy, too, perhaps. Who was I, a mere soldier, to suggest such a thing?

Damn it, I was chief of M.O.1!

I drafted a paper... too long, twenty pages... cut it to ten... to four... Finally got it into two sheets of paper, double spaced. Object. How to achieve it. Preparations necessary. Estimated costs and savings.

Roddy accepted it at once. Next day my proposal started for the heights, and I knew the heady excitement of seeing it cheered on all the way, though now of course it was no longer mine. Successively it was the plan of the Directorate of Military Operations, of the General Staff, and with the Chief's agreement, of the Army in India. The Experimental Frontier Brigade came into being... and my child flew the nest. As practically everyone else became involved, M.0.1 moved to other fields.

My job called for me to travel extensively, and if it hadn't I would have invented reasons to go anyway. I went to Burma once and Assam twice. On one of these latter journeys Lieutenant-General Tuker was on the plane. Knowing that I was in M.O. he came down the aisle and handed me a thickish folder. 'Read that,' he said. 'When you get back to Delhi, see that the Chief sees it, will you?'

'Yes, sir,' I said, wondering why he hadn't given it to the Chief himself.

The paper was a brilliantly worked out plan to give Burma and India independence but keep under British dominion a circle of Mongol peoples — the Mongol Shield, he named it — all round them, from Gilgit and Hunza in the north-west to the Shan States in the south-east. As an idea — welding together mountain-dwelling minorities who have always been hostile to and often victimized by the plainsmen below, who are of different religions and cultures — it was great. As a practical proposal it was a waste of time. It had no conceivable chance of fruition. Back in Delhi I gave it to the Chief, as ordered. Field-Marshal Lord Auchinleck; then General Auchinleck, and universally known as the Auk, glanced up at me — 'What's it like?'

'Er, interesting,' I said. 'But I don't think it has any practical application.'

'I haven't got to read it, then?'

'No, sir.'

But he did; for a week later he sent for me, gave the paper back, and said with a shake of his heavy head, 'Gertie Tuker is a very strange man.'

In November I accompanied the Chief into South Persia. The origins of this trip lay in the armistice terms that had ended the war. Under them all foreign powers had agreed to remove their troops from Persia by March 21, 1946. (Persia had been occupied by Russia and Britain, simultaneously, in August 1941, because the old Shah was helping the Nazis.) By late 1945 the Russians still had over two divisions in Azerbaijan, North West Persia, and apparently intended to keep them there indefinitely. The only other foreign troops in the country were the Indian Long Range Desert Squadron, stationed at Zahidan, in the extreme south-east of the country. If the Russians kept their 40,000 men in one end, should we not keep our 140 in the other, as a matter of principle? Cables began to fly between Delhi, London, and Washington. The Chief decided to go and have a look for himself and since he was going to take his DC3 there would be room for quite a large party. I found good reason (major policy matter, old boy!) to go with him. Also in the party were the Countess of Carlisle, who was queen bee of the Women's Auxiliary Corps (India), her aide Betty Collins (a lieutenant-colonel, like myself), and a few other staff officers.

Keeping well in the background, I watched with delight the evident nervous awe, in the presence of the Auk, of the various lesser generals we picked up en route. As we set off from Quetta on the last leg my spirits rose. For three hours we flew over a savagely exhilarating tangle of deserts and mountains, the Afghan plain to the north, the Indian Ocean far to the south. At Zahidan's bleak airstrip we were met by the local Persian general, and by Major Tim Waddilove, commanding our Squadron. Tim and I had been fellow students at the Staff College, and greeted each other warmly. Dinner was in a Nissen hut, the night bitter cold outside, the Persian stars as fierce as tiger's eyes. An American major had come from Teheran to meet us, having travelled two days in a truck loaded with vodka and caviare. After dinner we seemed to have the makings of a good regimental guest night, and I let myself go. With the American major I danced on a table top and sang 'Casey Jones'. Then I started on 'Who'll take the mail to Dead Man's Gulch?' a mass recitative with penalties for errors. The vodka loosened tongues, the mistakes came faster and faster and soon everyone except the Chief and a major-general from Quetta were helpless with laughter. The Chief was sitting back with a happy grin; the major-general's face was frozen in apprehension (I had called the Chief some outrageous names because he kept stumbling over the Dead Man's Gulch responses) as he waited for a thunderbolt to annihilate me. But I had no fear. I admired and liked the Auk, and I had no reason to be afraid of him. I was too junior for his opinion, whatever it may have been, to have a permanent effect on my career, whereas he could pension the major-general off with a word. That night I felt, too, that the Auk needed a respite from his enormous responsibility. His power encouraged sycophancy and his wisdom, quite apart from his four (soon to be five) stars, meant that he was always surrounded by a rather funereal respect. I thought he would enjoy the follies of young men in the old regimental way. So Waddy and I spared him nothing, except a few acts unsuitable for Ladies' Guest nights. After a couple of hours we collapsed into chairs. The Chief beckoned me and I staggered over to him.

He said, 'You're an Old Wellingtonian, aren't you, Jack?' (He had been at Wellington too — actually in the same dormitory as myself, the Beresford, but some thirty years earlier.)

'Yes, sir,' I said.

'Well, you're the most extraordinary O.W. I've ever come across. Have a drink.' He chuckled delightedly. Waddy joined us and we talked with the Chief about the preservation of the Long Range Squadron in the post-war army, if that were at all possible, in order not to lose all that it had learned in its short and experimental existence. As to maintaining the Squadron in Persia, the Chief said, 'I don't see any military reason for keeping you here, Waddilove, whatever the Russians do. I'll talk to the Viceroy when we get back, but I expect you'll be leaving before March 20.'

It was a hot, bumbling flight back to Quetta. An hour after take-off I looked up from my papers to see that across the aisle from me Betty Collins had leaned back in her chair and was asleep. Behind her the Quetta general was asleep. The staff officers were asleep. His Excellency General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, G.C.B., G.C.I.E., C.S.I., D.S.O., O.B.E, Commander-in-Chief in India, was asleep, and snoring lightly I went forward, and into the pilot's compartment. The radio operator was asleep. The co-pilot was asleep The pilot, Squadron-Leader Ken Booth had a book spread over the wheel, and was hunched forward over it. I leaned forward to see what interested the best transport pilot in India. (Ken had been the Viceroy's pilot until he came back from a test flight one day with straw in the D.C.3's undercarriage. He had buzzed an overloaded bullock cart, and they demoted him to the Chief's plane.) Ken's book was Forever Amber. I read over his shoulder with increasing enthusiasm. Shoulders gleamed, busts heaved, swains panted... but Ken's breathing renamed low and even. he was asleep, too.

The aircraft found its way back to its stable, and I to my desk. Tito turned the first of the once free states of eastern Europe into a Communist dictatorship by staging, one-party 'elections', and I thought wearily, here we go again. Examining India's borders I thought that the most likely target for communist expansion in our area was Tibet. For the moment the most likely aggressor was Russia, though if China ever ended her civil wars and was united under a strong central government, then she would be. I began to work out what effort Russia would have to exert to invade Tibet, or give military support to a fake revolution there, and how we could stop them if the Government of India were to accede to a plea from the Dalai Lama for help. When I had come to the conclusion that the Russians would need some 240 squadrons of transport aircraft to do anything effective, or they would have to give us two years warning by a massive road-building programme, I put the file away; but China would be a different proposition.

Roddy kept throwing problems at me. Which of the many airfields built for the expanded wartime air forcesshould be kept in being? The air force had its needs, of course, but we too were vitally interested, as the location of the airfields affected the speed of troop movement, the location of reserves, internal security methods, and a hundred other matters.

Next, railways. In addition to the broad gauge network which covered the whole country, there were two metre-gauge networks, one in the north and one in the south. It is hard to believe, bur a gap of seventy miles separated them, Surely now that gap must be bridged, so that civil and military freight. and passengers could move freely over the whole metre-gauge system. Every branch in G.H.Q. agreed, all the civil departments of the government agreed. The Home Department wailed that they had been trying to get that line built, as a famine relief measure, for thirty years, so they were entirely for our proposal. Fine! Now, how much is it going to cost and who's going to pay for it? Civil or military budget? Split it? Well, old boy, we have managed without it all these years, and you did say it was a strategic necessity, didn't you? The Army should pay. Over my dead body, if we have to pay for all of it, I muttered, and went off to enlist the help of the Financial Adviser to G.H.Q. This was Mr Mohammed Ali, later Prime Minister of Pakistan — a brilliant financier and civil servant, a tough watchdog over the country's money, but always a helpful guide to us simple soldiers through the mazes of his speciality; and a gentleman. Mohammed Ali patted me on the shoulder, laughing, and said, 'Next time, come to me before you mention costs to the civil side.'

The winds heralding political change began to blow through G.H.Q. For many years the Commander-in-Chief had been the head of the Defence Department, and a Member of the Viceroy's Council. Now an interim provisional government was formed, and Mr Nehru agreed to accept the Department of Defence. His long political struggle had pitted the army against him for most of his life, and I think he expected to find that was just another organism designed to further British interests and retain power as long as possible. I know he was relieved and surprised to find that he was mistaken. The Auk had always been a strong and dedicated advocate of early independence for India and from his example all of us took immense pains to separate India's interests from Britain’s in the problems that came to us. Several times, especially on financial matters, we received blasts from London to the effect that we seemed to be treating Britain as a hostile power; but we were not, we were simply pressing India's interests, as we saw them, against anyone else's, including Britain's. I did not find this difficult, for India seemed more home-like to me than Britain did. My family had worked here for 150 years. I was the fifth generation to serve here, as part of the British overlordship. All those years were coming to a head now, and at last one of us had reached the centre of power, at a time when that power would be real, total, and here, not delegated by distant politicians elected by unconcerned and uninformed strangers. I could never be Indian, of course, but surely I could go on serving, as I had served already. Life would go on as before: two or three years in Delhi, then back to the regiment; long leave to England, short leave trekking in the Himalayas. Perhaps we could take Susan next time. (But Barbara was pregnant, the child due in July, 1946.) Sunday lunches of lamb pilao, dal, curried vegetables, pink gins before; and afterwards a sleep on the grass under a tree while Susan crawled over us and the kitten crawled over Susan; dances at the club, old jokes, old friends, British and Indian...

Sam Lewis came up to me one evening in the club. He was some years older than I, and a personal friend of the Chief's. He said, 'I was having lunch with the Auk yesterday. He mentioned you and I told him you were going to be a future Commander-in-Chief.'

'What did he say?' I asked, while Barbara glanced at me with a look of quizzical pride.

'He said, "So I have heard... if there is such an appointment by then. And if he becomes an Indian." '

I went home in a thoughtful mood. Whether I attained two, three, four or five stars was not at that time a sensible thing to worry about. What was important was the prospect put into perspective by the Auk's words. The Indian Army was the outgrowth of forces first raised in 1695 by the Honourable East India Company and in 1859 placed under the British Crown when John Company was wound up. The enlisted men (other ranks) had always been Indian. The officers had all been British until 1919, when the first Indianization programme began. By now we were about half and half. In peacetime the whole of the Indian Army was stationed in India, together with British Army troops hired from the London government to help defend India against foreign attack and internal dissension. When India became independent it was obvious that the British Army troops would be asked to leave as soon as possible. The Auk's political sense told him that the same invitation would be extended, at once, to the remaining British officers of the Indian Army. I realized that I had been a fool to imagine that I would go on moving upward with Philip Mortimer and Bogey Sen, Hugh Pettigrew and Mohammed Usman, Derek Horsford and Shahid Hamid. The phasing out of British officers would not be gradual, as the phasing-in of Indians had been: it would be sudden and final.

I said to Barbara, 'It looks as though a promising career is about to end with a bang, not a whimper.'

'Not your career,' she said. 'I'm sure they'll give you all a chance to transfer to the British Service. They must.'

Perhaps not my career, then, I thought; but my work, surely. England was a place to retire to, not to work in. My work was here.

My dreams that night were not of careers or airfields but of my regiment, of the men with whom I had fought and sweated and bled — Manjang, Gumparsad, Hotu, Rudrabahadur, a thousand others. What was to become of us?

But I was no longer even weakly in control of my fate. Events moved faster and more violently, in India and the world. Ratings of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied at Karachi and Bombay. British soldiers put down the mutiny in Karachi, Indian soldiers in Bombay. The Chief steadfastly refused to ask for aid from cruisers of the Royal Navy, then in Indian waters. Indian officers captured in Malaya and Burma, who had helped to form and lead the Indian Traitor Army against us, were tried by court martial. There was exultant talk in Congress circles that the verdicts would not matter anyway. It was certain that the men would never be executed. When India became independent they would be released and given high honour. This talk ceased suddenly when a number of Indian colonels and majors, who had kept to their loyalty, often under bestial Japanese and Indian traitor torture, let it be known that they would not serve in the same army with men who had failed in that loyalty. The Congress were stayed (at least until Krishna Menon's time as Minister of Defence, fifteen years later) from making the disastrous mistake — far more dangerous to them than it could ever have been during the British dominance — of forming a 'political' army. The officers they were about to inherit had disagreed with many British policies, but had faithfully carried them out. They would do no less when the civil power was wholly Indian.

The hot weather began to make the dusty nights oppressive, Barbara's pregnancy advanced and she went up to Ranikhet to prepare for the baby. In a parallel move the British Government sent out a committee of the cabinet, headed by the old socialist peer Lord Pethwick Lawrence, to prepare the birth of Indian independence. The noble lord arrived, and apologized for his and our existence, while Congress and the Muslim League dug in for the decisive negotiations. Their points of view, which had once been close, were now opposed. A few years back the Muslim League had been asking only that when independence came the Muslims, as a large and generally under-educated minority, should have certain cultural, employment, and representational rights guaranteed to them. The Congress consistently refused to agree, and the League as consistently increased their demands, until now they wanted a separate country of their own, to be called Pakistan.

Late one burning afternoon a month or so later Roddy sent for me and said, 'The Viceroy wants a paper on the strategic results of splitting India. Here are the approximate partition lines you have to consider. I want a draft, about five pages, at eight o'clock tomorrow morning.'

I went back to my office and sat down with a sigh and a curse. Could this mean that the Cabinet Committee's plan which, I knew, offered adequate safeguards for minorities in a federated form of government but resolutely refused to yield to the demand for the creation of a separate Muslim state, had been refused by both sides? I didn't know and I had no time to think about it. My job was to give an unbiased answer to a technical question. I called for my two G.2s (majors).

We worked all evening collecting facts. The telephones hummed while we spoke to the quartermaster-general's people, gunners, ordnance, military farms and lands, engineers, signals, railways. Clerks pinned up and took down map after map. At seven Mohammed Ali, looking very serious, talked to me for an hour. I began to correlate the facts. How would the existing army divide? Would the new countries be militarily viable? It didn't look like it. Pakistan would be like the peel of an orange. It would have all the dangerous frontiers, and much of the military accommodation — but no flesh, no core of industry, manpower, or finance. Everywhere the lines of defence or counter-attack would be in Pakistan, the base depots to support them in India.

Late at night I began drafting. At one in the morning I took my paper home and went to bed. At four I got up and drafted again. At six my telephone rang, and Roddy told me that the Cabinet Committee had changed its schedule. There was not going to be time for anyone to review my work. I must make it fair at once, and it would go direct to the Chief at eight, for him to take to the Viceroy. I broke into a light sweat. The Auk must have been thinking about this problem. What if his opinion was entirely different from mine? Well, to hell with it. This wasn't really a matter of opinions but of facts and trained military deductions from them. I bicycled furiously up to G.H.Q., routed out the General Staff duty clerk, and gave him my draft. At ten to eight Roddy took it to the Chief for his signature.

Briefly, my paper declared that the partition of India was militarily possible, but unsound. For over a century military problems had been worked out on the basis of one country, its natural boundaries the Himalayas and the sea, and this unity was built into the military fabric. Indeed, I said, military unity had helped to unify India, and could continue to do so. I concluded that partition would place a very severe strain on Pakistan, particularly. The official advice of the Defence Department therefore was: don't.

Next day congratulatory messages descended like a Wall Street ticker tape on to my head, starting with a warm note from Roddy and ending with a laudatory epistle from Archie Wavell, the Viceroy. I had, apparently, hit the nail on the head, in fact Told It Like It Is.

As everyone knows, India was, in fact, divided, but it is not perhaps so widely appreciated that the responsibility for this tragedy lies with Mr Nehru. For when the Congress, the Muslim League, and other parties had at last been persuaded to agree to the Cabinet Committee Plan, he gave a press conference at which he stated that the Congress considered itself 'completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise'. As he was the president of the Congress this could only mean that his party, once it attained the majority power promised to it under the Plan, would be free to break the terms under which the other parties had agreed. With a sigh of delight — for in accepting the plan they had been forced to give up the goal of Pakistan — Mr Jinnah and the Muslim League also reneged on their agreement and returned to the old and now unalterable demand for a separate country of their own.

I went home warmed by the praise but tired and depressed. I could no longer float along like a piece of driftwood on the tides of these events. I had my family to think of, as well as my own goals and desires. Delhi was hot, sticky, and unpleasant. I had not seen my parents since June 1939, and they had never seen Barbara or Susan. The fate of the Gurkha Brigade had been thrown into the lap of the gods; or, rather worse than that, into the lap of the politicians. Soon after the Maharajah of Nepal allowed his Gurkha subjects to be enlisted into the Indian Army in 1819 he stipulated that only British officers should command them. If British officers were to be eased out of the Indian Army, that would be impossible. Yet the income from these men's pay and pensions (there were ten Gurkha regiments, each of two battalions) was vital to Nepal's economy. Would the future Government of India want to keep Gurkhas? Congress leaders had often branded them as mercenaries hired solely to suppress Indian freedom. Would the British Government transfer some of the regiments to the British Army, employing them perhaps in Singapore and Hong Kong? The Colonels of several regiments, headed by Gertie Tuker of the 2nd, were, I knew, already intriguing with Members of the British Parliament to ensure that their regiments should be chosen for this transfer. Should I try to do some intriguing on behalf of my regiment, the 4th? And if so, in which direction? Was it really in the interests of a Gurkha regiment, as opposed to that of its British officers, to become an appendage of the British Service? Whitehall knew nothing of Gurkhas, and could only teach them bad habits and unnatural attitudes.

I took a prearranged leave and went up to Ranikhet to assist at the birth of our baby. But doctors are fallible and babies have very little real notion of military punctuality. I spent ten days there while Barbara called her baby all kinds of unkind names and made every effort to deliver herself of it, but without success. Before I returned to Delhi we talked about our future. When my stint in Delhi was finished we had been looking forward to a job in the high mountains. I desperately wanted to work with men again, instead of with paper. One appointment I coveted above all, and Barbara had enthusiastically agreed: commandant of the Gilgit Scouts. But now when I talked of Gilgit she put her hand on my arm and said, 'Jack, I think you should try to get to England.' At first I fought against the idea, but the more I considered the facts the more clearly I saw that she was right. Big decisions were obviously about to be made, and they would be made in England, for Parliament and the India Office would remain supreme until India and Pakistan became Dominions, which was due to happen some time in 1948, two years hence. In England I would be in close touch with events and with people who could advise me. I decided to get a posting there if I could.

There were only two appointments in England for officers of the Indian Army, both of them fortunately of the right rank. One was at the War Office, the other as the Indian Army instructor at the Staff College, Camberley. Officers' postings and reports were in the hands of a general called the Military Secretary, who was responsible directly to the Chief. I had never approached M.S. in my life, for anything. I regarded myself as a professional, ready and able to do whatever was given me to do. I never volunteered and I never refused. But the time had come to assert myself, and I thanked God for the backlog of favourable reports that had accumulated in my file during the war, and for the rows of ribbons on my chest: plenty of other officers wanted to get to England. Then I went to the Military Secretary and asked to be given the Camberley job as soon as it fell vacant. Next day the general sent for me and told me the job was mine, starting in October.

He added with a smile, 'On the basis of your record, you could have had anything you wanted.'

Fine, I thought, thanking him as I went out, but what I wanted was the old life, leading to command of a battalion of my own regiment, mixed with spells with the Gilgit Scouts here and tours on the staff there. But all that was being taken firmly and finally out of my reach, to be as irrevocably lost as my first youth. I must find a new longing, a new love.

Martin was born while I was in London on a flying trip to take some Top-Secret-Super-Hush-Hush-Eyes-of-God-Only documents from the Auk to Lord Montgomery, the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Four days later I was in a bus winding up the mountain road to Ranikhet to greet the new baby. He was dark-red, wrinkled and froglike and he had tired Barbara out; I didn't think much of him, but I could tell Barbara that we had been given space on the troopship Empress of Scotland, due to sail from Bombay on September 8 for a British port, probably Liverpool. On my final evening in Ranikhet I took Barbara up to the ridge above the cantonment for a last look at the Himalayas. From west to east for 200 miles the horizon was a glittering wall of ice and snow, gold tinted in the low sun. The sun left the grass where we stood, and a cold wind shivered in the pines behind, but for half an hour yet those distant battlements shone in the afterglow, hanging in light above the darkness of earth.

I returned to Delhi, where Barbara and the children soon joined me, and we started to pack and crate our belongings. Barbara, bending half naked over the packing cases, straightened up and muttered, 'We could manure a fair-sized strawberry patch with the mule and horse dung they left in the packing straw they sold us. And it's getting wet with our sweat. And now we could make condensed milk out of it, too.' She leaned forward and I saw that she was dripping her own milk into the packing case. 'Tell ayah to bring me Martin,' she said resignedly. Slowly, she got the job done, while in the Secretariat the problems fell thicker and faster and more urgently on my desk. The London Government wanted to set a date for transfer of power — but to whom? The political parties in India had not agreed, so to set a date for transfer was merely to set a date for chaos. Lord Wavell stated that this would cost a great many lives, and that he would not be responsible for carrying out such a policy. As the Government in England intended to do just that, they set about finding someone to replace him, who would do what they wanted.

After a round of goodbyes, in a general atmosphere equally compounded of excitement, anxiety, fear, and hope, we took the train to Bombay. The heat was still appalling, both children cried all the way, and Martin suffered agonies from prickly heat. The heat and humidity increased while we waited two days in a small hotel near the docks. Finally we got on board. The Empress of Scotland was the same ship in which I had crossed the Pacific in 1938, only then she had been called the Empress of Japan. As a twenty-four-year-old bachelor, I had caroused and danced and sung in her from Hong Kong to Honolulu. Things were a little different now. Barbara, with Susan (two) and Martin (five weeks) in a basket, was allotted a first-class cabin on the main deck — but not alone. It had been designed to hold four berths. It now contained twelve bunks in two tiers, and was shared by eleven women and six children, plus four in baskets and cots. I left Barbara in a daze and found that I and three other colonels were sharing what had once been a single cabin on the boat deck.

The voyage began, and it was not pleasant. The Red Sea was at its worst. In Barbara's Black Hole there was always one child crying, to keep everyone else awake. There was no place to wash linen or nappies. Meal times were cramped, the food appalling. Barbara's milk gave out, and we had to mix Martin's formula in crowded, stinking bathrooms and toilets. The decks were crowded with soldiers trying to get some fresh air, and recently married couples trying to make love under inadequate blankets. No one could actually view the action, not even Susan, who was often an interested spectator and usually tried to pull off the blanket for a better view of the strange activities below, but one could almost see the rivers of sweat running out underneath.

Then a soldier on board went down with meningitis, and next day Susan complained of a headache. They put her in the sick bay and the doctor looked into her eye with an optoscope — the sign of meningitis is a red spot deep in the eye — while I took Barbara's hand. Susan's temperature climbed to 106 degrees that evening, and held there all night. Barbara and I spent the hours on deck, walking and waiting. Next day Susan was normal, and the day after she was bounding all over another ward, which she was sharing with five soldiers, to everyone's delight.

We had no time to talk of the distant future, let alone the immediate coming time when we would have to live with Barbara's mother until accommodation was allotted to us in Camberley. The days passed in stoically borne misery, and then suddenly, there ahead in the west was a great square white patch. It was the water catchment area of Gibraltar. Gradually the Rock took form round it, and the East lay behind us.

Here and here did I help England: how can England help me? — say I paraphrased again.

I had the answer three days later. It was raining and a yellowish fog hung over the Mersey. Behind our stern a wave of dirty yellow water curled off towards the muddy shore. At the dock the train was a long way down the pier, there was no one to help us carry our baggage, and about three hand-trolleys between a thousand of us. I made five trips with the kit we had to take with us. God knew when, or where, we would see the heavy baggage in the hold.

Nine o'clock, ten o'clock, eleven... The train waited. There was no food or drink on board, or on the dock. Susan slept on one seat, Barbara was crouched over Martin, who was at last dozing off in his basket at Susan's feet. I examined the floor. It hadn't been washed for a couple of months, or perhaps years. It was midnight, still raining, the dock deserted. The imperialists had come Home, in my case after five generations.

I got the message and, mentally folding my medals, my rank, and my beautiful record away into a trunk, went to sleep on the floor.

Chapter Two

The Staff College, Camberley, is one of those innumerable institutions at which army officers go to school. In earlier days it used to be the only wellspring of military wisdom, but by 1946 there were two other colleges above it — the Joint Services Staff College, and the Imperial Defence College. Our role as instructors at Camberley therefore didn't have quite the cachet it had had when Monty, Slim, and Haig had preceded us, but it was traditionally important, and prestigious enough. We were all majors bearing the local and unpaid rank of lieutenant-colonel, and were known singly and collectively as the Directing Staff, or D.S.

The institution itself was a large ivy-covered building on Crown lands at Camberley, just off the London-Southampton road, thirty miles from Hyde Park Corner. The Royal Military College, Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, was on the same grounds, a mile or so through the woods. It is a country of lakes, small streams, pine and fir forests standing on windswept sandy soil, and open heath criss-crossed by the straight traces of Roman roads. Windsor Castle is not far to the north and other institutions close by. A proper soldier could spend his entire life within a ten-mile radius of Camberley. He would be born there while his father was a student at the Staff College; after education at one of the innumerable prep schools in the district he would go to Wellington, thence to Sandhurst, join a regiment in Aldershot, attend the Staff College, return to Aldershot, retire to Fleet, and end in the Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Broadmoor.

Bachelors, both students and D.S., lived in the main building. Married students found lodging where they could, in the town or nearby; married D.S. were allotted quarters. Ours was No. 17, one of a number of long wooden shacks which had been put up by the Canadian Army as hospital wards in the First War, and condemned as unfit for human habitation immediately afterwards. In the manner of all 'temporary' things their grip on life was much stronger than those designed for eternity. They were still going strong in October, 1946, twenty-seven years after their condemnation, when I arrived to get No. 17 ready for the family. A long passage ran down one side, all rooms opening off it except the kitchen, which had been built on to the other side. The place badly needed painting, and the little patch of garden was full of weeds. Barbara and the children stayed thirty miles away with her mother while I lived in the mess, attended classes 'under instruction', and shopped for furniture.

Everyone in England seemed to have decided to celebrate peace by getting rid of their old furniture. An amazing amount was on sale for amazingly low prices. I attended local auctions two or three times a week, and came back with iron beds at 30 cents each (but the mattresses cost $4 each, to my disgust), a circular walnut dining table for $12, a huge mahogany sideboard beautifully made, all the shelves and drawers lined with green baize, for $4.50, chairs of every shape and size for a few cents, and for little more scraps of stair carpeting which I tacked down the passage and in strategic sites such as the lavatory and under the desk ($8) in my study. The most I paid anywhere was $84 for a complete bedroom suite.

By early December the family was able to move in, and we prepared for the children's first Christmas in England. We bought a Christmas tree, a few cheap presents, and a lot of candles. We propped the tree upright with bricks in the living-room, stuck live guttering candles among the branches and hung paper lanterns over all. It was a lovely scene, and highly perilous, but the door was propped open, a bucket of water stood to hand, and we were determined that Susan and Martin should see a lighted Christmas tree even if the house burned down. When all was ready Barbara brought Martin in in her arms, and Susan crept in on tip-toe. If Martin felt anything, he made no intelligible comment, but Susan's eyes grew and grew, and she thought the tree was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Looking at her then, I thought she was.

The house painters arrived, a gang of German prisoners of war started to dig up the garden, and a severe cold spell struck southern England. We survived with only the usual quota of burst pipes, and saw a most unusual and beautiful sight. The day before the cold front hit Camberley the painters had given the outer wall of the passage its first coat of paint. Next morning the paint had frozen into marvellous crystal patterns. We told the painters to leave that wall untouched, and so it was preserved, the only graceful thing about the unlovely building, all the time we were there.

A new course of students arrived and I formally joined the D.S. My chief work, like that of all the others, was to guide a seminar of eight or ten officers through all their work. The study of any phase of the military art usually began with an introductory lecture in Allenby Hall; then the students would read, in private study, various tomes and papers prepared by one of the D.S., who was in overall charge of that subject; then we would discuss the papers in the seminar, and end with indoor and outdoor exercises. My task in seminar was to guide, not control. I tried to generate enthusiasm and interest more than to lay down the law. I did not myself state the lessons to be learned but asked such questions as would lead a student to do so. I never took part in the heated arguments that arose, but tried to make sure they did arise.

At the end I summed up, but even this only in the early stages; later, I would ask a student to do so. I corrected my seminar's examination papers and criticized their solutions to field exercises, both by the light of the Pink Paper, the D.S. Solution, which was prepared at the same time as the questions by the D.S. in charge of the subject. I soon learned that if I really wanted to arouse my students I would hint that the D.S. Solution was indeed infallible, the veritable Papal Word. Some were Roman Catholics, but none believed very much in the divineness of Authority. They would accept the D.S. Solution only in the purely mathematical problems of logistics. If a student had loaded 1,000 tons of ammunition into a hundred 3-ton trucks, he didn't argue with the Pink Paper which said he couldn't do it. But tactics, fortunately, are not reducible to arithmetic, and every student there had just returned from a long and arduous war. Each had his own ideas, based on his own experience, and if the D.S. Solution was ever accepted it was usually only because the students' solutions were as far from each other as they were from it.

Still, it was exhilarating to hear them going at each other with ball ammunition... We tried that on the Sangro, and it didn't work... Yes, but at Vernon it did... You can't draw any conclusion from that. The Seine and the Sangro have quite different characteristics. Listening, I learned at least as much as I taught.

The other part of a D.S.'s work was the overall responsibility for one of these studies. I was appointed Assistant to the Witch Doctors in charge of Jungle Warfare and Military Law, and, as the Indian Army instructor, was Hereditary Grand Master of Mountain Warfare.

Spring came, the days passed lazily, garlanded with primroses and daffodils and bluebells. Martin pushed his wheeled toy donkey across the lawn, and soon would not need Donk's support. Mrs Cobden, the cat, scratched Susan for intolerable invasions of privacy. Barbara broke her record for the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle: 5 minutes 13 seconds. In the seminar room I surreptitiously studied the students' personalities: Did this one really know, or was he trying to blind us with science? Would that one's assurance stand up under the pressures of war? The weak sun filtered through the tall trees outside, sometimes a murmur of traffic reached us from the London road. At night in my study I corrected papers, a pot of red ink on one side and the D.S. Pink Paper on the other. Sometimes this took an hour and a half, sometimes six hours. Attack IV, for instance, was a written exercise for which I divided my seminar into three sub-seminars. Each sub-seminar had to prepare its own answer to the problem set, in the form of an Operation Order (about ten pages), a map overlay, three road movement graphs and five logistical annexures. This totalled some thirty pages as close-packed as a plum pudding; and there were three of them. If I were to do my duty as thoroughly as the students had done theirs, it took a long time.

So, while Barbara knitted and ironed and read, and sometimes, muttering about the need for a military trade union, went to bed, I read and scribbled, scribbled and read. I had first to appraise each overall solution, that is, what they intended to do and how they intended to do it; and then catch every smallest error in the papers — each incorrect abbreviation, ambiguity, misspelling, mistype, arithmetical error — for at the Staff College we were really teaching two subjects at the same time, first, how to solve military problems, and secondly, the technique of translating the solutions into action. In the first part we were looking for originality and realism, in the second for care and accuracy, to ensure that soldiers were not sent to their deaths through a misprint or because the little word NOT had been carelessly omitted from an order. CARELESS was the favourite word of all D.S., here just as much as in the sister establishment of Quetta, where I had been a student. We wrote it all over the students' papers, large, in red ink; but after my first rapture at castigating other people's mistakes instead of having Roddy McLeod castigate mine, I tried to tone down my enthusiasm and took to reserving CARELESS for mortal errors. When I had corrected all the papers I would make notes on the exercise itself, for consideration by the D.S. who had prepared it, and then on each of my students, against the day when we would spend ten hours in the D.S. Room grading each and every one of them, a grading that would vitally affect their future careers.

I found myself studying the techniques of writing. The lectures and discussion notes I prepared, the lessons I wanted the other D.S. to bring out, had to be put in writing. Some of the green Papers I got from other D.S. were effective, some were not. Why? There were many ways of expressing the same idea: how to find out which was the best? When Charles Earle of the Grenadiers looked over the first draft of my Mountain Warfare paper, he gently pointed out that what I had to say was great, but that my way of saying it was liable to arouse needless antagonism. I re-read my draft, and saw that Charles was right. Gradually I evolved a personal system of writing. First, I decided what effect I wanted to achieve. Second, I thought of the people on whom I wished to achieve that effect. Third, I built a structure of situations, phrases, and words, which should achieve that effect on those people. Fourth, I read what I had written, trying to be one of my readers; decided whether I had done what I set out to do, and made what changes were necessary. Sometimes I went through this process four times.

Barbara bore the brunt, in the repeated re-typings I asked her to do. It was fortunate, for me at least, that she was such a good and fast typist. She had learned when secretary to a Member of Parliament before the war, and later when typing bulletins at the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel on behalf of a rich godmother. 'Do you want me to wear long sleeves while typing?' she said, the first time I gave her a draft to do. 'What on earth for?' I asked. She said 'Those old clergymen who used to infest the S.P.G. insisted that we girls wear long sleeves, otherwise they got too aroused.' She sniffed scornfully. 'Though I didn't believe a word of it. All that aroused them were dirty jokes, I mean lavatory-dirty — poopoo, kaka, ah-ah, peepee. Ugh!'

After the war, where deprivation and danger were interspersed, but never simultaneous, with peace and love, it was a strange hotch-potch sort of life... Children gurgling about the house as I marked the maps for my Mountain Warfare exercise... Mornings on the edge of the downs, shouting arguments against the whistling wind as to whether the tanks of the King's Dragoon Guards should attack this way or that way... England v. Wales at Twickenham and a sudden remembered tightening at the heart as 30,000 Welsh stood to sing 'Land of my Fathers' in deep, unrehearsed harmony: I had heard the Welsh miners sing so outside my window at school, when they were sleeping out on the heath on their hunger march to London... Walking that same heath on a rainy afternoon with Mike Calvert, now a student, reliving the Chindit campaign of three years earlier, when we had both been brigade commanders... Crossing the Thames at the head of a vast (pretend) army: Bill Dodds, the American instructor, crying, 'Is that muddy little crick the Thames?'... Holding Barbara in my arms at the Staff College Ball, wearing white tie and tails, drinking champagne and eating moules mariniêres in the supper room, my mind far from the splendid scene about us, my inner eyes peering into a fog-shrouded future.

I spent some leisure hours on my hobby — railways — long neglected for harsher pursuits; and even taught Barbara and the children some of the finer points of the rite. Railways have always been something special to most male Britons: a people which names one of its stations Mow Cop & Scholar Green is unlikely to regard its railways as a mere means of transportation, and the railways have responded with an unflagging determination to amuse, mystify, and alarm the British traveller. One of the very first trains squashed a Cabinet minister in the presence of the victor of Waterloo, and they went on from there. Train fans (railroad buffs, they would be called in America) come from all ages and all walks of society. Had you taken a train in England in those last days of steam, you would always have seen a group of people gathered round the locomotive. You couldn't have known it, but the group would have comprised two or three schoolmasters, an eminent professor of mathematics, a solicitor's clerk, an army officer (that would be Neil Blair of the Black Watch, or myself), two rural deans, a bishop, and some twenty schoolboys in grey flannel shorts or trousers, blazers, and brightly ringed school caps. The adults would be gazing at the locomotive in rapt silence, the boys writing down its name and number in their notebooks, and exchanging shouts: '6002 King William IV Garn, I got her yesterday. I'll swop her for your Dynevor Castle.' The one sort of person you never saw train spotting was a female, of any age. They didn't even sit in the background, huddled up knitting while guarding the sandwiches, as fishermen's women do.

The railway fan had an outlook all his own. He knew all about the engines, the lines, and the trains but, when in his rail ecstasy, about nothing else. Many were trained by William Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, when he was headmaster of Repton. He did not punish minor boyish deviltries with a caning or a gating, but lent the culprit his own copy of Bradshaw's Railway Guide, and ordered him to work out how to get from Sampford Peverell to Nigg, via Ingra Tor Halt, Alsop-en-le-Dale, and Crook of Devon, starting not earlier than 3.7 p.m. on a Sunday and stopping at every other station en route. The victims, and the friends they roped in to help, learned the dogged perseverance which built the British Empire, and also more about railways than they really cared for at the time: but the memories stuck, pride followed, and proselytism followed pride. If you had such an enthusiast in your compartment, he would be delighted to tell you when your train (or indeed any other train) reached Hetton-le-Hole; but it would not serve to ask him for information on any other subject. You might want to visit York because Constantine was proclaimed Roman emperor there in A.D. 306; the train fan knew only that the best time to go to York is 2 a.m., when the London kipper specials race through from Scotland. Edinburgh? It has the longest station platform in Britain. Cambridge? The second longest. Stratford-upon-Avon? There is said to be a very interesting old turntable in the goods yard...

Two qualities attract the ordinary Briton, as distinct from the fan, to his railways. First, there is the atmosphere. An American train is friendly yet spacious; a British train is institutional, cosy, and tinged with threat. Most coaches (cars) are divided into small compartments, so one travels in isolated groups, arbitrarily selected. The lady opposite you in your little box might be the lovely and generous Countess of Bedworthy, or she might be a fugitive from Ruritania, with secret plans in her corsage. This atmosphere of pleasurable unease extends to S*X. Let me make clear that train fans, as such, are rigidly asexual, and station platforms are about the only places where elderly males associate with blooming boys without some pederasty being attempted or achieved. No, it is plain old lingam-yoni lust, and the compartment system, which cause the trouble. Before entering a compartment the wise traveller takes two precautions. First he decides what sex he is and if possible never gets into a compartment occupied by a lone member of any other sex. Second, he locates the communication cord and sits under it. British men, like others, have been known to think they are irresistible to women, and what better place than an empty compartment to prove it? And there are girls who sit prim as voles until the train is well into the Penge Tunnel, then leap up, tear their clothes, scratch their faces (and yours) and snarl 'Ten pounds or I'll pull the cord.' It is a difficult situation to explain away, though British magistrates are well aware of the racket. I read a story once where the hero, subject to this vexing insinuation, saved his name by pointing quietly to the three-inch ash on his cigar. It might be worth buying a good cigar for the purpose...

But my railway hours were rare. For the most part our life was governed by the place and the time. Like everyone else we stood in queues, ration books in hand. Sweets, bacon, butter, margarine, fats, meat, all were rationed. Every purchase was preceded by family syndicate discussions: how much must we buy to entertain the Roddy McLeods (he had just arrived as Assistant Commandant): where can we 'win' extra cigarettes and whisky? Martin learned his first word: horse. At first he made an anagram out of it, and pronounced it shore. When his ear told him that was wrong, he tried Hor!, shouting it very loudly in the High Street from his pram. He was pointing at a distant horse, yes, but also at a stout lady about three feet away. Her expression lives in our memory. Mrs Cobden had kittens, of which we kept one, naming him Disraeli; and Susan found a nest of field mice in the garden, bringing all the babies in to show us. We shut Mrs Cobden and Disraeli into a closet and hurried the little mice back, fearing that the mother might not return to them; but she did. Susan always had a way with animals. The kennels of the Staff College foxhounds were just behind our bungalow, and Susan spent happy hours talking to them through the wire of their pens. When they were taken out for exercise by the Master of the Drag, she stood yelping with delight among them while the huge beasts bounded all over her, waving their sterns, and the Master cracked his whip and made faces of appalling ferocity. (It is a serious crime in England to be nice to foxhounds.)

We were all learning something — in Barbara's case, how to cook. As a girl she had never opened a can or boiled a kettle. A string of nannies and governesses had interposed their sometimes harsh protection between her and life, between her and her parents. Then there was India, and shoals of servants. Here our domestic staff consisted of a batman, a retired soldier called Bache who did a little more cleaning about the house than he was supposed to, but no cooking; and Kate, a lady whose vocation was house cleaning and avocation the care and feeding of stray dogs. She usually brought along five or six, in a little pushcart, when she came to work for us. (Since then her collection has gone up to thirty or forty; she appears regularly in the picture papers and has become a figure of national fame.) Kate didn't cook either, so Barbara bought a cook book and opened it at page 1. Reading aloud carefully, with interspersed oaths, she filled a pan with water, put it on the stove, and selected two eggs... As for me, I had done much open-air cooking in my time, but lacked finesse as a butler. Told to heat the plates for a formal meal, I put the best Indian Tree dinner plates in the oven... with the roast. They stood up until we started to wash them after the meal; then the bottom fell neatly out of each one.

If we looked only at each day, or out of the window, we were happy enough. Barbara had never quite recovered from the exhausting move so soon after Martin's birth. She was thin, anaemic and, in spite of our wishes and precautions, pregnant again — but happy because we were together and at peace. I was happy in my work. It was when we looked past the day, past Disraeli stalking Martin and Donk across the grass, that we were worried.

On first arrival in England, after an absence of seven years, we had felt like strangers in a foreign land. We had forgotten how to buy rail tickets, what to order in pubs, how to drive in the traffic, how to speak to shopkeepers and policemen. Now all that had come back, but still we did not feel at home. Our years in India — nine for Barbara and twelve for myself, plus five more as a child — had estranged our ways of thinking, or at least our capacity to accept. Neither of us is a drunkard, but we saw no reason why, if we wanted a drink at four o'clock in the afternoon and a man was willing to sell us one, he should not do so. In India it was none of the government's damned business when we chose to have a drink, but in England it was: pub hours were rigidly controlled under a regulation made in 1915 for a wartime situation and never since repealed. Then, all the shops in Camberley closed at 5 p.m. every day; on one afternoon a week they all closed at 1 p.m. This was not because the store owners wanted to close; it was the Early Closing law, and we disagreed with the spirit of that law. Surely the rights of working men and women assistants could be best protected by their unions, and by restrictions on individual working hours? And if a man chose to keep his own shop open all day and all night, what business was it of anyone else's?

These and similar practices had become foreign to us. Plenty of other Englishmen felt the same. The difference between them and us was that we were not prepared to grin and bear it. After the geographical space and freedom of India, I felt that I was in prison. The restrictions on foreign exchange hit us particularly hard, because we needed to get out of prison, and because travel was our greatest pleasure — almost the object of our lives. As some work for Rolls-Royces, or country houses, or mink coats, we worked to travel, and we would not for long allow ourselves to be deprived of that right. (Even with the restrictions in force, we managed, by extreme frugality, to use a brief spring vacation to walk a hundred miles across the massif central in France.)

The summer advanced. Drowsy bees hummed among the flowers outside the window. Frankie Weldon came to the seminar room in morning coat, spongebag trousers, and grey topper, and kept looking at his watch. No one seemed eager to prolong our useful discussion on the Opposed Crossing of a Major River. I closed the session early, after we had agreed that Frankie should share out among us the money we had saved him by imposing this delay on his visit to Ascot.

I went to London, with wife, father and mother to receive my D.S.O. from George VI, King of Great Britain, etc, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India... but that last not for much longer. He looked pale as he stood throughout the long ordeal, the endless file of men and women jerking forward, up, past. My turn came and I knew my family were wearing the same look of tearful and idiotic pride that I saw in myself when Susan cowed a foxhound twice her size or Martin first went solo across our lawn. The King smiled at me, a real smile (but God, he was tired) and murmured, 'Congratulations.' An equerry handed him the medal and he slipped it over the loop which another equerry had already pinned on to my tunic in the anteroom.

The partition of India was decided on, and agreed to by all parties — with glee by the Muslim League and with sorrow by the Congress. Soon the terms to be offered to British officers of the Indian services, when India and Pakistan became self-governing Dominions, were published; and that would be on August 15, this year of 1947, as Lord Mountbatten had speeded up the processes of disengagement. I studied the proposals very carefully, for in them lay the key to our future. As far as concerned me, they offered three choices. First, I could transfer from the Indian to the British service, in my present rank and seniority, but at British rates of pay (they were lower than ours). Second, I could do the same, but serve with one of the four regiments of Gurkhas being transferred to the British Army, for service in the Far East; this would retain my Indian Army rates of pay. Third, I could retire with a pension proportionate to my length of service, plus a 'loss of career' gratuity. The idea of this latter was to enable us to train for or finance some new career, in place of the one that we had been suddenly deprived of.

I thought of the British Army. They would not welcome such as me, for they were already overfull of officers of my seniority. And how could Aldershot, Suez, Nairobi, and the rainswept Ruhr — the places where most of the British Army was stationed — replace the Himalayan home of my regiment in Bakloh? What could satisfy my longings for the wild, high jungles of upper Burma or the raw challenge of the North West Frontier? Nostalgia for Kulu, Spiti, and Kashmir dimmed my eyes. I forced myself back to the subject. The Gurkha collectively (there is, of course, no such person) had his faults, as I had mine; but he knew mine and I knew his. The British soldier, collectively (again, there is no such entity) had his virtues, and I had been proud to have many under my command — but we had not shared those long years. We were friends, but strangers, in spite of our common blood. And the British Army would not employ me much with troops in any case, for my greatest value to it would be as a staff officer. No, I could not contemplate the British Service with enthusiasm, and without enthusiasm the military life is a wasteland.

The transferred Gurkhas, then? They were to be stationed in Malaya, of which I knew nothing except that it was hot and damp. To Barbara and me bliss is mountain water, snow above, and a wind from the peaks in the evening. Then, the children would soon be reaching an age when they would suffer in health and education if they were not sent back to England. But — and this was the two-centuries old dilemma of the Indian Service family — if Barbara went with them, our new-discovered domesticity would be ruined, whereas if we sent them off alone to live with grandmothers and aunts (as had happened to Kipling, Saki, George Orwell, and me, among several hundred thousand others) it was they who might be ruined.

Then there was the matter of the particular regiments that had been chosen for transfer. The wire-pulling and influence-peddling which started before I left India, had continued ever since, in the War Office and Parliament. From Camberley I had written to General Slim, then Commandant of the Imperial Defence College, and an ex-Gurkha (6th and 7th), setting out a proposal that no regiments should be transferred as such. We should set up a new Gurkha Rifle Corps, with a single crest and entity, holding all the battle honours of the old regiments. We should fill it with Volunteers from the present regiments, or, if it seemed preferable, transfer whole battalions but give them new numbers in the new corps so that, say, the 1st Battalion, 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles would become the 6th Battalion, Gurkha Rifle Corps. The Corps should later expand to contain its own artillery, signals, engineer and supply units. We should train and educate many more Gurkhas to hold the King's Commission.

This plan was administratively sounder than the old-fashioned one adopted, and would have made the Malaya Gurkhas acceptable to many officers and men who had no wish to become too closely associated with the peculiarities of, say, the 2nd Goorkhas (one of the regiments eventually transferred). Bill Slim wrote back sympathetically to my ideas, but the business was already beyond his reach, the transfers already under way.

My regiment, the 4th, was not transferred, and I thought, if they don't want the 4th, they won't get me. To hell with them. I was bitter at the time, foolishly so. I should have thanked our stars that we were not chosen. The regiments that stayed with India have expanded and flourished, in their own Himalayas. The ones that went to the British Army served faithfully in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Borneo and as a reward are now about to be disbanded. Some would say that they have been sold down the river; but who would agree with such harsh language, except perhaps the rulers of the five hundred or so Indian States whose 'perpetual' treaties with Britain became as meaningful as so much confetti when Lord Mountbatten took the bridge of the Indian Empire and ran up his famous signal: England expects that every man this day will run like hell.

I toyed with the idea of claiming my Indian citizenship. Since I was born in Calcutta I would be a citizen of the new Dominion by birth, and could simply demand to stay on, as an Indian instead of an Englishman. Many of the Anglo-Indians (of mixed race) were doing just that. How could they keep me out? I didn't think they could. After a time of cautious probing to see whether I really had cast in my lot with India, I would probably be fully accepted, even by the politicians. But... was I Indian? Could I cast in my lot with India? Kashmir beckoned; the rivers of Assam rolled by, smiling; the flame-of-the-forest stippled the forests of the Vindhya Hills; Hindustani and Gurkhali were comfortable in my mouth, and the Nagri script to my pen. I knew India. I was happy there. But... but... We talked hours, day after day, late into the night. Barbara said at last, 'Darling, the truth is you're not Indian, whatever your passport might say. I don't think either of us can make ourselves Indians. It's nothing to do with colour, it's a way of thinking, a self-recognition. Sooner or later the ugly dachshund has to make up his mind that he is not a dachshund at all but a great Dane.'

I agreed glumly. I was not Indian. I was having great difficulty in seeing myself as English. So what was I?

If the British Army, the British Gurkhas and the Indian Army were all out, only one course was left: retirement, an end to my whole military way of life. But this was the bleakest prospect of all. I was a commander and a staff officer, with no special skills that the civilian world seemed to recognize as such. I could co-ordinate the work of engineers, scientists, shippers, pilots, caterers, financiers — but, myself, I could not build a bridge, split an atom, load a ship, fly a plane, bulk-buy food, or run a bank. What could I actually do? Well, I could light a fire in the rain. And read a topographical map: I was probably the best map reader between Wolverhampton and East Grinstead. I could write appreciations...

The word gave me an idea. An 'appreciation of the situation' is the way an army officer is trained to tackle every problem. First, he decides what precisely is his object. Then he considers all the factors affecting the attainment of the object. Then he draws up the various courses open to him, and to the enemy, with their pros and cons. Finally he chooses one of the courses as the best possible, and works out his plan from it. My writing system was a sort of appreciation, and with reason. It worked. With practice, it worked fast. Surely I could apply this tool to our problems? Barbara and I would make a joint effort of it. It was a pity that Susan and Martin weren't old enough to join the syndicate: but their future would have to be included when we came to define our 'object'.

But August came upon us and the Staff College went off en masse for its annual battlefield tour, when coherent thought was impossible. We were supposed to study the lessons from actual battles, on the ground, but as I was in charge of administering a group from headquarters in Paris, all I studied was the menus of a couple of excellent bistros in Montmartre, and where to get the best view of the models going and coming at Christian Dior in their astounding New Look clothes. On August 15 we returned to England. It was very hot, all sixty of us had hangovers, and the cross-channel steamer was crowded with civilian tourists. We sent wedges of officers into the jampacked bar to bring out drinks for all — any drinks. The civilians must have thought the war was back with them. I saw one school-mistressy young woman edging up behind Robin Rose-Price with the obvious intention of asking him who we were and what we were doing. At that moment, Robin — who was in the Welsh Guards and therefore technically did not recognize that there was anyone else present except other Guardees — said in a weary but penetrating voice, 'I feel like a used French letter.' Everyone within earshot jumped visibly: the young lady turned scarlet and backed off violently. Soon we were surrounded by a sanitary cordon several feet wide, and could drink in peace.

I suddenly remembered the date: August 15th. Hari Badhwar, Dhargalkar, Hissam el Effendi and Mohammed Sadiq were in our group. I found them, and shouted 'Dominion Day!' They nodded.

'Good luck to India! Good luck to Pakistan!' I cried. We raised our glasses. Others heard and soon we were all slapping each other's back and drinking toasts to the new nations. So, in the middle of the English Channel, I was cut adrift from my past.

In Camberley Barbara and I settled down to our Life Appreciation. There is an old saying that, when making an appreciation, one should spend about half the total time available clarifying the object, to a point where one can define it in a single clear sentence. A few weeks earlier a civilian lecturer on scientific research had given us a classic example of an ill-thought-out object. In the 1930s both the army and the air force were concerned with the problem of detecting enemy aircraft at a greater distance than the existing searchlights and sound rangers could do. Each service gave the scientific establishment an object to be achieved. The army said they wanted searchlights and sound rangers that could pick up an aircraft at 30,000 feet and 20 miles instead of the then limit of 20,000 feet and 10 miles. In due course they got what they had asked for — better searchlights, better sound rangers.

The air force defined their object more accurately: to detect and track aircraft from as great a distance as possible. They got radar.

So it was about 'object' that Barbara and I talked first. What was our object in life? It is a hard question to answer, in a single sentence. We would all like everything — security, riches, fame, good education for the children, travel, a life useful to others; but experience — and not only in military affairs — teaches that he who goes after incompatible objects is likely to achieve none of them. You have to choose just one object, and take the rest merely as factors to be considered in achieving it. We rejected security first, even though it was important to both of us, particularly to me. No one in my family had worked without the security of a government pension to follow for about 150 years. The idea of launching my family into a rootless future, with no special protection, no adequate pension, and almost no savings, was quite appalling. But when we tried to tell ourselves that security was our object, we could not say it. So out it went.

'The best possible education for the children?' Barbara suggested. This made more sense, for they were good children and would, we thought, deserve every opportunity we could give them. But, as the object? Suppose it meant my becoming a bank clerk, or going to Malaya, or handing them over to some State School for the Production of Geniuses? If it were our object, we'd have to do it. In fact the children's future would not depend on education as much as on other factors, especially our own happiness and the kind of environment we could surround them with. Throw that out then, as our object.

To become rich? Well, that was most desirable. So many other things, ranging from security to adventure and good works, could be attained through money. Also, we had expensive tastes and a wide enough experience of the world to know that whatever we had, there was something better. But, as the object?... A long grey Rolls phaeton drives up. A distinguished-looking man gets out and I stroll to the front door to meet him. He pats Susan on the head and introduces himself: Lord Melchett, chairman of I.C.I. He does not beat about the bush. Word of my Mountain Warfare Exercise has reached Mond House. He would like me to start right away in his office, with succession to his post. 'Say 30,000 pounds a year to begin with, Colonel? I know it isn't much, but, as a start...'

The vision faded. You worked hard to be rich. That I could do. But you didn't let up. Fifty weeks a year at least; on call day and night; watching stock markets, lunching with bankers, dining with merchants. For some ten years now I had been working seven days a week, usually more than twelve hours a day — but only for nine or ten months a year. Those long free months were vital to us. No, being rich could not be our object, because I was unwilling to pay the price.

'You don't want to be famous, do you?' Barbara said, in the tone she had used a year earlier, when she had said, 'Well, you may become a general but I'm damned if I'm going to become a Mrs General.' Now I could answer at once, 'No', because I had thought about fame and glory when wondering what was going to happen to the Indian Army. Those remarks of Sam Lewis and the Auk, about my becoming Commander-in-Chief, had meant a lot to me. Generations of Masters had been galley slaves in India, dying unsung and unhonoured in lowly jobs and lonely places. They would rotate in their graves with delight merely to see the words Field-Marshal Sir John Masters in print, let alone all those cryptic and to them unattainable letters that would follow the name. But it had not taken much consideration then to realize that it was not the end that mattered but the road, and now I could see fame as a spur, perhaps; but as an object, shaping our every move — no.

Did I have any great compulsion or drive which, by itself, would mean fulfilment? I could happily spend my travelling and exploring: but what of the home and education the children must have? I had enough ideas and experience to become a 'military expert' and thinker outside the army, like Liddell Hart. Perhaps, but my heart was in soldiering with Gurkha infantry, not in cerebrating. Politics? A Member of Parliament lectured our little dining club and afterwards invited me to go into politics. He was sure I would soon get a seat in Parliament, and quickly become a junior minister. Perhaps, again; but the only political party with which I felt the slightest sympathy was the Liberal Party, who were having a hard time keeping 6 seats out of 615. A Liberal politician was going to need some other means of support... which took me back to Square One.

Four weeks passed, with many objects considered and rejected. We began cruising among the wreckage, picking up surviving ideas: Independence. Travelling rather than arriving. Public and private liberty. A family unit. Sense of space. Opportunity.

Gradually we hammered them into a sentence, by God into an object.

To live as a family unit in a place that offers space, liberty, and opportunity to all of us and, to me, independence in a work that I like.

I wrote it down on a sheet of paper and put it away in a drawer. Later we would finish the Appreciation: the factors affecting the attainment of the object, the courses open to us, and so on. Then I typed out my formal request to be permitted to resign my commission, the resignation to take effect on December 31, 1948, and to be preceded by the customary twelve months leave 'pending retirement'.

I did not appreciate till years later how extraordinarily kind fate had been in forcing me to think out the purpose of my life. Like most people I had plunged into a career before I had the age or the experience to know what I wanted, before I could appreciate (whether in its military or ordinary meaning) what, on earth, I should do. I had no sense of vocation when I went into the army; indeed I had tried to become, at different times, a lawyer and a sailor.

The weeks rolled unhurriedly towards graduation. We visited the R.A.F. in Germany, to study the effects of mass-bombing on industrial areas (expensive and inefficient, I thought). We descended on the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, and were lectured by an admiral whose ancestor had been one of Nelson's captains at the Nile. The old salt rolled in, reeking of seaweed and tar, reached the dais and turned to confront our mass of khaki uniforms and military moustaches, all standing as we waited for his order to be seated. 'Anchor!' the admiral bellowed.

Lecturers visited us in a steady stream, but the only one who left a lasting impression on me was a youngish gentleman from the Foreign Office who gave us a most interesting, depressing and, as it turned out, penetrating interpretation of Russia's attitudes and policies. He said that the Russian leaders believed that capitalism was about to collapse. Russia would join various co-operative bodies, such as the United Nations, only in order to hasten that collapse by working to prevent agreement or co-operation. Their main fear was that the capitalist world, seeing the end of its system as inevitable, would launch a war to stave it off. More specifically, he said, Russia would never negotiate treaties to end the official state of war with various central European countries, until she had established Communist governments in them. The lever to achieve this was a clause in the armistices which permitted Russia to maintain troops in any country, and on her lines of communication to it, until a peace treaty had been negotiated with that country. The most useful ex-enemy country to Russia in this respect was the furthest west, Austria. For as long as Russia delayed making a peace treaty with Austria, she could keep troops in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Bulgaria.

The Yugo-Slav attacks on unarmed American transports strayed over that country were not merely a snook cocked at the West, but a demonstration to the people of the countries about to go under that no one, not even the United States, was going to help them.

I left this lecture in a grim mood. It seemed to me that if we accepted this sort of aggression from the Soviets now, we would have to face much worse in the future. They were acting in precisely the same way as Hitler had done in the mid '30s, and we were responding in the same way, too, by talking or waving pieces of paper, instead of instant and overwhelming retaliation. I thought the Americans should have dropped an atom bomb on the Yugo-Slavs within six hours after they shot down the first of those planes, and sent troops in to run another election, a free one this time. If the Russians had tried to interfere, they could have had the same treatment. Instead, no one had done a thing, because we had no politicians with the guts to make the people face the unpleasant truth. So, like everyone else who will not learn the lessons of the past we were going to be condemned to re-live it. We would drag again through the '30s and '40s, under continuous pressure and outrage from an armed and murderous dictatorship (which had already murdered rather more of its own subjects than Hitler killed of his).

I felt tempted to stay in the army, where I could at least work to see that we won the next war, as we had the last. But the problem was not military, it was political. Only Parliament could save the future, and I had been into all that. I put the sad prospect of an endless grey half-war, with a real war under unfavourable conditions as the only prospect at the end of it, into a corner of my mind, and resolved to stick to my plans.

In October, on my way to visit the Combined Operations school in North Devon, I turned aside to perform a painful duty. On a day in May 1944, the Japanese had sent a number of 105 mm shells into my brigade headquarters, in North Burma. One splinter stunned my Intelligence Officer, standing next to me in our foxhole. Another killed the artillery major who had just flown in to command our few guns. After the campaign I wrote a letter of condolence to, among others, the mother of the major. She was living with another son, a parson of the Church of England, who was rector of a village under the southern slope of Dartmoor. The parson had long since written asking me to come, if I possibly could, to tell his mother how her son had died. I did not want to do it. Men are killed in many and unpleasant ways in war, and though the major had died almost instantly, what could I say that would make his mother feel better? Still, that was not for me to decide. She wanted it, and now I could make the opportunity to go to her, for my train passed the foot of the valley where the village stood, and I could afford a night there.

It was a glorious evening in October. The railway runs by the verge of the sea, and the flat sunlight fell on the estuary, on fleets of seagulls anchored on the calm water, on the fishing boats coming back to port. The low hills the other side of the estuary rose soft as a Chinese print out of the haze. This, with the Wiltshire downs and the Cornish cliffs, was an England that I loved with a physical passion. Yet, as we reached the 'courses open to us' in our Life Appreciation, it was becoming clear that to achieve our object we must emigrate.

But could I leave this beauty? By here I had passed on my bicycle, a young man, a tent on the back and thoughts of a girl in my head. In Cornwall on a summer night, I had slept under a hedge, wondering what was the rhythmic silent beat that throbbed in the air and shook the earth below me. I found it was the swells of the western ocean breaking on the 400-foot granite cliffs ten miles away, a fetch of 3,000 miles behind them. On the grassy cliff tops by Tintagel and King Arthur's Seat I had watched the choughs wheel against a wind from America. In Wiltshire I had walked at night on the short turf, past the White Horse of the West Saxons, alone in moonlight past Stonehenge, awed, exhilarated.

In my pocket I had a cutting from The Times. The County Council of Cornwall — that very Cornwall of my cliffs and castles and curved surfing beaches — was advertising for a gentleman to fill the post of Chief Constable. In those days Chief Constables, especially in rural areas, were still usually retired officers, and I thought that a young lieutenant-colonel, staff college instructor, with a D.S.O., and an O.B.E., would receive very favourable consideration. The salary was reasonable, a good house went with the job, I would be my own master, the work was for the public good, and it was in Cornwall. My mind raced, and stopped, reversed, and started again. Should I? Shouldn't I?

I arrived in darkness at the village. Dartmoor loomed like the silhouette of a giant hound crouched behind the rectory, and above it the sky was bright with autumn stars. The rector and his mother received me with reserved gratitude for making this journey. After dinner the old lady led me to a small sitting-room whose uncurtained windows looked down the valley, where yellow lights shone between the moor and the sea. I told her of those moments in Burma when her son had died. Before I had said a dozen words her small hand crept out and clasped mine. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She was beautiful. I remember her now more vividly than the clearing there on the hillside, the metallic crash of shells all morning, a voice suddenly shouting, 'The major's hit, sir,' choking dust, a rain of bamboo leaves and cut twigs falling on my head, splinters screaming, Pat Boyle limp at my feet, a little blood trickling over my boots.

When she could speak, she thanked me, again drawing the cloak of courage about her and speaking with control; for I was a stranger, and only during those moments when there could be no strangers, had she bared herself.

Back in Camberley I discussed the Chief Constableship with Barbara. Yes, I love Cornwall, too, she said... And, yes, you'd be your own boss. And work your own hours... but do you want to behave like a Chief Constable the rest of your life? That brought me up short. I am not a particularly raffish fellow, but there is no denying I have always favoured a certain bohemianism in life style. Would the County Council appreciate their Chief Constable dancing Gurkha jaunris on St Ives jetty one summer evening, as thousands cheered? How would they take a South Seas Fancy Dress Ball at Police Headquarters, no one allowed to wear more than two blades of grass? Or Sergeant's Wife Swopping (Compulsory) the first Tuesday of every month?

With regret I tore up the cutting and put thoughts of Cornwall out of my head.

'Then we must emigrate,' I said. 'What we want is simply not available in this country.'

The beauty of England was real to me, and so was my love for it, but I had come to love India in much the same way, so I could obviously learn to love other places, once I got to know them. I said as much, but now it was in Barbara's eyes that I saw tears.

I stopped short. 'What is it? Do you want to stay, so badly?'

'No, no,' she said. 'We must emigrate... I've got to get the dinner ready.'

'Wait.' I caught her hand. 'What...?' Then suddenly I understood. When she married me she had had to give up two children by her first marriage. Liz and Mike were now nine and seven, and were in England. As long as we stayed here there was hope of an accommodation with their father which would allow her to see them again.

I took her in my arms and said, 'Let's approach Hugh again. I believe he's going abroad again, so he might let you have them.'

She shook her head. 'It won't work... We'll see them some day. Meanwhile there's no point in risking Susan's and Martin's future on the off-chance that we might change Liz's and Mike's.' She kissed me. 'Go on. Work out where we ought to go, and we'll talk about it after dinner.'

After talking that night, I started first with the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railway offices in London, to learn whether either had an opening for me. My reasoning was that each of those vast enterprises contained almost as many different parts as an army. Like an army, then, surely they must have a co-ordinating staff? I was wrong. They offered jobs — such as hammering spikes into ties in British Columbia — but no definite opportunities for advancement.

The offices of the other dominions I passed without much hesitation. Many Indian Army officers were buying land in Kenya, but I did not want a 'colonial' life, and I thought Kenya would soon go the way of India, but with more violence. I dismissed Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa because although they all wanted British immigrants, they didn't want my type. Mechanics, skilled or professional men — yes. But not me. I have never had the smallest skill with my hands; and I lack the temperament, the desire, or the patience to grow things. I am a creator or a destroyer, a hunter or a guardian.

I thought of trade. But in thirteen years of adulthood I had never succeeded in selling anything for more than I paid for it. Trade, even more surely than farming, was just not my métier.

I wrote to David Niven, who had been a regular officer of the Highland Light Infantry, asking him if I could hope to land a job in movies. I added that I was not an actor, but thought I could do well at the production end.

Niven replied very helpfully, saying it was really no use trying to plan things ahead in the U.S.A., especially in Hollywood. You had to go, find out, and sell yourself on the spot (as he had done, he did not add). Having been led to thinking of the movies, I tried the J. Arthur Rank organization in England, always on the same tack: I was a trained co-ordinator, I was trained to make decisions — right decisions. Surely somewhere in the civilian world an employer existed who realized that it was easier to teach a person such as me general technical ground work and basic principles, than to teach a long-time technician how to co-ordinate, and accept responsibility in fields other than his own?

I was wrong again. No such person existed. Or if he did, he wasn't at the helm of Rank's, where a pretty secretary risked her job trying and failing to get me an interview with Mr John Davis, its head.

Barbara was seven months gone in her pregnancy, and again we faced the backbreaking job of packing up all our belongings, this time with no idea where we were going. Again, Barbara's mother offered to let us live with her in Claygate until our plans were firm, and we gratefully accepted. My visits to London grew more frequent, more urgent, more dead-endish. Then Bill Dodds said, 'Come to America'.

