The Birth and the Bomb

It was not only at Berkeley that work on the atom bomb was going ahead. There were other sites in the United States all of them referred to by code letters. There were ``X'', ``Y'' and ``Zee'', and their locations were never to be mentioned. I had overheard hints and indirect remarks, but Oscar was always careful not to tell me anything I didn't need to know.

I was aware that there was one such establishment at Oakridge in the South. It was known as the ``dog-patch'' by those whose misfortune it was to work in that unattractive place; but so scared was I lest I should inadvertently let slip some indiscreet remark that it was many years before I dared even mention the State of Tennessee by name. There was also that main stage on whose boards the well-chronicled dramas were to be acted out, the core and birthplace of this weapon of destruction. It was somewhere in New Mexico and I had a hunch that it was the place called ``Y''. It was from there that fragments of startling news about developments occasionally filtered through to us. I didn't hear the real name of Los Alamos until much later. In the meantime a group of European scientists, who had gathered in the Canadian city of Montreal, were reaching a decision to build a nuclear reactor in the virgin forests of Northern Ontario, near to a village called Chalk River. It was there that they were going to use that rare and expensive substance known as ``heavy water''. Those two notable professors, Kowarski and von Halban, whom I was to get to know later on, had helped themselves to a bottleful - the entire European supply! - and had escaped from the Nazis, saving their precious booty as well as their own skins.

This and other startling revelations were shrouded in the close covers of security as far as people like myself were concerned. All I knew was that Professor E O Lawrence had invented and built the cyclotron, the first one ever. From a window of the house, I could see the round white building that contained it, standing on its own, high in the hills above Berkeley. The cyclotron had recently been converted in such a way as to extract from natural uranium metal the substance known as ``235'', which was to be used in the manufacture of a bomb. Today, there are so many buildings on that hill that it looks like a rock covered with barnacles.

It seemed strange that anything so mortally dangerous could be going on in this peaceful university town. Right from the beginning I knew that I was going to enjoy living there. It was clean and fresh, and the air smelled summery. I was to find that the difference between the seasons was not great: extremes of heat and cold were almost unknown. The sun shone frequently, and when it rained there was a brief but hearty downpour that left the earth moist, sweet and rich. The local people jokingly referred to the wet season as the time for ``liquid sunshine'', and they warned me about the famous San Francisco FOG. (``Smog'' had not yet been invented.) I would have called it mist, or, at worst, low-lying cloud. It was gentle and clean like the wispiest cotton wool, and seemed to bring the ocean inland to wash the buildings and cool the streets. Compared with the industrial ``peasoupers'' I had grown up with, where you couldn't see your outstretched hand, and got covered with sticky black filth, this was nothing to get excited about. Fog indeed!

The houses in our immediate vicinity were mostly of clapboard, painted white and surrounded by well kept gardens. When I wrote to my parents telling them that I was living in a wooden house, I received back an anxious letter instructing me to make sure that I was adequately protected against fire. There were very few fences or hedges marking the borders between properties as there would have been in England. In the hilly parts of Berkeley east of the campus, the roads curled round the houses, which were dotted about on green lawns like Mah Jong pieces on a bridge table. I could walk to my neighbours without circumnavigating an enclosure, opening a gate or even stepping out onto the street. It seemed as if house-owners knew how far their land extended and didn't see any reason to fence themselves in. How refreshing it seemed after all the petty squabbles about overhanging branches and falling leaves that kept raging across garden walls in suburban England! Here there was usually nothing between your lawn and the sidewalk, which could be separated from the street by another strip of grass. It seemed that Californians were not really concerned with their privacy. I felt quite disdainful when I thought of the almost paranoid way the British were obsessed with it. An Englishman's home is his castle! The iron gates, brick walls, and dense privet hedges that dwarfed me as a child, had meant that one didn't speak to the neighbours unless introduced to them by something other than mere proximity. Here the atmosphere seemed friendly and relaxed. Passers-by said ``Hello'' or ``Hi'', and expected you to respond.

The focal point of Berkeley was, of course, the picturesque Campus, spread like a green carpet at the foot of the hills. It was a joy to push the buggy on the quiet roads, stop and sit on the springy grass under tall trees I couldn't yet identify, and admire the flower beds and the exquisitely trimmed shrubs. They reminded me of the pictures on an oriental screen we had at home. This was hardly surprising as all the good gardeners in that part of the world were of Japanese origin. For the time being they had been rounded up and re-domiciled further inland. For their own protection? Another type of internment? But horticulture flourished nonetheless, and I was to learn a lot, particularly about the vegetation I extracted from Peter's clenched fists when I interrupted his play by picking him up off the ground. There were lawns made of dichondra, a clover-like plant that held the moisture and didn't need much cutting; and there was Korean grass, so fine that it resembled green spun sugar.

