It’s awful when a child goes to live thousands of miles away.
But that was 30 years ago now, when my first-born, Emily Wilson, went to Yale to do a PhD.
It never crossed my mind, at the time, that she was leaving England for ever, and the slow dawning of realisation remains a gnawing, everlasting ache.
For more than two decades, she has been a professor in Philadelphia (UPenn – Ezra Pound’s alma mater) and I visit her and the children as often as I can.
That cheesy song is true – Every time I say goodbye, I die a little'. Or, probably, in her case, since she teaches Ancient Greek, that should read ' die a Liddell' – after Liddell and Scott.
The surprise, over the last years, is the discovery that, when I head off home, I start missing the great Republic in itself.
The Yanks still drive in miles, not kilometres. The trucks still resemble my old Dinky lorries. The trolley buses in Philadelphia clank towards us from the 1920s, bells ringing. The churches are old-fashioned and Prayer Booky – and the Episcopal Church in particular has delivered some wonderful broadsides against the President.
The ruder we Londoners seem to become towards one another, the more I value the conventions of American politesse. I find myself, without affectation, calling strangers ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’.
When Emily first went to Philadelphia, I imagined it would be only a few years before she moved to somewhere ‘more interesting’. I have now come to love that city almost as much as I love London.
West Philly is a Betjemanic paradise of late-Victorian and Edwardian villas, each different from its neighbour, with its porch and balconies. Cardinals chirrup; chipmunks, raccoons, even deer frolic in the garden.
This gentle quartier (of, yes, clearly, a desperately poor city where many are less fortunate) has many of the shabby charms of North Oxford when Emily was growing up – an Oxford now wrecked by incoming Londoners who have inflated the house prices.
I regard her house as a sort of shrine – it was here that she sat for ten years translating Homer, in a version that is now universally regarded as the best thing since Keats looked into Chapman. (I know I am biased.)
This part of Philadelphia is much nicer than most comparable areas of London, and the houses are about a third of the price.
After a week or so in Philly, I went to New York. I hadn’t been for years and I’ve now reached the stage of life when I ask myself, ‘Will I ever do this again?’
The club where I stayed was in every possible way nicer than any club in London. It has olde-type architecture and 'service', while unobtrusively embracing the changes in modern life that are for the better.
I understand those who inveigh against ‘woke’, but is it not just a word for justifiable changed attitudes?
America led the way when it came to the civil-rights movement and the recognition of the equality of the races.
The Yanks had further to travel than the British – they had enslaved a large part of their population. So of course they felt more strongly than we did about the need to set matters right.
When I went into dinner in the Diogenes Club back in London the other day – yes, of course it was beautiful, as always – there were the same old codgers (I one of them) and a multitude of slightly troubling young, pretending to be codgers. But, in the club in New York, there were amusing young African American women dining in the company not only of their partners but of their extremely expensively coiffured dogs. The charming person waiting on me, Maxine, was trans.
Who can doubt that Old Europe would have been reluctant to change had it not been for America, which led the way in the women’s movement, gay rights and so many areas of cultural and artistic change? What was revolutionary in Greenwich Village in 1970 is now normal all over the world.
We are passing through a truly weird period in American history, but the efforts of the MAGA movement to put the clock back will fail – just as in Britain, the Dad’s Army Farage version of Trumpery will fail.
The simple truth is that women are equal to men and it doesn’t matter tuppence whether you are gay or straight or trans. All races and religions are equal under God. Weirdly, Europe had to learn these simple and obvious truths from the USA.
These are bigger things – because they affect actual, lived lives; bigger than Trump. He will go. These freedoms will grow, expand and teach the world.
They are the direct and ineluctable consequence of what we celebrate on 4th July – the decision by a group of extraordinarily intelligent lawyers to draft a constitution free from the constraints of throne and altar; based on the values of the enlightenment. The Georgian part of Philly, where they drafted that great document, survives unbombed, beautiful and ‘undeveloped’.
As always, I flew home with a tearful heart, reciting from Auden’s quatrain: ‘God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.’