It was a simple remark but, spoken by an American, it was like a master-key quietly pressed into my hand. I had driven across the United States in 1938, and had loved it. The wide skies of the west had exhilarated me, the sense of opportunity and freedom lifted me out of myself. I had been offered three jobs on that trip, not to mention two young ladies as prospective wives. Only the call of the 4th Gurkhas and the imminent prospect of war had brought me back. Why had I not thought of it before now? A score of memories echoed Why? I remembered the second night of Oklahoma! at Drury Lane, the sheer impact of the man walking alone through the sunlit corn singing 'Oh what a beautiful morning', and at the end the English audience and the American actors almost physically fusing together in a general passion of love. I thought of H. L. Mencken. A country had to be great to distil such wonderful vitriol in its writers — and survive. And Leonard Ross. I would be a new Hyman Kaplan, with a British accent.

Barbara said, 'I don't know anything about America except what you've told me, but if you want to go, I'm happy. I'm not happy here.'

Bill Dodds asked the U.S. Military Attache in London to get me a copy of the New York Times so that I could see what sort of jobs were available. The man sent a full Sunday edition, which weighed some 12 lb. and contained perhaps 450 pages in 8 sections. Days later I emerged from the Classified Section (40 pages) in squinting despair. Channel wire tubing salesman, experienced. Cigar and tobacco jobber. Packing engineer. Moon Hopkins No. 7800 bkpr pkge. Prod desgr ME massprod. I didn't understand a word of it. Ah, here was something more like: INTERESTING friendly full or spare time work your own neighbourhood, Represent well known women's wear. High comma. Interesting indeed, I thought. Selling panties door to door. Why not try them on, madame? I looked back up at the head of the column. Sales Help Wanted — Female. There's always a snag somewhere.

I restated the position. America, and only America, filled every specification of our object. But what in the name of God was I going to do there?

Why, follow David Niven's advice, just go, find out, and do it.

I had a headache. I wished fervently that I was on the D.S. at Quetta instead of Camberley, so that when the course ended we could go on trek in Kashmir, or Assam. Barbara with a pony. Mountains... The wild gleam by then almost permanent in my eyes became wilder. I liked mountains, Barbara liked mountains. Every right-thinking person liked mountains. The Himalayas were the most beautiful mountain mass on earth, and so vast that they could contain all the others and not notice them. I knew a lot about the mechanics of Himalayan travel. Americans were fervid travellers. Why should I not take expeditions of Americans into the Himalayas? For a consideration, of course. It was perfect. The more I thought about it the more it fitted in with everything we wanted.

I began to work out the details as though the devil and Roddy McLeod were at my heels. Staff tables, finance, clothing, gathering at U.S rendezvous, air transport to India, transport from airport to roadhead, accommodation, insurance, details of Himalayan route, fishing and game licences, pack animals or porters, cooks, catering, medical... I wrote to the firms in India which ran Himalayan treks, and fishing trips. I spoke to the sales departments of K.L.M. and B.O.A.C. about group fares, commissions, baggage rates. I went to India House and saw Arthur (Anand) Lall, a deputy to the High Commissioner, who gave me much help and promised his government's blessing and co-operation. When I thought that organizationally, speaking I was ready to go ahead I stopped and summarized the position. If it were to work, each party must number at least fifteen, and no more than twenty; I would have to take at least two such parties per year; the cost per person, for a six-week round trip from New York, all inclusive, (including drinks), would be $2,950.

With this in hand, I felt infinitely better about emigrating. My Himalayan Holiday plan felt as comforting as Dick Whittington's bundle on the end of a stick: it contained something to wrap myself in. In the more material sense my bundle also contained the £300 (then $1,200) a year pension I would be awarded, and my loss-of-career gratuity.

This loss-of-career gratuity was the only instance I ever came across of a government department — any department, any government — being both generous and sensible in a financial arrangment with its servants. It worked like this: if an officer was twenty and had really not started his Indian Army career, he got nothing, for he had lost nothing. If he was fifty and had earned his full pension, he got nothing, for he had had his career. Between these two ends the sum allotted rose to a peak of about £3,500 for an officer caught at seventeen years service, and about thirty-seven years of age. With fourteen years service, and aged thirty-three, I got £3,000. Others planned to use their gratuities to buy a farm, or a share in a business, to study law or medicine, to take courses in accountancy, or in how to be secretary of a golf club (a favourite, this). I proposed to gamble with mine, that is, bet my gratuity that we could make a living and a home in America before it ran out. Barbara agreed, and I felt even better. The clouds and doubts were rising. We felt uplifted and ennobled.

Why a reasonably normal couple should feel so close to heroic at the idea of venturing into the world with an assured income of 300 pounds a year, and 3,000 pounds in cash, is hard to explain. But it was so. We were nonchalant in the face of floods, earthquakes, cobras, and leopards under the bed. Ice, snow, long marches, heat and hostile natives did not bother us. We had lived happily and raised children without electricity, gas or plumbing, surrounded by lethal diseases. But Barbara had been brought up to inherited money (lost in the Hatry crash of 1929) and I on an adequate government pension. Our lack of fear of just about everything else was counterbalanced by real terror at even the shadow of insecurity.

Chestnuts lay under the trees and the brown misty softness of late English autumn thickened the air. Blue smoke from the gardeners' bonfires drifted across the lake. In the ivy-covered building, behind the coat of arms there — an owl astride crossed swords and the motto Tam Marte quam Minerva — we of the D.S. began grading the students and making our recommendations about the line of staff or command duty to which each would probably be best suited. The last exercises were piled up in our racks, the last war games filled rooms and corridors with maps, cables, telephones, and simulated radio sets. We prepared Allenby Hall for the last cloth model demonstrations, and coloured ribbons representing radio channels filled its earth and sky with complicated brilliance. I was presented with my engraved silver owl, the mark that I had instructed at the Staff College.

A fellow D.S. came up to me in the morning coffee break. 'I hear you're going to America, Jack?'

'Yes.'

'Well, my wife has invented a brassiere that she thinks might have a market there...'

I stared at him. We began to laugh. We arranged to meet for cocktails at his house that night. There Barbara and I learned the mysteries of the brassiere.

His wife was a friend of a leading British gynaecologist. With him, she had been studying the problems of women's breasts after lactation, and of over-heavy breasts in general. She had engineered a bra designed to hold, lift, divide, support, massage, and comfort all shapes and sizes of bosom. It also, she said, looked attractive, as that was important. America was the land of uplift. Why didn't I take a model of the magic bra with me and see if I couldn't interest someone in patenting and manufacturing it, she and I to share in the proceeds?

I agreed. I was not quite so sure as the inventor about the bra's natural charm, but it would add another arrow to my quiver (if any metaphor can encompass conducted tours of the Garhwal Himalaya and a prosthetic bra).

In Savile Row I ordered the construction of an exceptionally hairy suit of Harris tweed, to make a good impression on the American natives. We sold our furniture, with the proviso that it would not be taken away until we were out of the house, which would be early in January 1948. The children were getting worried by the commotion and I knew we must settle down soon, and for good. Susan had had a short spell of stuttering when we came back from India; it had gone, but now it was starting again. Born in Bombay, she had moved several times across India; then to Claygate; then Camberley, which had become her first remembered home. Now we were on the move again, and she sensed that it was an important and perhaps dangerous change, without knowing its nature. Daddy won't be wearing uniform soon. But Daddy always wears uniform until lunch. What will happen if he doesn't wear uniform?

And now were fired the first shots of a Seven Years War between myself and the U.S. Immigration authorities. The war was not of my making. The capitalist-imperialist aggressors had the effrontery to... But let me begin at the beginning, for we must go on to the end.

When we decided to emigrate to the United States I went to the Embassy, picked up the appropriate papers, and took them back to Camberley to fill in. There was a quota system for immigration, I knew, but I also knew that the British quota was 65,000 per annum, and that it was never filled. I set to work on the papers. No, I had no intention of blowing up the President. No, I was not now and had never been a member of the Communist Party. Yes, I would have means to support myself and could prove it. Was I a sink of moral turpitude? I looked at that one dubiously. Who was to define moral turpitude? According to the Pope I was guilty of it because my wife had been someone else's, and there had been adultery and divorce. According to the Presbyter General of the Church of Scotland and several other ecclesiastics I was guilty because I played games on the Sabbath. According to the London School of Economics I was guilty because I had accepted and enjoyed a position in the Imperial Government of India... Well, I would put down No, and explain later, if necessary. All in all, I gave a lot of information, including the fact that I had been born in Fort William Military Hospital, in the city of Calcutta, in the Presidency of Bengal, India, on October 26, 1914, the son of a British officer of the Indian Army. Then I mailed the papers back to the Embassy and waited blithely for them to send me my visa.

A week or so later I was informed that I had been placed on the Indian quota. The waiting list on that quota was at the moment four and a half years. Still blithe, I wrote again, pointing out that there must have been a mistake; I was British, not Indian.

They wrote back that there was no mistake. According to the law, a would-be immigrant's quota was decided on the basis of his country of birth, and nothing else. I had been born in India: ergo...

I spoke to Bill Dodds, who gave me the name of a rumoured-to-be-reasonable American bureaucrat, donned my other suit (dark pin-stripe, sincere) and went to London. The bureaucrat was polite but adamant. The law was as stated. Perhaps the spirit of the law meant something else but they had to go by the letter. No, there was no one who had the authority to bypass the law in special cases. No, it would not help to prove that I was of pure English parentage. There was nothing to be done but wait for my turn on the Indian quota.

I sat there, staring at him, thinking fast. If I were to accept this place on the Indian quota I would have to take a job here while waiting. What job? And then give it up? Settle my family in, and then uproot them again? Out of the question! What I must do was get to America as a visitor, then, find out whether I could sell the Himalayan tours or the Bra, and take it from there; move on to Canada, perhaps; return beaten to England, perhaps; find a job in the U.S.A., and some way of getting in legally and permanently, as thousands must surely do with such a foolish law as this to contend against.

I told the bureaucrat I would withdraw my application for an immigrant's visa, and apply instead for a visitor's visa. The man looked almost embarrassed as he mumbled that that was unfortunately now impossible. I felt I was at a mad hatter's tea party. I asked him cautiously why. 'Because you have applied for an immigrant's visa,' he said. 'It's a regulation we have, because so many people who found themselves on long quotas — the delay for Greeks is eighty-one years, you know — would apply for a visitor's visa and then as soon as they got over, disappear. Plenty of them become public charges. So we made this regulation... It may not be so bad,' he said helpfully. 'People drop off the list. You may not have to wait as long as four and a half years.'

I thanked him as warmly as I could manage, which was only a degree above glacially, and returned to Camberley. I was in a fine rage even before the train left Waterloo and my fellow traveller must have thought he was locked in with a madman, for I glared out of the window, muttered to myself, and scribbled furious notes on pieces of paper. This was downright double-dealing. What right had they to keep me out of the United States if I wanted to go? Wasn't the country built on immigrants, on freedom to come and go? Wasn't it barely a week since I had thrilled to learn what was inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

What generosity, I had thought, what a marvel of welcome! I wasn't sure that I could quite agree to being a huddled mass or a wretched refuse, but I was certainly homeless and yearning to breathe free. What sort of a country would they have now if the Indians (Red) had had an Immigration Service when the Pilgrims set out in 1620?

Those Pilgrim Fathers had had to fight storms, shipwreck, cold, disease, famine. I saw that this Pilgrim Son would have to battle with the 20th century's stand-ins for natural hazard: red tape, bureaucracy, and ill-written laws.

I gathered Bill Dodds and all the four American students at my bungalow, told them what had happened, and asked for advice. One shook his head and said, 'You can't fight City Hall,' a remark that I found as irrelevant as baffling. The rest said, keep at it, screw the regulations, hell, a thousand Mexicans are swimming the Rio Grande every week, there are always ways and means, what you need is some influence. Bill was a personal friend of the head of the U.S. Military Mission in Britain. He promised to tell my story to the general, who might be persuaded to talk to the consulate people. Meantime 'It's the Army-Navy game tomorrow,' he said. 'We can get it on the radio. Come and listen.'

I had seen one game of American football in my life, the Sugar Bowl game of 1939 between Texas Christian and Carnegie Tech, with Davey O'Brien as the hero. That was now nine years ago, and my hazy memories of the great concrete bowl and the yelling crowd were not enough to put any reality behind the announcer's gabble. Second and four on the five... right tackle smash, gain of two... fake to Kellum, Scot has it, there's a hole, a big hole, he's in the clear... The Crabtown defence is beginning to tire... Barbara asked if someone would please tell her what was going on. Although she was then 52 inches round what had been her waist three American majors gallantly clustered about her with eager explanations. Barbara batted her eyelashes at them, while I morosely drank more bourbon, which did nothing to increase my comprehension. I wondered whether I was really equipped for life in the U.S.A. After a long time everyone yelled cheerfully and had several more drinks. Army had won.

A week later Bill told me he believed I could safely go and see the U.S. Immigration people again. The same bureaucrat received me and told me that in view of my standing as a British officer they were sure I would not go to ground in the United States illegally. They would therefore forget my application for a permanent visa and give me a six months visitor's visa. I thanked him, he wished me good luck, I left. On the return journey to Camberley I mentally drafted a letter asking my mother why she had not had the forethought to get on a boat as soon as she felt that I was imminent. All babies born on British ships at sea are registered as having been born in England.

My passage was booked on the Queen Elizabeth, sailing from Southampton on February 4, 1948. By mid April, we agreed, I must send definite instructions to Barbara as to whether she was to follow, stay, or meet me somewhere else. We found a woman in her early thirties, who would work for Barbara as Nanny in charge of the children, and would come to America if asked to, and work there for a year at her British rate of wages, we to pay her fares both ways. After the year we would either have to raise her wages to American rates, or return her to England. (I should perhaps explain that to people of our generation and background a Nanny was the one indispensable help. We didn't mind cooking, scrubbing floors, weeding, or cleaning lavatories, but if the wife were perpetually tied to the children the marital relationship would be strained.) I made my last appearance in Allenby Hall, as an actor in one of the Combined Operations demonstrations. I was the fuddled major who asks the foolish questions which enable the wise colonel to bring out the lessons we wanted. I rewrote my part slightly so that at the grand finale, when the Signal Corps brigadier revealed that yes, indeed, the Royal Corps could provide twelve non-overlapping radio channels and twenty-seven different cyphers for a single beachhead, I took off my belt and threw it down in the traditional gesture of the disgusted private, and cried aloud the equally traditional words — 'I've had enough! I'll soldier no more!'

We got a big laugh, but I was not so cheerful under the tunic. The Indians and Pakistanis (how strange that latter name still sounded on my lips and in my heart) came for farewell drinks. Such students would continue attending courses at Camberley, but I was the last Indian Army instructor. We talked of what was gone and what would come, and parted. India had many devoted sons, but none more filled with the moral courage that makes nations, than these and those others of their generation, who served the British government loyally — some, like Han and Drag, through physical torture — in order that when their country became free, it should have trained hands as well as ready voices to serve it. Always vilified by their political compatriots, often snubbed by the English, through it all learning to admire what was admirable, giving nothing away, keeping silent when they could, speaking up when they must, above all, never hating — it was these, I thought, who would hold India and Pakistan together.

One rainy night, and cold, the trees bare and the dead leaves piled dark in the corners of the grass and the edges of the drive and under the single street light outside our gate in the depths of the Staff College woods, Barbara told me her time had come. I telephoned the nursing home in Farnborough, five miles away, where we had long since booked a room, for many babies were being born that second post-war year. My car was full of petrol, all five tyres correctly inflated, the oil and battery checked daily for the last ten days, everything in readiness. It would not start.

I awakened my neighbour — it was one in the morning — and since he was in the Royal Tank Regiment, the car would start for him! At Farnborough the matron told me to come back the next morning about ten, as nothing would happen before then. I slept little, and early the following day drove to Farnborough, where Barbara's mother joined me. The doctor came into the little anteroom and told us Barbara was well. She had given birth to a seven-pound girl at about six o'clock. This was her fifth child and it had not taken as long as the nurse had expected.

'How's the baby?' Ethel asked quickly, used to the subtleties of childbirth.

The doctor did not speak for an instant. Then he said gently, 'She's not well, Mrs Allcard.' He explained that our child had been born with a defect that pressed part of the skull on to the brain. She might live as long as fifteen years. No more, under any circumstances. If she did survive at all, she would live as an idiot; but she might die tomorrow.

I was far off, thinking. I heard the doctor ask whether we wanted to have the child christened at once. I heard Ethel say Yes. There was a padre in the hospital and they brought the baby and it was done. Barbara and I had long since decided to call our child Caroline if it were a girl, and Alexander, a family name, if it were a boy. Ethel held Caroline for the ceremony, then I took her.

The padre left us, with a word of comfort. The tiny spot of water gleamed on the baby's forehead. My thoughts slowed, stopped. There had been a day, a million years ago, when I had looked at a doctor as I was now looking at this baby, and nodded; so that he went and put overloaded needles into the flesh of shattered men, men without faces or shoulders, men with no body below the navel, men with half a head and half a chest, the rain falling on their ruptured faces, shells bursting around, the Japanese coming, no way of carrying them. Now Barbara lay in another room here, and in my arms I held a scrap of mortality that would need the constant care of both of us for fourteen years — and then die! What would that do to Susan and Martin? To me? It would destroy Barbara, I knew.

The floor was stone and hard. Ethel was smiling down at the tiny thing — full of love, no hint of pity or sorrow on her face.

I could not do it. I gave the baby to her, sweating, and went to Barbara.

The next day Caroline died. The day after, Ethel and I stood side by side in a little plot of the military cemetery at Farnborough and the padre buried my daughter and they put a small stone over her, where she lies now.

Chapter Three

The Queen Elizabeth plunged steadily towards New York. Among the 1st Class passengers were Maharajah Sir Kaiser Shamsher Jangbahadur Rana of Nepal; the Marquess of Linlithgow with his marchioness and daughters; Mr Hugo Rogers; and I. The Maharajah was going to Washington to present his credentials to President Truman as Nepalese Ambassador to the United States. The Marquess, lately Viceroy of India, was going to New York on business connected with the Midland Bank, of which he was chairman. Hugo Rogers was returning to his job as Borough President of Manhattan. And I was a Westward Ho Dick Whittington travelling in unaccustomed luxury on a government-paid passage, the last I would be entitled to. I was on my way to America, speeded by my mother's tears, my father's good wishes, my wife's love and faith, and an otherwise almost universal confidence that I would lose our money, fail in my plan, and return with my tail between my legs.

It was February, 1948. Every day I walked the deck for hours, to work up an appetite for the free meals, and to keep myself out of the bar, for which I had no money to spare. I also spent hours studying the Himalayan plan, preparing myself to answer any possible questions on it. And I practised putting on and taking off The Bra. My demonstration model was made of peach-coloured satin and looked like a novice's class in knot tying.

The huge ship was almost empty. Most of the passengers seemed to be businessmen from Yorkshire or Ohio, and very few were accompanied by their wives. The only glamour-puss on board, a blonde woman of indeterminate age and some connection with Hollywood, had more attention paid to her than she merited. The attention was shown in concrete form. Never had I seen money spent in the way it was on that ship. I began to realize that in these circles the words 'rich' and 'money' meant something quite different from what I had thought before. In pre-war voyages to and from India, for example, we used to buy tickets for the ship's daily mileage sweepstake for some fixed small sum, about a dollar, perhaps. Some mileages might have many tickets placed on them, some few or none. But here the possible mileages for the next day were auctioned every evening, one by one. They were bought for sums ranging up to $4,000, sometimes by an individual, sometimes by a syndicate. In the bar, too, money flowed like water (well, that flowed with extreme caution), but there was not much gaiety anywhere, neither in the auction room, the bar, the dance floor, or the boutiques where $100 presents were bought like glass baubles. In the manner of so many English visitors to the American shore I began to formulate a suitable generalization: businessmen, particularly Americans, take their pleasures sadly. But, on looking a little closer, I saw that really the money meant nothing to those people. They lacked a feeling that those of us who had never had much money knew well, a feeling that spending money on non-essentials is somehow immoral unless it produces violent euphoria.

In the main I kept myself to myself, since it was more economical; but I did strike up an acquaintance with Hugo Rogers, and sounded him out about my Himalayan Holidays. Mr Rogers and his associates (or bodyguards? he was never alone) listened disbelievingly. He was friendly in a cold way, but his answers to my questions were non-informative to the point of evasion. I did not at that time realize what being Borough President of Manhattan implied; and though I could have sorted out the meaning of 'the Democratic Party organization in New York County', I would never have known to shorten the name to 'Tammany'. Then the Ambassador heard that I had served in the 4th Gurkhas, and was kind enough to spend much of his time with me, talking about Nepal's future and Indian politics. Gandhi had been murdered the week before, and we agreed that the most important effect on India would be to leave Nehru without check or rival for as long as he lived. We were both worried by Mr Nehru's tendency to shoot from the hip, and by his absorption with Kashmir (he was a Kashmiri Brahmin), an absorption that had led him to try to enter Kashmir against the Maharajah's order, and get himself arrested at a time when he was supposed to be negotiating with the Cabinet Committee on the fate of India as a whole.

He kindly introduced me to the Linlithgows, in the hope that they could do something for me in America; but the marquess was not a very forthcoming type, nor could I think of any favour to ask him — I certainly didn't want a job in a U.S. office of his bank — so after a somewhat stilted discussion round a small table, we parted, and I only saw them again at a distance.

The days passed, cold in the shrieking wind on deck, cosy, somnolent and overfed below. On February 9 I got up well before dawn and went forward. Nine years, to the day, had passed since I last saw New York. I had sailed at night, the Manhattan gliding down the Hudson and I, alone by the rail, hungering for the banked lights of the city. Then I had been a tourist, and though I had had little money in my pocket I had been coming from a secure place, and knew I would return to it — the 4th Gurkhas, a career, a pensioned retirement — unless the bullets got me first. Now, in the last grey of night, the giant throb of the ship almost silenced as the Sandy Hook pilot clambered aboard, lights sparkling along a low lying coast to the north, I felt as I had when the battalion approached the shore of Iraq in 1941. I challenged the unseen land — friend or foe? Would it answer me with gifts, or with shot and shell? A cold wind whined among the forecastle derricks and I huddled deeper into my coat behind the glass of the promenade deck, peering forward.

As we glided through the Narrows the dawn spread up and out, and the magic city rose at the head of the Upper Bay.

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Only Marlowe's 'mighty line' came to me, and would not go. I did not try to analyse the application of the line, to wonder whether New York was the face, or the topless towers — and mine the face. The light slanted cold from the east across a bitter, cloud-streamered sky. The west sides of the buildings were dark exclamations, the east bright, the water black but aglitter with points of light on the thrown waves. We forged on through grinding floes and shattered blocks of ice, past the Statue of Liberty, past Governor's Island. For a moment Lower Broadway opened a long canyon, then the walls closed. We passed into the North River. We docked.

I had arrived. Surely no immigrant ever greeted the city and the world with a greater exhilaration, a greater passion of excitement and determination.

Alice Mathews, who had been Alice Westfeldt when her family were my hosts in New Orleans in '38, met me at the pier and took me off to Morningside Heights, where her husband was adviser to foreign students at Columbia University. After a few days there I moved to a small hotel in the east 30s, where I got a small room on the seventh floor for $19 a week. The cockroaches had left the place in disgust some years earlier, but it suited me. For $18 I bought a typewriter, which may have been Mr Sholes's first demonstration model, and opened my Himalayan Holidays file. I was in business.

I took a day or two off to walk about the city and arrange my thoughts. The family were supposed to move — somewhere — by mid June, but I ought to have a firm plan by the end of April. That gave me three months to make good with the Himalayan Holidays, The Bra, or whatever else I could unearth. I must live as cheaply as possible; I did not know how cheaply that would be, but I thought I could get by on $42 a week, all in. Above that, I must obviously be prepared to spend something on pushing my two plans. $200 seemed a proper sum of money to allot to them. When that was spent, I would have to decide whether to allot more time and money to them, or turn to something else. What else, I had no idea.

New York began to awaken at half past seven every morning, when I went out for breakfast. Dirty snow, left over from the Big Snow of December 26, 1947, lay packed along walls and sidewalks. Each morning, as the snow melted, new objects emerged from it — a pocket-book, a set of false teeth, an overshoe, a snow shovel. I ate at a tiny diner next door to the hotel, run by two Greek brothers. They closed at 3 a.m. and opened at 5.30 a.m. The food was not great, but it was acceptable, and I ate there because it made me feel good to think that the owners, whose accents were stronger than mine, could make a living by sheer determination. In the long reaches of the night one used to sleep under the counter, while the other stood sentry.

The bars also were open all day and most of the night and though my drinking was severely limited I made a point of occasionally downing a beer at an hour when the pubs in England would have been shut, to confirm to myself the reality of this particular freedom. I also felt easier in my mind, as I watched the work done in bars and cafeterias, for I saw that with a little practice I could undertake any of it. It would hardly be the attainment of our life-object for me to become a quick-lunch artist, but the idea put a kind of backstop behind my fears. We would not starve.

I began to hear the rhythm of the city. With each day's passing hours New York's life-flow shifted from some arteries to others. As Fifth Avenue congealed, Sixth and Second throbbed; 57th Street dozed and 14th Street awoke. All day steam hissed mysteriously and menacingly out of manholes in the streets, melting the snow around them, and at night the racing taxis hit the manhole covers with a double cl-clunk which, with the police sirens, was the music of the lonely hours. There were amazing neon-lit palaces where the packaged, cooked food was stacked in holes in the wall and you had to get it out yourself and take it on a tray to a sharp-eyed lady in a high chair. A dozen radio stations kept on the air twenty-four hours a day. The subways were ancient and filthy, and the streets full of blowing paper and junk of all kinds, but there were no girls offering sleazy delights from the doorways round Times Square, or anywhere else.

The pace of New York was measured and dignified, and considerably slower than London's. The people on Madison Avenue and in Herald Square moved less hurriedly than the people in Regent Street. For every man I saw running to catch a bus or subway I would have seen twenty in London. I never saw a New York girl running at all; in 87

London the pretty typists ran and scurried out of Victoria or Waterloo as frantically as the clerks. The elevators moved very fast once one had got into them; but that was not the New Yorker hurrying, that was a machine hurrying for him. The few escalators were narrow and old-fashioned, and seemed to be regarded as dangerous innovations. They moved so cautiously that in London everyone would have been running up or down them (in London one person in five on the escalators is always running, even at their fast speeds). So I went about my business, never stopping, at the even pace of the great city.

Carrying the Himalayan Holidays file I began to visit travel agents. I walked over 100 blocks every day, and usually saw ten or twelve agents. They were amazingly good in giving me their time, for me to explain what I was about; but they were not encouraging. I quickly found that a chief obstacle was a well-concealed distrust of my abilities and honesty. This brought home to me, for the first time, how truly I had cut my moorings in leaving England. The social structure of England was such that with my accent and my army rank my honesty would be taken for granted until I did something to cause people to doubt it. In England I was never asked to produce references, give my address on a cheque, or make a deposit on a purchase. In New York my hairy tweed suit and my accent, though both genuine, seemed to arouse the opposite feeling in those with whom I was trying to do business. I moved in a strong aura of slightly mystified distrust. I could almost hear the men muttering to themselves, Well, this guy's a phony if ever I saw one, but he's picked a strange racket; he isn't going to make much money out of it whatever he does, so what's the deal? Beyond doubting my honesty they also clearly mistrusted my competence, for to them service in a regular army — any regular army — was automatically a mark of business ineptitude.

To heighten these obstacles there was the unfortunate fact, now learned by me for the first time, that a well-known lady had taken a party of Americans to India not long before, and left them stranded in Bombay, while she came back with the money. Some of the agents I talked to had been bitten in that affair and did not want to get bitten again.

In the outside world, which became dimmer and more unreal every day as I dug deeper into my own struggle for survival, the Foreign Office prophecies continued to come sickeningly true. In this month of February the Communists, protected by Russian troops, took over Czechoslovakia, and in March murdered Jan Masaryk, to remove the only figure round whom an opposition could have rallied.

I learned of the existence of travel editors, and began to call on them. Snippets about Himalayan Holidays appeared in half a dozen newspapers and magazines. Then a letter of inquiry arrived from Boston, and I danced for joy in my seventh floor eyrie. Success!

The writer of that letter came down to New York and we had a long talk. He was, I think, convinced of my good faith, but it turned out that my expedition was not going to fit into his schedule. However, he gave me introductions, I was invited to parties, met people, and talked continually about the Himalayas, and the wonders of the open air and the high mountains. My victims listened with tolerant mistrust — of the open air, I mean. (Was it not in New York that the cocktail party guest crept into the kitchen and opened the window a tiny fraction to get some air, to have the hostess rush in a moment later, crying 'I smell gas!'?)

I allotted more time to The Bra, and found my way over to Seventh Avenue and the notions streets of the west 30s. Bra in hand, I explained its merits to many a wary denizen of the garment district. Their idiom was more sharply pointed than the travel agents', and they worried considerably less as to whether they were hurting my feelings; but they spoke their opinions honestly, and were in that way more helpful. Also, they didn't care what kind of a charlatan I might be. They confined their attention to the wonderful bra, and when that was dismissed, as it always was, chatted to me with no ill will. When I left these small, cluttered establishments we were usually on the best of terms, and I shared several kosher lunches in the district, but I wish I could have recorded in marble the expressions that accompanied our early dialogues, which went something like this:

'Good morning. I'm Colonel Jack Masters. I have here a brassy-air that should interest you.'

The chewed, unlit cigar swings slowly from the left to the right side of the mouth opposite, the ears prick forward like a hound's, the nose twitches, the eyes stray from my mouth, whence these strange noises emerge, to the tweed suit.

'A brazeer? That?'

'This strap here, and this, go round under the bosom, and by tightening, so...'

The cigar rotates wildly: 'Who did you say you were, mister?'

'... remarkable brassyair... patents pending...

He gets up and fingers my suit, which has the texture of a grouse moor. 'Nice piece of material there. How much did that set you back?'

'...supports sagging breast... firms muscles...

'Jesus, a dame could strangle herself in this, you know... Now, this tweed...

When I was there in February 1939, New York had seemed a cold, dirty city. It was still dirty, but the people I met now, on my improbable quests, showed me that it 90

was not cold. And after the travel agencies and the sweat shops were closed, and I could do no more talking, I kept on walking, and knew no boundaries but those set by hunger, when my rumbling belly told me I must eat. I walked from the hotel up to Columbia and down to Fulton Street. I walked to Coney Island and the Bronx. In Manhattan I walked from river to river, knew every street between the Village and the Park, and never, never spoke of the 'Avenue of the Americas'. I gazed in every window and at every intersection paused to observe the traffic, for sooner or later I would have to take a driving test here, and I did not mean to fail it. (I hoped I would take the test in a Cadillac with the flirty little fins. I found them as dashing and distinctive as the Vauxhall's radiator gouges, or the Daimler's louvered grill top.)

Of all the city, my favourites were the garment district by day, for its noisy energy, and by night the Armenian district Lexington in the high cos. The food there reminded me of far travels and was good and cheap, and the people were warm and outgoing. Several of the owners, waiters, and clients had not come from Armenia proper but from neighbouring Azerbaijan, in Persia. I had been close there in the war, so we shared bread and talked of the beautiful land where Turkey, Iraq, and Persia meet, the wild duck fly by Van Gol and the Kurdish snows bend down to Urmieh.

The only trouble was that these long cellars were always being discovered. In several cases, when I first went I was the only outlander and everyone was talking in Armenian; a month later bright young couples in search of quaintery had discovered the place, their confident English had abashed the Armenians into silence, and the old men had vanished into the carpets.

I thought, this is a good city. The people found me strange, because I had a strange product to sell, but that 9

was all. Where I was accepted, as I was in many very disparate milieus, it was as me, John Masters, not for what I had done or become. Busy people gave me their time, and rich ones took the trouble to explain what I was up against, and why. A stranger paid my fare to Boston and back and made me his guest for a week-end at an exclusive country club, so that I could meet people who might be prospective clients. The New York manner was sometimes brusquer than I had been used to, but there was seldom any ill will behind it. I became annoyed only once, when I held open the heavy swing door of an office building for a man behind me, and he strode through without a word. I stepped up beside him and said, 'When someone holds a door open for you, it's customary to say Thank you.' He turned with a stare, at first angry; then he shrugged and said, 'Say, I didn't notice.' Well, he probably should have noticed, but there was enough generosity being shown to me so that I learned to ignore the minor forms of politeness.

I met a marvellous variety of people. The first was Stanley Odlum, one of my closest boyhood friends, and this was a sad reunion. The cheerful boy with whom I had climbed trees and walked the downs in Wiltshire had become an embittered alcoholic at thirty-one. What had gone wrong? He was heir to millions, and had perhaps been given too much too soon. He had killed a woman with his car in California, but that was caused by the drinking. What caused the drinking? He had been shot down over Germany and spent two years as a prisoner of war. Perhaps that was the cause, but I doubt it. I spent more hours with him in the King Cole bar than I could afford, or wanted to, and once went home with him to his disgusted young wife. I had met her twelve years before, on their honeymoon in London, but now she took me aside and asked me to leave as soon as possible. Stanley was swaying in a chair, mumbling 'Siddown — have a drink,' but I was glad, and very unhappy, to go. He wasn't interested in her, or his kids, or his father's business, or me. I would probably fail. Have a drink.

Then there was an Afghan prince, in whose apartment I attended an occasion of half-oriental, half-Park Avenue opulence. The other guests were all Americans, but mental expatriates. They didn't think much of the United States. It had little charm and no breeding, and nothing really good was made here. I wondered why they stayed.

And a pair of young men in the east 60s, who had served in the American Field Service. The interior decorator's art — their own — had given their huge rooms something of the air of Nero's palace. They wore crew cuts and suede shoes, and their hands fluttered. Their voices were slightly nasal, the words long-vowelled. We parted on good terms, I with my virtue intact. I doubted whether they or their friends were likely candidates for a Himalayan Holiday, but perhaps I was wrong. There's no reason why gaiety should not reign on such a trip.

The worlds of America continued to burst into existence, like new-cracked crystals, around me. Already the idea of speaking or thinking in generalizations was becoming ludicrous. The garment men were Americans, the Armenians were Americans, the Greek quick-lunch men were Americans, the seedy hotel porter with his seedy tales of life in Moline, Illinois, was an American. So were the members of that country club outside Boston, where flourished a way of life that made me blink from its exact resemblance to that in a good regiment of British cavalry. The wealth was there, but played down, the manners were casual, the tweeds only slightly less hairy than my own, and there was a pack of foxhounds in the kennels outside. The only real differences between that club and the mess of the 10th Hussars was a slight one of accent in the voices, and that the oil painting over the mantelpiece was of George Washington. But they too were Americans.

And there was Vyvyan Donner, whose British cousin's wife was the inventor of The Bra. Vyvyan was in her mid-fifties at that time, I suppose, and was fashion director for Movietone. I presented my letter of introduction and she invited me to tea in her beautiful apartment in the Osborne. I told her what I was trying to do. She believed me, and in me; and from that day one for three months I often wondered how she and her cousin Eugenie Huckel got any other work done. They seemed to spend their entire time ferreting out people who could help me with my plans, and bullying them into inviting me to their houses. I ran from lunches to teas to cocktails to dinners, talking. Vyvyan knew everyone in New York, from O'Dwyer and Impelliteri to Believe-it-or-Not Ripley and Fernand Tappe, and didn't hesitate to enlist them. She tried to persuade Movietone to make a documentary in the Himalayas, with me as the narrator. She gathered groups for informal discussions; she thought up ideas by the score, wrote letters, made telephone calls. In that time I never heard her say an ill word about anyone, and I never heard anyone say an ill word about her. She was amusing, she worked hard, she was a well-known figure in the movie industry, which is not noted for its gentleness; but nothing ever altered her smiling efficiency and grace. With her and Eugenie, almost invariably at her expense, I began to see something of a more luxurious New York than I could have seen on my own. I collected vast and exotic sandwiches from the Stage Delicatessen a little down 7th Avenue; and sipped cocktails in the Beekman Tower, where the lower buildings between 1st and Lexington Avenue offered the best view of the glittering towers of midtown Manhattan. We rode together, well wrapped, in a drosky through Central Park, and actually shook hands with Sherman Billingsley and Toots Shor; and took three or four Sunday week-end trips to the estates of her friends in New Jersey and along the Pennsylvania Main Line. It was not a world that I would ever want to belong to, however successful I might become, but it was a much needed change from the fleapit... and it was fun.

Occasional visits to the Mathews' on Morningside Heights would strengthen my moral fibre and broaden my mind. Troup and Alice had four small girls by then, and I was amazed and encouraged to see how they could live on very little money, and with no servants at all, not even a Nanny. Troup's family came from Georgia, but he had been born in France and educated there and in England. He seldom finished sentences, and his talk was like flung crackers, exploding ideas to cast sudden light from unexpected angles. He thought my Himalayan Holidays plan was too pie-in-the-sky to succeed, but he did all he could to help. More important, he explained much, for his background enabled him to translate to me matters that I had no bearings on.

Alas, the time came when the expedition account was down to $ to, and the nearest to a client I had was a lady in California, who wanted her two daughters to take the trip. And, although a Miss America (Bess Myerson) had hugely admired The Bra (giggling), and although Vyvyan had almost twisted the arms off all her many connections in the garment industry, that too remained unsold.

It was April, a formidable month for the Englishman in the eastern United States. Since February he has been expecting spring to begin its slow appearance from behind the cold curtains of winter, as it does at home, at first leaving the secret white sign of the snowdrop in the bare woods, then a primrose in the hedge, then daffodils, while a subtle balm blunts the edge of the wind and a pale green 94 95

presence creeps along the black branches over the garden walls. Here, it was different. The snow lay everywhere in February, and the Hudson ferries hooted mournfully in the river fogs. The snow lay everywhere in March and the wind blew down the bitter canyons. The snow lay everywhere, and a drawn breath of air was a chill bronze in the throat, the first days of April. Then thunderstorms marched across the city, systematically bombarding it as they passed. One caught me tramping down Lexington Avenue and for an hour I sheltered in a doorway while the rock core of earth shook, the explosions crashed and boomed among the skyscrapers and the sky darkened at noon. For an hour I watched lightning flashes sear the silvered narwhal's horn of the Chrysler Building, and rain poured down like a monsoon in Burma. Three days later forsythia flamed in every lot and yard and the temperature was 75 degrees! Had I known better, I would have rushed out into the streets crying Rejoice, today is spring! But I did not know. I waited cautiously for the daffodil, the narcissus, the sight of a chaffinch collecting twigs and grass. Then the continuing sun hit me on the back of the head, the arsonists fed more flame into the blossoms all over the land, and it was summer.

Early one Sunday morning I took the subway up to Van Cortlandt Park and walked on the grass in the wet wind. I wished Barbara were here so that we could discuss the situation and decide what to do, for a decision had to be made soon now. Well, she was not; I was alone, and only I knew the 'feel' of New York and America, and the possibilities for our future here. So I must make the decisions by myself. First, the Himalayas, I thought I must give up that idea for the time being. It was not going to succeed without my putting more time and money than I could afford into it, and probably not even then. Conditions in the Indian sub-continent where the partition massacres still reverberated in the world press, and warlike bitterness increased between Pakistan and India, did not make it easy for me to persuade people that the areas where I intended to go stood in no danger of riots or religious disturbances. Nor could I, in my picayune one-man campaign, overcome the effects of the massive general ignorance, exemplified by the travel agent who asked whether the Himalayas were north or south of Miami. The travel agents, as a body, knew less about travel than about selling. If they did not go out on a limb to help me sell my trip, it was because they saw at once that it was unsaleable. Only a few of them may have been able to appreciate the extraordinary nature of the experience which I was offering, but all of them knew that people with the desire for such experience seldom had the means, and those with the means seldom had the desire.

So I must turn to something else. One man wanted me to go gem-hunting for him in Nepal. Another had asked me to join him in his travel agency. I did not like either idea very much, but my family were due to move in six weeks time. Should I go back to England? Stay here? Move on to Canada, and start again there, without the incubi of the Himalayan Holidays, The Bra, and my status here as a time-limited tourist?

Walking along the edge of the grass while the cars whizzed by on Sunday excursions to the country, I knew that I did not want to leave New York at this time. The city had excitement and wonder, and my opportunity was there somewhere. I had heard it scratching behind the wainscot in a hundred interviews, in the reading of a hundred newspapers. Nothing I knew about Canada led me to suppose that it could offer as much — to me — as New York. What was there might be easier to get at, and I would certainly be more generally accepted, but this was the face that launch'd the thousand ships...

City of the world (for all races are here,

All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)

City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!

City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede,

whirling in and out with eddies of foam!

City of wharves and stores — city of tall façades of marble and iron!

Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!

It was here I must stay, and hunt, and search, and never give up.

I went happily back to the fleapit, and, a day or two later, out to lunch with a reporter from the New Yorker. Word of the English colonel hawking his unlikely expedition about the city had reached the topless towers on West 45th Street, and someone Up There thought I might make a good piece for the Talk of the Town. I knew about the New Yorker because I had been taking it since 1937, and I was much pleased. If my Himalayan Holidays were to get this sort of publicity, perhaps they would succeed after all.

Rex Lardner met me at the Longchamps restaurant under the Empire State Building, and bought me a nice lunch, including two or perhaps three dry Martinis. The extra-dry martini, New York style, had been unknown to me before this year, but I had learned it was the only cocktail for the true New Yorker, and had been studying the technique of making them. These at the Longchamps were good — better than I knew, perhaps — for they loosened my tongue and gave it wings. The Himalayan Holidays were disposed of in short order, then Lardner drew me out on The Bra, my other plans and past history, and unobtrusively made notes. On my third, or perhaps fourth martini, I became fluent about Hollywood's India and Hollywood's England — the perpetual stunning heat of the one, the perpetual impenetrable fog of the other; the rajahs, snake charmers, sahibs, and chota pegs; the country palaces, dukes, cockneys and yokels — compared with the realities. My wit soared. Lardner listened, laughed, forgot his notes. Boy, was I brilliant!

Over coffee, Lardner said that he found my remarks quite funny. My euphoria began to evaporate. Then he said, 'I think, if you cared to write up what you've been saying, you might be able to sell it.'

'Really?' I asked, my spirits rising again.

'One can't tell,' he said. 'But if you have nothing else to do, it's worth trying.'

I had nothing else to do, as Lardner well knew. I returned to the lonely hotel room, pushed the Holidays file and The Bra into the bottom of the yakdan which was my office (a yakdan is a box, covered with red leather, designed to carry loads on a yak), and began to draft the article.

I set about it in the way I had learned, and taught at the Staff College and at war. First, what was my object? To sell an article about Hollywood's views of India to an American magazine. Wait, that wasn't my object, was it, really? Wasn't my object to write it? To write it really well?... No, my object was to sell it. If my object had been to write it, I wouldn't be thinking about the form of it, or what language I used; I would be writing to please myself only. But this was not so; I wanted to sell it, so that must be my object.

Now for the 'factors affecting the attainment of the object'. I wanted to sell it to an American magazine, so I must not use English slang, which would be unintelligible, and even if it were understood would give the American reader a sense of strangeness, so that he would be noting the language instead of doing what I wanted him to do, recognize my portrait and laugh at my humour. Still less 98 99

must I use American slang, because there is only one thing sadder than an American telling 'English' jokes, and that is an Englishman telling 'American' jokes. I must use universal English, which would be fine, because that is the most powerful and most flexible instrument ever formed.

What should be my style, my manner? Suppose I 'wrote down' to the readership of some imaginary pulp magazine, in the hope of pleasing the editor? I knew from experience that the result would be bad, because the condescension would show. I had learned in my profession that a battle order needs a choice of words and a rhythm of phrase different from a paper on India's strategic airfields. I had learned that if I were trying to persuade a choleric general of the falsity of something he believed in, I must select phrases to arouse his reason, not his choler. But within such limitations, I must always write in the clearest and most powerful way I knew, because anything less always showed. Only those write well for the pulps whose mind and style, at their best, are pulpy. Only time would tell whether I fell into this category.

And this, too, of writing my best, would solve another matter, that of self-satisfaction or, to give it the more pompous vogue-word of the time, self-fulfilment. I would not feel happy about work which was consciously inferior, however much money I made.

To the drafting, then: do I want to have the reader waiting for a punch at the end, some great belly-laugh, or do I want him grinning from the start? From the start, I think: for surely this subject is not climactic, but panoramic, so the writing technique must conform. Next...

These things, which take a lot of time to write about, took very little time to do, because the ways of thought which I have been describing were ingrained and automatic in me. In fact I had laid down the outline of the article in half an hour, and written it, some fourteen pages amounting to 3,500 words, in another two hours. The next morning I put on my hostile critic's hat and re-read it, sternly restraining my chuckles at the writer's wit and acumen. Had he done what he set out to do? Was the rhythm of the sentences right? Was the interest continuous? Was the humour in the situations (Thurber-like) rather than in the words (Perelman-like)? Had he written his best, i.e. could I find more pointed words, more powerful phrases, than he had used?

I made many corrections, large and small, hacked out as many adjectives and adverbs as I could bear to part with (this is Dogma One of Good English, as taught me by my English teacher at Wellington in 1930), and sent the piece to Rex Lardner, asking him to read it and, if he thought it good enough, advise me what to do next.

A day or so later he rang up to say he liked my piece very much. He would not submit it to his own magazine, because Hollywood was considered to be too much of a sitting duck for the New Yorker's poison-pen experts. But he had sent it to an agent he knew. The agent would get in touch with me if he had any luck with it.

I put the whole business out of my mind, and returned to my questing-beagle patrols, cocking an ear to people's conversations, turning over garbage-cans of thought, and studying the classified columns of the New York Times as though my life depended on it... which, as far as I knew, it did. But still the jobs that were vacant in such stunning profusion had no reality to me.

On the third morning the agent rang me up and told me that The Atlantic Monthly had bought my piece for $100. He, the agent, would be grateful if I could find time to visit him in his office. Yes, I thought I could find the time. My eye strayed over the empty room, the silent typewriter, the closed yakdan. No trouble at all.

The next day I went to his office on Fifth Avenue. Without more ado he told me that in his considered opinion as a long-time and successful literary agent, I could make my living by writing professionally.

An unearthly light filled the room. I had never in my life heard such an extraordinary and fundamentally meaningless collection of words. I asked him to repeat them. He did so. The light went out and I thought, good God, he means it.

Pulling myself together I heard him ask to see anything else I had written. I thought of my Mountain Warfare Green Paper, generally considered the most cerebral ever produced by a Staff College D.S. on that arcane subject. I thought of my little 1937 monograph on Infantry dress in India; of the half dozen poems I, like every well-bred British officer, used to keep in my knapsack rolled round my field-marshal's baton; of my 1932 school essay on Judaism and the early Christian Church, with Mr Malim's 'very good' inscribed in the margin. But these were not what the agent had in mind; in any case, I had not thought to bring them to the U.S. with me, so I answered, No. He then asked whether there was anything else I proposed to write. I answered again, no, but that I could probably think of something. With this, and expressions of good will, we parted.

Back in my room I considered the agent's suggestion. It seemed a strange and dangerous one. 'A living' meant a regular job. Writing, in the way the agent meant — that is, on my own, not as an editor or reader or employee of a publisher — would produce money obviously — I had a cheque for $90 in my hand to prove it — but it could hardly count as a living. It would be ridiculously precarious. There would be no pension. It was unsound, flighty, unfair to my wife and children. I ought to reject it out of hand.

But did it not offer freedom of action, independence, a chance to be my own master, happiness in my work? Periods of intense effort followed by long holidays? Freedom to travel? Apart from the lack of security it met every one of our requirements, and security was something merely desirable, not essential.

My earning power would obviously depend on how good, famous, infamous, or all three, I became. I knew that Kipling had earned $2.30 a word. In this Hollywood article I had worked for about five hours and been paid $100, less 10 per cent commission to the agent: $90.00 — or $18.00 per hour. But wait, I must have been mulling over those ideas about Hollywood in my mind for years. Perhaps I would need four martinis every time to translate an idea into words, which would add greatly to the cost and considerably shorten my writing career, not to mention my life. And I had had to go to India and see movies about India, to be able to write that piece. The expenses were really considerable.

By now my mind was beginning to glow with banked fires. I recited our agreed object: To live as a family unit in a place that offers space, liberty, and opportunity to all of us and, to me, independence in a work that I liked... It couldn't have fitted better.

For a time it might be necessary to live close to editors and agents — which meant, as far as my knowledge went, living close to New York — but even that was probably not vital, only desirable; and if I succeeded we could surely go anywhere: Arizona, Maine, wherever there was space. In truth, I was already getting the feeling of space, of room to expand, even in the deepest canyons of Manhattan, so there might be no need to pack a tent and search out a wild river, an empty sky.

Did writing itself have 'space', or scope? That I could not see, but surely it was because I could not yet relate my own abilities to the scope of writing, which obviously 103

had almost unlimited scope. The prospect, as yet dark to my sight, was like looking at the lower slopes of a huge something, fog-shrouded, lit here and there by flashes of light from a higher place. A Tale of Two Cities I saw momentarily, and Sons and Lovers, and Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales, Richard II... Rifleman Dodd, Tom Jones, Hornblower, Huckleberry Finn... Sherlock Holmes, Becky Sharp, Major Barbara, and Gibbon's sonorous roll of the emperors... the white whale and the whale hunt, battles, searches, and climbs... love and music and wine, sadness, the outward face and inward eye, Proust and Stevenson, the golden bowl and the silver cord.

Space! My God, I had not understood what the word meant till I began to look at this swirling, towering infinity in front of me. As long as I remained my own master, my scope as a writer would depend only on my scope as a human being.

Putting aside for a moment the question of financial success or failure, would I be content as a writer? Suppose I stayed for ever on the lower slopes, digging out saleable lumps of mud when I was striving to find diamonds. Suppose the expression of my whole personality through just one channel was too limiting. Then, how was it that so many writers seemed to suffer from frustration, the nature of which I could not know and they could not explain? (It usually seemed to spring from the fact that they wished they had written something other than what they had.) What about the writers who accepted fortunes in Hollywood, while wailing that it was degradation, prostitution? Worst of all, what if I got bored with writing, or succeeded too easily and found myself writing the same book over and over again, as, to my knowledge, half a dozen well-known authors were doing?

Well, from the fleapit, with one short article to my credit, those questions were insoluble and, for all I knew, might also be irrelevant to my case. As Nelson said: Something must be left to chance. No captain can do very wrong if he lays his ship alongside that of an enemy.

Good. Now to make a cold appraisal of my chances. It was impossible to know what kind of a writer I would be. Among the writers I most admired were Maugham, C. S. Forester, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gibbon, Chaucer, Milton, Walter Pater, Macaulay, and George Orwell. I could not decide whether to class Lincoln as a writer or not, but I thought that his style was the best of all. If I thought these were good, my own style would probably be lapidary and objective, rather than chiaroscuro and subjective. The content, at least at first, would certainly be matter of which I had personal experience, which meant, apart from the universals of life and love: war, India, Gurkhas, tigers, and so on. Generally speaking, that sort of writing and that sort of subject did not please critics, but did make money. In terms of survival, this was a factor favourable to me.

Assuming that I earned no money at all for a time we could, according to my now experienced calculations, live in New York for about two and a half years on my pension and gratuity alone. (The British Treasury had refused to give me the latter in a lump sum because I was asking for it to be transferred outside the sterling area; they were spreading the payments over five years.) This would still leave enough for us to return to England and survive a year or so on that part of the gratuity still due to me, while looking for a job. So I could invest about two and a half years in making myself a self-supporting writer. I did not hesitate a moment in deciding it was a reasonable investment.

Next, to consider what to do if I nevertheless failed. The worst blow would perhaps be to my self-confidence, for I would have been proved wrong and all those others, who waited with relish for me to fail, right. But would it be disastrous, really? I thought not — here. Here in the United States there were other jobs. I could shovel snow, or run a petrol station, or guard a bank, and though none of those was close to our object, perhaps farther west there were such jobs, in the National Park or Forest Services, or on a dude ranch, maybe. It was important that my background would not limit me. In England, if I had applied for a job as a bank guard, it would automatically be assumed that I was an incurable drunk, thief, or sodomite. Else why would I not be safe in one of those jobs the Establishment reserved for its indigent members — secretary of a golf club, steward of a small estate, bursar at a seedy prep school?

There was no escaping the dangerous logical answer: I ought to try to become a writer. I wished again that Barbara were here, but this time I knew that to try to throw any of the burden of decision on to her would be only because I was funking it myself. She would have to say, however gently, that only I could tell whether I might become a writer; for her part, she would happily accept my decision, and whatever risks were attached to it.

I grasped the nettle and made up my mind: I would be a writer. I wrote at once to Barbara telling her I had found a career. Then I recalled Nelson's dictum, just quoted: it was time to lay my ship alongside the enemy. I quoted aloud a drunken Sinclair Lewis's advice on the art of creative writing, given to an audience-hall full of would-be creative writers (and I quote his lecture in full): 'You stupid looking sons of bitches wanna write? Well, gwan home and write!' I could almost hear the money dripping out of my pocket as from a leaking tap. The last cents would tinkle out on December 31, 1950. I began to write.

Chapter Four

My interest in the New York Times shifted from the classified to the real estate sections. On Sunday mornings, after walking over to Lexington Avenue for breakfast and to buy the paper at a street-corner stall, I returned to my eyrie and began to search for a place where we could settle down while I wrote. We love the sea, so I looked first at the summer homes and camps on Long Island and along the Connecticut and Jersey shores. I found nothing of the size we would need, at anywhere near the price I could afford, except one on Shelter Island. After looks at the map and the railroad and bus timetables I decided that it would be too difficult and expensive to get to New York from there, so I regretfully turned my attention to the inland counties, and after a week or two of hesitations over places that were nearly right, but not quite, I found an apparently suitable house advertised for rent in Rockland County, New York, for a price I could afford to pay.

Inquiries failed to unearth anyone who knew where Rockland County was, and I had almost given up, thinking it must be west of Niagara, or in a hidden valley of the Adirondacks, when a friend chanced to say that he not only knew where Rockland was, he had actually been there, and he had not needed a machete, a compass, or a native guide. Rockland was in fact the southernmost New York county that lies on the west bank of the river. It was therefore opposite Westchester, and about thirty miles north of the city. One got there by the West Shore Division of the New York Central Railroad from Weehawken, or by occasional buses from 163rd Street.

Alice Mathews volunteered to drive me out to prospect. We went on a lovely day of early summer, apple trees in blossom everywhere and the grass very green. The house was built into the foot of a wooded hill. There was an upper balcony and a stone-walled dining-room with a low ceiling and a log fire. I took the place on the spot. Then Alice and I returned to New York and drank a toast to South Mountain Road, New City, New York, which was the address of the house. (I thought, we're going to have most of our mail finish up in New York City, with an address like that; and sure enough, we did, for the next twenty-two years.) I did not have time or inclination to find out about the neighbours. I presumed they would be farmers or small businessmen from the neighbouring towns of New City, Nyack, and Haverstraw.

A thought crossed my mind. My visitor's visa would expire six months after I landed; i.e. on August 9. I went to the Immigration Bureau at 70 Columbus Avenue and asked that it be extended. The official I saw did not grant my request without asking a lot of questions: What was I doing? Why did I want to stay? How much was I earning, and by what means? These were legitimate questions, and in accordance with the law, but I became impatient. The official obviously found it hard to believe that I had suddenly decided, a few weeks before, to become a writer, at my age, just like that. After a sometimes warm exchange, the blame for which was mostly mine, he agreed to extend my visa a further six months, until February 9, 1949. I then foolishly asked whether, if I were in the throes of finishing a book at that time, my visa would be further extended.

He said, 'I can't tell you. Probably not.'

It was worrying. But I had no time to worry. I had asked my question because there was a possibility that I might indeed be finishing a book, for publication, in six months time. In the four weeks since becoming a writer I had written half a dozen articles and short stories. None had been sold or seemed likely to be. Studying them, I thought they were as good as I could make them, and as good or better than much I had read in English magazines. But we were trying to sell to American magazines; and as Desmond Hall, my agent, pointed out, there was a different point of view. There was a greater concern here over women's interest because the bulk of the magazine readership was female. Then, my writing was regarded as too impersonal because if I were describing a cobra wriggling up to sink its fangs into a man's leg I regarded it as unnecessary to describe what the man felt about it. Most people knew what it was like to have an angry cobra crawling towards them, I thought, and if they didn't, then their imaginations would fill the gap more vividly than my words. But it was those cobras themselves, the tigers, Sikhs, and masty elephants that were the real gulf between me and the editors and audiences. Desmond, Australian by birth and gentle by disposition, pointed out that there ought to be a sense of identification between the reader and some character, preferably the protagonist, in the story. The average reader of the average magazine was a woman living in Wichita, Kansas, with a husband, two children, and family income of $6,780. She, or the editors thinking of her, were finding it hard to identify with the Gurkhas, Pathans, and Englishmen I was writing about. I could not get into my head the idea that my world was exotic or adventurous. The people among whom I 109

had lived would be interested to hear how I (or a fictional character) had shot a tiger, crawled down a mountain in a blizzard with a sprained ankle, hunted wild mountain goat in the middle of a battle; but only if I told it straight. If I were to attempt to emotionalize these events, or make something heroic out of them, they would have rejected both me and the story. Here it was different.

Desmond advised me to study some of the U.S. men's magazines. I did, and after reading a few, decided that the purpose of the writers was not to bring out the reality of the drama, but to make a man reading in an armchair feel that he had taken part in a great feat of derring-do. Moodily re-reading my pieces from this angle, I saw that by adding a few more hungry leopards and drug-crazed orientals, and by describing the hero's reactions in an emotional manner I might sell to the men's magazines. Desmond gently pointed out that not all True Stories were literal statements of fact. One could make a living by turning out such 'true adventures' — rapes, robberies, seductions, murders, the single-handed strangling of giant water buffaloes in the Congo swamps. But I thought I would rather wash dishes than write true stories that weren't true.

There was also the question of political outlook. In one of my stories the protagonist was a British police officer, who ambushed and killed three Indian terrorists. The theme of the story was the skill and bravery of the police officer. The editors wanted to know why he was shooting Indians. They could not, for themselves or on behalf of their readers, see my hero as a hero, or even as a good man. I offered to make him an Indian police officer, but that would not do. I offered to write the tale from the point of view of the terrorists; but that did not serve because, again, I wrote it straight and now the terrorists seemed like senseless murderers for whom the reader could summon no sympathy.

What was really happening here, but I was too green to recognize it, was my first meeting with the American Establishment Liberal, whose virtues are always dimmed and sometimes totally obscured by a mixture of factual ignorance and a divinely inspired belief that his own views are the only ones permissible. The effect on me of this first clash was wholly to my benefit, for it made me try to see other points of view, and to appreciate other dimensions and values in what had generally seemed straightforward and simple to me.

Here, in the case of my stories, the editors were going beyond the actions I described to the causes of the actions. Where was this supposed to end? In order to tell a simple adventure story would I have to go back to the childhood of everyone concerned and explain what brought them to this point, and with these attitudes? But were the editors really concerned with motivations, or with extra values? In reading my stories they were putting in an extra value, usually a political one. Political values in general I regarded as ephemeral, but the idea of the extra value or dimension was good. I must learn to tell a story always on two levels at once, so that by some means the reader would have not only a visual awareness of the action, but also an awareness of other feelings and motives simultaneously in play. Suppose, for instance, that the chief terrorist had had an affair with the policeman's wife, and the policeman knew it. The policeman could be put into a situation where he would not be sure whether he was only doing his duty, or taking a private revenge. Every reader would see the problem without my having to shout it in his ear every few lines. Such a device, very simple, would add enormously to the story.

I rubbed my hands gleefully. My new-discovered 110

Doctrine of the Second-Level would infallibly lead me to the heights.

Desmond had been discussing the peculiarities of my talent with Burton Hoffman and George Joel of the Dial Press. By chance Hoffman and Joel were obsessed, at the time, with the idea that the world was hungry for a new Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Desmond persuaded them that I was the man to write it. We had a couple of meetings to discuss the project, I agreed to see what I could do about it. Nothing so coarse as money was mentioned at this stage.

The idea of writing something to order was not at all foreign to me. Indeed, I thought that was how publishing houses obtained most of their books. They would get unsolicited manuscripts of course, and might take them if they were very good, but that would be a way to do business. I imagined that a publisher's main responsibility was to plan his next year's list, much as a cook would plan a meal or an individual dish — so much fiction, some hot, some cool; so much biography; a dash of uplift, a sniff of adventure, a pinch of education, so many dessertspoonfuls of women's world. When he had got a balanced and tasty list he would write to Somerset Maugham advising him to have a book of short stories, about rich people in the South of France, ready by December 8. Of course, an author of Mr Maugham's eminence was in a position to reply that he had thought of writing a novel about the Polish sub-culture of Perth Amboy; but that would not apply to me for some time yet. As to the writing, I had announced to the world that I was now a professional writer in the same way that I had once been a professional soldier. As a soldier it would have been unthinkable for me to announce that I could only attack towns, or defend swamps, or plan river crossings. I could do anything that was required, and now I must achieve that same competence as a writer.

Very well then — autobiography. Talk of it being a 'successor' to Lives of a Bengal Lancer could mean only that it would be about India and life in a regiment there, because I did not particularly like Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and was incapable of deliberately copying its style or content. This was going to be my book, and I must set about it my own way.

First, I defined the object of the book. After much search and rejection I fixed on: To make the reader share the joys and sorrows of a young man growing up in the old Indian Army.

Next, as an important factor, I considered what shape the book should be. I had read very many books in my life and it was clear that every book had a shape, and that in good books the shape was no accident. Grand Hotel was shaped like a wheel, with the hotel at the hub. Picaresque novels such as Anthony Adverse were shaped like a road, a winding road, with the interest in the scenery and the tramps who popped out of hedges. Gone with the Wind was a river, in which one central character stood like a rock while events flowed past and over her, shaping her, and the interest was in the colours of the water and in wondering whether this or that uprooted tree would overwhelm her.

Some books went like an arrow to the point, and some circled it as cautiously as though it was a dangerous animal to be pounced on at the last moment — only, often, at the last moment they did not pounce, but drifted away, and that was effective too, because it left you wondering (if you were still with them) what would have happened if they had pounced. Some books went up, then down; this left an impression of sadness when all was over. Others — certainly all magazine and movie stories — went down, then up, and, if the manipulation had been subtle and the overlay of treacle not too thick, you finished feeling happy with and for the people.

The shape of my autobiography, I thought, must be true to life, and in life it had gone thus and so — first the excitement of the discovery; then disillusions and mishaps; then a new feeling, not excitement but love, for places, institutions, and people; later, a sense of moving to a point where all this must and would end, partly because I was growing up and partly because the war was coming, and that would be another story.

So the book ought to go up, and then down, and then up again — but gradually, and on a different plane, in a different direction, moving towards something like a precipice.

By mid June I had filled several pages of a large account book with scribbled notes, thoughts and aide-memoires, which would have to be sorted and evaluated later. Then I checked out of the hotel, moved my belongings to Rockland County, and saw that the house was in order and stocked with food. On June 22 the Mathews lent me their car and I went to meet the family at Pier 90, North River.

They came down the Queen Mary's gangway at last and we ran to meet each other. Susan was in the lead and I noted again that after the first wild rush of greetings and kissing she hesitated over her words. We must settle down, for good. Then Nanny leading Martin in a harness, Martin staring from side to side and asking earnestly of everything 'Wassat for? Wassat for?' Then Barbara... We were together again.

It was a hot day, typical of early summer in the Hudson Valley. Barbara, coming straight off the ship and before that from the temperate coolness of June in England, thought it was very hot. As we were swinging round the curves on 9 W south of the Long Clove, the sun glaring fiercely off the road surface, she said, 'It's just like the C.P.' I had been too busy to notice details of the countryside, either then or earlier, but now, looking at the untidy forests and the outcrops of red trap rock, I thought, she's right: it is very like the Central Provinces, the country of Kipling's Jungle Books. We felt more at home at once. 'And it's beautiful,' she added, as we ran into a road cut where for a hundred yards the sides of the cut were a cascading wall of deep red roses.

Within the next week I had run over one copperhead (a poisonous viper) on the road, killed one on the lawn, and been shown another. This, I thought, is really overdoing the 'Welcome home, Indians!' theme. I had not seen so many poisonous snakes in twelve years in India. We brought India closer in a more material way when we unpacked the crates a few days later. Some of them had not been opened since we left Delhi, and we were able to manure the rose bushes of South Mountain Road with Indian straw and mule dung, exotically homogenized with British human milk.

Then Barbara saw her first American robin and laughed disbelievingly when I told her what it was. 'A Texas robin, you mean,' she said. I had felt the same when I was first told, for the American robin is a member of the thrush family, while the English robin is not much bigger than a wren, and is much friendlier to man. But Barbara's surprise reminded us that we were not really at home here, yet.

South Mountain Road did not go in for welcome wagons, and no one called on us. Nanny took the children for walks down the road under the big trees with the pram. She came back one shimmering noon to report that she had met a Mrs Hill, who had two children and a nanny. 'They seemed very nice people.' Then she added, 'I think they're Americans!' We assured her that was likely, as we were now in the United States; but Nanny had no more idea of where she was, and what those five days on the big ship had meant, than if she had taken a day trip down the Thames. Soon the Hills's nurse, who was a Puerto Rican girl, brought their children round to play. The conversations between the two nannies were worth eavesdropping on, for our Nanny was 'simple' and Margarita totally uneducated. Margarita thought England was attached to the U.S.A. somewhere up in the top right hand corner and that the English obeyed the President like everyone else, because it was a sort of state, otherwise how would everyone speak English which she could barely do herself and she came from a mere Territory of the U.S.? Nanny knew that England was not a state, and she didn't think it was physically attached, but as she could not say where it actually was, or, hence, where we had come from, Margarita got the impression that we had descended direct from the sky.

Soon we met Ray and Marion Hill, and gradually the circle of our acquaintance grew. People mentioned names of neighbours as though we should know them, but we did not, except Maxwell Anderson, who, I knew, had written What Price Glory? It seemed that we were surrounded by artists, writers, actors, and musicians. We thought it an odd stroke of fate, considering that I had no idea of the fact when I took the house; but also rather unfortunate. We had never lived among 'artists', and doubted whether they would understand us or we them. We met the colony for the first time when our landlady, Eleanor Hope, got us an invitation to one of Walter Fleisher's garden parties on Saw Mill Road. Maple-shaded lawns swept down from the old stone farmhouse to a pond, where ducks swam and willows trailed their fingers in the water. Fifty or sixty people had gathered by the time we arrived, and they were drinking. Barbara caught my eye and muttered, 'At four in the afternoon!' By British and Indian custom, six is the correct time to begin communal boozing, not a moment earlier. I kept my mouth shut, being afraid to admit that in the Sodom down the Hudson I had attended functions where people had started downing the sauce at three, or even earlier, carrying straight on from a good lunch. Now 'It's the custom,' I said, as we accepted drinks and moved out among the crowd.