How entrancingly pretty it all seemed, and it made me FEEL pretty too: as if I wanted to dress to fit in with my environment. I happily wore a flower in my hair as was the fashion of the day. I wonder, was this prophetic? More than twenty years later ``flower-power'' was the philosophy that swept over that part of the world, together with marijuana, ``love-ins'' and ``gay liberation''. At this time, no matter what the state of the world and the atomic experiments taking place so close-by, the Campus seemed quiet, serene and uncomplicated. Girl students, with shiny clean hair, wore pastel-coloured sweaters and ``bobby-sox''. They met their ``dates'' over ice-cream sodas in nearby drug-stores. Young men in T-shirts and jeans hurried through their studies while waiting for the Draft Board to send them off to fight.

All around the campus were tree-lined avenues, dappled by the sun shining through leaves and branches. These were roads of handsome Victorian houses, some built of rich brown cedar shingles. They were graced with elegant porches where one could spend a pleasant summer evening sitting on gently swinging hammock-seats and, in the way I have just described, being relaxed about greeting anyone who happened to walk past. Some of the houses were divided into apartments, some were occupied by older members of the University, and some were fraternity or sorority houses. Unlike our home in the hills, they were very near the main streets where the big stores and offices were to be found, the car-parks and the buses.

The centre of the town had a horizontal look to it. Unlike the pillars that shot up into the sky on the other side of the Bay, Berkeley had but one tall building then, and that was a mere six floors high. It protruded, in contrast to the surrounding buildings, and seemed out of place. Even the department stores seldom consisted of more than two stories, and the sky-line was not yet scribbled over by television antennae. A long road called University Avenue, stretching from the Campus in a straight line right down to the smelly factories on the Eastern Bay Shore, bisected the town. As you walked along it, you could observe the downward slope of the SOCIAL gradient. The streets set at right angles were all straight, and the houses became smaller and closer together. Even so, they were mostly neatly kept and their windows clean and curtained. Families would put a star in the window for every son serving in the war; if a star were gold it meant he would never come back.

I was to be sadly disappointed when I set out to find the beach. I never imagined for one moment that a town situated on the edge of such a big bay could be without one. In San Francisco there was a wide stretch of golden sand with the usual amusement arcades doing their best to ruin the Pacific coastline. Otherwise, it was necessary to go a little further afield, or eastward into the hills behind our house, where in the woody Tilden Park there was a lake called Anza, ideal for swimming and family outings. I started enjoying fantasies of Red Indians among the trees, waiting to descend upon the Paleface, and scalp him as he enjoyed washing in the cool water. Some unkind philistine felt obliged to tell me that it was an artificial lake, specially constructed to enhance the picnic area. I was overcome by San Francisco. That fantastic city, so rich in variety and dramatic history, so beautifully situated on the southern promontory of the Golden Gate, was so near at hand. I think that those of us who were posted to Berkeley were the most fortunate among the exodus of British scientists to the United States because of the proximity of San Francisco. Apart from its glorious position it had so much to offer in the way of concerts, theatres and galleries, not to mention a wide choice of shops. There was mouth-watering food such as succulent shellfish at Fisherman's Wharf, and delicacies from the Pacific Islands and beyond. There was the thrill of riding on cable cars. I still recall the sensation of stepping out on to the street and feeling the vibration of their mechanism under my feet. Many are the cars that have honked at me in later years as I tried to recapture something of that tingling in my toes.

The extensive and varied Golden Gate Park was, and still is, one of the finest in America. There was the Fleishacker Zoo, and a swimming pool a quarter of a mile long, where even on the most crowded public holiday it was possible to dive and plunge without colliding with another body. Now, sadly, that pool no longer exists; but the delicately pruned, miniature trees, the manicured lawns and curious bridges of the Japanese Garden are still there, and happily it has resumed its name. In those days of strife it had been referred to merely as the ``Oriental Garden''. Just occasionally, in the hills overlooking the ocean, there were small groups of quaint, old-fashioned houses, garnished with carved fretwork: survivors of the dreadful earthquake and fire that had devastated parts of the city in 1906.

