Homage to Gaia (21 page)

The cost of travel by ship across the Atlantic for the whole family was about £300 one way. The only way we could raise the fare was by selling our house. All through the summer of 1954, a succession of would-be buyers came, attracted by the £3,000 we were asking for our house in Finchley. But one after another their surveyors gave them damning reports on its condition. The would-be purchasers turned it down, often reluctantly, saying it was just the house they wanted. The surveyors all found subsidence and warned that it might not be cured and could lead to expensive structural repairs. I was just about to cancel our American trip when a young couple made an
offer: ‘We'll take it on, warts and all, but for £200 less than you're asking.' With the return of our deposit to the building society this left us with just enough money for the fares to New York but not to return, and we arranged then to travel on the
Queen
Mary.

Our first glimpse of the formidable bureaucracy of the United States was at their embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. To get an exchange visitor's visa for a year's stay at Harvard involved many visits. To make matters worse, in 1954 that grim and unusual man, Senator McCarthy, had undue influence over the politics of the United States. There was more stringent and difficult questioning than was usual at that embassy: questions like, did we intend to overthrow the
government
of the United States of America by force? It was difficult not to laugh at such absurdities, but we had been warned beforehand that laughing at them was the last thing we should do if we wanted to get a visa. Even odder and more insulting was the question, ‘Is the purpose of your journey solely to set up a house of ill repute and exploit women in prostitution?' We even had blood taken for the
Wassermann
test so that they could know whether we were syphilitic. In dear old failing England with its socialist tendencies, we had never encountered anything so demeaning, so crass, as this inquisition from an erstwhile ally. Eventually it was done and we had our visas and tickets. Our home was gone and we were staying in Salisbury for the night before we travelled with Tom Thompson in the Harvard Hospital station wagon with our luggage to Southampton and the
Queen
Mary.

On the morning that we left it was all excitement and we were full of wonder at the thought of our coming journey. Compared with an airport today, the ocean terminal at Southampton was not impressive. It had the appearance of a railway station trying to put on airs. The ship's crew took our luggage and we were on the gangway to the ship within minutes of arriving. The only time spent on land was in saying goodbyes. On the ship they took us to our cabin, large enough and with bunks for all five of us. Our youngest, Andrew, was now almost four years old, Christine ten, and Jane eight. We then walked to the tourist-class dining room for lunch. It seemed to take us an age to reach it, passing along the vast old passageways of the ship. We were soon well aware that she was the largest vessel afloat, so great was the distance to walk around her. In 1954 the UK was still rationed and we were used to short supplies of food, for there had been fourteen years of privation during and after the war. Our stomachs and our tastes
were unprepared for that first meal on the
Queen
Mary.
It was truly gorgeous, and we gorged. Even in tourist class, the cheapest way to travel at £60 a head to New York, the food was plentiful and of good quality, and delivered by waiters who provided an excellent service with several courses to the meal.

Walking around that floating ants' nest of a ship we encountered frequent barriers saying, ‘Cabin class only' and, more rarely, ‘First class only'. But the space available in tourist class was sufficient and included an area on most of the ship's decks, even at the top. The top deck was near the ship's funnels and when the ship sailed from
Southampton
to Cherbourg, her first port of call, we were up there to watch. We forgot that ships always announce their departure by a blast from their hooters, and those of the
Queen Mary
were claimed to be so loud as to be audible ten miles away. To Helen, Andrew, and me it was the most terrifying sound. A low deep throbbing that seemed to be measured in bels not mere decibels, it shook our bodies as well as our ears. Andrew screamed in terror and we staggered to the shelter of the stairway. We did not return to that deck again for the whole of the trip, but it was a pleasant journey. The five days to New York, even in tourist class, were more comfortable and relaxed than anything the airlines can offer. The shift in time of one hour daily is much easier to cope with than the sudden jerk of five hours. Eating in comfort at dining tables was a joy after so much privation. The ship's library and cinema had much to offer and there was no difficulty finding space in the ample recreation areas.

