A Category Five Hurricane - 19 September 2003

If talks had titles, this one would be called Waiting for Isabel, which has proved already at least as much of a strain as Waiting for Godot.

Well, it's been about a week now since Isabel's coming appearance was first proclaimed, emblazoned from every television set on the east coast and flooded the newspaper headlines.

Isabel - which we were told on Tuesday threatened the homes and persons of 50 million people living or temporarily housed along the great, white, sandy shoreline from North Carolina to possibly Long Island.

Isabel - the ninth of the season - is a hurricane conceived as usual in the Caribbean, growing up into an alarming size and tempo off the Bahamas.

But it was reported to be headed for the Carolinas, to the great relief of the usual victims in Florida and the people in and around the Gulf of Mexico-Louisiana.

New Orleans, early in the week, threw celebration parties for the departure of Isabel well to the north of them.

As I talk, which is midday Thursday, Isabel is about to vent her full wrath somewhere between central North Carolina and Virginia.

The publicity about Isabel was well taken, for when it was fully grown and on its way to the American mainland it was tagged a category five hurricane, which is about as bad as it ever gets.

Simply picture a big doughnut wheeling anti- or counter-clockwise. Those whirling winds were whizzing at 160 miles an hour.

The hole in the middle of the doughnut is the eye, about usually a half hour's period of dead calm - not a breath, not a stirring leaf - until the forward movement of the whole doughnut, which goes at about 10-15 miles an hour, comes whipping at you from the topside, when chaos is come again.

At my back door two days ago came two official notices - one was from the insurance company listing the precautions to take now, the things you must do if, after your house is a shambles or non-existent, you may justly claim hurricane insurance. This applies to our beach house down the island where my wife and a couple of innocent English friends are hoping for the best.

The other was a printed note from the landlord of this apartment house where I sit communing with you. Remarking that although New York city is now unlikely to have a direct hit "we must consider the possibility at least of a power outage", whereupon we should prepare by getting flash lights, a battery-run radio and any medicines we require. Right. And plenty of bottled water. Done and done.

It's good to remind people who've never been through a hurricane that, even if the hit is a couple of hundred miles to your north or south, the apron - what they used to call the petticoats - of the storm is wide and violent, bringing high winds and drenching rain. And what this time is most feared - monstrous flooding.

We've had an unusually wet summer and the prospect of a sudden surge of 15, 20 foot waves is, shall we say, daunting.

Anyway just to provide a little schadenfreude for such as that radio critic I quoted last week who was amazed to find me waffling on a Sunday - after the Saturday when a human being had orbited the Earth - I'll say now that whatever stormy fate awaits us we will be here, or on the island, to receive it.

The last vivid scene on the telly was a couple of days ago and it was of a white, long, sandy beach in North Carolina and six or eight loose-limbed, good-looking, young college boys and girls scuffing their toes in the rolling turf under a blue, blue sky.

They were being interviewed by a town official.

"So," he said, "what's your plan?"

"Well," said a young man, "we're from Pittsburgh. We've never seen a hurricane and we figure we'll stick around."

"Sorry about that," said the townsman, "but along with 150,000 other people you're going to be evacuated PDQ, now, inland."

Inland - along with, he might have added, thousands of fighter jets and bombing planes and crews.

In times of great stress the word of besieged populations since Anglo Saxon times has been "tell us a story". I will tell you two stories.

Last Monday afternoon a famous old Broadway theatre was filled with a mixed audience of family, friends, film and television fans, any passing citizens who thought they might like to pay a small tribute to an actor whose career spanned seven decades.

Better known perhaps in this country and his native Canada than elsewhere but enjoyed and admired by everyone who saw him - whom somebody the other day felicitously called "the actor with the big ears and a gleam in his eye".

Very good. They gleamed denoting mischief, humour, alertness, along with a talent to impersonate such different characters.

He earned the very rare distinction among even ardent film fans of not being easily recognised in the part he was playing.

His name was Hume Cronyn and he died a month or two ago at the age of 91.

Way back in the early 1950s he and his wife, the English actress Jessica Tandy, came on to a television series I was hosting and often afterwards we ran into each other at the same hotel when I was taping my show, which was always in Boston, and they were doing an out-of-town try-out at the local theatre. I have two droll memories of him.

One evening, dining with my oldest, most constant friend, who was a dedicated, upright, very conservative banker, the conversation got round to a recent fashion in the art of monopoly.

He was explaining the difference between what were then called vertical and horizontal mergers of companies.

Very simple distinction. He explained and justified let's say a motor car company taking over a small steel company or a leather company - any firm that made components necessary or essential to the main product.

But he deplored the spread of horizontal mergers where, say, a movie company buys a publishing house and then a football team and then a perfume company.

Such bizarre combinations are now so common that they excite no lamentations or outrage except from my old friend in his grave.

Anyway the talk moved on and we ordered dinner. What to drink?

I looked over the menu and decided I'd settle for a beer - a lager - but whose?

Ah, I noticed a Canadian ale I was very fond of and I said to my friend: "Hume Cronyn's mother owns it. At least I'll be putting a penny in his pocket."

"No more," sighed my friend.

"How come?"

"She sold it. It's owned now by Brazilian Traction."

Another evening, another dinner. It was a summer Sunday in New York city.

My wife was out at the end of Long Island. I was alone here and in the late afternoon the phone rang and it was Hume Cronyn.

He said: "John Gielgud's in town and Jessie and I are taking him out to dinner. We wondered who might amuse him or take his mind off the theatre, which, as you know, is a 24-hour obsession with him."

I modestly offered myself as a potential distraction.

We turned up at an Italian restaurant and we were barely seated before Gielgud went off on one of his famous gaffes.

After giving his order and handing the menu back to the waiter, he said: "And no garlic. I hate garlic."

The veins of the waiter's hands and temple swelled to bursting.

With enormous restraint he replied: "In my part of the country also, Signor."

And then performed that dismissive gymnastic which old-time novelists called "turning on his heel".

Gielgud, quite unfazed, returned to his memories of Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry and his connections with her family.

And the meal went as Hume had indicated - a feast of reminiscences from Gielgud of actors, actresses, directors, most of whom we'd barely heard of.

I managed to bring him up to date, to my date - the 1920s and '30s - during which the theatre had been one of my schoolboy and undergraduate passions.

Whereupon came forth a stream of - I must say - entertaining anecdotes about all the actors he loved or hated before the Second World War.

The meal was coming to an end but still the theatrical memories flowed on and at one point Hume's foot tapped mine under the table.

He'd hoped that I was the most likely guest to divert Gielgud on to some current topic and at the time nothing was more current than the spreading quagmire of Vietnam.

After the tapped foot Hume Cronyn broke in. "John," he said, "forgive me but I think Alistair would like to know where you stand on Vietnam."

Gielgud looked at him with studied tenderness.

"My dear Hume," he said, "I wouldn't know the difference between a liberal and a conservative."

And right away he reopened the floodgates and we heard more and more about James Agate and Cornelia Otis Skinner and Lawrence Anderson and Ernest Thesiger and Robert Lorraine and a score or more other actors that the Cronyns had probably never seen.

At two in the morning we shook the elegant Gielgud hand and thanked him for a wonderful evening.

And ever afterwards whenever I ran into Hume Cronyn - the last time I was in a taxi and he was walking past the Museum of Natural History - he waved an arm and shot the gleam and shouted: "Where do you stand on Vietnam?"

And chuckled his way along. Another "brave homme" has gone to his rest and, alas, will gleam no more.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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