I Was a Prisoner of the Imperialists
HAVE been telling how I was expulsed from Sofia. They said I must be telling you.'
This fragment of dialogue came into my mind when I ,read Mr. Sefton Delmer's account of his extrusion from Egypt lost week by Colonel Nasser's subordinates. The words are cbse of a Bulgarian Archimandrite reporting to the Religious ePartment of the Ministry of Information at the beginning cti the Second World War; they are taken from Put Out More Iggs, by Mr. Evelyn Waugh. Mr. Delmer, summarily returned to England, reminded 'Coders of the Daily Express of the other countries, all at the oppressed by some form of dictatorship, from which he "as been expelled. The list, like its compiler, was impressive; arid, knowing Mr. Delmer slightly, I did not for a moment s4Ppose that his refusal to `write [as he put it] for a visa' ‘'as due to some inner compulsion to epater les tyrans. He sent out for the same reason that he was sent in—because u,e has a talent for reporting pungently the truth as he sees it. salute his record as an expellee. I am the sort of person to whom things happen, if they IlbaPPen at all, the wrong way round. Not only have I never een expelled from anywhere, but the only time I got into the sort of fix which has been endemic in Mr. Delmer's career 1,,he whole crux of the trouble was that the local authorities, '''ough insistent that I had no right to be in their territory, vel'e equally clear that they had no power to send me out of I implored them, again and again, to expel me; they said "'at it was quite impossible. To make matters (as I see it) worse, this happened, not in some terror-ridden State behind the Curtain, but in a tropical holiday resort belonging to the united States of America.
The islands of St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix, together \vIth their satellite cays, cover an area of about 150 square they were bought by America from Denmark in 1917 °,r $25,000,000, and are known as the Virgin Islands of the ,.united States. (The rest of the Virgin Islands—including Dead Chest, which is uninhabited—belong to us, or rather '0the Queen.) This curious archipelago is a sort of halfway il,calse between the Greater and the Lesser Antilles, and when, 4,°ont eight years ago, I landed on the airfield at St. Thomas, Was on the last stage of a journey through the latter islands. Somewhere along my complicated route I had missed a connection, so I knew, or thought I knew, that I could spend NY twenty-four hours in the American Virgin Islands before tealching the next plane for Puerto Rico, whence I was booked 0 fly to the Dutch island of Curacao. For various reasons it esisential for me to reach Curacao on the appointed date. Charlotte Amalie, the capital of St. Thomas, looked an ittlyiting place as we circled over it, a brightly painted little r()svn clambering up the steep slopes of a scrub-covered ridge. tom the crest of which the ruins of Black beard's Castle sur- veyed the busy harbour. Blackbeard's Castle is alleged, on ,lender evidence, to have been the lair of the pirate Teach. looked forward to an instructive day in this rather bogus ' Place, which can be roughly described by saying that it is to the Caribbean what Broadway is to the Cotswolds. The day was certainly instructive, but Vsaw very little of charlotte Amalie. Two negro officials at the airport detected ri I• aw in my American transit-visa and I was driven (on the r,, le't of the road : a local deviation from the American way of liF -.e) to the headquarters of the Immigration and Naturalisa- tion Service. These were housed in a dreary office and presided over by a sad, conscientious white man called Mr. Beers.
Mr. Beers examined my passport and said in a shocked way that I had no business to be on United States territory. I pointed out that my visa had been issued by the American Embassy in London, had been accepted as valid by the immigration authorities in New York, and had been vetted by an American airline before they issued me with a ticket to St. Thomas. Mr. Beers was unimpressed. The visa was out of order and gave me no right to be there.
I said, Never mind; I was booked out on the plane next day, so he would soon be rid of me.
Mr. Beers sorrowfully shook his head. Two wrongs, he pointed out, do not make a right. Since I had no authority to come, I had no authority to go. I should have to stay on St. Thomas until the whole matter had been cleared up with Washington. He reached for the telephone and made the first of many unavailing attempts to ring up the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Philadelphia.
All day long, humbly and deferentially, I wrestled with Mr. Beers's unreceptive mind; never has a journalist striven harder to get himself expelled from anywhere. Though I watched him as a mouse watches a cat, I never divined what processes in that great slow brain finally decided him to seek a compromise; but at last he found a formula which gave me a temporary reprieve. He fished out the US Department of Justice's Form I-259, headed Notice to Deliver, Detain or Board or Retnove Aliens, and said that he would `parole me in transit.'
In fact the effect of this manceuvre was only to pass the buck, for the next stage of my journey would place me once more at the mercy of American officialdom in Puerto Rico; but he gave me a long and quite sympathetic letter to his opposite number there. This described my status as 'being on shore leave under detention, if there is such a thing' and added, rather decently, `the traveller is not too much at fault and I do not believe he is the kind of traveller that it was intended to follow the general procedure on.'
Overjoyed, I skipped out into the tourist-infested street, found an ex-Marine pilot with a single-engined amphibian and spent an hour or two flying over the strange congeries of islands which Columbus in 1493 named the Eleven Thousand Virgins. There were a lot of pelicans on Dead Man's Chest, and at a beach on , one of the American islets we landed. tethered the aircraft to a palm-tree, and had a swim.
But next day, at the San Juan airport, I was filled with misgivings.
Twenty minutes later I was in an imposing office in the heart of San Juan, a populous but unendearing city. There was a sort of counter with a grille on it, like a bank, and on the far side of this a posse of lynx-eyed men, wearing uniform and what looked like sheriffs' badges, were scrutinising my passport. Like Mr. Beers, they seemed puzzled and put out. If only (I thought), if only they will expel me. . . .
Finally one of them came over and slapped my passport down on the counter. 'There's nothing wrong with your visa, sir,' he said. 'It's all in order. Can't think what they were playing at in St. Thomas.'
Did I demand a written apology? Did I threaten to expose in a series of trenchant articles the high-handed incompetence of the American authorities in the Caribbean?
I did not. 'Oh, thank you so much,' I said. 'I'm sorry to have been such a nuisance.' And I snatched up my passport
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