A sentimental journey

R. G. H. Seitz A BUNDLE FROM BRITAIN by Alistair Horne Macmillan, £17.50, pp. 333 Alistair Home is an accomplished writer accustomed to speeding down the broad boulevards of modern European history. On this occasion, however, the author has veered off the busy highway to meander along a leisurely American lane of youthful reminiscence.

In 1940, before German U-boats made passage treacherous, some 8,000 British children crossed the Atlantic to the safety of American homes and families. Three thousand were evacuated under an official government programme, but the majority went privately and ended up under the wing of distant friends and relatives.

For Home this transatlantic passage marked much more than a transfer from the Old World to the New or from risk to security. America was a discovery and a liberation.

Home left behind a grim English child- hood. His melancholic mother died in an automobile accident. His father was aus- tere and remote, paying regular weekend visits to their fading estate at Ropely to inspect his only child whose world other- wise consisted of nannies and pets. Home was sent off to school at a ridiculously young age (a custom which Americans can never comprehend) where he discovered all the penitential degradation of a 19th- century system which had somehow sur- vived into the mid-20th: foul food, barn- yard sanitation, bullying boys, imperious masters and sexual jeopardy.

With assorted other bundles Home sailed from Liverpool in July. Safely on the other side, he was immediately embraced by a joyous, generous, rambunctious, ram- bling, wide-open, freewheeling American family whose clamour and closeness would normally set English teeth on edge but who for Home made up a brilliant sunburst after the chill winter of his own childhood.

The Breeses and Cutlers were not Mid- dle America; they were old-line East Coast gentry. The boys went to Harvard and the girls went to weddings. There was no self- conscious formality, however, nor sense of social predestination. It was important only to 'enthoose', Home writes, and to take life as it came. This was all fresh air. As his first summer in America came to an end, Alistair — now inevitably 'Ally' — at the respectable age of 14, went off to a small boarding school a few miles north of Poughkeepsie, New York. Again, the con- trast with his English experience could not have been more complete.

Millbrook School was the personal creation of its remarkable headmaster, Edward Pulling, known to everyone except himself as 'The Boss'. Imposing and digni- fied, Pulling was the essence of gentle recti- tude. The school reflected his towering standards of academic achievement and moral perspective, and he and his wife Lucy embodied the heart and soul of the place.

Unique to Millbrook was the community service programme in which every boy was assigned a task that contributed to the operation of the school: dishwasher, banker, postman, waiter (Home's first responsibility was light bulbs), and each autumn the school stopped for a Work Day so that Millbrook could hunker down for the winter. The students also ran the renowned school zoo, an extension of the biology programme.

Home writes of the 'warm, spontaneous, unquestioning friendliness' of Millbrook and the casual openness of his superb teachers. As with his American family, Horne seems at first to flinch before some apprehended blow, only to discover that his welcome at this extraordinary school was genuine.

Over his three years at Millbrook, Home developed an abiding affection for his mas- ters and for the great patriarchal Edward Pulling. So too did Horne build friendships with his American contemporaries, espe- cially his room-mate, the precocious and redoubtable William F. Buckley, who in turn introduced Home to yet another sprawling American family of ten talented, loquacious kids.

Home describes all this in the soft focus of a Merchant-Ivory memory. Could America once have been so innocent and simple? This was, after all, the tail end of the Great Depression. Could New York City really have been so vital and still so safe? Could the days truly have been so halcyon and the scenes so sylvan? The answer is probably yes, at least for some.

Home mentions a 1990 research survey of leading problems in US secondary schools which lists: 'Drug Abuse, Alcohol Abuse, Pregnancy, Suicide, Rape, Robbery and Assault.' The same survey in 1940 revealed the following heinous transgres- sions: 'Talking Out of Turn, Chewing Gum, Making Noise, Running in Halls, Cutting in Line and Littering.' America today is a great and global superpower and a burgeoning if strident democracy, but we have misplaced something along the way. Home rummages around in a dusty attic and rediscovers a bygone charm.

The widening European war and the mounting tensions in the Pacific form the dark horizon of these bright and youthful days. Home the historian describes the deep division in American society between Interventionists and Isolationists whom he interprets as projections of the seminal split in American history between Hamilto- nians and Jeffersonians. In 1940 and 1941 the debate ricocheted around innumerable American dinner tables, with the scion of the Cutler family, Congressman Hamilton Fish, and the spirited young curmudgeon, Bill Buckley, arguing against entanglement in a European war, and the mid-Atlanticist Ed Pulling and the adoptive mother Julia Breese in undisguised sympathy for the proposition that Britain was fighting Amer- ica's war.

In the end, the Japanese unexpectedly resolved the argument at Pearl Harbor. The United States immediately coagulated into a unity of purpose which lasted us pretty much to the end of the Cold War. As we see now in Bosnia, some Americans are again drawing distinctions about the gradations of America's security interests in Europe.

After school, Home returned to Eng- land, joined the wartime Coldstream and even enjoyed an affectionate reunion with his father before the latter died from injuries in a London black-out. He relished his happy, revealing interlude in America and has gone back to his American family and friends many times since. He confesses his book is an unabashed bread-and-butter note. All along Home was gonna take a sentimental journey, and this is what he has done so well.

R.G.H. Seitz is the American Ambassador in London.