Armed service pregnancy

A listener who describes herself as ardent – at least she said she was ardent when she could prop up a radio set on the bathtub on Sunday morning but now finds herself a little less ardent as she bangs the pots and pans around in preparation for Sunday dinner – she says I must be scrupulous about saying where I'm talking from so she can, and I quote, 'Get the thrill at the start of imagining you roaming the Barbary coast of San Francisco or lying by a pool in Hollywood or risking your life on the streets of Chicago.'

Dear, dear! I can see that at least 31 years of my life, fifteen hundred weeks anyway, have been lived in vain, for way back there in the austere and shivery winter of 1946 when there were no lights at Waterloo Station as I arrived, when friends wrapped their seat round with newspaper as they huddled over Bob Cratchit single coal and when gin was served from pipettes in what looked like eye-dropper cups, way back there, these talks were proposed and set up and authorised by my old and, I trust, still hail friend, Windsor Wellington when head of what was baffling called 'sound radio'. They were set up to counter, or correct, just such lurid preconceptions about the United States as my ardent lady still seems to possess. 

I'd hoped in the intervening fifteen hundred weekends that listeners, whether ardent or lukewarm had come to learn that when I'm in Hollywood, for instance, I'm more likely to be a guest of the splendid Chamber Symphony Orchestra of California than to be lolling by any pool with some bikini in false eyelashes. Alas, that San Francisco's Barbary Coast expired about a quarter of a century ago and is now the high street of the chicest decorators, it's sometimes known as 'boys’ town'. Yet the remnants of the old Capone gang, now dressed in tweedy three-piece suits, send their sons to Yale and are, as we say, 'into' banks and the unloading of ships at American ports, so that when I'm in Chicago I run no risk that I'm aware of. I tend to divide my time between friends at the university and the splendid Museum of Science and Industry and the shop on Michigan Boulevard which has the finest collection of antique English walnut in America or Britain. 

However, so the lady will not be deceived at the start, I'd better say that I am talking to her from London. That's not London, Ohio but London, England. If this talk were being heard in America, I imagine her ardent counterpart would imagine me tottering along Fleet Street to meet my old friend Dr Johnson and raising a tankard of ale to toast Princess Anne's baby son. If there are any Americans catching this talk on the short wave, may I say that Dr Johnson is dead and that few Englishmen ever raise a tankard and rarely ask for ale. 

On the contrary, I've been tottering along Oxford Street picking my way through the leather jackets and the polyethylene pants and the din of hard rock looking for a public telephone on which to call the Post Office and ask them to restore to life the telephone in my flat which gave out an hour after I'd arrived. Contact was eventually made with the Post Office engineers who assured me, at hourly intervals, that the trouble was due to a slight defect in the equipment that activates the dial tone. I could have told them that but they said an engineer was on his way. 

Well, after three days, he's still on his way, perhaps to his uncle or girlfriend, but not to me. So maybe this is as useful a way as any I can invent of assuring my friends that I'm not callous or unmindful of their existence, I'm simply marooned at the end of a dead telephone. I am, in other words, back in England and am reminded again that sometimes things work and sometimes they do not. 

Now New York, heaven knows, is only satirically known as Fun City. The potholes in the streets are a disgrace, most of the cabs look as if they've just been dredged up from the floods that engulfed us after five inches in one day, which is a sixth of the normal year's supply. But in these domestic crises we are undoubtedly spoiled. When I came in from the country the other weekend, I found a bath tap that had developed a drip, the mechanical plug in a washbasin had ceased to plug, the front door to the apartment had bulged so during the heat of the summer that it was difficult to burst open and the ceiling in the hall had developed a flaky patch in the plaster through which, at about two-hour intervals, a drip of water dripped from the pool left on the roof by the floods. 

