Thick winter fog had turned afternoon to twilight when the S.S. United States docked at Southampton. Then they wouldn’t let me through Customs because my trunk was missing, and when the first boat train to London left without me, I began to unravel.
I was shocked to hear the train was leaving without me.
But I had a reservation on that train, I told a porter.
Don’t worry, sir, they’ll take you on the second train, he said.
Thank God, they had a second train. I hadn’t known that. But where was my trunk? Could they have failed to put my trunk aboard in New York?
“Did you have it in the cabin, sir?”
No, it was stored in the hold.
Don’t worry, sir. It takes a little longer to get luggage out of the hold. It’ll be along presently.
We were in a cavernous shed. In the first excitement of getting off the boat, of actually setting foot in a foreign country, the shed had seemed a thrilling place, swarming with merrily chattering passengers, fast-stepping porters, and carts piled high with baggage. Now, though, with half the passengers gone, the other half drifting away, and the bustle reduced to a shuffle, my excitement was fading into dread.
It was dim and gray in that shed. The English being spoken by the porters and the Customs inspectors was not my English. Suppose my trunk was lost. What in the world would I do? But then, suppose it wasn’t lost. I had four cartons of Chesterfields stored in that trunk, and English law forbade more than two. Suppose the Customs inspector commanded me to open the trunk and spied the illegal cigarettes. Surely they didn’t send you back on the next boat, not for two cartons of Chesterfields. And yet, the Customs inspectors looked decidedly unfriendly. They were trained to distrust everyone, weren’t they?
The shed was becoming sinister and hostile.
I was suffering an acute loss of nerve, and knew it, and told myself to get a grip on myself, and keep my chin up. I was an American, after all. We Americans were the twentieth-century Romans, weren’t we? The Romans never showed fear. Tom O’Neill wouldn’t whimper.
My loss of spirit was accelerated by the damp, wintry chill. It was January. Though I was wearing my new wool suit with vest and my new overcoat, bought especially for London, the cold passed easily through wool, cotton, flesh, and bone, settled into the marrow, then clamped the soul in frigid embrace.
From nowhere the missing trunk appeared on the low platform in front of the Customs man.
“Is this yours, sir?” he asked.
I nodded, and he made a chalk mark on the trunk and waved me into England smuggling twenty packs of illicit cigarettes. The porter led the way to the boat train and said he would put the trunk in the baggage car. I produced a fistful of English coins acquired aboard ship and gave him several of the heavier ones. He looked more than pleased, so I guessed it was a decent tip and climbed on the train. The car was startlingly small and just as startlingly elegant. It contained eight small tables, four on either side of the aisle. Each table was set for two with dazzling white linen and the cups, saucers, plates, and silverware required for serious eating. On each table a small, silk-shaded lamp cast a warm orange glow. Armchairs faced each other across each table, creating eight intimate conversational settings.
A white-jacketed porter put me at a table opposite a well-dressed, middle-aged man whose tailoring, even to my untutored eye, spelled Englishman. I had been cautioned not to start idle chatter with travelers because the British were tetchy about talking to strangers, but in such close quarters it was impossible to ignore him, so I nodded, smiled, and muttered an innocuous greeting.
He did not smile back, nor speak. He simply glared at me with undisguised dislike.
Good Lord! This man hates me!, I said to myself.
My spirits had risen a little on boarding the train, but sank again at this sour greeting. To avoid having to look at my dyspeptic companion, I took some blank paper from my wallet and started making notes on my welcome to England. Maybe he would become curious and ask about my work, which would break the ice and give me a chance to tell him I was an American newspaperman. That ought to interest him. Head lowered, I made notes:
“Jan 19—arrival—bags fouled up—helpful porters—very outgoing hotel [Claridge’s] representative—didn’t tip him—bad?… RR train—so small!—the odor in car—medicinal—Pullman—2 armchairs facing a laid table—orange-shaded lamp bulb, small open bulbs overhead and along sides—cars look like all mahogany paneled…”
At this point the porter asked, “D’ya want tea, sir?” I said yes and was served the first cup of an ocean of tea destined to flow through me before I left England.
I made a note about the porter and the tea and wrote on:
“Pullman seats 16 people—with more private compartments at either end—great bustle of porters just prior to departure—‘Scone, sir?’—‘Yes, please’—So I get a buttered biscuit.”
