Long Island life

As you may have heard, all the New York City newspapers, all three of them, are on strike. How, then, am I going to acquaint you with what is being reported and thought about all – the great issues of the day in the news capital of America I am not.

It may be cold-blooded to say so but this seems to me to offer a golden opportunity to disclaim all responsibility for being well-informed or even informed at all. I could spoil it for you, and me, by saying that the television networks are doubling their daily coverage of news and of the controversies that spring from it, so that it's possible to sit down at 6 p.m. and emerge four hours later, choked and dizzy, with news of the world, and also slightly confused. 

In the middle of a hot and sticky August, this seems to be to be a mistake. Far better, I hope you'll agree, if I retreat to where I belong and tell you something about life as it's lived at the end of Long Island. To get a picture of the island, imagine a fish, a very long fish, with its snout on the left and its tail on the right. Its mouth is hooked to Manhattan. Its body reaches into the Atlantic in a direction more easterly than anything, for about 120 miles. Its tail is divided into two flukes which enclose a large bay about 30 miles long, five to six miles wide. This is called Peconic Bay – the Peconics were a tribe of Indians, fishermen, which the refugees from Suffolk came on in the seventeenth century. 

You know there are certain places of the earth that I would rather be than anywhere at certain picked times of the year, either because of the climate or the local food. In the fall, there is nowhere I would rather be than Vermont for the breathtaking beauty of its scarlet and gold landscape, or Long Island for its shining days and its miraculous draft of fishes. In fact, there is nowhere I know, not the Mediterranean or the Crimea, certainly not California, New Zealand perhaps, where between May and November there is such a succulent haul of so many kinds of splendid eating fish as we have on Long Island. We're just at the point where the northern cold-water fish nibble down at our shores and where the warm water fish abound. 

First, for the gourmet, is the noble striped bass and the bluefish and the swordfish and the flounder and the lemon sole. But there're also other very tasty species which city people either don't know about or despise out of genteel ignorance. In the summer months, for instance, the flat, fat porgy – he's always mooching along the bed of the bay. It's a paranoid species that feels it's being chased by submarines and so swims along on a zigzag course as if in convoy during wartime. I simply have no idea why the porgy never appears on the menu of restaurants. And more remarkable still is the non-acceptance of another fine fish, the weakfish. I have caught it and eaten it for 40 years. It's so called because it has a weak, papery mouth which it cheerfully, I presume, rips in order to dislodge the hook. It then swims off and grows the mouth together again. 

But you can't expect the fashionable types who live across the bay on the South Shore, the kind of people whose relations never die but pass on, to go out and buy a fish known as a weakfish. Some years ago, a droll Italian who owned a fish market on the South Shore took to laying out weakfish on a tray and marking them with a sign saying 'Sea Trout'. He is usually out of stock within an hour of piling up the weaks. 

Now the island, like all other bits of geography, has its own local lingo for its different districts which will not be found on maps or atlases. Thus of the two flukes at the end of the island, the northern one is known as the North Fork, the southern fluke is known however as the South Shore. There is a north shore of Long Island but that's about 80 miles nearer New York. The southern fluke, the South Shore, used to be the exclusive monopoly of early Dutch and English landowners and farmer – one English landowner, William Floyd, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and achieved a very late badge of immortality by having a motorway named after him. 

The early founding fathers were a little miffed, at the end of the nineteenth century, when some of the robber barons and their heirs moved in. One of them, name of Vanderbilt, on a visit to Scotland, saw the natives playing the peculiar game known locally as 'the gowfe'. He accordingly imported some clubs, hired a landscape man (or golf architect) and commissioned the laying-out of the first 12-hole links course in the United States. 

Until the Second World War, the fashionable resorts of the South Shore – South Hampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton – were pretty choosy places but, following the immemorial custom of all Western societies, the latest batch of new rich moved as close to the old rich as possible in the hope of having some of their effortless poise brush off on them. 