I had my very first whiff of the Far East in Chinatown. There were new impressions on every inch of those steep and busy streets. The red and gold architectural decoration, the dragons and pagodas, and the appetising spicy smells drifting out from the thousands of little restaurants, are now commonplace all over the world, varying only in their degree of authenticity and sophistication. But apart from Hong Kong it was then the largest Chinese settlement outside mainland China. The musty little shops were crammed with delicate examples of arts and crafts, and I still have a few small treasures dating from pre-revolutionary days. We often went there to eat, but once I was taken to a mysterious basement. This, it was explained to me, was not for tourists and visitors. It was where the local population gathered for special occasions, to celebrate at round tables in partitioned booths; the waiters hardly spoke English. The food was so delicately flavoured and subtle that I can almost taste it now. But when, a few weeks later, I tried to rediscover the place it seemed to have vanished. I often wondered whether it was forced to close its doors; or did its patrons, despite the Chinese talent for making a profit, want to preserve it for themselves, uninvaded by hungry pink-faced westerners? Since that time I have eaten all manner of Chinese dinners from Peking to Putney, but not one of them has ever quite reproduced the ecstasy of that early gastronomic initiation.

San Francisco as it was then is as fresh in my memory as my first visit to New York. I have been there a few times since, but however far I travel there is still magic in those images of bygone days too numerous to describe: the view from Knob Hill, the yachts by Marine Parade, the cool, fungus-scented shade of Muir Woods, Seal Rock near the beach, with its slippery inhabitants, and the little row of brightly-lit bars and nightclubs romantically called ``The Barbary Coast'' - all that remained of that infamous haunt of pirates and seafaring desperadoes.

Even the journey from Berkeley and back was exciting, far more so then than it is now with the Bay Area Rapid Transport train moving silently UNDER the water. If you couldn't drive there you could take a ride on the ``Key System'', an electric train that rattled over the lower level of the Bay Bridge. (Cars took the highway on the upper level.) The view of the islands around the Bay was beautiful. So, often, as I travelled across it, gazing out over the water and the horizon of the Pacific Ocean, it struck me that the Golden Gate deserved its name. The setting sun suffused both land and water in the sort of light you don't expect this side of the Celestial City. I thanked the gods who brought me there for not leaving me in England to sit in an air-raid shelter and grope my way around the blackout.

We were further blessed with lush, fertile countryside all around us, even if on the way there we had to travel past the soulless, new concrete blocks, built for housing dockworkers in the busy Kaiser Shipyards. Should we feel the need for a drier climate, it was only a matter of a few miles to the east, behind the hills, in the San Joachim Valley, where the so-called ``fog'' never penetrated. The choice of beaches, parks and picnic spots was infinite. The work may have been hard at the ``Radiation Labs'', as the Berkeley laboratories were called, but recreation was as varied as it was abundant.

At the start, my problems were mainly those of isolation, and - despite the friendly greetings - a little loneliness. I had one kind neighbour, but she had grown-up children and spent her days working at an office she called ``the outfit''. (More vocabulary to learn: I thought it meant something you wore!) The comfortable house put at our disposal was up a very steep hill, and having got Peter and the buggy down into town it was no mean effort, young and healthy though I was, to push it back. There was no such thing as a local store in this superior residential neighbourhood, and we had no car. One day I tried to reach a supermarket via an elegant road called Marin Avenue. It had a gradient of one in five, and I had a spine-chilling scare when the buggy wrested itself from my grasp and, but for a misalignment of its wheels, would have hurtled Peter to a disastrous fate. He still obstinately refused to walk. He sat placidly on his bottom, or crawled when he wanted to grab something not within his reach. The tram-car stop was only ten minutes walk from the house, but it was something of an ordeal to lift a weighty child, fold the buggy and clamber aboard, while the driver muttered impatiently under his breath.

Occasionally, the wives of senior members of the British team sought me out, and there was occasionally a welcome offer of a bit of baby-minding; but much as I hated being tied I didn't like to impose on people who, as often as not, lived some distance away. Our undoubted doyenne was Mrs Massey. Her husband had enjoyed a prominent teaching post for several years, and was later to become Sir Harrie and Quain professor of Physics at University College London. She lived in an important-looking house nearby and made a few suggestions. However, she couldn't drive, didn't care for Berkeley, and was frequently in poor health. Even so, she was greatly concerned about the younger wives, and particularly about me, for I was the only one at the time to have such a small child. Professor Oliphant's wife had not joined him in Berkeley.

It was not merely the need to gather provender for my household that worried me; I had an unquenchable thirst for sight-seeing that was going to suffer if I didn't find a solution pretty quickly. There is an Irish proverb which says: ``Providence looks after fools.'' It certainly took good care of me the day I answered an advertisement in the Berkeley Gazette. ``Children minded in your home,'' I read, ``50 cents an hour plus car-fare,'' followed by a telephone number. I rang up and immediately engaged the advertiser to care for Peter two afternoons a week without as much as asking for a reference, let alone ascertaining that she was not a child molester or a homicidal maniac. She turned out to be a lovely, white-haired lady in her mid-sixties, who had been forced reluctantly to give up her job at the nearby Shipyards for health reasons. As she was loath to be too dependent upon the daughter and son-in-law with whom she lived, she applied herself to odd jobs such as baby-sitting to earn what she called her ``pin money''. Thanks to that rash telephone call I not only had the freedom to go out on my own but had the horizons of my knowledge broadened to a remarkable degree.

