Big cars are back

The dog days are here. Having said that to myself, I wondered what it meant and looked it up. It means the hottest period of the year and is so called because the Ancients thought it always coincided with the first rising of the Dog Star. Well, we know – we being anybody from southern Arizona to northern Maine – that this is still not the hottest period of the year, it only feels like it.

I drove out the hundred miles to our house at the end of Long Island last Thursday, which is my normal procedure in summer, but whereas it normally takes just over two hours, even when you obediently stay with our national speed limit of 55 miles an hour, I went off in hot rain and wound up in rain under dark skies and it took just three hours and thirty-five minutes. This was not Friday. Since as far back as anyone can remember, mid-afternoon on Fridays has been the worst time to drive out of any city to any beach, lake or mountain. 

For about ten years after the war, the Second War, smart guys who could steal the afternoon off, used to have an early lunch, pile into their cars and take off about 3 p.m. and beat the rush by a couple of hours. And then prosperity came bustling in and everybody could afford to be a smart guy. The rush hour started at two. 

The smart thing then for anybody not on a time clock routine was to leave on Friday morning and pretty soon the smart guys were earning more and, if they were in any sort of large business, delegating to lesser fry more 'responsibility', you could call it – some people call it work. They went out to their cottage, shack, rented house or whatever, on Thursday night. 

Now, in spite of that recession three years ago and the Arab bogeyman two years ago, the big exodus starts on Thursday around noon. This does not leave Friday any less turbulent than it used to be. Simply, more people have more cars and more shacks, pads, cottages to retreat to. 

I'm trying hard not to moralise about this trend towards the three-and-a-half day summer weekend but, sharp as an arrowhead, there comes into my mind the memory not of a summer but a winter weekend and, my goodness, it's been 36 years ago, the December weekend of Pearl Harbor, when bang into the sound of the New York Philharmonic tuning up for its Sunday afternoon radio concert came a frantic, piping little voice saying, 'The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor'. 

To be absolutely frank, even war correspondents, and a member of the British War Supply Council I was spending a Washington weekend with, we really had to scramble through the maps in our minds to decide where Pearl Harbor was. And I remember this man saying, 'If it's where I think it is, to quote Groucho, "This means war".' We thought that a pretty funny line and laughed till the simple truth wiped the grin from our faces and within the half hour we were both in the press room of the White House. 

I was there on my boss's White House pass because he'd gone off for a weekend in Maryland and I was, as we jokingly used to say, 'holding the barricades'. He was a character, the like of which has not appeared in Washington since he died. He was the chief Washington correspondent of 'The' Times and I commuted between New York and Washington as second string to him and the New York man. His name was Bill Lewis, more formally Sir Wilmott Lewis, and in late 1941 he was still more than less of a bridegroom. He'd been married for, I don't know whether it was third or fourth time – say third – for not much more than two years. He must then have been about 70. We never did know his age. I attended three separate 70th birthday parties in different years. 

Well, it has nothing to do with Pearl Harbor, but I cannot resist telling you about the day of his wedding. It was just before the Nazis invaded Poland and The Times had finally decided that Hitler was probably going to have to be fought. They commissioned a film about the world service of The Times and the range of its foreign correspondents. I was asked to direct a small section that took in our man in Washington. We shot him at his typewriter in his little office in the national press building. It was a fiendishly hot day. There was no air conditioning in those days and to kill the sound of people walking along the corridor we had to baffle the transom above his door. So it must have been 100-odd degrees in there. 

Lewis was marvellously patient. In the end, we got our film of him and told him he was free. 'A lucky thing,' he said, 'I have to attend a wedding!' 'Oh!' We said, 'Anyone we know?' 'Yes!' He rumbled in his metropolitan baritone, 'It is I!' I saw him off to the lift. I knew his happy gift for marrying rich women, a very useful lifesaver in those days when British journalists in Washington were expected to dedicate themselves to high thinking and plain living. I asked him if his bride was rich. He slid into the lift and as the door closed, he hissed, 'You know me, old boy!' The lucky lady was the rich widow of an old soldier. 

Well, a week or two later, the New Yorker magazine picked up a misprint from the account of his marriage, in, I think, a Richmond, Virginia, paper. It's one of those items the New Yorker puts at the bottom of a page with a following comment. The item said – and I'm faking the other names – 'On Friday, at Founders Land, Virginia, Sir Wilmott Harsant Lewis, Washington correspondent of the London Times was married to Mrs Norma Frances Lee, wife of Major-General Randolph T. Lee, retired.' The New Yorker's comment was, 'Somebody'd better wake him, retired or not!' Well, Bill Lewis hugely enjoyed this bit. 

