Some memorable letters from America - 20 November 1998

From time to time, down the years, friends and strangers alike have asked me if there were any particular talks that stayed in the memory.

Well, 52 years and 2,596 talks, that opens up a wide field and I can say that the talks I'm most likely to remember most vividly turn out to be not so much talks about serious or sombre happenings, declarations of war, say, infamous assassinations, ceremonial occasions. Memory being the wayward and mischievous thing it is, the talks that are most easily recalled, by me, are ones that surprised me by the numbers of people who felt moved to respond.

And perhaps what keeps them impressed on the mind is the oddity, the weirdness or the homeliness of the topics. It's been suggested on this occasion, which many people have been generous enough to say, is a special occasion, it's been suggested I should recall and re-tell of the gist of one or two of these memories. Perhaps it's a good idea, since the swishing of that scythe at my back suggests that maybe while there's any memory left, I should tap it.

The first that occurs to me is, I was frankly astonished to hear, the favourite talk of the New York producer, who's been in charge here for quite a number of years. It was a talk done about an American institution I had never seen written about in books on American folklore. But it is as well-established as baseball or the hot dog. It is the institution of the summer bachelor. The man, who having seen his children off to summer camp, sees his wife off to the summer cottage in the mountains or the beach house by the ocean and who, the first or maybe the second weeknight that he's alone, tends to fantasise about a situation, most vividly immortalised in a cartoon by the New Yorker's Peter Arno, long ago.

It showed a portly, elderly gent with spotted bow tie, marching smartly down Park Avenue with a very trig, well-endowed young woman on his arm. Coming up the Avenue and just level with him is a majestic matron of about his age. "Why, George Fitzgerald, " she cries, "Whatever keeps you in town?" I will not blemish a family programme with any further comment, other than the thought that one of the most profound of American maxims is; "I love my wife, but oh, you kid".

I bring up this touchy subject because an item of technology is, I think, about to produce a minor sociological revolution in the United Stats. The cause of this one is the coming into general home use of the air conditioner. In the old summer days, the summer bachelor went, thankfully, at weekends from the furnace of his apartment to undressed days and what he thought of as cool nights in the country.

Now he reluctantly leaves the cool, cool paradise of his apartment for the hot days and the dank nights and the midges and the bugs of the country. Two days ago, a Wednesday, I pressed the elevator, the lift, button of my apartment house and as the door slid back it revealed the capacious frame of a neighbour of mine from the 12th floor. He's a retired old gentleman, a notable fisherman and a solid but saucy character.

I asked him what kept him in town in mid-week. "Are you kidding?" he said. "It's like the basin of the Ganges out there. I retreated to this wonderful apartment, and you know what? My wife showed up this morning. Hot damn."

"If this goes on, " I said, "air conditioning's going to play the hob with fishing."

"Fishing, nothing, " he said, "it's going to play the devil with marriage."

Perhaps because so many of my talks have been done from San Francisco, I have indelible memories of that haunting city, a likely place for dark doings, especially on the cold summer nights, when the white Pacific fog whirls through the vertical struts of the great red suspension bridge, actually twanging and wailing like a harp played by the witches in Macbeth.

This talk was done really in answer to a regular tourist question. Why should an island, only a mile across the water from the great white city on the hills, be chosen as an impregnable prison, which it was for many years, as the place to incarcerate the toughest incorrigibles with a record for most escapes? Alcatraz is built like a battleship. It lies bang in the middle of San Francisco Bay.

It housed, in its time, such monsters as Machine Gun Kelly, Limpy Cleaver, Gene Colson, Al Capone. Before it closed in 1963 as too expensive to maintain, 20-odd men had tried to escape, five had been shot in the water by the catwalk guns, three had vanished, presumed dead, 12 had been captured in the water or desperately sloshing back to the island. The point is that that one mile and tenth of water is a ferocious channel, slashed by riptides and gurgling with whirlpools and the water of an unvarying extreme cold throughout the year. The 12 captured in the water were half frozen after a few minutes. There was no record of anyone's ever making it until the case of Aaron Burgett.

