| Publication Overview 10th July 2006
Cooke's journey into heart of a nation in shock
A small question - unknown to millions of his fans - hung over the glitter-ing broadcasting career of Alistair Cooke, the Letter From America BBC star, who died aged 95 in 2004. Did he go to America and become a US citizen in 1938 to avoid fighting for his country?
Perhaps it was unease about this early part of his life that explains why Cooke chose not to publish this book - subtitled Life On The Home Front In The Second World War - during his lifetime.
If so, that's a pity. The book justifies Cooke's absence from our shores during the war. As he travels from coast to coast, he paints a brilliant portrait of a rather boastful nation brought to its knees after the attack on Pearl Harbour: Cooke writes: "Only a few days earlier, Barbara Hutton, the richest girl in the world, had been leaving for her dream palace in Hawaii, but the island was smoking with Japanese bombs…"
Early on, Cooke makes his status clear. Arguing with Washington officials over restrictions he'd face while travelling in wartime, he is told: "We are instructed that every citizen of a foreign country – including British subjects…"
Cooke suavely replies: "I told him they did right to treat the British that way, and that as an American I'd expect the same trouble in England." The official's face, "opened up like a September oyster".
What a trip he has. Out from Washington he motors, into the Appalachians; down through Kentucky to Georgia and Florida. Then west to California and Oregon. Throughout his trip he keeps an eye on wartime womenfolk. In Louisville, "the streets are rolling with dumpy broad-faced girls, sometimes pretty in a poorly rouged way". Jacksonville, Florida; he says, is known for "two of its most ancient industries: turpentine and prostitution".
Written more than 60 years ago and stuck in a drawer, Cooke's tour is bracingly un-PC; feminists won't care for his take on wartime women hanging around soldiers but his line on "Negros" is contemptuous of white authority.
This journey through a long-gone America also details industry, shipyards, agriculture, landscapes, flowers and grief. He Visits Deming, New Mexico and notes: "There was probably not a town or village in Great Britain that could afford to be superior to it on the count of personal sacrifice. A hundred and fifty men from a population of 2,000 is a crushing sacrifice."
Peter McKay | 
