Britain's heatwave

Much rousing stuff and much nonsense has been written and chattered on the box in the past week, which is the week that was something of a shambles 200 years ago in Philadelphia, what with recruiting stations being set up to receive the young men who'd been inflamed by the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and, only a street away, another station set up to recruit young men to fight against their brothers in the king's service.

I have such a recruiting poster in front of me now. It certainly gives pause to those of us who think and who, in the past week, have been encouraged to think of the youth of America rising in a body and making the skies quake with choruses of 'Yankee Doodle'. This may not be the most tasteful time to remind everybody that revolutions are very murky and complex things. Or that it's a fair guess that, say, two-thirds of the carefree Americans we saw whooping it up last Sunday in New Orleans and Phoenix, Arizona and Wichita, Kansas, and the rest, would have been either against the revolution or would have managed to get through it not giving a damn either way. 

Listen to this poster and imagine with what confidence and blitheness the British commanders, in an America just gone to war against Britain, could nail up this appeal, pretty certain that, say, a third of the youth of Philadelphia would respond to 'it' and not to the sacred cause of Mr Jefferson's declaration. 

'1st Battalion of Pennsylvania Loyalists commanded by His Excellency, Sir William Howe, KB' – and then, in bold type – 'All intrepid, able-bodied' – and then in tremendous black letters – 'heroes' (comma) – back to the main, bold typeface – 'who are willing to service His Majesty George III in defence of their country, laws and Constitution, against the arbitrary usurpations of a tyrannical Congress have now not only an opportunity of manifesting their spirit by assisting in reducing to obedience their too-long deluded countrymen, but also of acquiring the polite accomplishments of a soldier by serving only two years or during the present rebellion in America. Such spirited fellows who are willing to engage will be rewarded at the end of the war, besides their laurels, with 50 acres of land where every gallant hero may retire and enjoy his bottle and his lass. Each volunteer will receive as a bounty $5, besides arms, clothing, accoutrements and every other requisite proper to accommodate a gentleman soldier by applying to Lieutenant Colonel Allen or at Captain Kearny's rendezvous at Patrick Tonry's, three doors above Market Street in Second Street, Philadelphia.' 

This jolly document is a jolt of a reminder that, for quite a time, what was going on was a civil war, till things got rough for the rebels and they began to pass harsh and, in the end, dreadful laws against the loyalists or anybody thought guilty of not supporting the rebellion. 

Well, I was absent from the romantic orgy of last Sunday because I'd nipped over to London a week before to prepare to do an anniversary stint, setting off firecrackers over the Thames and listening to the music Handel wrote for just such an occasion. And I must say that of all the sounds we heard last weekend, the sweetest to me was the sound of Handel. 

But I must also say that the last thing that was on my mind, most of the time, was the bicentennial. The thing that gnawed away at my senses and yours too, I'll bet, was, simply, the heat. We've always chuckled over here when arriving Britons tell us tall tales about a heatwave. They sound remarkably like San Franciscans who bask the year round in temperatures rarely higher than 66, 68 or so, and, consequently, when they find themselves in the 70s, they begin to babble. And, once, I was there in a freakish couple of days when it hit 90 and then the San Franciscans lost all sanity and began to wonder if the cab drivers hadn't been right all along about the atom bomb. 

Well, I can only say that the last week in June, in London, was the most uncomfortable week I can remember since the late spring of 1939 when I drove with a friend around America and between New Orleans and the crest of the Coast Range overlooking the Pacific, something like, err... I think 2,500 miles, it was never below 100 by day or 80 at night. You'll notice, by the way, that I'm a Fahrenheit man and, in spite of the patriotic Common Market figures in the London papers about the temperature going to 36 tomorrow, I didn't see any headlines that screamed a warning about it's going up into the 30s. When the chips are down and the humidity's streaming, the Briton, like the American, reverts to the melodrama of 'up in the 90s!' (Exclamation point). 

I propose in these talks, by the way, to talk in Fahrenheit until it's prohibited by law and whatever the prim airline ladies may say at the other end of the telephone line, I'm going to ask if my plane leaves at three o'clock and not 15:00. Not, at any rate until Britain gets public clocks with 24 markings. For there's something, to me, cockeyed in arriving at a railway station whose clock says seven minutes to five and then having to figure out from the boards whether you've caught or missed your train which leaves at 16:59. Well, forgive me! I try not to get exercised by big causes, like err... teetotalism or capital punishment. But there's a limit to human neutrality when it comes to telling time, it's time for every man to stand and be counted. And I'm counting up to 12 and in Fahrenheit. 

