Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (29 page)

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.