Edith and her family turned out to be the kindest friends imaginable. Apart from the invaluable baby-sitting, they also adopted me and taught me a great deal. I had never seen my mother cook a meal because, like so many middle-class British families, we employed a maid to take care of our kitchen. Youngsters invading it and messing up the stove were not appreciated! Since having my own home I had enjoyed making gastronomic experiments, but naturally I had been endlessly frustrated by the limitations imposed by our grubby, dog-eared ration-books. Four ounces of margarine and sugar, plus one of butter each week for every person, was hardly conducive to the creation of gourmet dishes and I could not claim to be an experienced cook. Once in the house of these warm-hearted people I learnt to prepare fried chicken, cole slaw, lemon meringue pie and many other tasty dishes that were new to me. The culinary chasm between Britain and America was wide in those days, and for the first time I was shown how to combine all manner of flavours: pineapple with ham, maple syrup with waffles and bacon, and a delightful, snowy-white substance called ``cottage cheese'', served in a salad with fat juicy peaches. They introduced me to avocado pears, sweet potatoes, corn cobs, and an endless selection of Californian produce. They told me how Luther Burbank had, in this area, developed the nectarine by crossing a peach with a plum. Whenever possible they took me with them to see something of interest, and not only the obvious and the well-known.

When Edith and her family first invited us for dinner at their house, they unwittingly gave me an astounding lesson in American social studies and class structure. Edith's son-in-law was a quiet, well-dressed man of German origin. He had a fine collection of Mozart recordings, of which he played one or two while we were drinking coffee in their tastefully furnished living-room. He was obviously knowledgeable about the great orchestras of the world, and we enjoyed discussing music during that first evening of our acquaintance. The next time we met he was returning from his work at the Shipyards where, in my innocence, I imagined him holding an administrative position. I hope my astonishment didn't show on my face when I beheld his dirty overalls and heavy boots. In fact, he was a riveter. In all my life I had never before come across a WORKMAN who enjoyed music other than popular songs and hymns.

By now I was really able to make the most of living in this warm and pleasant land. I knew Peter to be safe with Edith. He had by this time decided to take a few steps, but the absence of a garden fence presented a new problem, that of straying into the street. He had to be watched every minute, but she had patience and she loved him. Moreover, she often arrived with some little gift in her bag: a jar of pickled peaches or home-baked cookies, and twice she made delightful little suits for my fast-growing son out of material her daughter had left over. It struck me as dreadful that I should be put in a position where I had to PAY someone such as the mother-figure she had become. We arrived at a happy solution. Silver dollars were still in circulation then, and she told me many stories about their history and design. As a young girl she had been employed ``teaching school'', as she put it, and was clever at making such things seem interesting. Thereafter I always contrived to have her money ready in this currency, so that she could examine the date and tell me even more about this facet of America's story.

Gradually the British team was enlarged by more scientists being recruited and despatched to Berkeley. Most of them brought their families. Dr Edward Alibone, an engineer from Metropolitan Vickers near Manchester, turned up with his wife, Dorrie, and two young daughters. Glad as I was to be away from that part of the world, it was quite a comfortable feeling to talk to people from so near home. They also were adventurous, intrepid sight-seers, and delighted to find themselves transported to California. Two women travelled in a fairly advanced state of pregnancy. One, now Lady Curran, was wife of the late Sir Samuel, later Principal of Strathclyde University. I'm not sure whether the authorities knew or not, but it was a courageous journey to make, particularly when one didn't know for certain where or when it was going to end.

Many of us would meet for Sunday lunch at a small restaurant near the Campus called the Black Sheep. It was not spectacular, even when compared with other university commissaries, and it was ``dry'' because U.S. law insisted that no liquor could be sold within a mile's radius of any university. As in so many places of its kind high chairs were supplied for infants, and Peter was soon enjoying it too. He had a plump face which the sun had tanned to the colour of a ripe apricot, brilliant blue eyes and an outgoing disposition. He was soon to become something of a ``side-show'' at these gatherings. We thought the food excellent and very unusual, particularly as everything was served at once on platters with several sub-divisions. Greatly to their own amusement, the Alibone children once assumed that the small serving of jam was INTENDED to be eaten with the fish, as the bread-roll had been forgotten. With true pioneering spirit - for this was the land of the unexpected and the unusual - they spread it on the surface of their fried sole and ate it with relish.

