500th letter - 8 September 1957

It is almost as much of a shock to me as it surely is to you to realise that this is the 500th Letter from America. I can not truthfully say that it seems only yesterday when these letters began, it seems like an age since they were first conceived and, after a short labour that would have done credit to a rabbit, were delivered to a sceptical world exactly 11 years and six months ago today.

Since 1946, we have seen many things. We have seen Harry Truman emerge from the lowly fame he enjoyed with Ginger Rogers as the only other known native of independence Missouri and we've seen him go back there. He now drives his car every morning to work even as any other wage slave and most mornings he says he is commanded by his wife at the door not to forget the new dish mop or the next insurance premium or that book from the library.

This was the man who ordered the dropping of the atom bomb, who stripped one of the most celebrated and certainly the gaudiest of the war generals of all his commands and retired him to the comparative obscurity of a chairman of a business machine company.

We have seen the swift beginning and the uncertain end of the first war in history fought by an international company of nations for their own collective security. We have watched the United Nations, which undertook that war, lose much of the bloom of the rosy youth that rollicked around the fun-lit hills of San Francisco. We have grown grey in the recognition that Soviet Russia, a jolly, if rambunctious, pal at San Francisco holds to its ambition to bestride and dominate the western World, the only argument amongst us now being about the means she intends to use to do it.

In a very few years, we have seen the famous under-defended frontier between Canada and the United States deprived of all meaning as the rather desperate frontier common to both of us has been pushed far to the north, to the edge of Alaska and Canada. We have seen frontiers shed their forts and concrete emplacements and emerge as a 5,000-mile screen of radar towers scanning the air 24 hours a day for the first Russian jet coming over the pole.

Old names in 12 years have taken on brave and grizzly meanings: Israel, Hungary, Swiss, Malaya, Indonesia, Algeria. New and menacing words have come into our vocabulary – automation, thermal nuclear, integration, the intercontinental ballistic missile, rock 'n' roll. The whole of American society, fattened in 12 years by another 20 million people, has ceased to revolve around the city and the farm. The farmer is now a permanently subsidised crop planter put out to grass; the city is turning into a cluster of office buildings. The new American social unit is the classless ranch-type suburb with its supermarket and its shopping centre complete with parking space for 2,000 cars.

I'm having these thoughts as I sit on a terrace overlooking a noble bay at the end of Long Island. Nothing, at first glance, has changed here since the iconic Indians speared for blue fish and porgies and greeted very courteously the first white fugitives from New Haven colony. I went through the nearest graveyard a day or two ago. The tombstones, the big ones for the grown-ups, the children's ones surmounted by skittish angels, are no mouldier than they used to be.

The names of the families that run our farms and stores and post office and lumber yard are the same names inscribed on the first stones, which were sunk in the 1640s. The Grizzwolds and Moores and Vails and Smiths gave their sons to the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 and the Civil War and the Spanish American War and the First World War and the Second. The cleaner stones add the youngest generation of the same names that fell in Korea.

But the place itself, the landscape, is much as it will be I suppose a hundred years from now. It is the first flawless day of the fall, though the calendar says not so. The sky is a clean wash of blue; the bay is a sheet of blue glass. The bayberry and chigger grass are turning red, as they do at this time of year. The wild ducks are waddling south.

The wind, says the weather bureau, is from the south at seven miles per hour. The weather bureau is a liar, there is no wind; there is only hot sun and silence. It's the sort of day on which you can feel the sand rustle between your toes, on which the window panes in the little house on a sandy point four miles across the bay glisten like flies preserved in amber. Our cat, called Tisha in a hasty moment before we discovered she ought to be called Tom flaps a lazy paw at my paper.

Thinking back in these surroundings to the first American letter, do I again recall Korea and the United Nations and the jet airplanes and the rising star of Khrushchev and the falling comet of Adlai Stevenson? I do not. Like any other humans surrounded by the things, the sights and the people he loves, he thinks about himself. And there's a memory brewing up in me, which – because it belongs to me and nobody else – is more vivid than anything caught in the headlines. It's the memory of how these talks started, and I should like to tell you about it.

It seems like a generation ago since I came into Waterloo Station on a damp night in January 1946 and thought I was in a catacomb. There were few lights in the station and they were painted over black to obscure their dim rays from the German bombers, which happily were no longer overhead, but if the war was over, its scars were everywhere. And to a visitor from the big brash non-combatant land across the ocean, London looked like a sad city still living in old bandages.