Now the train was pulling away from the pier. As it left the shelter of the dock siding, we could see that the fog was immense. Through the window I made out faint, blurry lights signifying that Southampton was out there, but nothing had form or outline, and then there was no light at all, just dark and impenetrable fog.
I had grown up on stories and movies set in prodigious English fogs, and I wanted England to be foggy, but this fog was not the gentle, romantic fog I had imagined. It was a fog with a dark heart, a fog that might never end, a fog that seemed to choke and smother the world. I jotted a few notes in this overwrought vein, then, having filled up the paper, had no choice but to tuck it away and deal with my tea and scone. As I did so, my companion stared directly into my eyes with such intensity that I must have raised my eyebrows in surprise, as if to say, “Yes?”
He spoke a simple, declarative sentence.
“America makes me sick,” he said.
I smiled at him. I was too shaken by the quiet ferocity of his voice to give a spoken reply. If he had thrown his tea into my face I could hardly have been more shocked. The smile was the only retort I could muster. It was supposed to tell him he could be as rude as he pleased, but could never provoke me to anger because I was a gentleman, a man of the world too polished, too well-bred to kick his filthy shins under the table, as a less temperate man might do.
Finally I said something inane. Something like, “Well, we all have our prejudices and it’s better having them out in the open than keeping them suppressed.” I could get off banalities like that without thinking, and probably did so now because I was too rattled to say anything that needed thinking about.
The man talked on in a perfectly even conversational tone that did not carry to the other passengers. My mind took in the substance of it, but not the music. It seemed he despised everything about America. Its overfed people with their vacuous smiles and raucous voices. The stupidity of its policies in Europe. Its lack of history, its absence of culture, its vulgar belief that money could buy anything.
Why was he doing this? He did not look crazy. Was this the famous British eccentricity, which so titillated the travel-guide writers? Back home, I would never greet a perfect stranger from abroad by telling him that everything about his homeland disgusted me. Maybe this was the mysterious British sense of humor at work, perhaps the man was enjoying some bizarre practical joke at my expense. But no. No humorist ever burned with the fierce intensity that fired this man. This was a man who would cherish no mirth unless it was sour.
“This man hates me.” I said it silently. The first person I meet in England, and he hates me, and I am locked in with him at this table in this terrible fog, and will be, all the way to London.
There was no guessing how many hours it would take to get to London. Gray foggy afternoon turned to black foggy night against the windows. Sometimes we passed station platforms with lights close enough to be visible through the window, and they slid past so slowly that the train scarcely seemed to be moving.
To cope with my hateful companion I fell back on reporter’s reflexes, asking him questions and listening dispassionately to his answers. This way I tried to reduce him to just another of the crackpots who fill the newspaperman’s life. The trick was to let them talk, keep an impassive face, pretend to be listening intently, then put them out of mind. This fellow was not so easily dismissed, however. Though I could pretend to listen to him while hearing nothing, he had already poisoned everything for me. I began sinking into despair, into total, black, terrifying despair.
I realized then that I had been deluding myself ever since that lunch with Buck Dorsey. I was utterly unqualified to be a London correspondent. I knew nothing about British politics, nothing about foreign policy, nothing about any of the complex economic or diplomatic matters that constituted the news from London. I didn’t even know much English history. What was Dorsey thinking of when he picked me for this job? I was headed for humiliation and catastrophe.
Since coming down the gangplank in Southampton I had been sinking deeper and deeper into this living nightmare filled with symbols pointing to failure. The missing trunk, the train leaving without me, the awful penetrating cold. Then this fog. Such a fog. Not like any fog ever seen or imagined. A fog out of nightmares. Crawling through it in this bizarre little train, I felt like somebody in one of those plays about baffled travelers who slowly learn they are dead and headed for know-not-where. To complete the misery, destiny had seated me beside this prime British hater of everything American, including me, this spirit-crusher, this well-poisoner, this messenger of death and youthful sorrow.
Before the train was an hour out of Southampton, I was lonely, scared, and homesick.
The sailing from New York had been one of the great days in the history of our family. It looked to my mother as if I had finally made something of myself and was headed over the ocean to amount to something, and she was determined to be at the ship to make sure I didn’t back out at the last minute.
She was entitled to enjoy the moment. She had driven, tugged, and hauled me a long way from Morrisonville, Virginia, since her bleak winter of 1930 when, bereft by my father’s death and nearly destitute, she had taken us to New Jersey to live on the charity of her brother Allen and his wife, Pat.