So in the past 20 or 30 years, these once fussy compounds have been invaded by brokers, interior decorators, cosmetics manufacturers, bankers, chic painters, actors and actresses, television producers, rock producers and the Shore is infested by ten percenters of all kinds. If you detect a note of reverse snobbery in this account, your instinct is correct. I have spent spring and I've summered and autumned, fall-ened on the North Fork for 44 years. We stand out on our 100-foot high cliff, or bluff, and look across the five or six miles of the quarantine waters that separate us from the chic, the bad and the beautiful. The North Fork is not chic, it is not rich – I doubt there are more than half a dozen residents whose combined securities could match the portfolio of any one of hundreds of the denizens of East Hampton and South Hampton. 

The North Fork was for two and a half centuries the province of English settlers from Suffolk and you can follow the families' succession through platoons of tombstones, the victims of seventeenth-century epidemics and all the wars since the revolution, in the local graveyards or what in my village is known as 'the burying ground'. I know old people, and not so old, who once in their lifetime made the 100-mile trip to New York. They didn't like what they saw and went no more. 

Shortly after the robber barons invaded the South Shore, the North Fork was invaded by immigrant Poles (Catholics, farmers). Like all immigrants, they had a nostril tuned to the smell of their native soil. The Poles smelled sandy soil, which is potato soil. And the North Fork today, much as it was 40 years ago, planted as far as the eye can see with potatoes and cauliflower and maize, and interrupted only by wooden churches with blunt spires, could be used today with great accuracy as the location of a film in Central Poland. 

The Poles were also industrious and very thrifty and soon took over the big duck farms which had been run in a comfortable way by the Anglos. So now our fork is populated by third-generation Poles. In the manner of long settled, rural communities, the North Forkers tend to take a dim view of the South Shore, or as they prefer to say, of 'South side'. 

But then the South Shore takes no view at all of the North Fork. In fact, friends of ours, on the South Shore – we are tolerant types – have lived and died there without having the faintest idea where the North Fork was or how to find our point. They were always asking us to dinner but regularly refused our invitations on the ground that from them to us was such a long trip. From us to them is somehow different. 

And I still have friends, New Yorkers mostly, who ask us every summer, 'How are things at your place in South Hampton?' which is like asking a proud Lancastrian, 'How are things in Bradford and Leeds?' Our point is called Nassau Point. After the English occupation it was rechristened Hog's Neck but it reverted once for all to Nassau since, under the Dutch, it had been designated as a sliver of crown property by King William – Prince, you will recall, of Orange and Nassau. And since then, the point has managed to remain unmentioned in the history books or even in the newspapers. 

In fact we're so obscure that when Nassau Point achieved the fame of a new comet, nobody noticed it. The Point, I should explain, is a slim peninsula that drops down like a finger, two miles long, from the North Fork into the bay. Less than a mile down our narrow road there lived one Dr Moore and during the Second World War he used to rent his cottage for the summers to an old man, an old immigrant, a man interested mainly in music and fishing and of a retiring disposition that made Nassau Point just right for him. 

On a boiling hot day in August 1939, two other immigrants, refugee scientists, drove down the island to see this old man. They sat down and together composed and then typed out a letter, a reproduction of which you can see on the last page of Life magazine's 'History of the Second War'. It's datelined Nassau Point, Long Island, August 2,1939. 

The two men who dictated it were Edward Teller and Leo Szilard and the dictatee, if that's the word, sitting there on Dr Moore's porch, and not liking very much having to sign his name to it, was the old man – Albert Einstein. 

It warned the President of the United States that the Germans had discovered a method of splitting something that almost nobody, certainly not President Roosevelt, had ever heard of – uranium-238. I don't know where that letter is now. It's surely the most fateful letter of modern history for it alerted our side to the need to mobilise, at whatever expense, the best physicists we had. It guaranteed VJ Day.

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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