They were strange and wonderful people, flaunting stranger and more wonderful clothes. Two ladies wore raffia work, with huge beaded necklaces swinging to their waists. There were a couple of prophetesses, with nails painted green and hair dyed blue. At least half the men had not bothered to put on a tie, and several were wearing not shoes but moccasins. We crept into concealment under a tree. Voices floated past. Someone was talking about Edna St Vincent Millay. Ah, I knew her: her candle burned at both ends. But it appeared that the speaker, a woman, was her sister... The P.T.A.... What on earth was a P.T.A? The Wildenstein Gallery... Has Lotte arrived yet?......Helen isn't going to accept the part. It's too like Victoria Regina... Helen Hayes? And the speaker knew her? They need a hundred and sixty thousand dollars before they can even get it to New Haven... September Song... The P.T.A.

'Let's get another drink,' I muttered We returned home in a subdued frame of mind. People had shown us a pleasant offhand courtesy, which is the best kind, for there is no pressure in it; but we hoped no one would call, for we would have nothing to talk about. Their world was different from ours, and they were not only isolated in it, but from what we could gather, mostly high up. I was only a writing apprentice, nor could I afford to give anyone drinks at 4 p.m., and not many at other times.

We settled into the routines of country living. I cleared a small extra bedroom at the back of the house, set up my office, and began to write the autobiography in pencil, in longhand. Then I worked all day, nearly every day, at my desk. Barbara shopped in the mornings and in the afternoons dug, mowed, and weeded. The children played alone and with Jim and little Kathy Hill, and developed dual accents, not a mixture of English and American but one or the other, at will. Together Barbara and I systematically explored the forested hill behind South Mountain Road, of which High Tor is the highest point, and often walked the long ridge path with its wide views over the Hudson, here four miles wide, and north towards West Point. We saw several more copperheads and a black snake. Hudson Valley thunderstorms burst over us with shattering intensity, the mountain quaked, the rain rammed down like iron bars, and we told the children of Rip van Winkle. Twice we heard the click of the lightning actually striking a few feet away, a fraction of a second before the flash and the thunder broke. In the aftermath of one storm, the children asleep and the night full of a cool balm, Barbara and I walked five miles into New City and back at midnight. She insisted on going barefoot, dancing now and then in the lonely road... and danced on to another copperhead, this one fortunately squashed dead.

The Russian occupying forces postponed the elections which were to decide the government of East Germany. I had little sympathy with Germans, as Germans; but any last hope that my children were going to grow up in a world full of good will faded. Like us, they were going to have to walk alert and heavily armed, or they were going to have to accept the new imperialism, which walked like a bear.

When I had roughed out the whole autobiography, so that I thought the events I had chosen to include would produce the effect I wanted, I began to rough out the chapters, one page for each. When that was done it took about two weeks — I calculated that the book would be 125,000 words long — 500 pages of typescript, double spaced. I was appalled. How could I write that much on a single continuous theme? My longest previous effort was about 10,000 words on Rasselas as a school essay project.

I pulled myself together. The first chapter was only going to be twenty-five pages, and I could manage that. Then the next... then the next... One chapter at a time, I could do it. The book as a whole, and each chapter, had been shaped by the master plan. Now I must concentrate on each page, each line.

The work went fast, and I found it so absorbing (I was, after all, writing about everyone's favourite subject) that I didn't realize I was working at all. Then sometimes, late in the afternoon, when I had been at it since 8 a.m., and had written perhaps 6,000 words in longhand, I would stand up to stretch, and suddenly feel faint, my head spinning. I would have to grab the chairback or the desk to prevent myself falling. A few times I ignored this warning, then decided to follow Churchill's example and make it a rule to have a nap after lunch every day, regardless of the state of the writing, the world, or anything else. The fact was that though I had worked at great pressure before, it had always been mixed mental and physical, both often intense at the same time, but each helping to erase the strain of the other. Now there was nothing but the sheet of paper there under the light, hour after hour, day after day.

I finished the first draft in less than a month and gave it a title: Brutal and Licentious, a quote from a well-known summation of the soldiery.

I read it through and tried to estimate it. It did not seem so good now as when I had been writing it. That must be a kindly provision of nature, for if it had stunk in my nostrils then, I could not have gone on. So, it was not right; but what, precisely, was not right, and why? First, it did not grip one's attention from the beginning, as, for example, Steinbeck's work always did. Then, this section was diffuse, and did not lead to the dragged-in conclusion. These twenty pages had no bearing on my object; I had thought they would in planning, but actually on paper they didn't. So there was a difference between planning and execution. It might be possible, to have a good plan for a book and for the book, written exactly from the plan, to be bad. How come? The writing, the style, whatever one liked to call it, could be responsible; or perhaps a dissonance between the particular merits of the plan and the particular talents of the writer.

A more experienced author might have been able to avoid these errors, but for me there was no way but to re-plan in the light of what was there on paper. I had meant to build a fine house. Now that it was done anyone could see that the roof wasn't on straight, and a couple of gables seemed to have no artistic or other purpose. Find out how it happened, first, and then remedy it.

I divided several sheets of paper into lines and columns and went carefully through the MS, grading each sequence in three ways: by length, by type, and by merit of its type. It soon developed that almost every sequence could be classified as Action, Explanation, Colour, Characterization, or Thought. When the job was done, and it took several days' hard work, my new charts revealed a very lumpy texture in the book. Page followed page of action, with no explanation and little colour. Colour was not used as a background to action, nor as a perimeter to characterization, but haphazardly, as the pictures had come to me. Although I could grade some sequences A, too many were Bs and Cs: not good enough for a professional.

Desmond was asking when he could see an outline and some finished work to show Hoffman and Joel at Dial, as we should then get an advance against the whole work. An advance was, of course, not a gift, being only a subtraction from one's eventual earnings, but it would prove that the publishers had confidence in the book, and it would much encourage me to feel that I had already earned something.

Using my charts to correct the early faults, I rewrote the first two chapters. By this time the MS was illegible to anyone but me — and not easily to me — so I got it into typescript by a method familiar to both Barbara and me through our work in the army (she had served as a sergeant in the W.A.C.(I)). I dictated, while she typed direct on to the paper. I had used the method for the rapid production of operation orders in the field, often to confirm verbal orders. It was the fastest system possible, the disadvantage being that it tied up two people for hours on end: but that was unavoidable, in view of the condition of my MS. Barbara was soon hitting 3,000 words an hour, including changing of paper and carbons.

When the two chapters were done I dictated an outline of the rest of the book, and sent it all to Desmond. A few days later I was summoned to New York. Travel to the city was an expedition, for we had no car. I caught an early bus to Haverstraw, the decaying Hudson Valley Gothic riverside town, once the brick capital of the state, which was our main shopping centre, four miles away on the other side of High Tor. There I took a train, and finally reached the Dial Press offices via Weehawken, a ferry boat, and two more buses. The West Shore Railroad, still using steam engines and passenger cars left over from the Railway Race in Georgia, was a trial indeed on a hot day. Sparks flew in through the rattling windows, cinders littered the seats and ground in one's teeth, the cars humped and swayed and one's head shook like a marionette's. There was a famous story about the man who, surrounded by bags and boxes, took this 38-mile trip from Haverstraw to Weehawken. At the terminal he staggered out crying 'Thank God, the worst part of my journey is over!'

'Where are you going?' the conductor asked him. 'Tibet.'

At the Dial Press George Joel told me they had read the two chapters and the outline and were very favourably impressed. Money was mentioned. Desmond thought an advance of $1,500 would be acceptable to us. Joel did not commit himself, but said they wanted to have another reading first and we would settle matters early the following week. I returned to Rockland with great hopes, in spite of Desmond's warning that he thought that actually we would not get more than $1,000.

I settled down to re-writing the rest of the book. At the end of the week Desmond wrote to tell me that Dial were no longer interested. I went into New York at once, and asked Desmond what the hell was going on. Joel had been enthusiastic on Friday; there was no one senior to him and Hoffman in the firm to override them. What had happened?

Desmond said, 'I'm afraid they allowed themselves to be talked out of it by Victor Gollancz.' He explained that Gollancz, a famous British left-wing publisher, was in New York and had dined with Joel and Hoffman over the week-end. They mentioned my book and Gollancz advised them not to touch me with a bargepole. Retired curry colonels writing their reminiscences of India, he said, were two a penny, and no one wanted to read about the sahibs' world, etc. etc. Hoffman and Joel bowed to Gollancz's superior wisdom or, as one might say, they ratted.

I returned again to Rockland County, and again read my book. It was nothing like other reminiscences of India, and, on the whole, it was a great deal better than most. What kind of a success it would have none could tell — almost certainly not the same kind as Bengal Lancer's because that had sprung from the phony mysticism in it. Brutal was direct, not mystical — but it was real. Sometimes I could almost feel the reality of my own words, like rocks.

Barbara and I talked over the rebuff, and I decided to take Desmond's advice, finish the book, and then hawk it around the publishers in the usual way.

In the way of Exurbia, acquaintances were made. A. J. and Carrie Balaban, who lived opposite, heard we were indigent and sent over remains of food from their kitchen. We met Fernand and Laura Auberjonois (he ex-Swiss, and head of the French language programmes of the Voice of America, she an ex-Princess Murat of France); and Bill and Julie Sloane — he a publisher, who smoked us like kippers with his pipe, and gave me several informative lectures on infantry tactics: and Mr and Mrs Squillini, who had fourteen children already and another on the way (Mr Squillini was caretaker of the huge, now empty, mansion on the hill behind us. The mansion had been built high by Mr Katz of early nickelodeon fame so that he could look down on his ex-partners and rivals A. J. Balaban and Adolf Zukor, who had built the other side of the valley); and Gus Weltie, just retired from working on High Tor Farm, who had come from Germany some sixty-five years ago and seen the whole birth and growth of the artists' colony here; and Marion Hargrove, author of the wartime best-seller See here Private Hargrove, who lent us his car for Barbara to take her driving test (I had taken mine in Manhattan), and the homosexual Young Boys, who lived up on the hill; and the Old Boys who lived in the forest; and the Girls who lived up the road behind a wall of forsythia; and an old English lady whose sculptor husband had run away with his model one sunny day of long ago, leaving a note on the mantel of their house: suspecting what the note contained the lady called all the neighbours to a champagne party before opening it; and Henry Varnum Poor and Bessie Breuer, Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill, Burgess Meredith and Maxwell Anderson, and all these were amazingly kind, without pressure or condescension, to the foreigners in their midst.

Rockland County used to be a part of Orange County, but in 1798 it was cut off and its capital set at the geographical centre of the county, the already-existing New City. (In Maine they would certainly have called it Rockland Center.) It is a triangle of roughly twenty-mile sides, the eastern boundary being the Hudson, and the southern the New Jersey border. Around us there were still a few farms and orchards, but most of the people lived by working in Haverstraw, Nyack, New City, or by commuting to New York. Until recently the crack Squadron A of the New York National Guard had kept their horses here and come out here to play polo. The Squadron lands were a rolling oasis of grass in the middle of the universal forest. During prohibition the area had also been a favourite breakdown point for liquor smuggled down from Canada and destined for the speakeasies of Manhattan; but the only relics of this when we arrived were a few taverns, bars, and restaurants whose owners maintained an astonishing affluence in the face of an almost total lack of clients.

On South Mountain Road a certain bohemianism, a relic from the past, hung in the air as cigar smoke from last night's party lingers in the curtains. A character universally known as Om the Omnipotent had only recently closed down his yogic-tantric resort in Nyack, an establishment which provided health foods, blah, and sex to the local ladies and eager devotees from New York. At a party we would be introduced to some middle-aged and slightly deaf lady, far from bacchanalian in appearance, and learn that she was a painter. An hour later someone would mutter, 'See her? On Christmas Day, 1925, she stripped herself and her husband naked and rode him down South Mountain Road, on all fours, in a snowstorm.' At the A & P the lady in front of us, buying groceries, would seem to be a portly countrywoman, red of face and simple of mien, and nothing more; but the friend behind us would hiss, 'See her? She was a farmer's daughter, and the first girl any artist here asked to take her clothes off to model. Her father came out with a shotgun the same night.'

In a different category was Mrs Mahoney, who was aged ninety plus and lived alone in a wooden shack among the trees, which at first the mind simply refused to accept as real: it was incredibly ramshackle, half roofless, holed, leaning, rotting — but that was her house, and she knew classical Greek, and had once been a grande dame, and spoke sweetly to Susan when we met her one evening, a grey wraith in a long ragged dress, gliding painfully through the dusk of South Mountain Road.

The Hills's home life was always in some confusion, because Ray's chief 24-hour-a-day avocation was drinking extra dry martinis. Martinis were as popular in Rockland as in Manhattan and, feeling that I needed some distinctively American parlour trick to counteract my accent and general foreignness I learned to make good ones. I used House of Lords gin, which I considered (and still do) the best gin, Martini & Rossi dry vermouth (it is not over-herbal, like most of the French-made ones), mixed 12 to 1, never shook, and kept the gin, vermouth, pitcher, glasses, stirring spoon, and lemons in the refrigerator. I returned to sanity when we heard about the lady (of South Mountain Road) who, confronted by another martiniac, said, 'Oh yes, my husband and I do all that... but we get into the icebox to drink them, too.'

One day Barbara came to me, perplexed, and said, 'Eleanor Hope's invited us to a weeny roast on Sunday. What's it mean? Dwarfs and midgets only? Or do they roast only very small things, miniature chickens, legs of baby lambs?'

I said, 'Ask Marion,' who explained that wienie was short for wiener sausages, which did not exactly mean the same as frankfurters, or hot dogs, but near enough.

Sunday was a still day in high summer, when the heavy dark green trees met in a tall arch over the road, and only a few spots of still, hot light dappled the grass outside the little cabin on our grounds (we called it the Chicken Coop), where Eleanor and Chester spent occasional weekends. Blue smoke drifted up towards the dense leaf ceiling, and we drifted like the smoke, mixing, blending, bourbon on the rocks in hand while Chester turned the franks on the grill. Here was Phil Morse, nodding to us. He was sweating, black under the arms, but not because of the weather; he was always sweating. He told us of a minor domestic mishap, but to him it was a disaster, a personal affront. 'That's what you get for marrying a goy,' he ended, between set teeth. But what was a goy? Phyllis Kauffmann was speculatively eyeing a lone man near the grill. She poured herself another drink, took a large gulp, and moved in purposefully on the man, her hips swinging.

Ralph Barker caught my arm, 'Hey, Jack, remember what I said about the Chicago & Northwestern last time we met?' I remembered; it was another week-end and Ralph was practically unintelligible, but nothing could diminish, though it blurred, his infectious enthusiasm for the carloading figures through Milwaukee. Now he was unintelligible again, or soon to be, but we were off on the pulp tonnage shipped out of Great Lake ports for the fiscal year 1947; and I was enthralled. Around us Doris Clark and Joe Wright danced a formal minuet we were already coming to recognize as being like the music of the spheres, in that it had no beginning and would have no end. She revealed, smiled, beckoned — but would never give. She needed only the reassurance of her youth (which was passing) and her beauty (which was fading). Joe was the favourite target of her performance because he had recently divorced his wife and was on the loose. He knew well that there would be no climax to the show, but was good-naturedly happy to play a gambolling suitor to her coy non-virgin. In any case, several other ladies here and in the big city kept in trim a phallic limb rumoured to be the most shapely in the county.

And here were the ageing artisan, hot-eyed still, and the long-haired young satyr. A voice behind me murmured, 'Old Mellors — and young Mellors, his successor. South Mountain Road has always been full of Lady Chatterleys.'

Eleanor brought us hot dogs and said, 'Have you met Keith and Emily Jennison? They lived in your house once.'

Emily was tall and slim and dark. Keith taller, blond, and strongly handsome. They both smiled easily. Keith said, 'Have you heard about the Japanese lady who peed in four streams?'

He told the story, very well, with a perfect Japanese accent and perfectly-timed gestures, to the moment where the doctor, bowing and murmuring 'So sorry', extracts a gentleman's fly button from the lady's plumbing. I have a low tolerance for dirty stories, not because they are dirty but because so few are funny. Keith had made this one good, and the four of us drifted away, talking. He told me he was with William Sloane Associates, a publishing firm.

One day a man with a limp and an English accent breezed in and soon had the children his slaves as he sat them on his knees and told them long and wonderfully involved stories of the sea and ships. This was Frank Laskier, an English seaman who had had one leg blown off by the battleship Von Scheer and had been torpedoed twice, after losing his leg. He had written one novel, Unseen Harbour, and was at work on another. He read the manuscript of Brutal and Licentious, and a couple of short stories I was working on, and gave me an encouraging opinion.

What impressed me was his innate grasp of rhythm and force in the putting together of words. He had had no formal education except what British reform schools could give; I was the end product of twelve years of expensive schooling — but he could put teeth into a phrase much better than I, and I tried to see how I could achieve his effects without restricting my much larger vocabulary. We drank a lot of beer together and he gave us a kitten, which we named Tomlinson. Frank liked to engage me or another friend in a realish-sounding quarrel in a bar. Once everyone's attention was thoroughly engaged on us, he would call me an unforgivable name. I would whip out a knife and pin his foot to the floor, amid the gasps of the other clients. Here Frank would cry, in his best Lancashire accent, 'Oah, doan't do that, Jack! It tickles, like.' and slowly work the knife out of his (artificial) limb. One place where we did not play this trick was the Mount Ivy Bar & Grill. Real fights and knifethrowings were common enough there, so that while one of the two owner-brothers served bar the other sat upstairs with a shotgun, watching through a large hole in the ceiling.

It was Frank who, as the autumn colours began to smoulder in the forests, strode down South Mountain Road calling on all his friends with the cry, 'Have ye heard the good news? Mr Squillini has had the change of life!'

Marian Hill found Susan making a lovely salad for her dolls, and rushed into the house pale as a ghost to tell us — for the salad was of poison ivy, unknown in Europe and to us. It was a shiny three-leaved creeper which contains an oil with effects much like mustard gas; it raises painful suppurating blisters that last for many days. We met American 'communalism' for the first time, in the form of a complaint from Eleanor that we were hanging out our washing at the front of the house. What in hell had it got to do with her, we asked ourselves. Or anyone else. An Englishman's house is his castle, etcetera. But the principle that what we do on our own property affects others and is subject to some sort of control from them we were gradually absorbing, as we learned about zoning and our neighbours' fight to protect the qualities of our life against commercial exploitation.

Vyvyan and Eugenie came to spend the week-end and we all listened to the World's Series on the radio. Vyvyan seemed to know what was going on, but in spite of her explanations Barbara and I remained as baffled at the end as at the beginning. We were still foreigners. The huge newspapers were still full of events meaningless to us. Much of the conversation we heard and overheard was like the song of birds, pleasant but not readily to be interpreted. Troup Mathews decided not to register his car for the winter. He rented it to us at the generous rate of $1 per day, and we drove down to North Carolina to visit friends Barbara had made on the Queen Mary.

The cook at their house in Rocky Mount was large, cheerful, and black. When she went to hug Martin, aged just over two, he shrank back in horror. She burst into a great chuckle and said, 'There, you frightened, ain' you. You ain' seen no coloured people!' (He had, but he did not remember, for he was six weeks old when we left India.) He made friends with her later; while Barbara and I, walking round the town, watching the tobacco auctions, observing the signs, Coloured — White on the rest rooms, wondered what America was going to do about this anomaly. The shame was not ours, it was theirs, and we only observed as outsiders and with a certain grim satisfaction, remembering the lectures we English had received from the U.S. on the wickedness of our ways, particularly in India. There was no Jim Crow in India, except in the case of the clubs, and at least twenty years before independence the English had realized that they were in an untenable position there, and the clubs had desegregated.

Our hosts offered us their beach house at Nag's Head for a long week-end. We accepted gratefully. During August we finished the second draft of Brutal and Licentious. During September I went over it all again, making many more corrections, and again re-phrasing to bring out qualities that I knew were there, but still hidden; now only a hundred pages remained to be typed. Heartened by a telegram from Desmond, who had sold a short story to Argosy for $300, we drove east, and after several hours came to the ocean.

To the encouraging beat of the surf, while Nanny watched Susan and Martin playing on the beach, we finished the dictation in two days. In the evening the children brought in fulgurites and sand dollars they had found, both very common there; and Nanny said she had talked with a nice woman called Nellie Myrtle. She added cautiously, 'I think she's English.' She was wrong, we found later; Nellie Myrtle was American, of that Devon stock which inhabits the Outer Banks, still speaking a pure 17th-century West Country English.

On the third morning, the work done, we went exploring. The sky was bright and the water dark-blue, wind-whipped. I had a new sensation of America, stronger and more deep than any since I first bowed my head, nearly weeping, before Lincoln in his cold white chair ten years before. We stood by the reconstructed log wall of the Lost Colony. Across the ruffled water of Currituck Sound, where dune grass held the sand together in a low rise against the thieving wind, rose a winged stone column. It was the Wright Brothers Memorial, for that low sand dune was Kill Devil Hill.

Here, on opposite sides of this uninhabited inlet, where there was no sound above the sigh of the wind and the slap of the water, had taken place two events of final importance for mankind. It was not French, or German, or Danish sailors who had founded this colony (later lost, later replanted) — it was English. And there, man had first flown. He would have done it somewhere else soon enough; but he had not, he had done it here. The shrinkage of Earth, the inescapable irreversible compression of all peoples into one world, began here, not in a European capital or an Asian university.

Brutal was finished — again. Considering that I should have a colophon (a writer's personal 'trademark': Kipling's swastika and Maugham's arch are examples), I designed one for myself by superimposing twin mountain peaks, snow topped, on the five rivers and rising sun crest of the Punjab, to symbolize what I hoped to write about. (I have used that colophon ever since. It is displayed on the title page of this book, below my name.) For the last night our hosts the Dowdys came out from Rocky Mount, bringing food and Southern Comfort, while we collected a huge pile of driftwood. The bonfire towered up on the edge of the ocean, Susan and Martin sat wide-eyed holding hands at the edge of the flames, we ate fried chicken, danced, drank, and prayed that Brutal would succeed. The next day we were on our way north.

Brutal and Licentious began to make the rounds of publishing houses in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. I worked on short stories and articles, finding the medium constricting after a full length book. While we had been away the autumn had secretly surrounded us, the forest behind us blazed and glowed with a brilliance that we found unearthly. The light, strained through the golden leaves, poured gold on the floors and made haloes of gold round the children's heads. Along the road the maples stood like ethereal flames, the sun afire in each transparent leaf. Up a disused cart track a hundred yards away, a single tree had turned deep scarlet. The heavy summer damp had dried out of the air, and every morning we breathed a light champagne, as sharp and exhilarating as the tang of evening woodsmoke from our fire. From High Tor ridge we saw Manhattan, opal and gold, rising out of the flat lands forty miles to the south like a presence created by a djinn, to vanish at his whim.

Macmillan rejected the book: no comment.

Forewarned that the Immigration authorities would probably not renew my visa when it came due in February, I had began to take action to defend our future on many fronts. The Dowdys were interceding with Congressman Harold Colley and Kenneth Royall, then Secretary of the Army, both North Carolinians. Colonel John Howard of Massachusetts, a Himalayan Holiday contact, was interesting Senators Cabot Lodge and Leverett Saltonstall. Through Vyvyan we had met the son of Senator Kilgore of West Virginia, who was approaching his father. An Immigration lawyer recommended by A. J. Balaban was studying my case...

While at Rocky Mount we had been taken to see the North Caroline — North Carolina State game; or, perhaps more accurately, to see Charlie Choo-choo Justice and Chorus. We enjoyed the game and the special college football atmosphere, and now determined to see as many Army games as we could afford. I was army myself, even if it was a different one, and West Point was barely twenty miles up river from us. So one glorious Saturday we provided ourselves with sandwiches and a flask (I had seen at Chapel Hill that this was de rigueur) and drove up to watch the Army — Columbia game. The Hudson, similar to but considerably more magnificent than the Rhine, was a trench of liquid steel between the gold and scarlet banks of the forest. At the Academy the cadets were marching on to the grassy Plain, their Colours and guidons snapping, all around the oriflammes of the trees.

The cadets drilled exceedingly badly to my eyes. At Sandhurst the whole lot of them, and whoever was responsible for their training, would have been rushed to the guardroom. After a time I realized that they weren't really drilling badly, they were listening to a different drummer. Each man slouched easily along, making no sound on the grass. There was none of the crisp crack and crash of British drill, but, from a distance, lounging against a rainbow at the edge of the Plain, the masses of them had grace, grace in the sum of the individuals, grace in the effortless unhurried step. The green cocks' feathers fluttered, the long rows of black stripes went back, forward, back, forward. Very nice... I was back in a familiar world. It was reassuring to know that it existed here, too.

Later, we asked the way of a cadet busily hurrying somewhere. He stopped, saluted, called me Sir and Barbara Ma'am. When he had learned where we wanted to go, he turned, slowed his pace to ours, and began to walk with us. It took several minutes of arguing and counter-courtesy before I could persuade him to go about his business and leave us to find our way.

We walked up to Michie Stadium in growing euphoria. The cadets' girls, the Columbia girls, the secretaries from New York, were as pretty and cheerful as so many bright birds. Red coats and dresses glowed like maples in the stands. The solid grey bank of cadets began to chant. The turf was bright green and covered with a hundred-and-fifty warriors in light blue, white, black, gold. The man behind us offered us his flask. The game began. We were seated behind the goal posts, high up, and could see little, but since we understood little, that was proper. The good temper of the crowd exhilarated us. Immediately in front of us a group of Columbia supporters, youngish and crewcut, probably lawyers or business executives, shouted outrageous remarks at Army supporters down the aisle. The man behind us explained that they were taunting Army with the previous year's famous Columbia upset victory over Army, then rated No. 1 in the country. A middle-aged Army wife near them responded with worse arrows at Columbia. Flasks were much in evidence, but only one man was drunk and he was in such good humour with himself and with his team, and so many people were looking after him, that it didn't matter.

In England, I thought, no one took a whisky flask to a Rubgy International. The team would not have been called 'Army', either, because it wasn't; it was only the Military Academy. In England...

I stopped short, thinking of a brief remark that Troup Mathews had made, without malice but with insight, the last time we met. 'You're in the comparing phase,' he had said. I realized that we were indeed not seeing events or circumstances in their own context, but in comparison with our own experiences. The tea was not as good as in England, the coffee better; New York was dirtier than London on the streets, but cleaner in restaurants and snack bars; just now I had been seeing the West Point drill not in itself but in comparison with Sandhurst's; Judge Medina's trial of the Communists in New York had prompted a continuous (and highly unfavourable) comparison between the courtroom chaos there and what would have happened at the Old Bailey... But Troup made us think that perhaps we should not compare; perhaps we should try to estimate things — even singing commercials — in their own terms, the terms of here: South Mountain Road, New City, Rockland County, New York, the United States of America.

Chapter Five

It would be exciting to try a novel. The major problem was the length of time that my capital — my writing hours — would be tied up in what might be another unproductive enterprise. A novel consisted of about 100,000 words, a short story of about 5,000. In theory I could write twenty shorts in the same time as one long. A novel was one big gamble, shorts a series of small ones. But the real odds were better on the novel, for the plain fact was that my short stories were not good, while the long book, (Brutal) was. Further I did not like writing short stories. And that settled it.

Harper's turned down Brutal: no comment.

I waited, biting my finger-nails, but Desmond gave me valuable advice. He said, 'A writer's time is always valuable. If you don't write anything I can't sell anything. While Brutal is going round the publishers, you should be starting something else.' I began to say that I had no idea for a short story, and that no one wanted the sort of articles I was interested in writing, but he cut in, 'Why don't you write a novel? You could, you know.' I settled down to work out the full implications of his suggestion.

The writing of Brutal had given me confidence that the mere mass of words in a full length book was nothing to be afraid of. Indeed, Desmond and others told me that I wrote much faster than most writers do. I like the freedom of the full form and found that short story a strait jacket. This was partly through indiscipline and extravagance in the use of words, but it was obvious that some writers are better in one form and some in the other. Kipling only wrote one good novel, Kim (a short one); Hemingway only two or three; Maugham, one; while most of the great novelists seldom or never wrote short stories. Perhaps space had a special value to me in writing, as in living. Perhaps I was a 'spacious' writer.

Very well. John Masters, who has written a volume of autobiography which no one will touch, is going to write a novel. O.K., what about?

But, wait. If the novel were not taken, I would give up writing. I would have no time or desire left to go on beating my head against the wall. I had other talents and would have to turn to them. But suppose it were published, what would be the results? There would be an immediate but probably impermanent lessening of our financial stringency. And then? I would be expected to write another novel. I would want to do it, too, for the first publication would be success, and I knew that champagne tingle in the blood. And then? Another one, obviously. And another... In fact, without planning it, I would become a novelist. But the smallest inspection showed that writers fell into two categories: one-book authors, and many-book authors. As I had no other means of support, one-book success would be no use to me. Therefore I had to be a many-book man. Was I?

John Day rejected Brutal. They said they already had a writer on Oriental subjects (Pearl Buck).

The many-book authors could again be divided into those who linked their books into some form of coherent chain, and those whose subjects were not linked. With Hemingway, for instance, there was no continuity between one book and the next. The pressure that made him write each book came from events in the outside world. He saw a war, a fiesta, a civil war and each triggered him to say something about it. Faulkner and Forester did link their books (Yoknapatawhpha, Hornblower) and the themes seldom had a direct or obvious connection with current events. The pressure that made them write, therefore, came from inside. They were more independent, since their thought or feeling carried its own germinating impulse, and did not require fertilization from outside.

For myself, I did not think it would be wise to trust to outside germination. Suppose I remained uninterested, infertile? To be sure of becoming, and remaining, a novelist and carrying out my elementary responsibilities as a husband and father, I must make sure that I had the seeds in me, fertilized and ready to flower and fruit under proper husbandry.

So the question, What is my novel to be about? had become, What are my novels to be about? The first requirement seemed to me to be that I should know my subject or subjects. Everyone knows something about people (though usually notably less than they think they do) and of course people and their development must form a large part of any novel; but the events and circumstances which do the developing are not universal, they are special to particular times, places... and people. To write about any one, you had to know that one. I could not write about Rockland County, for example, because I did not understand deeply enough the circumstances and events which helped to make our friends what they individually were.

The American scene engrossed my peripheral awareness. No one locked his door, day or night. I had had three or four small jobs done on Troup's Chevy and every time the mechanic had waved away my proffered money with a curt, 'Forget it', but the charge for one bigger job was very high. Legend to the contrary, I had met only politeness from New York cops and U.S. customs officers; but in the nation and community graft seemed to be endemic and universal. The papers were full of kickbacks, gerrymandering, and payola — words that I had to ask the meaning of. Everyone talked lightly of fixing traffic tickets. Fixing a traffic ticket, or attempting to bribe a policeman, was a criminal action; how could the politicians be expected to keep their fingers out of the pie if the voters thought nothing of fixing a ticket? Both actions were equally disgraceful. But the country so throbbed with energy, there was so much doing, talking, acting, planning, so fiercely were fought the battles, that dead cats were always being stirred up to the surface, to be grabbed and hurled as ammunition.

No, what I knew most about was the English: not the English in England, the English in India. There I had a personal knowledge extending over nineteen years and an understanding that stretched back, seeming to be bred into me, for four previous generations, a hundred-and-forty years. I had more appreciation of Clive than of Marlborough, and took pride that Wellington was called the Sepoy General. I admired Warren Hastings, 'the plain man in the snuff-coloured suit', more than either Pitt. In large part this was because I also understood and appreciated the circumstances that had shaped them. The breakdown of the Mogul Empire was far more real to me than the Industrial Revolution. I knew a great deal about jungles and jungle-dwellers and nothing about slums. I knew the difference between a Jain and a Sikh, but not between a Baptist and a Methodist. I admired Indian heroes, such as Asoka, Shivaji and Akbar more than any of the Napoleons, Fredericks, and Garibaldis who had managed to intrude themselves into the All-British history we were taught in school.

So, I could write about India and, more particularly, about the British In India. Anything else? Military affairs, for one; adventure and mystery stories, probably. And would I enjoy it? Yes, in all three cases, but India the most. And who would enjoy the results — like, for instance, readers? Some writers did not give a damn whether anyone read what they wrote, or not; I had met several such in Rockland County. I could not agree, for to me there is no writing without a partner, the reader. If there are to be no readers, there is, for me, no writing. Classifying the three fields open to me I thought that military affairs, being a rather specialized area, would attract few readers, unless I became a military correspondent. 'India' could hold a general readership, if I did it well. 'Adventure and mystery' with perseverance, certainly would. But my God, a mystery writer's life! the hours creating — what? Anodynes. I did not want to go into the drug business.

Little, Brown rejected Brutal. It was very well written and eminently readable, they said, but they couldn't think what category to publish it in, as it contained elements of travel, belles lettres, adventure, and military history, as well as autobiography.

My novels would be on 'the British in India', then. This covered a 347-year period. How many novels were there in that? An awful lot. But it was no use saying glibly, 'an awful lot'. How many could I write, and on what precise subjects?

Novels were made of conflict, growth, change. Good novels carried you along on a river of narrative, and as you went you learned, felt, thought, about the squabbles of the boatmen, or the life along the river banks. The best novels made you feel equally sympathetic with both sides to the conflict. There were no villains, there were only two good people brought into inevitable conflict by opposing philosophies. (This was what often lifted adventure and spy stories above the aspirin level: the 'enemy' was not a villain, he was a man doing his duty as much as the hero was.) There were, of course, many other ways of looking at the novel; but, for me, I thought I could make a novel about any real conflict.

And the elections! Appalling accusations were being made every day. Either they were true, in which case all the major candidates on both sides ought to be in jail for about twenty years apiece, for felony, corruption, and treason; or they were false, in which case all the major candidates, together with the press and radio journalists, ought to be in jail for about twenty years apiece, for slander, blackmail, and libel. A majestic oak tree stood at the end of South Mountain Road, and someone had painted on it in ugly white letters — VOTE FOR DEWEY. That was bad taste, and it made us think less of Mr Dewey that his supporters should do such a thing. We wondered how many voters felt as we did. We read the papers, and studied the issues. We wondered whether we might, between ourselves, take sides. All my training was to keep away from politics; as a soldier my job was to carry out lawful orders from a constitutional government; the price of bearing arms was to stand absolutely aloof from politics, in order that no one could accuse you of exerting armed pressure on the state. But I was not really a soldier any more, and this election campaign, now being waged from end to end of the huge land, the communiqués plastered across every newspaper and blaring from every radio, affected our lives. We were not Americans, and God forbid that we should intervene in any way; but, supposing we were, what then?

Suppose we were Americans: then we must think first of the good of America. A good many voters seemed to be more concerned with what was good for other countries, particularly Israel and Ireland. Others were concerned only their states, or even their own businesses and industries. All in all, we decided we would vote for Mr Truman. We had done a lot of listening by then, too, and we also thought that Mr Truman would win.

I began to list the high points of conflict during the British period in India — of nation against nation, brother against brother, man against nature, wisdom against ignorance...

The first words on the list were Indian Mutiny, 1857. Here was a conflict which became the physical and psychological hinge of all relations between England and India; and, I believed, between East and West. A hatred had been breeding under a surface outwardly calm, and in a prosperity and peace such as no living Indian had known, nor his father before him. That hatred had bred hatred. The resulting explosion had destroyed most of the good and some of the bad in the British-Indian relationship. Here was a theme with an inherent narrative of tremendous power, and strong enough to carry whatever insights or messages I wanted to give on the second level.

Doubleday rejected Brutal: no comment.

Next I wrote, Thuggee. This was the practice of strangling and robbing travellers by religiously motivated gangs. After flourishing for centuries, it was put down in the 1820s. It was of the same order of phenomena as sutteeism (the practice of Hindu widows burning themselves alive on their husbands' funeral pyres), and the fact that Brahmins could not be punished for capital offences. The British overturned all these, but what vital conflicts must have preceded and followed, for none could have flourished without the approval of millions of Indians? And what inner conflicts must have bedevilled the British, committed to leaving their Indian subjects in the free practice of their religions?

Malaria, I wrote; for it was Ronald Ross of the Indian Medical Service who had discovered the method of transmission of the disease. It had been a long struggle — man against his environment, if you like. There must have been many setbacks. There may have been murmurs from some about the effect of wiping out malaria on a country so poor that it could hardly support its existing malaria-ravaged population.

The names and purposes of small wars crowded into my mind. In all of them two ways of life had been in conflict. In all, something of value had been at stake on each side. Lake's 1803 campaign against the Mahrattas was an obvious choice, also the Nepal, Sikh, Sind, and Burma campaigns, later in the century. Then there was the geographical exploration of India, the work of the surveyors who had marched with theodolite and chain where armies could barely move. Who had discovered Everest, and how? Who had built the railways, the roads, the dams, against what human and natural enemies? Who had fought the great fights against famine, against illiteracy, and how? I knew there had been a tremendous struggle, vital to the future development of the nation, as to whether the higher education of Indians should be in English or vernacular languages. There would be a magnificent and universal theme in the conflict between a missionary, truly Christian in every way, and a Brahmin, also of the truest faith and morals. An ancestor of mine had been the first man to discover the tea plant growing wild in Assam; but who had first grown it commercially, and after what vicissitudes? One great-grandfather had been a Hooghly pilot; the tale there would be of perils at sea and in the great river, of graft and merchants and money, of insurance speculation, perhaps, against professional integrity...

Everyone had an amazing sense of public duty, and, on public business, an apparent imperviousness to boredom. Our friends were constantly slipping off to attend meetings of the P.T.A., which we had come to believe was an American secret society dedicated to destroying the public (state) school system. When we were invited to a couple of meetings as guests, in view of Susan's imminent entry into that system, we learned that the letters stood for Parent-Teacher Association, and that our friends spent those long hours discussing the teacher shortage or the price of school lunches.

Everyone's tolerance was phenomenal. Bumbling idiots who wandered miles from the point and at the end made a suggestion that had already been turned down were heard out with bottomless patience and good will. The result was that two hundred man-hours of our time was regularly spent in settling a point that really needed no more than five minutes thought by one democratically chosen representative. But it did involve all of us in our schools. My God, how involved we were!

Everyone knew who was our State Assemblyman, and the names and voting records of the members of the Town Board. Many thought nothing of actually attending Town Board Meetings, where they kept close watch on the Board's allotment of sewer contracts and grant of variances from the zoning laws. Everyone knew who was on the School Board, and many worked hard to elect the members they believed best qualified to serve on it.

'Do you realize,' Barbara said to me one day, 'that two out of three of the people round here have been in, are in, or are going to be in psycho-analysis? And they're bringing up their children not by what they believe is best, but out of books. Do you think they're all unbalanced?'

Or was it we who were unbalanced? In our combined seventy-two varied years neither of us had ever met anyone who had been treated by a psycho-analyst or a psychiatrist. Was this phenomenon into which we had landed the wave of the future, or was it yet another fad of the unbalanced over-rich, probably imported from California along with Aimee Semple MacPherson and Rosicrucianism?

Since over 30 per cent of South Mountain Road's artistic and intellectual community was Jewish one event from the outside world had a particular impact upon us. That was, of course, the foundation of Israel on May 14 of this year, the terrorism against the British mandate authorities in Palestine before it, and the war with the Arabs after it. We found ourselves in our usual schizophrenic position. All our friends professed the deepest admiration for the British people and their institutions, but some had been collecting funds for the Irgun Zwai Leumi, which would be used to murder British soldiers (who had, incidentally, captured the country from the Turks in the first place). Then, we found it very muddled thinking to make amends to world Jewry for what the Germans had done to them by awarding them lands belonging to Arabs. The Allies ought to have given them land they themselves owned, or carved it out of Germany, and guaranteed its boundaries. The war, itself, found us on the side of Israel because although we thought it should not have existed in that place the Arabs' purpose, like Hitler's, was to annihilate it and kill all its people, men, women and babes, while the Israelis' was only to survive. None of this made friendly argument easy but at least we were spared accusations of anti-Semitism. That the Road never used among its own.

Putnam's turned down Brutal; no comment.

In the course of a long day I listed thirty-five areas of conflict about which I felt I could write novels. They covered the whole period from 1600 to 1947. Taken as a whole they would present a large canvas of the British period in India. The British would be in the foreground, as they had been in actuality; yet I thought the canvas would show how they were controlled by their environment — India — even while they were ostensibly directing it.

Such a large project would benefit from an imposed unity. Since I was going to cover all India, which is a large place, and 347 years, which is a long time, I thought that the only course left open to me was to put into the foreground of each book some member of a single continuing family. The family should have dominant, recognizable characteristics, which in turn should resemble the characteristics of the British as they showed themselves in India. The tragedies and dramas of my stories would not happen to 'the British' but to human-size people, who would also stand as measuring rods by which readers could judge the size of events.

The whole would be larger and nobler than the sum of its parts, if I could complete it. At that moment I knew that I would like to... but what I liked was almost irrelevant. I had undertaken this search to find a field for novel writing. I had found it. Death might cut off the work at any stage. Other interests might turn me from it. That was to be expected, for as India receded from me (not that I would love her less), I would learn to love others as much, or more. I would be a sad specimen as a person, probably as a writer, too, if this were not true.

So, a many-book novelist I would be; and a damned bad one if I didn't study the techniques more professionally before putting pencil to paper. I bought E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, and found it brilliant, giving the same stereoscopic clarity of insight as his A Passage to India. I did not much admire the latter book because, knowing India, I knew that the clarity was false. There is none in India, and it can only be imposed by shading greys to blacks, and uniting muddled chains of small hillocks into a single sharp mountain range. I thought that the clarity of Aspects was also probably bought at the price of real truth. But I needed a guide, and Mr Forster would have to serve until I learned my way about the crags for myself. Aspects of the Novel took its place on my desk along with the Concise Oxford Dictionary (which I very seldom looked at: if, with a personal vocabulary of about 60,000 words, I didn't know a word already, it would look out of place if mined from the dictionary and mounted uncut in my prose); and the Fowlers' Modern English Usage. The Fowlers were already out of date in places, but they were not didactic, and their principles — Be clear, be simple, be natural — were faultless, and their distinctions and explanations were like alum dropped into cloudy water.

Under the glowing Sunday leaves we played the last Marching & Chowder Club's softball games on Alan Anderson's grass. After the last out Keith Jennison brought in the pitcher of beer he had carefully protected behind a pillow — second pillow, I believe it was called — and Joe Wright his shot from the outfield. I stirred lazily under the tree and thought I'd never understand the game, even though I had thrown (Pitched, Jack, for God's sake') a couple of innings. Underhand! Like a girl's school! I was still blushing. We parted. Back to wives and children, hot dogs and hamburgers.

Enabled to move about for that princely $1 a day, we went for the first time up into Bear Mountain Park, a few miles to the north. Martin was wearing a dark green wind-jacket and Susan a red shirt. I see them still at the water's edge, a maple in flame over them, the pines a dark curtain beyond the mirrored steel of the lake, the high pale sky, a sense of space, silence, wilderness, and winter coming.

Sometimes we drove the Chevy over to Westchester and spent a lazy afternoon watching the New York Central steam-hauled expresses as they thundered along the river's verge by Croton-on-Hudson. At night when the wind was in the east or south we heard the distant breathing beat of West Shore freights making the long climb from West Nyack through the black earth truck farms of Valley Cottage towards the Long Clove tunnel, and the mournful minor key moaning of the whistles for the level crossing at Congers, and again, dying and vanishing, for the tunnel mouth.

The night of the election found us in a state of secretive and guilty excitement, for we had Taken Sides. Neither of us could help it. Try as we might we could not see Thomas E. Dewey, President of the United States, as anything but a misprint. Mr Truman's dismayingly petty past in Missouri politics seemed to us to distort but not obscure the essential guts and quality of the man. So we sat up all night listening to the radio and in the morning went to bed marvelling, for the first time, at the American people's uncanny ability to make the right decision when the only sources of information available to them are either biased, doctrinaire, lying, ignorant, or all f our.

Alfred Knopf rejected Brutal; no comment.

Carrie Balaban sent for me and handed me a thick manuscript. Would I read it and advise her how to improve it, for a suitable stipend? It was called Aunt Hattie of Cripple Creek, and was the story of Carrie's Aunt Hattie in the wild west of the Colorado mining towns around the turn of the century. The story itself, of gambling and highlife, of fancy ladies, rough miners, and sharp operators, was magnificent, but the presentation was flat and boring. After three days hard work I prepared an analysis, the sum of which was that she had a beautiful piece of steak there, but it was badly cooked. I made suggestions for improving it, and would have liked to offer to ghost it for her; but my style wasn't hers. She had to develop her own. Collecting $42, I returned to my own work.

Winter came, filling the house with the roar of the heating system. We had never seen anything like it, and regarded it with awe and some terror. There was a furnace in the basement on the garage level, and this furnace, fed by natural gas from Texas, heated sucked-in air, which a pump then blew up through a square hole, covered by a grating, in the living-room floor directly above. The hole was called a register, and that was the entire heating set-up. The other rooms downstairs — kitchen and dining-roomhad no heat; and as winter advanced we took to leaving the oven doors open, so that Barbara could work down there. The living-room, containing the register, was usually comfortable, and our bedroom and my study on the same level were tolerable, but upstairs... We didn't appreciate what it was like up there till one cold night Susan and Martin staggered down purple in the face, weeping, their pyjamas sweat-soaked, wailing that it was TOO HOT. We went up and it must have been 99 degrees in their room, for the stairway was open and the register just beside the foot of it. Most of the hot air rushed straight on up so that for every degree we raised the living-room the kids' bedroom went up four. We devised a system of baffles but it was never right, and I have not liked the circulating hot air system since. The register did have one great purpose. All the family put their pyjamas on the register in the evenings and they were warm and welcoming by bedtime — when we laid our underclothes there, to warm up until we rushed through first thing in the morning to put them on.

Christmas came and the Hills dropped by after dinner for a drink. We gave them pieces of Christmas pudding prepared English style. As it was awash with brandy Ray wasted no time getting his portion into his mouth. Then he gagged, and mumbled, 'What the hell's this?' He felt in his mouth and pulled out a quarter. Susan clapped and told him he was lucky, as most of the coins Barbara had baked into the pudding were only dimes; but he felt his teeth and muttered, 'Crazy British.'

Farrar Strauss rejected Brutal; no comment.

We detected suspicious movement on the high ground that dominated our exposed left flank. Through binoculars I saw cannon being hauled into position, and detected the grim faces of the Immigration Authorities directing the operation. Mr Kahn, the immigration lawyer, tried frantically to dig trenches in which I could take refuge. First, he claimed I was a privileged academic (on the grounds of my Staff College teaching); then, that I hadn't really been born in India at all, but on British territory (a British military hospital in Calcutta). Calls for counter-battery fire flew like flights of carrier pigeons to Senators Lodge, Saltonstall, and Kilgore, Congressman Cooley and the appropriately named Mr Battle, a lawyer of Rocky Mount. The responses were not encouraging. Mr Kahn handed me a white flag, and advised me to leave before I was deported, as that would put a permanent black mark against me.

I began the preparation of the first novel. The subject must be the most powerful to my hand: the Indian Mutiny. I spent two days wondering whether I could afford to start with another, for the Mutiny was so great a subject that I really ought not to tackle it until I was better equipped to do so. But a man being charged by a tiger is wise to use his biggest gun the first time; there may not be a second. So the Mutiny it was.

I defined my object: To tell an exciting story about the Indian Mutiny. Hell, that was no use. That would fit a potboiler for the pulps, and here I was wanting to pull the heart out of my body to transmit the terror and tragedy of 1857.

To make readers feel the true facts and emotions of the Indian Mutiny.

O.K., but was it enough? Where was the second level I had been learning was essential to good writing?

What was the natural second level of the Mutiny? That stuck out a mile: the fact that good men on both sides were turned into beasts, much (I learned later) as had also happened in the Spanish Civil War.

To make readers feel the true facts and emotions of the Indian Mutiny, while showing how hatred breeds hatred.

Long-winded... but after all, I was not about to write an Operation Order for the capture of Mandalay. That was a complicated business; this was going to be much more so. It would do.

The next problem was research: now or later? I knew the principal events of the Mutiny and, more important, I knew roughly why it had come about, and what most British and Indians felt about it at the time. If I did a lot of research I would dredge up more detailed information. I would find out what young ladies wore at formal balls in 1857; what was the correct way to address a deposed Rajah; the names of Havelock's aides. But it was not certain that I would want to use any of this information; so the collection of it might be a waste of time. I also knew, from correcting Staff College papers, that once a man has done research he has a strong tendency to make his readers swallow the fruits of it. I could see the danger.

After all, it would seem a criminal waste, once I had with so much effort dug up the fact that Tippoo Sahib used to give his pet pug dog champagne for supper, not to use it. To hell with the architectural line and ornamental plan of the book — stick it in.

Holt rejected Brutal; no comment.

I decided to leave research to the end. If my broad plan was not right, I had no business writing the novel in the first place. After I had done the first or second draft I would find out whether the greased cartridges were introduced on April 1 or March 1; and I would make out a calendar for the year 1857 so that my Sundays fell on the right dates (the Mutiny began on May 10, and subsequent risings on May 17, 24, and 31 — which is not important; but all those dates were Sundays, which is important, because on Sundays the British troops went to church, leaving their arms behind, until they learned better); I would get the Hindu and Muslim feast days for that year; and go to the Nautical Almanac and make a chart of the times of sunrise and set, and of the moon phases (Barbara told me that in one of his books Rider Haggard has the moon at full seven nights in succession: I did not want such a dreadful story told about me).

The creation of the book began: the formation of the major characters to achieve my object; how many should there be? Must be at least two, one for the British and one for the Indian points of view. How shape the secondary characters (according to Forster's Law) to reflect light on the major ones?... Narrative flow, how can I get the reader reading, which is after all, Task One? I am not writing this to be chanted to myself in the bath... A strong lead? Someone travelling probably, as it is human nature to want to know where a traveller is going, and why, and what will happen when he gets there... What is the over-all shape of the book? Like the letter X, I think, with the Mutiny as the central point in which everyone meets, and then goes their separating ways afterwards. True to life, but will it be anti-climactic?

Why not write the Mutiny chapter first, with all characters and events at their crest, so to speak? Then build events back from it, in narrative, tracing what led immediately to it, what led to that, and so back, step by step. The same with the characterizations; by the Mutiny chapter they must all have reached that stage of knowledge, love, whatever, where the impact is greatest: build back step by step, so that they grow to the Mutiny.

Desmond and I discussed sending the MS of Brutal to British publishers; but I feared that others would think like Victor Gollancz; and in any case, even if the book achieved instant recognition and success for me over there, it would still be in England and not in America. We had gone through an exhausting process to decide that recognition and financial success in England were not what we wanted.

I began to write the Mutiny novel with frantic concentration. A few more publishers turned down Brutal. Fall passed into winter. Susan had lost her stammer. Tomlinson the kitten was almost a cat. He liked to fight the papers on my desk, and follow us for walks in the forest.

Josie Balaban suggested that our neighbours should all swear we were nice people and petition Congress to let us stay in the United States. She made up the petition and started collecting signatures. Old Gus Weltie volunteered his help. The Squire of South Mountain Road, a white-haired Viking called Harold Deming, came to inspect and cross-examine us before signing the petition.

On a tip, I went to see the local boss of the Democratic Party. He told me he thought our legal entry could be fixed if I went to Canada, applied to come back in... first paying $1,000 to the Democratic Party funds. Like hell, I thought, with difficulty keeping my open, manly smile in place.

We took the petition to one pair of prominent neighbours — Mr and Mrs Kurt Weill — in person. An unbalanced washing machine groaned rhythmically off stage as we talked to them, until Lotte cried, 'That awful thing, I can't think while it goes huh-huh-huh like that! It is too sexy!' — and rushed to turn it off. Being both immigrants themselves, they signed at once, with encouraging words. In all, 137 people signed the petition and then it was sent to our district's representative in Congress, Mrs Katharine St George. She agreed to introduce a special bill on our behalf into the House, and Senator Kilgore said he would do the same in the Senate. Turning to that flanking hill, I saw the Immigration gunners withdraw, gnashing their vile teeth, since they were stopped from trying to throw us out until the bills came up and that might take several months. But they left their cannon in position.

The Polish United Workers' Party finally imposed Communism in that country, and the darkness spread. It seemed a little less black than the others, to our eyes. The light here was so bright, and Poland so far.

We gathered in a neighbour's house to see the old year out. I went in the full dress messkit of my regiment, with miniature medals, for these were my last hours in the Army. After a good many rum punches and the like, some of my friends began plotting to divest me of this militaristic finery by force, but I forestalled them. I slipped away a few minutes before midnight, and changed into civilian clothes — or mufti, as I still thought of them. After fourteen-and-a-half years I was no longer a professional fighting man, but a professional writing man, and nothing else. Since my net total earnings for the year had been $402, this seemed to me rather a bleak statement, or admission.

Barbara took off her girdle and shoes and began to dance in her bare feet. Peter Burchard put on her girdle, over his trousers, and danced with epicene abandon. Keith sat by the fire, strummed his guitar, and began to sing 'Oh, the Eer-i-ee was arising, the gin was getting low.' Emily hugged my arm and said, 'You know, when we first met you, I thought you were going to be the only sort of Englishman I don't like. But you're not so bad. And Barbara's marvellous!'

That's fair enough, I thought. Can't do better than that without more practice.

Chapter Six

Our sublease of the South Mountain Road house expired. Once again the Mathews came to our rescue, this time by introducing us to Tony Palmer, an actor who had been asked to tour with Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne, but did not want to accept unless his wife could go with him. After a couple of meetings they offered us their cottage in New Jersey, rent free, for three months, if we would look after their two-year-old son. We accepted with gratitude and early in January 1949, made the move piecemeal in the Palmers' Crosley, which they leased to us for a small charge. Twice I drove that car through the Lincoln Tunnel and down U.S.1. In the driver's seat the hub caps of the vast trucks were level with my eye, and so were the exhausts, as they roared past amid sulphurous thunder and a clangorous changing of gears. The sheer wind of their passage jerked me all over the road. I was a trembling wreck by the time we were settled in the sandy wastes outside Milltown; and if I have a complex about small cars, it can be blamed on that experience.

The cottage was small, wooden, and dilapidated, but comfortable. We thought it might house a poltergeist, as there were mysterious rattlings, groanings, and bangings at night; but the thing did no actual damage, so we asked it to be a little more quiet, and forgot about it. Barbara at once cut out baby Mick Palmer's accustomed night-time bottle, which ensured that he would sleep in a wet bed, and also gave him meat which he had not had before. In the first week he threw a few violent tantrums, in which he hurled himself face down on the floor and screamed his head off, watched in silent astonishment by Susan and Martin. When nothing else happened he cut off the noise as though at a tap, got up sheepishly, and did as he had been told. In the second week, after he had watched me smack our two a couple of times for minor offences, the next time (though he had committed no crime himself) he formed up and held out his own hand. Now I was in rather a quandary. I did not want to let him feel that he was different from ours, but I didn't want him to think a smacking was unconnected with a cause. In the end I told him he didn't have to be smacked but, if he really insisted, I'd give him one and then a kiss; he insisted, and it was so arranged. Most of the time we never saw the kids, for they were out playing in the sand with our Hungarian-and-Polish-American neighbours. In no time our three were talking about griss and theirs about grawss. (The local war memorials showed clearly how the population base of the area had changed. All the dozen or so names on the Civil War memorial were of English, Scottish, or Irish origin; of the forty or so on the World War memorials, only five were.)

I dug in behind my desk. The piled manuscript of the Mutiny novel grew. Brutal and Licentious lay in the bottom of the yakdan. Barbara said, 'One day you can do to the publishers what I did with my brigadier's silly messages.'

I said, 'What?'

She said, 'Return them, neatly folded, with a large pin through one corner, where I'd written THIS END FIRST.' (I should explain that the 'Women's Auxiliary Corps in India contained a part-time section manned or womanned — mainly by officers' wives whose husbands were overseas. Thus Sergeant Jones might be Brigadier Smith's personal assistant by day and his hostess that night. Discipline was good, but sometimes highly informal.)

Meanwhile there was the matter of eating. The money was going faster than I had calculated, and we always had to hold in hand that reserve for getting back to England, so that I could keep my promise never to become a public charge. It would be wise not to run the writing attempt too fine. I should allow a month or two to find some other job before finally deciding to go. Barbara was earning a little by doing typing for Mrs Balaban, who was reworking Aunt Hattie of Cripple Creek, in the ways I had suggested. This took her to New York twice a week, (where the Balabans were now living in the Dorset Hotel on West 54th Street) but as we still had Nanny I was able to keep working. We decided we could maintain this pattern of living for another six months, then we'd have to make the final decisions.

Winter passed and the wild asparagus began to sprout in the ditches and along the roadsides, to be gathered by the children, cooked by Barbara, and avidly eaten by all, except me: I can't stand the stuff. I decided I had to have a title for my novel. Writing without one was like aiming an arrow at air. Fashions in titles change from generation to generation. Sometimes the small whimpering phrase is In, e.g. And the lights dimmed. Sometimes it is the defiant exclamation: Look homeward, angel; sometimes the simple precis of the contents: Drums along the Mohawk. I wanted a title that would be fair to the prospective reader, and yet would attract his attention in the shop window — that Place Pigalle where lurid jackets take the place of hoisted skirts in catching the wandering eye. I also wanted to include in a single phrase the information (a) that the book was about India; (b) that it contained elements of adventure and suspense; and (c) that it was an action story. After many rejections I decided on Nightrunners of Bengal. I hand-lettered it proudly on a title page, and returned to the story.

Bill Lewis, a lawyer friend of Vyvyan Donner's, put my case to the firm of which Sam Rosenman was a prominent member. (Judge Rosenman had been a close confidant of President Roosevelt's, and kept considerable political piston in New York and Washington.) Whether privately persuaded by Rosenman or not the Immigration people extended the visas of Barbara and the children for another six months. In Washington the Attorney General's Department advised the appropriate committee against passing the Kilgore-St George bill for the admission of John Masters, on the ground that it would set a precedent. This was, of course, their stock advice on all the many bills of this sort which were put into the hopper every session. Nevertheless they also began to gather information about me for the committee's use. I had my first set of fingerprints taken at the Immigration Office in Newark, and obtained my first certificates of good conduct from the New Jersey State Police — and also from the New York State Police, to cover the period we had lived on South Mountain Road.

Getting into the spirit of things, the Immigration Service asked for Barbara's fingerprints, and the F.B.I. took mine a couple more times. The committee urgently requested good conduct certificates covering my residence in Camberley, England; Claygate, England; New Delhi, India; Ranikhet, India. Burma? The war? Good God, where had I not been? I wrote streams of letters, and spent a fortune on airmail stamps. During a visit to the New York Alpine Club a delightful quiet middle-aged mountain-lover and Wall Street lawyer called Oscar Houston offered me his help — which he gave without stint. Vyvyan Donner signed a pledge guaranteeing that she would be responsible for any charges incurred by the public on my behalf. I offered the immigration service a set of Martin's fingerprints...

Desmond asked urgently for a couple of chapters of Nightrunners, as he had aroused interest at Doubleday. I sent them off and redoubled my efforts on the rest. Early in April I had the first draft finished — just in time, as Desmond telephoned me that Doubleday liked the two chapters and wanted to see the whole manuscript at once. We were practically in the clear, he said joyfully.

The journey to New York on the Pennsylvania Railroad involved a terrible five minutes while the train passed a huge piggery on the Jersey meadows. The pigs were fed, it was rumoured, on scraps from New York restaurants usually some days old. The sweet, sour rotting smell pervaded the train long after it had passed the piggery, and was about to plunge into the Hudson tunnels. But there were fantastic piles of abandoned cars to admire (New Jersey is the Junked Car Capital of the World); and the twisted spaghetti of steel and concrete where roads, railways, and canals passed through and around Newark; and, out there beyond the estuary of the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers, a curious world of tall brown marsh grass, hidden waterways, wild birds seen suddenly from the train, a man gliding hidden down a narrow channel in an old punt, fowling or trapping muskrats, who knew? So I took my MS to New York in person, handed it over, and returned to Milltown to debate with Barbara as to how we should spend all the money we'd soon be getting.

About two weeks later a letter came from Desmond. I knew it contained bad news, for in that world people always telephone good news. Doubleday had rejected my book. Desmond was genuinely distressed; he said that the executive editor, Lee Barker, was all for Nightrunners but in a week of civil war had not been able to persuade the rest of the editorial board.

My first reaction was to part company with Desmond.

I know he understood why, and I think he approved. As I told him, our standards and ways of thought were too much alike. By now there was quite a backlog of optimistic forecasts leading to final failures. I wanted an agent who thought not like me but like the people I was trying to sell to. Carrie Balaban recommended a friend, Paul Small, then just leaving M.G.M., and after a brief interval I was taken over by Miriam Howell of Paul Small's new literary agency. Miriam accepted the chunky manuscript of Nightrunners and began to circulate it among the publishing houses.

Macmillans rejected Nightrunners; no comment.

The Palmers returned from their tour and we would have been homeless; but by good fortune the same South Mountai n Road house became available, and Eleaner Hope offered it to us, furnished, at the same reasonable rental we had paid before ($980 a year). We had met nothing but goodwill from our neighbours in New Jersey, who were mostly occupied in manual labour or mechanical trades in the nearby towns and factories; but we had had very little to talk about with each other. So it was with an unsuspected and surprising feeling of Going Home that we loaded the Crosley for the last time and drove up U.S. 202 to South Mountain Road and its special quality of leaving people alone to get on with their lives. There close friends might not see one another for a couple of years and, at the end, pick up the old relationship exactly as before. There no one lived under social pressure, no one was 'keeping up' with anyone else. The disparity between the world fame of some and the total non-fame of their neighbours, close friends, was such that the idea was ridiculous as soon as mentioned; nor can people keep records of whose turn it is to invite whom when some friends disappear abroad every few weeks to write for national magazines, some stay at home, and some spend parts of each year in Hollywood, London, or Rome.

We were back. Here was the Hudson, the far bank dim in the heat haze. Here was Haverstraw, seedy and shadowed under High Tor. Here was Hook Mountain, towering so dark and steep over Nyack that it required no imagination, during one of the frequent thunderstorms, to see Henry Hudson's little ship tossing on the wide black water below, lightning in its rigging. Here were the artists and the artisans, the farmers and the carpenters. And here were some very unusual people generically called the Jackson Whites. They lived in the Ramapo Hills, the western border of the county, with a way of life as primitive as anything told of the Smokies. They lived by the rifle and trap, eating squirrels and woodchucks. They never sent their children to school, and never came down from their fastnesses except to sell their handcarved woodwork at Margulies' store on U.S. 202. They would not be paid in money, but in sugar and flour, salt and tobacco, and with these climbed silently back through the forest.

Up there the deer died by the single shot, all year round, whatever the game laws said, for they were food; and if the game warden went up to investigate, he died too.

(The Jackson Whites murdered two, about this time. No one was ever charged.)

They were said to be descendants from three successive waves of refugees, who had sought shelter in these forested hills: local Indians, dispossessed by the first Dutch settlers; Hessian deserters from the British armies; and runaway slaves in the years before the Civil War. All this one could understand, but it staggered the mind to imagine the Jackson White of 1949, for, from his ridges he could easily see the ordered walks of West Point ahead, the Empire State Building on one side and the kosher pleasure domes of the Catskills on the other, while at his feet roared the endless traffic of Routes 17, 6 and 202, and the Erie and West Shore railroads.

One of their patriarchs vanished that winter. He thought an enemy family were shooting into his cabin. His sons told him no one had fired, but he insisted, and took his rifle and went out after them. They found his body next spring, by the little church of St John's in the Wilderness, where his people worshipped, if they did. He had frozen to death.

Our friends greeted us so warmly that our sense of Home was reinforced. Yet I found myself dreaming of granite cliffs and sandy coves, springy turf and the wild ascending song of skylarks. Was it really Cornwall and Wiltshire that called, or only my youth?

We steadily widened the circle of our acquaintance, starting with Diane Fenwick, who had rented the Chicken Coop next door. She was a girl of startling beauty and a corresponding vagueness about the facts of life in the country. Soon after we had settled in again, and killed another copperhead for good luck, I awoke one morning, went to the bathroom and turned on the taps. Whooosh, out burst jets of superheated steam. I began turning hot and cold taps like mad to relieve the pressure. Steam hissed out from all of them. I ran downstairs to the water heater, thinking the thermostat must have failed. But no, the trouble was farther off than that, for the cold-water pipe leading up from the well was hot. We shared the well with the Chicken Coop. The cold pipe from the pump to the Chicken Coop was hot. I broke in through a window. The place was like the boiler room of a troopship in the Red Sea. Diane had left her heater (which did not have a thermostat) on, and gone away for the week-end. The steam had worked back down the cold pipe, to the pump in the well house, through that, up our cold lines...

We forgave Diane with a gentle Monday lecture. Only her looks could also persuade us to forgive her habit of feeding exclusively on huge bowls of navy beans and raw garlic; but she had never found out how to cook anything else.

The Milltown poltergeist seemed to have smuggled itself on board the Crosley (we couldn't think where it had found room), for now the rattlings and moanings troubled our nights in South Mountain Road. With cause, we decided it must be Nanny and sent her home.

Little, Brown rejected Nightrunners; no comment.

The Hills gave a cocktail party for us soon after our return. Ray was less than sober, Marian harassed, and Jim and Kathy more than usually disturbed, but what engaged our attention was Keith Jennison's feet. He was wearing slipper-socks. We thought it extraordinary that anyone should go to a cocktail party wearing such garb, though we were forced to admit that the slipper-socks were nothing out of the ordinary in that assembly, where some women seemed to have stepped out of Bonwit Teller's bandboxes and others out of wrestles with large shaggy dogs, while an eminent lady artist was wearing puce trousers and a cape made from an old bedspread.

Some of the men were obviously of Wall Street and others no less obviously of the third sex — to which Rockland was as disinterestedly kind as it was to actors, plumbers, and retired lieutenant-colonels, Indian Army. But we eyed the slipper-socks with particular attention because Keith was not a man oblivious of his surroundings, not was he a rebel, so the slipper socks were a matter of choice. An hour earlier he must have sat barefoot, but trousered, at his dressing-table and said to himself, 'Shall I wear the black oxfords or the brown loafers this evening?' After arguing back and forth for a while he had decided on the slipper-socks. Such a choice was not open to an Englishman, where for every function, time of day, and geographical location there was one correct sartorial response — and only one. I realized with a start that this was true of many other things besides dress. For English people of our class and type, in many political and social areas, most problems had pre-selected answers. Americans, it seemed, had to work out the answer each time. It must be difficult being an American.

