Out West: Chapter 23

The only memory I had of Rose Agnes Banner, appearancewise, was one lifted from a two and a half inch, square, black and white snapshot she had sent to me during the war, half a century ago.

I believe it was taken when, or soon after, she had graduated. Or perhaps it was a twenty-first birthday, or something. Anyway, in the picture, she was done up to the nines in a smart, two-piece suit, the whole ensemble being topped off by a big, white, Easter bonnet sort of hat that shouted from the rooftops that its wearer was celebrating something.

I don’t think I had looked at that snapshot for maybe thirty or forty years.  I didn’t even know whether I still had it in my possession, back home.

Nevertheless, a clear impression of the photograph must have been retained indelibly in the depths of my subconscious – for the prospect of the imminent meeting with my American cousin had shoved the fifty-year-old image suddenly and almost rudely, to the forefront of my mind.

It was hovering there, bright and clear, as cousin Rose entered the building.

The image of the elegant young girl that had been shimmering in my imagination was, of course, not the one I was now looking at. For this lady – my relative, at long last – was in her late sixties or early seventies. Well, she would have to be wouldn’t she? Rose had already graduated when I was writing to her, and at the time I was just 12 years old.  I was now 64.

Yet, I recognised her immediately…

Like me, Rose was carrying more than half a century of wear and tear, and she appeared to have filled out a little from what I recalled of the photograph.  Nevertheless, the bulky, dark anorak and the warm trousers she was wearing against the cold Laramie breezes outside, easily disguised the portliness that encroaching age had imposed upon her.

All the same, I could see she didn’t know me from Adam…

And I was now agonisingly aware of the presence of the twenty-four-hour growth of grey stubble on the face I was about to present to her.

Yesterday – would you believe it – for the first time since I had started shaving at the age of seventeen, I decided not to. Shaving was a damn nuisance and a chore – as any man will vouchsafe. For me, the daily habit was a spin-off from National Service days with the military, when failure to shave – unless under direct orders not to from the MO – would be enough to put you on a charge for crass slovenliness.  Besides which, there was a certain amount of encouragement from Mark, who had said: ” I don’t know why you bother to shave every day. With your colouring nobody can see it, anyway…”

So, noting that my son hadn’t bothered to shave either, I had stashed away my toiletries. And – I thought – it being extremely unlikely that Rose and I would be bumping in to each other, I had shrugged off any vain ideas about what the general American public were going to think about this pair of unshaven Limeys who had dared to contaminate their pristine environment.

Yet – wasn’t it ever thus? – in spite of the unlikeliness of the event ever happening, nevertheless, it happened. My cousin Rose was, at this very moment, coming towards me.

It was hardly surprising then, at this point, that my twenty-four-hour growth of alfalfa was beginning to feel as though I had sprouted – overnight – the very twin of the goatee that adorns the familiar, patriotic countenance of Uncle Sam himself…

Why is it that things always seem to work out just the opposite to what you expect?

As Rose came nearer she was wearing a slightly quizzical expression. I knew, without any doubt whatsoever, that she was asking herself: “Wonder what dung-heap this couple of bums – who are claiming to be my relatives – crawled out of?”

Well, it must be admitted that our trip wasn’t the usual tourist jaunt. We hadn’t come to the US in order to dress up and take in the Las Vegas bright lights.  Or to parade ourselves along Hollywood Boulevard on the off-chance that some desperate talent scout was sweeping the horizons on the lookout for a couple of Limey prospects for belated stardom…

In fact, except for one or two occasions when we might fancy a posh nosh-up at some salubrious restaurant nearby, we ate either in a simple diner, or in our bedroom at whatever motel we may be currently staying.  Or we’d stop at some breathtaking overlook and eat surrounded by wilderness – like the pioneers we had come here to emulate.

So we weren’t exactly adorned in our Sunday best for what was going to be, obviously, a memorable occasion.

All this, together with the stubble on my face which – thanks to my tortured imagination – had, by now, turned into an Amish beard, began to make me believe that we had, indeed, crawled out of the dung-heap of cousin Rose’s razor-sharp speculations.

I began to wonder whether it might not be a good idea to duck out of sight and leave Kathy Clymer to explain to Rose it had all been one great big case of mistaken identity…

Meanwhile, the doors of the magnificent boardroom, which Kathy had invited us to use for the meeting, had been left wide open, awaiting our cousin’s arrival.

