From Mexico - 10 March 1978

Last year at this time, I was in Mexico and, come to think of it, this year at this time, I’m in Mexico. Which is why I want to tell you briefly about a splendid lady bearing the Dickensian name of Alice Crouch.

We wound up our stay last year with some friends on a beautiful 16th-century hacienda with open rooms and interior little courts which illustrate the Spanish gift for outdoor-indoor living centuries before the style was so-named by California real estate agents. It also had, in running order, the original pure water supply system from a well – dug, I imagine, by the conquistadors. It’s the sort of place we all might yearn to repair to if the coal strike continues, or resumes, in defiance of Mr Carter’s legal order to the miners to go back to work.

Well, the last night we were there, the present owners threw a party, and one of our friends, a San Franciscan I’ve known (it seems) forever, said, “Whatever you do, make a point of talking with Alice Crouch.”

The party was well underway, but an hour or so away from dinner, when Miss Crouch arrived with a maid, bearing a coconut cake about the size of a flying saucer. Miss Crouch made a gesture toward the host. “See that it’s very cold,” she said, and the host hurried over to her, burning his fingers on a martini whose glass steamed like dry ice.

I was led over and introduced to Miss Crouch and we sat down, and talking to her was as easy as sliding down a snow bank.

They’d warned me that Miss Crouch was a little hard of hearing, which I don’t believe because she heard everything, even though recording engineers tell me I have a voice of a very low decibel volume. “Why don’t you project more?,” they say. “Because”, I say, “I am not an opera singer. I can only talk and at the moment I’m talking to a friend.”

I suspect that Miss Crouch, like my father in his later years, could turn on and turn off her hearing according to what she wanted to hear. I don’t know whether or not she wears a hearing aid; they make them these days no larger than a pinhead.

Miss Crouch’s general serenity reminded me of old Averell Harriman, still alive and spritely at 86. He, you will recall, was Roosevelt’s old sidekick, once ambassador to Russia, then to Great Britain, and now considered the elder statesman of the Democratic Party. Who the younger statesman of the party is, nobody cares to say.

But when those interminable talks had been going on and on in Paris between the Americans and the South Vietnamese on one side and the North Vietnamese on the other, several American delegates wore themselves out listening every day to the regulation one- or two- or three-hour harangue about the imperialist ruling circles of the “fascist beast”. The United States, that would be.

Eventually the president sent Averell Harriman to be the chief American delegate to Paris. He was then in his late 70s. He stayed there, attended all the sessions, and when I asked a veteran of these so-called negotiations how Harriman managed to stay awake and benign through the daily castigations of the United States, the man said, “It’s very simple. He sits down and turns off his hearing aid. And I’m not sure about staying awake, but he waits till they’re through and then an aide nudges him and he switches on again and he’s ready to argue.”

Well, back to Alice Crouch. I forgot to say that she is an American lady who has lived in Mexico for, I think, 40 years at least, and she is 95.

The pleasure of her company has much to do with her age and, of course, the fact that she has all her marbles. I find a special relish in talking with very old people of character. It’s because I think they have long ago given up liking the things they’re supposed to like. They don’t waste valuable time by pretending to tastes they don’t have. Better, they don’t pretend to know about things they don’t know about, however high-toned and cultural.

Freed from the neuroses of being either a know-all or an artful pretender, they tend to be as inquisitive as small children, to learn about the ideas and interests of the world that’s growing up. They have the assurance to be mannerly, but direct. They have abandoned the idioms of qualification, the “You may be right, but …” and “If I may say so” and “Would you mind very much if I suggested …” and the whole minuet routine of younger people who cover testiness with good breeding. In a word, they don’t give a damn.