Norton's rejected Nightrunners; no comment.

Another aspect of the lack of rigidly enforced standards was the general unwillingness to judge others. Some of our neighbours drank too much, and for this or other reasons sometimes committed acts considered outrageous by any standards. People shrugged, said, 'He was drunk,' and continued to accept the transgressor socially. In the society from which we had come judgment was automatic; a man attending a cocktail party in slipper-socks was showing lack of respect to his hostess; a man committing dreadful acts when drunk would lose his friends. We were guided by hard rules and infallible punishments, and they produced an obvious pharisaism among us, since none would be blameless if all private actions and secret thoughts were made public. Here there was less concealment, which was good; little judging, which was probably good; and, springing from those, a tolerance of many differing life styles. The dangers in non-judgment and tolerance were the concomitant lack of guidance to the young, and the risk of its extension to criminality and antisocial actions. The most alarming manifestation among South Mountain Road's liberals was hatred of the police, and sometimes of the judicial system — not because of brutality and venality, though they were sometimes mentioned — but because they were society's engines of judgment and punishment. We found this particularly ironical because these liberals admired the British system and attitude this side of idolatry. When we pointed out that respect and even affection for the police was an essential part of it, they could only shake their heads and say, 'It's not the same here.' They were right; and the fault was not in the police but in them. Some of our friends talked like those people in a lifeboat who demand that there must be tolerance for all... even for the fellow pulling out the bilge plug.

Another aspect of the permissive society was the matter of bringing up children. It was, and is, a European commonplace that the American child is not brought up at all, but is allowed to do whatever he likes, and that this system produces the most spoiled, ill-mannered, selfish and slovenly youth in the world.

Observing our neighbours, we thought that the basic fact was reasonably true; American parents, at least in our area, did allow their children considerable licence. In some cases we thought that this was a deliberate policy, of letting each kid find his own way to his own maturity; in other cases that it was the result of the parents' lack of confidence in their ability to guide their children. We were supported in this latter opinion by the number of articles in newspapers and magazines in which child doctors, psychologists, religious leaders, and assorted quacks of every kind told parents how to raise their young. In the rest of the world these articles would have been considered interfering impertinence.

The results, however, were not as the European myth had them. The early teenage girl was apt to be awkward, unkempt, and rude. A few years later, at sixteen or seventeen, she was suddenly a young woman with a poise and sense that her English contemporaries would not gain for another three or four years. We did not know how this came about; we only observed that it was so. The boys seemed to start better but end worse. Up to about sixteen the American boy was basically in closer contact with the earth and sky than his European contemporary, freer in his enthusiasms and wider in his outlook. At about seventeen and eighteen his development seemed to be arrested. We knew it was foolish to try and pin down an exact cause of something so vaguely felt, so soon after our arrival in the United States, but we thought that the boys had to turn their minds to making a living, and that the school system had not equipped them with the means to develop the life they would live out of working hours. As a result, from eighteen on their business of professional stature grew fast, but their 'personal' stature grew much more slowly, if at all.

We ourselves could not abandon our belief that it was our duty and pleasure — not Dr Spock's — to bring up our children in the light of our own experience, love and intelligence.

Television came into our world about this time not in our house, but at friends' nearby — and after much talk we could not think it was good for children to watch it for long periods each day. The programmes were harmless enough, but even if they had been magnificent, we thought it was wrong to teach children to rely on a means of learning or entertainment that came from outside themselves. In childhood they ought to learn the value of solitary confrontation, oneself against the fact; and television was a constantly present escape alley. We therefore laid down a limit of one hour a day for TV viewing, to be reconsidered in a couple of years when the children, and TV, would have grown up a bit.

Holt rejected Nightrunners; no comment.

Still in the context of the children, we thought about citizenship. For ourselves, we could wait. A majority of British immigrants to America never became citizens. Our own mental attachment, at the moment, was to Rockland County, not to the United States. The question of the children was more urgent, but in a way simpler. Assuming that I would somehow win my war against the Immigration authorities, we intended to live in America.

For the children it would be the only country they would ever have known. The idea of raising them as Englishmen Abroad, though tenable in India or even Chile, where differences in religion, culture, and language between the parents and the neighbours could be used as reasons to preserve the distant patriotism, was untenable here. We told them therefore, that though we were still English, and might remain so, they were Americans. We acted so early — Susan was five-and-a-half Martin three — because we had already noticed a built-in hostility between other first-generation immigrants who had made the big step and came to the United States, and their children who had been born here. All around us were examples of children refusing to acknowledge the language, culture, and habits of their foreign heritage. The process of Americanization, which could produce changes in build and colouring in a single generation, also involved the rejection of, for example, spaghetti, the Italian language, respect for elders, and whatever ancient customs the parents held dear. The situation of English immigrants was not quite the same, owing to the greater weight of the British heritage in American tradition, and also owing to the snobbishness of many Americans who would croon over 'a delightful English accent', while sneering heartily at an Italian or Polish-Jewish accent; but the problem was there, merely lessened, and we thought we must face it.

Our plan worked with good success, and the children did not seem to despise us, although we had no idea why they wanted to put on masks and hollow out pumpkins on October 31 (this festival of Hallowe'en was replaced in England some 300 years ago by Guy Fawkes Day, November 5); or why we should eat turkey on some Thursday in November; or give presents to our mothers in May (I give my mother a present on her birthday, if I feel like it). They began to carve up their food with the knife and fork, and then transfer the fork to their right hands to eat, while we continued to eat with the fork in the left; and they reasonably agreed that we were too old to change our funny habits. And to save them embarrassment, we learned to pronounce ate as eight; the English usage is, of course, et, but Susan told us that was very uneducated.

Susan began to rehearse the ceremony of swearing allegiance to the flag. We, also in the process of learning, saw how unnecessary, even obscene, were the national exclusions which for too many were the only substance of patriotism. The children were going to be Americans. So had been Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, and these had brought a heritage from England, which did not make them any less American. This our children could do. They would take to the schoolroom something of a household where Chaucer and Shakespeare, Galahad and Nelson were the stuff of beauty and bravery, and there barter those gems for the wisdom of the Talmud, the genius of Goethe and Tchekov, Homer and Leonardo: but in that marvellous exchange no one would lose what he had given. We were proud to be contributing to this noble experiment. What was lacking here, on South Mountain Road, was the inheritances from the Chinese emperors, from Asoka, Akbar, and the kings of Niger.

We knew that the absence of Negroes and Chinese from our local school was due to the fact that almost none lived in the school district, though we had plenty of poor whites. Why this was so was a problem then beyond us. It should not have been racial prejudice, although it was already obvious that many who fought anti-Semitism did not seem to think the same rules applied to anti-Negroism.

On South Mountain Road we did not for a long time get to know which of our neighbours were Jewish and which were not, or, for that matter, which were rich and which not. Where there was a community of interest, intimacy grew; where there was not, we had friendship and tolerance. Gentlemen's Agreement had recently been published and people were bending over backward not to be caught saying 'Some of my best friends are Jews'. (It seemed a valid statement to me, and I never did find out what I was supposed to say: 'None of my best friends are Jews'?) It was at this time that I was talking to Dave Itkin, whom I knew to be a Jew, in his store in Haverstraw. He held up a small musical instrument and said, 'What would you call this, Jack?'

'A Jew's harp,' I said promptly; then caught myself up, and began to think how to apologize.

'So would I,' Dave said. 'Do you know what they're trying to call it now? A Bruce harp. This damned discrimination's driving me nuts!'

Frank Laskier was killed in a car crash. The driver and only other occupant, who ran the car into a tree, was the pretty young blonde wife of a New York dentist.

Physically almost unhurt, she was put to bed with acute shock and her husband was urgently telephoned for from the city. He came out hotfoot, to shout at her, 'My God, the insurance!' Later that night he called Marian Hill and said a warming pad was needed urgently. Marian didn't have one. Up and down the Road lights went on as the ever widening ripples of the search for a pad woke up more and more sympathetic people. A couple of hours later one was located and Marian drove off to get it.

Near 4 a.m., dog-tired but triumphant, she took the pad to the stricken girl. 'Thanks,' the husband said grouchily at the door. 'My back's been killing me.'

Frank's wife was away and the only people who thought what she would feel like, coming back to his last dirty cup and unwashed plate, were the Young Boys. They went and cleaned the cottage from top to bottom. I felt a boor to have been worrying about the boiler and the safeguarding of his manuscripts. A few days later we attended the funeral. As we entered the funeral parlour Barbara stiffened and muttered, 'Good God, he's on show.' Frank lay in the open coffin with a sardonic half smile under his moustache. 'I bet he'd like me to do the knife-in-the-foot trick,' I muttered back, 'but now I could stick it in his heart. He's the only one who'd laugh, though.' It was the first time we had ever met the American custom of displaying the corpse, dressed and made up, before burial. We did not think it added any dignity to the proceedings, only an unbearable pain to those who had loved the dead.

John Day turned down Nightrunners, with an explanation: It falls to me in the absence of Mr Erikson to tell you that we cannot take on John Masters' THE NIGHT-RUNNERS OF BENGAL. We already have a number of books on Indian subjects, published or in prospect. And our interest is not very strong in books about past history there, written from the point of view of the British soldier — not promising for American readers I should think. (Signed) T. J. Walsh.

Our good friends at Immigration redoubled their efforts to keep us from getting bored. Barbara had chest X-rays made and was then told to be out of the country by September 20. (The X-rays showed no disease.) I had blood tests and went twice to the State police barracks in Hawthorn, N.Y., to make more fingerprints. The lawyers advised that although I was determined to fight on it would still be wise to get a legal American domicile for those of us for whom it could be done. This meant that Barbara must go out to Canada with the children and return as an immigrant on the British quota (she was born in England). To prepare the way we sent to the U.S. Consul General in Montreal the documents he had demanded: her passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate, police good-conduct certificates in duplicate, fingerprints, photographs, evidence of support (this from Vyvyan), proof of termination of previous marriage, birth certificates in duplicate for the children, and military service certificate in duplicate. (That last was a teaser, but Barbara found her W.A.C.(I) discharge and sent that.)

Immigration denied her further brief extension of stay, though the consulate had not processed the papers we had sent up. I wrote to Hanson Baldwin, (military correspondent of the New York Times), Field-Marshal Slim (Chief of the Imperial General Staff), and General Morgan (head of the British Military Mission in Washington), asking each to let the U.S. Army know that they had in me a potentially valuable reserve officer with special qualifications. If they once got that message, I thought, they might be persuaded to pull some strings on my behalf.

An impassioned letter about the Montreal situation (copies to Senator Kilgore and Representative St George) persuaded Immigration to let Barbara stay until Montreal was ready for her.

On September 18, having sworn on their honour that they had no intention of devaluating the pound sterling, the British government devalued it by 30 per cent, from $4,03 to $2.80. In the same instant that part of my loss of career gratuity, which they had not yet sent to me, shrank by the same proportion. It was going to be a close race between our dwindling money and the arrival of the next instalment from England in February 1950. We surveyed what we could do to lessen the odds against us. Barbara said, 'We can try to sell my wedding veil.' It was Limerick lace, about 1840. 'And the furniture my grandfather left me.' This was magnificent early Victoria walnut. 'And the George I soup spoons.' Here I interjected, 'Over my dead body.' But it might come to that.

'You could start darning socks again,' I said.

She responded briskly, 'Change a light bulb.'

In the end we cut down on drinking and entertainment generally, sold the furniture for $500, tried to sell the lace but couldn't, and kept the spoons. I sold no more stories because I was writing none; I was plotting another novel, about the ritual murder cult known as Thuggee, which had flourished in India for several centuries, claiming about a million victims, before it was uncovered and destroyed by the British in the 1820s. Otherwise we kept on much as we had been, having decided that we would live American to the end, and, if it came to it, die American, with colours flying. My remark about darning socks was a sort of code word between us and it meant, let us keep our sense of proportion: think American; don't decide how much money you have and then spend less decide how much money you need and then go and get it. No one darned socks, because it was cheaper in time and not much different in money to throw them away and buy new ones. We had also noted that Americans saved themselves a great deal of money by do-it-yourself methods about the house. Very few Englishmen indeed, and only those of a specially mechanical turn, could build sheds, tile roofs, adjust plumbing, and make cabinets, the way our artists and pianists and actors thought nothing of. But this way to save money was unfortunately closed to us: I am the world's most unhandyman; if I don't call in the help of professional electricians before changing a light bulb I will certainly have to do so afterwards.

Scribner's turned down Nightrunners; no comment.

Keith poured a drink behind the bar in the Toad & Throstle, his downstairs cellar room. Emily poked the cannel coal fire in the big grate. The low rafters rang to the marching songs of the International Brigade, blaring out from the phonograph. Smoke drifted up from our cigarettes. Keith said, 'You know about the tourist who drove up to this old Vermonter leaning over a gate,' and said, 'Hey my man, how do you get to Rutland?' And the Vermonter looked at him a long time without speaking, until finally he said, 'If I wanted to get to Rutland, I wouldn't start from here.' The accent was flat dead, very funny. Keith was a Vermonter.

'What about Steinbeck?' I said, 'What's he like? Can you understand Faulkner? Why does he make his sentences so labyrinthine? How do good do you think Thomas Wolfe is? Did you know Hemingway? Does J. P. Marquand ever write about anything but Boston?'

The guitar strummed, the bourbon drained, we sang. Six little maidens I've drownded here and you the seventh shall be. E. B. White? Thurber? On, the Eer-l-ee was arising, the gin was getting low. Barbara danced in her stockinged feet. The lights momentarily dimmed and Keith cried,

'Watt's the matter with Rockland Light and Power?'

Barbara said, 'They don't have ample energy.'

Keith said, 'That's revolting!'

Barbara said, 'Oh my!'

Emily doubled over in her chair, weeping with laughter.

I covered my head with my hands, groaning.

Sex. 'No, damn it, it's not a matter of taste or daintiness.

Women are only dainty, and only want to be treated daintily, until you get their clothes off.' Benny Goodman, louder. Masturbation. Polyandry. Louder, louder. 'Look, I don't think every queer is created by his mother, but I think most are.' Keith asleep on the floor by the phonograph, his head pillowed on a cushion by the speaker.

'You've got to accept sex as a part of you, like your hand, not a shameful or dirty impulse.' Yes. But. However. Sex. ln fact. Never. Always. Why. Then. Give me another drink.

Keith snored lightly.

The squire's sister, Miss Eleaner Deming, had a downstairs room too. We crouched decorously round the fire toasting scallops on fencing swords and getting our fingers burned. Miss Eleanor was over seventy, and about to set off round the world. The man beside me bit into a scallop and swore silently; he had burned his tongue. We talked. He said, 'You must be a disciple of Santayana's.' Who's he? I thought; but said, 'Why?'

'He said that the best things about America were football, kindness, and jazz.'

Yes, I thought. But we couldn't afford to watch any football at West Point this year. We would have gone up to see the pre-game parades, only we didn't have a car... until kindness enveloped us again: the Girls bought a new car and gave us their old one. It was a 1938 Dodge coupe that did about thirty-five miles to the gallon (of oil). The children travelled in the nimble seat or lying on the shelf under the rear window, jammed in like clams, and as happy.

The consulate in Montreal at last wrote that they had finished their preparations, and Barbara set off, having arranged to stay with ex-English friends who, she gathered, lived in the city. After an eight hour journey on the Delaware & Hudson, with both children sitting on her lap and crying most of the way (the tracks run close beside the Hudson or Lake Champlain for much of the way; not being able to see any land on that side, they were scared that the train was going to fall in), her friends met them and drove them home... thirty-five miles away in Ste Hyacinthe. Here they had gathered a large party to greet the visitors. The celebration went on most of the night.

As they did not have an extra car Barbara took the children into Montreal the next day by bus, bought them some rubber toys at a drug-store, and, soon after the doors opened, entered the U.S. Consulate. She was in there until 5 p.m., eight Sisyphean hours. She would join a long line, the children pushing their toys about on the floor, tugging her skirt, or demanding to go to the john; eventually reach the front of the line, and have one document stamped; rush off to get sandwiches and milk and pot the children; then into the next line; at the latter end, near hysteria from fear that they would close for the day before she could get everything done, and she'd have to face it all again the next day; finally the Immigrants' visas issued just before closing time.

Her immense relief that it had at last been done was for the moment buried under the strains of the moment... another long ride back to Ste Hyacinthe, in a crowded rush-hour bus, both children on her lap; to find her hosts had found some people who had not met her the first time, and invited them to do so now; to bed about 3 a.m., awakened at 5 to catch the bus back to Montreal; nine hours in the train this time, as it ran late, the children now whining and crying without cease. At Peekskill the train stopped just long enough for her to get herself, the children and the bags on to the platform. With a shriek and a clanging of its bell it disappeared. She stood alone beside the glistening tracks, snow falling heavily, looking for me. I was not there. No one was there.

The Dodge had shed a gasket, and then I had had to drive slowly through the snow. When I arrived, half an hour later, Barbara burst into tears. 'Why weren't you here?' she sobbed, 'Oh God, that's all you had to do and you weren't here!' It was the only time she broke down during all these long and, in truth, nerve-racking years of literary rejection, official harassment, and, except from our parents, universal pessimism about our prospects from England. She wept quietly most of the way back to South Mountain Road, a murderous drive through falling snow on very slippery roads over the Bear Mountain bridge and down 9 W. Marian Hill was at our house when we got there; and after one look at Barbara's face took our children off. As she left she muttered to me, 'Give her a poached egg in the living-room. Off a tray. With tea and whisky.' It was good advice.

Lippincott rejected Nightrunners, with a letter: After a complete series of readings and a lot of discussions and in spite of my personal enthusiasm — it has been decided to return (Nightrunners) to John Masters. Frankly, I think we are making a mistake and practically lost my voice saying so... (Signed) Tay Hohoff.

Driving out alone from New York one evening I was flagged down on the George Washington bridge by a police car. I followed it through the tolls and stopped behind it in a dark spot under the mass of the bridge approach on the Jersey side. I got out and went to the cop's car (I had been told never to make a cop get out of his car and approach you; he doesn't know what your intentions are, or whether you have a gun trained on him, and it makes him jumpy and bad tempered). He said I was speeding. I said it was possible, I hadn't been looking at my speedometer. He asked to see my driving licence and the car registration. I showed them to him and waited for him to note down the particulars. It would be annoying to pay a fine, and perhaps have my licence endorsed: I must be more careful in future. The cop did nothing, except stare at me. I waited. He said 'Oh Christ!', threw the papers back at me, engaged gear, and shot off. I climbed back into the Dodge, puzzled. Was the poor fellow not well? Had he realized he had made a mistake? About ten miles up 9 W it struck me that he might have been expecting a bribe. When I got home Barbara said that the local Democratic boss had telephoned, repeating his previous offer — that if I paid $1,000 to party funds my immigration difficulties would be smoothed over; but this time he had said I need not pay until I had the money. I was to call back.

It was a bad night, for we were already sure we would be Democrats if we became citizens. Would we have to accept this debased political and 'official' morality as a counterweight to America's greater honesty in non-political life, for example, in giving an honest day's work for an honest day's wage? We didn't know. We could only play our part. I did not call back.

Random House rejected Nightrunners; no comment.

We saw more of the Jennisons. Their two boys were prime exhibits in our study of American education. They were now about twelve and ten, undisciplined but with a natural politeness and evident goodwill towards strangers, and somehow doing what was necessary about the house without a lot of fuss. William Sloane Associates had broken up, and Keith had gone to the Viking Press. Much against my will, I was now forced to think of him as a publisher rather than as a friend. I had never shown him one of my MSS, because I did not think it right to use a friendly intercourse to obtain a business concession, e.g. a reading. In the army, too many times, I had had to tell friends that they were poor officers, and I was going to remove them from their posts. It could never be made a pleasant experience for either of us, and it usually killed the friendship. But, just as friendship had to give way before the demands of the service, so now I was willing to sacrifice it for Nightrunners of Bengal and my writing career, which included our future in the United States. At a party at the Girls, to which the Jennison were also invited, I downed three martinis, backed Keith into a corner and said I would like him to read my book. He said, 'Sure. I've been waiting months for you to suggest it.'

I gave him the MS next day, with a letter: As you know, I am trying to sell you not only this book but my writing career... Please try to keep me posted on progress, after a reasonable time for preliminary readings. With that proviso you can take your time over it because I want to work with you if it can be done. I need help and advice from someone who knows things I do not, and whom I trust. Let us therefore to our stations and bear ourselves well, for once we are over this hurdle I think there may be great and exciting days ahead.

Next day, still bearing myself well in my station over the hurdle, I read in a magazine articles that there were 3,700,986 people writing whole or part time in the U.S.A.

All these were my competitors in the market.

The weeks passed. We avoided the Jennisons, so that Keith should not think I was fussing round waiting for an answer. I felt again as though I were waiting, high up in one of those Manhattan office buildings, alone in the lobby, forty doors all around. On the frosted glass of each is the name of a publisher, a magazine, an editor; slowly I make the circle, carrying an ever heavier load of paper on my shoulder. I ring each bell, knock on each door. No one answers, though I hear whispering behind the glass...

Vyvyan Donner had an idea. She knew a man, Jack Luedekke, who worked at the Army Film Unit on Long Island. He thought there might be a job for me there. I met Jack a couple of days later at Vyvyan's apartment, and went out to the studios with him. He showed me round, and gave me some scripts to study. I had never heard of such a place — the Indian Army could not afford one — but saw at once that it was a necessity for producing a technical citizens' army, e.g. on mobilization for a major war. The unit made every kind of film. One taught how to embalm corpses for transportation to the U.S.A.

Obviously the army could not, in peacetime, maintain a large Embalmers' Corps; equally obviously such a corps would be needed in war. This film would train men quickly and cheaply. The cost of making it would be saved many times over. Embalming was hardly my line; nor was the film on the life-cycle of the rat (for the medical corps, to deal with rat-borne diseases); nor the one on security methods to be taught to soldiers going on active service; but there were tactical films which exactly paralleled the instruction I had been giving, by other methods, at Camberley.

The surprise to me was that films were made from a script. Although I had written scripts for Staff College demonstrations I had always thought that films just happened, the director telling everyone what to do as they went along. After studying the scripts Jack Luedekke lent me, I made a formal application to be allotted a subject, reminding the Signal Corps that I was a British national, and could not be given classified matter. In a little essay accompanying my application, I pointed out to the colonel in charge that he had twenty script writers who in effect knew nothing about soldiering; would he please give a chance to someone who had the reverse qualifications — a professional soldier totally ignorant of script writing?

The letter disappeared into the mail pouch of the U.S. Post Office's snail-paced horseman. I had rung another bell.

Whispering susurrated in the lobby. I was fed up with spaghetti, and the children's clothes were in rags. A local lady's New York lover offered Barbara a job as secretary in the garment district. She would earn $60 a week for being genteel and Gentile, and — as a matter of fact — a damned good secretary, too. If she accepted, it would slow down my writing, for I would have to cook for the children and wash and iron Susan's dresses; but there was no help for it.

We were down to $250, plus our tickets back to England. At my urgent request the law firm of Rosenman, Goldmark, Colin & Kaye sent me their bill for twenty months of legal services. It was $50. I suppose Jerry Plapinger had personally spent 100 hours on my case, not to count long distance telephone calls to Washington, and consultations with Sam Rosenman and other senior partners. This to help a stranger in need. It is hard to express gratitude at such times.

After paying the bill, and a few other items, we had $143.87 left. Barbara promised to give her prospective employer an answer on January 2, 1950.

Christmas came. It had been a bad year all round. In March East Germany had held elections on a single (Communist) list and in October formally proclaimed the Communist Republic. In March the Communists finished taking over the ruling Socialist party in Hungary. Our own troubles seemed a little less black in comparison.

It was a balmy season that year, the forest like a leafless summer. Our Christmas tree was barely three feet high, and in deference to the fire regulations, we had replaced the bare candles of Camberley with a single loop of red electric bulbs and a great deal of tinsel. For dinner we invited the Girls, since they had no families — at least, none that wanted to see them. I made jugs of Tom & Jerry and, long before the turkey came on, we were ready to weep on each other's shoulders. Shortly before dinner was cooked Barbara retired to bed, but not until the Girls told us they had rewritten their wills, to leave their worldly goods, first to each other, then to Susan and Martin. Then we really did weep on each other's shoulders. Barbara left. I carved and served up the turkey and all the trimmings. When they were gone I went into the kitchen to open the canned plum puddings. Some error must have occurred in the cooking, for when I rammed a can opener into the first pudding it exploded. Under a steady drip and thud of pudding from the ceiling I opened the other can more carefully and returned to the table. Martin clapped enthusiastically at seeing the pudding all over my face, hair, and clothes, but the Girls were polite enough to affect not to notice. I next poured the pre-heated brandy on to the pudding, which now stood on warmed plates, and with a flourish, set light to it in the proper manner (by using a match to light a toothpick and using the toothpick to light the brandy: this obviates the unpleasant sulphurous taste of the match). The plates were perhaps too hot (a common failing of mine, this), for now the brandy exploded in orange flame, blackening the beams overhead and burning off most of my moustache and part of my eyebrows. 'Pretty, pretty,' the Girls murmured, while Susan broke into unfeigned applause. Soon after we had finished eating Barbara came down, fresh and cheerful, and I took her place in bed, for a few hours.

I remember one of the Girls telling me that the Brimfields' marriage would be in trouble soon, if it wasn't already. 'how do you know?' I asked. She said, 'They had a party there the other night, and I ran into Sally Brimfield under the stairs. It was dark, and, well, a girl's a girl... I made a big pass at her. She loved it.' She shook her head sadly.

The hours passed. Barbara took off her shoes and began to dance. The children came downstairs and begged us to make less noise. We drank more Tom & Jerry and finished two magnums of champagne the Girls had brought. At dawn of what we still called Boxing Day, we broke up, after agreeing that life was real, life was earnest, and it led but to the grave.

The next morning I settled down seriously to my ironing class.

Chapter Seven

On December 30, with just over $100 available cash in hand, the Army Film Unit offered me a contract to write the script for a training film on Operations of the Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. The terms were $800, plus board, lodging, and transportation to the Armored School at Fort Knox and back. I accepted with what dignity I could muster, and we hurried into New York to kiss Vyvyan and Jack Luedekke. (In my case the latter salutation was, in fact, simplified to a handshake: Jack was a very heterosexual person.) Next day, Barbara turned down the secretarial job that had been offered to her, with thanks, for the film money would see us through until the next instalment of my gratuity arrived from England.

The old Dodge's gas consumption was now down to 20 m.p.g., and bits kept falling off it at traffic lights. I decided to get a better car and went down to the bank in Haverstraw to see about raising some money for the purpose. I asked to see the manager, but apparently there was no such person, only presidents, vice presidents, cashiers, and so on. However I was finally sent to talk to a chap behind a desk in an inner room. I told him I proposed to get a better car — not a new one, just one that would go — and suggested that an overdraft of about $500 would do the trick. The chap asked me for collateral. I had no idea what he was talking about, and repeated that I merely wanted an overdraft to tide me over until I got the Army money. After asking some more impertinent questions, the chap regretted that his bank would not lend me any money. I began again, explaining in simple terms that I did not want a loan, only an overdraft. 'We don't give overdrafts,' he said quite nastily. I walked across the road to the First National Bank of Haverstraw, and on being referred to a Mr Bob Scott, told him I proposed to transfer our account to him as I had met a lack of co-operation on the opposite corner. Bob expressed his pleasure. I then told him I needed an overdraft. His face lengthened, but fortunately he had a sister married to a missionary in India and knew something of British ways. After more questioning, but this time sympathetic, he lent me the money to buy a three-year-old Chevy convertible.

Leaving the car with Barbara, I set off for Fort Knox, my brain creaking as I dredged up any lessons I had learned about armoured reconnaissance in battle. When I began to think of the situations I must create to teach those lessons, I checked myself. Though the facts of war are common to all, different armies look at them in different ways. I must have a few sessions with the staff at the Armored School, and study their tactical doctrine.

I spent a happy ten days at Fort Knox, the script came along well, the Armored School were happy, the Film Unit were happy... and that was that. I never heard whether the script was made into a film, or put in a drawer to moulder until changes in equipment had made it obsolete.

Back on South Mountain Road I began again the weary round of getting fingerprints for other sub-committees of other branches of the Congress. The Kilgore — St George bill had been turned down and the Immigration people were in a position to deport me: but Mrs St George seemed to be holding them at bay for the time being.

When not waiting in the corridors of police headquarters I worked on articles and short stories with an Indian background, glumly more aware each day that there was no market for them in the United States. In England I would probably have earned £20 or £30 for each from Blackwood's or similar magazines; here the payment would have been at least three times that, if... I was also working on the Thuggee book, which I had titled The Deceivers (a direct translation of the Hindi word); it was not a thrilling phrase, and it certainly did not meet the requirements I myself had laid down for a good title, but I was unable to think of a better one.

South Mountain Roadhad a professional oldest inhabitant. Carroll French, the Girls' landlord, had come from Michigan bringing his bride in a horse-drawn cart across the country, paying for their food and lodging by giving puppet shows. He favoured a small white beard and had a lovely smile and was a great man with his hands. He painted and sculpted and designed and built. The open stairs and rough stone and odd corners of Alan Anderson's house (first enlarged by Max with the money from What Price Glory?), were Carroll's mark. He was not really that old, but when he told stories of his boyhood in Michigan, and sleighs in the snow, and the early days on the Road, he made us feel that he had carried a fife at Lexington and crossed the Rappahannock in a covered wagon.

Our doctor's son was bar mitzvah'd in Haverstraw, and we were invited. At the door of the synagogue I took my hat off with a reflex action, although I had been told one didn't. The usher there picked up a yarmulka and put it on my head instead, muttering, 'We stay covered in the house of the Lord.' It was a very orthodox congregation, so Barbara and the womenfolk sat on one side of the aisle, the men on the other. The boy's mastery of Hebrew, the crashing march-like music, the way old men wandered about, scarves trailing, eyes rapt, the passionate chanting, the sheer length of the service — four hours — so many people wholly absorbed in the bringing of this youth into Jewish manhood, all left a deep impression.

An old friend of Barbara's, war-widowed, visited us in January on her way to spend a couple of months in the Bahamas. She used to be very highly sexed, Barbara told me. She hadn't changed, for in no time she found her way, like a bee to honey, to Joe Wright, he of the mighty equipment. When she came back briefly in the spring Joe was engaged, and kept away from her. She, poor simple English country girl, laid her snares for the Young Boys. She kept backing into one or other of them in dark corners, or under bushes in the garden (they were all helping us with the pruning), and in other alarmingly skittish ways advertising her availability. Were they not bachelors and therefore untrammelled by wives or conscience? We had to tell her the facts of life before she began to doubt her own attractiveness.

We found a store in New York that had maps of the trails in Bear Mountain Park, and began to make a systematic exploration of them. The Appalachian Trail, a 1,400-mile footpath from Maine to Georgia, ran through the park, together with many local ones. We ate sandwiches or cooked corned beef hash in the shelters set at every few miles along the trails — Dutch Doctor, Big Hill, Island Pond, and half a dozen others. The trails were empty on weekdays, and it was a strange sensation to walk for hours alone in silent forest, sometimes seeing a deer, or from the edges of the escarpments to look out over the blue roll of the forests, the gleam of the Hudson, the sparkle of lakes, to realize that we were in the middle of the richest, most heavily populated part of the country — and see no works of man, not a house, or a spire, or a road.

The Hargroves separated, after putting a great deal of money into the house they had bought. Bill Mauldin bought the house from them, and at once began putting more money into it. It was an odd coincidence that the proceeds from the two best-sellers of the war years should have gone into the same house on South Mountain Road.

One evening Emily Jennison telephoned and said, Run outside. Look north!' We hurried out. The trees rising behind the house half obscured a strange wall of light along the top of the mountain. We took the children and walked across the road to the Balabans' lawn, where we could see without obstruction. The northern sky glowed with purple and green and blue light, as though covered by a curtain made of long pieces of glass of those colours. The curtain shimmered to an invisible wind, rose to invisible hands, lowered until only a band of colour crawled along High Tor, waved like celestial seaweed in a magic tide. After half an hour the colours first dimmed, then sank towards earth, and at last vanished. It was dark, and cold on the grass. We had seen the Aurora Borealis for the first time.

Came Keith Jennison to the house with a guarded message. He and Helen Taylor, another editor at Viking, both liked Nightrunners enough to think it was publishable, if I would accept some editing suggestions from them, and work on it. What can I lose? I thought, and agreed. Keith introduced me to Helen Taylor, who did most of the work with me.

She was a big blonde woman, craggy and kind. I still think she was the best editor in New York, and this not only because she was my first, when I needed one most and had most to learn. For the next six months we battled over Nightrunners like two rivals over the body of their mistress. At first every stricture discouraged me... and Helen balanced each criticism with a piece of praise. Her efforts to make me see her point of view seemed to me only an obtuse refusal to see mine... and Helen kept quietly, calmly at it until I myself saw that there were other ways than mine of reading what I had written. She soon recognized my main fault hitting the same nail too often, too hard — and by praising the effectiveness of the first stroke, led me to see that the rest were not necessary. She explained structural defects, economic considerations, and proof-reader's marks. We battled over taste and agreed over grammar.

After the first couple of encounters, I understood that I did not have in her an enemy to my book, still less someone who was trying to write it for me, but a knowledgeable and experienced friend who was determined that Nightrunners of Bengal should be as good as I could make it. And oh, what bliss to have someone read and weigh every word as carefully as I had! Sometimes Keith sat in on these sessions, throwing yet another light on a character that we had seen only our own ways, sometimes mildly protesting at the explicitness of the sex, rape and murder scenes. And sometimes we all, Barbara too, met at Louis & Armand's or the Absinthe House, and had several drinks; and I wondered how publishers got any work done at all. For me it was a once a month occasion: for them, it was daily.

One morning I told Barbara, 'Susan wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.' Barbara said, 'What an extraordinary thing! Still, if we have bacon, lettuce and tomato, I suppose we can't complain. Here are the peanuts and the butter, and there's a bowl of Jello in the icebox. You make it.' Susan took the sandwich and ate it, but with a vaguely dissatisfied look. It was several months before Alan Anderson, a peanut butter fiend, introduced us to the stuff; and not for years did 'jelly' mean to us what in England is usually called 'jam'. After that the revelation that most native born American males and many females slept in the nude hardly disturbed us. In England the poor slept in their underclothes and everyone else in 'pyjamas'.

The beautiful but garlicky and absent-minded Diane returned to the city and Eleanor Hope rented the Chicken Coop to a young couple of immigrants from Tobacco Road, who worked at staggered hours, so that while one was at work, the other was asleep, and no one looked after the children. The kids made their own breakfasts, a healthy repast of hard candy (boiled sweets), and ran around all day in dirty underpants and nothing else. It was the little girl, to our disapproval, who offered Susan 5 cents to show her her Kelly's Eye.

Ray Hill was fired from his job, and began to take the money for his drinking out of Marian's housekeeping, but he continued to be a very amusing fellow in public, and actually helped me make some money for the two of us. One evening, before the martinis shot him down, he told us a tale of his boyhood in Kansas, when he and a friend had tried to raise a young turkey buzzard they had found. It was warm, funny, and American, far from my rejected Indian jungles. I told the Hills I would try to turn it into a short story and, if I sold it, would share the proceeds with them, fifty-fifty. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve: Huckleberry Finn as told to James Thurber — a simple task. The character of the boy and his narrator — (obviously he had to have a Doctor Watson) practically defined themselves, and I set to with a will. After a week of hard work I gave the completed story a title, Lester Wimpy (the name of the buzzard) and sent it off to Miriam Howell. Then I returned to rewriting Night-runners.

Easter came with its apology for spring, and I thought we must somehow get away for the summer. I had been doing desk work continuously and hard since September 1946, mostly seven days a week and often up to fourteen hours a day. Two hot, humid summers in the Hudson Valley had made us swear, not again. Our children had never known that chiefest delight of our own childhoods, a summer by the sea. There was no debate as to where we wanted to go. It had to be Maine, for we had a clear picture of it in our minds: a stern coast, like Cornwall's; a people with long weather-beaten faces, lobstermen all; slow green seas bursting in white foam on curved golden sands and towering grey cliffs. The problem, of course, would be money.

We simultaneously advertised our house for a summer sub-let, and looked in the classified columns for a suitable house in Maine. The Maine Information Bureau also sent us a pamphlet listing hundreds of houses, camps, and cottages for rent. We eagerly scanned each line, and finally picked on the cheapest one listed that was on the sea. It was at Prince's Point, Yarmouth, and avowedly 'primitive' and so it should be, I thought, at $150 for the three-month season! We had had no bites on our house yet, but that Maine cottage would surely go soon, so, acting on my new American principle of doing what you want to do and later finding the money somehow, we applied for the cottage, and got it.

Two days later we sub-let our house for three months to the bandleader at the local country club, for $550. Clearly, we could not afford not to go to Maine.

Came Keith again to the house one evening on his way home from the station. I think he would have liked to adopt a sympathetic air to make us conclude, before he spoke, that Viking had refused Nightrunners; but he is a poor actor, especially where good news is concerned, because he feels it so directly himself. I could tell, as I saw him getting out of his car, his ears positively radiating joy, that he had nothing of sorrow for us.

'We're going to publish it,' he said.

I felt weak with relief, for I had at last won a grim, wearing, and painful campaign. Almost immediately, relief was replaced by scorn of the publishing fraternity as a whole. If my book was publishable, why had ten publishers turned it down? Was this passing from hand to hand some sort of ritual designed to starve writers into submission, a refinement of the Inquisition whereby all publishers worked from a secret rota which told them, on submission of a manuscript, how many times it was to be refused before someone took it?

However, clarification of this and other matters could wait. Nightrunners would be published, in January 1951. Viking would negotiate a contract through my agent, but would probably offer an initial advance of $1,500 against royalties. I told Keith, after thanking him, that I hoped we could finish the editing process on Nightrunners soon, because I needed to concentrate on The Deceivers now.

Keith said, 'Good. We publish authors, not books.' Then he went on his way.

The sun was beginning to peep over our horizon. No one but a fool or a very young writer would feel that the millennium had arrived because one book had been accepted, and I was thirty-five-and-a-half. But it would be equally foolish to see only the pitfalls. An excessive caution is worse than none at all. There must be thousands of people who had written more than two books before having one accepted. Keith's parting words, though sobering, also held out promise of an exciting and ever widening future. We publish authors, not books meant that they trusted an author to develop. I wasn't contracting for one book but becoming a partner in a continuing enterprise, in which it was their duty to treat me fairly and show efficiency in selling, and my duty to write better books. It was my duty, in particular, to Keith and Helen, for Keith had revealed that they had had a hard time persuading the Viking chiefs that Nightrunners — and I — were worth publishing.

They had only won by the Fabian tactics of putting off a decision every time someone seemed inclined to speak out against the book. It is also relevant that when Harold Guinzburg, the then owner, had formed Viking, almost the first book he published was Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

Well, I thought, I seem to have done a This end first to the publishers, at least. Now for the readers... But soft, between me and the readers stood the critics.

The New York critics, who would most affect me, ipso facto belonged to the American Liberal Establishment, which stood much closer to the professional intellectuals of mainland Europe than it did to the British equivalent. Man lives by thought, the communication of thought, and action. Writing should reflect this trinity, but the A.L.E. did not accept the importance of the third leg, action. To them only thought and the communication of thought mattered. This was in general not so in England, where a man could be an expert on Provençal poetry and a big game hunter; a football fan and a historian; a politician and a novelist; a soldier and a painter; and neither world despised the other (though they could laugh at it), because they recognized their equal validity, and their dependence on each other.

Apart from sneering at action the A.L.E. had taken sides in many questions of the day, and believed that writers should do so too. I did not. I had come to believe that the writer's duty, as a writer, is to offer some effectively worded insight into the human condition. If anything else, a particular situation, for example, is at the centre of his work — that is, if the situation and not the humans are the essentials of it — it will not last, because all situations change. It is for this reason that Of Mice and Men is a greater work than The Grapes of Wrath. The Depression has long gone: George and Lennie live for ever.

Nor did I believe a writer should write to change social or political conditions, abolish poverty, or castigate brutality. A person can write for any of these purposes, just as he can write to explain how to boil an egg or use a tangential inferometer; but he is not then a writer, he is a mechanic, using words as his tool.

But the A.L.E. believed that writing should be inspired by a political and social conscience, and their judgments were consequently not of the writing but of the writer's attitude; and if the wretched fellow had not expressed any political view, why then, impute a bad one to him, and castigate him accordingly. A clear example of this was in the reviews of the war reminiscences of German generals, submarine commanders, and fighter pilots, which were just beginning to appear. The criticisms were political, not literary: the authors had been Nazis and were therefore dirty dogs. I had done my best to destroy Germany and all Germans, and wish I had been able to finish the job; but evil can be brave, can be perceptive, can know hunger and thirst and pain, and can write well about them. The A.L.E. thought otherwise, and made no attempt to be fair. If Julius Caesar were to publish his Commentaries here, now, I thought, the critics would make no mention of his prose, only of the fact that he and his imperialistic legions were invading the freedom-loving peoples of Gaul.

The John Day letter (already quoted) turning down Nightrunners showed how all this would affect me. I was writing about India in the colonial days. I had done my best to feel as each of my characters might feel — patriotic Indian, patriotic Englishman, self-serving prince, and so on; but certain concepts — e.g. 'loyalty', and the 'master-man' relationship — were in themselves anathema to the A.L.E. It was incapable of appreciating, for instance, the attitude of the old-time British private soldier, whose motto was, 'I'm as good a man as you are — sir.' All it heard was the 'sir' at the end, because the rest was not spoken aloud.

I was not concerned with making a judgment on these or any other concepts, but I was desperately concerned with transmitting the reality of them.

The result would be that my 'exciting story about the Indian Mutiny, showing how hatred breeds hatred' would be pilloried because it had little about race-prejudice in it (though much about race-pride, British and Indian); nothing about the evils of colonialism (my theme was the inherent melancholy of power); no anti-heroes (though several opposing heroes); and a great deal of action. All in all, a bad outlook. Oh well, it was no use crying before I was hurt, though well to harden my sensitivity. Worse things happen at sea, as Frank Laskier used to say, in and out of season.

My efforts to re-create the Kansas of 1910 succeeded. Lester Wimpy was bought by Colliers for $750; and the editor asked Miriam to tell him more about 'the brilliant new young American writer'. That one cracked my protective wall. We gave half to the Hills — to Marian, specifically, at her request, that it might not all disappear in gin before the kids got some new clothes — and had a small celebration.

I awoke with a start. The full May moon flooded our little bedroom and the trees were shimmering silver outside. I heard a whimpering and shuffling close by, and tensed. Good God, had Nanny projected her longings across the Atlantic? A woman's voice sobbed, 'Jack... Barbara... help me... ' It was a woman, though I did not recognize the blurred, tearful mumble. Barbara turned on the light and we saw Marian Hill, wearing only a nightie, at the foot of our bed. She threw herself on to it, reaching out to us, crying, 'He's going to kill them. Oh God, save them!' She was drunk, of course, but very much afraid, too. Barbara pulled her up on to the bed and held her close while she muttered that Ray had refused to go to bed; he'd drunk another bottle of gin after we left, beaten her up, thrown her down the stairs, sworn he'd kill the kids. 'Please, please, Jack, save them!'

I pulled on a dressing gown and shoes and looked at my arms collection: my own ceremonial sword, a Japanese officer's sword, a Burmese dah, and a Gurkha kukri. I selected the Japanese sword — really the best suited for heavy work — drew it, and set out across the wet grass. It was half past three in the morning and the night absolutely beautiful, a stirring in the silver trees and the road itself like a river of dark and light. I stalked along in silence, carrying the bare sword on my shoulder. What would I say if Ray invited me in for a drink? I'd have to accept and then he'd say, 'Nice sword you have there,' and I'd say, 'Yes, jolly nice, got it off the body of a...'

I was there. The windows were open and I heard heavy snoring from upstairs. That must be Ray. Then I heard the typical high-low ah, ah, ah, ah, of Kathy, who always rocked herself to sleep; she might have psychological problems, but she wasn't dead. That left Jim. He might be a corpse by now, but I doubted it. In any event, I did not intend to find out. After a careful circumnavigation of the house, finding no bodies in the bushes, I returned home. Barbara was giving Marian coffee in the kitchen. An hour later, when she had recovered herself, she left. Soon afterwards the Hills separated, and the house fell vacant. After a month or two Ray found a lady alcoholic with $18,000 a year of her own money, married her, and lived happily ever after. Marian, too, married again and left the neighbourhood.

On the Immigration front a legislative assistant to one of the Congressional committees, perhaps prodded by Mrs St George, suggested a way out of my difficulties. It was very improbable that the Kilgore-St George bill, or any other like it, would be passed. I should instead apply for permanent suspension of deportation on the grounds that I was the sole support of a legal resident — Barbara. My first reaction was a near-paroxysm of anger that none of the Immigration people with whom I had argued, begged, and pleaded for three years had suggested this method before. My second was wonder why my lawyers had not known of it. That led to the third, the suspicion that there must be a trap in it. But careful inquiry confirmed that it really was the best course open to me.

The first step, if I were to apply for permanent suspension of deportation, was naturally for them to try to deport me. (How could my deportation be suspended if no one were deporting me, see?) So a formal warrant was issued, ordering me to surrender myself at 70 Columbus Avenue at such and such a date and time, for deportation. I obeyed, bearing with me the request that the deportation be permanently suspended on the grounds that etc., etc. Now they released me on my own recognizances and set a date for the hearing of my application, setting forth all the information they would need from me before the hearing.

The paper-chasing of previous years was now seen to be nothing but preparation for this moment. I gave up real writing in order to fill in forms, declarations, and statements. I ran from New City to New York to Milltown to Hawthorn getting fingerprints, certificates, and X-rays. I drafted affidavits wherein my past and present agents, and Harold Guinzburg and Keith Jennison and every magazine editor who had bought one of my pieces, all swore to my probable earning capacity and economic self-sufficiency. I mailed out certificates to the effect that I was a model of moral rectitude, perseverance, cleanliness, frugality and sobriety, and these were signed (in quadruplicate) and returned by Roddy McLeod, General Pete Rees, General Dick Hull, Field-Marshal Slim, Vyvyan, Bob Scott, Bill Sloane, Squire Deming, Maxwell Anderson, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. Remembering George Washington's troubles with the cherry tree when young, I manfully swore that I had committed adultery but had never been a member of the Communist Party. I swore a great deal, one way and another, before finally wrapping up all the papers and taking them to New York. As the West Shore thumped and groaned northward that afternoon I had a feeling that I had knocked on my last door. Someone would now have to open it or I'd bloody well break it down.

On June to, 1950, we set out for Maine, taking Marie Laure Auberjonois, then thirteen, with us as baby sitter. We got off late and only made Nyack, ten miles away, before stopping for lunch in a tavern. It was one of the first days of the Kefauver hearings into organized crime in the United States, which were being televised. We stayed, absorbed, later than we meant to. It was to our ideas an extraordinary way of making such an investigation. In effect the general public were being brought on to the committee's bench, to turn the inquiry into a show-biz act. But of course Kefauver was not a judge, he was a politician; the way he conducted these hearings, and what he unearthed, would affect his future. He would be inhuman not to think of that, rather than solely of truth. Although we saw the value of the process in certain cases, we put down televised public hearings as another defect of the American judicial and investigatory systems, together with trial-by-the-press, and interminable delays caused by unworkable procedures. What the country badly needed was the equivalent of Royal Commissions, headed by trained judges with life appointments and no political or other axe to grind.

The Kefauver public hearings were often preceded by private hearings at which the committee tried to find out what sort of evidence each witness was going to give. At one of these so-called executive sessions a very pretty lady, asked why so many gangsters were eager to load her with jewels, roundly replied, 'because I'm the best goddamn lay in America.' (I am sorry to add that the committee didn't have the nerve to ask her the same question on the little screen.)

When we set off again we had the top down, the sun shone, and the children in the back jumped up and down singing,

We're off to Maine We're off to Maine

And not by any boat or train.

Later, Susan, influenced by the family in the Chicken Coop, who combined religious fervor with unfortunate personal habits, began to chant,

God made the sun

God made the moon

God made the stars

God made the trees

God made the sea...

A long thoughtful pause, and then:

God made everything, except our furniture.

Meanwhile, Martin, standing up against orders in the back seat, chirruped, 'Dodge... Chevy... Chevy, Pontiac, Cadillac... Ford...'

'No, it isn't, it's a Mercury,' I said crossly, 'and sit down.' It was about the last time I was able to correct him on the year or make of any car seen on the road, from any angle at any distance. He was a month short of his fourth birthday.

We passed through Mystic, Connecticut, and spent an hour at the whaling museum, where a faithful reproduction of an early 18th-century New England whaling port was being built up. It was a very peaceful, pleasant town of old houses, with a broad, sheltered estuary ringed with great elms. We remembered it.

After spending a disturbed night in a decrepit motel built so close to the New Haven Railroad tracks that giant freights actually seemed to crash through our bedroom at eighty miles an hour, and at intervals of half an hour all night, we had two fractious children on our hands, and taught them Animal Euchre. (For the sake of any parents who have not heard of this excellent time-passer, you allot each child or team one side of the road, and every animal he sees on that side is worth points — different points for a cow, horse, dog, etc. Some rule has to be made about herds or flocks too large to be counted in passing. A cemetery on one side takes that side's score back to zero, but of course it is up to the other side to see the cemetery. A cat on a window sill always counts game-winning points, whatever they are, usually a hundred for each game; five games the set.)

Next day we came about noon to the Westerstago Inn behind Prince's Point. Maine! The sky was a pale northern blue, the air sharp and smelling of fresh seaweed, and the roadsides bright with wild roses. We ate steamed clams and lobster rolls, both for the first time, and then set out to find our landlord. Dr Rounds showed us the Indian arrowhead stuck in the door of his house — it had been fired during an Abenaki raid of the the mid 1700s — and then took us to the cottage close by. As promised, it was primitive, but, to people accustomed to the Indian mofussil, perfectly livable. We set up a work table for me in the corner of our bedroom, screwed the ancient electric burner (one ring) into a light socket, noting that the wire grew rather hot to the touch, bathed the kids in the sink, and went out to explore the cove. It was perfect, a curved sandy beach, with seaweed-covered rocks at either end and a cluster in the middle, and not another soul in sight, or prospect. This is it, we cried, aloud, walking hand in hand on the sand in the twilight. Maine!

Two weeks later, when we were well settled in, and knew our way to Cumberland Center and Falmouth Foreside, and the grass was growing as high as the children's heads along the lane, North Korea invaded South Korea. Not again, I thought, not another weak-kneed acquiescence... then President Truman threw the power of the United States into positive action to throw back the aggressors. The same action threw me into a sea of self doubt and questioning.

We walked again along the sand, the Halfway Rock light flashing out of the Atlantic night to the east. That transformation which we knew, theoretically, would happen when we left England had come to pass: we physically loved America. We had lost nothing of love for the English land, but the nostalgia for it had faded. (We longed to eat English bacon again, and Melton Mowbray pies, and Dover sole — but the belly's hungering is not the same as the heart's aching.)

This land under our feet, Maine or Rockland or Manhattan, was where our hearts rested. From now on, wherever we travelled, however much we thrilled to the journeys, it was these seas, this sun, this wind that would define 'home'; and the dogwoods blooming at the high curve of South Mountain Road; and the sunburst sensation of freedom and gaiety when the October maples showered gold on the people going to the football — combative, friendly, generous, alert. They had been generous to my country, above all, and we had never had to grow a protective shell around our nationality. Apart from a few absent-minded jabs from the Irish, and a rather apologetic hostility from some Zionists, Britain was liked and admired. Equally among people whose national origins gave them no cause to love England as among the professional Anglophiles, we had met a singularly moving sympathy with England and appreciation of what she had achieved and suffered in the past forty years. As soon as the storekeepers in Haverstraw learned we were English — which was at once, from our accents — they would exclaim over the unfairness of the hard times then gripping England; of the rationing; of the people's doggedness during the war; of their discipline under crushing taxation.

Italian greengrocers gave us fruit, and Greek delicatessen owners bread free, because we were English. In twenty-eight months neither of us had ever had to defend England against verbal attack, though we had once or twice been asked to explain anomalies.

Now the United States was at war, and England had promised to help. What should I do? Not even a British general mobilization and a call to the Colours would get me back to England after what I had been through to stay here, because their Colours would not be mine. Nehru was obviously not going to offer any armed assistance from India, and I had no intention of returning only to serve on a British Army staff. In any event general mobilization was most unlikely unless the Russians came in. I could join the U.S. Army. I had fourteen years' experience, eight of them on active service, as a command and staff officer. Surely I could translate the generality of what I had learned into the specifics of the U.S. Army, just as I had learned how to translate my knowledge into a movie script? But I would not, repeat NOT, serve as a journalist or writer in a propaganda or information service. I was a writer now, by force of desire and achievement... but not in battle.

I wrote to the army offering my services in any capacity provided it was with a combat formation. (The thought of giving up my new career to administer a clothing depot in Fayetteville , Ark, gave me nightmares.) The army thanked me cordially and said they could get along without me. I did nothing more, and so remained obsessed — as I still am — with a sense of guilt. I ought to have pressed my offer of service on the country which had been so generous to me.

My hands over my ears to shut out the distant mutter of the guns, I returned to The Deceivers. I had long since defined the object of the book: To tell an exciting story about the uncovering of Thuggee. The corollary, that I wanted to make the reader feel the reality of that time and place, hardly needed to be stated because it was inherent in the object. A second level, needed to raise the story above straight narration of mystery and adventure, was hard to find, so I started to write it on the one level only, hoping some depth would later reveal itself.

For various reasons it was necessary that the Savage in this book (the Savages were my continuing fictional British family in India) should join a gang of Thugs and so discover their secrets. It had not actually been done this way: the real-life Captain Sleeman caught some Thugs in Central India, and the rest of the conspiracy was uncovered by extracted confessions, the following up of those, more questionings, and so on. But what I wanted was not impossible. During the Mutiny of 1857 the British Chief of Police in Bombay went about in disguise among the sepoys for many weeks, to find out whether any such explosion was brewing there as had rent the Bengal Army. But my Savage — and I — were slowly forced to realize that he would have to become a Thug if he wanted to find out the full scope of the conspiracy. Then what would he do if he were told to kill a traveller? Would he stand by while his companions killed? Would his conscience allow it? Or would he be in the position, say, of a spy placed in the German General Staff and there told to prepare the plan for a minor attack?

The spy would know that he must produce a good plan (which would kill more of his own people) because if he did not, he would lose his place at the centre of affairs, where some day he might be able to take the decisive action, pass the vital information. Here was an important moral problem, that would be as relevant to the modern reader as to the 1820 Savage.

As I got deeper in my study of the Thug rituals, I was struck by the extraordinary resemblance of some of them to the idea and practice of Christian communion. It was clear that these men, dedicated to murder, had a deep religious conviction, and received their sacraments as direct from God. God did not give them a mere licence, but a direct command, to go out and kill in the prescribed way. The rituals had an amazing power, for though they were purely Hindu, and dedicated to a Hindu goddess (Kali the Destroyer), many Thugs were Muslims. In no other branch of their life did these Muslims accept any god of the Hindu pantheon, but believed that there is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God. If they were affected by the cult of Kali, I thought, why should not a Christian be affected? My Christian, the hero?

Thuggee was not closely analogous to Hitler's Nazism, but there were enough points of resemblance to make the comparison clear to most readers: the mystique cutting across all other faiths; the ritual necessity to kill, to wipe out; the sense of being God's appointed right hand on earth; above all, perhaps, the arousal of a feeling in the non-Nazi, the non-Thug, that cried, How could these ordinary people be turned into such monsters?

I tried to imagine the strains put on an ordinary not too-brilliant Englishman forced to kill and watch killing, forced to share in these sacraments and sacrifices, in circumstances of the utmost drama, surrounded by fanatical believers. It sprang out at me then that here was my second level. I began a new draft with enthusiasm. It was going to be hard to give the story continuous depth without slowing the adventure narrative; but I knew I could do it. This must be what Keith meant by growth in a writer. Nightrunners had gone much as I planned it. As I wrote, the characters stirred but little of their own volition under my hand; they did what they were supposed to do to arrive where I wanted them to arrive. But the people in The Deceivers were coming alive, and facing problems that I had not planned for them. I must loosen the rein, but not the curb...

Life outside the work was pure joy. We explored the White Mountains and scrambled up rocky streams in the Pemigewasset wilderness; we built sand castles and rode the surf at Higgins beach, where I often found a friendly seal six feet off in the same wave with me; and dug up bushels of steamer clams from sandy pockets among the rocks; and watched our children meet and play with our neighbours'.

The country was nothing like Cornwall, as we had expected it to be, and I took another step towards shaking off the habit of comparison. Cornwall faces the Atlantic with a wall of cliffs 50 miles long and 400 feet high. The ocean strikes with the fetch and force of over 3,000 miles of prevailing westerly winds behind it. The surf is heavy on the calmest days, and in a storm smashes up and over the top of the cliffs to blow in a fine spray miles inland over the moors. In Maine the cliffs were laughable little walls; but the pine forests marched to the very edge of the sea; in a thousand deep-carved inlets there was a stillness and a moving silence; and one man in a boat, far, mirrored between pine and muted ocean swell. A host of islands lay to seaward, rocky, low beckoning. There was a sudden shock in the water, and a haze where the icebergs glided along the horizon. Whales surfaced lazily among the icebergs and schools of seals swam down the coves at evening; huge black-backed gulls hunched on the rocks in the sea-wrack and, ten miles out, Jack Trefethrin rocked in his lobster boat, hauling in his pots, seventy above or thirty below.

Our neighbours the Curtises, two brothers, both married, invited us to a clambake. We had heard the word often enough, but had no idea what it implied. A year ago we would have thought it meant that someone was going to bake a lot of clams, but we were getting wary. We went prepared for anything.

Sonny Curtis's land ran down to the sea opposite Cousin's Island on Casco Bay, and we gathered there about three o'clock on a hazy Saturday afternoon. On the rocks at the edge of the sea there was a fireplace about three feet square, open fronted, the rough stone walls two feet high. A four-foot square sheet of cast-iron lay to one side. 'Driftwood!' Sonny shouted cheerfully, 'seaweed! Collect tons of seaweed, tons of driftwood. And there's the cellar.' He pointed to a large zinc tub full of ice. We stacked our contributions of beer and bourbon, stripped to bathing suits, and set to work. Others arrived. We drank, joked, swam, and pulled 50 lb. of seaweed; swam again, rested, took a can of cold beer, and dragged up a stack of wood. 'They must be going to bake a million clams,' I said to Barbara, as Oakley Curtis drove up in his station wagon and called, 'Give me a hand with the baysfeet.' We staggered over to the fire with crates containing forty-eight live lobsters on ice; then a barrel of clams; a crate of chicken legs and breasts; eggs; corn on the cob, still in the green ears.

Sonny dragged the iron plate into position over the fireplace and Oakley and I built the fire under it, shoving in wood until it was a seething red furnace. Then, working quickly together, the two brothers spread a six-inch layer of seaweed on the plate, and on the seaweed laid out the chicken; another layer of seaweed, and the lobsters; another, and the eggs; another, and the clams; the corn. The pile now stood up three feet above the iron plate. We dragged a large tarpaulin, its edges scorched and burned and odd holes in the middle, over all, and weighted centre and corners with rocks. 'Two hours,' Sonny said. 'The women'll look after the fire.' There were twenty of us in all, men and women.

We began to play softball on the patch of grass above the rocks. The women sat by the fire, putting on more wood, and singing part songs. We swam again, the sun sank into the pines and we put on sweatshirts. The bourbon lowered in the bottles and the mixed smells of woodsmoke and cooking seaweed drifted along the shore. Twilight came and we slipped again into the sea to call out and laugh with those on the shore by the fire. Betsy lit hurricane lanterns and Anna put little pots of butter round the edge of the fireplace, to melt. In the full dark I helped Sonny strip off the canvas tarpaulin. A smell indescribably Biblical and savoury burst out, to sighs and groans of pure animal contentment. Then Oakley began to take off the seaweed and Sonny to serve out the food. Anna showed us how to break and eat a baysfoot with the bare hands, and we settled back to a lazy enjoyment of the greatest eating experience I have ever known. Everything was done to perfection, each part distinctive in its own flavour, but welded by the savour of smoke and seaweed and the steaming juices of the other ingredients into a single, great whole.

There were no lights on the bay, none on the island; only the stars, the lanterns, the firelight on the faces. Thirty days ago we had not known any of these people. What miracle of human alchemy made us now friends, trusting and happy in each other? It was a moment to live for ever.

Three days later Mrs Rounds hurried over to the cottage. I was wanted, long distance, from New York. I went back with her to the big house and picked up the phone. It was Keith Jennison, his voice trembling with emotion. The Literary Guild had chosen Nightrunners of Bengal as the book they would distribute to their membership for the month of January 1951. My share of the guaranteed advance on royalties would be over $16,000. And Mr Beecroft of the Guild said that I had written a damned good book.

Chapter Eight

After a few days of euphoria we pulled ourselves together. Now that it looked as though we could not merely live here, but live well, the question of my status was more important than ever. The Immigration people had set no date for the hearing on my application, nor could I be sure of the outcome. Still, worrying would do no good. We returned to our routine of work and exploration.

We met two people who gave us different but profound insights into the country. One was a storekeeper and one was a general. While filling our car at a little store outside Freeport, Maine, the owner asked us where we came from. We told him. He said his family had come from Portugal. Where were we going with the pretty kids? Fishing off Bailey's Island, I said. He stroked his chin, and looked up and down the road. 'Hell,' he said. 'You don't know the water. And you'll have to hire a boat. I got one out there. Hold on a minute.' He locked the pumps, dashed inside, and started loading his own car with hot dogs, rolls, ice-cream and canned beer from his store. Then, beckoning us to follow, he drove off. We had a marvellous day with George Freitas in his boat. He talked of his days running a rum boat during Prohibition, of hard times, of making and losing a couple of fortunes. He showed Martin how to bait a hook, and Susan how to kill a flounder (put its head in your mouth, while it is still on the hook, and bite it sharply behind the eye). He gave the kids cokes and told them jokes. We drank beer and trolled and fished all day, and when we drove back, sun-soaked and drowsy in the evening, he wouldn't take even the drink I tried to buy him, but slapped my shoulders and said, 'Welcome to America'

The general was from South Carolina. His father had been a young Confederate brigadier-general killed at Chancellorsville, and he himself was a classmate of John J. Pershing at West Point. He was now ninety-one years old, brave, courteous, intelligent. He said he hoped we would become American citizens. I said that we were thinking of it, because we believed that the American ideal, that all men are born free and equal, was the only hope of the world, even though we were sadly far from living up to that ideal in the case of the Negroes. The old general leaned forward. 'Yes, but are niggras human?' he asked quietly.

Meeting George Freitas and General Higgins almost on successive days made us realize that without more cooking the contents of the melting-pot might be an indigestible stew.

From Viking came word that they had put my British affairs in the hands of the London firm of Pearn, Pollinger & Higham. After some delay, caused I believe by differing opinions about my book inside the firm, Michael Joseph Ltd agreed to publish Nightrunners in the British Commonwealth, and Pollinger's started contract negotiations with them.

At the end of August we returned to South Mountain Road and the warmest greetings from a hundred friends who had heard our news and were almost tearfully glad that, financially at least, we had won our war. I bought my first Brooks Brothers suit, which was of an excessive correctness; and tickets for all Army's home football games, as well as the Army-Navy game; and a new Plymouth convertible (pale green); and swore we would never eat spaghetti again unless we actually wanted to. We threw a party for everyone we knew, and about 120 people came.

Fried chicken was devoured by the bushel and beer by the barrel. Softer sensualities must have been aroused for on prospecting round the back of the house I saw, at the edge of the wood, an upturned and bare male behind covering but not altogether concealing a spread-eagled female body, which also appeared to be bare from the waist down. This at 3 p.m. on a sunny afternoon. They were pumping away in the finest stand of poison ivy on the property, but the damage in all sections had been done, and I said nothing but crept away, reflecting that one must never, never judge by appearances. The man was wearing his Bermuda shorts around his ankles (that was how he was easy to recognize) and affected an appallingly genteel British accent, and Barbara and I had decided he must be a faggot. Far — to the lady's obvious enjoyment — from it.

'You know all those ghastly American jokes about Cholmondeley and Niffles?' I said to Barbara one day.

'Well, I've found a place here we can fire back with. It's on Nantucket, and it's spelled SlASCONSET but pronounced Sconset. Helen Taylor's family owns an island off the coast there.'

Though our accents were not changing our ways of speech and choice of words were. We who had sneered so heartily at 'Paris, France' and 'Manchester, England' were now saying 'Portland, Maine' and 'Fort Wayne, Indiana' with the best; and talking freely of cookies, sweaters, and pies instead of biscuits, jumpers, and tarts.

Some American accents caused us trouble. In Haverstraw I went into a delicatessen and asked for Italian sausages.

'Hearta nartheart?' the old man said. 'I beg your pardon?' I said, baffled.

He repeated his chant, 'Hearta nartheart?' with a questioning inflection. To make his point clear he got out some sausages and showed them to me. One lot was redder than the other, I thought. I understood. One kind must contain heart and the other not. But whose heart? I went out to Barbara in the car and said, 'Do we want heart sausages, or no-heart sausages?'

'Some of each,' she said Napoleonically.

We learned fast, through our taste buds, that what the old ltalian-American meant was 'hot' or 'not-hot' sausages. That R, unpronounced in English — English often got us into trouble. (But in Maine they didn't pronounce it either, and words like Bar Harbor, car, and heart became Ba Habba, Ca', and ha't.)

The Crosbys invited us to the annual grape picking at their vineyards under High Tor; Life Magazine were going to attend and would we please all look picturesque; we did, they didn't. The summer birds of the Dells country club winged back to New York; no more would they be seen in bright plumage pecking away at greens and fairways as we drove by on our way to and from New City. The colours showered down in brilliance on to the forests, and in the early mornings pheasants stalked down the misty road and called harshly in the fields.

As they lay in their bedroom one night after some particularly foul misdeed and a correspondingly sharp spanking, I heard Susan sob; 'Sometimes I wish we didn't have Daddy'; and Martin's thoughtful reply, 'Me, too... but if we didn't we'd grow up into awful stinking little children.'