He'd gone ten years with a faultless record. He was head of the garbage detail. On the last day of September, he and a pal whipped a new guard with a knife, tied him to a tree, stole some plastic laundry bags from garbage cans and Burgett used his as a pair of water wings and took off. The klaxons sounded and the San Franciscans felt the same old guilty thrill and perhaps the unholy hope that one day the warden would get a postcard from Atlantic City or Miami, "Having lovely time, wish you were here, signed Aaron Burgett". These un-civic thoughts were frozen in their tracks, 16 days later. Many logs and much debris float by the island. One such object on that day had an almost human look, almost but not quite. It was the rather frightful remains of the corpse of Aaron Burgett.

I have no difficulty at all in picking out one talk, from all the thousand of others, which produced far and away the largest mail, from all sorts of people, of every class and country. It was a very early talk, done in 1950 and I called it simply "A Baby is Missing". The first day of spring that year came in in New York City with showers of snow and the night of 21 March was no time to be out – foggy and very raw.

But that night a young coloured woman, a Mrs Holden, was taken by her anxious husband to an uptown hospital and was delivered of a premature baby. It weighed 2lbs 2oz and was put in an incubator right away. The doctors told the couple all they could do was their best. Nine nights later, a bitter, freezing night, the night nurse went through the incubator ward to see how the premature babies were doing and the Holden baby was gone. The parents were called and arrived half-crazed. The doctor, pressed to tell the truth, said that a baby taken outside on such a night might live two hours at best. He drew a tentative stroke across the baby's progress chart. A police siren set up its banshee sirening, the tabloids reported a routine kidnapping, the FBI was called in, they would have jurisdiction over local police if the baby had been taken across a state border.

A month goes by and one morning a chunky coloured girl in her teens strutted into the bus depot on 42nd Street and, of all things, she went up to a cop. She told a rambling story. She'd had trouble of some sort up in Harlem and another cop wandered by and said, "I know that girl. She lives in my hotel." So she did, a seedy little place.

By the time the cops phoned the station house, the girl had vanished and within 24 hours the FBI men were stopping the traffic and dredging through bus stations from New York City all the way down to New Orleans. But she'd not taken a bus. She'd simply crossed the street and gone back into her hotel room.

Days later, two detectives found her in a tiny, squalid bedroom and she told her story. She'd lately given birth to stillborn twins. "Please, " she said, "leave me alone." Yes, she'd kidnapped the baby. She was frantic for a baby. The detectives cast a roving eye around everything, tapped the tattered wallpaper, looked under this and that. They knew as well as she did that the baby was dead. They were on their way out with her, when from across the hall they heard a thin, broken wail, like the complaint of a powerful kitten. They broke the lock on a small door and opened up a room no bigger than a linen cupboard or closet and the heat from inside came at them like a 10lb roast, and there was the baby.

When it was returned to the hospital, it weighed 3lb 1oz, a gain of about 6ozs. Now why? The cops were the first to ask. The doctors said, a miracle. An act of God, said another. Well we all know that God helps them that helps themselves. What had this forlorn, half-crazy girl done to nurture this miracle? All she would say was that she'd hailed a cab at the hospital and shocked and had had a row with the cab driver because she took her skirt off to wrap around the baby and somehow got downtown to her seedy room.

But it came out what the detectives had seen in that tiny, steaming room were three paperback books, The American Woman's Cookbook, a Bible, the New Modern Home Physician, a little folding carriage with an electric blanket, a small electric grill, a row of baby formulas and 12 bottles with those sterilised nipples that pop up without touching, a pan of water, sterilising tweezers, baby powder, cotton wool, baby oil and the essential feeding weapon for a child that size, an eye dropper.

They brought the girl into court about a month or so later and two or three very reliable psychiatrists looked her over and all agreed she was quite mad, a certifiable psychotic. And since psychotics are beyond the intelligent handling of life, not to say a threat to you and me, they put her away. The baby is, at this writing, a year old and very fit and laughing its head off.

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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