It was at the Black Sheep that I was to meet a few of the better- known figures in the ``atomic business''. There was Frank Oppenheimer (brother of Robert), Bernard Peters and David Bohm, all of whom were later to come under suspicion of being involved with communism or ``un-American'' activities under the needlessly cruel witch-hunt instigated by Senator Joe McCarthy during the 1950's. They were also, incidentally, all Jewish.

Outstanding among this restaurant's patrons was Herbert Skinner, who had helped Professor Oliphant show us around that first day, and who was later to play a big part in starting up the British Atomic Energy project in England. He was often there with his family. His wife, Erna, a plump, dark-eyed raconteuse on the brink of middle-age, would regale us with her hilarious tales of everyday incidents, which she could turn into pantomimes with her descriptive powers and her unrivalled talent for self-mockery. How could I know how many experiences we were later to share? I was beside her when she died, suddenly and dramatically, from a heart-attack in my London house about thirty years later. It is easy to imagine the detail with which, had she been able, she would have described and embellished that event. Shakespeare might well have written for her the words: ``Nothing in this life became (her) like the leaving of it''.

Professor Massey urged caution in making friends with local people because of the difficulty in explaining our presence in such numbers. I fear I couldn't obey his instructions implicitly. Keeping secrets was one thing - I could do that - but asking me not to make friends was like asking me not to breathe, particularly when the owners of our hill-top house wanted it back and we went to live in a much more sociable neighbourhood.

After a short search we found a small bungalow, a third of a ``triplex'' of three houses with adjoining walls. About a mile from the Campus, and two blocks from University Avenue, it was in a part of town that was considered to be ``just the right side of the tracks''. That meant the cheapest part west of the centre of town, where white people with regular employment could live respectably. In this case, the ``tracks'' were none other than those of the Santa Fe Railroad, beyond which lay the ghetto home of Mexicans, blacks and ``poor whites'. The Chinese kept to their own areas, and didn't care for that part of town where Berkeley became noisy and dusty and showed the scruffy, scarred side of its otherwise attractive face.

Nevertheless our new neighbours were well away from it. Most of them were making good money; their houses, though small, lacked nothing, and their cars were luxurious. They were, for want of a better word, ``working class''. Here we had no problem explaining our reason for being in California. The local people would swallow any sort of ``cock and bull'' story about exchange university appointments. It would never occur to most of them that during a war that sort of thing would be out of the question. Few of them had received any sort of higher education.

The house was a match-box consisting of two rooms plus kitchen and bathroom. It stood on a corner, and the wooden walls were painted pale pink. There was some creeper growing round the front door and a minute strip of grass separated it from the sidewalk and another from the street. The low windows of the other outside wall, at a right-angle, looked straight out on to the side road and afforded a first-rate view of the contents of people's shopping bags. The remaining walls were paper-thin partitions. Here we had few of the luxuries provided in our previous abode, but there were a number of integral features that I have spent a lot of energy trying to get copied in my subsequent homes. A hinged ironing-board that lets down from a wall cupboard is something few seem to think of even today, and curved linoleum where the bathroom and kitchen walls meet the floor saves a lot of effort when chasing dust. We bought a load of furniture from a junk shop. Instead of a gleaming refrigerator we had a zinc-lined cupboard called an ``ice-box''. There was a top compartment that could accommodate a one hundred pound block of ice, delivered twice a week by the driver of a well-insulated truck. It kept the food reasonably cool, but there was always the hazard that the trough underneath, into which the melted ice dripped, would overflow if not emptied daily. Many a lapse of memory necessitated a long mopping-up operation.

What I really revelled in was that this dolls-house was on the level with a supermarket at the end of the road; now there were no more steep slopes to be manoeuvred. There was an unlimited supply of friendly neighbours, with small children who didn't just say ``hi'' but invited you to ``come right in and visit''. Public transport was practically on the doorstep, and on the days when Edith came I could see friends, shop, or even get to San Francisco and back if I didn't delay. There were movies and lunch counters, and even ``take-away'' Chinese food was available within ``spitting distance''.

I became addicted to listening to ``soap-operas'' on the radio while doing the housework, and was intrigued by the ``commercials'' for products and local services. One day I heard a studio photographer offering a free sitting for a child whose parent could identify a tune he was about to play on a record. As soon as it was recognized the listeners were to dial a certain number and the first one to guess correctly would win. I recognized ``Daddy'' at the first note, but the great problem was that my phone was yet to be installed. I shot into a neighbour's house and breathlessly asked to borrow hers. Naturally, I wasn't in time to win the free sitting, but I became firm friends with the couple and their son.

