Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (27 page)

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.'