New York looting

I had in mind to talk about the packing of the New York City jails with those three to four thousand looters, the ones who were caught and what might come out of the desperate slowness of the law in America where picking a jury can take as long as three weeks. However, we'll let that wait. Call this, if you like, a letter about America, since it's being done from a distant place, from London, seeing America as others see her.

By the way, it occurs to me that sooner or later Women's Lib may have something to say about the ancient, but quaint, custom of making all countries feminine, whether they're placid countries like, say, Finland or ferocious countries like Uganda or Ethiopia. And that reminds me of a similar custom that's always followed by the United States Weather Bureau. I suspect it's a custom that's going to be changed very soon, maybe a month or so from now, which is the beginning of the hurricane season along the North Atlantic seaboard. 

September 1938 was the first time in nearly a century that a massive hurricane, coming up from the Caribbean as usual but staying on a northern course, which is not usual, dealt a lethal blow: 635 people dead, to the coastline of New Jersey, Long Island and all of New England. 

And since then there have been many hurricanes that threatened or even swiped us in the north and it's only since then that we've become familiar with the custom of identifying hurricanes by female names. The Weather Bureau starts each year at the beginning of the alphabet so that the first hurricane warning goes about one called, say, Alice and after her, Beatrice, and then Catherine, and so on. This has been going on, even in my memory, so long that the bureau begins to get hard pressed, and one year they're having to reach for Alma, Bathsheba and Coreen and pretty soon now they may be reduced to Aphasia, Boadicea and Celeste. In fact I think we've had a Celeste. 

Anyway, a few years ago there were faint but facetious protests in the press, but so far Women's Lib has been silent about the plain inequity of assuming that one of the most terrifying natural disasters is always a female. I'm bracing myself against the day when the Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution is passed, which can't be more than three or four years away, and the first hurricane of the season is called Alistair. 

At this point, some of you may wonder at the workings of the human mind. Of my mind, anyway. But I have a growing sense that I'm going somewhere, starting from that preoccupation, when I started to talk, with the darker side of the New York blackout. I mean the wild, looting and plundering of shops and stores in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. 

What has this got to do with hurricanes? Well, many commentators in the United States have been sufficiently disturbed by the sudden spurt of freewheeling violence in black slums to wonder if we weren't in danger of another eruption of city violence such as the one that shook America in the late 1960s, most of all in the terrible black year of 1968. 

That was the year when Martin Luther King was shot, when a week later Baltimore and Washington blew up and then Bobby Kennedy was killed and Detroit went wild. Then we had the Republican Convention in Miami which looked more like a besieged city, fortified and ringed as it was by police with guns. And after that came the obscenity of the Democratic Convention with police and protestors gone berserk in the streets. 

When it was all over and 1969 came in, and then 1970, people began to say, sociologists especially, they began to go back in history and come up with the reassuring news that these periods of city violence were epidemics and did not usher in a revolution, but were more like boils on the body politic which burst and pretty soon the body returned to normal. 

I remember saying at the time that I hungered and prayed that they were correct but that since nothing radical had been done to cure the causes of the outbursts or boils – the blacks were still packed in the worst parts of town – the Supreme Court 1954 integration decision had given them new spirit and since, nevertheless, unemployment among the blacks was still three or four times that of the whites, I feared that the general calm after the general blow-up was not the end of the violence but only the eye of the hurricane. 

It's one of those phrases we all use without, I think, giving it too much literal thought. Like saying that somebody is a stubborn as a mule, a phrase which existed, for me, only in the dictionary until the dreadful day when I went down the Grand Canyon on a mule and learned that the man, the person, who coined it spoke nothing but the awful truth. If a mule, staggering firmly down the narrow path that winds sometimes it seems almost vertically down to the canyon floor a mile below it, if that mule sees a tasty bit of flora sprouting from the edge of the precipice, nothing you do with your reins or your heels or your voice is going to stop him going over to take a nibble. 