In the Korean War the amphibious landing at Inchon turned the tide in our favour. Three weeks later we crossed the 38th parallel and carried the war to the enemy, to the accompaniment of considerable howling from our left flank. Apart from the ordinary logic of doing to an aggressor at least as much as he has done to you, it is a sheer impossibility to win a war — any war — by a defensive strategy. A war in which the enemy can retreat or prepare behind a sacred frontier will go on for ever. Three weeks later again the Red Chinese entered the war, and since their frontier too was regarded as sacred, a bloody stalemate was ensured. It was a depressing prospect.

The editorial process began on The Deceivers. There are three schools of thought on editing. Most British publishers belong to the Smoked MS School. They send manuscripts submitted to them to an outside reader whose judgment they trust. The reader reads the MS, curing it the while in pipe smoke, then sends it back to the publisher, well smoked, with a report to the effect, perhaps, that the MS is worth publishing, though a bit long, and disorganized in patches, and that the chief character is insufficiently developed. The publishers now send the MS back to the author, listing these defects and saying that if the author cares to see what he can do to eliminate them, and resubmit, they will be happy to consider the book again. The author does what he thinks best — works on it, puts it away, submits to another publisher — and sooner or later probably gets published. The resulting book is indubitably his own.

All American publishers belong to one of the other two schools, the Compulsive and the Blood-Sweat-and-Tears. In the Compulsive School, a decision is first made that the MS is publishable, on the basis of its contents and what the editors think they can do to improve them. The author is told that the book will be published if he agrees to make changes suggested by the editorial staff. If he agrees, the compulsive editor tells him not only what he must do but within fairly narrow limits how he must do it. Writers throw a lot of abuse at the Compulsive School, and it is certainly packed with people who, themselves unable to create, live by distorting the creations of others. Still, the writer always has recourse to another publisher, and he is brought up hard against a fact of literary life, that in one aspect a book is a piece of merchandise, and the merchandiser has a right to shape it for sale.

All the same, I consider myself fortunate that Viking stood firmly in the third school. Harold Guinzburg explained their philosophy to me: 'We will publish your work. Through blood, sweat, and tears we will try to see that your books are as good as you can make them; but in the last resort, we publish what you write. No one escapes. We give Steinbeck just as hard a time as we give you.'

Helen Taylor zeroed in on Thuggee... She reminded me that this phrase, that situation, those words, would give a different impression to the American reader than to the British. What was the purpose of so-and-so, his role in the book? I explained (and it was surprising how often the mere attempt at explanation brought the fault to the front). Helen pointed out places where, to her mind, I had not achieved the effect I was striving for. Did I agree? Yes, but now I was baffled. It was easy to see what was wrong... but what would be right? Helen showed her real genius, an ability to understand the writer's intent and the motivation of his characters better than he could himself. She would give me a reasoned and sensible reading of a personality so confused that I had lost track of it, as a parent can lose touch with a loved contrary child through being too close, too involved.

Our arguments were waged with force and fervour. Accusations of stupidity, ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and lack of sympathy (all from me) filled the air. Helen told me a whole chapter was, unfortunately, nonsense. I defended it hotly. Somewhere in the defence Helen cried 'Stop, Jack! Now you have explained it... but you don't say that in the book.' She was right. It was only necessary to put on paper what had been in my mind — and had stayed there.

Martin comes in as I scribble notes, stares at me seriously for a while, then says, 'Daddy, why don't you work, like other daddies?'

It is a long, hard process, and a writer can lose self-confidence; but with editors of this calibre, who love books and have a deep feeling for writing and writers, it enables the writer to bring out the best he has in him.

Army had a brilliant new young quarter-back, Blaik, and a big, good team. We foresaw great days ahead. Mrs St George was re-elected to Congress and asked us to meet her in Goshen to talk about my Immigration situation, the day after Thanksgiving. A hurricane hit the state that day and at 7 a.m. the Bear Mountain weather station was reporting a wind of over 100 m.p.h. All cars were warned off the roads but we battled through, dodging several fallen trees on U.S. 6, and arrived on time for the appointment. I told Mrs St George that I could not think what was keeping the Immigration people from reaching some decision on my application, and asked her what I should do. She counselled patience, and said she was sure all would be well. We returned through torrential rain to South Mountain Road, and found a big tree down, its upper branches touching the back of the house. I read in the New York Times that Justice William 0. Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court was planning a trek in the Himalayas for July and August of the following year. These are monsoon months all along the Himalaya except in the extreme north-west, and on the north side of the main chain, which was hard to reach, both physically, and politically. I therefore wrote to the Justice advising him to make weather enquiries from the Indian or Pakistan embassies before committing himself. He replied warmly and we began corresponding about his trip.

In December, stemming from the friendships I had made at Fort Knox, I was invited to attend the and annual Student Conference on United States Affairs at West Point. These conferences gathered together forty cadets from West Point and Annapolis and a hundred students from civilian universities across the country. These were grouped into seminars of ten, which spent several days discussing some subject of importance to the country. This year it was 'The Far Eastern Policy of the United States'. What was American policy in the area as a whole, in each country taken individually? What ought it to be? Why?

My position was as an expert adviser on India and Pakistan. I sat in a comfortable office and waited for delegates from the seminars to come along and ask me questions. What were the origins of the Kashmir situation? What was the Hindu population of Pakistan? Was the Indian National Congress a congress, or a political party, or what? I crept into the back of some of the seminar rooms and attended all the general lectures and expositions. It was a thoroughly rewarding experience. The young people worked together, bending good and informed minds to specific problems, and coming up with sensible and practical recommendations. The civilian youths were usually more bellicose than the cadets when it came to dealing with 'enemy' nations, possibly because the cadets knew that they were the ones who would have to put the harsh words into practice.

On January 24, 1951, I handed Keith the complete and final MS of The Deceivers; two days later Nightrunners of Bengal was published. Viking gave a lunch at Twenty One in my honour and to launch the book.

The main course was, appropriately, curry, but the chefs suffered from the common American delusion that if a dish is good made with water it will be better made with milk and best made with cream. (Our American cookbook includes cream in the recipe for the French dish quiche lorraine; the French cook-book does not.) The curry, like much else about West 52nd Street, was rich but tasteless.

I had vowed to read no reviews except what came under my eye, which were those in the New Yorker, Time, and the New York Times. The New Yorker man was bored with all the running about. Time thought more highly of it, but opined that the flow of blood had obscured my message (that hatred breeds hatred). I did not agree, naturally, but was delighted that at least one critic had deciphered the message at all. The bloodshed also caused Orville Prescott of the Times to drop a stitch in his crochet work. Later he picked it up and, licking his lips, went through the book again, listing the various methods by which death had been inflicted. I was amazed at the bloodthirsty ingenuity shown by both British and mutineers.

The book started to sell well enough, creeping on to the bottom of the best-seller lists for a week or two. Meanwhile we started a siege of sickness, with one or more of us down from February to June: both children had German measles, then measles proper, then flu, then mumps — (in which they were joined by Barbara). I sprained my ankle.

In the middle of all this I was hailed to New York for the hearing on the vital application. I hobbled off, supported by witnesses and stalwart friends, keyed up for a final solution. But I was only asked a few questions I had already answered at length on paper, swore to a few more documents, and was told to go away and wait. I would be informed of the decision in due course. My stalwart friends supported me to a few bars and in the evening rush-hour I returned with Keith to Rockland County via Weehawken and the purgatory of the West Shore. This was a time when we were discussing the technical problems inherent in making a martinicle — a very dry martini in a liquid state inside a globe of ice on the end of a stick, to be picked up by commuters on the run and enjoyed at leisure on the train homeward. We were going to make our fortunes...

Barbara and I faced a new problem. We had desired freedom of living and working conditions. With the Literary Guild's money on the way, we were free. But, as we examined our situation, the size of that freedom was borne in on us. I could make the down payment on any reasonably-sized house, anywhere. We could buy expensive cameras and stock our library with books. Or travel. Or stay here and leak the money away at theatres, cocktail parties, and Chambord. We could go to the sun — Florida, California: to the mountains — Montana, Colorado: to the sea — Maine, Washington: south where land was cheap and labour cheaper — Arkansas, Texas: north to the forests and ice and bitter exhilarating days — Michigan, Minnesota.

We reined back our vaulting imaginations and tried to set sensible limits to the frightening scope of our freedom. We agreed first that we needed to buy a house. The children had been rootless long enough, with the extra disturbance of not knowing when Daddy was going to be deported (is that the same as executed, Daddy?). Martin had travelled 11,000 miles and lived in seven houses before he was four.

Where should our house be? We had come to Rockland County through answering the first advertisement that offered a house for rent at a price we could afford to pay. We loved the place and the people, but I could not bring myself to believe that my luck was so great as to take us straight off to the best place in the world to spend the rest of our lives: a good, very good place, yes — but, the best? It seemed presumptuous to imagine it.

But Barbara said, 'I think we should stay in Rockland. The people here have been so nice. And they're fun to be with. They're intelligent, they read and talk and write.'

I reiterated my argument. Barbara shook her head dubiously, and repeated, 'I don't see how we could be better off than we are here.'

Then I said, 'I want to live by the sea.' I had always wanted to, and though the longing was originally defined in terms of the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, another sea would do. I wanted the sea for its own sake, and because the children would grow up with boats, able to swim and sail, handling compass and tiller, sail and engine, from the earliest ages.

Barbara hesitated, for she loves the sea as much as I. I said, 'And we'll try again to get Liz and Mike. If we have four kids in the house, really the sea's the only thing that would keep them all busy and happy.' With that, she agreed and we turned to discuss what sea, where. Maine seemed the obvious answer; but for years yet I would be dependent on visits to editors, agents, and publishers. Maine was too far from New York. And there was an old saying about Maine weather 'Down east here we have two seasons... July — and winter.'

At this moment an apparently perfect house appeared for sale in the classified pages of the New York Times. It was in Mystic, Connecticut, that same Mystic we had found so attractive on our drive to Maine. We went to look at it. It was perfect: old, not large, white-painted lath with green shutters, a few huge sycamore trees standing on an acre and a half of lawn sloping to a low sea-wall. We bought it and arranged to move early in April.

Keith stoked the cannel coal and a cloud of yellow smoke filled the Toad and Throstle. 'Did I tell you about the old Vermonter digging in his yard, and this city slicker comes by and says, "You lived here all your life?" The Vermonter leans on his spade and after a while says, "Not yet."'

Glasses banged, ice tinkled. Emily came down the narrow stairs, doubled with laughter. 'I asked Julie to toss the salad for me. She's tossing it... it's all over the ceiling.' Bill drew judiciously on his pipe. 'My wife's mind is literal rather than literary.' Emily went back upstairs. The boys stuck their heads in and said good night. Nicky grabbed a handful of peanuts before he left.

Joe Wright leaned over the back of Donna Morse's chair, leering pointedly down her cleavage; but his heart wasn't in it, we all knew. He was about to remarry, and Jane was there. 'Hey, Keith,' he cried, 'Let's have the farting contest record, Paul Boomer and Lord Windermere.'

Phil Morse was sweating, his voice angry. 'Bizet never wrote a decent note for Carmen. The good music's all Micaela's. There isn't a soprano today who...' He was not wearing his toupee, which meant that he felt at ease; but with Phil it was hard to tell the difference.

Phyllis Kauffmann hitched up her skirt another notch where she sat, and took another gulp of bourbon. Her face was flushed but she wasn't drunk, yet, Her eye fell on Joe, but he was dancing across to his bride to be. Keith. No. Ralph Barker. No. Me. 'Hi, Jack, why are you leaving us?'

'... he's fluffed!'

'Papa's a great man.'

'I think Across the river and into the trees is the worst book of the century. Pretentious crap.'

'Did you read Across the street and into the grill?'

'Murderous. And the McCarthy piece...'

'Knife in the back. He's too big for people like that.'

'Crap. He's a phony chest beater, both in his writing and his life.'

'I know him. He's... big.'

'And do you realize that over 14 per cent of the company's income comes from government leases? Hell, that means a change of administration can cut the ground from under their feet! But Consolidated's on a different basis...'

Emily came downstairs again, frowning. 'I think that's a bit much.'

'What?'

'I went to the john, locked the door, pulled down my pants, and sat down. As I was getting up a man's voice said, "How's the party going?" It was Bill Ballantine. He was in the bath all the time, three feet away.'

'And you didn't see him?'

'He didn't have time to take a shower before we came up,' Roberta Ballantine said defensively.

We sang a commercial:

?

Christianity hits the spot,

Twelve Apostles, that's a lot,

Jesus Christ and the Virgin, too,

Absolution is the thing for you.

?

Emily said, 'Funny... but sacrilege. Religion is…'

'... crap!'

'You have no right to say that! Some people believe. There are millions of...'

What about the Unitarians then? Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual. Balls. Judo-Christian witch doctors. Sunrise service at St John's-in-the-Wilderness, very moving. Not a hope in hell. Look, what warrant do you have to believe any of...? Would you believe it if the New York Times...?

The volume of music rose. Dixieland. Keith Was sprawled by the phonograph, his head cushioned. Seven and a half per cent new equipment sure bourbon and water up MacArthur up skirts better oh God no miracles goodbye goodbye goodbye.

Chapter Nine

In Mystic there was a Welcome Wagon, and the ladies who ran it turned out to be good Samaritans indeed. When they called on what is normally a rather commercialized venture (handing the new arrivals free samples from various stores, shop address lists, etc.) I was the only one up; my family were in bed with mumps. Obviously not trusting a man to prepare food for the invalids, they undertook to do it themselves. For the next six days one or other of them would drive up with a huge bowl of clam chowder. We ate nothing else, for that week; but I still love the stuff, whether New England or Manhattan style (the latter is thinner, and with tomatoes).

We began to get to know our neighbours. They were a mixed lot — a few painters, but mostly businessmen and simple citizens (very simple, some). The Episcopal clergyman came and gushed over us because of our accents. Martin staggered in one morning a pale green in colour, unable to tell us what was wrong. We put him to bed and worried over him until Susan rushed in with the news that the boys down the road had been showing them how to skin an eel. First they nailed the eel (live) to a board by hammering a nail through its head. Then they made a circular cut round the neck, caught hold of the skin and began to pull it off backwards... Martin's malaise was explained. It was one of these same little boys ho liked to excrete underwater and then chase the results when they bobbed to the surface. A brother was in the 6th grade (age eleven) and could not read.

I buried myself in my writing, and Barbara in housework. My next novel, I decided, would be about the Great Game, the continental chess contest of spy and counterspy in Central Asia during the period of Russia's expansion from the Urals to the Karakorams. This is the subject of Kim, and of some of Kipling's short stories, but what I determined to do was translate the plot of the best spy story ever written, Erskine Childer's The Riddle of the Sands, from the sea background of North Germany to the mountain background of the Himalayas. To make clear to myself what I was aiming at I at first called my book The Riddle of the Pamirs; but certain character developments in it, as I was writing, made me change that to The Lotus and the Wind.

I went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Barbara was ironing, the radio on. She had taken to listening to the radio then, to take her mind off the fact that we had again failed to get Liz and Mike. She said, 'Someone called 'Willie Mays has stolen a bass. First bass, I think they said. I suppose the man will have to borrow the second bass's bass. I wonder how many they have, altogether?'

'What the hell are you talking about?'

She indicated the radio. I listened but could only make out that rhubarb was being served, which I supposed took the place of lemons at half time in rugger, or tea in the pavilion at cricket. But rhubarb?

Barbara said, 'It's from the Polo Grounds. Giants against Cardinals.'

So these people stuffing themselves with rhubarb were circus freaks and princes of the church, and they were playing polo, not baseball, as I had imagined. I returned to the simpler problems of my four-dimensional plot.

Next day she was again listening to the radio. 'The umpire's called the infield fly rule,' she said. 'That means they can pee in the middle of the field, instead of wasting time going to the john. It must be far enough off so that the women spectators can see what they're doing, but not what they've got.'

I listened idly. Strike one, ball one. But they were throwing a ball, weren't they? So it was all balls. That's about how I felt.

Squeeze bunt. Amazing, and almost obscene into the bargain. I advised Barbara to find something more intelligible to while away her hours at the ironing-board. Baseball was just a more complicated version of rounders, a simple-minded game in its own right, and we would never understand it, so why waste the time?

'You're wrong,' she said. 'If we're going to live here, and our kids grow up here, they're going to be involved. Martin knows what a strike is, so we ought to. We've got to be involved, at least with what involves them. And one day there'll be a Fathers v. Daughters game at some school, and they'll laugh when you pick up the bat. Think of what Susan will suffer.'

I started to listen to the broadcasts on W.M.C.A. when I could, and on the next day I would carefully read the report of the game in the New York Times, to correlate what I had heard with what was explained in more detail, or pictured, in the newspaper. We asked our neighbours questions. Common-sense and processes of elimination elucidated jargon that initially seemed pure gibberish. W.M.C.A. broadcast all games played by the New York Giants, and we became Giant fans. We learned the names and characteristics of the team, and wholly identified ourselves with it. When the Giants suffered, we suffered; when they rejoiced, we sang. Our favourite players were Sal Maglie, a pitcher with a marvellously black-avised and threatening Sicilian gangster image, and Willie Mays, a young Negro of phenomenal cheerfulness and energy. The team manager was an import from the hated rivals of Brooklyn, the Dodgers or Bums, and all right-thinking Giants wanted to sell him right back there, but he kept on winning, there was no denying it. There were rumours of a pennant, yet.

My passport expired and I applied to the British Consulate General for a new one, giving my particulars. After a week or two they informed me that I appeared to be a citizen of India and should apply for an Indian passport. I replied that I had been thrown out of India, together with several thousand others, on the reasonable grounds that we were not Indians, but British. In my own case I had been employed with Gurkha troops, where there was a specific agreement between the King of Nepal and the King of England that only British officers should be so employed. The Consul General relented. If I could prove that my father was born in England, he said, they'd agree that I was a citizen of the United Kingdom and give me a passport accordingly. Breathing deeply, I replied that my father had been born in Midnapore, Bengal, India, the son of the Superintendent of Police of the Presidence (then an exclusively British job); who had been born in Kishnagur, Bengal, India, the son of the headmaster of La Martinière School there (then an exclusively British job); who was the son of a man born in Wiltshire, England, in 1773. In manhood this last had gone out to serve his sovereign in oriental climes with the 8th Hussars. The Consul General played his original note again: I appeared to be an Indian, and should apply to the consulate of that country for my passport. I did so, got my Indian passport, and formally abandoned the idea, so long dear to me, that I was an Englishman.

Judge Rosenman's firm sent me a bill for $100. We paid our first income taxes and celebrated with a bottle of champagne. The tax seemed ludicrously small compared with what the country had given us. I wrote to President Truman, sending him a copy of Nightrunners of Bengal, praising him for his courage in firing General MacArthur, and asking him to turn some of his attention to the graft obviously visible in American public life. MacArthur certainly had the right idea on how to deal with the Korean situation but it was his duty to obey his civilian chiefs, right or wrong, and he didn't.

On April 12, the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, the Immigration Bureau permanently suspended their order for my deportation. 'I'm in!' I shouted, and hugged my wife.

'Read on,' she said soberly.

A few lines lower down the letter advised me that the action taken had to be approved by Congress. 'Christ,' I said miserably. That was how I felt — because I did not know and the Immigration bureaucrats did not think it proper to tell me, that unless Congress acted within six months, the suspension order would stand. In other words, what I needed from the Congress was not action but inaction: this, as anyone knows, is a very different kettle of fish. But I didn't know, and began worrying how I would prod Congress into a favourable vote.

I was not English then. So what was I?

I dug myself deeper into The Lotus and the Wind. The Riddle of the Sands is not only a great spy story, it is a wonderful evocation of the mystique of small-boat sailing. Here was a possible second level for my book: but I did not want to make my hero a mountaineer, for I meant to reserve mountaineering for another book, where spying would not muddy the images and problems. I found the second level in my passionate feeling about Central Asia as such. The very names of Samarkand and Bokhara, Yarkand and Pamir have sent electric shivers up my spine since I was ten. I had long since read everything available about the area. Before the war I had corresponded briefly with the great archaeologist and explorer, Sir Aurel Stein, about making an expedition there. In Nightrunners and Deceivers I had written historical novels — that is, I had tried to give a sense of the history of those times, and what it was like to live in them. In The Lotus the historical feel was not so important to me, it was the land that concerned me. I wanted to make Central Asia so strong and real that the reader would recognize it as a part of the story's architecture, not a mere decoration. This would be fitting too, and therefore ought to come out well, because the geography of Central Asia was integral to the plot, as the North German coast is to The Riddle of the Sands. I was going to write not a historical but a geographical novel.

The appearance of a third level, unbidden, began to alarm me. This was, the nature of mysticism. Davies, the hero of The Riddle of the Sands spends his life alone in small boats. But why? What does he hope to say to himself on his deathbed, that he has achieved? What goes he out for to seek? Some vision? An understanding of God? An understanding of himself? Erskine Childers, his creator, doesn't say.

Davies falls in love with a girl, and through that stumbles upon the spying plot. Tension grows in him as he realizes that if he uncovers the plot he will ruin the girl. I had tried to follow this pattern but it didn't fit, and my characters had got themselves into a much more complicated situation. My girl, Catherine, said simply: 'I love this man, Robin Savage. I am a normal young woman, affectionate, passionate perhaps, in no way cut off from other women or humanity in general. Therefore I want to marry Robin, settle down, have children, and make a home. He has been hardly treated by the world. No one understands him, but I do (the universal cry of woman). I will so enfold him with love that he will he cured of whatever ails him. He will he happy.'

But my young man, Robin Savage, said to himself: 'I have to keep searching. For what, I don't know. I have to be alone, stripped of all that encumbers thought. I must be free to move like the wind across the earth. I love this girl — but she terrifies me. The deeper she gets into my heart, with her need for love and a home, the more I fear her, because she will kill me. I am the wind. Hold the wind still, and what happens to it? It dies. She is the lotus, a flower. Tell the flower to follow the wind, throw it up in the wind, and what happens to it? It dies.'

I wished to God Robin and Catherine would get back in the channels I had cut out for them, and behave themselves. These problems were too deep for me: on the one hand I believed it was my duty to find an answer to them, on the other they were clearly unanswerable. It was extremely difficult, on technical grounds alone, to weld the three levels of my book into a single whole. I had set up a target and was now finding it beyond the range of my weapons. A miss on one side would fall into mawkishness, or plain confusion, since mystics are as difficult to write about as to understand; a miss on the other side would produce a spy story whose clean lines were blurred by pointless philosophising.

But who knew what the limit of my range was? I certainly did not. It might increase all the time, with trying. Besides, I had no choice. I had to write the story as it now revealed itself, or not at all.

Summer drew on. We left the children with friends in Rockland County and took of for two weeks' camping and walking, starting in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After rain on the Dry River Trail, rain on Webster Cliff and Lake of the Clouds, and rain at Arethusa Falls, we moved north to the National Park of Mt Desert island, behind Bar Harbor, Maine.

It was mid-week, early in the season, and the camp ground was deserted when we arrived. We put up the tent in a grove of pines beside the sea. A bell buoy clanged eerily a hundred yards out and seagulls floated past on long wings, black-tipped against the pale light. A jalopy arrived, bearing a man in late middle age and two teenage boys. The car had New York licence plates, and as we lit our fire we surreptitiously watched the efforts of the newcomers to set up their tent. The grove echoed with Brooklyn oaths, complaints and orders, but the tent did not rise. Barbara and I whispered to each other. Should we offer to help? Would we be intruding on their privacy, or would we be acting as 'good neighbours'? The man solved the problem by coming over and asking us where he could find water and firewood. I thought from his accent that he was a first generation immigrant, probably Greek. We soon had their tent up and a fire started. The younger boy began piling it high enough to set fire to the grove, but I stopped him and suggested we have a big one later. We showed them how to protect the tent against heavy rain in the night, while Barbara cooked a meal for all of us. After supper we sprawled hack, talking, and although nothing of note was said, we were deeply moved. The man he was indeed Greek-American — had been saving for years so that one day he could close his store and take his boys into the wilderness — their wilderness, for they were Americans born. The 'old lady' was staying at home, anxiously convinced that her men would be eaten by bears. The firelight shone in the man's grey eves and wrinkled face, on his thin shoes and faded town clothes — 'This is their country,' he said, 'This belongs to them, right? They gotta know about it, right? But did we have a night last night!'

All talking at once, they told us: they'd been rained out, the tent had collapsed, no one had slept for mysterious howls, thumps, and moans... but it was all worth it, and now they'd met us, and we'd shown them how, and told them where to go, and everything was going to be fine.

I felt humble that so much had come to me so comparatively easily; but in a small way we could share our portion that night, and we sat up late talking over the fire in the grove, by the sea. I envied the boys that these were their first nights in the open. I was younger than either of them when I first slept out under the loom of the Wiltshire downs, with a dead pigeon for tomorrow's breakfast clutched in my hand and a loaf of bread crumbling somewhere in the blanket in which I had rolled myself. Since then two thousand nights I had lain down to sleep under the sky, in England, France, Iraq, Persia, Syria, India and Burma, on mountains, by rivers, in deserts, under all the Asian stars, in the thunders of the monsoon and the oven wind of the Euphrates night. They had all been wonderful — but they had not been the first.

In the morning we parted as friends, and Barbara and I climbed Cadillac Mountain in a thick fog. The view from the top extended twenty feet in all directions. Far to the west we could not see Mt Washington. Two miles directly below us we could not see Bar Harbor. We could not see the Atlantic horizon a hundred and more miles away to the east and south. To the north, Mt Katahdin, where we were going, would have to await our inspection till we reached it... which we did the next day. The sun's rays touch the summit of Katahdin before any other place in the United States; but not the day we climbed it. A dense fog settled on the mountain five minutes after we left Chimney Pond camp for the walk up the Cathedral Trail. It saved me money, at that: the two photographs I took from the top of Cadillac also served as views from Katandin.

On the way south to pick up the children we spent a couple of days on the Appalachian Trail above Berlin, New Hampshire. The Androscoggin was a wide and lovely river there, but its waters were brown-tinged and vile-smelling from the acids the paper companies dumped into them, and it took half an hour's climbing to leave the stink behind. Then we were in the pines. The bad weather had gone and when we went to bed in the Trident shelter the sky was clear, and a warm slow wind stirred the low bushes around the tent. I awoke at three in the morning to a dying moon and the sound of a small animal scratching somewhere close by. But that was not what had awakened me. I heard then a steady beat, a deep breathing to the south. It reminded me of the breathing of the ocean that I had heard so many years before in Cornwall, but this was faster and more regular. Then an owl called, faint and far, a long hollow, quavering call in a minor key, and I understood. It was not an owl, nor the ocean, but a steam engine. I awakened Barbara and we sat up in the shelter mouth smoking a cigarette while far down in the darkness the locomotive laboured a heavy Grand Trunk freight up the Androscoggin valley, Montreal-bound. The exhaust beat grew louder, stronger, though always hollowed and blurred by our remoteness on the mountain above. We watched the searchlight creep up the valley, and at the unseen crossings heard the long mournful owl call of the whistle. That call has always cried America! to me, ever since I first heard it at Kingman, Arizona, on a Santa Fe express grinding in out of a Mojave blizzard in a winter night of 1938. Now, on the New Hampshire ridge, we felt that the engine down there was calling to us, 'This is home... home hoooome.'

On our way to New City we spent a night in Brattleboro, Vermont. In the evening we drove up the hill on the west side of the town and had a look at Naulakha, Kipling's house. We did not want to inconvenience the present owners, so did not make a call but parked in the narrow road and peered through the hedge at the house, some way up the hill. It was a big house, but the first thing that struck us was its exact resemblance to an Indian hill-station bungalow. Its very presence turned Brattleboro into Simla, the Green Mountains into the Himalayas, and a passing New Englander into a Bhotia shepherd, complete with dog. I stood a long time, staring, for Kipling did much of his best work here, and for a time seemed to be going to make America his home. Was I, too, to write about India on American soil, and then, called by heaven knew what primal need, return to my native land? Except that England wasn't my native land... nor Kipling's, come to that. He was born in Bombay.

We returned to Mystic. I settled down in my working routine: at my desk at 9 a.m. every day; work till 12; lunch; nap; work and 'administration' until 4 (tea); play till 6; Martinis.

The Lotus and the Wind grew and became stronger. The children turned brown in sun and wind. As I poured a first Martini Barbara told me that the Giants had won again. We settled back in our chairs and told ourselves, This is it! This is what it's going to be like the rest of our lives.

We said the words, and tried to feel them, but it wouldn't come out right. Something was wrong. What?

We tried to analyse our feeling, but spoke cautiously and with circumlocutions, for it was impossible to admit even to each other that there might be a flaw in the vision that had sent us to this gem of a house beside the sea. Yet some facts could not be concealed. Both our children were bright, and deserved the best possible education; but the local school system was considerably worse than the one in Rockland County. Then, the atmosphere of the little town was more formalized than we liked. People owned fine houses and accepted a gracious way of life as a worthwhile object in itself. There was a noticeable anti-Semitism and narrow-mindedness, both particularly oppressive to us after the far-ranging acceptance and scope of Rockland County. The general attitude was summed up for us in the Daughters of the American Revolution, who were strong in Mystic. This is a society of women claiming descent from someone who fought in the American Revolution (on the American side, it was sometimes necessary to add). In many ways the D.A.R. were entirely praiseworthy, but although they were American, they denied the same status to the recent immigrant; they certainly weren't revolutionary; which left 'Daughters' as the only word defining them. Of this they were proud; but I did not feel that they were proud of their forefathers because they were unkempt farmers and hunters, fighting for individual freedom against the strongest power in the world, but because their early arrival on the American shores was taken to confer a patent of aristocracy on their descendants. We had not come to the United States in search of the aristocratic ideal; we had seen that system working, and pretty well, in England.

Then a neighbour advised us not to paint our shutters blue 'because that's the colour the Italians paint them'. A day later, some aura of dissatisfaction having apparently become visible to others before we ourselves could isolate it, we were asked, should we ever consider selling our house, not to sell it to a Jew or (a laugh at the unthinkable) a Negro. On that occasion I asked the speaker whether she would prefer us to sell to John Dillinger, but did not pursue the matter further. That night I said, 'I've a damned good mind to give the house to Jackie Robinson.'

'Not him,' Barbara said tartly. 'It's far too good for any Dodger. Give it to Willie Mays.' (Jackie Robinson was the first Negro to be permitted to play major-league baseball. He was brilliant — but a Dodger. Willie was also black — but ours.)

Racial prejudice is not the worst sin in the world. Some peoples, notably the Jews and the English, could not have survived without a heavy endowment of it. Our neighbours in Mystic were honest, generous, hard-working, and essentially worth-while to humanity and the United States. But each man's shoe rubs in a different spot, depending on the peculiarities of his feet. I had been driven out of a country where we still had much work to do, and where we would have been welcome to stay and finish it if it hadn't been for our attitude of racial superiority and the social snubbing based on it. I owed my life and reputation to coloured people, and for hours on end had shared holes in the ground with them, fighting a common enemy, who was sometimes white, sometimes coloured. I was taught race prejudice under the guise of race pride. I had grown out of it. I did not want to have anything more to do with it.

A little later I succeeded in isolating our original mistake, and saw that it was not ours, but mine. In the list of limitations which theoretically narrowed our total freedom I had not given enough weight to the most important: people. A house by the sea may be all very well, but people are a man's best friends. We had no wish to alter the way these people lived their lives in this corner of Connecticut, but nor had we any sense that we could usefully share in it. Barbara had felt this in our original discussion, and now she could have said, 'I told you so.' But she didn't. Instead, when I asked rhetorically, 'Where are our people then?' we both answered with one voice, 'Rockland County, New York.'

Next day I telephoned Laura Auberjonois, who acted as a house agent on the side. She said, 'Boy, are you lucky! Helen Eustis has just put her house on the market, at a very reasonable price, with five and a half acres.' We had met Helen once (she had written Horizontal Man a few years earlier), but knew her house from the outside only. It was an old red farm house just off the east end of South Mountain Road, about two miles from Eleanor Hope's house, and in the same school district. This meant that we could simply drop back into the same circle of friends we had left in April. The house would be available in November.

It was no moment for hesitation. I told Laura we would buy the house, and a cheque to hold it would be in the mail within an hour. Then we put our Mystic house on the market. Our experiment in Connecticut was to end, after seven months, in failure. We had no regrets. We had learned a lot.

Next day Barbara said, 'Do you realize that there is only one game more to go, and we are tied with the Dodgers in first place?'

'We'll beat those bums,' I said confidently.

But we didn't; we tied them, for each team won its last game, the Dodgers over Philadelphia in fourteen innings, and even then thanks only to some fantastic fielding plays by Jackie Robinson. The Giants' arrival in first place was something of a miracle, for they had been thirteen games behind in mid August. To do it they had had to win thirty-eight out of their last forty-five games. We liked to think that our fervent support from Goat Point, reaching them by E.S.P., had something to do with it. Now the Dodgers and Giants would play a best-of-three-games series to decide who was to meet the champion of the other major league, the American, in the World's Series. Their champion for the year, as for most years, was the most powerful team in baseball, the New York Yankees, Babe Ruth's old team, and the Babe's successor, Joe di Maggio, was still playing.

The Lotus and the Wind, nearly completed after three re-writes, lay on my desk. A devoted editor at the Ladies Home Journal had found a way to compress The Deceivers so that it could be published as a one-shot, for which the magazine had offered to pay $7,500. Miriam Howell, my agent, pointed out that since one-shots competed with the book being published simultaneously, I would, according to my contract, share the magazine money fifty-fifty with the Viking Press. She said we should ask the Ladies Home Journal for more money on these grounds. I took the train to New York (a lovely ride by Long Island Sound, over great rivers, through green fields and bustling towns) and we went together to the magazine's offices. The editor congratulated me warmly on my writing, and when Miriam broached the money matter said breezily, 'Sure. Of course. We'll pay you $10,000.' I was overwhelmed and began to express my gratitude. The editor got up with a smile, shook my hand, and said, 'It's nothing. I always try to pay as much to our talent as I can because, relatively speaking, it's peanuts. Do you know what our monthly ink bill is for this magazine?

$78,000.'

I returned happily to Mystic and the Giants. I will not go into details of the National League play-off series of 1951, because my English readers won't understand a word, while to Americans it is old history, known by heart by everyone who has ever been interested in the national game. Yet there was something there that I must communicate, for the climax of the series was the climactic moment of our involvement with, and commitment to, America. Obviously we had gradually been becoming so involved and committed at deep and emotional levels, but perhaps it needed something as simple and surface as a game to bring out and define our position.

There was a famous bar and ex-speakeasy on West 52nd Street, owned by a rabid Giant fan. Whenever the Giants won he wrote up the score of the game in large letters on a blackboard at the end of the bar. When the Giants lost, he wrote up NO GAME TODAY. On this playoff series we won the first game 3 — 1; the next day there was NO GAME TODAY; so a final third game had to be played. Barbara and I listened to it on the radio, and as the last strains of Old Glory died away, our hands were sweating. We — particularly Barbara — had suffered through the long 154-game summer with the team. We knew them all by name and peculiarities, and, from occasionally watching TV in bars, by sight. They had been so far behind, their situation so hopeless-seeming; so had ours. They had fought, and never given up; nor had we. They stood on the threshold of final victory — or defeat. At that moment to our eyes, the Dodgers' uniforms might have been lettered U.S. IMMIGRATION SERVICE.

As I have already indicated, a detailed account of what followed would serve no purpose. However, the final moments must be described, and for the convenience of my readers I will do it twice, first in American (in roman type face) and then, in the succeeding italic paragraph, translated into English and into cricket terms.

Two runs behind with one out in the bottom of the ninth, the Giants' cause seemed hopeless. But two men were on base, and then, with one swing of his bat Bobby Thomson rifled Ralph Branca's second pitch into the lower left-field stand just beyond the 315 foot mark for a home run. Then, as the Staten Island Scot began to lope round the bases, were enacted some of the most amazing scenes ever witnessed on a baseball field. 'The entire Giant team swarmed out of the dugout to greet the Hawk as he crossed home plate with Manager Leo the Lip Durocher on his back, and the guards were powerless to prevent thousands of fans rushing on to the field in frenzied enthusiasm to join the melee.

Gloucestershire's cause seemed hopeless with 9 men down in their second innings, 87 runs to make to surpass Yorkshire's grand total of 432, and a mere 50 minutes in which to amass them. But while Parker stolidly held up one end, Goddard hit like a man inspired, playing a veritable cadenza of shots of which no one had believed his rather dour figure capable. With the hands of the clock showing 6 p.m., 17 runs to make, and 3 balls left in the last over, Goddard straight-drove Verity for three successive sixes over the Chapel end sight screen. Then were enacted some of the most amazing scenes ever witnessed on a cricket pitch, as several spectators started to clap, the Gloucestershire captain (B. H. Lyon Esq.) waved his cap from the pavilion, and two men (believed to be visitors from London) stood up and cried 'Well played, sir!'

This was the moment that came to be known as the Miracle of Coogan's Bluff, from the fact that the Polo Grounds are built under a rocky cliff called by that name, which frowns across several roads, a muddle of railroad tracks, and the foul water of the Harlem River, at Yankee Stadium on the other side. The Polo Grounds were so called because New York's bluebloods used to play polo there; but that was a long time ago, and polo surely never produced such a roar as that of October 3, 1951. Keith Jennison told us later that it escaped from the Polo Grounds and filled the whole city. Three seconds after Thomson set out round the bases every office window and door was flung open, and two million people rushed about yelling their hearts out, wordlessly, in the canyons of the streets, and torrents of paper were hurled out of skyscraper windows in a vast ticker-tape parade, with no parade. We heard nothing, for we were hugging each other and dancing round the room screaming, 'We won! We did it!'

Martin ran in from the sea-wall, 'What's the matter? What happened?' he bawled.

'The Giants have won the pennant,' I yelled, '5-4!' 'The Yankees will beat them,' Martin said sourly and returned to his fishing.

We calmed down eventually, went out and sank on to the grass by the sea-wall, beside Martin and Susan. We had a small zinc tub there full of sea water. The kids caught minnows and dumped them into the bath, and that was Tomlinson's icebox. When he wanted a snack he helped himself, munched contentedly and came in with one forepaw wet to the elbow. Once he fell in, stalked furiously into the house, and lay down soaking wet on my pillow.

Tomlinson was there now, but asleep. After all, the kids were catching the fish for him, why should he work? I said to Barbara, 'We'll become American citizens as soon as we can, I think?'

She said, 'Yes. Except for the bit of paper, we already are.'

Chapter Ten

In the World's Series (best of seven games) the Giants sprang away to a 2—1 lead in games. They had the Yankees on the ropes and then, the day of the fourth game, it rained. Their best pitcher had time to rest his arm, and Joe di Maggio to see his analyst. After that... NO GAME TODAY.

That rainy Sunday in New York we took a Foliage Tour of New England. Organized by the Boston & Maine Railroad, it was composed in roughly equal parts of nature lovers and railway fans, plus a few — a very few — like Barbara and myself, who were both. It was a long and crowded train, with three restaurant cars scattered through it, and it was a long and crowded day, whirling through the gold and scarlet forests, climbing to Crawford Notch, pausing to admire decrepit round-houses in decaying Merrimac mill towns; and all the while people surging like fish from one side of the car to the other, the click of cameras, the counterpoint of explanation and exclamation: Look at those sumacs... that's the Mechanicsville, Dumbarton & Pacific Railroad spur to Bellows Falls... dogwood, always, at the edges... abandoned in 1893... sugar maples, and one Chinese... outshopped from Baldwin in 1931... glorious... great...

In mid November, having sold our Mystic house at a small profit, we returned to Rockland County, to be greeted with affectionate badinage by the assorted United World Federalists, Unitarians, liberal-Jew-pinkos, faggots, bleeding hearts, and starry-eyed dreamers who constituted much of our circle. We disagreed with some of them about everything and all of them about something, but they were widening, not narrowing, to the mind: and there was always West Point to escape to when the cries of liberal Americans belittling their country became too raucous to be borne with equanimity.

I felt secure enough to invite our parents to visit us. My father and mother were able to accept, Barbara's were not.

Mrs Hallam came over from Lancashire with her husband, long ago. Mrs Hallam had been brought up in the servants' halls of great houses and knew how things ought to be done. She did some cleaning for us, called us Sir and Madam, and kissed me firmly on the lips at Christmas and New Year's, and when we gave her a birthday present.

She couldn't abide people who didn't know their station, like that Mrs Lloyd, who also employed her, but wrung her hands and wailed about degradation to see her on her knees, scrubbing the floor. 'She wants the floor cleaned, doesn't she?' Mrs Hallam demanded.

The Army football team had been annihilated by a cheating scandal. After the expulsions of August the remnants would have had a hard time beating Slippery Rock Teachers. Since the schedules were made up years ahead the season had been one long massacre. We attended the final burial by Navy, our heads high, and our Army favours more prominent. 'Wait till the year after next,' we muttered, 'or maybe two years after that.'

A strange man came one day to empty our garbage cans. 'Where's Capasso?' I asked. 'Oh, he flew to Florida for a couple of weeks' vacation,' the man said. I went back inside, shaking my head. What a country.

We had a dinner party. I glanced at my watch as I poured the drinks. 'Ten!' I called. Susan and Martin, sprawled on the floor, went on reading.

'Nine... eight... seven...'

'What are you shouting for?' Armon asked.

I handed round the drinks, 'Six... five... four...' 'What's going on?' Nancy said.

'Three... two... one...'

The children leaped to their feet and raced for the door.

'Time!' I yelled, and ran after them. They raced up the stairs, screaming. I slapped at their behinds until they hurled themselves into bed and disappeared under the covers. When they emerged I kissed them goodnight, turned out the light and went back to the living room.

'Does this go on every night?' Alan asked.

Barbara nodded. 'Except when he takes a horsewhip to them.'

The Lavalles asked the Auberjonois and ourselves to dinner in their large old house in Piermont, where most of 'Birth of a Nation' had been filmed. During the dinner Ramon Lavalle, an Argentinian, proclaimed his desire to see the Communist Chinese defeat and destroy the American and other U.N. forces in Korea. Laura Auberjonois stiffened, and I felt the hair crawling on the back of my neck. Amelia Lavalle, who had womanned a machine-gun for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, tried to shush her husband, but he kept on talking in the same vein. Laura pushed back her chair and said, 'I'm going home.' I rose, too, and told Ramon that he was a son of a bitch to misuse America's hospitality to him. l suggested he set out immediately for Red China, leaving a cleaner air for the rest of us to breathe. We left. The Lavalles separated soon afterwards.

There was a letter from Hamish Mackay, late 4th Gurkhas. He and Misha had been back in Great Britain nearly three years now, after retirement from the Indian Army. Hamish wrote: We find the 'couldn't-care-less' attitude of people here little to our liking. Nor can I find any agreeable employment. (What experience have you? they ask. Man management, I answer... clearly a ludicrous reply in the changed conditions.) For the sake of the younger generation we think we should look farther afield. Can you help me find something in the U.S.A.? Thal one made me scratch my chin. Hamish was about fifty-two then, and had served thirty years before retiring as a full colonel with a D.S.O. and bar. He was Highland Scots, wise, quiet, grizzled, very well read. But, like me, he was untrained in any civilian speciality. Thinking of his extra years I was tempted to write back saying, Don't. Then I thought of Capasso and thought, Hell, yes. We'll find something. He's not proposing to make a career, just do a good job for a few years. I wrote to him accordingly.

This year our local grade school, the Street School, put on a Christmas show that could probably not have been equalled by any other small school (about seventy children then) in the world. Each of the eight grades, and the kindergarten, sang a well-known song or carol (one of the songs in Hebrew) while one of the parents drew or painted on a large sheet of cartridge paper a picture illustrating the theme of the song. All were professional artists and some of those sheets of paper would have been worth quite a bit just from the initials scrawled in the corners. On the way home in the frosty dark I reflected that if we had wanted to we parents could have written the songs, composed the lyrics, designed and made the costumes, and staged, produced and directed the performance on Broadway and made it pay. I also reflected on the dichotomy of our community. Between us, the adults in that crowded little auditorium could probably influence two hundred million people all round the world; but we could not influence our Town Board!

On the Immigration front — silence, although by now I knew that as six months had passed since the suspension-of-deportation order, with no overruling action by Congress, I ought to have been advised that I was a legal resident. I had been corresponding frequently with Justice William 0. Douglas about his proposed 1952 trip to Ladakh (also known as Little Tibet), and felt I knew him well enough to ask his advice: how could I find out what was going on? The Justice told me to go and see a lawyer friend of his, Simon Rifkind, in New York. I went, and gave Mr Rifkind a three-minute summary of my problem. He picked up the telephone and spoke for one minute flat. Next day the Immigration Bureau confirmed that I was free and clear; and, a week later, they formally recorded my date of legal entry into the United States as February 9, 1948, which was the date I had arrived as a visitor on the Queen Elizabeth. I at once applied for citizenship. The Immigration people — (God knows what subtle intimations Rifkind had put into that phone call; I didn't hear any threats or promises) — fawningly backdated my application to February 1948, which put me nearly two years ahead of Barbara, whose legal immigration was the only factor that had enabled me to get in at all! The law is indeed too often a ass, a idiot.

My father and mother arrived on the Queen Mary on a bitter December day. I got a customs pass and went down to Pier 90 to meet them. The customs officer glanced at Dad's declaration, clapped him on the back, and said breezily, 'Well, John, let's have a look at these prints.' My father, Lieutenant-Colonel John Masters, D.S.O., The Rajput Regiment, retired, drew himself up to his full 5 feet 5 inches, and bristled his grey moustache at the man. I trod on Dad's foot as the customs officer turned over one of the 19th-century prints of Indian Army scenes which Dad had brought over for me. 'Antiques, I'd say, John, wouldn't you?' the officer said, winking broadly.

'They're not antiques,' my father growled. 'They're...'

I trod on his foot again, and the customs officer slapped him again on the back. 'That's it, John. Antiques! Hope you and the wife have a good time.' He stamped the baggage and passed on with a cheery wave, Dad glaring after him. I explained that antiques pay no duty, and Dad relaxed. He began to chuckle. 'John, he called me!' he said, 'And we'd never even been introduced. Wall, say bo, we're in Amurrica.'

The clock turned back, for us, to our first contacts with America, for through my parents we relived much of our own experiences, our own thoughts. The shops are so full of everything, and really very reasonable, not dear at all... A dollar for a haircut! Why, that's seven shillings. That's ridiculous!... Yes, but gasoline's only 28 cents a U.S. gallon say, or about two and three your gallon — less than half what you pay... How can you stand the commercials on the wireless? Commercials? Oh those. Well, I could do without them, but we've developed switch-off ears now, and don't hear them unless they're very bad and insistent, and then we make a vow not to buy whatever they tell us to... The countryside is so beautiful. West Point is really lovely, the chapel, the young men look so smart and stand so well... But why doesn't anyone tidy up the woods? Look at all those fallen trees and dead leaves. Nasty, it looks. untidy... Yes, Mummy, it does, but would you like to come up in an aeroplane and have a look at this country from the air? This is the most thickly populated, heavily industrialized part of the Union, and all you'll see is forest. There simply aren't enough people to tidy up the woods, and no economic necessity for them to pick up sticks for firewood...

Barbara! you're not going to throw away that lovely bit of brown paper, and look at this string, it must have cost a shilling... Yes, they're going out. We had to decide long ago whether the house was for us or for the packagings... People are very chatty, aren't they? The woman in the greengrocer's shop asked me whether we were from England, and then gave me a cabbage. Really!... Do you mean to say those bicyclists are allowed to wander all over the road, driving whichever side they want to?... I'm afraid so. No one's decided yet whether a bicyclist is a vehicle or a pedestrian. Disgraceful!...

The lights are really wonderful, aren't they? Look at all those cars, Johnny. There must be ten thousand of them, and all the red lights. (We were looking down the West Side Highway from the George Washington Bridge, the car lights flung like coruscating necklaces of red and white round the icy rim of the river). My, but they could do with some of those lights in England! Huge great lorries with only one tail light the size of a penny! Disgraceful!... Waal, twenty-two skiddoo, this is the bees' knees, Jackie. I'm sorry, Dad, it's twenty-three skiddoo, only no one says it any more. Nor that stuff about the bees' knees and the cat's pyjamas and the caterpillar's spats. Waal, is zat so, bo?

It was a good Christmas season that year. The Masters' family way of life meant that it was very rare for all of us to spend Christmas together. Even now my brother was serving with the British Army in Germany, but this was better than most years. My father and mother marvelled at the abdication of privacy which made everyone put their Christmas tree in the window, and draw back the curtains so that passers-by could share in their celebration. (No hedges, either. How do you keep people out?) There was material plenty with us, and it was good to see that my financial success had eased a load off my parents' minds. For four years they had been worrying over my throwing up my very promising army career. Now they saw that I had made another. Susan and Martin learned that they had grandparents, just like other children.

There's a peculiar-looking dead animal at the side of the road, sort of like a big rat. Hey, it's not dead, it's moving. It's gone!... That was an opossum, Dad, and you saw it actually playing 'possum... Quite a nip in the air this morning, Jackie. There must be five degrees of frost. Let's see, five degrees of frost is 27 above. The temperature when we walked out of the house was 19 below. Look, I can break off hairs of my moustache, like icicles. The cold here is not damp, as in England, but dry. You don't feel it as much.

Dad went skating on Rockland. I watched from the edge of the woods on shore, thinking how very Currier & Ives he looked, in his old-fashioned suit and wool scarf and earmuffs, a cloth cap on his head, leaning slightly forward, circling alone on the large and empty ice, his hands clasped formally behind his back, small and dark against the white background of the hills. He flew alone to Buffalo to see Niagara Falls; and was offered a good price for his tweed jacket, then about thirty-five years old, by our local storekeeper. Mrs Hallam, hearing of this, turned on the storekeeper with a marvellous feudal scorn. 'You —' she cried in broad Lancashire — 'you couldn't wear the colonel's coat in a thousand years!'

Before they sailed back on the Ile de France (a nasty ship, rude stewards, nasty French sauces on everything... couldn't get a decent fried egg for breakfast) they asked when they would see us again. We considered and said, 'The spring'; for now we were free to leave the United States if we wanted to, and we did. The old nostalgia for England had been aroused by my parents' visit and their talk. We had countless friends and relatives to see, and again I realized that I was free to go, come, work, play, wherever I wanted to.

I returned to my desk. The Lotus and the Wind had been received with enthusiasm at Viking, but the editorial war would be fought over it just the same. I began to think what to tackle next. One possibility was a biography of Orde Wingate, the eccentric British soldier and passionate Zionist under whom I had served in Burma. The suggestion had been made to me by one or two men in England, and by my agent there, Laurence Pollinger. The problem was going to be Wingate's widow and family. It seemed probable that they would demand some form of censorship or approval of the book as a price for full co-operation with documents, family letters, etc.; and that I would not agree to. With any subject it puts an unacceptable rein on the writer, and in the case of Orde Wingate it would have forced the book into a mould which the man did not fit. He was brilliant, controversial, violent, detestable, determined, perhaps paranoiac; to bury him under two volumes of evasively laudatory prose would be to damage both our reputations. Still, I determined to try, and asked Pollinger to put me in touch with Wingate's family.

Helen Taylor zeroed in on The Lotus and the Wind... Anne should be sure from the very beginning that Robin was her man, that she was going to let nothing stand in her way of marrying him. I think this is a good idea, (but)... it would seem to alter just a little the innocence and inexperience which you stress in her character. A girl so positive of the man she wants is not apt, even in the Victorian age, to have arrived at the age of twenty-two without some pretty close observation of men and the world.

...Robin's problem is double; his innate understanding of Muralev makes him, without his knowing it, the best British agent to trail Muralev, and his own personal desire to be with Muralev seems at times to be at variance with his duties as a spy Chapter 21. Part of the sameness feeling on this here-we-go business may be a matter of technique. You start describing the countryside again. Why not begin as on page 3 and plunge right into the narrative? Save your description for when it's really needed, when it's superb... No more quibbles — just cuts, and leaving it to you to deal with the geographical thing. Try to pace these last chapters just a bit more quickly, thus achieving another difference.

Thoughts of railway engines filled my head. Steam engines, Indian steam engines, working heavy loads up jungle grades in the hot weather, the Indian fireman leaning out on the shady side, the Anglo-Indian driver hunched forward under the canopy. The Anglo-Indians were a point of conflict. Not quite of the sort I had listed in my original list of the thirty-five books I could write about the British in India; but one that should have been in there. I could tackle it now. I was acquiring the technique... Trains, going somewhere — that fitted the requirement for movement, to interest the reader in where these people are going. That would apply to the Anglo-Indians, as a people, too. I would put Anglo-Indians on trains, where they belonged in real life, their English background perhaps trying to send them one way and their Indian background another, like a junction.

We determined that while we were in Europe we would do some walking. Our first thought was to go back to the French massif central but that seemed a lazy solution, for we already knew the country and the language. 'Spain?' I suggested, with intent, for I have always had a romantic longing to walk in the Pyrenees, among the bandits and the smugglers. Barbara said, 'Suits me,' and that was that. The Spanish Tourist Office in New York told me that the place to start from was Huesca, and I wrote to the mayor there, asking him to put us in touch with some local mountaineering or touring club that could give us advice and maps. Then I bought Molts' 'Learn Spanish' records, and we settled down to acquire the language. This particular set was made during the war, I believe, for the instruction of American soldiers. The talking was done by a Colombian — Colombians are reputed to have the best accents outside Spain — and it was certainly very clear. After Don Pedro we enunciated, 'Buenos dias, amigo.' 'Como está Usted?', and 'Donde está el escusado?' In the true-or-false sections towards the end, when Don Pedro was speaking quite quickly, we shouted True or False in chorus to such statements as 'En Washington hay machos monumentos,' (there are many monuments in Washington), and 'Yo me lava la cabeza con jamón' (I wash my head with ham).

In consultation with Amelia Lavalle I learned a special phrase which I believed I needed for my personal protection. This was 'La siento, pero no puedo comer los calamares, porque me hacen daño' (I am sorry, but I can't eat squid, because they are bad for me). The need for this remarkable avowal arose because a few weeks earlier (1) Amelia gave us french-fried squid rings; it was the first time we had eaten squid, and we loved it; I ate a lot; (2) Two days later I went down with a mild fever and a red rash, which caused most of my skin to flake off, until the bedroom looked like the last act of East Lynne. A doctor came, tapped and thumped, and pronounced that I was suffering from an allergy. I found this embarrassing, as I don't really believe in allergies, and had never had anything of the sort before. Still, there it was, and the squid was the only possible culprit. I was allergic to squid. Having given me the disease Amelia now gave me the antidote, or, at least, the protective incantation, for use when we reached Spain where, she said, squid would be thrust on us from all sides. In America the chance of coming unawares across a squid in my soup was to all practical purposes nil.

After twelve days of study, an hour a day, we set sail for England in the Mauretania, on April 15, 1952. We were delighted to find that several Colombians were on board. I don't know that they were so pleased to be buttonholed by us and told that 'En Washington hay muchos monumentos', or that, unfortunately, I could not eat squid — but we had to practise on someone. When I tried the escusado phrase on them, though, one of the men said, 'In Colombia we don't usually call the toilet the escusado, but the chicago, because the first ones imported into our country were made there, and had the name prominently engraved on the bowl.'

Also on board were the U.S. Olympic boxing team and our Martin (44 lb.) found occasional employment as sparring partner to the heavyweight, Floyd Patterson. On an afternoon of low cloud, half a gale blowing out of the south-west and the seas running short and steep across our beam, we saw England again, after four years. The Land's End light flashed a brief, recurring welcome. A tiny collier, outward bound, surged up on the crests, disappeared in the hollows. Spray burst like bombs against the distant cliffs and made a thick haze on the wet, green land. 'England, their England!' I thought to myself, yet felt a pang, for I still loved it, and always would.

At Southampton, grandmothers were at the quayside, to exclaim over the kids' cowboy boots and jeans, and to receive from Martin a genial greeting learned in his Mystic days: 'Fucking bastards.' In London I had lunch with Orde Wingate's brother and sister, and noted, 'Nice people, but cautious. The widow up in Scotland and not anxious to see anyone until the brother and sister have approved.

They all fear for the young son. What effect will it have on him if he grows up with all this publicly known about his father?'

I didn't know what 'all this' might be, except that Wingate tried to commit suicide in Cairo during the war, but that had already been published in Leonard Mosley's perceptive book Gideon goes to war. I wondered vaguely what else the family were trying to hide, and lost a little interest in the project, for I am not a good muck-raker.

About the Anglo-Indian book: Victoria Jones would be a good name for the heroine. Something like d'Souza for the male Anglo-Indian perhaps. But that means Goanese. He must have a British heritage as the source of his inner conflict. A name like Patrick Taylor would be better... Must get a book of Sikh prayer, and find someone who can tell me their views on proselytism... Start making calendars, moon tables, sunrise and sunset charts for the year. And gradient profiles for the stretch of railway line. And invent a name for this junction. Hathipur? Karawala? Devabad? Bhowani? That'll do. Bhowani Junction Must find an expert to tell me what different railwaymen actually do, what are each's skills and responsibilities. Only Kipling and Nevil Shute have so far written novels about work, where a man's work is a part of him.

Most novels are about what men do in their spare time, at home, etc. But his work is really part of a man... Must also make the railway not background but integral to the story, the plot, the characterization, everything. Big drivers turning, hot wind blowing, sex in the sleepers behind. Great!

The Deceivers was published in England and America.

The reviews were fair, on the whole grudgingly admitting that this new novelist could not really be said to have failed at his second jump, as so many do.

On April 29 we caught the Night Ferry at Victoria, for Paris. They looked oddly at my Indian passport, but I said, 'Jee-an, huzoor, ham-log Hindustani hain,' and we passed on to the train.

Chapter Eleven

The tilted plain ran down gold and ochre to a distant tower. To the left snow glittered along the crest of the receding mountain wall, to the right red flowers bloomed in a wide dry water course. The rails ran recklessly down the slope under the catenaries, the car swayed and jerked like a roped animal, the wheels clattered and whined and shrieked, the wind roared, the open windows rattled and banged; but no mechanical noise could compete with the sounds made by the human beings crowding the car — the Spanish. The old man on our right talked with the old woman in front, the young man behind with the young lady on our left, the babies with the ceiling, the soldiers with the girls. The sun and wind leaned in as participants in every conversation. The women's lips were the barrels of machine-guns. They loaded the syllables just behind the teeth, pressed an unseen trigger, and out came a high burst of sound that rattled the woodwork. We said a word to each other and fell silent, appalled, for our own voices seemed to be formed in our bellies.

A girl walked down the aisle to the rear platform, swaying just right, her carriage positive, head high, shoulders back, breasts firm and out-thrust, sure of herself and her sex.

'I don't understand a word,' I said.

Barbara said, 'Nor do I. But I like it.'

We were lonely rocks in an ocean of sound. Our neighbours looked through, past, and over us without a smile or a frown. In a manner, we did not exist; but we had no reservation in Barcelona and we needed advice. After fifteen minutes of rehearsal I turned to the woman across the aisle from me, and said, 'Please, madame, can you give me the name and address of a good cheap hotel in Barcelona?'

The lady was small and energetic. After a brief baffled pause while she tuned in to my extraordinary voice, and I repeated my question, she took off. I slowed her with a despairing cry, Despacio, señora, por favor, más despacio!'

The car coagulated round us. Men leaned over the back of the seat and women huddled in the aisle. A cloud of acrid blue smoke from the black Spanish cigarette tobacco engulfed us. Were we English, Dutch, German, American? We did not look like French. More like Danish, perhaps. Where were we going? Ah, Barcelona naturally.

Why?

Words actually addressed to us were fed one by one, as morsels to a child. We didn't have a hotel room booked?

No. Chirrups, and bursts of dismay. A volley of suggestions was fired from the end of the car and countered by a barrage from the other. Our friend's name was Teresa. She would take us to a place she knew — cheap, good, clean — in the Barrio. She would show us Barcelona.

Barcelona was an underground station brilliant with lights, hospital-clean, jammed full and then suddenly deserted. Up, and without warning into the evening roar of the Plaza de Cataluña, the Ramblas, people, people in tens of thousands, a river of dark eyes, smiles, girls and men eyeing each other, saying nothing, swirling on among the flowers. On at Teresa's side in the taxi, Teresa gesticulating, explaining; narrow streets, towering medieval walls, whores in doorways, soldiers, sailors, a pulsing life, doubly vivid in the dark alleys... the hotel, a meal, bed and at once, like unwound toys, total rest.

Next day Teresa showed us the sights of the city, her city, capital of Cataluna, St George's city, the greatest city of Spain, only those unspeakable Castilians kept the capital in Madrid. She showed us the Diputación (what in hell is a Diputación?), the city hall, the cathedral (dark, high, full of piety and assignations and running boys), the statue of Colon (who's he?), the harbour, and Montjuich.

We drank manzanilla in narrow bars and beer in a huge square called the Plaza Real, surrounded by cloisters and the cloisters full of booksellers. The beer had more body than American beer, much less than British, and was served ice-cold in litre tankards. Perfect. Shrimp, snails, squid rings, mussels, all called tapas, or 'What will you have con liga (to go with the beer)?' Perfect. Do we have to leave Barcelona? Yes. We are going to the Pyrenees.

In the train to Huesca we began to hear what was being said, to see what was being shown. We travelled in a 3rd class wooden car with hard slatted wood seats. Name plates and signs were of brass, well polished. Seats, floor, walls and windows were clean, the toilet at the end of the car a stinking mess of ordure. Thunder and lightning crashed over us and rain streamed down the windows as we climbed out to Manresa. The car was full of poorly‑dressed people surrounded by bags, bundles, baskets, vegetables, chickens and wine. A tight-mouthed man with a small moustache and a corduroy suit drifted up and down, occasionally stooping over someone and whispering, and then the someone would produce a bit of paper. On the back platform a pair of Guardia Civil, as handsome, saturnine and confident as the conscript soldier opposite was scruffy and depressed, let the wind blow out their green cloaks and the rain glisten on their patent leather three-cornered hats.

The hours passed, the rain passed, the train passed from tangled scrub-covered hills to a rolling land of crops. The black smoke trailed across vineyards and almonds and olives. Then we were grinding and swaying across a desert. A white road ran across it from nowhere to a more distant nowhere beyond the burning rim. In the centre there was a lone thorn, and under the thorn — no one, nothing, nada. A mile to the south two dark figures crawled on foot across the empty landscape, one on each side of the road. The old lady muttered to me under her breath, as though the figures out there could hear, 'La pareja... That's what we call the Guardia Civil, because they always go in pairs.'

Everything felt vaguely familiar and I did not know why. The view was large. It was hot and uncomfortable but we were at home. Everyone in the long car was talking to everyone else. The little soldier had brought down a guitar from the rack and was plucking it mournfully. Dust whirled by the windows and ahead the engine screamed a long, falling, dying call.

The old lady opened her basket and unwrapped bread, sausage, tomatoes and wine. She held the basket out to us and said 'Le gusto?' (Would you like some?) It looked great, and without hesitation I said, 'Yes, please.' Did I catch a suspicion of alarm and surprise in her face? No matter. We opened our packs and got out the food we had bought for the journey. It was store stuff, nothing like as good as hers, but now definitely her face cleared, as I held out the food to her. She preferred ours, and we hers so the meal went merrily. The man in the corduroy suit secretively flashed a badge and asked to see our passports. The Guardia Civil listened tolerantly to the soldier with the guitar. Wafts of clean sunny air from the plain mixed with gusts from the unspeakable toilet.

We asked the old lady if she knew a good, cheap hotel in Huesca. She didn't know Huesca, but... The car awoke. Huesca? Who knew anything about Huesca? Not me, sir, I am going to Zaragoza. Nor I, unfortunately I live in Monzón and travel seldom. But these gentlemen, perhaps? Yes, we know Huesca...

They were travelling salesmen from Graus. We had to go to Graus; it was beautiful, on a river, in the mountains. The food was good, the water good, and the people alegre, simpática. And what were we going to do in Huesca? Find the Pella Guara. Well, we've never heard of it, but that's no problem. But you must have an introduction to the president of the Diputación (what in hell is a Diputación?), and the Mayor, and see the Bell of Huesca, and the park, and eat castaños de mazapan, and...

When we eventually chugged into Huesca, and the Guardia Civil had marched briskly into the darkness beyond the street lamps and the soldier had climbed into the military bus — a little horse-drawn box on wheels — the travelling salesmen picked up our suitcases and led us to the hotel. After leaving us for an hour they returned and ate with us, at their expense. Next day whatever they were supposed to be selling they didn't sell, as they were introducing us to the mayor and the president of the Diputación. (Pray, sir, tell us what is a diputación? It is a form of provincial government, with little responsibility for He in Madrid does not like to delegate power except to those more directly responsible to him).

The Bell of Huesca was a gruesome painting of a lot of headless bodies in a cellar. The park was small, hot and dusty, with a large war memorial inscribed 'Fallen for God and Spain'. New buildings were going up everywhere because the central government was making plenty of money available for Huesca, the Most Loyal, Most Noble City. It had fought and held for Franco for two years, just as Madrid had held for the Reds. The Reds? You mean the Loyalists? Ah yes, but everyone called them Reds then, they called themselves Reds, and they'd be proud of it if they'd won. But it's all over now, thank God. We're all one people now. Except some.

It was thirteen years since the end of the Spanish Civil War but its presence was universal and overpowering. Every Spaniard talked of life and events ates (before) and never thought it necessary to say before what. The scar on the people's memory was almost as visible as the actual destruction. Still, after thirteen years, we passed rusted locomotives and boxcars on railroad sidings, the marks of bomb splinters and machine-gun bullets unmistakable. Still, after thirteen years, we saw houses in rubble, and twisted fallen bridges where the road wound up and down on a 'temporary' diversion. The names on the memorial in the park evoked harsh memories even to me, who was not there. I knew the names: Monte Argon: Estrecho Quinto... below that George Orwell was shot in the throat...

It is over but not yet forgotten, that is asking too much. But there will never be another. Never never! That is all we ask of Franco. That is the reason of his power.

On the way to the bus station, the day we left Huesca, we saw a huge old man in Aragonese costume: rope sandals with low black cross gartering over home spun stockings; white lawn under breeches ruffled out to show at the knees under black velvet breeches; a purple sash a foot deep from the waist to the buttocks, black velvet waistcoat and white shirt; and on his head a sort of bowler, low crowned, curly brimmed, with a small piece of bright cloth hanging from the back over his neck.

It was a wonderful costume, good-looking, simple, and practical; but we learned that only a few old men from this one village of Anso still wore it regularly. We asked ourselves a question to which we have never found an answer: Where do machines get this will of their own? When the English‑made machines were imported into Spain to make clothes, surely it would have been natural and sensible to set them to make the clothes already in use. But no — the machines made English clothes, and that's what the people had to buy. Why?