Naturally she wanted Aunt Pat and Uncle Allen to come to the sailing, too. She couldn’t have got me there without their help, so in some ways this historic day was as much theirs as hers. She thought they would surely want to be there, and she was right. We all spent a night at their house in Belleville, and next morning Uncle Allen crammed everybody and the baggage into his Plymouth and drove us across the Hudson to the pier at West Forty-sixth Street.
Mimi was not going yet. She and the children would cross in April after I had learned my way around London and found a place where a family could live. This was Buck Dorsey’s command, and it made the historic day a glum occasion for Mimi, not only because we faced a three-month separation, but also because she was being left alone to cope with the children, put furniture in storage, find a new tenant to take our apartment lease, tend to bills and taxes, and do all the packing required to move a family overseas with two babies.
Nobody in our family had any experience of ship sailings, but we had all seen enough in movies to know the form: excited bustle in the stateroom, telegrams being delivered at the last minute, champagne flowing, ship’s loudspeakers booming, “All ashore that’s going ashore,” then the last farewell kisses, the rush to gangplank and rail, the waving across the widening expanse of water as tugs nosed the great ocean liner out into the Hudson River. That’s how it turned out, too, except for the champagne, which was omitted because my mother, Aunt Pat, and Uncle Allen were all teetotalers.
My mother was so exultant, even without champagne, that while exploring the cabin she managed to trip over a doorjamb and fall into the bathroom, but came up laughing and unhurt. Twice, stewards even brought in telegrams. They came from friends on the Sun and said, BON VOYAGE. Snapshots were taken. Everyone was smiling happy historic-day smiles except Mimi, who carried Kathy in her arms and looked morose.
At sailing time I went with them to the gangplank, then climbed to a top deck to wave at them down on the pier, but never found them in the crowd.
The next night Mimi wrote, “We raced along the entire pier yesterday trying to catch your eye as the boat pulled away, but you stood immobile as the Sphinx looking seaward.”
The ship was the S.S. United States, fastest ocean liner in the world. Five days from New York to Southampton. It was like the world’s best hotel if you went first-class, and first-class was the way I was going. The Sun expected it. Like some fairy-tale enchanter, Buck Dorsey had waved his magic martinis and turned me from a city-room serf into a prince of journalism. Sun princes traveled first cabin all the way and sent the bill to Uncle Abell.
Where would I stay in London until I could rent an apartment? Sun correspondents who knew the London go-around were unanimous. There was only one hotel where a Sun man could possibly stay: the Savoy. So I booked for an indefinite stay at the Savoy. I knew nothing about the Savoy, but noticed that people familiar with London looked at me with rising respect when they heard I would be staying at the Savoy for a month or two.
I was uneasy about this new license to spend lavishly. Until now I had never spent fifty cents for a cab ride without fearing the Sun would reprimand me for squandering money. Now I was being told to squander freely. In some embarrassment, I went to Buck Dorsey shortly after his enchanter’s lunch and said I didn’t have any luggage and couldn’t afford to buy any.
“Get yourself a new suitcase and send the bill to Uncle Abell.” He shrugged, as if to ask why I was troubling him with these piffling questions. Didn’t I know that a prince of journalism had unlimited expense-account rights?
Taking Dorsey’s advice, I bought a three-suiter of cordovan-brown leather. Even empty, it weighed a ton, and was supposed to. Heavy luggage was a symbol of power. It showed you didn’t have to carry your own suitcases. In 1953 travel was still travel, not brutish transportation. Civilized people crossed the Atlantic in leisurely seaborne luxury, not like canned goods hurtling dementedly through the time zones. They bought their luggage heavy, and porters competed to carry it.
They dressed for dinner, too. Everybody said I would need a tuxedo to hold my head up in the first-class dining room, so I went to Hamburger’s and bought the full regalia: jacket with glossy lapels, black suspenders, cuff links, shirt studs, shiny shoes, black bow tie, crisp white shirt. I bought a London suit, too. Dark gray with a thin pinstripe. Somber enough for an undertaker, it looked like London to me. I didn’t have the nerve to bill the Sun for the clothes, though, so I spoke to my mother. She spoke to a lifelong acquaintance who was somebody in the savings-and-loan business, and he lent me two hundred dollars.