Well, let me tell you about the eye of the hurricane. In 19... I think it was, yes... 54, we were hit directly by a hurricane called Carol, and for an hour or two I was convinced, cringing there in the roar of it in the living room of our house, high on a bluff, overlooking a bay at the end of Long Island, I was convinced that pretty soon the house itself was going to be airborne. There's no suspense in that sentence because plainly I'm here. But for an awful time I was sure that it was, as the cricketers' say, 'close of play'. 

We were six in the house – my wife and I and our daughter, then aged five. An old college friend, a doctor and his wife visiting us with their daughter, also aged five. A hurricane warning had gone out the night before but there's generally no need to get excited until they shift the word 'warning' to the word 'alert'. Anyway, we... we went to bed, all was calm and quiet, not a leaf stirring which, if we'd only read the books more carefully we should have known, is the normal prelude to a hurricane. It doesn't seem to build up at all. We had another one the following week by daylight and by then knew enough to pack up and get out, when the wind died and the leaves seemed frozen and the sky turned a leaden and quite motionless grey. Back to Carol. 

We went to bed and by about four in the morning there was such a hullabaloo going on outside that none of us, not even the children, could sleep. A strange, awful sound. Not... not a big wind such as Dickens described, like a maniac on the loose, sometimes screaming, sometimes sighing, sometimes moaning, but an absolutely steady, toneless roar, like no sound I've ever heard. The trees were tossing around like paper fans and, from time to time, some of them cracked and fell over or suddenly came up by their roots and then keeled over as they do when a logging team is at work. 

All the noise and the wind was on the south-east side of the house, the doors were straining at their jambs, a big plate-glass window bent and bulged, and we collected mattresses and such to cushion the splinters if the thing burst which, subsequently, it did. So this went on until we could see nothing outside, neither the bay, nor the terrace, nor the trees. Nothing even six foot away, only an encircling, great, grey, roaring gloom, and the house from time to time shivering and creaking, but standing still. 

By about eight o'clock, this grey pall lightened and the roar went down to a normal high wind and then to boisterous puffs, and we began to see things, and then the sky broke up and soon the sun came blazing out of high, scudding cumulus clouds. An hour later, it was all over. Still a blustering high wind. 

We told the doctor that there was a family in a house almost at sea level at the end of the point where our little peninsula drops sharply from its high bluff into the bay. And it occurred to the doctor that if they had not kept one crack of a window, if they had locked themselves in tight, as you'd tend to do in a normal storm, they would be more subject, down below there, to the whirling pressure of the storm. It moves like a huge doughnut, the ones with a hole in the middle, spinning counter-clockwise. So he and I went out and strode against the quite bearable wind and went down to the house to see that nobody was hurt. 

We found a pretty scared family and, sure enough, all their windows had been locked and had exploded. But no bones broken and no cuts, no blood, just a forlorn family in the middle of the living room, looking fairly bloodless. They were grateful to be visited and all was well and, anyway, it was all over. So, on what was now a glorious, windy day, the doctor and I climbed back the quarter-mile or so up the dunes to our house. 

We just made it. For the last 50 yards we had to go on hands and knees to stay from being blown over. The sun had gone in, the sky had darkened over and gone to lead again and we were just safely inside when the whole thing started up again, in a light that can only be described in Milton's phrase, as 'darkness visible'. The roaring wind came thumping at us now from the north-west against the other side of the house, the other bending windows, and it went on for about forty minutes or an hour, and passed on to do its deadly work up through New England. Meanwhile, our neighbour's house which was a Cape Cod cottage, clapboarding painted white, shutters black, showed now not a flake of paint. It had been sandblasted down to the naked wood. So the interval of the glorious, if boisterous, sunny day was the eye of the hurricane as it went over. The dead calm hole in the doughnut. 

My own feeling about the looting in New York and the slow, dangerous business of packing these people into rotting jails in a hundred degrees is that maybe this is an isolated horror, but we have no certain reassurance yet that what we've been living in since 1968 is not the eye of the hurricane, and that the violence last week may not be the first slap of the old storm coming at us from the other direction.

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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