Back to that last dreadful week between Louisiana and La Jolla, California. There was nothing particularly novel about the weather on that ride. The South steams from April to November. And in June, July, August, the whole continental mass from the Alleghenies to the California Coast Range, what Americans call the 'Heartland', is a cauldron. No wonder the Spanish spread the legend that the devil took his holidays there. 

But... but! Whereas, before the war, the Second World War, that is, it was always in the 80s and 90s over most of America in summer, we accepted it as babies accept a bellyache. It was part of life. Even then we didn't, like the poor Londoners of the past three weeks, grin and gripe and sweat and bear it. There were precautions and remedies well understood at birth by any American born in the heartland. Midwesterners have always sprinkled salt in their first beer and, if you worked in the summer in hellish places like Texas or Oklahoma – the Rodgers Hammerstein musical, by the way, is pure propaganda. Where do you think Rodgers and Hammerstein lived? Not Oklahoma, I can tell you! – if, I say, you worked in the south-west, you took advantage of the little machines that they had in drugstores and at railway stations, certainly on oilfields, machines that dispensed salt tablets which I always found the most palatable way of putting back the salt that you lost in your sweat. 

On that fearsome trip, too, I recall we made life barely bearable by buying, somewhere in New Mexico, a desert ice bag and this was something, I imagine, thought up by the pioneers and the Gold Rushers – a thin, canvas bag which you filled with ice. By day you shut all the car windows, since the air outside was as hot as a branding iron, left a little chink on the driver's side and set the bag dangling beside this chink. It worked pretty well and it worked even better at night when you hung the bag against the window that faced the west – the window of the bedroom – where the prevailing wind, if any was prevailing, came from. 

Now, I must tell you about the first historic slip that led to our downfall. The year was 1934. I was driving across the country for, I think, only the second time, and staying with a college friend in St Louis. It was monstrous. We drank water and water and never slaked our thirst. One day it went to 107 and our host said, 'Say, there's a new thing in town'. It was the first air-conditioned restaurant in the United States. We went there, walked as if into a blissful ice box and had a giant meal – had a human meal – for the first time in a week. Then we came out, walked into the scalding blanket and collapsed on the sidewalk. We knew, then, that air-conditioning was a dangerous fad and would never catch on. 

Well, it didn't for some years, but the war came and then, afterwards, it did and by the 1950s, every movie theatre, theatre, hospital, restaurant, drugstore, bus station was air-conditioned. And by, I should say, the late 1950s, every train, bus, department store, every delicatessen, liquor store, greengrocer, hotel, not to mention houses and flats. And life in such sinks as Houston and Dallas was made possible by being able to leave an air-conditioned house for an air-conditioned car, office, lunch room, the works. 

That's what made London an inferno to Americans lately. Americans used to say the problem in England was how to keep warm indoors in the winter. The problem now is how to keep alive indoors in summer. It's too much for those of us whose bodies have long forgotten that the baking heat and streaming humidity are what God, an inscrutable being, intended as our lot. We have been softened and corrupted – thank God – by the great man who invented air-conditioning. 

But I realise the most profligate thing Britain could do would be to spend millions of pounds fitting up the land for summer comfort and then finding that for the next dozen years you are back to normal, with 55, 60 degrees and a run on raincoats. But you can do something. You can, for heaven's sake, learn about two most splendid American inventions, iced tea and iced coffee. 

You simply pack a large tumbler with ice – and I mean you put in a dozen fat lumps, not a token sliver to show that you have ice in England – brew hot tea and pour it over the icebergs, sugar to taste, squeeze in a little lemon, drop in a chunk of same. Infinitely more palatable than those ghastly chemical fruit drinks. Iced coffee is simpler still. Same pack of ice. Pour over hot coffee, sugar, cream, if you like – delicious, also! 

And both of them better by far, I regret to say, than alcohol which stimulates for a while and then fulfils its true function as a depressant. Only in the heat it leaves you in a stew of depression wondering if anything, Wimbledon or the bicentennial or Jimmy Carter, is worthwhile. 

I've just heard the weather forecast on the box. It's got so that he says, 'For Sunday through Thursday fair, average temperatures in the middle or high 80s. So you see,' he ended, 'it looks like we're headed for some pretty pleasant weather.' This man has a touch of grey in his hair but I'll bet it's a tint. He's obviously too young to remember what air was like before they conditioned it.

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.