Fred and Winnie had a used car business, and we were soon the proud possessors of a 1936 Plymouth at a bargain price. It was a great hearse of a vehicle, flanked with running boards and space inside for two chairs and a table, assuming you had a mind to take them around with you. Wonder of wonders, there was a radio on the dashboard. Although gasoline was rationed we never really went short. You got a basic "A" card for a modicum of running around, a "B" card if you lived more than two miles from work, and a "C" if you had to travel ten or more miles for essential reasons each day. Fred had a "D" card, which virtually meant unlimited gas as he was in the motor trade. With their help and guidance we explored all the lovely places around us. We went up and down the coast from the Napa Valley, where the now famous vineyards were just beginning to establish themselves, down to the Monterey Peninsula where we sat on the silvery sand one day in November after celebrating Thanksgiving with a turkey dinner cooked by Fred's mother. We scaled Big Sur when the Pacific Ocean was not living up to its name and great waves were breaking over the rocks. In San Jose we tasted the natural spring waters, salty and sulphurous, from fountains in the park. In these and other places, such as Santa Cruz, Los Gatos and Palo Alto we enjoyed the bright sunshine and the shade that was provided by redwood trees and those sweet-smelling eucalyptuses. I though California was the loveliest place I had ever seen.

In spite of the joy of my surroundings, I ran into my first piece of marital trouble. Oscar had a fondness for a way of life that I found difficult to share. He was an enthusiastic ``naturist'', or nudist. He had told me of this, but of course in the prevailing conditions at home there had never been an occasion for me to try it out. I thought it funny and laughed, hardly taking it seriously. Once in California, he lost no time in finding a club and centre for this cult. Often at weekends we would set out for a fruit ranch in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, where there were sports facilities and simple accommodation. Everyone was expected to go about naked at all times, even at meals. I loved the ranch but found I didn't care for the people. They all seemed weird and cranky, and I found their bodies distasteful. In this lovely climate, however, it didn't seem to me as ridiculous as it was to become afterwards in the cold, damp weather of England.

Viewed in the light of to-day's topless beaches and bars it all appears rather ordinary, but standards were different in those days, and America adopted a more prudish attitude than did Europe. For example, Oscar took a photograph of me holding Peter, both of us clad in nothing but our evenly tanned skins. When he sent it to be developed and printed, the processors wrote requesting permission to destroy the negative as it was against State law to put obscene matter in the post. Even naked children in full view of the public were considered indecent. Once Peter shed his small swimming trunks while playing in the garden, and I did nothing about it. A neighbour crossed the road and drew my attention to this irregularity.

After a few months the prudishness of land-owners north of the Golden Gate won, and the Sonoma club was closed. Some irate neighbouring farmers contrived to have nudism banned from the county. I was quite relieved. I couldn't overcome MY prudishness, and although I hope I was not as obstructive as those I have just mentioned I found it difficult to shake off my squeamishness and adapt to my husband's persuasion.

However, life at my little home improved daily. Peter was not only walking but tearing around like a tornado. He had plenty of friends, and soon I was playing quite a part in the friendly community of that little street. I spent much of my time on the grass outside, getting to know the neighbours and keeping my eye on Peter who was becoming increasingly interested in scrutinizing passing cars from close quarters. We erected a small enclosure to prevent him straying too far afield, but I soon took it down because he was always welcome in Winnie's back-yard which was less exposed to danger. There was no loneliness now. On the contrary, there was more baby-sitting on a reciprocal basis than even I, with my passion for going out, could cope with. The neighbours were generous and jolly people. They taught me to play poker and pontoon. They enjoyed their Bourbon and their beer. They liked to drink it straight from the bottle when concentrating on a game, and only got out their glasses for special occasions or for ``putting on the dog'' as Winnie called it.

If I give the impression that my new companions were ``slobs'', such as those depicted in a scene from ``A Streetcar named Desire'', I must correct it. I have seldom seen such carefully kept houses and gardens as those next door to me or across the street. Washing machines never ceased to run, everything was polished including the refrigerators, and sprinklers were built into the miniature lawns to keep them green. On the whole, I got along very well with my new friends, even though, unlike Edith's son-in-law, they didn't care about Mozart. They would rather go to bars and night-clubs than come with us to concerts or the theatre. To repay some of their kindness, we once took them to a show at San Francisco's Opera house. The sight of their strained, immobile faces taught us not to repeat the experiment. But then we were from ENGLAND, and as most of them had never met people from so far away before we were finally accepted despite our weird tastes and preferences. We were soon forgiven.