Rose walked through them, into the boardroom, and came to a stop right in front of me. Her eyes, twinkling behind the large, sepia-tinted lenses of her horn-rimmed spectacles, were questioning but friendly. She held out her hand in greeting. “Hello”, she said. “You Jim?”

As I introduced myself and Mark to Rose, Kathy Clymer had been bustling around somewhere in the background, and now she appeared with a tray of coffee and biscuits and laid them on the boardroom table. Then she went out and left the three of us – distant cousins in more ways than one – to get acquainted.

It was all very slow at first, and we talked haltingly and shyly, as strangers talk when they are seeking for something in common on which to hang a decent conversation. But then the ice began to crack, and it wasn’t long before we were firing the names of mutual relations at each other, and laughing and joking as though we had known each other, if not for years, then at least for a couple of months.

Mark, meanwhile, had seated himself – rather politely, I thought – a little to one side, as if giving Rose and I a little elbowroom in our efforts to get acquainted with the idea that we were, in fact, blood relations.

He must have been quite entertained by it all.

Here we were, in his eyes, a couple of old fogies, relatives but strangers, who had never met up in their lives, trying desperately to make up the difference in space and time by throwing family names and experiences at each other for all we were worth. In a matter of minutes, I learned I had relatives in England I never knew existed, and Rose was busy pinning new leaves to whatever branches of the family tree I happened to be acquainted with.

But, quite apart from the obvious novelty of the situation in which I had now found myself, there was something else, for me at least, about meeting up with Rose Banner.

Here – at this very moment, and quite impossibly – had come about the manifestation of a concept, bandied around way back in the Forties, mulled over and played with, and finally, flung aside as being nothing else but an immature daydream. Here – within the luxurious, polished-wood and carpeted surroundings of a Chamber of Commerce situated somewhere within an historically-famed sector of the vast and beautiful American West – a childhood bout of wishful thinking had somehow bounced into reality.

Through the magic of time and circumstance, the descriptive stamps of “impossible”; “immature”; “daydreaming” had been sloughed away from a young boy’s youthful shoulder-shrugging contemplations, and, by way of a sort of “quantum leap”, the youth – now grizzled and in the winter of his existence – had tumbled, startled and incredulous, into the future…

Isn’t it amazing?  After many long years of a humdrum, workaday, oh-so-ordinary-sort-of-non-event existence, “normal” man’s only and established ambition is to have provided adequately for his family, and so he settles into doddering old age, sitting in the pub swapping reminiscences with his peers. Then, suddenly- and quite unexpectedly – something like this sweeps across his entity?

I have to hand it to my son. It was Mark’s generosity that had brought about this belated jump into an American daydream, and the resultant “Hi, there’s” between a couple of relatives whose awareness of each other’s existence had lapsed into indifference many years ago.

Fact is, Rose had not even been on Mark’s itinerary. His original plan was to head south for the warm deserts as soon as we had hit Denver and stocked up with provisions. The loop through the snowy Rockies was an addition at the last moment, at my instigation.

Which is why the meeting with my cousin had to end there, in the boardroom of the Chamber of Commerce in Laramie, Wyoming. It was a shame. But finding Rose was not the main object of our trip to the US…

Mark wanted to show me parts of America he had already seen for himself; parts that he knew I would fall desperately in love with; parts I had carried around in my imagination all my life; the sorts of places I would then carry around in my imagination for the rest of my days…

We must revert to his original plan and head south as soon as possible. Which meant tomorrow…

So we took our pictures, and we said our goodbyes. And we waved when Rose’s car passed us as she drove home.

One thing I knew. It had been a little sad to be saying goodbye so soon after saying hello. But Rose Rasmussen – this being her married name, although she was now a widow – would remain the high point of our visit to America, and would forever be my favourite talking point whenever I met up with other members of the family in the coming years…

Out West: Chapter 22

I glanced over the white-painted brick frontage of Laramie’s Chamber of Commerce and took in the large, shining windows adhering to which were neatly printed legends extolling the fact that this was the best town in the West in which to open up your new business…

The building itself was nothing like the aristocratic edifice back home, which towered proudly over the heart of one of the most salubrious commercial areas of Birmingham.

Nevertheless, boastful banners called out, with some conviction, the fact that if the potential entrepreneur was interested in “Commerce” and/or “Economic Development” then this was the place where, in the first instance, he should present himself.

Well, I was no entrepreneur. But I was, nonetheless, a man with a mission.

