Visit of Japanese emperor

A few months ago there was a lively discussion, I think it was at a conference of psychologists, neurologists maybe, about how far back our memory goes. In other words, at what age does a baby or a toddler start to record impressions, mostly visual, I guess, which can be fairly accurately recalled in later life. This, I'm told, is a profound and ticklish problem about the life of the human brain but it's one most human beings don't regard as profound or difficult at all.

Most people have very firm ideas about something they saw or felt and the age at which they experienced it. The problem here is that in all families, one or both of the parents habitually tell small children about how they acted, comically or violently or endearingly, at some event which the child is certain not to remember on his own and by the time we grow up, it's almost impossible to sort out one's independent impressions from the common pool of the family's memories. 

I know a young man, who shall be nameless, who's convinced he has the most vivid memory of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and it won't do to tell him his birth certificate, if nothing else, is there to prove that he was at the time 13 days short of being one year old. No point in telling him now that he lived in a newspaperman's household and that, for a few days after December 7 1941, chaos came again – the papers smudgy with banner headlines, the radio on, Roosevelt's voice soaring through the living room denouncing 'a day that will live in infamy' and the head of the household, as we whimsically called 'the bread winner' in those days, dashing off to Washington and back again, the sudden appearance of old college friends in uniform, the oldest friend, now a young doctor, in no uniform at all coming to say goodbye before he sailed out to the Pacific and, as it turned out, four years of impromptu surgery in tents and freighters and jungle clearings. 

All this was obviously talked about years later in that household, though at the time the 11-month-old was chiefly occupied eating and sleeping and weeping and gurgling and being bubbled. He is convinced he saw, heard and felt it all. 

Well, I remember – and nobody's going to tell me different – when the new king, George V and Queen Mary, came and rode in an open carriage through the streets of Manchester. I was sitting on the shoulders of my father. I had on a new skirt, a new dress, and a bonnet with a silk ribbon. In those days, unisex clothes were worn by children up to the age of four or five and it's odd to think now that they were always female clothes, though I don't recall any men's liberation movement mobilised to protest the custom. 

Well, it was hot, I well recall, though I grant that maybe the heat was generated less by the sun blinking through the rusty smog of Manchester, than by the layers of petticoats I was wearing and the extreme snugness of the bonnet which caused me, and this I'm prepared to believe I was told later, caused me to pound on my father's bowler and cause it to splay his ears out, giving him the appearance, as Bing Crosby says about himself, with or without a hat, of a taxi with both doors open. Anyway, I recall the heat, the superior view I had from my perch and the way the cheering grew from far off like a breaking wave and crashed around us as the Royal couple went by. I claim this as my first memory. And why not? I was three at the time and even the neurologists grant that memory starts to raise its inquisitive head by then. 

I suppose I was told in the later years about various other things that happened that year because I have to admit that I was comparatively unmoved by the railway strike of August 1911 and the coal strike the next winter and I cannot remember being involved at all in the battle between the Scots guards and a bunch of anarchists in Sidney Street. I don't want to hear, by the way, from any hair-splitting historians that George V never rode through the streets of Manchester. I was there, I tell you, whatever the Court Circular says. 

But what comes through now, not so much as a memory, but as a reflection on the memory of this and other Royal processions, is the general atmosphere of the crowds, waving handkerchiefs, giving off cheers, sometimes lusty, sometimes genteel, spurts of clapping but always curious, good natured, out for a show. And the slow, processional pace of the carriages. You could get a long, good look and the suspicion never crossed our minds that somewhere there may have lurked in the crowds a sneaky character with a gun. So much so that when Edward VIII, at the beginning of his short reign, was returning from presenting the colours and on Constitution Hill a man broke through the police line and had his arm jolted and a gun skidded under the hooves of the horse the king was riding, the man seemed more like a boor than an assassin. 