Although enjoying our easy-going comradeship, I have to confess that secretly I found certain things about my neighbours strange to say the least. They were most conservative in their eating habits. A steak was a sine qua non of a really good meal, and canned vegetables were preferred to the freely available fresh variety. Also, it seemed odd that they considered it undignified to mend or repair a garment. If something tore or split it was promptly thrown out and replaced. Patched jeans were considered a disgrace and only seen on the other side of the ``tracks''. Being reasonably competent with my needle I made a few surreptitious forays into their garbage containers when they were out, concealing the washed and restored spoils of these raids at the bottom of my closet to be used later on. Most peculiar of all, they hated crossing the Bay Bridge, and five minutes spent in the city were five minutes too long.

We went out with them at night; we played juke-boxes, we danced, we flirted: and sometimes our behaviour at local parties became more than simply ``wild''. I suffered my first serious hangover. I don't expect we would have remained quite such close friends had not circumstances thrown us together. We came from different worlds, but I was to gain greatly from the warmth and generosity with which I was welcomed into theirs.

During this time the pages of history were not merely being turned, but flicked over as rapidly as an animator's cartoon. I experienced my first American election, and was horrified by the blatantly partisan attitude of the newspapers, particularly that of the Hearst press. As foreigners in a sensitive situation we were most strongly advised to take no part, nor even to express our views. This was frustrating to someone who had spent most of her short life making the maximum use of every available political forum. I had to make do with a large picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt stuck inside the door of a closet. Peter was beginning to talk both sense and nonsense. One day the staunchly Republican Edith heard him chanting ``Doo-ee, Doo-ee'' while jumping up and down on his mattress. It sounded suspiciously as if he were campaigning for the opposing contender for the White House, Senator Thomas Dewey, Governor of New York. ``Keep right on saying it, Son,'' Peter was advised by the delighted lady.

Happily, F.D.R. was returned to power for his historic Fourth Term in November 1944, and the Yalta meeting between the three leaders of the Allied world was able to take place with this great man representing the United States in discussions with Churchill and Stalin. If one looks at the photographs taken at the time it is obvious that Roosevelt was getting frail. The following spring we were stunned and immensely sad when we heard of his sudden death. Normal radio programmes were suspended that day and the late president's favourite tune, ``Give me a home where the buffalo roam,'' was played almost non-stop. I can never hear that song without remembering America subdued and in mourning. The Vice-president, Harry S. Truman, was sworn in. He appeared at first to be a man of small stature, but turned out to be far more effective than anyone had expected. What fun it was much later on, in 1948, to see the press photograph of this game little man from Independence, Missouri, holding up some over-optimistic, pre-printed banner headlines proclaiming Dewey the winner of the election in which he had had just been vanquished!

The war in Europe was gradually coming to an end, and as the Allies liberated town after town the full extent of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis became known. I was pregnant again, and the gruesome films of the concentration camps threw me into a black depression for quite a while. This was aggravated by the death of a child, the two-year-old niece of a neighbour. Jessica Mitford has since exposed the crude commercialism of the ``American Way of Death'', but the money the parents felt obliged to spend on the crib, the clothes and even a doll, for that small wax-like corpse, must surely have exceeded what they spent on their daughter during her brief life. They were not wealthy people. We were cheered up by the Labour landslide of the British elections held shortly after Germany capitulated. My Republican neighbours were shocked when I offered a tray of drinks on the lawn outside my house to celebrate. ``Churchill was your great war-leader,'' they declared in disapproving tones, quite overlooking the efforts they had made a few months previously to unseat their own.

There was still a little time left before I was due to deliver, and we continued to make as many trips as time, work and gas restrictions allowed. Yosemite National Park provided a fantastic week's holiday, with its incredible waterfalls, lakes and mountains. Waking each morning in a log cabin in the shade of giant sequoia trees one wondered if a dull day had dawned, but an upward glance was always rewarded by the sight of a cloudless blue sky, a hot sun and the fresh smell of clear mountain air.

Subsequently we travelled to Los Angeles where the erstwhile agent for my grandfather's textile firm, now in business on his own, put us up in his flat in Beverley Hills and showed us some of the glitter and glamour for which the town and its surrounding suburbs are famous. He and his wife spared no effort. They took us to the Hollywood Bowl, the Farmers' Market, Grumman's Chinese Theatre, and the world-famous Sunset Strip. At the Mocambo night-club we saw Errol Flynn and Tallulah Bankhead in the flesh. He was large, long-haired and, strangely enough, sober. She had a lively, mobile face that bore, despite its gaiety, signs of suffering. We were lucky enough to see a tremendously funny and skilful show at Earl Carrol's famous Variety Theatre, where comedienne Martha Raye had us hysterical with her antics, and two agile fiddlers danced while bowing each others' instruments. We drove past several luxurious homes, owned by movie stars, and shopped on Wilshire Boulevard where the stores were then still separated by open spaces and small parks.