Typically, as young socialists, we resented our exclusion from the first-class territory. What justification was there for these bloated plutocrats and faded gentry to travel so extravagantly? Typically also, we were determined that as soon as we could afford it we would not travel classified amongst the poor but would be amongst first-class also. Such is the contradiction of socialism. To citizens of sensible nations, I must explain that in those days the English were so class-oriented that questions of status were ubiquitous, but it was not all bad. We knew instantly from the class system, from dress, voice, and deportment, just where anybody belonged on the pyramid of our nation. Many, if not most, were contented to know this place and lead their lives at its level. This was true to some extent of us also, but the segregation of classes on a ship somehow seemed to ignite the politics of envy. All this must seem odd, if not mad, to wealthy Americans who choose to travel economy on the flight from America to Europe or
even farther. They do so as part of their puritan ethic. I knew
American
millionaires, at a time when a millionaire was seriously rich, who would never waste money on the greater comfort of business or
first-class
travel.

The journey to the United States in early October was pleasantly enhanced for us by rough weather. This kept many in their cabins sea sick and there were few in the dining rooms and recreation areas. There were gales blowing most of the journey, and the Atlantic swell made the bows of the ship rise and fall through sixty feet or more. The tourist class lounges and bars were in this part of the ship. This we didn't mind in the least; indeed, we enjoyed it.

Looking out from a ship on a transatlantic voyage there are three great sights: the green countryside of England as the ship passes down Southampton water into the Solent; the sea in all its moods; and the splendid arrival at New York past the Statue of Liberty and to the white cliffs of the skyscrapers. The airlines can never offer so
magnificent
a prospect. As the ship berths on the East Side, its large,
functional
, but seemly bulk is a true match for the architecture of New York. The stopping of the ship's engines punctuates the journey's end. Then comes the anticlimax. On the
Queen Mary
this involved for us a long and wearying wait in queues in the ship's lounges for the attentions of the immigration officers.

My experiences of public servants like police officers and tax inspectors came from my growing up in London. This was a time when policemen, even in the rough area of Brixton, were friendly men who walked the streets and who seemed to spend as much time holding up traffic to let children like me, or the elderly, cross the road, as in deterring crime. I never saw in all my childhood, especially with the poorer children of Brixton, anything that would fit the academic Marxist image of an oppressive force that kept the poor in their place. Indeed the police were mostly working-class themselves. If the Marxists were right and the function of the police was
oppression
, then they did their job with such tact and sensitivity that no one on the ground, except criminals, was aware of it. But London in those times, in spite of profound racial differences, was only stratified by class, and it was otherwise a homogeneous society. It was so different from the mix of cultures that London is now and New York was then. An Austrian living in Boston in those days said to me, ‘I would never live in America if the police were unarmed or in Britain if they were armed.' Waiting in the vast dockside customs sheds for our luggage to
be checked, we saw the armed police around and immediately were made aware how different from our own was the society in which we would spend the next year. Two officials from the Rockefeller
Foundation
met us in the customs shed and eased our way through customs and into a taxi. They took us to the Abbey Hotel in
Manhattan
. It was not far from the Penn Station from where we would be travelling to Boston the next day. Travelling with my family gave a wholly different perspective from my solo journey earlier that year. Everything we saw in New York during our brief stay was strange, fascinating, yet slightly threatening. How odd that the hotel had no public rooms at all, just a small entrance hall with a reception desk and a row of lifts. Meals were in restaurants somewhere in the streets around. In the evening we chose an automat to eat in; we were too insecure to want to interact with these strange and inscrutable New Yorkers. They were so unlike the men we had known in the American Forces during the war. To add to our feeling that we were indeed alien, Andrew had a nosebleed during the night and bloodstained his bed. We left in the morning in a hurry and embarrassed, imagining that shortly afterwards there would be an encounter with the police and the problem of convincing them that the blood had come from nothing more serious than a nosebleed.