But, back or forward to Pearl Harbor. He was, as I say, off with his wife in Maryland. On Saturday morning, he'd filed his weekend despatch – and there was no Sunday edition of The Times – for publication on the Monday morning. It appeared, in the early edition, certainly, the president's reply to the Emperor Hirohito. Nothing, for one edition anyway, about Pearl Harbor. The news of that had come hurtling in on Sunday afternoon and it wasn't confirmed till late Sunday and I did the best I could to get off a piece by the time the Monday morning Times was being distributed. 

Well, Lewis came back hot-foot to Washington on the Sunday evening and, on Monday morning, the day Roosevelt was to go before Congress, for a declaration of war, Lewis sat very upright and unflustered in his swivel chair in his office. He used to stand as erect as a Grenadier and he talked like an archbishop. And when I came on him, he had his door wide open which was not his custom. I asked him why? 'The better,' he said, 'to hear the rolling of admirals' heads in the basket.' Of course, there was no other topic than that of the swift and murderous Japanese flight over Pearl Harbor just before dawn on the Sunday morning. Everybody by now knew that Pearl Harbor was the main base of the Pacific fleet and we... we winced to guess at the extent of the damage and the casualties. 

Now Bill Lewis had spent some, many, I think, of his younger years in China, Japan and the Philippines. I said to him, 'But how could the Japanese know or guess that just before dawn, on a Sunday, they could fly in there unspotted?' 'My dear boy,' he said, 'not the least of the useful things the Japanese have learned from us is that 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning anywhere in the western world is the low point of our energy and our sobriety.' Now he had a point and it has got so that few people in charge in an office or a factory expect much useful work to be done after lunch on Friday and much before lunch on Monday. 

I will not press this point. I'll leave it with another simple memory of last summer on a blistering Sunday in London. We'd just been up to Oxford to film a bit in the Sheldonian Theatre for a television special I was doing on Mark Twain. We were lucky, did it quickly and we were back in town by about 1.15. The director, an old friend of mine and an Englishman, came up to my hotel room for a drink and then we went out to have a sandwich at a nearby pub. 

'No sandwiches!' the man said, 'Not on Sunday!' Down another street there was another pub. Same story. 'Why?' I asked. 'Oh!' the owner said, 'The man doesn't come in to make sandwiches, not on Sunday!' At a third place, we asked for an imported beer which my friend said he'd found very good indeed and was available only at this one pub. But they didn't have it. 'We don't carry it any more,' the man said, 'too big a run on it.' 'I don't understand,' I said. 'Of course you don't understand,' said my friend, 'because you live in a consumer-orientated economy. You'd expect there to be two men making sandwiches on Sundays because that's when there's the biggest call for them, right?' 'Right!' I said. 

Well, if he's right about the American economy, there's another side to this steady concern for the consumer. The American economy is dedicated, not always, to what people need, but to what people want. And driving out in that rainstorm last Thursday down the island, this six-lane freeway choked with cars for the first 60 miles, I noticed something that has crept up very slowly on my consciousness but was an instant shock to a visiting English friend. 'My God!' he said, 'But look at the size of them!' 

A small car is still an oddity and he's quite right. After the Arabs raised the price of oil, there was a booming business in small cars that got good mileage. Detroit announced grandiose plans for non-grandiose cars. The compact car was here to stay. It stayed for about six months, a year at most. Detroit changed its tune and abandoned its plans, when the memory of the Arabs dimmed and the people rose up and demanded the all-American symbol of energy and prosperity – the big car. The jumbo of speed. Not that anyone's much disposed to break the 55-mile-an-hour limit. 

But the big car shows that we're not buckling under to anybody. Not even a sheikh. So the highways are clogged with, what is it, ninety, a hundred million cars, most of them large, powerful and thriftless. And the president has backtracked on his energy sermons and the Congress doesn't really believe that our oil supplies are exhaustible in only a few years. 

Some day, an Arab will learn, that Thursday and Friday afternoons in summer are the high points of American pride and profligacy. They will not need to mount a sneak attack. They will simply go out to the petrol station and chalk up an extra digit on the price per gallon.

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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