I called the superintendent. He said, 'Pete'll be right up'. And Pete was up within the minute, shaving the edge of the door against the lintel, installing a new washbasin plug and a new washer on the bath tap and an hour later the plasterers were there redoing the patch on the ceiling. And for this lightning service, I thought they deserved no less than a two-dollar tip. 'Thank you, Pete!' I said. Pete is a Puerto Rican. 'De nada,' he said. 'Any time, Mr Cooke.' He's usually accompanied by Luis, another and singularly cheerful Puerto Rican. 'What happened to Luis?' I asked. 'Ah! Poor Luis,' he said, 'he goes to the hospital, he has the spastic colon.' I sympathised deeply because long ago I myself had a spastic colon. 'No,' said Pete, going on his way, 'no problem! He will live, I think.' Well then, I'm now in England which, let us not forget, pioneered the Industrial Revolution but has never quite conquered the telephone. 

The day before I left New York, enough things happened to keep us buzzing for a week. First there were the banner headlines about President Sadat's willingness to visit Jerusalem. I don't think there's a special American angle on this but it's startling enough and novel enough to have caused for the moment as much excitement as Neville Chamberlain's announcement – Lord, it's been 39 years ago – to go to Munich and arrange with Adolf Hitler for, remember, 'peace in our time'. And there was, the same day, the unpleasant novelty of clouds of tear gas floating across the White House lawn and causing entirely automatic tears to flow from the eyes of President and Mrs Carter as they greeted the Shah of Iran and his empress. The tear gas was enough to provoke, I imagine, headlines around the world but the troop of protestors outside the White House gates was absolutely normal. 

Some mischievous publisher in a foreign country could, in fact, easily convey the notion that Washington is in a perpetual state of siege by filming the protest marchers practically everywhere that President Carter goes and certainly wherever a foreign head of state or government travels in the United States. Prince Charles had it in Chicago and San Francisco. The Shah will have it. So would Mr Callaghan if he came, or Mr Sadat or Mr Begin or the prime ministers of Sweden, Albania, Italy. Name the distinguished visitor and he will be sure to get the distinctive treatment of chanting crowds, waving banners, shaking fists and sporadic unpleasantness because in practically every city you can name there is a sizeable and vocal minority which nurses a grievance about something that's happening in the country from which they, or their fathers or grandfathers, came. 

New York, of course, has by now at least five or six generations of professional and voluble Irishmen. Britons know this but we tend to forget, or not to know, about the Armenians of California, the Basques of Idaho, the Greek sponge-fishers of Florida, and in cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, the solid ethnic groups from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Lithuania – name your country. 

And we all remember, I'm sure, President Ford's thundering gaffe when he ad-libbed during one of the election campaign debates with Mr Carter that Poland was not under the domination of the Soviet Union. I live on the eastern end of Long Island which was overrun at the turn of the century by immigrant Poles seeking, as immigrants tend to do, the familiar soil of their own land. The eastern tip of Long Island is sand country and there the Poles reverted to their old trade of potato and cauliflower farms. They are Polish Catholics to a man and woman and at all times staunchly Republican. The morning after Mr Ford's remark, they switched, to a man and woman, to Carter. 

The final item I picked up before I took off on the three-quarters empty jumbo jet was something that is surely as much as anything you can quote a sign of the times. The three branches of the American armed forces – army, navy, air force – have, or had until 1974, a rule. Any service woman who became pregnant was discharged. This ruling was challenged by women's rights advocates and the rule was changed. Now she's allowed to resign honourably or, if she doesn't, she may be recommended for discharge which still is a difficult rule to enforce. 

However, the air force has broken new ground and lawyers in the Defense Department say that the other services are pretty much bound to follow. The air force announced last Monday that a service woman who becomes pregnant may now remain in service. The lawyers looked into the old rule and decided that if it went to the Supreme Court, it would probably be declared unconstitutional. However, if the girl then marries, the air force rule applies which bars married women from the air force academy. This, too, I should guess, could come up before the Supreme Court. 

I must say that the imagination – my imagination anyway – is tickled and the mind reels before the prospect, say five years from now, of a midshipman going about her duties with six children in tow so long as she doesn't give any of them what used to be called a 'good name'. Aye, aye, sir! 

Ah! P.S: the Post Office engineer is still, I guess, on his way. Please call me. I have no way of calling you.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.