The Peña Guara, in the persons of Julio Nogues and Antonio Lacoma, gave us advice, what few maps were available, and, at last, just when we were despairing of ever finding out what they were — castaños de mazapan.

They turned out to be caramel-coated chestnuts made of marzipan, and as Antonio passed a huge box of them into our hands just as the bus was leaving Huesca (they had already got us seats and explained to the driver and conductor where we were going), we wondered when we would ever want to eat them in that hot afternoon.

The answer was — we didn't. Learning a lesson from the amazing generosity of Spain, we handed them round the bus. That served as an introduction and before we had reached Arguis everyone on board knew about us, to the third and fourth generation.

The bus was old, bulbous, and asthmatic. Everything rattled except what groaned, there were no treads on the tyres, we were heavily overloaded and the road was narrow, unsurfaced, and mountainous. I realized that anywhere else in the world I would be in a paroxysm of nervousness, but here it seemed inappropriate. The driver was very careful, and our neighbours cheerful: it was not dignified to let mere machines oppress us. We joined in the general conversation.

On the edge of a particularly menacing precipice we stopped to change a tyre and in the small dirty town of Sabiñanigo we changed buses, the new one being smaller, older and more bronchial than the last. Darkness and rain fell together as we started up the valley of the Gallego. The feeble light in the ceiling went out. Huddled like cattle we swayed into a gorge. Lightning flashes showed a torrent, a cliff... vultures, surely waiting? The horn blared continuously, but was barely to be heard under the echoing barrages of thunder. Every twenty seconds regularly we looked down over the edge of a steep curve into a black boiling chasm loud with water. Three times we had to back out over the abyss, on a gradient of 1 in 3, because the bus could not otherwise negotiate the hairpins. Conversation died away as the uselessness of talking against thunder penetrated the minds of all, even the 200-decibel housewife behind us.

Dimly I realized we were among houses. The bus stopped. A single electric light bulb on a tall stone wall illumined only the slanting rain. Suddenly the bus was empty. We were alone. Then I saw three sinister figures, black-cloaked, standing pressed against the wall below the lamp, the water pouring down from the eaves making a curtain in front of them. Did they have knives hidden under their cloaks? What were they waiting for, except to rob and murder us?

There was no sign of a hotel or bus station or any other living thing. We couldn't spend the night in the bus, so, summoning my courage and my Castilian I scrambled out, splashed across to the cloaked figures and cried, 'Please, gentlemen, pray tell me where is the Hotel Balaitous?'

The three were galvanized into activity and I saw that one was a Guardia Civil. 'The Balaitous?' they cried, 'We'll show you. Come... Your bags! The lady! Ah, the rain.' We waded up the street and soon arrived, dripping, before a huge dark barrack that looked more like a prison than a hotel. In Spain, ask, and it shall be opened. The Guardia banged on the door and we went in, shaking ourselves like a troop of Newfoundlands. In those days in Spain one was lucky to find large rooms lighted by a single 30-watt bulb, and that's what they had in the Balaitous, but it shone out like a torch in a primeval cave, giving far more than light; and the host was a small man who greeted us with an accordion in his hands, and there was a great fire burning in the grate, several young men playing violent ping-pong in the next room, and a cheerful, efficient, copper-voiced serving girl called Milagro (Miracle).

I said, before we went to sleep, 'I've got it. Spain is India.'

'People usually think it's Africa,' Barbara said, 'Like that man who wrote that Africa begins at the Pyrenees.'

'We don't know Africa,' I said, 'so to us its India... another India to replace the one we lost.'

In the succeeding days we began to confirm, with growing excitement, that it was true. Spain was not particularly similar to India, but the two countries touched the same chords in us — a sense of space, of poverty faced with courage, of man-to-man relationships that had nothing to do with the obvious class or caste systems, of indestructibility, of values quite different from ours, seeming sometimes barbarous, sometimes ethereal. We had learned already that there was only one key to the riches of this country — the ability to speak Spanish. To the man who tries to speak Spanish, and is not afraid of making a fool of himself in the process, no doors are closed.

We sat down before Spain — the country, the people, the language, the food — like hungry hunters before a bottomless bowl of stew. We asked a thousand questions, mostly very stupid. We peered and poked and inquired, trying to find out not only what but why. The Frontier Guards arrested us in one direction and an Army outpost in another. (That one ended in several jugs of wine and a large group photograph.) The secret police, naturally, became suspicious and came to ask why we took such excursions so close to the French frontier, who we were, what we were after. We answered, 'Tourists,' but were worried until Francisco came, playing his accordion, and said, 'Those people have nothing else to do. Forget them.'

It was early May, the snow low above the town and daffodils and primroses curtsying in the corners of the fields. Spain was stirring after its long agony, and the encircling mountains rang to the hammer and pick and echoed to the roar of dynamite as the new hydro-electric dams went up to bring power and water to the medieval poverty of Upper Aragon. We hired a guide to show us a good walk, and he took us up to the tunnel they were making through the mountain, to tap the water of Lake Respumoso. He was Luciano Urieta. once ski champion of Spain, now working for the power company as a watchman. He said, striding slowly along beside us, 'In the war, when I was sixteen, we had to ski over to the next valley, about ten of us, and bring back food for everyone in the village. We were cut off all winter. I carried 180 lb. a time.' It began to rain, the spring rain of the mountains, almost sleet, and a man came charging down the huge slope front the works above. He was wearing a sack as a cloak and as he came near us I said 'Buenas dias.' The man was big and wet and dark-eyed. 'Good day?' he yelled in Spanish, 'It's a terrible day! The weather's bad, Spain's bad, Franco's bad.' He charged on down the hill, but not before the shadow of a grin creased his streaming face.

I had said good morning because we were learning our Spanish manners, and in the country never passed anyone without the proper greeting. We had learned to look surreptitiously at our watches before opening our mouths because every shepherd knew exactly when it was noon, without a watch, and if we said 'Buenas días' at 12.10 would answer, with a hint of reproach, 'Buenas tardes.' We never left a bar or shop without muttering a general farewell to everyone there. We knew now that we had committed a solecism by accepting the old lady's proffered food on the train. You were supposed never to eat food in a public place without offering to share it with anyone nearby, in the phrase Le gusto? But the one to whom it was offered was supposed to refuse it with the words Gracias, que aproveche. (Thank you, no — but enjoy it yourselves.) Now whenever we opened our sandwiches on the trail I would bellow Le gusto? to anyone within half a mile, until Barbara said I was, as usual, overdoing things.

In the mornings we listened to Milagro sing hoarsely about Aragon and the Virgin of Pilar as she scrubbed the floors, and learned that she was singing jotas, the folk songs of Aragon. In the evenings, before the very late dinner, we ourselves sang to Francisco's accordion, and played ping-pong with the squad of young engineers from the hydro-electric works. At supper we ate trout perfectly fried in olive oil and drank ice-cold Aragonese red wine that had been left out under the eaves all winter and strengthened thereby from 11 per cent to 20 per cent alcoholic content; and learned to handle the twin-headed porrón and the leather bota with the proper abandon if not with the corresponding skill. And on Monday and Wednesday after the main course at supper Milagro would come to the table with big hopeful eyes and say, 'Tonight for dessert there is fruit, or flan;' and on Tuesday and Thursday she would say, 'Tonight for dessert there is flan, or fruit.'

Then we moved, and one morning pitched our tent in the valley of Ordesa, outside the last farmhouse in Spain. Punctually at noon the valley boomed to the thunder of avalanches as snow fell off ledges high on the giant cliffs of Tabacor above us. The Ordesa is like a smaller, greener Grand Canyon, and is one of Spain's most dramatic scenic attractions and was its first National Park; but in 1952 you needed a military permit to go there, and were forbidden to take photographs. I did not know this, and my camera was confiscated by the corporal of the guard at the Puente de los Navarros, at the entrance to the valley. I cursed and swore, thinking I'd never see it again; but I didn't know Spain well then. Next day the sergeant of the guard walked the four miles up to our camp (wearing his bedroom slippers) to return the camera to me. As he handed it over he said, 'Don't let those swine of the Frontier Police see it.' Then we settled round our camp fire to talk. His name was Manolo; he had eighteen years' service as a regular, and he came from the Asturias. 'Our music is the bagpipe,' he said, 'and our drink, cider.' He poured out of an imaginary bottle at a great height. Bagpipes, I thought, in Spain! No one told you about bagpipes and jotas and the Ordesa, only about flamenco and gipsies and Seville. Was there no limit to the diversity of this country?

I asked why there were so many soldiers and civil guards about everywhere. Manolo said that the soldiers were here in these frontier valleys because ever since the end of the Civil War the French had been sending over Communist terrorists. No one could prevent them getting in, but when they had murdered a guardia or a mayor or blown up a bridge or power station there was a better chance of catching them on the way back. He was for Franco because Spain needed security, peace and order much more than it needed democracy, though there were plenty of the opposite opinion, especially in the Basque country and Cataluna. Why were England and America so silly about Franco when they were friendly to the dictatorship of Tito, the Middle Eastern rulers, and the South American banana republics? Anyway, there'd never be another civil war in Spain as long as Franco held power. Or as long as anyone lived who had seen the last one. It was — he shrugged his shoulders, frowning, and corrected himself — we were... like beasts.

Next day Barbara and I walked up to the head of the valley, the lovely Circo de Suaso. We soon caught up with an old man taking three calves up to pasture. The snow was deep in places and the calves were small. Often he carried them bodily over bad places, politely refusing my offers of help. Above a series of falls, from ten to thirty feet high, the valley opened out to a wide grassy plain, now dotted with plaques of snow. The great mass of Perdido towered over the far cliffs, and white waterfalls streamed over every cliff. We all sat together on a huge rock and by being quick with my pack straps I managed to get out our food before he could, and so was able to say 'Le gusta?'

'Gracias, que aproveche,' he said automatically; but we insisted, and we were both well rewarded: he, like the old lady of the train, loved our chocolate, and we loved the superb highly spiced tripe sausage his wife had made for him. When we had shared our whisky we sat, smoking, and talked a little of Europe and the world. We found him surprisingly knowledgeable and well read — surprisingly to our big-city Anglo-American provincialism, that is.

After a while he said, 'How much does a man such as myself, a plain cultivator, earn in your country?'

Guessing at the earnings of a small farmer, we told him. It was probably between five and six times what he earned. 'How wonderful,' he said simply. 'What a wonderful country, that rewards its working men so.'

The old man's direct and simple response affected us deeply. We had had a bad time with anti-Americanism recently. Too many in England seemed to resent the United States' dominance of the world, and its riches. In France the painted signs A bas Ridgway lined the railway tracks. But this old Aragonese had something those people lacked — self-respect. He did not know what jealousy or backbiting were. Whatever fate dealt him he would not whine, because he had never learned how to. His bearing and the other circumstances of our meeting gave firmer shape to our emergent feelings about Spain and the Spanish. He was dignified, but not at all heavy or pompous — he laughed frequently and made such jokes as were appropriate. He was old and poor, had no hope of anything different, had led a hard and tragic life: yet he was obviously experienced in that pursuit of happiness which Jefferson defined as our object in life, meaning 'pursuit' in the sense of 'calling'. He lived in and I think agreed with a feudal and authoritarian society, but also knew that he was as good a man as the dukes, generals, shopkeepers and cardinals who owned so much of what he owned so little. Hombre, 'man', is the usual Spanish greeting between such as he and the dukes — each to the other — and with reason. One is a man. In the end, nothing else matters. He had not said a word to us beyond the compulsory 'Buenas dias' until I offered my help with the calves. That was like the men against the wall in Salient, Teresa and her friends on the train from Puigcerda, the travelling salesmen of Graus. Privacy, independence of spirit, are all. If a man sits beside a broken-down car in a rain-storm, that is clearly what he wishes to do and it would be impertinent to intrude on him. But if he should get up and say, 'My car is useless. Can you help?' — ah, that's different; he knocks at my door, and in the name of our common humanity I will do all I can for him.

And help us they had, every Spaniard we had approached. We had learned the rule: go direct, ask plainly, hold your head up.

We parted with curt handshakes and a gruff Que siguen bien, and Barbara and I turned back into the hanging beechwoods above the torrent of the Araza. Lower down it began to snow lightly, and at the foot of the beech woods we saw two Guardia Civil de is Frontera huddled in a shallow cave. One carried a rifle and the other a submachine gun. I noticed that both were in perfect condition, clean-bright and slightly oiled. The men's uniforms were clean, their black leather-work gleaming. I made to show my passport, but one said, 'Pass. We saw you go up with the old man.'

'Here?' I said, for I had not noticed anyone in the cave. The man with the tommy gun nodded, grinning. 'How long have you been here?' I asked curiously, expecting him to answer something like, since dawn. 'Three days,' the other said.

We went on down, I shaking my head. The Guardia Civil, to which care of the frontiers had recently also been awarded, was created a century earlier, to fulfil in Spain much the same duties as the Royal North West Mounted Police used to in Canada. The good and had points of the two forces reflect the different characteristics of man and government; but this internal and self-regulated discipline of the Guardia Civil is something special in Latin countries. (The only other similar case I have met is the Carabineros of Chile.) For fourteen years I had served as an officer of a magnificent volunteer army. We had a hard time getting the men to keep their arms and accoutrements in that sort of condition, and stay fully alert on two-hour sentry shifts, even with the men in large bodies and shoals of sergeants and corporals to keep discipline taut. How the Guardia Civil did it, working always without supervision, in twos and threes, in conditions made for idleness and corruption, I don't know. We had seen already that they were not popular in Spain, but then nor was General Franco. In both cases the word was not 'popular' but 'essential', and this most Spaniards glumly recognized as a fact, as long as Spain remained rural, poor, violent... and Spanish.

From the Ordesa we went east. The train, an occasional express, hurried through a station whose name I just managed to catch. I told Barbara that we had just passed through Retrete. The next station was also called Retrete, and I asked our neighbour whether there were two stations in the town. After some repetitions and double takes he burst out laughing and said, No, senor, nor in Caballeros, either!' He explained that in Spain retrete, not escusado or chicago, was the most commonly used word for 'toilet'; the place was also called the W.C. or water (pronouced "Vattair').

After three days in Andorra we returned to Barcelona. Here we experienced our first corrida de toros. We had not learned that the farther away you sit the more the cruelty of the performances obscures the courage and the colour; for when you are close those horns menace you too, those bright blades flying through the air could slice into you, the dust and blood and sweat are acrid in your nostrils, and it is in your ears that the bull grunts as he strikes at the cape, and the running banderillero pants and gasps as he hurls himself over the fence. From farther back it is impersonal, antiseptic, and unpleasant. We had done our homework and knew what we were going to see, and we saw it. Our impressions were predictable and not worth recording, except perhaps that nothing prepares one for the combined strength and lightness of foot of the bulls. They run like cats on hoofs tiny for their size, turn and toss their great heads like a woman her hair.

Compared with them the beef bull is like an overloaded farm cart alongside a tank. The power of the fighting muscles on the neck is fantastic. One of the bulls was noticeably larger than the others, with a correspondingly large hump of muscle. When the picador came on, this bull charged the horse with a certain deliberation, not hurrying, and not jabbing. Ignoring the picador's lance now in his withers he carefully planted his forelegs, snuggled his horns in place against the horse's belly rug, and very slowly, like a circus strong man doing a stunt with barbells, lifted horse and rider over his head to land them in a tumbled mess behind him. Then he walked away. The load his neck muscles had lifted without a snatch or pause must have been about 1,600 lb.

From Barcelona we went to Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava, and I confirmed what I was already beginning to suspect. Those strange white things, rather chicken-like to the taste, which I kept meeting in my paellas and often ate at bars, were squid. I had never felt better; so what of my allergy? I had to give it up, the only one I ever possessed. (I learned later that what I had suffered from during those days of the flaking skin was scarlet fever.)

From Lloret we went to Gerona and so back to England; and we saw many lovely things and met many wonderful people, but formed an opinion that Cataluna was not our personal dish. The people were noticeably more anti-Franco, as Sergeant Manolo had said, but also noticeably less Spanish, less possessed of those remarkable qualities and traits which had enamoured us of Aragon. Nor were their mountains to be compared with the central Pyrenees, and as for the Costa Brava! Busloads of echt Deutsch direct from Stuttgart goose-stepped down the water-front at midnight singing beer-hall songs; bars were full of alcoholic British expatriates, who hadn't learned a word of Castilian in ten years, complaining about Spanish laziness and inefficiency; the fearful promise of these phenomena being multiplied a hundredfold come summer... but after all, we were never going to know all Spain. We already had a little part firm in our grasp and there would be others. We could leave Cataluna.

So the panting engine bore us at last to Port Bou and the frontier. The black maw of a tunnel gaped at the northern end of the platform. Through the tunnel lay France, England, and Rockland County. But here we had found a second home and a second folk-family, a family of amazing diversity in music, outlook, background, culture, food, yet one in generosity and independence. The laws their temporal and spiritual rulers set for them were brutal (and sometimes so were they) — but seldom put into literal effect. More usually, with a wink and a finger set beside the nose, it was Se obedece, pero no se cumple.' (We obey, but the thing doesn't get done.) Everything about Spain was a matter of form, of inherent shape, not of decoration. It was the quality of the fish that mattered, not the sauce, for there often was none. The land was stark and uncompromising, set in unadorned architectural masses under the snow and sun, and the people stood as severe and hard-edged against it. The cities rose like exclamations from the rocks and ended as suddenly, with no echo. It was a country that showed a hostile face to strangers, but oh, the rewards of going on, with love: the thyme on the moorland wind, the lavender and the ice-cold spring hidden in the rocks, the fat partridges in the wheat, the girl singing by the well, the stone-like clarity of Castilian heard in a lonely place, and jotas sung in the market place, wine drunk in the whitewashed cellar...

The train jerked into motion and the spring sun vanished as we bored into the mountain. We said to each other, Volveremos. We will return.'

Chapter Twelve

Laurence Pollinger told me that Sir Alexander Korda wanted to discuss some film ideas with me. I went to 146 Piccadilly and a retired captain, Royal Navy, ushered me into the presence. Korda's office was long and gracious, with french windows at the end opening on to a walled garden. Beyond, the traffic hummed and growled up Park Lane. Korda, who resembled a taller and more worldly Einstein, came forward to greet me. We shook hands, beginning a friendship which lasted till his death. He was everything a movie producer is supposed not to be — highly educated, polite, intelligent, and sensitive. He could charm money out of backers as easily as he could charm Winston Churchill, King George VI, Marcel Pagnol, and Laurence Olivier — to name a few of his personal friends. The only 'movie' thing about him was his strong Hungarian accent, of which he was ashamed, though proud of his Hungarian origins. He told me that his favourite among his own films was The Scarlet Pimpernel; 'Everybody to do with that was Hungarian,' he said, his eyes gleaming behind his glasses, 'The writer — Baroness Orczy. The producer — myself. The director — my brother Zoltan. The art director — my other brother, Vincent. And the star...'

'The star?' I said, puzzled. 'I thought Leslie Howard was the star.'

'He was! Alex crowed, 'And Leslie Howard was Hungarian! You didn't know that, did you?'

He talked of growing up in a place that sounded like Purtarol Poparol (I never did find out how it was spelled), where his father was agent of a great estate, and the family were the only Jews in the village. He told me why he became English: 'I came from Europe,' he said. 'There was the depression, and Hitler rising. No one in Europe trusted anything any more — not their governments, nor their banks, nor their leaders, nor themselves. Then I came here, and I was buying cigars at a little shop off Piccadilly — I still buy my cigars there — and, while I was paying for them, I asked the man what he thought about the depression, the chance of devaluation, or of the banks failing... I was very nervous very jumpy, myself, I tell you, Jack. And the man said, 'Well, I don't know much about that, sir, but there's one thing certain. The pound will always be worth 240 pennies.'

I walked out in a daze. How could anyone be so stupid?

Yet these people had beaten the Germans, and the French over and over. This was the most stable country in the world. Gradually I began to feel better. If everyone really had such confidence, then the pound really would always be worth 240 pennies. I stopped being nervous, and began to try to think like an Englishman.' He was very proud and grateful for his British citizenship, and his knighthood.

He told me his favourite Hungarian proverb: if you have a Hungarian for a friend you don't need any enemies. But if anyone, except perhaps Merle Oberon, ever applied that one to Alex himself, I never heard of it.

He wanted me to write a successor to The Thief of Baghdad, an enormously successful film he had made before the war, with Sabu as star. He said, 'There are hundreds more stories in the Arabian Nights than we used in that film, than most people have ever heard of. Take this —' he gave me a complete set of the Mardrous-Mather edition of The Thousand Nights and a Night — 'Go away, read it, mark the stories that interest you, and that you think you can link into a continuous new one, then come back and we'll have another talk. I'll fix the money with your agent. And your expenses. About a hundred pounds a week, I should think.' He was showing me to the front door. He opened it, shook my hand and then muttered, 'My God, look at that!'

I turned, and began to laugh. Korda was staring at a lean, stooped old man standing outside on Piccadilly. He was wearing an off-black suit of 1880 cut, the tight trousers strapped under black boots, the coat long‑frocked. Instead of a collar and tie he wore a white hunting stock with gold pin. His hat was a curly-brimmed grey bowler, and his long face was screwed up double while he tried to read something on a bit of paper held an inch from his eye, through a monocle held on a thick black ribbon.

'He looks as though he's escaped from Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities,' Alex said.

I said, 'Left over from them. That's Ned Haines, squire of Wilsford, near Devizes. I ate sixteen sausage rolls at a children's Christmas party at his house when I was twelve.' I said goodbye to Korda and went down to greet Ned.

He had been visiting Apsley House (the Duke of Wellington's London house, now also a museum) almost next door, and was trying to read instructions someone had written down as to how he was to reach his next destination. He was almost blind and as I read the instructions for him I noticed that nearly everyone who passed us stared, gaped, and giggled at the caricature figure beside me, neighing away in his high old-fashioned accent with plenty of doncherknows and dear old chappies; but none of them knew that on the wall of his study there hung a cowboy hat, chaps, spurs, lariat and a full set of Western tack. He had spent two years as a wrangler in Wyoming, as a young man. Since he was incapable of speaking or acting any other way than he always did, my imagination had always boggled — and still does — at the picture of him in those days. I see him in Western gear, monocle in the eye, addressing another cowhand in the Last Chance Saloon: 'I say, old chap, would you awfully mind if I asked that gea-al you're holdin' for a dance...?'

On the writing front, although the Wingates never actually came right out and said so, it was becoming clear that they meant to insist on their right of censorship of any book written about Orde with their assistance, so I abandoned that project. In truth, I already had on my plate all I could manage, for Bhowani Junction now had to share my time with The Thousand Nights and a Night.

All around was England, where the beer was warm, and tasted like horse-piss, ice was doled out grudgingly on a teaspoon, when available, no one knew how to make a decent Martini, and the language and I seemed to have parted company. At one London restaurant the more I complained that the Martinis were not dry enough, and sent them back for treatment, the worse they became. I finally found out that every time I asked for a drier Martini they put in more bitters. In more was I changed than in my garments.

Barbara had a joyful and tearful reunion with Liz and Mike, and arranged to see them again next year, either in England or America. We also visited my father's mother, then aged ninety-two and still bathing every day in the icy English Channel. She was an old gorgon, a devout Roman Catholic who equally despised Frogs, Jews, natives, niggers, and the lower classes. My father hated her, my mother feared her, and I, when aged eleven, had run away from her house during the school holidays, but she had sat unmoved when German bombs hit the cinema she was in, she then eighty-four, and afterwards helped carry out the dead and wounded; and she had raised seven children in Indian jungles and — worse — British suburbs, with little money and less help from her husband. She plainly had guts. I was not to see her again.

Lyme Regis was as pretty as ever, and larks still climbed in ecstasy to the sky on the Dorset Downs. The prehistoric Long Man still proudly waved his outsize instrument over Cerne Abbas, and they still drew good scrumpy in the saloon of the Three Cups, though G. K. Chesterton, whom I had seen there when I was a boy, had gone. The kids regained their English accents and no longer wore their cowboy hats... and we secretly began to calculate how many days were left before our ship sailed for America.

The Arabian Nights tale came along nicely and Alex Korda wanted me to stay an extra month to work on it. He promised he'd send us all back first class on the Caronia instead of cabin class on the Queen Elizabeth. Reluctantly I agreed. Sixty days more, instead of the thirty we had just worked out.

I went to the Chindit reunion dinner and sat at the high table next to Bernard Fergusson, a fellow brigade commander in 1944. I listened glumly while he told the gathering that one of our Chindit heroes was in serious trouble with the law and of course it was all a mistake and the hero's name would soon be cleared: glumly, because my cousin, an army lawyer, had prepared the case and in view of the hero's reputation had cross-checked and triple checked every piece of evidence and every legal nicety. There was in his mind no doubt that the hero had done what he was accused of doing, (as the courts later agreed). I felt glummer yet because Fergusson's speech was precisely not what we ought to be saying to the hero, which was: 'Look, even if you've done this thing, it will make no difference to us, we still admire you, and will help you.' — which some of us were able to do later, when the thunderbolt fell.

I was not in a very good temper when Fergusson, who was never one of my favourite people, sat down and turned to me with a 'witty' anti-Americanism, based, as usual, on a profound antipathy to the American ideal and a profounder ignorance of the American scene. But I should not have been so particularly curt with Fergusson, for the English air was thick with anti-Americanism. The ordinary people didn't particularly love the Yanks (or any other foreigners) but they were reasonable about it, friendly, and good natured. It was the upper class, the old-school-tie brigade, who sniped and snapped in private and to the newspapers, though being perfectly polite to individual Americans. Their feelings also were understandable: on the 'bad' side — envy, ignorance, and a sense that America owed her position to staying out of wars and making money, while England bore the brunt: and on the 'good' side — legitimate doubts raised by such farces as the Caryl Chessman case, Eisenhower's cowardice in the face of McCarthy, wide support for MacArthur's messianic delusions, Jim Crow redivivus. When all this is festering under the skin of people who have ruled the world for a century and a half, and who believe in the deepest recesses of their being that everything British is best, the resultant emotions can be quite strong, and bitter. Since I spoke English-English and occasionally wore a Gurkha Brigade or Old Wellingtonian tie, the evidence of my Brooks Brothers suit was not correctly read, and I received several lectures on the horrors of America. No, the speakers had never been there, thank God! I.ife in America, where American achievements and motives were questioned to an extent then unusual in other countries, had made me consider the nature of patriotism. I graded it into three categories: a boy could be proud of his country's things — its Rolls-Royces and Golden Gate Bridges: a youth could be proud of his country's men — its Nelsons, Napoleons, Lincolns: but for a grown man the only proper object of pride was his country's ideas; what, of value, it had given to mankind. Most British newspapers were still in the 'things' stage, and fate played a ghastly trick on them in this year of 1952.

The first commercial jet to fly was the British De Havilland Comet. By 1952 one or two examples were flying on B.O.A.C.'s routes, but the plane had not been certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Agency, without which it could not fly to America or be bought by American airlines. The nation was very proud of the Comet — a genuine first — and the newspapers dropped hints and made accusations to the effect that the dirty Yanks were delaying certification until an American jet was ready, in about a year, in order to do Britain out of dollar sales. I pointed out, when the subject was raised that the Comets I and II, then flying, were not intended to cross the Atlantic and indeed could not do so; it was the Mark II that was going to be used trans-Atlantic. As the Mark III had not yet flown at all, the F.A.A. could hardly be expected to certify it. In vain: the outcry continued... until a fatal flaw in the Comet I's construction resulted in aerial break-up of three of them in quick succession, with great loss of life. The 'dirty Yank' theme ended, without apology, but only until another suitable grudge arose. Given the chauvinism of many newspapers., these were not hard to find. Attacks on 'Americanization' of the language were popular; no one pointed out that, powerful the U.S.A. was, it could not compel Englishmen to speak American unless they wanted to. If American words and phrases were coming into common use it was because English people found them good, and because the genius of the English language will take and absorb anything it needs, and (unlike the Daily Express) considers no source unclean — but then the Daily Express's contacts with the English language were always minimal.

This sort of thing should have passed over my head without bothering me, but I was English by blood, I admired most English institutions, and I did not like to feel ashamed of my own people; but ashamed I was, when I remembered again that in four years in America I had never once had to defend England — neither its things, nor its men, nor its ideas. As a contrast there was the heading in the automobile section of an English magazine: 'Though of American origin, a good-looking motor car.' I tried to imagine an American magazine headlining an article: 'Though British, it works.' I failed, and was about to cry, when I decided to laugh instead.

Since I was obviously on the point of giving up my birthright — my status as a British gentleman it was time to consider just what was involved. I would lose something, all right. Men's Wear Weekly is all very well but only a British gentleman can tell what tweed it is proper to wear on any occasion. Why? Because the Right tweed for that occasion is the one approved by the British gentleman. Why? Because on this and related matters the British gentleman is infallible.

I should here clear the decks of some misconceptions common in the U.S.A. Few gentleman wear monocles. Those who do usually have a defect in one eye (like Ned Haines and Bernard Fergusson), but not in both; it is un-American to sneer at chaps who suffer from lopsided physical defects. Few gentlemen are dukes: the converse proposition has also been debated. Gentlemen do wear top hats but only when attending Ascot, the Eton & Harrow cricket match, and certain types of wedding.

If you meet a man with a monocle and a top hat, who says he is a duke, the circumstances tell you nothing about what the man is but a great deal about where you are — Hollywood. A gentleman never says 'Beg pardon', or 'Granted', or 'It's a pleasure': and incidentally he never says 'Bally', 'Eh what?'. 'What-ho', 'Ripping', or 'Jolly good show'. These expressions are one with Nineveh and the cat's pyjamas. Gentlemen eat with the knife held in the right hand, sharp edge down, and stuff the food into their mouths with the fork, which is held in the left hand at the very same time. Ladies too. Gentlemen do not behave in a courtly manner to ladies in public. This is a dago trick. A gentleman may kiss a lady practically anywhere except on the hand or wrist. This is a dago trick.

How does one recognize and define a gentleman? By job? No. Gentlemen may now be fishmongers (but not barbers). By title? No — see above re 'dukes'. By acreage owned? Partly. A man who owns more than fifty acres is a gentleman unless he has made enough money out of it to live on, in which case he is a farmer. If he loses a little money most years he is a bad farmer. If he loses a lot of money every year he is a gentleman farmer.

By breeding or ancestry then? Again, partly. But there is a proverb, 'Clogs to clogs in three generations.' Ah, by wealth, of course? Well, there is another proverb: 'Rank is but riches, long possess'd.' This is true, but personally acquired wealth may be a positive obstacle to gentlemanliness.

Education? Much nearer. It is almost axiomatic that a man who has attended one of the twelve or so 'right' public schools (in England 'public' means 'private') is a gentleman. A man who went to one of the others, called 'minor', is not a gentleman, he is a quivering mass of schizophrenia, because nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the population admire and envy his tie, while the thousandth sneers at it; rather, he hides his sneer in the way only a Right-public-school-boy can. This fact highlights the First Principle of gentlemanliness: a miss is much worse than a mile.

And we are now so close to another truth that an exercise in intuition will bring us to it in one bound. Gentlemen are made by institutions; institutions are made by gentlemen. The Marylebone Cricket Club is such an institution: the M.C.C. is the governing body of cricket, and therefore every member of it must, by definition, be a gentleman; so the M.C.C. possesses the constitutional power to make gentlemen. This is also true of the Royal Navy, certain small London clubs, and one or two regiments of the British Army.

The old 60th Rifles, for instance, could take a slum boy without a penny or an acre or an aitch to his name and if they accepted him as an officer, he would become a gentleman from that moment. But (First Principle) it is illusion to imagine that if rejected by the 60th, the 59th or the 61st would have been as good. They were excellent and battle-worthy regiments, and full of gentlemen; but they did not have the power to make gentlemen.

A gentleman can be of any faith although it is much better (again First Principle) to be a Buddhist than a Baptist. He can be of any race because, in matters of taste, he is infallible and could not therefore have chosen to be born in a wrong one. By the same reasoning he can be of any colour, although an unusual choice of tribe, creed, or pigment would make the gate a little more strait. On this, as on so many other subjects, the last word rests with Mr Winston Churchill who on October 14, 1939, minuted thus to his colleagues at the Admiralty: There must be no discrimination on grounds of race or colour (in the employment of Indians or Colonial natives in the Royal Navy). In practice much inconvenience would arise if this theoretical equality had many examples... I can not see any objection to Indians serving on H.M. ships where they are qualified and needed, or, if their virtues so deserve, rising to be Admirals of the Fleet. But not too many of them, please.

A gentleman's amusements are divided into two classes sports and games. All games, except court tennis and cricket, rank below all sports, except greyhound racing and the breeding of racing pigeons. Greyhound racing is trade; pigeon racing is not done. Court tennis is mentioned with a reverence all the more impressive because there are only three courts in England, and no one has ever seen the game actually played. Playwrights who have implied that a gentleman's only sports are foxhunting and adultery are guilty of over-simplification. Salmon fishing is more correct than either, and just as expensive. Nor is it true, vide Maugham passim, that East of Suez a gentleman merely substitutes polo for hunting, and adds alcoholism.

After cricket, Rugby football is the best game, because it is played at nearly all the Right schools; but a rugby-playing gentleman has to be wary of falling into trouble by association, because the game also attracts a hearty crowd of beer-drinkers, ale-quaffers, and backslappers from Wrong schools. Eton protects its alumni from this danger by playing a game of such stunning boredom that no one else plays it, or wants to.

When I became an American it would be a shock to find that I was no longer capable of wearing the right clothes, applauding correctly at cricket, or eating in a civilized manner; but more important were the privileges I would be losing, and the responsibilities I would be shedding. A gentleman's most useful privilege is the right of first refusal to certain jobs. Golf clubs descend to the level of sportvereins unless the secretary is a gentleman, preferably a retired commander, R.N. Sir Alan Herbert has pointed out that the quality of tea depends on the quality of the people growing it. I think he gave the best recipe as one Old Harrovian to two Old Cheltonians for the lighter Assam teas, with an Old Rugbeian to be substituted for one of the Old Cheltonians for the stronger South Indian and Ceylon varieties.

The responsibilities are: to keep the highest possible standards of dress and conduct; to lead public opinion in peace, cautiously; to lead the soldiery in battle, incautiously; to make no display of emotion; to keep calm. A gentleman can be dismissed from the class for persistent evasion of these duties. And — this is where the rub came — he would be automatically disenfranchised for going abroad to live. Whoever heard of an Australian gentleman? Oddly enough, American gentlemen are recognized. They live in Boston, row for Harvard, are very rich but without ostentation, and would really rather have been British. One admires them for their stiff-lipped loyalty in not saying so.

Well, I thought, there it is. The tea will have to grow without me. I hope I don't have to lead any more soldiery into battle, and if I set any examples they will be strictly private. So, farewell, my past, with thanks and appreciation for all that you did for me and were to me, once.

I returned to my work: Sinbad is a great character. Suppose I make him the hero, substituting him for the actual men in my chosen Nights tales. I must try to get Scheherazade herself in...

Counsel from Bill Oaten, my railway expert: The driver would close the regulator and open the drifting valve and coast. Steam would not be blowing off through the safety valve... It is always the practice where there is sabotage to run pilot engines in front of trains, or an armoured truck with machine-guns manned by the A.F. (I)…

If Sinbad, as prince, grants the mysterious old beggar one wish, and the old man asks for one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the next, four on the next, eight on the next, and so on, he'd bankrupt the kingdom, wouldn't he? Could use that to have wise old man teaching young prince to think before he acts. Also good visual incident to have chess game played out on black and white marble floor with harem girls as chessmen; something important must depend on the outcome. Sinbad's life? He, captured, tied to a pillar, watching?... Alex says, when he's reading a book with the idea of making it into a movie, he tears out the pages where his attention has been held, and then tries to stitch them into a script. H'm.

Bill Oaten wrote of a partial draft of Bhowani Junction: I like the book very much but it is a bit descriptive in parts as you say from the sex point of view, also the words. I think you should visualize your books being read and put into the bookcase, do you think that would happen to this one, and you do not want to lose your public.

Helen Taylor was often sniping at me about the same thing. It annoyed me, because I could not find a solution. The word 'obscenity' has a selective meaning, but I could not select my readers. I have always tried to choose the exact word to convey my meaning. But the correct word for some act, if I were talking to a rifleman of the Cameronians, was not the same as if I were talking to my proper maiden aunt. It was not my intention to make the one laugh, or shock the other, simply to inform, to paint a picture. But how could I do that when the colours appeared different to different eyes? Well, I'd just have to take each case as it came, but if Bill and Helen thought I would have the foul-mouthed Rodney Savage cry, 'Gee whiz., Taylor...', or talk about 'agreeable intercourse' when in the middle of a lusty mating, they were wrong.

As for descriptiveness, they wanted me to stop outside the bedroom door. On what grounds? If I any not to describe what goes on in there, why do I describe what goes on in the storeroom, the engine shed, the barracks? There must be a reason for the inclusion, of course, but showing a sexual compatibility can be just as important as showing a technical skill. But the damnable core of the problem is that what titillates one reader shocks another, informs a third, and bores a fourth. My lights must be my own.

The summer ended, my work for Alex ended, and we trooped down to Southampton. First class in the Caronia was full of Republicans praising Joseph McCarthy, an unspeakable self-seeker, liar, and cad. Since it soon became obvious that he was all these things, the people of Wisconsin incurred a grave responsibility in re-electing him to the U.S. Senate. His anti-Communism was as bogus as everything else about him (except his rascality) and Barbara and I had several brisk arguments with his admirers. I wished the English denigrators of America had brought him up more often, for he was something we could have got our teeth into as a real American problem. He was particularly real to us because he had gone after the Voice of America, where two men who had befriended us were now responsibly employed — Fernand Auberjonois and Troup Mathews. In those Caronia arguments we agreed vehemently that Communism was a menace; we agreed that the American Liberal Establishment either did not appreciate the menace or deliberately played it down. We knew more about this than the Republican bankers on that ship did, for in Rockland County many did not want to believe that the Russians had massacred just as many of their own people as the Germans had massacred Jews; and it was terribly bad form to mention the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. But, we said, American Communists must be gone after by constitutional means, inside the law. If the law wasn't tough enough, make one that was. The bankers laughed and said we had a very English point of view. We looked forward to escaping to West Point and the company of young men trying to live up to a simple, difficult credo: Duty, Honour, Country; and in those very words standing firm between the lunacies of the right and the astigmatism of the left.

But these angers and uncertainties disappeared in that dawn when the engines slowed, we held our children close on the forward deck, and Miss Liberty rose like a promise out of the mist. The ship glided silent across the flat silver towards the land. We were home, and in that draughty graceless barn of a pier at the foot of West 50th Street I wanted to kneel down and kiss the concrete.

When we came to Rockland County, a stag was standing in the edge of the pine copse below our orchard. We stopped, and looked at each other, then he shook his heavy antlers, crossed the road, and trotted round the pond and up into the forest.

Chapter Thirteen

Every day the children walked hand in hand the two hundred yards up Route 304 to the corner of South Mountain Road, keeping carefully to the left of the road. There they waited for the bus to Street School. Usually I had walked up earlier to get the newspaper from the Centenary Community Store beyond the corner, but sometimes I went with them and when I passed on my way back, the New York Times under my arm, the kids were scuffling and shouting. Once I saw Susan fell to the ground, with one swing of her book-laden satchel, a boy called Evvie Burger, who was a year older and three times bigger than she. He had been pulling her hair and was probably madly in love. The headmaster told us that Susan and Martin were both exceedingly bright. They seemed to be happy, though Susan withdrew rather more often with comics and Island Stallion tales than seemed normal. Martin, starting kindergarten, read aloud to the class in the teacher's absences, since Susan had long since taught him, and also gave the teacher many useful hints on car recognition.

We had birthday parties in the kitchen, which was floored with brick from Haverstraw brickyards that went out of business about 1845, when Haverstraw was Sodom-on-the-Hudson. There was an old bread oven in the wall down there, and a Franklin stove against a central chimney, for it was dug into the slight slope, the house standing tall above, barn-red, white-shuttered, with an indomitable wisteria trying to pull down one side. There were plenty of mice, but they were rural fellows who bothered us little. When they became too numerous they obligingly trooped into the traps we set. Bats sometimes flew down the chimneys and, once, so did an owl. Cars and timber trucks passed close in front, but after a month no one heard them any more. It was quiet, except for the noonday sounds of teenagers from Clarkstown High fornicating in their lunch-break around a pond on vacant land across the road. The roar of engines, and shriek of tyres as they gunned out afterwards was like the mating call of triumphant wapiti. Well, the school was three miles away and they had no time to waste.

We had to make a few minor changes, such as shoring up the beams supporting the children's bedroom (we got suspicious when their beds kept rolling down to meet in the middle of the floor). In the process we found, nailed to the underside of the old wide planks with a square hand-made nail, a faded note:

Please pay Mr Stagg the sum of fourteen shillings if you will oblige your most obedient servant Abm. Stauches.

Stagg's Corners was the old name for Centenary, which was our address. The date of the note was February, 1812...

Five acres of land surrounded the house, though it was set close to the road, as all farm houses were in the days when it was built. Barbara's green thumb was allied to a physical love of the new land and guided by a considerable knowledge of gardening, and she soon had our three hundred feet of road frontage lined with forsythia, and the untidy bridal-veil bush at one corner of the house well trimmed. Beyond the bush was a big barn, its interior hung with cobwebs, mildewed saddlery, broken horse furniture, sleds, and tools. In the far corner there was a well, the mouth seven feet in diameter. A huge wheel, perhaps ten feet in diameter, hung on the wall beside the well. A long rope was wound round the wheel's thick wooden axle, which was worked by a handle and ratchet arrangement. From the rope hung a round platform, which normally rested on the wooden well-cover. But when this had been a working farm, the full milk churns were put on the platform in summer and the whole lowered on the rope into or just above the water, which was seven feet down and ten feet deep. That was how they kept the milk cool and that was why our place was called Well Wheel Farm — though we called it just 269 Route 304, as we thought the old name would be cutesy and presumptuous when it was no longer a real farm. Several pairs of phoebes and swallows nested in the barn in spring, and though the kids liked to swing on the rope and raise and lower the platform, the birds didn't mind.

Outside the barn a pair of small walnut trees stood on a tiny rise, inscrutably named by the children White and White Star. Under the mound they buried our second American cat. Tomlinson had disappeared, probably in an argument with a raccoon. This second, a kitten we called Natch, was killed by a car two months after we got him.

To the south there was an orchard of apple trees, so old and big that their gnarled branches scraped the ground. They bore good fruit, but worm-eaten, since we did not spray. The trees also supported some impressive poison ivy, the stems thicker than my thumb where they climbed the trunks. In the autumn the apples fermented on the ground and wasps, bees, and hornets gathered from miles about. There were many deer in Rockland County then. I had seen several in the trees behind the Hope house, and others crossing the road above Centenary. They also liked to cross from the forest along the Hackensack River behind our land to the High Tor woods. To do this they would work down the pine copse where we had seen the stag, and then wait for the traffic to die down. The apples sometimes tempted them to linger in our orchard.

One evening our solid applejack turned three respectable matrons, grown does, into suburban housewives on a bender. They got drunk on the fermented apples, and after a while they were standing on their hind legs, butting each other, kneeling to waggle their behinds in the air, and charging about like puppies. All the time a large stag stood in the corner of the wood and watched them with an expression of disgust. They cavorted about for half an hour before the stag made some sign or sound, which clearly meant, 'Come away, you drunken sluts'; then the ladies pulled down their skirts and staggered off after him.

The deer seldom made any serious attempt at concealment, for they knew the dates of the hunting season better than the game wardens. Young Mellors said the sight of the year was to lie up beside one of the game trails leading into Harrison Harriman Park, where hunting was forbidden, a day or two before the season opened. The deer went by in hundreds, trooping into sanctuary. We were all glad that they were getting rare in the flatlands, for the county was becoming heavily populated, and the hunters, apparently, more myopic. Up in the northern part of the State farmers used to write in large letter COW on both flanks of all their cattle, but the beasts still got hit; while shot and shell occasionally pattered against our shutters or bored through the barn wall. The first week of the season was always set aside for bow-and-arrow hunting only, and during it I hourly expected, with mixed feelings, the thunk of an arrow in the woodwork. It would be dangerous, yes... but think of the cachet of having an arrow, like Dr Rounds's, stuck in the front door! Not Abenaki down here, old boy — Mohawk.

Our main activity in the orchard was starling-killing. The other small birds — wrens, tits, finches, and warblers — would start nesting in the marvellous holes in the old apple trees; then the starlings would arrive. Twice we found warblers' eggs thrown out, broken and eaten, and starlings installed. Once it was baby chickadees, dead on the ground. I bought a .22/.410 over-and-under single-shot gun and we began a campaign of extermination, in which even the sensitive Martin happily joined. We used the gun, hoses, cats, and worse — for the starlings were a local and national pest. They were originally brought into America by a romantic ass who had imported two of every species of bird mentioned in Shakespeare. The other birds seemed to know what we were at. Once I turned a starling into a bloody pulp in the middle of a circle of cardinals, less than three feet from him. The cardinals barely left the ground in acknowledgement of the blast before settling back to continue their meal around the corpse. We killed about ninety starlings a year, their corpses going to join the condoms the high school kids dumped into the swamp across the road.

We saw many skunks — often at dusk, at close quarters, when we threw bread towards them. In the twilight Barbara almost picked one up outside the front door, thinking he was the black and white kitten. When he stood on his head, she recognized her error, for we had not taught the kitten that trick yet.

The only skunk who fired his main turrets nearby had been menaced by some fearful Thing in the middle of the night. We don't know what it was for we saw and heard nothing, but were awakened at 2 a.m. by a truly imposing smell which was occupying our second-storey bedroom to the point of pushing us out. Of course we saw many dead skunks on the roads, especially during the autumn mating season, for the skunk (British readers may not realize) is so confident in the power of his weapon that he fears nothing, and that includes cars; if he sees them it is only to raise his tail and murmur, 'I say, old boy, keep off a bit, will you?' But they don't.

We had a few opossums, mostly seen dead — really dead on the highway; a rat or two left over from the farming days, several slow-worms, garter snakes, and black snakes — but no copperheads; we were half a mile from the rocky High Tor terrain which they liked. We had rabbits and a fox or two somewhere out in the brush towards the Hackensack, where the remains of a farm bridge had fallen into the little stream during Garfield's administration. Once we came home to a real Nature-in-the-Raw-is-Seldom-Mild demonstration for the children. As we got out of the car we noticed several small birds hovering low over the long grass outside the orchard, all chattering blue murder. We hurried over, and heard a continuous high-pitched screaming. Under the birds, which hovered around still, we saw a very small rabbit, crouched wide-eyed, and screaming in terror. The children cried, 'What's the matter with it?' I didn't know, but as I stooped down to pick it up a sudden movement caught my eye. A three-foot black snake, which had had the rabbit's hind leg in its jaws, released its grip and began to wriggle away. The rabbit recovered its wits and also darted off on a diagonal course from the snake's. The children clapped and cried, 'He's escaped!' But when barely twelve feet off the snake turned and made to intercept the rabbit. If I had not run forward and balked him, he would have had him again. Black snakes are very useful beasts, and the children thought we should give the snake a starling in lieu of the rabbit we'd deprived him of; but I couldn't find one.

We did not bother the woodchucks which proliferated in the tangle of scrub and small trees (there was a derelict jungle-covered tennis court at the back, too) unless they bothered us, or unless Louise wanted one. Louise Samuels was our new cleaning woman. She was a Negro originally from Florida, who liked to eat woodchucks and knew how to cook them. She was not rich and for her sake I shot half a dozen woodchucks every year, with less compunction after Barbara showed me the ruins of her lettuce and petunias and said, 'Those damned woodchucks have been at my garden again.' When Louise settled in as a regular worker with us — she came once a week — we gave her a piece of land in the orchard to grow whatever she wanted on. Soon she too was accusing the woodchucks of every crime from arson to incest. With two women out for their blood the woodchucks didn't have a chance.

A row of big willows lined the road between the forsythia, and a huge black walnut guarded the drive. The best tree on the property was a big maple outside the front door. It gave shade in summer and in the autumn the light filtered like distant fire through it into the living-room. Under the warm shower of light we sat on the little terrace of brick, drank beer and Martinis, waved to passing friends and listened to football and baseball games. We went out seldom and when we did our friends' older children baby-sat.

The Auberjonois had a lovely downstairs kitchen like ours — their house was as old — but visits to them were saddened by Fernand's increasing strain under McCarthy's accusations. The Jennisons had the Toad and Throstle and a derelict track of the New York & New Jersey Railroad. The Andersons had a waterfall, and a piece of the Hackensack dammed up to make a pool for summer swimming and winter skating. The Fellers had moved into what had been the Balabans' garage, originally built by Waldo Pierce. Henry Varnum Poor fed us beer, and his wife Bessie Breuer introduced us to her brother, the composer Julian Freedman. 'He's a Jew,' she whispered, in a piercing aside. The Girls and the Young Boys came and drank and talked late, and we suddenly realized we had a lot of friends, many more than the gypsy life of an army officer had ever gathered in one place before. Among them were the Mackays, who had just arrived to take over as butler and cook for wealthy people on Long Island. 'They seem nice enough — so far,' Hamish said cautiously of his employers. 'When they asked me how I knew so much about a butler's duties, I had to say it was because I used to have one myself.'

We became members of the P.T.A., the North Clarkstown Civic Association, and (unwillingly) the Episcopal Church, where the children for a time attended Sunday School until their obvious boredom and a strong sense of our own hypocrisy made us pull out altogether. We sat through interminable meetings of school boards, town boards, planning boards, and zoning boards. Recommendations were made, laws passed... only to be bent double at the whim of the next developer. With us eternal vigilance was the price not of liberty but of existence.

In Korea the peace talks were broken off, and at home Eisenhower gathered much support by promising to bring the boys home. A neighbour with a son in the Marines expressed dismay at the casualty figures, which did not seem very high to me for a large country. There was a great deal of sneering at 'police actions'. We wondered uneasily whether America had the stomach or the patience for long wars undertaken on behalf of principles, not of survival.

In a westward-facing screened porch, which we had walled in for my study, I prepared for the forthcoming editorial battles over Bhowani Junction. The shape of the book had become clear early in the planning: it was a clock, the characters and situations steadily moving round like the hands. The protagonist, an Anglo-Indian girl, made particularly definite moves — from accepting her status (noon); to refusing to accept it (three o'clock); to trying to be an Indian; failing; trying to be British; failing; and finally, at midnight, finding herself back where she was at noon, an Anglo-Indian who has accepted herself. At the end, nothing had really changed, but it was twelve hours later and everyone had grown that much older, that much wiser. I tried, early on, to make the whole plot fit into those twelve hours, but soon saw it could not be done, and gave up any hope of achieving full Greek unity. But I knew I had a powerful book under my hand.

The Lotus and the Wind was published to generally favourable criticism, and with that the reviewers and feature writers suddenly remembered that I had said I would write thirty-five novels about India. Till now they had, quite properly, ignored that statement as hyperbole, but with three books published in three years, and another in the works, they began to quote and marvel. To be accurate, they misquoted, for I had not said I would write thirty-five novels about India, I had said that before becoming a novelist I made sure I could...

An incident that occurred at this time explains as clearly as I could do now, by hindsight, my differences with the Liberal Establishment. On January 18 the New York Times Book Review contained a critique of A Brighter Sun, which sent me rushing to my typewriter, with a letter to the editor.

Dear Sir,

It is a good and likeable quality that enables man to feel the hurts, the indignation, and the sorrows of others. The quality is called sympathy and it is happily common in America, more common than in other parts of the world that I know. But in some people, who would probably call themselves 'liberals', the capacity for sympathy has become a compulsion for resentment. This is not sympathy, but bias, and it is dangerous.

An example is Edith Efron's review of Samuel Selvon's new novel, A Brighter Sun. Note first that the author of the book is an (East) Indian. Then note the words of the reviewer: she thinks that the response of the book's protagonist, also an East Indian, to colonial race prejudice is 'oddly timid'; she accuses the author of 'the deliberate softening of painful realities' and of an 'anxiety to spare British colonialism'; she regards the book as likely to assure those readers who enjoy having their poetic notions about the childlike primitives confirmed; on these grounds and because the book's reaction to 'harsh racial conflict' is 'oddly non-corrosive' she dismisses it as having 'something of the official tourist pamphlet about it'.

The only excuse for such an assault on the author's honesty and courage would be for the reviewer to be, like the author, an East Indian domiciled in the West Indies. Perhaps Efron is one; but, even so, a developed critical faculty would have contented itself with pointing out that its own experience had led it to a different outlook.

Edith Efron dismissed the letter with an even more viciously 'liberal' riposte. The Editor of the Review, whom I saw a few days later, gave me an explanation which I fear is libellous. I said I thought it was particularly unfair to attack a new writer from an ex-colony in this way. Samuel Selvon wrote to thank me for drawing the sword on his behalf, and for understanding what he was actually saying in his book, not what Edith Efron thought he ought to be saying — but then he was only a poor native showing proper gratitude to his white master.

Correspondence between myself and a young Negro novelist from Jamaica put my position even more clearly. It took place a few years later, but this is where it belongs. The Atlantic people sent me The Eye of the Storm by John Hearne, for a blurb. I thought it was a good book, and said so, and added: I would be glad if you would pass on to John Hearne my personal appreciation and best wishes. It is a real joy to find a writer who is in the classic tradition of the novelist, that is, he deals with people on the human level, and is stirred by them in their loves and hates and basic characters, not by them as symbols of lesser conflicts. Hearne also writes professionally, which means that you want to go on reading instead of saying gloomily, Christ, I suppose this inefficient lazy bastard has got a Message somewhere in all this crap and he expects me to take a spade and dig it out and thus acquire merit. Of course Hearne has something to say, too, but he is a novelist, not a pamphleteer in a poor disguise.

To this Hearne replied: It was most gratifying to see that you spotted my distaste for what you rightly term the 'lesser conflicts'. There's a place for the big politico-social issues but not in the game we're playing. We — the story-tellers, I mean — are after a different beast. None of us, except Shakespeare, maybe, has ever got a really perfect specimen, but it's quite necessary that a few of us try to hunt it down in every generation. There is nothing uglier, to my mind, at least, than to see the phonies going out day after day and bringing back the sham trophies — all dressed up in 'social realism', 'involvement', 'political awareness' and the rest. The only consolation is, that the sham stuff always begins to go rotten after a few years.

Some bright spark at the Rockland Foundation (our county association for the promotion of the arts) dreamed up the idea of a public debate entitled 'Writing for Love or Money'. Harvey Swados agreed to argue that writing must be done purely for love, for the writing's sake; I undertook to defend the proposition that all good writing was done professionally, for gain; and Hortense Kalisher refereed. We three knew each other personally and were friends in the offhand manner of the county, and it was a good debate, with some fine verbal mace work in the clinches and a few notable spear thrusts. But it is memorable to me for what happened afterwards.

Some young fellow newly moved from New York, knowing Rockland's liberal reputation, knowing my imperialist background, seeing me present myself in the most philistine way, thought he would earn a little popularity by sticking a few barbs into me on his own account. So, when the debate was thrown open, he made a rather snide remark and waited for the applause: dead silence. Another, better aimed arrow was met with more silence and, from a corner, one small hiss. He floundered to the end and sat down. My reply was a joke that might have raised a titter in the 3rd grade if they were in a good mood. The large audience practically stood on their chairs applauding. I felt my eyes stinging, for what was happening meant that we had arrived in a far more meaningful sense than the success of any book. We were known, accepted, even liked. That roar was Rockland defending its own — even the curry colonel with his neanderthal opinions. The young man was so embarrassed, in front of his wife, too, that we sought them out for a long friendly talk after the meeting broke up.

From London Alex Korda piped a beguiling decoy note. Would I come to England, with all my family, and write original treatments for two movies, one to be about the Taj Mahal and the other to be based on Kipling's Second Jungle Book? The terms were good, both ideas interested me, I was about finished with the creative part of Bhowani Junction, and I had nothing better to do. I accepted, and flew over early in April, leaving Barbara to bring the children in June when school came out. By then, I promised, I'd have a place where we could pass the summer while I worked, the essentials being sea, sand, and reasonable proximity to London, since I'd have to go up now and then to consult with Alex.

London that spring was pleasant, dry, and mild. I stayed in a small hotel in Belgravia, and every Sunday morning ate winkles and cockles off a barrow favoured by young Guards officers recovering from all-night debutante parties. All three Korda brothers invited me out. Zoltan was shy and delightful, Vincent warm and friendly, and Alex, of course regally generous. Twice he invited me to men-only dinners in his suite on top of Claridge's, where I felt that I was living in one of John Buchan's novels. The guests, usually about fifteen in number, were Cabinet Ministers, Eminent Financiers, Asian Rulers, Merchant Princes and Foreign Diplomats. Once there were a pair of rich Indian merchants who wanted to get into films, but business as such was never discussed, only affairs of state and occasionally, to show we were all human, minor scandal. The food was England's best — good beef, simply cooked and quietly served, with great wines.

After the port had been put on the table Alex's mistress appeared, a chair was pulled up for her beside him, and we all eased back to make room for her. Alexa was barely twenty-one at this time, but I have never seen a woman of any age carry off a tricky situation better. She was neither loud nor quiet, proud nor humble; she stepped into the stream of talk as though she had been with us all the time; she never said too much and never too little, and what she did say was always sensible and informed; she never flirted and never snubbed. She was a Canadian singer of Ukrainian descent whom Alex had found in a Toronto night-club and eventually brought back to England with him and installed in another part of Claridges. I have seldom admired a woman more. When I left, Alexa pressed my hand with a look that acknowledged my admiration, and expressed her own appreciation and friendship... and nothing more: and that was a feat in itself.

As Alex's guest I attended a huge party thrown at the Savoy Theatre to honour his production of Gilbert and Sullivan. The invitation read 'black tie', but the Bakloh moths had used my dinner jacket as their food ration during the war and I had refused to buy another, considering the garment despicable (I liked tails, but they, which should have survived, had gone right out). So, in order to do proper honour to Alex, I bought a flowered waistcoat in gold, black, and red brocade, and wore it with my Brooks Brothers suit. Alex paled and stepped back, a hand to his eyes. David Lean, whom I had met a couple of times (and tried to tell about my admiration for The Sound Barrier) cried 'My God, you're the bravest man I've ever met.' I agreed quietly. Also present at the affair was a lady who, in my Sandhurst days, had been one of a trio of debs collectively known to us as Friggem, Bangem, and Pullit. This one had recently acquired a really notable reputation for holding orgiastic camera sessions with several different gentlemen, whether with or without her noble husband's approval and co-operation was never made clear. Perhaps he answered the telephone. Alex introduced us, and I did not remind the lady that that was unnecessary: we had danced together at a Sandhurst ball in, I think, 1933.

Alex said, 'I'm going to stay in London till after the coronation, then go to Antibes. Are you planning to watch it?'

The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was set for June 2. For me it would be practically a family affair, for the King's Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, and the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, both due to play central roles in the ceremonies, were commanded respectively by Frankie Weldon and Charles Earle, who had both been at Wellington and the Staff College with me; but to Alex I said, 'I don't have a hope of getting a good view and I'm damned if I'm going to pay for one, so I'll probably stay at home and work.'

'Ah, you are still English at heart,' he said. 'If you were really American you would give your right arm to see it... Would you like to go to Antibes and work on my yacht for a couple of weeks? We'll join you after the coronation.'

I thought that was an excellent idea and a few days later flew down to Nice for Antibes, and settled into Alex's palatial yacht. There I put my papers aside and studied the burning problem of the hour: supposing that John Hunt's expedition, then more than half-way up the mountain, succeeded in climbing Everest, what rewards would be given to the actual conquerors, and to the expedition leader, Hunt himself? I reckoned that a K. would be about right for Hillary, and since the Order of the British Empire was always favoured for colonials, that he would get a K.B.E.

If Hillary was knighted his leader would have to be; but Hunt was an officer of the regular army, a brigadier, and regulars didn't get the K.B.E. until they were lieutenant-generals. So I thought it would be suggested that Hunt be made a Knight Bachelor. In due course these things came to pass; but whoever advised Her Majesty to palm Tenzing off with an M.B.E., which in the circumstances was a calculated insult, was a prize ass.

Alex's yacht was moored alongside in the inner basin of Antibes harbour, and the only other inhabitant, apart from the crew, was an oldish lady, said to have been Gorki's last mistress, and also H.G. Wells's. I called her, privately, Mme Ouspenskaya, and very sweet she was to me, but I worked hard and went out little — the chef was a master — until Alex and Alexa came down; then my horizons expanded. What impressed me most was the continuous high level of Alex's life. His friends were at the top of their professions — not near it, but at the very summit. The subjects of discussion were never easy or petty. Conversation was never banal (or, to tell the truth restful), and if Alex could help it there were never any dull minds present though he couldn't always dodge some alcoholic Dodges he had had the misfortune to meet in the U.S.A.

Marcel Pagnol, Orson Welles, and Freddie Lonsdale were frequent guests, with assorted British bankers and French cabinet ministers. One oddity was the attitude of Alex and his friends to Lord Beaverbrook. They all knew Beaverbrook personally: all told stories about him: and all the stories revealed the Beaver as a ruthless, thoroughly unpleasant megalomaniac. One day I pointed this out and asked why, if Beaverbrook was such a shit, they all claimed him as their friend. Four eminent men turned on me with flooding explanations — of his charm, his loneliness, his ability. But I think really they liked him because he was as powerful, as rich, and as far removed from the common herd as they, and solely through his own efforts.

Orson Welles was trying to interest Alex in a screenplay he had written, and one of the evenings he spent on the Yacht is a particularly happy memory for me. There were only the five of us present Alex, Alexa, Mme Ouspenskaya, Welles and myself. All evening Alex and I, emigrants both, debated the relative merits of the British and American ways of life. He spoke for England in a Hungarian accent you could cook a goulash in; I for American in 'Wellington-and-Sandhurst English; the expatriate American Welles refereed in mid-Atlantic.

I liked Welles and we got on famously, except once when he backed huffily out of a debate on Roman Catholic censorship and freedom of thought on the grounds that it was his personal affair; quite so, but those were not the terms on which debate was held in Alex's cabin. That night, when Welles left, Alex and I walked him to the end of the jetty. As we returned in the sea-scented moonlight, Alex put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Jack, there goes a great actor and a greater director, who wants nothing more than to be a great writer. And he is a terrible writer. Let that be a lesson to you.'

Some Dodges and Ed Lopert were there the night Alex made a classic remark. Lopert had been in the distribution end of the movie business and now wanted to go into the production end. He had come to discuss it with Alex. After dinner he began to tell Alex about Menasha Skulnik, the famous Second Avenue comic. Finally he said, 'He's, well, he's the Jewish Charlie Chaplin.'

Alex dropped his glasses to the end of his nose, looked over them at Lopert, and inquired carefully — And what does that make Charrrlie Chaplin?'

It was usually Alexa who brought me mid-morning coffee and biscuits while I was working in the chart room, but once Alex came. I seized my pencil, looking guilty, for he was paying me an awful lot of money and at that moment I was leaning back, day-dreaming. Alex pushed me down and said, 'Don't be afraid of letting the mind lie fallow, Jack. I am not Sam Goldwyn. You know, he had John Drinkwater working for him once in Hollywood. He went into the office they had given Drinkwater, picked up a pencil and said, 'I am coming back at noon, Mr Drinkwater, and by then I want to see this pencil down to here!'

Then one morning Alexa came in very formally dressed, and said, 'Come to the big cabin.' I went and found Alex also in splendour and Mme Ouspenskaya beaming. Alexa said, 'Jack, we're going to be married today, in the Matisse chapel at Vence. We're not inviting anyone except the prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes, who arranged everything for us, without publicity. Wish us luck.' I kissed her heartily, also Mme Ouspenskaya, and wrung Alex's hand. They deserved happiness for they were civilized and generous people. She was twenty-one and he sixty and the yellow press naturally had a field day when they heard of it, wallowing even more deliberately in the mud (interviews with sex specialists on problems of the ageing male, features on young girls who throw up all for money) because Alex had not made the wedding a Roman spectacle for them.

A momentary shadow crossed Alex's beaming face, and Alexa said, 'What's the matter?'

Alex said, 'I just remembered a terrrrible nightmare I had last night. I dreamed I was marrrrying Merrrrle again.'

A few days later the yacht put to sea on their honeymoon cruise, and I flew back to London. 'Not the famous author?' the man at British immigration said, glancing at my passport. At first I thought I hadn't heard him aright. Then I looked over my shoulder, but there was no one there. Wonderful, perspicacious, intelligent people, the English. Make the best Martinis in the world.

I started an urgent search for a summer place. After eliminating all south and east coast resorts within reach as being crowded, noisy, and suburban; and regretfully dismissing our old favourites of Devon and Cornwall for other reasons, an ancestral memory sent me on an exploratory trip to Wales. The summer of 1922, when I was seven, (my parents were in India), I spent the summer holidays from boarding-school with an aunt and family in a farmhouse outside Llanbedrog, near Pwllheli, North Wales. The memories were small but clear: a sunbaked lane, between rough stone walls, damsons heavy on the bough overhead; a rocky cove with a little sand; a faintly heaving sea; hot heather, gorse, an adder wriggling across the footpath; an old woman in a shop teaching me Welsh...

It was clear and sunny that day of my reconnaissance, the natives were friendly and an estate agent in Barmouth had a small house in Llanaber a mile or two up the coast, for rent furnished with — oh extra joy — only the railway line between the house and the beach. I took it on the spot.

Diana Gray, a cousin of my own age, agreed to spend the summer with us, to help with the kids. I hired a small car, the family flew in from New York, and off we went to our new retreat. While the others ran out on to the sand I arranged a back bedroom as my study and spread out the timetables, gradient graphs, work sheets moon tables, topographical maps, and plot charts of Bhowani Junction, to be ready for Helen Taylor's barrage. In other drawers I put away the draft of Taj Mahal, and some notes for my next novel.

That summer divided itself into two parts: rain, and the rest. Under 'rain' I recall that we were in Llanaber seventy-four days, of which it rained sixty-two. We were able to visit the beach some fifteen days in all, of which several were wet, cold, windswept or all three. With the intention of teaching the children the joys of camping I took them one at a time up Cwm Bychan, a valley along the coast with Roman steps and fine hidden tarns.

Martin came off all right, as it only drizzled, but when Susan's turn came we were flooded out. (Me, after twenty‑five years camping all over the world! But the damned stream climbed a hill to get us at 1 a.m.) We stumbled down the mountain in black dark and driving rain, and passed the rest of the night huddled together, soaked, on a pile of manure in a barn. She was nine and afterwards I never could persuade her that camping was really fun.

