Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (24 page)

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.