For five days on the North Atlantic, life was idyllic. Because it was January, tourists were few and the passenger list short. Mostly they were business travelers and senior government people who, since the United States had been built with federal subsidies, traveled at discount.
With so few passengers to keep them busy, the stewards swamped us with services. I pushed a button in the cabin, and a few moments later someone was bringing me a tray of fresh fruit, a pot of steaming coffee with the pastry chefs latest confections, a pitcher of ice with bottles of Scotch and soda water, a new deck of cards, a full breakfast or lunch or dinner if I was too weary to ride the elevator to the dining room. After breakfast in the cabin and a leisurely bath and walking a mile around the promenade deck, there was the bar, where I could sit over a brandy milk punch and enjoy the sensuous roll of the ship riding gently in long oceanic swells.
In no time at all I had traveled light years beyond the shabby penury of our old Baltimore existence and was shamelessly devoted to the life of idle luxury.
“This is the third day out and the weather so far has been ideal,” I wrote Mimi from the ship’s library. “The first two days were like riding on a great placid lake. Shipboard life is very pleasant and not very exciting. The crowd is mostly very oldish—filled with the kind of women Helen Hokinson used to draw and very brisk old gentlemen who get up at sunrise and stride purposefully about the deck in—you guessed it—gentlemen’s caps.”
The people who looked “very oldish” to twenty-seven-year-old eyes were mostly in their forties and fifties. One passenger not “oldish” was Ed Hughes, The Wall Street Journal’s European correspondent, who sat with me at the chief purser’s table in the dining room. The voyage was so empty of celebrities that the chief purser had to fill out his table with newspapermen, and Hughes embarrassed the trade, I thought at first, by coming to dinner in a business suit instead of a tuxedo. When he did it a second time, I was the one who felt embarrassed. It dawned on me that a newspaperman who put on a fancy dress to eat was probably ridiculous, particularly if he was so poor he had to borrow from a savings-and-loan to pay for it.
After that, I admired Hughes’s cheek outrageously. His was the common touch that no reporter should ever lose, I thought. Nevertheless, on the third night I again wore my fancy suit despite Hughes’s example. Dressing up for dinner not only provided a time-killing amusement in an idle day, but also heightened my delightful sense of luxurious living on shipboard.
Those five days at sea disconnected me so completely from the world that I ought to have been decompressed before being allowed into the messy, cold, foggy, and rude reality of England. My terrible companion on the boat train had decompressed me all the way down into deep depression long before the porter announced we were arriving at Waterloo Station. I stepped out into a fog so dense that neither end of the train was visible, nor the ceiling of the station, if it had one, nor anything resembling a waiting room.
Desperate to put this nightmare day behind me, I gave my bag to one of the porters swarming over the platform and begged him to get a taxi and get me out of there. I remembered my trunk going into the baggage car at Southampton, but had no idea how to get it off, and didn’t care. To hell with the trunk. Let the railroad keep it. Close to panic, I was ready to drop everything and run.
The porter put me into a cab. No doors for the driver’s seat. How antique it looked. It reminded me of my father’s Model T.
“Where to, sir?”
I said, “The Savoy Hotel,” and sank back into the vast darkness of the backseat and let my mind race. My God, I had left my trunk back at the station. It was gone for good now. Stupid, stupid, stupid! One little bit of pressure and I had cracked completely. Some foreign correspondent. I had behaved shamefully, had humiliated myself because of that awful Englishman on the train. I had handled it as though I were a child, not a foreign correspondent, not a prince of journalism, not a colleague of Tom O’Neill’s.
The taxi seemed barely to have gone around the corner before it pulled into a driveway.
“Here you are, sir.”
A man in crisply tailored uniform was opening the cab door. Another was carrying my suitcase away.
How much was the fare?
The cab driver uttered some numbers that meant nothing to me. I had practiced English money at home with Mimi so I would understand it well enough to deal with porters and cab drivers. Twenty shillings to the pound, twelve pence to the shilling. Since the pound was worth $2.80, the shilling was fourteen cents, and the penny was a little more than the American cent.
I remembered none of it now with the cab driver waiting to be paid, so producing a one-pound note I asked if that was enough.
“Far too much, sir,” said the cab driver.
I said why didn’t he take out whatever I owed him and then take as much more for the tip as seemed fair and give me anything that was left.
What he gave back included some large heavy coins and a small brown paper note. It was startling to get so much change for my pound note, and though I couldn’t tell how much it was, I knew instinctively that, given the invitation to rob me, the driver had declined. That was the first happy thing that happened to me in England.