There was rain at Harlech Castle, rain at Caernarvon Castle, rain slanting over Trawsfynydd, seen from the head of Cwm Bychan, rain at Llanfairpwllgwyngllgogerchwyrndrobwlltysiliogogogoch, rain on the Druidical sites we looked for in Anglesey, rain on the prehistoric hut circles at Tre'r Ceiri (I asked the children to imagine the Roman soldiers trudging up through the gorse, cursing the weather), rain in our camp on a grassy stretch of the deserted light slate railway near Tan y Bwlch, rainy stone walls and rainy slate roofs and rainy pubs closed on Sundays, and waiting in the rain to buy fish and chips wrapped in wet newspaper for supper...

And the rest? Well, the sun shone one day when Barbara and I climbed Cader Idris (but it rained when we walked up Snowdon). The children copied the Welsh lilt, and we all learned to differentiate between Jones the Fish, Jones the Coal, Jones the Bread, Jones the Paper and Jones the Garage. We made pilgrimages to several light and miniature railways then running in Wales, that the children might remember the glory of steam. We dashed round Scotland in a five-day 'It's Tuesday so we must be in Inverness' tour of our own devising.) But I remember best the climb to Ais Gill summit on the Yorkshire moors, and a pair of curlews, the bleak stone curve of Ribblehead viaduct swinging into the lowering mass of Blea Moor ahead, cloud shadows and a threatening touch of violet in the light; and the rhythmic quickening of the beat after Ais Gill, the swaying racing passage down the Eden Valley, as rich and lovely as any in Europe, the great gables of the fells slowly falling back.)

And I worked. I had a good strong Taj Mahal story, principally because I had found out in my researches that the sons of the Emperor who built it, Shah Jehan, had revolted against him and imprisoned him close by the Taj. This, and some legends about Mumtaz Mahal, the wife whose tomb it was, added some needed salt and lemon to the frosting sugar sweetness of the building and of the basic story.

Bhowani Junction was in its final editorial process, and the letters winged back and forth between New York and Llanaber. Helen wrote: On the subject of bearing down hard, Patrick is a prime case in point, and I... would ask you to think about his general character and do more if you can. To some readers he is still a stupid oaf and nothing more — not in the least sympathetic. The reason may be the innumerable large and small things against him that are absolutely unrelieved, until you get almost to the end and find that he is a good hunter. He is loud-mouthed and tactless, a bully, a rash and unthinking blunderer. He cannot control his emotions, and he blusters, or he cries childish tears. He is tongue-tied. He cannot ride a motor-cycle well, and he cannot dance well. He drinks badly. He is caught in bed with Rose Mary behaving like an animal. He cannot command the respect of his A.F.I. platoon who titter at him. He bites finger-nails. The basic outlines of his character are clear — that of the unsure and unstable victim of an unfortunate societal environment, whose worst qualities come to the fore in any emergency, a man who has learned no protective coloration whatsoever.

But there is also the suspicion that he is unreliable and worthless, and this may come from that overabundance of detail, from the many times he is scored on by Savage and made to look and feel ludicrous, from his frequent cursings at the Collector, Ranjit and the other Indians. I wish you could think of some saving graces for Patrick, not only because Victoria does love and understand him, but because his last blundering action — which results in the death of Birkhe — is the final straw if one does not like Patrick. See if you can introduce some positive new note... In Victoria's section she might remember something about their growing up together, some fun-loving qualities (which he has) and the tenderness he has always felt for her. Both of their meetings behind the signal light behind her house might not have to end disastrously... On the first, he might even comfort Victoria, and, since he loves her, not think only of himself, but wonder how he can help her. For he really understands their dilemma as Anglo-Indians just as well as she does... He is a soft-hearted man, but not essentially weak...

And more, much more. I sent her six pages in return, including a total acceptance of her dissections of the characters of Patrick, Victoria, and Rodney. Then I started my counter-battery fire:

There has been the problem of technicalities. I know that S.M. or G.H.Q., or three-tonner, sprung suddenly on the average reader, will be unintelligible. But I am writing about experts, speaking in the first person to other experts, and that is how they speak. And I have always wondered why you pick on the army, which I write about, instead of, say, the sea. Your principles should he applied to those innumerable sea-stories of which I and most other men are very fond. Let us take the standard situation:

'Reef the main t'garns'l,' Captain Joshua roared into the teeth of the gale.

The bo'sun shouted, 'Aye aye, sir' and ran toward the foc'sle.

I love this. Everyone loves it. We don't understand a word of it, but the sailors, thank God, do. They are technical experts, otherwise I wouldn't be on that ship with them, not on your life. But I will edit the above (as you would like it):

Do you see those three big poles stuck in the deck?' Captain Joshua roared. He had to roar because the wind velocity exceeded fifty nautical miles an hour. 'Aye aye, sir,' answered the principal sailor in the vessel (not counting the officers, that is). The captain looked at him reproachfully. He blushed, remembering that he was in a book, and muttered 'I mean, Yes, Captain Joshua, I have followed you so far.' 'Well, take the last one, the one nearest the blunt end of the ship. Follow the pole with our eyes...' But the waves now exceeded seventy feet in height and the ship quickly sank under them, carrying Captain Joshua and all who travelled with him to a merciful oblivion. ?

* * *

?

It is amazingly unhelpful to write the message COARSE in the margin opposite some sentence. You must believe me when I tell you that I meant it to be coarse. It was a coarse man speaking in a coarse moment; and even if it wasn't, you must still believe I know the meaning of the simpler phrases I write down. So what? Do you mean that you don't want any coarse people in any book published by the Viking Press? Do you mean that you don't mind coarse people, but they mustn't be too coarse? Too coarse for whom? You? Harold? The Book Clubs? The average reader? Anything you say that makes sense I will pay great attention to. But the single word COARSE makes no sense, not from an editor to a writer.

?

* * *

?

The many peremptory commands pencilled in the margin — CUT, OUT, NIX, WON'T GO — do make sense of course — from a publisher's editor to a writer. Is this the sense intended?... The problem is a very real one and it won't be solved by writing NIX any more than it will be by me calling the lot of you a pack of literary bystanders. The real problem is that the word may have a greater impact on the reader, if he is not used to it, than it ought to have... Nevertheless there are cases where only the word spoken is the right word. There are forces that may prevent that word being used in a book; our business is to study those forces in every case, and the importance of the book and its characters; please don't emit any further smoke screens about offensiveness, staleness, tastelessness, and so on, People are offensive, stale, and tasteless (outside literary-discussion groups). FUCK is sometimes the best and only right word to use.

Having gone carefully through Bhowani Junction I find thirteen really foul words. SHIT (4), FUCK (5), CUNT (1), BUGGER (3). In the milieu, over several weeks, dealing with at least two violently-tempered men, I am amazed at my own restraint. Even they could probably be reduced to half that number without altering anything but the finest shading of a nuance in some characterization. But because I am a coward and because you are all cowards too, I am going to eliminate them. Nobody likes to be brought face to face with his own weakness, and I do not thank you for doing so in this case. This affair has been like an attack that failed. in the safety of the rear areas we all talked bravely about the integrity of the artist and the solemn privileges of the publisher. As we advanced into the open the brave words became carefully phrased warnings about artistic necessity and intelligent readers. At last, whimpering of the investigating committees and reader-resistance, the line broke, turned tail, and fled. I am left alone and I haven't got the guts to go on by myself. All I ask, when we are recovering our nerve over a drink ten miles from the firing, is that we should not talk any more about integrity...

The rain dripped steadily from the eaves. I sealed the letter for mailing and picked up my notes on the next novel. I had decided I would tackle the first arrival of the British in India, in about A.D. 1600. What did the British know of India then? Obviously, very little... no maps, no tourist reports, only the smallest commerce and that passing through a score of intermediaries. A time of wonder, when anything could be believed, and was, about the Mysterious East. The golden coasts of Malabar and Coromandel. Coromandel! The name itself was hung with sea-born pearls.

Everyone knows too damn much nowadays. Then there would be this sense of marvel, of acceptance of magic, of seeking after Golcondas. A young, a very young hero then, to intensify the youngness of the world, the newness of the British relationship with India. A gullible youth, probably, but intelligent; romantic, certainly. A boy walking at the tail of a Wiltshire plough, dreaming of brown girls. Perhaps he has to leave? He has put one of the milkmaids in the family way? No, if he is to be unusual, it must be the lord's daughter, or perhaps two simultaneously, and all the while he is not really thinking of their pliant bodies but of the sand and the palms on the Coromandel coast... Coromandel!

Chapter Fourteen

'Estribor cinco, a ciento sesenta y tres,' the captain snapped.

The quartermaster turned the wheel slightly, responding, 'Estribor cinco. Ciento sesenta y tres. Asi, asi, asi!' Out on the port wing of the bridge the First Lieutenant crouched over the sighting compass, taking a bearing on a point of cliff just visible under low cloud ahead. Snow flurried around him, gathered on the bridge glass and was thrown off by the whirling windshield disc in front of the quartermaster. The Magellan Strait stretched ahead, its waters breaking grey-and white-capped in the earliest light. The great headland plunging black out of the clouds on the starboard bow was Cape Froward, the southernmost tip of the mainland of the American continents. Spray burst over the bow and rimed the canvas of the forward gun.

'Babor dies a…'

Was I asleep? Was I re-living those youthful daydreams of the naval career lost to me by the discovery of my slight colour-blindness? Was I, in a fit of schizophrenia, doing in imagination what I could never do in reality — rap out confident orders, stand swaying in heavy duffel coat, hands in pockets, binoculars slung round the neck, eyes crows-footed from peering into Cape Horn gales?

No, it was real. My feet were cold in the borrowed sea-boots, and I felt a little queasy. In one pocket a cold hand clutched a notebook, for I was on an assignment for Life International. Cape Horn lay 150 miles ahead through storm-swept channels. I thought I'd better go and lie down a while.

It was six months since we returned to Rockland County after our Welsh 'summer'. I had a new agent, as Miriam Howell and I had decided to part professional company, in spite of a warm personal attachment (Barbara and I often went into New York to dine and drink with her in her private capacity as Mrs Ralph Warren). The reason was that her strength as an agent lay in the theatre rather than with books and magazines. On the recommendation of Laurence Pollinger I wrote to Helen Strauss, head of the literary department at the William Morris Agency, asking if she would take me on. At a meeting in New York soon after I got back she agreed to do so, and we laid the foundations of another friendship.

The Giants finished 5th in the National League, and we muttered, 'Wait till next year!' Army football was climbing fast out of the cheating doldrums, and we watched Pat Uebel batter out three touchdowns in a 20-7 defeat of Navy. The Auberjonois had a large television set now, and our New Year's Day Bowl Game marathon was conducted in front of open windows, wearing overcoats and carrying flasks and waving banners. But Fernand, still hunted by McCarthy, had made up his mind to leave the country. 'I can do more for America in Europe than I can here,' he said sadly.

Visiting us from the wilds of Centre Island, Hamish and Misha Mackay reported that they were settled in, and all was going well. Misha said that when conversation turned that way, which was probably not too often, the house guests were vaguely surprised to learn that she, the cook, had a Master of Arts degree in Indian and Colonial History; but they were quite flabbergasted to discover that the 'Colonial' part was what they had always thought of as American History. This and other accomplishments and talents of the cook having been discovered, Madame la Chatelaine would summon her every morning, not to receive orders on the day's menus, but to hear and pass opinion on the Chatelaine's latest poem. One day the line under discussion was:

The tulips open their mouths and say doh Misha took this problem back to Hamish for analysis, and he, considering the aggressive brilliance of the tulips in their beds, suggested that the line should read:

The tulips open their mouths and shout doh If his suggestion was accepted, he received no acknowledgement.

Susan attained 4th grade, Martin 2nd. We acquired another kitten, which the children insisted on naming Tany-Bwlch, after the little railway station on the abandoned Welsh slate line. God knows what the neighbours thought when they ran about calling for it. I worked on Coromandel!, finishing the first draft in December. The Book of the Month Club chose Bhowani Junction for distribution to their members in March 1954. A little later the British Book Society also chose it, and I felt justified in trading in our 1950 Plymouth for a 1954 Dodge convertible.

I had time on my hands, and Helen Strauss arranged for me to talk with Cal Whipple, the assistant editor of Life International. Cal asked me if I would be interested in doing a piece on Cape Horn, then suddenly returned to strategic importance because the Navy's new atomic carrier, the U.S.S. Forrestal, could not get through the Panama Canal. For the first time since 1914 the Horn passage would have to be used by American warships travelling between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the U.S.A. Cal was enthusiastic, for sailing was his hobby and Joshua Slocum and Erskine Childers among his gods. I also am a romantic, and my head at once filled with images of China clippers plunging through monstrous seas, the Horn dim on the port bow and the blue-nosed skipper bellowing 'Let out that reef in the mizzen royals Mister Mate!'

'I'll go,' I said, pretending to ignore the pittance that Life International paid for such chores. Followed a flurry of letters to the Chilean Ambassador in Washington, an hour's instruction in how to work a Leica (camera and instruction provided gratis by Helen Taylor), on March 14 southward-ho, a couple of days conferring and explaining in Santiago and Punta Arenas, and here I was, supercargo on the Chilean patrol vessel Lautaro. She was an ex-U.S. Auxiliary Tug, All Services, of 805 tons, 143 feet long, with a crew of about 45. The Chileans had mounted a small gun on the forecastle, and 20mm. Oerlikons on each flank of the bridge. The captain was LieutenantCommander Patricio Carvajal — short, clean-cut, darkly good-looking, the very picture of a youngish officer of the Royal Navy. He had been a little reserved with me at first, but the ice was melting as the weather grew colder. First Lieutenant Pedro Fierro was tall and vaguely saturnine. The poor wretch had to give up his cabin to me and now shared with the sub., Jaime Germain, an irrepressible young man of about twenty. The ship was on a routine southward patrol from Punta Arenas, the southernmost city in the world. Its first task was to re-supply the crew of the weather station and lighthouse on the Diego Ramirez Islands, seventy-five miles south-west of Cape Horn. My job was to get an insight into the area, find out what it had meant in the past and what it might mean now, and pass it on to the readers of Life International.

The geography of the area is intricate; but as a generalization, a glance at the map will show that though the mainland of America ends at Cape Froward, close-knit islands small and large continue south-eastward for another 200 miles. One of the islands — Tierra del Fuego — is huge; and others, such as Navarino and Hoste, are large; but most, including Horn Island — the southern point of which is the Cape — are small. The channels between are sometimes broad and straight, more often complex, sharply angled, unmarked and unlighted, and even in bright sunshine extremely dangerous; but the dominant weather is rain, storm, and fog. The best known of the big channels is the 300-mile-long V-shaped passage from ocean to ocean named after the first European to see this land, Ferdinand Magellan. He reached the eastern end of the strait on October 21, 1520, and named the low headland there the Cape of the 10,000 Virgins. He then passed through and on November 18 entered the Pacific Ocean near the Evangelistas Rocks, and sailed on to his death in the Philippines.

Fifty years later Captain Francis Drake followed the furrows of Magellan's keels through the strait, entering the Pacific on September 6, 1578. He was then struck by a gale which blew him south down the coast, and then actually back eastward into the strait between Antarctica and Cape Horn, though he saw neither. This reach of water, 500 miles wide and the stormiest in the world, was later named Drake Strait.

More Spaniards and British — Sarmiento, Cavendish, and others — followed; but the next important discovery was made by the Dutchmen Jacob Lemaire and Willem Schouten. In order to protect the position of the Dutch East India Company the Dutch sovereign had ruled that only the Company's ships (among Dutch vessels) could use the Magellan Strait when on passage to or from the Spice Islands (Java, Bali, Celebes, etc.). Lemaire and Schouten determined to circumvent the edict by finding a way from ocean to ocean farther south, although many sailors of the time said there was no such passage — that the land south of the Magellan Strait was joined to Antarctica. But Hawkins had believed there was a way, and Drake's adventures in the storm pointed to the same conclusion. So the two Dutchmen sailed from Texel in the ship Concordia, of Horn, Holland, on June 14, 1615. On May 29, 1616, they rounded the southernmost tip of land of the southernmost American island and named it after their home town — Horn. Weeks later they reached the first Dutch East India Company outpost in the Spice Islands and reported they had found a new way thither. They were naturally thrown into jail as liars.

When the rumour that Drake Strait was an open passage reached Spain, the king sent out two caravels under Nodal to investigate. These two tiny ships sailed in 1618, discovered a small group of islands seventy-five miles southwest of the Horn, named them after the expedition's navigator, Diego Ramirez, and returned to Spain without losing a man after a voyage of nine months.

Since the Spaniards brought back most of their American gold by an overland trip at Panama, the Drake and Magellan straits were used mainly by British, Dutch, and French men-of-war, by privateers and pirates, and gradually by men of science. Anson went round in his great circumnavigation of 1740. Carteret, Foul-Weather Jack Byron (the poet's uncle), Kerguelen, Bougainville, and Cook all passed here. Bligh passed as sailing master under Cook, but when in command of the Bounty on the expedition which ended in mutiny, he could not make the passage. After two months striving against gales and head-winds he turned back and headed for Tahiti clear round the world in the other direction.

In the 19th century the Horn passage first came into major use as a sea lane, being used by wool and tea clippers from Australia and China, American emigrants to California, and indeed much other traffic of the expanding nation. The Magellan Strait was less and less used, for it did not offer enough sea-room for the bigger, faster ships; but the Royal Navy had thoroughly surveyed the whole area in the 1820s and 1830s. Most of the work was done by the 10-gun brig Beagle, Captain Fitzroy. On the second expedition he too carried a supercargo: a young scientific observer called Charles Darwin. Another ocean-to-ocean passage about halfway between the Magellan Strait and Cape Horn was charted and named after the ship — the Beagle Channel.

The great days were few, for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point lessened the Horn's importance, the completion of the Suez Canal hastened its decline, and the building of the Panama Canal finished it off. After the last grain clippers scudded eastbound past the Horn in 1939 it saw no one but a few explorers, warships, solitary yachtsmen, and seal hunters.

As so often elsewhere, the white man drove the original inhabitants of the area to extinction. The Ona lived on the mainland and in Tierra del Fuego; it was from their fires that the first Spaniards named the big island Land of Fire — Fuego. In due course someone noticed that the land and climate were suitable for sheep ranching. The Ona tried to prevent the theft, and were duly hunted like animals and killed off. None now remain.

The Alcaluf were called the Canoe Indians. They inhabited the islands, channels, and bays up the west coast from the Beagle Channel northward. It was probably Alcalufs about whom Darwin wrote in a famous passage:

While going one day on shore near Wollaston island, we pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians... (they) were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together with the spray, trickled down her body. In an-other harbour, not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-born child, came one day alongside the vessel, and remained there out of mere curiosity, whilst the sleet fell and thawed on her naked bosom, and on the skin of the naked baby!... At night five or six human beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals. Whenever it is low water, winter or summer, night or day, they must rise to pick shell-fish from the rocks; and the women either dive to collect sea‑eggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and with a baited hair-line without any hook, jerk out little fish.

Today the Chilean Navy looks after a settlement of a few Alcaluf at Puerto Aysen, but their culture is to all intents dead.

The Yahgan lived south of Tierra del Fuego, and were wiped out mainly by the kindly efforts of the missionaries who, disapproving of their nakedness, gave them blankets to wear. The blankets came from measles patients and had not been disinfected. To such as the Yahgan, measles is a fatal disease, and in 1954 there was only one reputedly pure-blooded Yahgan left alive.

At the dingy damp museum of the Silesian Fathers in Punta Arenas I had seen a few relics of these unhappy people. They had been big and handsome, and had well adapted their lives to their hard environment. Sometimes they went naked and sometimes they wore guanaco capes or lovely cloaks of rat skins or penguin pelts. I wished I could have seen them as Darwin saw them, but they were gone, all except that lone old Yahgan woman; and I felt that the purpose of the museum, rather than to mourn a vanished race, was to show that it had not been worth preserving.

The Lautaro plunged into the Magdalena Channel, and the light strengthened in the north-east. It was inexplicably strange to have the light coming from the north. We threaded down calmer passages, where mountains clothed with beech forest swept down to the water's edge. Snow whitened the trees, 1,000 feet up; a little higher, clouds hid the tops. Squalls rushed at us, buffeted the ship, and passed on without warning or leave. We faced the long stretch of Cockburn Passage, with the wind dead ahead at Force 6, and the Lautaro began to pitch heavily. Hail storms swept the deck and churned up the strait astern.

The wind increased to Force 8. At the mouth of the passage, for a couple of miles, we entered the Southern Ocean. The waves ran twenty feet high, dark grey-blue, foam-capped, rolling endlessly in from the south-west. The little grey ship rose, plunged, lurched. Cormorants and seagulls swept past, banking in the wind, to fetch up astern and dip into our wake. We turned south to enter Brecknock Passage and the seas hit us broadside on. I watched the roll gauge on the rear bulkhead of the bridge, by the chart desk: it recorded 20 degrees each way. Below decks there was a continuous clangour of sound. We passed into the lee of Astrea Island and at once the sound and motion ceased. Behind I saw the massive sea breaking against the islands and rocks in the mouth of the Passage. Spray burst a hundred feet in the air and a veil of white water blew across the face of Aguirre Island.

At 4 p.m. we entered Whaleboat Sound. (Here in 1827 Indians stole the Beagle's whaleboat.) Seaweed floated in yellow ropes like witches' hair, flat and long and dank. Germain, on watch, scanned the chart as though his life depended on it, for it did: some of these long seaweed locks had been torn loose in the ocean, and were floating free; others were growing from a rock close below the surface, and the weed might be 200 feet long; so the rock could be... where? Some of the rocks were marked on the chart, most were not. The air temperature was 43 degrees. Diego Ramirez, our destination, reported low barometer there, and wind Force 7. If these conditions held we would not be able to land supplies for them in our boats.

At half past six we anchored in Puerto Engaño — a stark little bay sheltered by a low island. I was wearing thick wool underpants, heavy trousers, Viyella shirt, wool sweater, windjacket, and duffel coat, but I wasn't warm. After dinner in the tiny wardroom we played liar dice, and I taught them a form we played in the Indian Army, which they found more exciting than theirs. We talked, too, mainly about Argentina, which was extremely unpopular with all Chileans I ever spoke to. The seeds of the antipathy lay in past and present frontier disputes, but even if there had been none such, Chileans would still have regarded the Argentinians as a bunch of unstable and bombastic sabre-rattlers. At this time Peron was still in power, but his throne was shaky.

I went to my bunk, and lay there a while, hearing the steel murmur of the anchored ship, and thinking that it was these people, Chileans and Argentinians, Ona and Alcaluf, Fitzroy and Darwin, and the blue-nosed skippers, who made the texture of Cape Horn; but what would they matter to the U.S.S. Forrestal, hence to my article? I must find a way.

Next day, March 22, we weighed anchor at 7 a.m. and steamed on down the north-west arm of the Beagle Channel in cloud, hail and rain, but not much wind and that from astern. Many dolphins followed us on both quarters and Mono, the shaggy ship's dog of indeterminate but multiple breeding, dashed from side to side barking at them. At 11 a.m. Patricio Carvajal had all the weapons fired for practice (and, I think, in the hope that an Argentine spy was lurking in the seaweed) — the gun with solid shot and the Oerlikons with tracer. Diego Ramirez reported a rising barometer and a south-west wind, the conditions we needed to land the stores. Patricio decided to go straight to Wulaia, a small settlement on Navarino Island, and thence to Diego Ramirez if the weather held. Down in that farther south the weather was king. Fierro told me that the lighthouse on the Evangelistas Rocks, at the western mouth of the Magellan Strait, is sometimes inaccessible for forty-five days on end. I believed him, for every day I had studied the reports we received from various lighthouses and weather stations. Whatever the rest had to say, Evangelistas always reported Wind Force 8, and Sea Gruesa or Boba (Heavy or Very Heavy).

We anchored at Wulaia, where we found four houses, a couple of radio masts, and a small landing-craft loading sheep. Our whaleboat took ashore two women and two children we had brought from Punta Arenas to join their men — the sailors at the radio station. I went along and had a talk with the petty officer in charge on shore. It was a beautiful place, dense forests rising up the slope behind the tiny settlement, a rushing stream, a sheltering island in front, and the snow mountains of Hoste Island spread in jagged magnificence across the western horizon. Three men were stationed there, with their families, for two years at a time. I asked the petty officer whether he did not find the life a little bleak. He seemed surprised at such a foolish question. Why no, certainly not, he said. He had a good house, cows, fresh milk, a few sheep. What more could a man ask?'

Back aboard the Lautaro, I told this to Fierro, who said, 'Many of our sailors are from Chiloe. If you think it's bleak here, you should see the places they came from before they joined the Navy.' He also told me of the problem they had been having with such really isolated posts as the Evangelistas. If they put on two men with their wives, there was invariably wife swopping; if they put on men only, there was sodomy. Better the cross-adultery, the navy finally decided, and chose the women.

The name of the island sheltering Wulaia is Button, and it has an interesting history. When the Beagle's whaleboat was stolen on the first expedition Fitzroy, in the course of raging up and down the channels looking for it, seized four Indians as hostages. The sailors named them after incidents of their capture: Boat Memory, York Minster, Jemmy Button, and Fuegia Basket (a girl). The whaleboat was never recovered, and Fitzroy took the four back to England with the ship, intending 'to procure for these people a suitable education and, after two or three years... send them back to their country, with as large a stock as I can collect of those articles most useful to them, and most likely to improve the condition of their countrymen...'

Things did not work out quite like that, of course. Boat Memory died of smallpox, and after only nine months of 'education' (and meetings with King William and Queen Adelaide), the other three were once more embarked in H.M.S. Beagle, and heading for home. A year later Fitzroy put them ashore at Wulaia, where York Minster was to marry Fuegia Basket (by then eleven and a half). All three were clothed, and well provided with food and gifts. A year and a month later again the Beagle, turning into the Murray Channel, saw a canoe ahead with three Indians in it. All were naked, thin, and ill. One was Jemmy Button. Some months before York Minster had stripped him of all his belongings, stolen his boat, and disappeared with Fuegia Basket. After two days on board Fitzroy put Jemmy Button ashore for the last time, again clothed and provisioned. As the little brig headed out of the bay, a column of smoke rose from the sheltering island — Button Island — as Jemmy Button said farewell to his captain and what he had perhaps long thought of as his ship.

In 1859 a party of missionaries, trying to convert the heathen from a base at Wulaia, were murdered by the Indians. The man who threw the first stone was Billy Button, Jemmy's son. Fuegia Basket was heard of whoring herself on passing sealers. In 1865 Captain Fitzroy, a fundamentalist unhinged by progress in general and Darwin's Origin of Species in particular, shot himself.

And all this is woven into the warp of the Horn.

The weather report from Diego Ramirez was good, and Patricio said, 'We go.' We weighed from Wulaia at 5.30 p.m. and headed south. It got colder, and I tied down all my belongings and wedged everything that could not be tied.

At 9 p.m. we were forty-five minutes short of False Cape Horn, which is the southern tip of Hoste Island. There was a heavy overcast with a patch of light in the sky to the south. The swell was moderate to heavy, with no breakers there in the lee of Hoste. The Lautaro pitched easily. All bridge apparatus — radar, echo sounder, etc. — was working, and Fierro had the watch. Diego Ramirez reported their barometer steady, wind south-west Force 5, sea gruesa. I went to my cabin and jammed myself into the bed. A few minutes later we passed out into the open ocean.

For a long time I thought I was going to be seasick, as the rolling steadily increased to about 25 degrees each way. Then I realized that, although I felt light-headed, I had no cold forehead, no shivers, and no cold sweat or other ill feeling. With that I fell sound asleep until 5 a.m. when I went up to the bridge. After a few minutes Fierro, who was back on watch, went out. Soon Patricio appeared, and a few moments after that...

The quartermaster at the wheel turned the wheel to the left, then more. He glanced at the compass in front of him. Then he spun the wheel to the right... far, far... waited, looked at the compass. He turned the wheel back and said, 'Falló la caña.'

Patricio leaped off his high chair, looked at the compass and snapped 'Al medio la calla! Para la maquina!'

Our steering gear had failed. We were seventy miles out in Drake Strait, with Diego Ramirez still five miles to the south-west. As the light spread, the Cape Horn current began to carry us east at two knots. In that direction there was no land clear around the world, and I began to feel empty and apprehensive. We lay broadside on to the seas, rolling now to 30 degrees each way. The engineer warrant officer scurried off to find the trouble. Half a dozen of us jammed ourselves into nooks and crannies of the bridge, and waited. The sun rose, casting our shadow over the water towards the wall of white spray bursting on the long reef running north from Diego Ramirez. Radio messages reporting our plight went to naval headquarters at Punta Arenas, where the Chilean admiral was a collateral connection of that Indian Army general, quoted in Chapter 1, who had raised the 4th Gurkhas; and bore the same names — Donald Macintyre. Admiral Macintyre put the Lientur our sister ship, under emergency orders to come out and help us; but she couldn't reach us in under forty-eight hours.

I had time to think of some of the more gruesome Cape Horn tales, particularly one I had recently heard in Santiago. An old English lady there had shown me her husband's diaries, and one story had stuck in my mind. In the present circumstances I wished it hadn't...

Her husband, Milward, had been a seaman in windjammers. On a day in 1875, just about here, a slackening and sudden filling of the sails to a gust of wind jerked the carpenter overboard. Milward, at the wheel, threw him a lifebelt as he floated astern. Then the ship came up into the wind and they launched the whaleboat. Everyone on board was watching to see whether the whaleboat had rescued the carpenter, when instead, they saw a great wave overturn it. A much longer time was needed before the second whaleboat could be launched, for it was well chocked and lashed down and used to store vegetables. When it was finally launched another crew pulled it away to windward, leaving only a few men on board the clipper. Fog descended. After a long wait the second boat crew loomed out of the fog, bleeding from foreheads, hands, and arms. They had brought no survivors from the first boat, nor the carpenter. They said they had found no one, only lifejackets floating around, all unfastened. The captain's theory was that albatrosses had attacked the men in the water and pecked their eyes out. Rather than face more such torture they had undone their lifejackets and pushed themselves under.

I looked at our whaleboat and cutter, and remembered that there were some automatics and rifles locked up in a corner of the bridge...

The engineers began to fix up a jury steering gear, using large chains direct on the rudder. That was ready by nine o'clock, and we set off erratically for Hoste Island at slow speed, erratically since there was no 'fine tuning' on those chains, and because the telephone had also failed, so orders had to be bellowed by megaphone from the bridge to the poop. Then the chief reported that he could mend the electrical steering gear but that the ship must be stopped and the jury rig disconnected to do it. Patricio ordered this done, and for another two hours we wallowed in the marching waves, wind and current sending us away from Diego Ramirez at over five knots.

When the steering was at last fixed, we turned and headed back towards it, for they had reported landing conditions O.K. When we got there though, Patricio spent barely a minute examining the beach through his binoculars from the wing of the bridge before he said, 'No... Starboard ten. Bearing six three. Full speed ahead!' We circled, tucked our stern under us, and headed for Orange Bay, where we would have to wait until conditions improved at Diego Ramirez. On the way in, with Hoste close ahead, we were rolling a steady 40 degrees each way, and the ward-room toilet excelled itself. In a roll it was always liable to explode water to a height of a foot or so. On this journey, when I was about to begin operations, it geysered up three feet, drenching me from the bottom up, and causing mild psychosomatic constipation for the rest of the trip.

At 5.30 p.m. the anchor splashed down in Orange Bay on the east side of Hoste Island, some twenty miles north of False Cape Horn.

Next day, while the engineers thoroughly overhauled the steering gear, I went ashore with Fierro and a whaleboat crew, to rebuild the Romanche tower. The Romanche was a French vessel which came here with a scientific expedition to observe the transit of Venus in 1882. At their camp they had erected a wooden pyramid which was marked on the charts, so the Chilean Navy saw that it was kept in good condition. The pyramid had blown away, but we found a small brick pillar containing a stone slab engraved with the dates Sep 1882 — Sep 1883. Nothing else. A ghostly army of stunted, white tree trunks marched away inland, and the beeches grew horizontally along the ground from the perpetual pressing down of the wind. It was cold, showers of rain and hail coming, passing, going, as the sailors began to rebuild the pyramid. Fierro and I tramped off into the wet wind, he with a Steyr rifle, taking pot-shots at large birds like geese. The ground underfoot was wet and springy, covered with a coarse tight-meshed grass. Pools of water, large and small glistened everywhere, and between the rain squalls we saw the Horn group of islands off to the south-east. After a couple of hours of exercise, harmless to the geese and badly needed by us after our confinement on board, we returned to find the pyramid made and the sailors dancing and singing round a huge fire they had built on that utterly desolate shore. The Chilean sailors, as I saw them, were as fine small-boat men as any in the world, and withal well-disciplined, humorous, tough, hard-working and completely natural. In their simplicity and good humour in primitive conditions they reminded me very much of the Gurkhas I loved. Our trip to Spain enabled me to communicate with them, and I learned some other modes of Spanish. (Here the toilet was neither escusado, chicago, nor retrete, but aseo.)

We rowed back to the Lautaro, sitting like a grey swan on a calm sea, and had a couple of piscos to get the chill out of our bones. Then, on the forecastle, I taught Patricio and Germain how to dance Gurkha jaunris, while the boatswain played a mouth-organ and the sailors clapped in rhythm and laughed ready to burst.

At 8 p.m. there was a favourable weather report from Diego Ramirez, and at eleven we weighed and headed south. It was a terrible night. The Lautaro bumped, bored, pitched, jerked, tossed, corkscrewed, and sunfished like a desperate bronco. The companion outside my cabin seemed to be full of metal cans, tearing paper, and hissing snakes. At 4 a.m. I could stand no more and went to the bridge, where I found we were rolling 48 degrees each way. I invited Patricio's attention to this, since it didn't seem quite safe for us to be standing on alternate ears every few seconds. Patricia said, 'We did 60 degrees each way coming up from Antarctica last month.' I went back to bed.

When I awoke we were at anchor in Diego Ramirez 'roads'. The cutter was already in the water, and the crew had started to load the whaleboat. On the island there were two little square houses and a straining Chilean flag, all facing north-east. Through the Nodales Strait, between the two islands, the Southern Ocean heaved under fitful sun in its mighty world-girdling swell, dark, dark blue flecked with broad glittering daubs of white. Both boats went off on their first trip, under Germain, who was bundled up to look like the Fat Boy of Peckham, what with his lifejacket, duffel coat, and probably all the shirts he owned. Thousands upon thousands of seabirds sat like a grey and white army on the island's shore. Catspaws of wind pounced on us, shook us, and vanished. Two squalls passed, but all the sailors cared about was getting their pictures in Life. Until Patricio called down a sharp reprimand from the bridge, they were all standing up in the wildly heaving boats as they passed, indicating shots and camera angles to me.

The bearded chief radio operator of Diego Ramirez came aboard to make a report. In contrast to Germain, he was wearing only trousers and a cotton shirt, and seemed quite impervious to the keening wind, the temperature of 36 degrees, and a sudden snow shower.

At noon, all done, we hooted on our siren and headed for St Martin's Bay, a small indentation on the east side of Hermite Island, about six miles from Horn Island. The wind was south-west, Force 6, and we were rolling about 20 degrees but barely pitching. It was difficult to estimate the spacing of the waves, as they were broken up by crests, sub-crests, wavelets, and separate waves five feet or so high crossing the main line of march, but I thought they averaged 300 yards apart. For the same reasons, it was also hard to judge their height, but none were less than twenty feet from trough to crest, and most were about forty feet. They rolled up steep and monstrous high behind the Lautaro's poop, where she had barely four feet of freeboard, and were terrifying to watch as I tried to photograph them. I understood why the old sailing masters used to put a box round the helmsman, so that he could not see astern.

At about 2 p.m., being full of eager impatience to see the most famous — and infamous — headland in the world, I went out on to the starboard wing of the bridge, and stared through binoculars into the east. At 3.20 p.m., cold and battered by the violent heavings of the ship, a pale shape took form, and my weariness and my bruises were forgotten. 'Cape Horn, bearing 85 degrees true!' I yelled into the bridge.

'Gracias,' Patricio said with a humouring smile, 'And it's fifteen nautical miles distant.' We drove on. A dismal grey light hung from low clouds, the island peaks were black cut-outs against the sky, the cloud base sinking lower and lower to merge into the dark sea. The great waves abated as we passed into the lee of Hermite. At 5 p.m. we anchored.

St Martin's Bay is a narrow cut, steep-sided, with trees growing from the sea up to 600 feet. Strong squalls blew down the sides upon us without any previous sign, just as the old sailing directions warned. The Lautaro heeled over to these sudden vicious blasts — Patricio had two bow anchors out — and it was easy to imagine the danger to a sailing ship. Many were overturned even under bare poles, and when they were wearing any sail the peril was great. The difficulty of the Horn passage, westbound, was that the skipper had to set a certain amount of sail to make headway against the prevailing winds and the eastward set of the Horn Current; then the winds could dismast him. The danger eastbound was simply driving the ship under: a blue-nosed skipper carrying a press of sail would refuse to reef, a heavy squall would strike, and the ship did not rise to the next wave. Instead, forced on by the great power of the wind, she simply drove in... and under.

Next day, which was the date of publication of Bhowani Junction, we sailed for Wulaia, going round Cape Horn first for my benefit. Horn Island is covered with brown-green grass but has no other vegetation. The south face of the cape is a giant cliff of grey and black rock, 1,350 feet high. The eastern ridge of this cliff is a steep cascade of turrets and pinnacles. At two miles out from it we were in fifty fathoms, on the continental shelf. A hundred miles south the shelf ends and the water is more than 2,000 fathoms deep. Seas were breaking heavily over two isolated rocks south-west of the cape, but I stared at the dark pyramid of the Horn, my thoughts full. I saw the glimpses men had had of it between storm wrack and wave. I sensed the terror and rage and courage and skill it had inspired. I tried to imagine the loom of it of a sudden, this close, under sail, a southerly gale blowing, as Darwin had seen it:

We stood out to sea, and on the second day again made the land, when we saw on our weather-bow this notorious promontory in its proper form — veiled in a mist, and its dim outline surrounded by a storm of wind and water. Great black clouds were rolling across the heavens, and squalls of rain, with hail, swept by us with... extreme violence. It is as imposing as its legend and I am privileged that I have seen it.

After passing the Cape we headed north and northwest round Horn Island, leaving Deceit and Hershel Islands to starboard. Soon fog and mist hid the Horn. Squalls of rain and hail hammered the Lautaro's steel deck and rattled the bridge glass. The ship passed, silent, gleaming grey and wet, down a formless aisle of black capes, deserted headlands, and grim rocks intermittently hidden by bursting spray. The radio operator came up with a cable for me that had been radioed to ship from Punta Arenas. It read:

BHOWANI JUNCTION PUBLISHED TODAY GENERALLY GOOD REVIEWS CONGRATULATIONS LOVE HELEN KEITH I read it again, and put it away in my pocket. The words remained imprinted, a little out of focus, on the wild seascape around us. I heard them, as though whispered, under the brief commands of Germain to the quartermaster at the wheel. The book was going to be a big success. In some ways it already was. I could write. Bhowani Junction had not been difficult to write — I had finished the first draft in ten days, at about 12,000 words a day — but it would be more acclaimed than any of the other three, if only because it dealt with the present.

'Babor cinco — así!'

'Así, así, así!'

This was what I had given up — my executive power and skill, the ability to cause masses of men and machinery to work efficiently together for an object higher than themselves, transcending themselves and their own desires or thoughts. The captain and crew of the Lautaro were more important to the world than I was, and a great deal less selfish, but when would any of their names appear in Who's Who, as mine already had? I wished I could exchange my small fame for that sense of doing a public work, and doing it well, which I had once had. I missed it. But it was gone, beyond recall, and I would have to live with nothing more than the memory.

Now it was my turn to stand champagne all round, and we repaired to the ward-room. There Patricio pored over a chart, found our exact position, off the western shore of Deceit Island, and then picked out a small unnamed island nearby. He pointed it out through the porthole and formally named it on the chart ISLOTE MASTERS. We had another drink.

The beat of the engines suddenly slowed, and a voice called, 'Captain, to the bridge!' — but Patricio was already there.

Fierro on watch, pointed to the echo-sounder. It had been recording 30 fathoms under our keel. It was now down to 12, and as we watched it recorded 8. Fierro had the engines to slow and we inched forward. The echo-sounder gave 5 fathoms and Patricio had his hand ready to signal 'Full astern' on the telegraph, for we drew about 15 feet. We glided on... 5... 6... 5... 10... 15... 30... 30. After a quarter of an hour Patricio ordered speed resumed, while Fierro carefully plotted and recorded the position of the unmarked reef. Then we went back to our champagne.

By mid afternoon we were approaching Navarino Island, and were surrounded by whales. All around us the choppy surface of the sea was marked by little puffs as though of steam, rising six to twenty feet above the water. The nearest was a quarter of a mile to port, but barely a hundred yards away I clearly saw three huge blue-black backs rolling along just below the surface.

We entered the Beagle Channel, and puttered eastward, stopping off at a couple of two-house settlements, before reaching Puerto Williams. This was named after one of the Chilean admiral heroes, most of whom were of British descent. Here Chile was building a small naval base and colony, complete with a hospital and maternity ward, in competition with Ushuaia on the opposite, Argentine, shore.

Until then women from the little estancias tucked into these bays and fiords would go to Ushuaia to have their babies, who were thus automatically born as Argentine citizens. Now they would be Chileans.

A mile or so east of the new colony was the settlement of Mejillones, where the last of the Yahgans, about thirty in number, lived. It was a sad place, tenebrous with the blight that has stricken all American Indians since the white man came. I spoke with a wrinkled brown-skinned crone who was said to be over 100 — that last pure-blooded Yahgan of whom I had heard in Punta Arenas. Then I walked alone on the bleak shore, my mind full of the desolation which had come upon the Yahgan, the Ona, and the Alcaluf, all once, like the seals and the eagles, living parts of this savage southern world.

It was raining next morning when I awoke, determined to climb the low mountain behind Puerto Williams. Germain and a Lieutenant Portilla, stationed at Williams, agreed to go with me, and soon we set off into the forest, armed with sandwiches, botas of wine and, in Germain's case, a new Spanish automatic. The drizzle continued, and we came to a wide stream. Germain fell in, but was no wetter than the rest of us. We left the edge of the sea and turned inland, among great fallen trees, moss swaying from the standing beeches, and began to climb on faint and sometimes confusing animal trails. The trees were dense at first but gradually grew smaller and more widely spaced as we climbed. Here, as everywhere in that wind-dominated region, some trees grew vertically while others had bowed to the constant force and grew almost as creepers or bushes.

We reached the tree line about noon, some 11,800 feet above the Beagle Channel. Germain was indecently full of energy, singing songs, making funny noises, imitating his instructor at the naval school, and shooting off his automatic in all directions. He made me feel about eighty-five years old.

Above the tree line the mountain went on up in shale, gravel, and thick springy moss, with occasional small streams. Soon the mist thickened and we could no longer see the crest above us. We decided to turn back. Back in the trees we sat on a fallen trunk for a rest. Germain suddenly gasped, and pointed. A large animal was staring at us from the forest thirty yards off. Germain and Portilla both cried 'Llama!' but it was a guanaco, for there are no llamas that far south. It wandered off, not very alarmed, making a harsh, strange cry, something like a parrot's. I ran after it and got a dubious photograph. For fifteen minutes afterwards we heard five or six guanacos calling down the hill, but never saw any more.

Next day the Lautaro set off on a cruise whose main purpose was to establish, once more, Chile's claim to the three small islands at the east end of the Beagle Channel — Nueva, Picton, and Lenox. When asked to arbitrate the original boundary dispute between Argentina and Chile in this area, King Edward VII of England ruled that the Beagle Channel should be the frontier. That seemed clear, since the Channel runs almost dead straight, and due east and west, all the disputed islands lying well to the south of it, that is, on the Chilean side.

Then Argentina claimed that the Channel did not go straight out to sea, but turned sharp south, narrowed from three miles to 500 yards, and passed between Navarino and Picton, leaving Picton and its two small companions on the Argentine side. Chile rejected this ridiculous claim, and kept a few retired sailors and marines living on the islands to confirm its ownership.

It was a beautiful day, a strong west wind blowing us down the Beagle Channel, the mountains of Argentine Tierra del Fuego a wall of snow to the north, the small one we had climbed on Navarino yesterday now clear in purple and russet autumn colours to the south, the white cavalry of the sea cantering eastwards beside us, the sun shining. Looking down the Channel towards the sun there were times when I could not see the surface for the luminous curtain of spray, 300 feet high, hanging over it. Water devils, like tornadoes, were being formed continually, to pirouette off down wind, half obscured by whirling rainbows.

We anchored in a tiny cove on Picton Island, and at once a dozen sailors went off in the whaleboat to look for erizos. These sea-urchins, together with the Alaskan king crab or sea-spider, are common in those cold waters, and that night we had erizos in scrambled eggs as well as the usual way, that is, cold with lemon, chopped raw onions, and brown bread on the side. The night was as lovely as the day, all the stars a-glitter and the Southern Cross directly overhead.

Next day a smoke signal on Nueva drew us in to pick up a colonist who wanted to go to Punta Arenas. On Lenox we embarked a sergeant of marines and his wife, and the radio operator went ashore to examine another settler's radio transmitter, which was giving trouble. He came back an hour later and reported briefly to Patricio. 'It won't work now.'

'Good,' Patricio said, dismissing the man.

We were alone in the ward-room, and I raised an eyebrow. 'We suspect that settler of communicating secretly with the Argentine navy in Ushuaia,' Patricio said. 'It's difficult to prove... but easy to stop.'

We made a night passage, steering by radar only for practice, across Orange Bay. After learning how to read and operate the radar scanner, I went to bed. I heard the anchor go down at midnight, awoke again at 4 a.m. to a fearful howling of wind, and went up to the bridge, where I found Patricio and Germain. Five minute squalls were hitting us from the west-south-west at Force 10. Patricio was putting out a starboard bow anchor and lengthening both anchor chains to 8 cables (120 fathoms, or 720 feet). Seeing that he was making the right decisions without me, I went back to sleep.

Next day we visited a small settlement on Hoste, then passed through the Murray Channel and anchored in Yendegaia Bay, barely two miles from the Argentine border on Tierra del Fuego. It was a wild, grim place, the water milky-green from the glacier whose snout lay just behind the estancia at the head of the bay. To the east a cathedral-like spire of rock was rapidly sinking into the evening dusk.

The owner of the estancia, Rudolf Serka, invited the officers and myself ashore for dinner. The food was good, but the house bare, comfortless and cold, except for the small hallway where a little stove was kept burning. I learned something of what was needed to survive as a settler in these parts. Serka's father, a Serb, started the estancia in 1914 with 300 head of sheep. The next year he had 150 left. It took father and son forty years to build the herd up to 7,000, plus a few cattle. They lost an average of 10 per cent of their animals every winter, as there was really not enough food for them. In the very hard winter of 1930 they lost over half. The Serkas were now Chileans, but their natural communications were with Ushuaia, which was just behind the cathedral mountain and easily reachable, there and back, in a day, by boat or on horseback. The nearest Chilean town, Porvenir, was a severe and dangerous seven-day ride away over snow-covered mountains. There was no road anywhere, except about five miles on the estate, which Serka had built, and now maintained himself. Supplies came once a month by an incredibly old ex-German tramp steamer called the Micalvi. I saw her at Puerto Williams and wondered that she could survive waves more than two feet high or an adverse current greater than two knots. I asked Serka about a small sailing boat lying on its side in the mud by the jetty. He said it was a seven-ton cutter, with no auxiliary engine. A couple of his men owned it, and used it for sealing on the Diego Ramirez Islands. They go there in that?' I cried.

Serka nodded. Patricio said, grinning, 'You see, we weren't being so brave out there in Lautaro, were we?'

I shivered. The idea of facing those gigantic seas and vicious winds, not for heroics, but to make a few dollars, in a seven-tonner... Serka tanked us up high with pisco and vermouth, which made our return to the Lautaro quite an adventure. She was moored to the end of the jetty — which was broken down, planks missing, unrailed, unlighted, and 300 feet long.

Next day we crossed the Beagle Channel to Canasacka, where a rancher was reputed to have oil and logs ready for us. The oil was, and we loaded it; but the logs were not. Patricio happily told him he'd have to wait for the next patrol ship, and we sailed. Our next task was to provision the crew of the Yamana Lighthouse on the north shore of the Beagle, but the weather turned dour, clouds sank low to the water, the mist thickened, wind and rain drove into the ship and Patricio decided to put off the provisioning till the next day. We steamed on westward. I used my binoculars to scan both sides of the channel, hoping to see a stranded whale. Serka had told us that he quite often found whales beached and dead or dying along the shore, well out of the water. They had been chased by packs of the giant black-and-white dolphins called killer whales (orca orca). Although the whale is ten times the size of the orca it has no protection except flight, and often hurls itself full speed ashore, where it cannot move or breathe, for its weight is too great for its own bones to support without the added lift of a water environment. The barrels of oil we had loaded at Canasacka were from two whales that the rancher had found, cut up, and rendered down.

We anchored that night in Romanche Bay, a narrow and steep-sided fiord on the south side of the Beagle Channel. It was the most picturesque anchorage, in its severe way, of the whole trip. Snow clouds drifted and flurried over the Channel, whose water was a palish inky green. Opposite, the Romanche Glacier hung down the mountain like a frozen river of ice, to the edge of the sea. A few minutes earlier we had passed the mighty Italia glacier, where a wide torrent of ice three hundred feet thick hangs blue and streaked over the northern shore of the Channel. A great piece of this ice, breaking off, made waves which nearly wrecked the Beagle's whaleboat in 1833.

Full darkness came and we gathered in the ward-room to play solo whist. I had Grand Abundance once and Misère twice, in successive hands, but still Patricio finished the evening ahead. He was a real card-player, one of those damned sharps who count the cards and remember who played what, and why, fifteen hands back.

The next day was clear and windy and the Pico Frances, from which both the Romanche and Italia glaciers flow, was very distinct. Snow cornices 100 feet high ran up the south and east ridges to the peak, which was over 7,000 feet above us. The wall facing the Channel was an almost vertical cliff, 4,000 feet sheer, enclosed by the ridges which swept down on either side, like arms, to the sea. Clouds of snow blew off the summit arete, making opaque white veils in the northern sky. Deep caves pitted the ice at the foot of the central cliff.

Then, as usual, clouds descended, the fog-horn blared mournfully, and it began to rain. The temperature was a bone-chilling 38 degrees, but that wasn't what made me hunch my shoulders deeper into my duffel coat. We were heading for Punta Arenas and 'civilization' now, and the prospect depressed me immensely. I was sorry, very sorry, to be leaving the desolate and savage splendour of the southern channels.

For the next two days we crawled down a low tunnel between grey sea and grey cloud, back along Whaleboat Sound, Cockburn Passage, the Magdalena Channel and at last out into the Magellan Strait opposite Cape Froward. There the clouds lifted, rainbows, storms, and hail passed over and the deck hummed like a steel guitar. Then the sun came out, and when we docked the stars were shining.

There was a man waiting on the jetty with a message for me: would I come for drinks at the British Club, right away. I sighed. I was back, all right.

The note was signed Michael Pigott, late 4th Gurkhas, which baffled me until I reached the club and learned that Pigott had served with the 2nd Battalion of my regiment in Italy as a wartime officer. I was in Burma at the time, so had not met or even heard of him. His father, Michael Pigott Sr, was General Manager of the Sociedad Explotador de Tierra del Fuego, the giant sheep combine which owned most of Chilean Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Until very recently the (British) General Manager's word had carried considerably more weight in these parts than that of the (Chilean) Governor of the Province, Magallanes.

So I stepped out of the Lautaro's world of steel and rain and sea into a chattering, perfumed flock of expatriates. Everyone was British, even the wives, and I gathered that it was deeply frowned upon to marry a Chilean. Everyone had been there a long time — Pigott Senior, forty-seven years — and no one spoke Spanish. Everyone complained about the weather, the Chileans, the peso. There was a lot of gossip, most of it silly (e.g. the local admiral was trying to get his daughter married off to an Englishman. What a hope!), but some informative. I solved a riddle which had been puzzling me for days: why was one mainland estancia called China Greek, on the map? An old gentleman explained: Greek was a misprint for Creek; Cina was the Ona word for 'woman'; by that creek the Ona women used to jump out at the early settlers to frighten the horses and enable their men to shoot the white men with bows and arrows.

When I returned to the Lautaro I found Fierro reading in the ward-room, though it was late. Fierro was a more taciturn man than either Patricio or young Germain, but I liked him. I asked him how anyone could live so long in a country and not speak its language. He said, with a sardonic smile, 'It's the English snobismo. It prevents fraternization with the natives, and miscegenation.'

On the next night I gave a farewell dinner party for the officers at the Cosmos Hotel, a marvellously rambling old firetrap long famous in Punta Arenas legend. Patricio, I had grown very fond of; he was a good man and a great sailor and I wished then, as I mixed my special extra-dry Martinis, that we could go on cruising those channels together for a long, long time more. They blinked when they tasted the Martinis and I can hear Patricio now, chuckling, 'Qué barbaro! Qué salvaje!'

Next day they all came to see me off at the airport and to tell the captain of my flight what an important fellow I was. Only mildly hungover, I headed north. That flight up the southern Andes is one of the most spectacular in the world, particularly at the low altitudes of those days. On the way south I had flown in a D.C.3 down the west side of the range from Puerto Montt to Balmaceda, where we passed through a gap to the east side. All the time we crawled along at eye level with mountain streams, snow-fields, or walls of forest sliding down to a crawling sea. Now, heading north in another D.C.3 over Patagonia, the landscape was at first a familiar desolation, of tundra pockmarked with half-frozen water holes and lakes large and small, the Andes cut out of the western sky. The light was pale blue and green, clouds low and streaky overhead, a path of sun, another hurrying cloud below. Gradually this gave way to the open pampa, a brown waste marked by the arrow-straight lines of sheep fences coming from nowhere and going to the same place. Mt. Fitzroy, the highest of the south Andes, wore cloud like a cloak on its shoulders.

The drone of the engine dropped in pitch and we began our descent towards Balmaceda. We crossed the lip of the Lago Buenos Aires gorge five feet up and at once flew into strong turbulence over the huge lake. On the north side we snaked among low hills, and when I saw a sheep peering at us from a crag fifty feet higher than the wing tip, I made ready to complain.

When we took off after the Balmaceda stop the pilot invited me forward. As we headed for the serried volcanoes of the south-central Andes he pressed me into his own seat and said, 'You fly her. She is easy... wonderful.' On orders I brought the D.C.3 down from 7,000 to 5,000 feet and controlled her through some turbulence, which felt much less alarming there than in the passenger cabin. 'Now head there,' the pilot said, pointing at the nearest volcano. 'Volcan Villarica, good volcano,' he said. 'Live! Very picturesque, take photos.' the sun blazed in a clear sky, the mountains thrust up all round, most of them higher than us. We flew on, a little winged insect among them. Volcan Villarica was smoking and the pilot's delight knew no bounds: then the co-pilot did take over the aeroplane, as they said I must be free to take pictures. He flew it over the crater 500 feet above the rim, then banked steeply. I got two photos straight down into the smoking, quaking, black and red bowels of the earth. It was wonderful. It was awful.

'Again?' the pilot cried eagerly.

'I'd love it,' I said, 'but I have a train to catch.'

When I returned to the cabin the passengers almost applauded. Chileans like spice in their lives. And they knew that the pilot and co-pilot were Chileans, and therefore without fault or technical blemish.

After a day's business in Santiago I headed for the Chilean lake country to have a rest and write up my notes. My taxi driver to the Alameda station was a girl-fancier, who began to extol the beauty and passion of Chilean women as soon as we drew away from the hotel. 'Look at that one!' he cried over his shoulder, the taxi veering — 'See how she walks!... And that, ay, what breasts' — the brakes squealed — 'There, a madonna!... But not that one, no virgin that one, eh?' He worked himself up to such a pitch about the nation's beauties that several times I thought he was going to stop the taxi, jump out, and enjoy one on the spot, insisting that I join him so that I could carry the good word back to the U.S.A. He had the right idea, at that, as I have never seen a higher average of beauty than in Chile. One particular young woman who walked by while we were stopped at a light was perhaps the loveliest human being I have ever seen. She was about 5 feet 8 inches, with ash-blonde hair, deep violet eyes, a velvet skin and a proud but supple carriage, and she fairly radiated an innocent sexuality. The taxi driver should have been quick-frozen and stuffed for exhibition at that moment, for his expression of combined animal lust and religious awe was the very epitome of man's feeling for woman.

It was a cool, cloudy afternoon, the sun low, black smoke drifting across the railroad yards. After a brief wait an old tall-funnelled steam locomotive emerged from a hole in the ground almost at my feet, pulling a string of dirty old-fashioned wooden carriages; but their windows were clean, and when I got in, I found they were comfortable, too. After the necessary backing and filling we chugged off for the south. (When Chileans talk about the south, sur, of their country, they mean the middle: the real south, where I had been, is called austral.)

Our engine laid a trail of black smoke through a haze of dust, for dust rose from the horse carts and trucks on the road beside us, and from our own passage down the dusty right of way. We ran between blue-grey mountains to the left and lower hills, silhouetted against the setting sun, to the right. We passed from sun-hazed eucalyptus groves into twilit villages, grass shacks, tin roofs, children playing in the dust. I talked with a young lawyer about the austral, about Argentina, about Chilean women. He purred with pleasure at my appreciation of them. The mixture of races caused their beauty, he said — German, Spanish, British, Yugo-Slav, and of course Indian. 'The Germans work hard here,' he said, then told half a dozen funny stories against them, not as Nazi types (which is not their reputation in Chile at all) but as dense, simple-minded people, the butts of everyone else's wit. Many Chileans seemed to have a similarly dichotomous outlook on their Indians, the Araucanos. They were proud that the Araucanos are the only Indians on the whole American continent never defeated by the white man. (Incidentally, the Incas couldn't conquer the Araucanos, either.) They told stories of their courage and endurance; of how the Indian Lautaro was a body servant to the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, then became a leader against the Spaniards and killed de Valdivia, only to be himself later betrayed and killed. They named their warships after Indians, but still treated them as a people apart, dirty, lazy and thriftless.

Next morning the white Chilean peasants, the rotos, that I saw out of the train window were beginning to look more as they 'ought' to, with wide black hats, huge spurs, ponchos plain and ponchitos coloured. The inn at Villarrica, my destination, was situated where the Tolten River flows out of Lake Villarrica on its short course to the Pacific. Across the lake towered the volcano I had been peering down into two days before. I found that the main business of the hotel was fishing; and though I had not thought of fishing when I made the reservation, I hired gear, a boat and a boatman and after lunch set off down the Tolten. It is a wide river, mostly about 100 feet across, that goes down to the ocean in alternate calm pools and shallow rapids. For long stretches the banks are cliffs, and with the bamboo growing everywhere I felt I was back in North Burma. Passing under one rock wall I was astonished to see a line pass my nose. I looked up and saw a roto sitting on the edge of the cliff a full ninety feet above, dangling his hook in the river — a very vertiginous pastime.

At each set of rapids the boatman would row back and forth across the river while my line streamed into the first of the rough water. At the fourth rapids, I got a bite. After ten minutes of low comedy, in which I nearly fell into the river, and did manage to tip several gallons of water into the boat, I landed a 1 lb. rainbow; then in quick succession two more, one of nearly 2 lb., who fought very hard and well. The boatman cooed congratulations and praise, and I wondered what were the going tip-rates for flattery and rainbow.

We floated on down the lovely river. I saw many wild duck, the sun went down into shimmering rapids ahead, twilight crept out of the misty earth, almost together I saw a cormorant and an owl. At last, in full darkness we reached the stage, eleven miles from the hotel. Here a truck would come and carry us and the boat back to Villarrica. Other fishermen, who had come down ahead of us, had been using dry fly only, so had caught brown trout, some considerably bigger than mine. I believe the record brown on the Token was over 30 lb. I learned that the fishermen, who had struck me as unusually dark-complexioned, were of Syrian descent, and all engaged in the carpet business.

The hotel truck did not come and, after talking around a big fire for an hour, we all picked up our gear, staked down the boats, and trudged a mile to the main road. Soon an empty truck stopped for us and we all piled in, fishermen, fishermen's wives, Indian guides, boatmen, rotos, trout, fishing rods, nets, creels, flasks full of pisco, and me. As cars passed us from behind their lights made a marvellous frieze of all those various heads, hats, and ponchoed shoulders across the back of the truck.

A storm that night blew down telephone and telegraph wires all over the country. The next day, April 10, dawned dull and raining, with showery intervals. The fishermen wrapped themselves in ponchos, and sou-westers and went off, their mutinous ladies staying behind. I wrote up my notes, and decided on the form and content of my article for Life International. I made up my mind I would come back to Chile one day, with Barbara. Then Herr Fritsch, the proprietor of the hotel, came in with a garbled message for me relayed from the travel agency in Santiago. They had a cable for me from William Strangways of New York, and they'd read it to me when they could.

Strangways? Strangways? I'd met one in India somewhere — but New York? I hung around in the lounge with the four Syrian ladies while Fritsch tried to get back to Santiago. Near one o'clock, after a couple of false alarms, he made it. The cable informed me that the motion picture rights to Bhowani Junction had been sold to M.G.M. for $150,000.

So Strangways must be a misprint for Helen Strauss and the William Morris Agency, I thought. Then the meaning of the cable hit me. It was absolute nonsense! Just before leaving Santiago the first time I had had a letter from Helen saying she thought there might be some movie interest in the book, at about $25,000: she asked for my instructions. I had cabled back telling her to use her best judgment, which was certainly more informed and experienced than mine.

Well, she'd sold the movie rights. I wondered where the mistake was in the figures. If they could read Strang-ways for Strauss, God alone knew what they could do with the figures. Perhaps Helen had got $50,000, perhaps $15,000. Quite enough to celebrate, any way. I ordered champagne, magnums of it, and invited the four ladies to join me. When they understood why, they accepted eagerly.

We drank champagne before lunch, through lunch, and after lunch, then had a few brandies. Then I packed and left quickly, for the ladies were rolling round under the tables like the drunken does in our orchard and I didn't want to be present when their husbands returned.

Next morning the train whispered towards Santiago through a heavy ground mist as the light spread. Gradually the proud Andes rose, snow-capped, to the east. At one in the afternoon we reached the capital and at half past one I saw a confirmation of Helen's cable. The correct figure was $155,000. I had achieved at least one part of that multiple object I had set myself when I first came to America. And then, I thought, I am a writer. So much to do, so little time.

Chapter Fifteen

Keith had said the reviews of Bhowani Junction were on the whole good. They were also perceptive, which reflected much credit on the reviewers, considering the remoteness of the theme from their experience. But one or two followed the pattern of Lewis Gannett in the New YorkHerald Tribune. At the end of a longish praising-with-faint-damns sort of review he wrote: (Masters) has indeed something of Kipling's... belief in the white man's burden, the coloured man's problems and the overriding virtue of loyalty.

Well, I might, or I might not; but there was no way Gannett could learn what I believed by reading a novel written in the multiple first person of created characters. He was, in fact, transferring to me sentiments expressed by some of my characters. This is as ignorant as the Government of India complaining (which they did) because a character said he'd just as soon see Gandhi dead as not. A government cannot be expected to know the difference between a writer and his characters, but a book critic can, even in New York.

Then Gannett, quoting again from the book, wrote:

There was a young lady called Starkie Who had an affair with a darkie The result of her sins Was an eightsome of twins Two black, two white, and four khaki. Apparently the colonel and Victoria both believed in the folklore genetics behind that vulgar verse. Evidently Mr Masters does, too.

Oh?

Gannett ended with the usual lazy assumption of the American Establishment Liberal that because I was an ex-imperialist I condescended to Indians. I made no reply or public comment on these and other biased remarks, for I still held to my old army credo: Never explain, never complain. A year or two later a good Indian novelist, Khushwant Singh, answered for me and for my work when he wrote: Both Kipling and Masters understand India. Only Masters understands Indians.

Life accepted my article on Cape Horn with enthusiasm, paid me, then marked the piece 'File and Forget', and stored it in a steel safe in the basement of the Time-Life building, where I presume it still moulders. I was not pleased, for I do not like being paid for talking to myself. Cal Whipple told me that one way and another the magazine bought about ten times what it used. Nothing came of my work for Korda, for his films ran into bad luck and the Prudential Insurance Company, out of which he had wheedled $20,000,000 was forcing him to curtail his productions.

I finished an article for Holiday magazine, and decided that my next book would be a volume of autobiography. In fact, I thought with grim anticipation, it would be the book the eleven publishers had rejected in 1948. There seemed little doubt now that Viking would publish Brutal and Licentious. What I had to do was first, as a minor pleasure, make sure that it did well enough to make all those eleven publishers wince; and secondly, as my will and duty, make sure that it was good enough to stand with Bhowani Junction. I got the typescript out of its drawer, and sent it to Helen Taylor for a thorough review and critique.

Martin, having discovered what Daddy did for a living, thought he'd try it, too. I told him he could use my typewriter whenever I was not, and that he must not worry about spelling. He showed talent, in nothing more than his way of getting into a story without fol-de-rol or fal-de-lay. Thus, a five-page story called ARMY began as follows:

One day in a pleasent army camp,

we were e-v evrything was still,

there was a very moldy colonel„,

and he was old to. suddenly the koreans came,

bang boom a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a

boom! banggang boom a-a-a-a-a-a-a-bam boom

whizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

bam bang boom aaaaaaaaaaaoooowwwwwwwwwwww

Barbara and I agreed that we must do something meaningful about using our sudden wealth, for when Lady Luck embraces a man, he who responds by taking out more insurance won't see her again. Barbara had no doubt what we should do — learn more of this America to which we had committed our lives and our children, and which had so amply repaid our faith. I agreed with her, and we planned a trans-continental camping trip, the children to spend a month on a ranch in Wyoming, while Barbara and I walked in the Tetons and went to the Pacific and back.

While preparations for this odyssey continued, I fired the penultimate shots in my battle with the Immigration service. I had filed my first papers for citizenship in December of the previous year. In January I found that considerable trouble getting visas, etc., attended my status as an Indian, and I asked Immigration if there was a way in which the processes of attaining citizenship, which seemed to be endless, could be speeded up. The answer was a simple No. Then, having had more trouble in South America (I couldn't get a visa for Peru at all), and seeing the certainty of more travel ahead, I wrote apologetically to Mr Rifkind, and asked him the same question. As before, he spoke a word on the telephone and an abject Immigration bureaucrat revealed what they had felt it their business to conceal: if I applied for naturalization in the Southern District of New York, rather than in the Supreme Court of Rockland County, my case would be much speeded. I did so, and on June 17 appeared at the Immigration bureau, with two witnesses, for the Bureau to acknowledge that I had filed my petition and that they had received it. There remained only the final hearing, so-called, which would actually be a swearing-in. I gave the Bureau Helen Strauss's address, and told her where letters and cables could reach me.