I pushed open the door, Mark following closely behind. Mark was letting me take the initiative, for he had never heard of Rose Agnes Banner until he told me he was taking me to America. So it was up to me, on this occasion, to do the talking…

Inside, a light and airy vestibule contained a rack filled with dozens of pamphlets and magazines, all of them advocating most of the activities to which the sightseeing tourist and the wealth-seeking entrepreneur might be attracted.

I gathered together a thick sheaf of whatever was on offer and tucked the bundle under my arm. Then I pushed open another door and we stepped into the carpeted reception area.

“C’n ah hailp yuh, gen’lemen?”

The broad, western drawl floated towards us from a general office to our left, along with the pretty, fair-haired young woman whose stoutish proportions belied her graceful approach.

Kathy Clymer had a nice smile and a pleasant manner. I told her we were British tourists seeking a relative with whom I had had no contact since World War Two. “Her name – then – was Rose Banner”, I told her. ” She lived at 701, South 2nd Street when I was writing to her, but my guess is she moved, probably a long time ago.”

I told Kathy that when Rose graduated she went to work with the County Assessor, but whether she stayed in the job for the rest of her life I had no idea.

“Well”, said Kathy. “Lait’s jus’ see what we c’n do”

She reached up and took one or two books from a shelf above her head. Her fingers started flicking through the pages. Now and then Kathy made pencilled notes on scraps of paper, and then she would pick up the telephone and have short conversations with people who, I gathered, were related to Rose.

Finally – and it could only have been ten minutes or so – Kathy handed me the ‘phone.

“There’s your cousin”, she announced, as though she had done nothing much – all in the day’s work, you know, sort of thing…

I took the ‘phone from Kathy and clamped it to my ear. “Hello”, I ventured, carefully. “Hi, there…” came a response in that casual, distinctive, western drawl.

I was so overcome with the speed and efficiency with which Rose’s whereabouts had been discovered, plus the fact that she was still – amazingly – in Laramie after all these years, that I could think of just one word to say in the circumstances. So I said it…

“Rose?”

A couple of short sentences later Rose said to me: “Stay there. I ’m coming over…”

Out West: Chapter 21

She was small and neat and pretty.

As she came towards us I could see she was wearing some kind of uniform jacket. Snow-white trainers adorned tiny feet that stepped along the broad sidewalk with smart, athletic tread. And she was wearing dark glasses against the blue intensity of a sky made bright by the occasional strong emergence of the sun from behind silver-lined clouds.

Mark spoke to her and she turned down the busy squawking of the radio transmitter fastened to her left shoulder. “Hi, there”, she said, good-naturedly.

As she leaned nearer to catch his words she raised a futile hand to her head in a vain and very feminine attempt to control the generous mane of ash-blonde hair contorting wildly around cheeks turned ruddy by the cold breezes blowing in from the high plains.

“Oh, sure”, she smiled. “Just carry on to the next corner, turn left, and you’ll find the Chamber of Commerce three blocks further along”

Mark thanked the girl. “You’re welcome”, she said as she turned away to take up the stride we had interrupted.

In spite of her obvious femininity I picked up a hint of the macho about that young lady; a quiet strength, reinforced by a touch of authority. I wondered what she did for a living.

“Cop”, said Mark

Had I heard properly?

“She’s a cop”, he repeated.

“What! That little thing?”

“Sure is”, Mark insisted. “And she’s probably a good one, so don’t start anything”

I shook my head in disbelief. Then I realised that I had noticed that even back home in England the police were not only appearing younger, but they also seemed to be getting shorter…

So, what the heck. This was America, and over here they always seem to do things in a bigger way than we do – or, in this particular case, smaller than we do.

We ambled on along a wide and busy road that was bright in the warm, noon sunshine. As we took the route that the glamorous little cop had indicated, I looked around me and realised that my imagination – slow burning as ever – had not kept up with the times.

I had expected a sort of ‘old-fashioned’ set-up; a still prevailing and very obvious frontier atmosphere. I thought I might see a hay wagon or two rumbling by once in a while, with a ranch-hand perched high and mighty, reins dangling easily from work-worn fingers.

I was wrong again.

The Laramie I was looking at was shining and smart and not a bit like Jimmy Stewart’s dusty old cow town languishing in a hot, mid-day sun.

Rangy cowpokes that in earlier times may have adorned raised, wooden boardwalks whilst gazing idly at the noisy, passing scene, were long gone. So, too, were the crinoline-clad ladies teetering prettily, eyes averted, past swivel-hipped gallants raising their Stetsons in polite flirtation.

Here, in fact was a Laramie that was neat, and as modern and as commercialised as Denver – the big city I had left behind only a few hours ago.