Miss Crouch appeared to me to be the most intelligent person at the party with a freewheeling mind that offered endless surprises. I may, of course, be prejudiced by her response to my opening gambit. “That,” I said, “was quite a cake you brought in here.” “Yes,” she said, “I was late with it because today is Tuesday.” “How so?,” I asked. “Well,” she said, “it takes time for the icing layer to set and then she has to grind the coconut and powder the stuff on. And I tell her she may not use the electric whipping machine between five o’clock and 5.14. The machine plays havoc with my radio.” She gave me a cheerful glare. I swear to you in all simplicity, I was puzzled. “But what happens,” I said, “between five o’clock and 5.14?” “Oh come now,” she said. “Tuesday at five is Letter From America.” “Flattery,” I said, “will get you nowhere.” But she then recounted with flattering precision most of what I’d talked about. But I tell you it was a shock as immediate as pulling at a light plug whose rubber insulation has worn away.

I used to make the mistake – and maybe I still do – of thinking of one or two gathered together over a gas fire somewhere, almost anywhere in Britain. I say Britain advisedly, because the letters never cease, from the Scots most often and sometimes the Irish and Welsh. But then the letters come in, too, from India and Switzerland and the Caribbean and Hong Kong, and at such times I remember to say not the House of Commons but you, if you happen to live under a parliamentary system. But it had never crossed my mind that Mexico was also part of the audience, or to wonder how you greet people who sit down to listen at 5pm on Tuesdays, not to mention 6am in the south of France.

I think this is the right time to get something off my mind that has troubled me for several years. An English father wrote to me and said, "My son and I usually listen to your talks on Friday evenings, but if we miss them, we catch them on Sunday mornings. My son is eight and he wants to know why is Mr Cooke nice on Friday evenings and rude on Sunday mornings?" In other words, this well-brought-up little boy is never greeted with a "Good morning", but, bang, I go off into the main topic or the first digression or Alice Crouch or whatever.

You can see the problem. If I were to greet everybody, I’d have to record a whole series of "Good mornings" and "Good evenings" and "Good afternoons" for Mexico, to go no farther, and then the BBC would have to splice these beginnings on to the master tape. And this, I’m afraid, would smack of Watergate monkeyshines with the tapes, even though there is a large deceit involved in recording something on Thursday which is heard first on Friday, and then again on Sunday, and after that around the globe.

There is no way, short of doing a fresh talk every day, to do what I must appear to be doing, namely to be giving an up-to-the-minute commentary on whatever has just happened. There was, for instance, the dreadful weekend when nothing of great consequence seemed to be happening here and I talked about this and that, which was acceptable enough on Friday night; but on the Saturday the Russians sent their first man, the first man into orbit – Gagarin, I believe. So on the Sunday morning, I started up again about this and that.

A few days later, the BBC’s own publication came out and its radio critic wrote the acid sentence,"There’s one thing you can say for Cooke: he’s unflappable. The bomb may drop, continents may slide into the sea, but, like Old Man River, he keeps on waffling along."

You see, even a radio critic, who might be expected to know something about the mechanics of the game, is tricked by the simple magic of the medium, by what they call the effect of immediacy, by believing that what is being said is being said now.

But now I’m in Mexico and adrift from American news. In the United States, we do get regular dispatches from Mexico, but they’re always on two topics. First, we read about Americans lingering in Mexican jails on charges of dealings in drugs. Lately, by an agreement between the two countries, most of the culprits have been exchanged for prisoners on the other side of the Rio Grande, so that the Americans who were seen on our television jubilant over their coming return to the home of the brave and the land of the free were not seen on television being less than jubilant at finding that they had to serve out their sentences at home.

The other topic is the endless, unresolved problem of illegal Mexican immigrants who have no trouble crossing over into the United States when you consider what they’ve long considered – the pitifully inadequate border patrol. Last time I heard, it was five helicopters scanning a 2,000-mile border.

The government figures that there are about eight million illegal immigrants into the United States who take, obviously, an enormous bite into the employment rolls; and of these, they say there are about five million Mexicans. I hope to look into this and hear the Mexican complaint that illegality is a two-way street with Americans, American companies doing a land-office business, illegally shipping into Mexico all sorts of goodies – electronic gear, dishwashers, radios, pumps, firearms and drugs originally grown in Mexico itself.

In the meantime, may I welcome back all those incensed listeners who think of me as a natural accompaniment to bacon and eggs or kedgeree. To you, I say good morning. To everybody else, from here to Singapore, I’d better just say, if goodnight is inappropriate, have a nice 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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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