We even had a tour of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studios, and were received in an oak-panelled office by the matriarchal secretary to Louis B. Mayer, a father of the industry. Mrs Ida Koverman, although seated behind a hectare of walnut desk, looked like an Edwardian hostess. She had much experience of dealing with the big and the powerful as she had previously run J. Edgar Hoover's secretariat. She told us many scandalous tales concerning the misdemeanours of the famous, peppering her sentences with the slang considered ``racy'' by her generation. I was particularly pleased with her jokes about that massive figure in the musical world, and master of repartee, Sir Thomas Beecham, from whose sarcastic tongue I had once suffered as a child in Manchester. While we were there, Judy Garland's mother rang up. The call was about some escapade of that tempestuous young star who was just about my own age. I felt very much involved in the world of films by being at the very centre of it for a day!

The tremendous ``sound-stages'', so large that they could contain streets, ships, castles and elegant drawing-rooms, were baffling. They looked convincing enough until the rough wooden backs of the scenery and their crude supports caught one's attention. I tried opening a door in a fine baroque palace. Although it was of gilded marquetry, I nearly fell backwards. It was light as a feather.

My pregnancy was becoming hugely obvious despite my efforts with dramatic hats and flowing garments, but such were the acrobatics of my unborn child that I couldn't help fearing that they would be picked up on the sound-track of the movie we watched in the process of ``shooting''. It was not a major film but I should have been embarrassed should Ava Gardner and Frances Gifford have been forced to ``re-take'' because of some inexplicable thumps. I was allowed to step inside the first dressing-room that Clark Gable ever used on the M G M lot. It was not much smaller than our house. This was indeed a heady sojourn in that El Dorado of dreams, ambitions and make-believe.

One Sunday afternoon, at 4.37 p.m. Pacific time, I gave birth to Peter's younger brother, Michael. I was loath to spend a moment longer in the delivery room than necessary, and I had put off going to the hospital until my contractions were fast and frequent. No sooner was I admitted than the baby was there, yelling lustily.

I noticed the clock above my head as the doctor tied the umbilical cord and pronounced the child perfect. Nothing, at that moment, was further from my thoughts than the time and the date in Japan. It was early morning on the 6th August, 1945. In Hiroshima the ``mushroom cloud'' filled the sky as the first Atomic Bomb was dropped. Twenty thousand lay dead, and countless more suffered unspeakable injuries.

Next day, flowers, gifts and cards were strewn on my bed among the grim headlines in the newspapers. Nagasaki was to suffer a similar fate a few days later. A Venezuelan girl called Mercedes, married to a sailor, shared my room. Her daughter, Maria Teresa, was born a few hours after Michael. Ours was one of the few rooms with the radio on, and doctors and nurses, their masks hanging from their faces, crowded the doorway. Mercedes cried. ``Why did they have to go and drop another?'' she protested through her sobs. ``The first one would have finished the war off. I want my husband home from the Pacific real soon, but it's wicked to kill all those innocent people.''

Those were the days when one lay in bed for several days after childbirth. No climbing off the delivery table then. In the Berkeley General Hospital a five-day stay was all that could be offered as the shipyards had swollen the local population. I was given a special concession - one week - because I had no female relative within reach.

A few days after I brought the baby home I was taking an afternoon nap. Dorrie Alibone had taken Peter to her house to give me the necessary peace and quiet to get the breast-feeding established. As usual I had the radio on but had dozed off. I awoke to hear the commentator's voice, strident and rapid. The factory sirens of the Bay Area shrieked and wailed while the local residents started honking the horns of their cars. ``What's going on?'' I asked out of the window. ``It's all over. They surrendered'', Winnie told me.

I jumped off the bed, threw on my cotton house-coat, and joined the small group of women and children gathered on the front lawn for a celebration. Everyone brought something, a bottle of beer, a few dough-nuts or some special tid-bit from their kitchen. I opened a cherished bottle of California Riesling that had been waiting in the ice-box for the ceremony known as ``wetting the baby's head''.

We laughed and chattered with delight and excitement. Some of the neighbouring children had strewn the sidewalk with toys, and a white-faced lady kicked them viciously as she passed. ``What the hell?'' I started accusingly. ``Take it easy,'' said another neighbour quietly, putting her hand on my shoulder, ``both her sons got killed.''