No Papers
By D. W. BROGAN QUITE a long time ago, after the First World War, I was a candidate for a fellowship at an Oxford college which shall be nameless ; then it had four undergraduates and now it has none. The candidates assembled and were suddenly confronted with the demand that we should prove out right to be candidates. It was then discovered that none of us had any " papers." There was one exception: a Central European who had a passport, a birth certificate, as well as academic docu- ments of various kinds. I had a passport, but where was it? I had had a birth certificate, but where was that? (I knew from family tradition that I had been registered six weeks after birth, and that, when my father was taxed with breaking the law, he replied that he knew that he was doing so, but he had been busy.) Finally, the college accepted a brief note from w former Fellow whom I shall hide under the name of Kenneth Bell, and that was that. But even between the two wars " papers " were still rare, and the idea that you had to have them would have seemed outrageous. After all, it was not very far from the time when passports were demanded only by such barbarous and backward countries as Imperial Russia and Imperial Turkey. And with what astonishment one read that in Russia not only did foreigners have to have passports, but Russians had to have internal passports (anglice identity caits)! That a day would come when a new John Hampden would win headlines by refusing to show his identity card to the English police -would have seemed, in the innocent pre-1914 world, quite beyond belief. Passports existed, of course, even outside Russia and Turkey. Very important persons had them as a special concession, but they were no more necessary than a Rolls-Royce.
As Moliere says, we have changed all that. No one is short of papers today. I have, for example, my identity card. This is odd, for my talent for losing paperSds notorious in two, possibly in three, continents. I had my firstpassport stolen from me in Milan within a fortnight of its issue. (I have never been really fond of Milan since.) I ant one of the few persons (as I have reported here before) who have twice lost a trans-Atlantic flight ticket. I could go on with stories of things lost by me, but never my identity card. It has never been of any use. I have given it up from time to time to my wife to get a new ration book: But it has never otherwise been asked for. And there it is (TAA. 9092690).
The passport is a very different matter. Like many other people, I rejoice that my first passport was issued in an imperial manner by George Nathaniel, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, K.G., G.C.S.I., &c., &c. Since then I have had Eden, Simon, Halifax, Bevin, but nothing so impressive as Curzon. Like some correspondents of The Times, I think the British passport, in its stiff binding, is too bulky, especially if an earlier issue is bound in with it. But there they are, with the photographs showing the "contagion of the world's slow stan," from the fair and saintly youth to whom my first passport was issued, down to the fugitive from a war-crimes tribunal whose photograph disfigures my present passport. We must assume that passports play a useful role. They are, I amlaid, highly vendible in Par Perpignan, &c. Bur after recent events, it is hard to believe That the mere withdrawal of a passport would hamper a really competent foreign agent. How are they checked ? I am familiar now with the procedure at London Airport, at Northolt, at Southampton. It is de rigueur to open the passport and gaze earnestly at some entry, any entry. Then the passport is handed back. No doubt there are astute agents all over the place, disguised as hostesses and porters, but if there are they are well disguised.
And every time I give up my passport for inspection (which is deplorably often, since I detest travelling), I recall an incident of the last war wheA' has a passenger in an aeroplane- from America. Every passenger was either a British or American official. We all had special passports. Our plane had to be diverted, since its normal port of entry had been bombed. So we landed at a West Country airport, where the intellikence officer was a- parody of a Punch sergeant-major. The really V.I.P. on board was a civil servant of the highest rank and the most formidable character. Did he not wear woollen underwear during the horrors of a Washington summer? The intelligence officer demanded of him: "How do I know that you are Sir X. Y. Z., Assistant-Secretary for Predestination? " " How would you know if I weren't? " Saying which, the V.I.P. snatched up his passport and walked past, all of us following him, to the special train that awaited us: This was war-time, but even in peace-time one wonders. What becomes, for .example, of those medical reports declaring where one has slept for the previous twelve nights? Are they ever checked? Are they ever read? If they are read, would anyone believe the form I handed in a few weeks ago, asserting, truth- fully, that I had passed the previous twelve nights in Cambridge, New York, Corning, yew York, Cambridge, Lausanne, Geneva? Not quite truthfully, for one of those nights had been spent in the air with a landfall in Newfoundland and another with 'a landfall in Ireland.
After recent events it will not, I hope, appear-treasonable to express scepticism of 'the efficiency of most forms of " security." Were it not for the terrors of the Official Secrets Act here and of the McCarran Act in America, I could tell stories of break- downs, in London and Washington, that would amuse the public (possibly not very much). But one incident I do remember, a war-time meeting with all the American apparatus of security, into which there suddenly entered one of the most beautiful women that anyone had ever seen. To borrow a word from my children, she was " smashing." All her papers were in order, but the " high brass " was suspicious. " Who was that young woman who came up and spoke to you? She looks like a spy." " She is. She is one of your spies," which was pretty near the truth. Alas, she retired to matrimony and motherhood before I had a chance to introduce her to my friend, Eric Ambler.
It is easy enough to laugh at this paperasserie as long as all is in order. But if you do travel, sooner. or later you get into infuriating jams that make you realise, with fellow-feeling, how much more terrible is the plight of people who have either no papers or who are really lost if their precious papers are lost. For all the cobwebs of regulations under which we now live are designed for normal situations. And sooner or later you are in an abnormal situation.
For' example, beffSre one of my frequent visits to the United States, I went to get a new visa in London. With the genuine helpfulness that I have found to be a mark of most American officials, I was.told that my existing visa hadn't run out, and was advised to go to Ainerica and renew it there. When I got to America, I learned that you can't get a visa inside the United States. I offered to fly up to Canada to get one there, but was told that an equivalent; a kind of pernzis de se:lour, would be issued. It wasn't. I waited till I became, by the lapse of my visa an illegal resident. All I wanted to do was to get away. .But I couldn't leave without a sailing permit, &c. Time marched on ; Cambridge term got nearer. I could neither stay nor go. Finally; I appealed to a knowledgeable friend, who pulled*the proper wires, that is, put in a 'Phone-call, which "resulted in a telegram permitting me to leave the United States. I left, and, a year later, received a letter in Cambridge (Eng.) saying there was no record of my departure from America. I was in England, and had, in fact, been back to the United States and had left again. But I am sure that there is an unfinished dossier on me debating the point of my departure. It is because of this foolishness, which is not merely American, that I rejoice in the moral victory in the identity-card case. I don't think it matters very much to the citizen that he can, in practice, refuse to show his card, but how good, how very good, for the police that they can't simply demand it! When I was a boy, one of my favourite books was Through Savage Europe, by Harry de Windt. " Savage Europe " was the Balkans, and police nonsense was part of the savagery. How much wider is the area covered by savage Europe today.
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