Entering the hotel lobby, I was startled to find it bustling with people. By then the day seemed to have been a thousand hours long, and I’d had the vague notion it must be long after midnight, so was amazed to see that it was the cocktail hour.
Looking around the lobby, I noticed that it was full of fog. Long wisps of it floated in ectoplasmic layers just over people’s heads, seven or eight feet from the floor. It was black because, as I soon learned, it contained lethal quantities of poisonous soft-coal dust. The lobby smelled strongly of coal gas, which was one of the distinctive odors of London in the early 1950s.
While marveling that there should be layers of black fog floating in London hotel lobbies, I was startled again by the approach of a stately gentleman in ambassadorial dress: tailcoat, striped pants, the full rig. He seemed to work for the hotel.
Would I step over to the reception desk, please?
As I did, he accompanied me and stood at my elbow while I signed documents and surrendered my passport. Then he made a small gesture and uniformed men came scurrying. One brought my expensive suitcase.
Did I have any other baggage?
I confessed that I had once had a trunk, but had abandoned it at the boat train in Waterloo Station. The ambassadorial man made another small gesture, and a uniformed man went scurrying off.
Then, carrying a key, and followed by a uniformed man carrying my suitcase and a second carrying my portable typewriter, he led the way to an elevator, and all of us ascended in silent grandeur.
The room we entered was even bigger than the immense bathroom that went with it. We were joined by a funereal-looking man who announced that he was the valet, started to open my suitcase, and became sulky when I insisted I didn’t want it opened. Though I had never seen a valet in the flesh before, I had the impression that they were finicky men who might hold you in contempt if your wardrobe was not top drawer. I did not want this one discovering that my magnificent suitcase contained little but dirty laundry and a few frayed jackets and slacks, which had been good enough at the rewrite desk in Baltimore but would not pass muster at the Savoy.
Before I could get them all out of the room, in came another uniformed man wheeling the trunk I had expected never to see again. I was so overwhelmed with gratitude and awe at the efficiency of the Savoy’s trunk-recovery squad that I almost forgave England for the awful man on the train and decided I would love it after all.
The phone rang. It was David Lampe, a Baltimorean who was trying to make a living as a free-lance writer in London. We had known each other years before in a writing class at Hopkins. On learning I was coming to London, he had written volunteering to help acquaint me with the city. As this bizarre day went on and on, it was good to hear an American accent on the telephone. Lampe offered to treat me to dinner, and I told him to come by and pick me up.
The phone went off again, and it was Joan Graham, the Englishwoman who was the second half of the Sun bureau. She was in the Savoy bar having a drink with a friend. I probably needed a drink by now; wouldn’t I like to join them?
David was small and soft-spoken; Joan big and dynamic. By now I was too tired to notice much more about anybody. Still, when Lampe suggested we take the Underground to his place, where he could provide a decent dinner, I agreed, since it offered a chance to see a little of London and because I dreaded having to confront the mysteries of British restaurants alone that night. Many foods were rationed and hard to get, and most restaurants were supposed to be terrible by American standards.
In the dense, gassy fog, Lampe led me through Trafalgar Square and into Piccadilly Circus, where he showed me how easy it was to use the Underground, after which we rode an endless escalator down to a deep tube and took the train to his stop. He said we were near Regent’s Park, but for me, lost in that fog in that immense sprawl of a city, it could have been the outskirts of Scotland. In the tiny kitchen of his tiny apartment, he quickly prepared a steak, which I ate with relish even though it did not quite taste like steak.
“How did you like it?” he asked when we were finishing over coffee.
“It was excellent,” I said.
“It was horse,” said Dave.
I must have looked baffled.
“Horsemeat,” Lampe said. “It’s not rationed and it’s better than most of the meats that are.”
Back at the Savoy before going to bed that night, I wrote to Mimi, omitting the more harrowing aspects of the day, though confessing, “I felt a little depressed when I arrived this evening.” A postscript said:
“Got my first introduction to the rigors of British life tonight. Dave Lampe took me to his flat off Regent’s Park and cooked me a fine horsemeat dinner—horsemeat filet—no kidding.”
That same night in faraway Baltimore, Mimi opened her letter by writing:
“Darling: Your first day in London! Stomping at the Savoy! How exciting it all must be.”