Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (10 page)

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.