Soon we were in the magnificent Penn Station and ready for our journey. We had our tickets and we boarded the Boston train for the 250-mile journey from New York to Boston, about the same distance as from London to Newcastle. In England, a fast steam train in those days did the journey in about three hours. We were surprised to find that our 9 am train did not arrive in Boston until 3.30 that afternoon. It was a dismal journey, creeping past dry, barren-looking countryside and numerous small industrial towns. If this was New England,
presumably
therefore most like old England, whatever must the rest of the United States be like? Later we found that in many ways New England—in landscape, culture, and peoples—is the least English of all the regions. It was different from the countryside and small towns of Texas, which later we found was much more familiar and pleasant to live in.

We eventually arrived in Boston hungry and thirsty, for there was no restaurant car on the train, just a vendor selling peanuts and Hershey bars. We took a taxi to Harvard Medical School and went with our entire luggage to the Department of Biophysical Chemistry, in which I was due to work for the next year. They seemed quite
unprepared for our arrival, although I had written on several
occasions
telling them exactly when and on what date we would arrive. After a while someone managed to find another Englishman,
Kenneth
Walton, who was also spending a year in the department but had arrived earlier, and he took us to the Peter Bent Brigham Hotel just nearby. It was an ancient faded wooden structure with miserable rooms, more like a doss house than a hotel but, as he said, it was cheap. We were rapidly discovering that the $3,000 a year fellowship that Rockefeller Foundation was providing was wholly inadequate to support Helen, the three children, and me.

We had to find somewhere to live quite soon, and the next day we spent visiting a round of realtors. All were unable to offer anything that we could afford until the last one—a Jewish realtor—mistook me for a Jew, not just a quarter of one. He offered us a flat in Brookline, conveniently near the university and in the Jewish quarter of Boston. The rent was $140 a month, which was more than half our stipend. But since the department at Harvard University had promised to add $2,000 a year, our difficulties would merely be temporary. We
discovered
later that the size of our family had prevented easy access to rented accommodation. Our three children were seen as a threat and no one wanted to rent their property to us. The Jewish realtor who finally did said afterwards that it was because we were English that we got the flat. I think that this was because at that time English children were seen as well behaved. After visiting the nearby supermarket and settling in, life seemed less stark.

The next morning I went to the lab to start my year's work. I found it was oddly disorganized. The labs were poorly equipped compared with those at Mill Hill and money seemed to be in short supply. I went to see the staff member who had invited me to Harvard. High on my agenda was the $2,000 a year that Harvard, through him, had offered to supplement my Rockefeller stipend. To my dismay, he said that Senator McCarthy had introduced new regulations concerning the employment of aliens, which made it impossible for the university to help me. I had no way to check his statement and the first few days in the United States, with hotel bills and purchases to equip our flat, had reduced the tiny sum of two weeks' salary, $114, to almost nothing and there were two weeks remaining. We found near complete inflexibility. When I asked how we were to live, the reply was ‘Well, give up smoking, you'll survive.' The Rockefeller Foundation was equally unhelpful. When I pointed out that the two weeks' stipend given
me in New York was not enough to live on, their response was to say, ‘You should not have come with three children and a wife. Why have you not left them in England?' They refused to give an advance to tide us over. We began to realize how cosseted a society socialist Britain was and that America was a world of harsh reality for which we were wholly unprepared. I mentioned my plight to an English colleague, Bill Jones, who I had met in Washington in January and who worked in the blood-grouping laboratory just down Longwood Avenue from Harvard Medical School. He snorted and said, ‘I warned you about that bunch.' He suggested that I sell a pint of my blood. The rate then paid was $10 a pint. I had given many pints in England for experimental purposes so I thought why not sell my blood to feed the family until our next pay cheque comes in two weeks. Bill had the technicians check my blood group while I chatted with him about his invention, a blood-cell counter, which he called an ‘
arithmometer
'. When he saw their report he said, ‘You are in luck. Your group is so rare that we will pay $50 a pint.' I was delighted to give my pint of blood, for they were paying me almost a week's stipend and in cash. Bill explained that my blood group was common among Baffin Land Inuits but extremely rare elsewhere. It was no use for
transfusion
but valuable for typing other bloods. We celebrated that night in our Brookline flat on Beacon Street with a good meal, our first since we had arrived.