Preconceptions about place

Some years ago, I was on a round-the-world trip under the most respectful auspices – I suppose I ought to say what were then considered the most respectful auspices – namely the United Nations, and we arrived in Fiji. I knew nothing about Fiji that I hadn't learned from the early talking-picture travelogues – there's a mouthful that dates me.

There was an earnest couple, always on the wing, called, I believe, Mr and Mrs Martin Johnson and their mission in life was to fill in the geographical blanks of what used to be called 'well-informed' people, not to mention the huge population of us ignoramuses. There was also an ever-present traveloguer – I believe he's still with us, but resting now after circling the globe more often than all the astronauts put together – named James Fitzpatrick and in the days when every decent movie house gave you, before the main picture, an hors d'oeuvre of a newsreel, a cartoon and a ten-minute visit to a place you'd never seen, that was where James Fitzpatrick came in. 

He had a simple formula. Long shot of some exotic landscape or seascape with a droning narration about how far it was from you and me and such everyday marvels as central heating and paper towels, then cut quick to the typical natives who're always working in the fields with ancient-Briton tools or indoors weaving baskets, then a few perambulating shots of half-clothed women carrying the finished baskets on their heads. Then a little oddity about the communal life, such as that everybody wore hats only at weddings or nobody could buy a hut until the medicine man had peered into the entrails of an alligator or a cow and seen that the omens were good. And then fiddles and tympani came in for the romantic mood and we saw that these people lived in a touching paradise and ought not to be disturbed. 

At which point, Mr Fitzpatrick summoned up the vibrato of his resonant tonsils and intoned his final sentence. It was practically always the same, so much so that, when I was in college, it was the cue for the whole audience (I almost said congregation) to join in and chant in unison, 'And so, as the sun sets on Bontang Bay, we say farewell to beautiful Microplasma'. 

My knowledge of Fiji before this first, and only, visit was about on a par with Mr Fitzpatrick's instructions. It was something of a shock to find that the Fijians were no more stupid than you or I, that they, too, bought paper towels and Lyle's Golden Syrup yet from their general stores and that, in the evening, their favourite community music was not ancient battle cries and tom-toms but the very hymns I had learned in a Wesleyan Sunday school, namely 'Jesus bids us shine with a pure clear light' and 'Hear the pennies dropping, listen while they fall'. 

This came about because the Fijians, once they'd shed their native queen and allowed themselves to be annexed by well-meaning Britons – and this was a period when Britain, from the highest motives, was annexing a third of the world – they were riddled with Methodist missionaries and showed the effects long after my old Sunday schoolmates had switched to Paul Whiteman and Bing Crosby. 

Another thing I didn't know was that the gorgeous beaches of Fiji were not golden, but black. Well, I could go on and on about the shock of my education in Fiji, but what I meant to say at the beginning was that our round-the-world plane, run by the Australians, had paused overnight at Fiji and would be off again tomorrow for Sydney. So we woke and, as always on that airline, remember, we left not at 8.03 or 8.15 with apologies over the loudspeaker, we left at 8.00 sharp. And after I don't recall how many hours, the poignant voice of the captain came on to say Sydney had had the worst storm in decades, with raging winds and enormous floods and we were going to have to land hundreds of miles away at Adelaide. This was before the jumbos, it was the early heyday of the 707s and apparently nobody in Adelaide had ever seen one. So once the word got around, the entire population, it seemed, came out to watch the wonderful monster touch down. 

Well, by then, most of us aboard were pretty well exhausted from the community singing and the accompanying snorts of barley wine – happily they'd had Scottish missionaries in Fiji, too – and when I came up before the immigration man I was in something of a stupor. He said, in the politest way, 'Do you intend to stay in Australia more than three months?' And before I could arrange to have my manners get ahead of my instincts I blurted out, 'Good God, no!' This is not the most tactful way of entering a foreign country. The man winced but said no more and after my short stay in Australia, which I was mad about, I've felt guilty ever since and I wake up in the night sweating under the strain of a grilling by infuriated Aborigines. 