So, towards the end of June, 1954, we set off in bright sunshine for the west. We quickly developed and perfected habits which we have always since used in travelling in America. I set the alarm for 4 a.m., when I got up and lit the Coleman stove for coffee. Then, while Barbara helped get the children up and dressed, I took down and rolled the tents. They packed the bedding, and I gave everyone a hot drink and some Danish pastry (bought the day before). It was rare that we were not on the road by 4.30. Soon first light tinged the eastern dark behind us. The fading headlights showed rabbits on the verges, and deer in the forest, but no intrusions of man.

The roads were empty. We drove through small towns that might have been abandoned movie sets, so perfect of their kind and so still were they. We whispered down the endless aisles of the Great North Woods at a steady seventy, the children asleep in the back, and Barbara and I spelling each other every hour and a half. By breakfast we had done nearly 200 miles; by lunch, always taken in a small-town restaurant or diner, another 200; there we bought the supplies for supper and the next day's breakfast, and tried to be in camp (or a motel, for the sake of a bath, every few days) by 3 p.m., for at that hour one always found space in camp-sites and motels. Our afternoons were leisurely — a swim, a nap, a walk, a seeing of curiosities; and the evenings a leisurely cooking of steak or hot-dogs, putting the children to bed, a companionable drink by the light of the pressure lamp, a short stroll through the moonlit forest, and to bed in our double sleeping bag on the inflated air mattress.

After a couple of attempts at finding our own campsites, we settled for the state and national parks. The solitude we sought always had drawbacks — dubious water, no benches or table, no sanitation, and even the privacy unreliable, whereas at that time of year the parks were not full; also, we did want to meet American people as well as see American scenery. This last was particularly important for the children.

So faithful blue RK 1403 carried the explorers from the Empire State (New York's nickname) towards the sunset: the Delaware River and Pennsylvania Dutch sausages; Ohio, the shore of Lake Erie; the lower peninsula of Michigan... so far nothing unusual, the scenery no different from Europe. I was getting impatient for the West. In 1938 I had driven alone — also, by chance, in a Dodge — from Los Angeles to Poughkeepsie, via New Orleans. The West had impressed on my very spirit a sense of space, of sweeping wind and far water. I urgently wanted to share this with my wife and children, but it wasn't here yet. Still, we had the North Woods, and a feeling of endlessness, of virgin-forests-where-the-foot-of-man-has-never-trod (though someone told me that there isn't a stand of virgin timber east of Montana).

We crossed the Mackinac Strait, seven miles, in a ferry steamer, and camped on the north side. There was a little smoke house a mile up the road that sold excellent smoked whitefish; and half an hour after dawn the next day we were presented with an eclipse of the sun, the path of totality passing through us for a few minutes. On west... triumphant borders of the orange and scarlet Indian paintbnish along the road, and a heralding clarity in the sky; the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, glimpses of Lake Superior cold and without horizon on our right hand; the wonder of the children at a coppery torrent in Wisconsin; a majestic all-night thunderstorm outside Moorhead, Minnesota. Thcy took turns to come in front and huddle over the heater blowers that morning, for it had poured rain while we were loading. The trunk of the car, the ill-rolled tents and soggy bedding stuffed into it, looked like a swamp full of dead men. The same rain had flooded Bismarck and Mandan and under one railroad bridge the water was over our hub caps.

But suddenly the throb of the engine echoed farther and lighter, for the sky had flung back to an unimaginable distance. We had crossed the Missouri, we were there. The West! This was the West which Bud Guthrie made so magically real in his book and in the title he had given it: The Big Sky.

'Look, look, children!' I cried, 'Look, Barbara!'

The sky was pale and undomed, the road stretched beyond distance. The country was not rich and fat but spare and lean, not dark green but the grey-green of thyme. The wind blew in our faces from the Rockies crouched under the curve of the prairie ahead.

At Billings, Montana, we equipped ourselves with cowboy hats, shirts, and boots and drove on. A mile or two south of Red Lodge, where the climb to the Beartooth Pass (10,940 feet) began, we found a perfect camping place just off the road, not in a park. We settled in to explore the stream, bathe, and cook a steak. It was July 3.

In the East the Fourth of July is a formless exercise in nostalgia and patriotism, the patriotism muted by the nostalgia for an America that has gone from those parts. But the East is not good at parades, regarding them as rather hick, slightly embarrassing. Everyone sees everyone else twice a day without benefit of parades, and would rather be home having a wienie roast. So, on the Fourth, a few veterans shamble down Main Street to an out-of-tune band, watched by a handful of thinly clapping spectators. At the war memorial a politician makes a speech and everyone thankfully goes home, or to a little league game, or to the old swimming hole, if it hasn't been filled in for a housing development. In the evening the town board organizes fireworks at a central place, which cuts down on accidents but loses the excitement of the old spontaneous eruptions.

In the West the past is very close. In many places, it still believes it's the present. The West has no self-consciousness about parades, and it has thousands of the prime necessity for a parade — horses. The people who came to Red Lodge for the celebration probably lived over an area of 10,000 square miles, and this was one of the few times when they would see each other in the year. The sun was not damp-hot or sullen, but plain hot, dry, burning, Western hot. Main Street was paved, but fine dust blew across it from the unpaved side streets and the bare mountain slope beyond. All morning cars and pick-ups poured into town, and by eleven the sidewalks were jammed. Then up from the south, on a great white horse rode the marshal, wearing new levis and chaps and a white ten-gallon hat, sitting straight, the American flag set in his stirrup snapping out in the wind. All down the street we fell silent as he passed, and took off our hats. Then the high school bands strutted by, not bored but proud of the day and their part in it; and old men in flag-hung buggies, who might have seen Custer pass; girls, stunning girls in full western rig, a-glitter with silver and spurs, wide, flat, curly-brimmed hats on their curls, their behinds tight stretched, their thighs astride fiery quarter horses. And Indians... I wondered that they should celebrate this day, but they were here, the names of the tribes as proud as the Stars and Stripes ahead. I was glad to see them.

In the afternoon we repaired to the rodeo grounds up the hill. We got good seats in the miniature grandstand and tried to keep Susan and Martin on the seats and with dry jeans, forcibly carting them off to the toilets from time to time, for their excitement at the bronco riding, bull riding, dogie roping and the rest could not be contained. Across a narrow valley light planes kept landing and taking off from the town airstrip, and then we'd see the dust of a car racing the mile or so from there to the rodeo grounds. It turned out there was another rodeo at Cody, Wyoming, that same time. Many of the cowboys were competing in both; the light plane shuttles carried them fifty miles back and forth from one to the other.

Next morning we crossed the Beartooth Pass in the first light — a stunning view of the Bitterroots to the west and headed for the Yellowstone Park. It is about half the size of Wales and full of wonders; but we would be seeing it later, and drove through without stopping, to come an hour later upon one of the most dramatic views in the world the Teton wall from across Jackson Lake. Teton is French for 'breast', and the mountains were so named by the early French voyageurs, who must have had some singularly spiky girl friends; for there is nothing swelling or woman-soft about these mountains. The chain is not long — barely forty miles miles from north to south and twenty across — but it is of granite, a jagged frieze of towers and spires standing up more than 6,500 feet above the valley. Firs clothe and darken the lower slopes and surround the lake. Above, the rock is light and shining; snow daubs and banks and streaks the summit walls; and all is reflected in the ten-mile lake.

In a Jackson bar we began to get the distinctive feel of Wyoming. On the wall behind the barman, among the ranked bottles, there hung a plaque decorated with red-hot-poker work. The picture showed a huge Western hat sitting on top of a pair of Western boots. The caption below read: Portrait of a Texan after an enema. It was pretty funny in its own right, but what made it special was that Wyoming depended largely on Texan tourist money for its existence, particularly in the autumn hunting season.

We headed back up the Snake River to locate the D-Lazy-K Ranch, where the children were to spend a month. The dudes (paying guests) at this ranch were children only, and the owners undertook to give them a taste for and some skill in the Western way of life. We eventually found it, tucked under a hill not far from the Snake, and introduced the children to their temporary foster-parents. The place seemed well organized, though primitive — but that was what we wanted Susan and Martin to experience. We could have no idea whether the owner or the wranglers or the cook or the resident nurse (who seemed about 108) knew their business. As far as previous investigation and inquiry could guide us, they did. The rest would have to be left to chance. We stayed two days at the ranch, settling the children in, then organized ourselves for the mountains. Carrying one small bivouac tent to sleep in and another to store food supplies, we set off on foot up the Cascade trail to make camp behind the Grand Teton. It took us two trips to carry up food and supplies for the ten days we intended to spend there.

The ten days passed in solitude, hiking, photographing powers, fishing. We saw no one except a park ranger; a burly Mormon with a 100-lb. pack, who'd already covered ten miles by breakfast; and a great many marmots. These beasts still owe us a beautiful ten-gallon white hat, for Barbara left the one she'd bought in Billings under a tree while we tried to climb up through the snow banks to reach the Alaska Basin. When we returned — no sign of the hat. The marmots, locally called fishers, had eaten it for the sweat in the band and, presumably, the tastiness of the felt. [Scanner's Footnote: The name must be very local or more likely plain British confusion of marmots with martens. In all my sources, formal or informal, the fisher is a North American marten, related to the weasel; marmots are rodents, and might well treat a hat in such a fashion.]

When we came down we first paid a brief visit to the D-Lazy-K to see how the children were getting along. We found them suntanned and fit, but were not so happy to learn that they swam their horses across the Snake without any wrangler or adult present. The Snake was wide, deep, and fast there. Martin looked like a pea on a drum on top of his horse, and any suggestion that he was controlling it would have been purely complimentary. The children also looked strangely at our whisky bottle in the evening and glanced at each other with a superior expression; but they said they were happy, and they looked it. Susan was already a good and confident rider, and Martin was on the way to becoming a Marksman of the National Rifle Association, with a .22 rifle. So Barbara and I set off on Stage 2 of our summer.

This was combined work and pleasure. I had an idea for a book: the theme of the death of craftsmanship, the end of art, the sacrifice of skill to convenience. I had not tried to define it more closely. All the way west, when there was opportunity, we watched trains — mainly Great Northern and Northern Pacific, with occasional glimpses of the Milwaukee Road. I looked hungrily at the big black engines hauling the huge loads, for I knew what work was being done, what skill being used, up there on the high footplate, what art there was to controlling a steam engine, always having as much power as you needed, never more (for that was a waste of fuel), remembering every up and down of the road, the weight behind the tender, how long the steam already in the boiler would last, when more water would be needed (turn on the injectors well ahead of time to heat it before it passed into the boiler), where to use sand, when to run on the throttle and when on the cut-off... Then a four-unit diesel would grind past, or a Milwaukee electric. How much easier, simpler, cleaner! But what had been lost? Picturesqueness, certainly; the steam engine, almost alone of inanimate things, can transmit a sense of power, of movement, of effort. But what mattered, surely, was a loss of skill. The diesels and the electrics were push-button affairs. What happened to a man when his skill, the source of his pride, suddenly became worthless? What was going on in the spirits of those grizzled men who had spent twenty or thirty years learning the art of the steam engine, to find it useless? 'The same applied everywhere. What was happening to women, who did not have to learn how to make pastry any more because they could buy excellent mixes? Where were the new sources of pride, of self-identification, to come from?

This was my theme. Although the areas in which the theme could be worked out were endless — woman's life was particularly interesting — I knew that if I were to write it, I would base it in railroading. So we were looking for a railroad centre to which I could return later this year, or next, and spend two or three weeks riding the cabs, living with the engineers and firemen, absorbing their ways of thinking and acting. We examined Livingstone and Paradise, both on the Northern Pacific, and Three Forks, where the Milwaukee Road crosses the N.P. on the level, but none of them was right, so we decided to get on with our trip and examine the Union Pacific later.

We drove north and west through Montana, past Flathead Lake (it was like the Lake of Geneva, complete with Swiss chalets, but lonely and wild instead of manicured and tame). We camped and walked in Glacier National Park (we trudged through a July blizzard from Going-to-the-Sun Highway to the Hanging Gardens, and saw a pair of foxes); then west by Spokane and the Washington desert, across the Columbia, and up through the apple orchards of Wenatchee and the little Cascade Range towns with names like Skykomish and Snohomish; through Seattle without stopping, to an attempted walk in the Olympic peninsula. We climbed up a little way through an immense silent army of Douglas firs but where the firs ended, suddenly, at less than 5,000 feet, there was deep snow, a blinding intensity of light — and we had not thought to bring our snow goggles. Well, back at the base area the hot sulphur bath was an exciting experience, too.

We drove on down the Pacific coast, past Humptulips and Hoquiam, to Portland, Oregon. There were several smoke houses on the north bank of the Columbia here, where we again enjoyed excellent smoked fish; but the man we bought from said that his business, and the Columbia salmon, were being ruined by the timber companies. 'Every tree they cut down up there,' he said angrily, jerking his head at the forested slope behind him, 'they kill five salmon in the river.'

We returned to the coast and held southwards on U.S. 101. If the smokehouse man was right, the salmon were certainly being killed off at a great rate, for the winding road, very beautiful and with superb views over the Pacific, was murderous to drive owing to the continual stream of huge and hugely loaded timber trucks. Some of the Oregon beaches looked like Japanese prints, with the surf like lace and a sea mist half veiling, half revealing grey rocks and silver sand. We camped among redwoods near Garberville, California; and next day ran over the Golden Gate, through San Francisco and over the Bay Bridge, and on without stopping. It was an exciting town on the water, people said, with good restaurants; but we had one like that at home, just down the Hudson, and we were getting impatient for the mountains and the cool air. We ran on, like thirsty dogs, across the San Joaquin valley with the temperature over 100, and at last reached sanctuary among the pines, the granite, and the running water of Tuolumne Meadows at the upper end of Yosemite National Park. Here we set up camp, carefully hanging our food from tree branches out of the reach of bears. The bears here, as in most places where man has come, soon learn to search the tents and garbage cans, as being the easier way. One thing we never did was leave food in the car. RK 1403 was a convertible, and there would have been nothing easier for a bear, once he had an idea there was food inside, than to tear open the top with his claws.

There was good walking from Tuolumne, and the weather stayed hot, dry, and clear. The Yosemite granite is a very pale grey, flecked with black and red mica. From a distance the high ridges glittered like snow and twice we had to walk right up to one to assure ourselves that it was indeed rock and not ice that we were seeing. This granite does not wear away like softer rocks, so there are cascades where the water runs down in a wide sheet an inch deep over the sloping rock, and has done so for millions of years. It is an unexpected and oddly eerie sight, when one is so used to water gouging out a channel, to see it apparently wandering where it will. The most spectacular of these 'flat falls' that we saw was at the head of the Merced Valley, where we were looking down from the high sierra, the shining cliff of Half Dome on the right and El Capitan beyond.

The Yosemite Curry Company ran (and still runs) six-day horseback trips from the valley to the sierra and back, stopping off at five tented camps where they had simple accommodation, bedding, and restaurants permanently set up. At Tuolumne we were already on the high sierra so we did half the route the wrong way round, and on foot, spending nights out at Vogelsang and Merced Lake camps in both directions. At Merced Lake we met one of the horseback tours, and its members exclaimed mightily over our arrival on foot; but when they heard our accents they ceased to be surprised. We were not native-born Americans and could therefore walk without being suspected of treason. (This is a rather cheap and inaccurate gibe: in our travels and hikes we had come to the conclusion that the native-born fell into two classes as far as walking was concerned: either they didn't walk at all, or they walked enormous distances carrying unnecessarily large loads. A closer knowledge of the country was teaching us that for the real cross-country walker the loads were not excessive, because the distances between supply points were great. There were no villages, and no village pubs, in any of the huge tracts we had walked in.)

We headed on, south-eastward now, into Nevada. Nevada was a cauldron, empty but for the little groups of wrecked automobiles which we called 'Nevada gardens'.

The thermometer hovered round 110 and the road was a black ribbon, a hissing of melted tar under the tyres. We measured one straight thirty-one miles long. The mountains of the atomic proving range, barren, stark grey and black and ochre, shimmered along the eastern horizon. Each lone store in the desert had its 'Nevada garden' at the back, ice-cold beer in the front, and fervidly advertised slot machines selling condoms in the men's room. In Las Vegas we found a motel away from the main drag, and in the evening ventured out to explore the Sin Capital of the U.S.A. For a couple of hours we gawked at a world so tawdry, so inane, so sheerly ox-dumb that we marvelled it could exist in the same country with Einstein, Wall Street, and the double play; but of course the genius of the nation was to provide facilities for such idiocy, so that one can come from and go to it, as through a door, when the need strikes. In the United States, another world is not across the Channel but across the street.

Next day we made a scheduled call at the Post Office to pick up mail. Susan was fine. Martin had an infected finger but was O.K. Our parents in England were fine. And, forwarded by Helen Strauss, a communication from the Southern Judicial District of New York invited me to attend at the court-house on August 9 for a final hearing on my application for United States citizenship.

It was August 4. We drove that day to Kingman, Arizona via Boulder Dam and a confrontation over Senator McCarthy. At a small cafe where we stopped off for a cold drink McCarthy was speaking on the radio. The craggy lady behind the counter said belligerently that there was the only man who could save America from the Red Menace. We said nothing. Citizenship was so near, but not yet... She insisted. Didn't we agree? I sighed, and said I thought McCarthy was a disgrace to Wisconsin, the U.S.A., and President Eisenhower. We exchanged sharp words, with Barbara firing from the flank. At length the angry, lady, probably baffled by our accents, cried 'Where do you come from, anyway?'

We got up. 'England and New York,' I said, 'And proud of both.' We left. But one must remember that the Grand Canyon, also, is in Arizona.

That was where we went next. It is indeed grand, as awesome for its colours as for its vast scale. It is hard to describe and harder to photograph. We spent a morning there, saying little, and then drove on, the memories fixed and stupendous in our minds.

This was a different West, high and dry and full of names and faces from an older America. We wanted to go by the goosenecks of the San Juan River, Mexican Hat, and Navajo country, but the maps warned 'Roads in bad condition, take extra water, gasoline, and tyres.' The thought of missing my appointment in New York, after all I had been through, gave me the shivers even in that heat. So we turned back to U.S. 66 at Winslow and thence east to Gallup, New Mexico. We had hoped to pass the night in Gallup, but the first three motels we asked at were full, so we had a beer in a bar full of slightly drunken Navajos, and headed north on U.S. 666. The road was straight most of the way, but only in one plane. In the other it flicked up and down over the many transverse ridges like a lashed whip. It ran up the eastern edge of the Navajo reservation and in the dusty afternoon we saw three flocks of sheep, the young girls herding them through the chaparral riding easily on horses at the back of the flocks.

Straight ahead an English perpendicular church spire pierced the skyline; but surely there were no churches like that in New Mexico? We drove ten miles and the spire seemed a little bigger, but not much. It could not be a spire, but a whole cathedral. Ten more miles... it rose darker over the intervening ridges, higher, more massive It was not a cathedral, but the peak of some far mountain. Ten miles more... the setting sun gilded the upper battlements. It was not a peak, but a city. We breasted a ridge and it burst over us, a mightier Mont St Michel, a cathedral, a mountain, a gigantic rock schooner crossing the desert, its mast piercing the sky. It was the Shiprock, the summit of its topmost crag 7,178 feet above sea level, and 1,400 feet sheer above the desert washing its base. In this ship, since turned to stone, the Ute Indians believe they came from another world, to settle here, their third incarnation as a people.

From Denver Barbara drove back to the D-Lazy-K and the children, while I flew to New York. Vyvyan, generously excited, met me with tickets for a night game next day at the Polo Grounds. She was a Jint fan, too, and we were leading the league. Willie Mays was back from army service, and we'd got a great young pitcher, Johnny Antonelli, from the Braves.

It was a good game, with a typical Polo Grounds crowd, about a third of us Negro, good tempered, partisan, drinking Cokes, eating hot-dogs, and yelling our lungs out for Willie and Monte and Don and Whitey and Captain Alvin and even Leo the Lip. But Willie made one of his fantastic catches, and completed the double play by throwing a runner out at home, throwing while still about six feet up the centrefield wall and 450 feet from the plate; and the team looked so good that I made up my mind we were going to win the pennant, and the World Series; and there and then I chose an October date for a party to celebrate the victory. That night I took Vyvyan and her cousin Eugenie Huckel to some splendidly expensive Gotham hash-house, and we drank Romanee-Conti and Vyvyan wept a little because after all the struggling and begging and introducing and arm-twisting and vouching, I had arrived. If there was anything to be proud of, she shared in it.

Next day, in the vast barrack on Foley Square which is the U.S. Court House, it seemed particularly appropriate, since Willie Mays had been an inspiration at the start and at the end of the long journey, that the man sitting next to me on the pew-like benches should be a Jamaican Negro, chauffeur to a Long Island millionaire. The millionaire was there, too, to see that George, who did not have much education, was not finally conned out of his citizenship by the bureaucracy; but when I said I would look after George, as I knew the ropes (by God, did I know the ropes!), the millionaire went off to take care of his money. George and I sat through an hour or so of preliminaries, and at last, en masse, swore allegiance to the United States, its flag and constitution, and promised to forgo all other kings, princes and potentates. I could almost hear the words'... till death us do part,' and felt oddly as though the Jamaican and I were being married; which, in a way, We were. After we had filed up to receive our certificates of naturalization we found a bar, had a couple of drinks together, shook hands, wished each other all good luck in our new country, and parted.

Next day I was purring down into Jackson Hole airport on a Frontier Airlines Convair from Salt Lake City. There below was the Grand Teton, Mount Moran, Jenny Lake... nearly all the snow gone from Alaska Basin now: we would be able to explore it without danger... the airport, and Barbara with the car. (She would become a citizen six months later)... the D-Lazy-K, and the children running out to greet us, only Martin had thought it proper to mount his horse for the ceremony. He galumphed up on this animal, roughly the height of a giraffe and the girth of a hippopotamus, bounced to a stop, and chirped 'Howdy!' His infected finger was quite bad, and neither of them seemed to have washed for a month, but they were walking volcanoes of information on moose-hunting, horse-grooming, calf-roping, and flapjack-making.

After a few days with the children, during which time we mailed out fifty invitations to our October party to celebrate the Giants' world championship (including to our parents in England); and a promised excursion to Yellowstone (full of wonders, indeed, but also of people) — we headed up once more into the Tetons, this time hiring a wrangler and pack-horse to carry up our kit.

We pitched camp on Fox Creek Pass, on the boundary between Wyoming and Idaho. A drift of snow lingered still under a north-facing bank, and there we buried our bacon, butter, and other perishables, well secured in tins. If bears found them, we'd be out of luck, but we had seen none, nor signs of any, during our previous spell. This time we made two or three excursions into the Alaska Basin, photographing the wild flowers that were just bursting out, so late, from where the snow had lain. For three days we saw no one, but on the third evening, lying in the sheltered tent, we heard a dog barking and then a voice calling... in Spanish. We tumbled out and found a horseman herding a big flock of sheep up from the Idaho side. He was a young Catalan — a city boy from Barcelona, but all Spaniards are born shepherds — doing this lonely work, which sheep ranchers can't find Americans willing to do, however much pay they offer. We sat late round our camp fire that evening talking nostalgically of the Ramblas, the Diagonal (which no one has ever called the Avenida Generalissimo Franco), the beer in the Plaza Real, and the seafood in Barceloneta.

Cold, wet days followed and we decided to go back down. But the wrangler was not due to pick us up for another three days, so we would have to carry all our gear ourselves. This meant two trips. The first spell, we reached the trees at the head of Death Valley, dumped our loads and climbed back up to the pass for the rest. As we again reached the dump, the rain returned. We pitched camp on the spot, stowed everything away, made ourselves warm and comfortable, and went to sleep.

Next day, August 2nd, it was snowing. The loads had been very heavy — we were counting on that pack-horse — and we agreed that we couldn't go on this way. One of us must go and get a horse from the nearest dude ranch. Barbara declined to be left alone at the head of Death Valley in a small blizzard, so it was she who had to go. The snow was turning to rain as she set off near nine o'clock for an eight-mile hike down the ill-marked trail, keeping a sharp lookout for mountain lion and grizzlies. She saw neither, but soon noticed large soup-plate size indentations in the soft mud of the trail. They were moose tracks, going the same way, and they were full of water, at first. But as she hurried on through the dripping forest the tracks became only half full, and filling... then nearly new, water just trickling in. She was closing up on the beast. A bull moose standing about ten feet at the shoulder, she imagined. With horns spreading the width of a house. Black, and in an extremely bad temper. Weighing 2,000 pounds... 4,000... 6,000... Could run faster than a racehouse. Knock down a redwood by leaning on it. The bull was furious. His wife had run away with a travelling wapiti... The huge footprints were now dry. She was on the animal's heels. Barbara stopped, huddled herself into shelter under a tree, and smoked two cigarettes; and a third. Then she started gingerly on, whistling and singing, which was to say Please get off the path, sir. The moose must have been a gentleman, and he also must have been very close; for she had barely gone a hundred yards when the hoofprints turned off and were lost in the heavy timber. Barbara broke into a trot and reached the White Grass Ranch in a muck sweat. There the dudes, mainly from Philadelphia, were having pre-lunch Martinis in the warm and elegant ranch room, wearing their stretch pants, western shirts, and turquoise jewellery As Barbara clumped in, dripping wet and covered in mud, her hair like the Medusa's, a silence fell; but once they found that she knew what Martinis were, and indeed actually drank them (west of the Susquehanna, like most mixed drinks, they are often regarded as effete eastern medicines, fit only for interior decorators) she was much feted and cosseted.

Meanwhile, back at the dump, I slept, watched the rain change to snow and back again a few times, ate cold bully beef, drank bourbon, and waited. At last I heard the creak and jingle of saddlery and up the trail through the snow came... my God, came America! The wrangler was six feet four, the build of a rail, long face tanned mahogany under a high Wyoming hat, short blue denim jacket, check wool shirt, silk kerchief, work-worn chaps. With him rode a tall girl, also in full cowboy costume, leading a riding-horse and two pack-horses. They came on, the horses trotting heavily on the muddy trail, snow mantling the riders' hats and shoulders and big gauntlets. They stopped a few feet from me, where I had crawled out of the tent and waited to greet them.

'Howdye,' the man drawled, dismounting in a long, easy swing. I'm Jim.'

'I say, how do you do?' the girl said. I'm Betty Featherstone.'

She was English, working a summer as a cowgirl at the White Grass. The wrangler was from Ely, Nevada. We loaded up the gear, I mounted the riding-horse, and we set off.

A couple of days later we went to the D-Lazy-K to pick up the children. The owner told us they were great kids, which we already suspected. Susan, he had noticed, was turning more to books and less into relationships with other people, but she was a highly efficient and indeed dominating young person, organizing everyone in sight, when she chose to be. Martin was highly competitive, and had done well in riflery, though his real passion was fishing. From everyone's angle it had been a worth-while summer, we thought, as we set off on the last phase of it, a circular trip to look for a suitable site for my railroad research.

We headed, first, towards South Dakota, to examine the Chicago and North Western, and the Milwaukee Road. As we drove we found that the kids had learned other things beside horsemanship at the D-Lazy-K. Martin chanted Baptist hymns and reprimanded me for using the name of the Lord in vain. Susan kept asking us if we realized the enormity of our sin in drinking whisky; we would not be saved, she insisted, we were hurting the Lord's feelings and flying clear in the face of the Good Jesus. We turned their attention to the numerous domesticated beasts on the prairie around us, and set them to playing Animal Euchre. If a man isn't safe from salvation in his own car, where is he?

Finding nothing to suit me, we headed back south towards Laramie and the Union Pacific. The children had collected some huge elk horns while at the ranch, and these they insisted on taking home. As there was no other place we arranged them on the back seat, and the children travelled curled up inside them, as though in singularly uncomfortable chairs designed by a mad Scots laird.

As we bumped over the single Milwaukee Road track in Interior, South Dakota (pop 87, on Saturday nights) saw that a road fork a little ahead was not signposted. I turned back and went into a bar (the bar) to ask the way.

After I had spoken to the bartender a man sitting in the cool gloom with several empty beer bottles in front of him cried, 'You wanna go to Chadron? I live jus' west of Chadron, and I'm on my way. Jus' follow me.'

He was a thick-set man in a store-bought suit, about thirty-eight, with a wide, cheerful mouth and slightly unfocused blue eyes. I said, 'Thank you very much, that'll be great,' and headed for the door.

'Wait a minute. Let's have a beer,' he cried. 'The name's Leo.' He stuck out his hand. It was about three in the afternoon, but I had a beer, while he told me that he was on his way home from a farmers' convention in Chicago. Then we went out into the glare of the sun. Leo shook Barbara's hand, leaped into a parked green Ford pickup, and took off at seventy miles an hour.

The road, across the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Sioux, was cut into the black dirt of the prairie, and was unpaved, deeply rutted, and full of unmarked crossroads and junctions. The pickup bounced and jolted south like a demented jack-rabbit far in front of me. We tore through Indian trading posts like the chariot race in Ben Hur, each time twice jerking into phlegmatic alarm the somnolent Sioux squatted along the shaded wall. I followed Leo by the trail of his dust, and by the beer cans he flung out in regular succession along the roadside. Once he vanished, and I only found him again because he had stopped for us to come up: he had run out of cans, and the bottles he was now on needed an opener. At length, after an hour, we came to a main road, and headed west. The signposts pointed clearly to Chadron, where we intended to stop the night, but Leo wouldn't hear of it. 'Follow me!' he cried, glassy-eyed, leaning heavily against his pickup. 'Wife's away! You spend the night with me! Ain't a decent motel in Chadron, anyway.' He would not be denied, and a Nebraska farm house was going to be far more interesting to us than a Nebraska motel, so we accepted.

From his farm the black earth stretched flat and even to the huge red ball, dust-hazed, of the setting sun. There was not another house in sight, just the earth, and the dust. Trees surrounded the farm yard, but there were no others inside the darkening sweep of the horizon.

It was night. Our children were in the only bathroom, splashing and singing. It sounded like Niagara, but every time Barbara got up to calm the hurricane Leo waved her down crying, 'Let 'em enjoy themselves. That's the way Jane would like it. Here, ma'am, have another drink.' He had changed to rye whisky by now, and began to ask us questions. What was my business? -Where did Barbara get that cute accent? When he learned that we were English born he had to have another drink to celebrate. The news that I was a writer produced another, together with a rather touching awe that a writer, a real writer of books, was sheltering in his house. When he learned that Bhowani Junction (he had never heard of it) was to be made into a movie starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger he staggered to the telephone, crying 'We've got to get Jane. She'll love this!'

Barbara signalled frantically to me behind his back, no, no! I needed no urging and began to babble that it was nothing, he mustn't think of disturbing her, she couldn't possibly get here in time to say hello. But he had the telephone and was mumbling, 'She's only twenty-fi' miles away, staying with her mother. Wouldn't miss it for nothin'.' The children tumbled out of the bathroom followed by a tidal wave. Barbara smacked them both heartily and told them to dry themselves and get into their pyjamas at once. On the telephone Leo was saying, 'Great people, honey, greates'! Gonna stay the night... No, no, met them in. In-in-interior... But...' The children's false screams echoed through the house, and no doubt, the telephone.

There were long ominous pauses while he listened, swaying. Then he said, 'Lovely honey. You comeonover ri' away. A writer... wrote a book about India, with Ava Gardner.. Be seeing you'

He turned back rubbing his hands. 'Time we ate,' he cried.

'Yes, oh yes,' we said enthusiastically.

'You've sure come to the right place,' he said. 'We farmers have these deep freezes, stacked. Looka this!' He opened a huge freezing chest and pulled out a couple of frozen chickens. 'Everyone like chicken?'

'Yes,' we said. It was no time to argue. The sooner we got some food into Leo, and ourselves, the better. Leo slapped a large frying pan on to the electric burner, switched it on to full heat, and poured in a cupful of corn oil. Barbara began to make up the kids' beds on the living-room floor.

We were to sleep in the matrimonial bed, and Leo in the spare room. He and Jane had no children; they had only been married two years.

Leo pressed a rye into my hands and poured one for himself. The corn oil was smoking hot and the kitchen looked like the gas attack at Second Ypres. Leo dropped the two frozen chicken into the boiling, smoking fat and I dived for the door. 'Ow, hey!' Leo yelled as burning fat exploded all over the kitchen, spattering his hands and face. I could hardly see him by now, and oil was dripping off the ceiling and the walls and all the cups and china in the racks. And it was getting worse as more water melted out of the chickens.

'Shouldn't we be doing it a little more slowly?' Barbara asked, having come on the run at the yelling. The kids sheltered behind her skirts, applauding whole-heartedly.

'No, no,' Leo said thickly, 'thass the way we cook 'em in Nebraska.'

Then, preceded by a large, barking and over-excited dog whose wagging tail knocked Susan's glass of milk off a side table over what appeared to be an expensive Axminster carpet, Jane arrived.

We left early the next morning. Jane did not get up to see us off, which was naughty of her, as her husband's generosity to strangers could not be blamed on us; nor, in a Christian sense, should it have been blamed on him. Leo and the dog came out of the barn as I started the car. Leo was in his underclothes, rubbing straw and sleep out of his eyes, and mumbling bleary good wishes. I made a mental note to send a copy of Bhowani Junction, signed, and bearing our best wishes and thanks to him, but only him. Then we headed the Dodge, fast, away from Chadron, Nebraska.

That noon we came to Laramie, Wyoming, and it seemed to offer all that I wanted. The main line of the Union Pacific passed through, and I learned that it was a division point for crew changes between Cheyenne and Rawlins. On the Sherman Summit I recognized a Big Boy, one of the 4-8-8-4 Mallet compounds which were the biggest and most powerful engines in the world, and I also saw several diesels, and a gas turbine, both on passenger and freight trains. I arranged to stay a week, then drive home early in September, while Barbara returned at once by train, for the children were due back in school. I saw them all off on the eastbound City of Los Angeles, and began a week of noseying around the freight yard, riding cabooses down to Cheyenne, and the cab of a steam 4-8-4 express engine hauling the Overland Limited to Rawlins and back, and twice on Big Boys as they ground up to Sherman Summit under a drifting pall of black smoke with 5,000 tons behind the gigantic tender.

I talked to engineers and conductors and firemen and brakemen, ate in commissaries and drank in railroad bars, and learned the arcane jargon of the Iron Horse. It was all a dream come true, but at the end of it I was no nearer to a solution of the problems of my theme than at the beginning, so it was with mixed emotions that I headed the Dodge cast.

The weather was perfect, the roads empty. In one dawn I covered 320 miles across Minnesota and the northern peninsula of Michigan in four hours precisely; and the next day drove 619 miles between 4 a.m. and 4 p.m., from Sault Ste Marie across Ontario and back into New York State. The next day it was home, and a Barbara who seemed, after the first embraces, distinctily disgruntled. It appeared that I was responsible. In my eagerness to sample new railroad experiences, even vicariously, I had booked them from Chicago eastward on the Erie Railroad, shunning the much better known, shorter, and more popular New York Central or Pennsylvania routes. They had learned the reason for this lack of custom: the Erie was trying to get rid of its passenger service, if service is the right word for the combination of surliness and neglect which they experienced for twenty-four hours on a two-car springless train and a switchback roadbed that had not been maintained for forty years. Barbara was black and blue and starving, and the children seasick, by the time they reached Suffern, where Keith Jennison met them.

I went out and bought a white Cadillac El Dorado convertible with red leather upholstery, but Barbara would not be gruntled. She holds that trip against me to this day. As to the writing, the loss-of-skill theme would have to remain locked to me until I could find the key. I decided to tackle now the mountaineering book which had been prominent in my original list, for the Himalayas have always been a challenge, particularly to the English in India. But that too would have to wait a little while, for the first business at hand was to cheer the Giants through the last two weeks of the season, coach them through the World's Series, and then prepare the great party.

Chapter Sixteen

Milton Caniff shook his head in wonder: 'It's hard enough to believe that they won at all. You know the old saying, "Never bet against Joe Louis or the American League" — but four straight! You must have a powerful whammy, Jack.'

I agreed modestly. A few days earlier our Jints had swept the World's Series from the Cleveland Indians in four games. I added, 'But it was really Dusty Rhodes who had the whammy.'

My mother, coming up behind me, said in her best party voice, 'Now, Jackie, who is Dusty Rhodes?'

I shrugged. Who, indeed, was he — this journeyman batter who'd got off the bench in three successive games to -pinch-hit the winning blow for the Giants? We'd scarcely heard of him before, and if World's Series history was to be any guide, we'd never hear of him again. Like a meteor he had had his flaring hour.

We drifted apart, myself in one direction with my father and mother, Milton and Bunny across the grass to the table set up in the back orchard, where the drunken does had cavorted.

'It's a nice party,' my mother said. 'Such well-bred people.'

'I don't know about that,' I said, 'But they're good people.'

'A bit socialist, some of them,' my father said dubiously. During the ten days since they arrived he had listened to some talk that in his view savoured of Bolshevism or socialism. As I often agreed with him, I said nothing, but took the drink out of his hand and firmly poured more water into it. He had had one already, and not for nothing was he known during his twenty-six years in India as Smell-of-a-Cork Masters, the cheapest man to get drunk between Dera Ghazi Khan and the head waters of the Dihong.

He looked around now, and said, 'You've done well, Jackie.'

My mother dabbed her eyes, 'Yes. But so far... you've gone so far…'

Far, does she mean, I thought, or far away? It didn't matter, for both were true. The India of my birth was a far, faint cry:

My Hindustani went within six months of reaching England, but I remembered the taste and look of the bazaar candies for ever, the yellow balls made of coarse sugar and corn meal. On my fifth birthday we went out in a boat to Sandspit and there were thousands of crabs running sideways and diving down their holes, the sea washing over them. Ashraf made a three-tiered cake with ladders of icing from one level up to the next. A wheel came off a horsed carriage full of British soldiers — Tommies, Mummy called them, and they all spilled out into the street. My father was not there.

In Eastbourne I was six, and spent all day, winter and summer, running barefoot about the steep pebbly beach with my brother. We wore only khaki shirts and shorts and the boatmen called me Bombay, which they pronounced Bombye. We found pennies and silver in the pebbles where the people had been sitting, and once I fell off a breakwater into deep water. Prep school was long corridors and Eton collars and mortar-boards, and secret societies that lasted three days, and struggles and pushes and yelling in the corridors over Oxford and Cambridge. One holiday was an adder in the hot gorse over Llanbedrog, and another running through a great frozen park, an over-excited Sealyham snapping at my ankles. Then we re-discovered Nanny and her father's cottage by the Great Western main line, and all summer I ate bread and marmalade on a chair at the end of the vegetable patch, beyond the smelly outhouse, a notebook on my knee, waiting for the distant hurrying beat of a Castle coming down the bank from Pewsey, or a King labouring up from Woodborough with the Torbay Limited. Stanley and Alex and I and Eddie and John climbed elms for rooks' eggs, and walked across the springy turf of the downs beyond the White Horse of Wilcot, or waded up the Avon for the moorhens' nests.

I arrived at Wellington on a winter evening, carrying a heavy suitcase all the way up from the station through the misty lamp-lit dusk towards the loom of the great buildings. I stopped at the narrow gate, iron-barred but open, and saw what was written above: The path of DUTY is the way to GLORY. It was always autumn at Wellington, the woods brown and the chestnut leaves thick on the damp earth and orange and black scarves going down to Bigside, cocoa brewing at the end of dormitory, and oh to wear a cap with a tassel swinging at the back of my neck, and Grimshaw spoke to me and knew my name.

I saw a Sandhurst drill parade and couldn't believe my ears or eyes, for the disciplined crack of each epileptic movement, the oneness of the six hundred khaki bodies, the single, multiple flash of the bayonets in the wintery sun. Then I was there, and not failing, and a seedy-looking chap accosted me in the Gents at Waterloo, and a barber's shop in Camberley sold a magazine called London Life in which everyone seemed to wear rubber underclothes and there were a great many small advertisements for whips and high boots. I discovered girls — not the physical conformation of them, that had been done earlier — the waywardness, the wonder, the baffling non-maleness of them.

The ship to India was slow and dirty and full of soldiers vomiting in the troop deck. In one year with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry I grew up ten, and became a man, I joined the 4th Gurkhas, and learned another language, and stood guard in the riot-tom streets of Lahore, and ran all day to utter weariness and thirst over the scorching barrens of Waziristan, and heard the bullets go smack-clack over my head. Hitler came and I rode the dusty trucks along the Euphrates, across the Djezireh, over the Jabal Hamrin, up the Paitak pass. I studied war and met Barbara and together we discovered the Himalayas, which I had seen so often, but at a distance, and we found in them respite from war, rest from weariness, and love. I flew over Burmese jungles and fought in the teak forest and crossed the Irrawaddy in a tiny boat by the light of the moon. I killed, and was nearly killed, and breathed battle and destruction, for I was a young god of war.

Then the guns died down, grumbling in the east, and I went back to the Himalayas with my love. We were standing in the holy man's little house, looking at the newspaper he held out to us...

The Rawal was small and dark. His black eyes were soft but they penetrated deep, and I was not certain whether the depth was in an inward or outward direction, into himself or the world. The Auk was big and blond and grizzled. His blue eyes were mild, but they did not yield. When either of them smiled, it was a great beauty.

After the war the British officers who had served in the 4th Gurkhas formed an Association, and dedicated a Garden of Remembrance in the churchyard at Stoke Poges. Any of the Indians who had succeeded us, and might happen to be on duty in England, always attended the annual service and reunion. I met Raj Bir Chopra there, of the 'new guard', and of the old guard, Major‑General Sir Arthur Mills, whom everyone called Uncle Arthur. Uncle Arthur was small and erect, with fierce white hair and three D.S.O.s. He had fought in the Boer War and the Great War, commanding Indian cavalry in Palestine and Mesopotamia. He knew only one motto:

The path of DUTY is the way to GLORY... and the GLORY was immaterial, at that. His eldest son Bill had been the adjutant of our 2nd Battalion before me, but at the 1952 reunion he was wearing a dog collar, for at the same time that I retired he became a parson of the Church of England. Beetle Lowis was growing strawberries in Scotland and Hugh Moule farming in Suffolk. John Strickland had disappeared, Willy Weallens was making tweeds in County Mayo, and Flossie Cosens was a tennis pro in South Africa. We had come together in Bakloh from the ends of Britain, and now time and the river flowing had carried us to the ends of the earth.

Roddy McLeod had brought me along the way, with his brutal determination to have the best. Like Helen Taylor over there, talking to Henry Poor. A necessary brutality, a necessary pride, a necessary determination.

And Tim Brennan, who had sat at my right hand during that speech of Fergusson's at the Chindit reunion. Tim reminded me of a young Auk, only he was an underwriter of Lloyd's. The sense of his two worlds, of how good he had been as a soldier, how successful in this world of London finance, helped me. We had fought together, he as a colonel of twenty-six and I as a brigadier of twenty-nine, and he had believed in me then, and he had believed in me now.

Other faces were not here that should have been — Frank Laskier, who'd passed on to me, almost like a bishop's Laying on of hands, a sense of the power of the English language. Bill Douglas and Sam Rosenman, and Simon Rifkind, the patient officer of State Troopers at Hawthorne, and the apologetic little official snooper of the Bureau of Immigration who'd asked our neighbours so many questions about us, and at the end left his galoshes in our hallway. And Fernand and Laura Auberjonois who 'could do more for the United States in Europe than we can here'.

Julio and Antonio, the mountaineers of Huesca, definitely; and Milagro singing on her knees in the barn-like passages of the Balaitous; and Sergeant Manolo from the Asturias, with his dreams of bagpipes and cider. All these had added a dimension to my humanity — and that was true of everyone here (whether in the flesh or in memory).

'To live as a family unit in a place that offers space, liberty, and opportunity to all of us and, to me, independence in a work that I like.' That was the object we had found for ourselves in that long-ago and far-away Camberley appreciation. We had achieved it. I had found a new career, and Barbara had developed more as an individual than she ever could have attached to the man's world of the Indian Army. For the children the opportunities stretched around them in a profusion unimaginable to the European mind. They could make of themselves anything they wished and had the capacity for.

Susan was showing no particular bent, except for the compulsive reading. It was not the reading in itself which worried us, but the shutting of herself away that was a consequence — or a cause. Still, she was going to be very attractive and had a first-class brain, particularly in mathematics. It was hard to forecast in what direction she would go, and unwise to guide or influence her, at the age of ten. Martin also read, and wrote, and showed an increasingly imaginative gift. I had hopes that he would go to West Point or Annapolis. He would not make much money then, but it looked as though I would be able to help out in that department. If not one of the fighting services which my own background made me consider the most honourable and proper, then a civilian service to the country — the Forest or Park Services, perhaps. He too had the brains for anything to which he was willing to give the application. He was eight.

As I had gone up the army ladder I had gained control over more things and people — including myself. An odd fact about my present situation was that I had begun to feel that this process was going into reverse. I was gradually losing control over the destinies of people. The children, for example over whose future I would once have held decided opinions and a strong hand, were now going to be ruled by other influences at least as much as by Barbara and me. I was changing, sometimes in spite of myself. Events were going their own ways, with me shrugging on the sidelines where once I would have been in there over the centre, barking the signals. New currents of thought were hidden in the air and concealed in the earth — the American environment, the liberal neighbourhood. We were under pressure from traditions and customs, good and bad, that exerted a mysterious force on us. The natives were born to a knowledge of all this, and perhaps with inborn or early acquired immunity to much of it; but we were not — and I did not care.

I had become an American, Barbara soon would, and the children had the right to do so when they reached the age of twenty-one. But what, in truth, was an American, and was our Americanism a reality, or a word on a piece of paper?

I thought that an American must believe that all men are created free and equal. I did.

An American must offer allegiance and support to the Constitution. Allegiance and support — yes; worship — no. I thought that the Constitution sadly needed re-designing if it was to serve the country in the future as it had in the past.

An American must prefer to live in the United States. I did.

An American must accept the burdens and privileges of citizenship in the most powerful of the democracies. I did.

He must accept all other Americans, and give full faith and credence to their beliefs. I was doing my best to do so.

An American must know the names and capitals of all the states, and the true meaning of Tinker to Evers to Chance, the Crimson Tide and the Rambling Wreck, the Manassa Mauler and Jolting Joe, Old Hickory and Old Ironsides, and what the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina. I did.

And in all this, Barbara shared with me; also — so far — the children.

I was earning my living by writing, but was I a writer? As I had defined it to myself a writer is one who, in writing, offers effectively phrased insights into the human condition. He is not a propagandist, or a mechanic, or a communicator and his work need not, indeed probably should not, have a meaning, a purpose beyond itself. Writing, as I practised it, was a pure art. It was not for me, nor any critic of my time, but only time itself, to decide whether I was a good artist or not, but an artist as writer, I was.

These two transformations deliberately wrought, of becoming American and becoming a writer, had caused other changes in me. I had learned tolerance — not a great deal, but more than I had before — because Americans do tolerate, and because a writer must: he cannot create without understanding, and he cannot understand without allowing, tolerating. In the same way I had achieved a certain power of sufferance very far from me when I was a fire-eating brigadier or a ruthless chief of staff. Even patience, a quality notoriously lacking in most of my family, I had summoned a little of, by the example of Americans just as quick as I, in P.T.A. meetings and civic association meetings, and discussions formal and informal. I had developed a catholicity of standards, and was able to see many forms of excellence (as America had so many directions) instead of one, the True Light, whether in dress, politics, or 'the höflich manner of eating artichokes'.

I ought to go and put up a Flag, there on the middle of the lawn, I thought. But to tell the truth the Flag embarrassed us. All that bowing and scraping and hand-over-the-heart, and wrapping it around oneself as a guarantee of inner purity, was as repulsive as Kipling's jelly-bellied flag flapper. But the flag, lower case, moved me greatly and every time I saw it waving in the breeze I got a lump in my throat; but not for the world would I have let anyone know. Of course the Flag was the symbol chosen by the United States to unify peoples from many different races and countries, but was it wise to pin so much on to a piece of cloth? Surely the loyalty must [amount] to an Americanism of the spirit, which I had tried to define? Well, I'd get a flag one day, and fly it high, and everyone who passed by could make up his own mind whether it was a flag or a Flag.

Emily came up and fell on Barbara's shoulder. 'Oh!' she cried, 'I'm so happy for you. It's like a fairy story.'

I hugged her heartily. 'And you knew us when!'

'When you were living on scraps off A. J. Balaban's table,' she said and began to giggle.

'They wouldn't have done it to the Yankees,' Phil Morse said morosely. With such a crowd he was, naturally, wearing his toupee.

'Balls,' I said, 'this year's Giants were the best. Willie won the batting championship, Mueller was second, and Antonelli won twenty-one games. This year they would have beaten Yeshiva Frosh.' Phil stuck out his chin, and then began to laugh.

'Oh, the colours in that maple!' Vyvyan cried, 'Do you remember the first year we listened to the World's Series, in the other house?'

'And he didn't know anything,' Eugenie said.

'He didn't know the difference between a bunt and a baulk,' Vyvyan teased.

'Or between lie and lay,' I said.

Joe Wright and Doris Clark passed, dancing their never-ending gavotte. Jane Wright watched pensively from the maple. 'I won $50 on the Series,' Joe called back over his shoulder. 'You were so goddamn sure that I thought it had to come true.'

Troup and Alice Mathews came up. Alice hugged Barbara in the same way, and with almost the same words, as Emily a little earlier. Troup said, 'Horatio Alger, in person.' I took his arm and said, 'Not without help at the beginning, when it was most needed, Troup.'

They moved off. They were going to have a hard time because of McCarthy. Troup had resigned from the Voice of America and was trying to make a living importing South American goat skins for rugs.

When we came to America the Russians had started their advance in Eastern Europe, but they had not possessed atomic weapons. Now they did; and now Red China was on the march in Asia; and, unless we were willing to fight, it was hard to see how or when many small peoples, once free to live in their own life style, could escape their domination. We were not in a shooting war but our enemies were advancing on many fronts by other means, like termites, and as ruthless. As a soldier I feared that by not helping the helpless now we were merely ensuring that our own struggle, when it came, would be that much harder, that much longer.

But I must cultivate my garden. I was going to try to be a better writer. As to how this was to be achieved, I could only try still harder to find the right words, the deeper insights, a truer 'feeling with' the outside world and a truer translation to the inside and the words on paper. I never knew what inspiration was, only the application of my whole mind and experience to this task, for so many hours a day. I had never lacked the will to write. Words, ideas, and thoughts had always come spouting out as from a perpetual spring. The problem was to analyse this flow of material, to channel it effectively — yet not lose the original native force.

I was finding the life satisfying. The early frustrations caused by leaving so much of my personality unused were dying down. I probably no longer had the power of command, or the speaking ability, or the incisiveness of decision that I once had, for they had not been used for seven years and had atrophied. It was a pity, and I missed them, but like boyhood and the Gurkhas and the woodsmoke-and-leather camaraderie of the Indian Army, they were gone beyond recall.

I hoped we were being good Americans. It certainly took up a lot of time. We were founder members of the North Clarkstown Civic Association, where we spent hours each month trying to find ways to make our local politicians uphold the laws, particularly relating to zoning. Rockland County was under tremendous pressure of growth. Thousands of people were anxious to move out of the city into Rockland's rural calm. Hundreds of businessmen, particularly builders, were anxious to make money by turning Rockland into a replica of what the city people were leaving. Some politicians wanted the population growth, some smelled money and some got money. The unions, generally, were against us because they could see no further than jobs for their members.

On the wider scene, we were registered Democrats, and did what we could to see that the party chose the best available candidates for public office. I occasionally wrote letters to the President on matters which deeply concerned us, or on which we had some special knowledge, because I thought it our duty to take part in the consensus which someone would analyse out of all the letters that people wrote.

In one small battle I led the mob to the barricades. The New York Trap Rock Company was suing the Town in court to try to break a town zoning ordinance. The Town was counter-suing to the effect that the Company's operations constituted a public nuisance and a menace to health and welfare in the area. In the middle of all this the Company was also opening a new and hugely noisy crushing-plant quite close to Centenary, the hamlet where our house stood. They invited Governor Dewey to come and make the formal inauguration of the new plant. I got a Rockland neighbour, an old-line conservative whom no one could possibly call a pinko-Jew-liberal, to join with me in signing a letter to the Governor in which we advised him that his appearance at the ceremony would look like taking sides for the Company against the Town and people. Whether because of the letter or for some other reason, he changed his mind at the last minute and did not attend. Later I and many neighbours spent hours in court giving evidence in the case against the Trap Rock Company. To protect their 'right' to befoul the environment they attempted to prove that we were a bunch of penniless bums who didn't have an environment worth preserving. In support of their case they produced photographs of old Mrs Mahoney's incredible shack, but did not show the $100,000 houses of the Caniffs, Housemans, Demings, and others along South Mountain Road. The whole demonstration of corporate morals made us realize that our leftist neighbours had a point.

As a person I hoped I would go on growing in the general direction indicated by my new profession and country, which was quite different from what I had expected at the age of twenty, or even thirty. One particular dream which we could now make a reality was travel. I am a born gypsy, Barbara a willing and delightful companion, for we shared the same attitude towards the outdoors, museums, sights, night-life, food and wine, and in other ways complemented each other: when we walked together, I saw and pointed out the long views, the grand scenes, while she saw and identified the flowers among the rocks, and the birds in the trees. We both loved meeting strange people, eating strange foods, and experiencing other ways of life, both for their own sakes and perhaps to take some part of the people's life style into our own. I spoke six languages — three well — and Barbara as many. We agreed that we would try never to go to any country without learning a little of the language beforehand.

Where to go first? We pored over the maps and agreed at last Corsica, to walk in the maquis; and Switzerland, to walk by the Matterhorn, perhaps in the upper Rhone Valley, preferably in the time of the grape harvest, the vendange.

'Fondue! Rösti!' Barbara cried enthusiastically.

'The Brig-Zermatt Rack Railway!' I said. 'The Simplon Tunnel! The Loetschberg!'

Mrs Hallam was drying plates and glasses in the kitchen. 'Lord, I'm quite tiddly, sir,' she said. 'The gentlemen keep giving me drinks, and they swear there's nothing in them, but there's no green in my eye, now is there?'

The Girls were there, but not together. 'I wouldn't mind almost anyone else,' Vi said to me in the entrance to the barn, waving her glass energetically, 'but that Cindy she's taken up with... look at her! She's awful! Peg says she's marvellous in bed. Peg's infatuated, that's the truth.'

'Perhaps you might try the other side of the fence now,' I suggested, for I knew that a devoted neighbour, sensing the call of a duty higher than mere marital fidelity, had stayed late one night with her, in our house, after we had gone to bed, and proved to her the joys, or at least the acceptability, of manhood. Vi knew that I knew, and gave me a rather pleased leer. 'I might, at that,' she said, 'It wasn't at all as bad as I expected.'

Keith finished carving the last of the steaks he was doing — we had three grills out — and I said, 'Now it's time you ate something.'

He said, 'I've been nibbling all the time.' He settled his back against an old apple-tree and plucked the strings of his guitar.

'Oh, the Eer-i-ee was a-rising,' I cried. 'One more time!'

He grinned and laid his head back against the rough bark:

Oh, the Eer-i-ee was arising, and the gin was getting low I scarcely think we'll get a drink till we get to Buffalo 'You made it, Jack,' he said, strumming quietly.

'We did. Where did I start?'

Helen Taylor said, 'The new draft of Coromandel! is much better, Jack, though I'm still not sure that I really accept Jason's innocence. Something, somewhere makes me feel he's only pretending to be innocent. But I think we'll find it. It may be his confidence.'

Edgar Levy said to Henry Poor, 'So we bought it and are going to stick it on to the end of the house and use it as a dining-room. The only dining-room on South Mountain Road with stained glass windows.'

Henry chuckled. 'Aren't you supposed to deconsecrate a chapel before putting it to such a use?'

'It already has been,' Corcos said seriously. 'We could use it as a kosher kitchen now, with the Pope's blessing, if we wanted to.'

Colonel Vald Heiberg, Professor of Mechanics, said 'We've got to raise our academic standards at the Point, I know. They're all right in the sciences, generally. It's the humanities that we lag in. But there's a time factor. We have to teach the cadets so many things you don't in the civilian colleges.'

Charlie Frankel, Professor of Philosophy, nodded his heavy head. 'I think mental isolation may be the real problem at the service academies. Perhaps you could have more civilian instructors.'

Colonel Hamish Mackay, butler, said, 'You don't have any now, do you? I would think that would tend to isolate not only the cadets, surely, but the instructors too. Would they not run in a channel separate from the main stream of learned thought about any subject?'

I took him and Misha aside and we found Barbara. 'Is it still going all right?' we asked.

Misha said, 'Yes, really. I think Madame doesn't love us. She's actually jealous of us, you know, because the Master pays so much attention to us. She egged him on to see whether we were feathering our nest, I think.'

Hamish said, 'Oh, that wasn't the poor lady's fault. That was old General Neil Mackay's postcard.' He turned to us — This is an ancient warrior with whom we share common ancestors. Seven generations of them lived in Nansemond, Virginia, until they were dispossessed for a too-strict loyalty to His Majesty King George III. The old general wrote to us on this open postcard: Interested to hear what you're doing. Hope you are getting our own back.

It would be a Time-like impertinence to sum up America after only four years acquaintance, and a mere two months of citizenship. But there were impressions which we would live with.

On the con-side we equally disliked the American superiority and inferiority complexes. The one would break out in a rash after an election with such cries as 'It could only happen here' — when 'it' was patently happening in a number of other places, and with a good deal less mayhem, noise, and corruption, than 'it' was happening here. The other caused a curious bending of the knee, a sort of nervous genuflection, before any article labelled 'Imported', and at any serious discussion a deprecatory cry of, 'But we're such a new country.'

American merchandise of all kinds, from shifts to aircraft, in fact compared favourably with that of any other country, and was often the best in its field. The United States is the second oldest continuous political entity in the world, nor is the idea of a national youthfulness tenable.

The American ideal, what the country collectively wanted, was different and new, and so was often derided as gauche; but other people's derision should not be taken as informed judgment.

We did not like the split in society, which we felt was growing, between the long hairs and the short hairs, the intellectuals and the football fans, the white collars and the blue collars. It had not been there in an earlier America, but it was obviously there now, and I thought the Liberal Establishment and the Business Man were about equally responsible. There was a vindictiveness and an unwillingness to accept others' good intentions which we thought new and foreign. Bill Mauldin's cartoons, often funny but usually motivated by a small-town divisiveness, epitomized what oppressed us.

As I have said already we thought that the Constitution badly needed re-writing, for it was designed not to work.

It was all very well to fear big government when outside enemies were 3,000 miles away across seas patrolled by the Royal Navy, but when America moved out into the world, about the turn of the century, and the problems became bigger and more urgent, the mechanism which was designed not to work did just that. In essence, in spite of Jefferson, the framers of the Constitution did not trust the people and so limited the powers of the people's representatives; and they made the fatal mistake of separating responsibility from power. A great change for the better would be wrought if, for instance, the defeat of any presidential proposal were to cause new elections, for then proposals and votes would always have real meaning, and not be mere political manoeuvres.

The country's judicial system was a farce, slow, inefficient, and widely disrespected.

The educational system was good, as far as we could judge, but there was something much too rigid about it, all the way from bottom to top. At the grade school level it seemed more concerned in adjusting children than in teaching them, while we thought that adjustment was the family's job. On the administrative level we thought that form changes should be made more often than once a year, and different subjects taught not by form or grade but in 'sets', to which children would be allotted according to ability. Much of this came from our background in English education, which seemed to work better than the American system.

The American Liberal had taught me much, above all to look afresh at institutions and ideas which I had held as fixed pillars of the universe. Without his abrasive presence and pressure around me, I could not have written anything better than potboiling thrillers. After six years of learning what he stood for and how he thought, I agreed with him probably less than when I arrived, for he seemed to me to be selectively blind seeing the obvious evil in Nazism, for instance, but not the equally large and equally obvious evil in Communism; and he was totally intolerant, particularly of the imperfections of democracy. The rule of the majority may not be very intellectual and it may not always seem fair, but it was the liberal himself who insisted that the power of kings and popes to dictate what is Right or Wrong must be abolished; and if there is a better alternative than the bumbling processes of democracy, many of us would like to hear about it.

We were continually amazed to realize that the American people had given commerce control of the air waves without a qualm or, as far as we could see, a quiver. The programmes which the huge advertising funds made available were often excellent; but at other times one walked through a waste land, when every network and every independent station was trying to grab the largest proportion of the audience at the same time, all the programmes were exactly similar, and all pure mush. The Canadian system, where there was a government-run network to set standards for the commercial stations, and commercial stations to prevent the government from having a monopoly or getting stuffy, seemed to be the right solution.

Would we get it? No — because of our last bete noire: special interests, lobbies — in this case the networks and perhaps the big manufacturers. Special interests riddled the fabric of the country to such an extent, and they had so much money with which to force their views, that it was often hard indeed to find truth in any situation. It was all very well to say that the national interest is the balance of everyone's special interests; but certain groups — I was thinking particularly of the American Legion, the Teamsters, General Motors, and a score like them — exerted forces that were multiplied by their central organization, and so overwhelmed the rest of us. Collective bargaining becomes meaningless when a union controls, say, all garbage removal, or all transportation, or all elevator operators. A strike by any of these is no different in its unanswerability from a strike by the army. The big corporations allied hypocrisy to ruthlessness, for while they bayed the moon on behalf of free enterprise they were secretly fixing prices and demanding government protection.

On the other side of the picture we thought that the greatness of America was, simply, as it must be for every country, its people. Since there are wonderful peoples everywhere — we knew and loved at least three others — we tried to pin down in just what this particular greatness of character lay. We thought, first, it was the sense of tolerance which I have already mentioned. Then we admired the earnestness of local responsibility; and it was perhaps this which gave the people as a whole their amazing power of making the right decisions when uninformed, misinformed, or both. Next, we felt a quality which I don't know the word for, but it was the opposite of materialism without being spirituality. Americans were not materialists. Their cars, boats, houses, and gadgets were designed to take them towards, or free them for, something else — the contemplation of still water from a still boat, the hunt of the deer in the heavy forest, the fierce campaigning on behalf of Joe Snooks for Dog Catcher. Of course there was some keeping up with the Joneses, but it did not seem to be basic to the character, perhaps no more than the throw-off of surplus energy. Certainly Americans were less materialistic than say Indians, and Mr Nehru's attempts to lecture the United States as from some peak of spirituality unattainable by us always raised a sour smile in me, particularly after his seizure of Kashmir.

There was an energy in the air — (walking up Fifth Avenue on an October morning; pushing down the midway at a New England county fair) — that one felt like a charge in the blood. Whether the energy was always properly directed we were not sure; but we were happy because the surrounding life-force entered us too, and we saw, thought, did, indeed were more than we had been.

A people cannot be praised or blamed for their variety, or for the space surrounding them, but these were both factors in our feeling for the country. The Big Sky was not a mere phrase — we had run under its canopy from the Missouri to the western ocean. The diversity of peoples and ways of life were not a legend — we had spoken with them, eaten with them, worked and danced with them: yet we were all Americans.

America was a shared experience now, like a concert, the mighty fire on the beach at Nag's Head, the light dancing on the children's awed faces and the heavy mutter of the Hatteras surf behind; flashing lights along the shore, Montauk facing England, our old home, the Half Way Light on its rock among the whales; the diffused murmur of sound at the Polo Grounds, suddenly concentrating, Willie Mays is ten feet up the centre field wall, glove upflung — the sound cracks like a cannon shot, echoing, echoing; it comes back now as the roar of the cadets at Michie Stadium, third and goal on the Penn State two-yard line; and that, like a record in reverse, is the swing of the music on the Plain as the Colours and guidons go by; then silence, but for the whirr of the tyres down the endless avenues of the Michigan forest, Barbara at the wheel, the children asleep behind and a dawn mist carpeting Lake Superior; a gradual growing of sound, the crackling of the fallen leaves underfoot as we walked among the silent aisles of tulip trees in Bear Mountain, and found ice in the mouth of a mine shaft where the pioneers had once forged iron for their tools; and there was the silence of the night in Trident Shelter, broken by the freight calling from the Androscoggin; and the thunderous night ride up Sherman Summit in the cab of a Big Boy, and taking the whistle cord myself to send out that moaning minor call over Wyoming, in case someone was listening, hearing the labour of our exhaust, as Barbara and I had once listened and heard, and New York nights, when the lights blazed like a shivering sea below, above, all round, and we walked the streets, hungry, drunk, we too charged, electric; back, to the dream come true, Manhattan rising from the bay, a greater, more magical, more mystical Venice, by the golden door.

'I have discovered the secret of American games,' I pronounced, for I had had several bourbons. 'When the British invented the games they had only one ending, or climax, at the end. The Americans split them up into a series of orgasms — innings in baseball, first downs in footballs...

'Balls!' Phil Morse said. 'American games are split up so that they can put in the commercials.'

'That comes well from the most pear-shaped voice on the commercial air waves,' Alan Anderson said.

Phyllis Kauffmann gave me a big hug — 'Oh God, I'm so happy for you,' she said. Davy Itkin grabbed my arm and pumped it -'Four straight, you bastard! How do you do it?' Phyllis gradually transferred her hug from me to Davy.

Ralph Barker said to Don Ettlinger, 'Prime time rates per unit delivered have got to go up, because...' Don looked interested.

Old Mellors said, 'Looks like you might have to put some new lath on the east side of the house, where the wisteria was.' His eyes followed a shapely female behind across the grass, but whether in memory or anticipation he was too experienced to show.

Young Mellors sat on the brickwork staring at the woman seated beside him, but we all knew what that gaze meant: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Their mating had been amazingly public and the marvel was only that her husband and his wife had not come across them, locked like dogs, at various spots along South Mountain Road. Barbara announced, 'I am five ft. five in., and weigh 130, but my reach is one inch longer than Rocky Marciano's, and I can carry any man here around that tree.' She picked up Harold Guinzburg, and carried him round the lawn, under one arm. I have never seen a more amazed publisher. The party continued.

We walked late in the silent orchard, Barbara and I, and saw that the fires were out. The moon rode among a fleet of clouds, casting intermittent shadows of the maple boughs on the grass. We went into the house and closed the door, but did not lock it. Barbara cleaned the sink and I weighted the papers on my desk, that the breeze through the open window might not blow them away. We turned out the lights. My father and mother were long in bed and asleep. Our children slept, though Martin had kicked off his blanket. We went to our own bed, content, but aware of a distant thunder, so far that it could barely be heard, so deep that it shook our bodies, and the house, and the earth.

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen