New Hampshire

A cab driver who picks me up from time to time was unusually cheerful the other day. It was one of those New York winter days, bright as a jewel but sharp as a knife, when even crossing the sidewalk to jump in a cab is like leaping from a refrigerator into an oven.

'End of February, most of March,' the man said, 'is the worst time. Brutal. But me? I'm off to Florida?' 'Mm,' I said, 'just in time for Super Tuesday!' Which is the day, the 8th March, when 20 Southern states will hold presidential primaries. 'I'll tell you something,' the man said, 'that's the only bad part. I'd like to run away from the whole damn business till July, then have somebody tell me who they've picked. Both of them.'

One of the nagging things about living in New York City is that you can never really settle into a northern winter because it's an on-again off-again climate. You may wake up to a warm wet wind from the south or a cold wind from the north-east or six inches of snow from the west. Or anything in between.

My daughter, 400 miles to the north of us, in Vermont, lives on no such see-saw. Comes December and the land is blanketed and will be through March, maybe April. She sounded as merry as a cricket the other morning. She has a small truck for her five children, high-axled, snow tyres, four-wheel brakes being compulsory if you're going to crunch and lurch through the country roads – if, indeed, you're going to go on living your life. She'd just driven the two boys 20 miles off to school and was now dressing up the three small girls in their Eskimo winter uniforms and taking them out to ski and sled. They'd just had a two-day snowfall of 20 inches on a powder base and the sun was bright and it was 21 below zero. 'What do you call that in England?' she said. 'If they had it,' I said, 'it would be 53 degrees below freezing.'

So, what had she been up to? 'Oh, the usual. Up at 5.30, stoke the furnace, clean out the horses stables, breakfast for seven, school, shop for dinner – six friends were dropping in.' Then she had to write a short sermon for next Sunday's church, then cook for the 13 of them. 'What do you do in your spare time?' 'Are you kidding?' she said. She's taking a bachelor's degree in English and American literature at Vermont College. 'Have a happy,' I said, and turned up the radiator and buried myself in the New York Times.

It was after that that I ran into my cab driver, licking his lips over his imminent departure for Florida, which led me, when I was home again, to look up a favourite old book, an enormous economic history of North America by a great man, Professor J. Russell Smith, now long gone. An economic history sounds heavy going, but this old man carried a load of knowledge very lightly and had a tart wit that passed over even into the photographs which illustrate his huge tome.

Here, for instance, I'm at a chapter entitled, 'Sub Tropic Coasts and the Florida Peninsula', and looking at a photograph to illustrate Florida's chief crop and chief source of income. It's a sharp picture of a beach and the aquamarine ocean beyond, and in the foreground, four sparkling palm trees with half-naked couples lazing under them. The caption says, 'The healthy condition of these small palm trees is proof that repeated photographing does not injure a tree'.

If he were writing the caption today, he might well have added, 'The Chamber of Commerce has seen to it that the camera did not veer slightly to the right. Otherwise, we should have seen trucks pounding along a four-lane highway'.

Now, of course, Florida is big enough – it's slightly larger than England – to have much back country, great forests and a long inland stretch of lake country, but it's southern Florida and its coastline that has attracted, since the Second War, enough northerners – and, in the past few years, refugee Cubans, Mexicans, other Hispanics – to make the population of Florida quintuple in just over 30 years. In 1950, two millions, in 1980, ten millions, now 13 and rising.

But the advertising men still control our imaginations. It used to be in print, now it's on television. They make the stereotypes and blind us with them. So that you say 'Florida' and it's still the aquamarine sea and the palm trees and nubile girls with carefree, bronzed men. And, of course, it's the same for the pictures that Americans keep at the back of their minds for the regions of the rest of the country. In a continental country of this size, you'd go mad trying to juggle the complexities of the real thing.

This past week, for instance, we've been saturated every evening with reports on the spot of the presidential candidates of both parties bending into the bitter winds or clomping through the snows of New Hampshire. Every broadcast of one network ended with a symbolic picture of New Hampshire. Sometimes it was two horses in a snowfield by an old barn, next night a forest of snow-laden birches against a background of blue mountains, next night a slender eighteenth-century colonial white-wooded church. Just what everybody knows to be typical of the life and landscape of New Hampshire.