I would have been only mildly surprised to see people like the Siberian refugees in Russian novels shuffling about with newspapers around their feet. You must please forgive the memory of this shabby picture because I've never forgotten it, whereas you had to forget it and outlive it, if only from the healthy suspicion in a proud nation that austerity – originally a noble word – had taken on a meaning that was gloomy and abominable. But the night when the train disgorged its well-pressed trans-Atlantic travellers and the customs men frisked us for currency and nylons and bottles of the nourishing produce of Scotland, that night you had not begun to outlive the condition of a man who has used up all his capital, mortgaged his house and moved into a one-room lodging with his ration card and his oldest jacket.

Later in the evening, I suffered from an emotion I never expected to have. An old and whimsical English friend of mine, released from his customary tact by some hefty pulls on the extract of barley I'd brought over, leaned towards my chair and, very delicately, ran his index finger along the crease in my trousers. He said only two words; he said "Well, well", and I felt the way I imagine a racing tout would feel at a prayer meeting.

The dank and melancholy scene at the railway station was warmed for me, however, by the sight of a slim blond man with a black hat and a rapid stride. His chin was down in a heavy coat as he bent against the wind, but as he made for me his face broke into a foxy grin. He could have been a secret agent but he was, in fact, an emissary of the BBC and he'd come to meet me. Not as an official greeter, but as an old friend, a man I'd had the honour at various times of introducing to championship boxing in Madison Square Garden, to jazz piano, and colonial Williamsburg and the staple product of Bourbon County, Kentucky. He was just the man to ease my re-entry into an England beginning to take a second and cooler look at the American ally.

For Lindsay Wellington – that is his name – had his own shrewd views about the delicacy of stretching hands across the sea once the honeymoon was over. He had lived much of the war in London and had also worked in the United States as a British official for three years, one of them during the taxing time when the players blooded on the field were receiving such irritating advice from Americans in the grandstand.

He could have told you, as any honest war correspondent can, that it is a comparatively simply chore to write rousing things about two allies when they are shivering together in the cannon's mouth, but a peace correspondent has to report the trickier relationship of two people, two nations that have no pressing choice between fighting together or hanging separately. They lick their wounds, sell their uniforms and stand off, panting slightly, with time to wonder if their late comrade-in-arms is really a fine fellow or something of a heel.

I have a daily reminder of this foolish truth in the fact that a beautiful house next to my apartment house has recently been taken over and very tonally decorated by a race of men we are now given to understand have no peers on earth for intelligence, ingenuity, humour and grace of manner; they are Japanese of some distinction. And the house they have renovated now bears a tasteful plaque bearing the legend "The Nippon Club of New York". When I bow to them as smartly as a non-bowing Westerner can, I can't help recalling that only 12 years ago it was proper, it was even compulsory, to believe that such men were little yellow monsters more akin to anthropoids than any branch of the human family.

Well, Lindsay Wellington knew all this and he came to me with an offer, which he elaborated when we got inside a room and crouched over one coal, with overcoats on. He said he feared the time had come when the ordinary Englishman was going to skip his wartime lessons in American politics. It is always a strain, even in the most comfortable times to keep up what is called an intelligent interest in other people's politics, it's like asking a man who has just mastered the elements of chess to work himself up over another form of chess in which kings count less than pawns and the knights move sideways. In wartime, he might try it. In peace time, people revert to their own game.

Even the most America-phile Englishman cannot be expected to stay in palpitation for long over the stirring news that the House Rules Committee is bottling up a Senate bill that will deny offshore tidelands revenues to states producing more than their quota of the national production of oil. In a word, said, Mr Wellington "Let's forget politics, how about the America I learnt to enjoy when I left the office and the memoranda. Could you not talk week after week about the fundamental things in the lives of 150, now 170 million Americans?"

Well, that's how these letters started. Tentatively, I was warned, because even if they were kindly received, the BBC at the current rate of the pound sterling then could most likely not afford to run them for more than three months, six months I was told, at the outside. Well here we are in our twelfth year, and it's this discovery that gives me, if you will forgive it, a touch of pride that I cannot cover up.

It does occur to me, as a chastening afterthought, that pride is a swollen form of self-respect and I recall with a twinge the definition of self-respect given by my favourite American author. "Self-respect," said HL Mencken, "is the secure feeling that no one as yet is suspicious", so I had better stop preening my feathers.

After all, the BBC gives us abundantly, but the BBC also taketh away. Not yet a while, I hope.

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.