Alistair Cook - Alistair Cooks American Journey

Wartime Britain, though few nowadays have a personal memory of those years, is fairly well etched into our collective imaginations: the silent blacked-out streets, the night skies lit by beams searching for bombers; the raucously cheerful Workers Playtime lunch-hour concerts broadcast from a factory somewhere in the North; the boxed gas masks on every scurrying shoulder; the nightly pip-pip-pip preceding BBC Radio bulletins, where the only consolation for the invariably bad news was that the unshaky baritone of the announcer Alvar Lidell suggested that somehow there would always be an England. There was a palpable sense of isolation, and then there was the marvellous moment when Mr Lidell at last had something good to relate. America had entered the war.

Nobody in Britain had much more than the foggiest notion then what the Americans might bring to the war, or indeed what Americans were really like: there was just a palimpsest of Franklin Roosevelt/Charlie Chaplin/John Steinbecks Okies. Saul Steinbergs famous New Yorker cartoon was drawn years later but summed up the perspective then and now, the skyscrapers of Manhattan distended westwards to Hollywood and the Pacific, with something vague and dusty in between. The arrival in ration-book Britain of GIs armed with the temptations of nylon stockings and cartons of cigarettes excited more envy than curiosity; after all, they came in late last time, took the credit for whipping the Kaiser didnt they? and they were coming in late again.

What was happening in the vast mystery of America was, of course, of supreme importance and more than passing interest, as that new American citizen Alistair Cooke realized at the time. Having worked in London as the BBCs film critic, he had returned to America in 1937 in time to hear the drum rolls of war reaching Washington from the Far East; he was in the capital for Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; and then on the morning of February 27, 1942 he left the air of tobacco-choked energy that is the Washington odor of panic. For saking the hot news from the capital, he set out on a prodigious journey to explore the country, south, west, north and east. On the first trip he drove much of the way in a car with five retreads, then in 1943 and 1944 he did the trip again by train and bus. Only a handful of Americans have seen the country like that, still less reflected on its diversities. There is nothing weird about the doctor he meets in St Louis who tells him, I never was west of Louisville nor east of Charleston, West Virginia.