Nothing, however, could be more false to the New Hampshire of today. Over 30 years ago I was up there for the New Hampshire primary and I noted, then, the forests of white birch, the gurgling rivers, the folding snowfields, the white wooden houses, as well as the shabby capital city of Concord and the grimy, industrial town of Manchester.

But at the end of day when I'd gone mushing through the Arctic with now-forgotten political giants – I remember old Senator Taft – I came to a village that was no more than a few wide lanes of white houses in moon-white fields.

There was an old colonial church with leaded windows and a soaring spire and the place was ablaze with light. In the basement where the heating pipes were sizzling against the ceiling, there were about 100, 120 people – farmers in leather jackets and plaid shirts, road men in peaked caps, women in cloth coats and bandannas, girls in ski pants and wind-breakers, tradesmen, a teacher or two – they were about to hold a meeting, a special meeting of a sort which, by Act of Parliament in 1774 was banned throughout New England as a revolutionary and powerful force.

So it was. The annual town meeting, which everybody, from the parson to the street sweeper, votes on an agenda that has gone out to every family in the town. It's a fat printed booklet accounting for every nickel spent in the past year on everything from rates to dog licences and fuel for the grange hall. Tonight, all these citizens would vote on how the following year's nickels and dimes and dollars were to be spent.

In colonial times and 30 years ago, and today, no town in New Hampshire is governed by elected officials, this annual town meeting does it. Everybody votes on whether to have a new hospital, an increase in rates, how much for old-age assistance, how much to mend the cracked flagpole by the church. They parcelled out, I see, $67 to an asphalt company, $240 to one man for unspecified labour – he bore, by the way, the splendid name of Exist Champagne. One third of New Hampshire's people are descended from French Canadians.

All right. Next item, the cemetery. How much for upkeep? Wrecking company for this and that, money to mend the covered bridges damaged in a ferocious winter storm and so on. On and on to a fierce squabble over the bounty to be paid to every boy who brought in a dead porcupine, which is a damaging pest in those parts. Some boys had brought in only tails which can be ingenuously manufactured. It was voted that they had to deliver also the nose and the whiskers. And when it was all done, a budget of over $76,000 was passed for the coming year. Three so-called select men – or see-lect men – were then chosen to carry out the decisions of this one-day, almost alarmingly democratic, parliament.

Well, that was, as I say, over 30 years ago, but that institution – government of the towns by town meeting – is still the rule. It's one of the few colonial survivors and one of the few reminders of the New Hampshire of long ago and not so long ago. Today, this still-beautiful state, pictured every night through its farms and the Wren spires of its old churches, has less than ten per cent of its land in farms; only one other of the 50 states is more industrialised. When I talked about that town meeting, New Hampshire was a poor, rural state. Today, it's a prosperous state. Its unemployment rate, two per cent, is the lowest in the nation. It had 150,000 people in 1790. In 1980 not much more than twice as many. Today, eight years later, a million.

The sons of the old textile workers now make microchips, plastics, electronics, high-tech. The average income – $15,000 per person – is the eighth-highest in the country. It has no state income tax, no sales taxes. It is still heavily Republican, though an influx of 100,000 blue-collar workers from Massachusetts to the south may swell a little the Democratic vote.

Only a little, because the blue-collar vote in New Hampshire is still more Republican than Democratic and the Republicans there, oblivious of the teaching of liberal columnists that Mr Reagan is an old, doddering, lame duck, approve of him in his job by 80 per cent, which is 15 per cent higher than his popularity rating over the whole nation. Even that 65 per cent is something to ponder when you consider that it's higher than that of any president in living memory at the end of his second term. So, no wonder, in spite of all the expert predictions to the contrary, no wonder Republicans went solidly for Mr Reagan's man, Vice President Bush.

New Hampshire – conservative, tiny, no doubt very unrepresentative, is still living in what it takes to be Ronald Reagan's golden age.

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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