However, live and learn from even such a tiny embarrassment as that. The truth may always come out under the influence of wine, but other truths come out in instinctive responses and some of them are so embedded in us that they have settled in the language as idioms. For instance, the word 'out'. Americans in London are in the habit of wincing and then chuckling when they hear an Englishman just returned from the United States say he was 'out there six months', or two years, or whatever. Similarly, people who live on the east coast of the United States give similar winces to people from California when they say they are going 'out West'. The unconscious idea, too well established by now to disguise, is that the homeland is the centre of the world and that anywhere far from home, is 'out' from centre. 

These are the little words that try men's souls. No Californian meeting me now – and I'm in San Francisco – says, 'How long are you going to be out here?' They say, 'How long are you going to be here?' But so firm is the memory that this country was settled from east to west that even a fourth-generation Californian will say, 'I haven't been back east in a couple of years.' Back, that is, not to where he came from, but where we all came from. 

This, I realise, is by way of trying to discover a base out here from which to report a few things seen from the west coast instead of the east. It's particularly hard to report from California to a European audience because the very word 'California' sets off a whole geyser (or guy-zer) of preconceptions, some of which are very funny to Californians. For instance, a European – and he might just as well be an ambassador as a farmer – will quite cheerfully ask, 'What's the weather like in California just now?' And when you begin by saying, 'Well, now, that depends where you are', you sound like a fusspot. 

But how would you feel if an American, putting through a telephone call to Edinburgh, asked, 'How's the weather in Europe?' Or, if he put the same question on a call to Naples – and I pick my cities with meticulous care, because California stretches from north to south the distance from Edinburgh to Naples. Also, as everybody knows we'd better say, the California coast is buttressed with a range of mountains, the Coast Range, and the difference in July, say, from being in San Francisco or 50 miles inland over the mountains is the difference between a foggy 55 degrees in this city and a burning 105 degrees in the Central Valley. 

I put in such a call today to a friend in Norfolk who's done a good deal of roaming around the United States, admittedly in pursuit of a dimpled white ball, 1.68 inches in diameter, so he does tend to get the idea that the world is a series of fairways and bunkers surrounded by different trees, to be sure, but, beyond them, by vague accumulations of telegraph poles and high-rise buildings known as cities. I was trying to explain the monumental collapse of the world's greatest golfer last Sunday down on a stretch of land 120 miles from here which Robert Louis Stevenson called 'the most beautiful mating of land and sea in the world'. Robert Louis Stevenson had never heard of Jack Nicklaus and it could be vice versa but I can imagine that if anybody had quoted that memorable phrase to Nicklaus this week, Nicklaus, a shrewd man of a few, well-chosen words, might well have answered, 'No kidding'. 

For the layman – or perhaps today I should say for the lay person, which by the idiotic logic of jargon can only mean woman – I should explain that a professional golfer who plays in the tournaments in any country is known as a scratch player. That's to say, if the golf card for the course says 'Par 72', he's expected, more often than not, to play the course in 72 blows or less. Jack Nicklaus who is, without question, the giant of the game today and, almost certainly, the greatest player of the game there has ever been, was well on his way to winning the famous Bing Crosby Tournament last Sunday. He started the day leading the field by one stroke. At the end, he was 18th. He went around Pebble Beach not in 72, but in 82 which is as if George Best, in a Cup Final, scored six goals through his own goal. 

Nicklaus went around the back, or last nine, holes at Pebble Beach in 45 strokes which is what I once went around the back nine at Pebble Beach. He has never, since about the age of twelve, scored 82 in a round. 

When my good friend in Norfolk who knows as much about golf, on paper, as anybody, asked across 6,000 miles, 'Why? Why? Why?' I said, 'Well, he went skiing for ten days and his thighs bulged so, he couldn't get his trousers on.' 'Damn fool,' said my friend, 'Where did he go skiing?' 'Right here,' I said. 'In California?' my friend squeaked. 'Of course! A hundred some miles from here up in the Sierra!' Which, at this time, can have thirty, forty feet of snow. 'In California!' my friend gasped. Well, in sight of those skiing buffs, people lie by desert pools and get toasted to a crisp, gasping naked in a temperature of 92 degrees. 

Ah well, I'd meant to go into segregation, inflation, the CIA and Gerald Ford but what am I to do when a best friend doesn't know whether I'm talking from the Sahara or the Alps? I'm talking from San Francisco and I'm just off to shoot the back nine at the San Francisco Golf Club course in 45 strokes. So people will mistake me for Nicklaus. You think? 

By the way, how's the weather on the continent of Europe?

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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