Postscript
God's country
P. J. Kavanagh
tv"ou English? You like New York?'
said the taxi-driver, a thin, humorous-looking man. 'Very much,' I replied, adding, because I knew it was ex- pected, 'but it frightens me a little.' It sure scares the hell out of me,' he said. 'It's a hard town. Ybu've got to get your hit in first or they walk right over you.'
We were on the way to the airport, and soon we came to a tunnel that took two lines of traffic while five lines tried to get into it. The resulting jam gave me time to ponder my polite untruth: I had not found central New York frightening. On the con- trary, it had seemed less hostile and hurried than central London. Sure, you had to know what you wanted and ask for it clear- ly. Sure, you couldn't stop anyone to ask the way because they walked past you, glaz- ed, as though you had not addressed them. (Often they were then observed to be wear- ing head-sets and were presumably wrapped in their own cloud of sound.) But on the whole you were welcomed, however brus- quely, as a fellow human. There was none of that wearying sense of being 'placed' socially and economically, to be flattered as a possible target for a rip-off, or rejected as an unlikely prospect.
It was a hot afternoon. The five lines of cars came closer together as each driver fought to enter the tunnel, and tempers shortened. Nevertheless, what happened next was shocking. The occupant of our neighbour car, a cultivated-looking man in an expensive machine, turned slowly, Shane-like, to my taxi-driver, and said quietly: 'If you scrape my fender I'll knock your fucking head off.'
I gaped, there was no danger of such a thing, but my driver, deprived of his chance to get his hit in first, began his reply before the other had finished speaking and Escalated the Conflict. He announced that it would give him the greatest satisfaction, not only to grapple the other's fender clear away, but to demolish his whole car and then its occupant. Our neighbour then replied in kind. It was violence of the tongue, at a chilling, conversational level, on the grand scale. It was also profoundly unpleasant, a kind of generalised hatred, but my anxiety was brief, that they would have to settle it with jacks and wheelbraces (as they would have had to in England, never mind one of the Latin European countries) and I would thereby miss my flight. They meant it all right, but it was not intended to come to that; it was, perhaps, part of the image of the 'tough' city that New Yorkers seem to cherish (even if with a shudder) that, carried through, would make the place uninhabitable — which clearly it is not.
I thought of this incident when I read President Reagan's recent vilification of the Soviet Union; violence of the tongue for which any referee would have to send him off. I hope Russia realises it is a normal American mode and, though meant, is not meant to lead to anything else, as it would in Europe. This is what makes Mrs That- cher's abuse, presumably intended to please her host the President ('megaphone diplomacy' in Lord Carrington's phrase), much sillier. The way she spoke is not the way European nations speak about each other in public, unless they mean business.
It has been pleasant to note a minor furore that has broken out on Radio 4's PM programme. A listener wrote in to say what a pleasant place Russia was to visit, and the jolly presenter, Susannah Simons, com- mented that he must have been wearing his rose-coloured spectacles. Since then their postbag has burst with passionate defence of Russia and Russians which, at the pre- sent time, is cheering. Few indeed of those who write to the BBC sound like Party Members...
And if I'm pleased to hear people stand- ing up for Russia let me put in a word for the USA. At the time of the taxi/fender confrontation I was returning from a trip into Virginia, one of the most beautiful places on earth — no wonder the early set- tlers called it 'God's country' — and sham- ingly friendly and pro-British. Shamingly, because we seldom say a good word about the US. In one of those superb ice-cream places that line the highway my Yankee companion became convinced that the beautiful girl behind the shining sundae machines was of English descent. He asked
her, and she blushed. 'Why, thank you!' she cried, and had to decline the distinction.
Thanks — and delight — at being mistaken for British... May we have the grace to blush ourselves and labour to deserve such a reaction.
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