Demented characters threatening kings lived exclusively in Central Europe, just as police sirens and men crouched on the running board of a whirling automobile belonged to America. Well, the only Royal procession in America that I can recall was the trip of George VI and his Queen Elizabeth to the New York World's Fair in 1939. They, too, were in an open car and it glided at a visible rate and the then Queen waved smilingly all the way up the East River Drive and across the Triborough Bridge into Flushing Meadows. Years later, I asked a Secret Service man I knew if they were scared at the Royal visit and how much extra security was called for. He said at once it was no less, no more than for a presidential drive through the streets. 

Well, now there's another Royal visit. The first official visit to the United States of the Emperor of Japan. In the cause of niggling accuracy, we have to throw in that word 'official' because he once touched down in Alaska for a refuelling stop on his way to Europe and this time, as you can sadly imagine, it's a different story. 

The day the emperor left home there was a parade in Tokyo of a couple of thousand or so protesting leftists who like to keep green the memory of the Second War and the holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this country, the White House and the Treasury, which is the authority over the Secret Service, went through a long and painful period of discussion and investigation before they officially announced their delight at the emperor's coming. He left Japan with only seven security guards but by the time he's through visiting Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, he will have been hustled in flying wedges of security men of, in all, several hundreds at least. 

The depressing modern note was struck the moment his DC-8 landed at the airport outside Williamsburg, Virginia – a place he'd gone to rest and a happy choice since it's the wholly restored colonial capital of the United States. The restoration goes to the extent of decking the building guides and drivers of carriages in eighteenth-century costume and the emperor must have thought he'd been aboard a time machine and landed in the wrong century when he saw the welcoming militia got up in frilled hunting shirts and britches and cocked hats and stood and watched the fife-and-drum call in their cherry-red cutaways and white stockings and buckle shoes. 

But if he glanced up, he knew right away which century he was in. Guards with shotguns surrounded the plane as it taxied and they were dotted like toy soldiers on the airport roof and as he moved to his car he was engulfed in security men. And so it will be. 

So these days it has to be, which at this point makes me say a word for the Secret Service and the FBI who are under daily attack for not having spotted Squeaky Fromme in Sacramento as a former member of the Charles Manson family and, therefore, as a character likely to run amock anywhere in public. There seems to be a plausible, not to say alarming, case to be made against the Secret Service in the matter of Sarah Moore, the girl who is alleged to have shot at President Ford in San Francisco. She was sufficiently suspect to have been held for questioning by the Secret Service the night before the shooting and released. And the next morning, she was so mentally disturbed that she telephoned the Secret Service five times and never got an answer. She was afraid, she said later, that if she went to the scene of the president’s leaving his hotel, she might feel an irresistible impulse to 'test' – her word – the security system. 

Since the two attempts, we'd better say 'seeming' attempts on the president’s life by Miss Fromme and Miss Moore, there have been 320 threats written or telephoned against the president. If anyone doubts that the world has an over-generous quota of maniacs, remember that in a 'normal' month, so-called, the Secret Service has to investigate and track down about 150 people who make threats, write obscene or menacing letters and the like. 

I believe the truth is that if the Secret Service were increased a thousandfold, anybody cunning enough and careful enough could kill the president in a public place. It's a grizzly thing to recall that President Kennedy, sitting with friends, the last night of his life, said exactly that. 

The Secretary of the Treasury believes that the tripling in the number of threats is a direct reflection of the huge glare of publicity given to the Misses Fromme and Moore. I made this point last week and can only say, 'Amen'. The response of an influential network official has been to say that not to plaster the suspects all over the magazines and the television would be to endanger the freedom of the press, an argument, to me, worth of being incorporated in new editions of George Orwell's '1984' or 'Animal Farm' – a supreme example of dotty double-speak. 

Well, after two talks on this theme, I hate to end on such a note. Here's an item I dare to say is historic. The New York police, last week, invaded, under warrant, an apartment in New York and had to totter through it between barricades of books, books in the closets, the bathtub, books on the stove, 15,000 books, all stolen by one man from two branches of the New York Public Library which, after three or four years, shrewdly suspected they had a thieving problem. And when the man was taken into custody and asked why – why had he stolen 15,000 books? 

He gave a classic reply. 'I like to read.'

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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