I could have been sad, even a little disappointed. But I wasn’t. For this was here, and this was now, and I came to earth just as I heard Mark say: “Here we are…”

Out West: Chapter 20

We were parked in South 2nd Street, directly opposite number 701, the address to where, many years ago, I would send eager letters, all of them painstakingly written in my best, copperplate hand.

The house was small, I think, by American standards, or at least by the American standards I had calculated as a result of Hollywood’s offerings over the many years I had been consuming them. And it was timber built, which was no great surprise, this being the land where hardy pioneers had built their first homes from the soaring pines of the virgin forests and called them – what else? – log cabins.

Featuring a front porch and an upstairs balcony – access to which, I presume, being obtained through a bedroom window, for I saw no door opening onto it – the dwelling was painted in what would have been an attractive maroon colour had it not been done, apparently, a long time ago.

Now, the whole place looked tired and run-down, like an old lady who has devoted her life to the shelter and well-being of her loved ones, but to whom the years have now brought fading looks, and the inevitable and consequent aches and pains of burdensome age.

While I was browsing over Rose’s old home – I knew instinctively that she no longer lived there – I wondered why Americans call their byways and thoroughfares ‘streets.’

Streets! Why, most of the streets I had seen since coming to this country were twice as wide as some of our ‘A’ class roads, and South 2nd Street was one of them…

I’d gained the impression that their streets’ names were always numbers – like 42nd Street, or 5th Avenue. (“I’ll meet you on the corner of 5th and 42nd.” says the hero, maybe, in one of Paramount’s gangster films) – or something like that.

Not once had I come across anything like a ‘road’- Denver Road; Rock Springs Road; Laramie Road – something like our Bristol Road, for instance…

Mark interrupted the undoubtedly crucial import of American and British attitudes towards their somewhat conflicting descriptions of each other’s highways and byways. “What do you think, then?” he said. “Shall we go across and ring the bell?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. It’s been fifty years, and that house looks a bit run down. I doubt that Rose would be living there, now. She probably married and moved away a long time ago. I’d be surprised to find her over there today, and that’s a fact.”

Mark pulled gently at his bottom lip as he mused for a second or two. “She was with the local authority at some time or other, wasn’t she?” he asked. “Why don’t we go along to the local Chamber of Commerce and make a few enquiries? They may have a line on her, especially if she worked for the city.”

“Good idea. Let’s try it.”

Mark gunned Jimmy’s starter and drove us out of South 2nd Street.

And so evaporated some of the aura of the romanticised West which – along with the Laramie address of a distant cousin – had had a special place in the back of my mind for over half a century. For this was reality, and I never saw South 2nd Street again.

Out West: Chapter 19

The map was wrong. Or we’d read it wrong. There was no right turn onto the Lincoln Highway, and thence to our destination.

In fact, Highway 287 took us straight to Laramie, sailing under a flyover that turned out to be Highway 30 – the famous Lincoln Highway – as it soared over Laramie’s outskirts. 

Highway 30 carries on due west until it merges with and becomes Interstate 80.  The photograph shows a monster truck thundering along Interstate 80.

It’s a bit of a shame, really.  The Lincoln Highway, completed in 1923, at once became world famous as being the first road ever to span the breadth of an entire land mass.

Tons of steel and concrete had been hauled across America, as a result of which, two great oceans, parted for eons by the solid might of a single continent, became joined by a snaking umbilical cord some three and a half thousand miles long.

Wriggling its way between soaring peaks and fertile meadows, the highway had pushed hard against wild and arid wastelands. Eventually, a coast-to-coast rendezvous was created, and the Atlantic finally joined hands with the Pacific...

The whole affair was a magnificent feat of logistic enterprise, well worthy of a great country and the big thinking, pioneering people who lived there.

One of such men was Henry B. Joy - the First President of The Lincoln Highway Association - whose efforts, along with those of others, resulted in the fabulous highway’s creation.  The photograph shows the memorial erected on the Wyoming section in Joy’s memory.

Yet now, would you believe it, here we have the first transcontinental highway ever built disappearing into the rear end of some johnny-come-lately, less historically-noteworthy road, which is somewhat mundanely designated as being Interstate 80.

And I understand that other sections of the same, gloriously named “Lincoln Highway”, has vanished ignonimously up the back sides of other, less flamboyantly christened highways all along its transcontinental route…

All because some unimaginative politician or other decided that they’d had enough of the complexities of named  roads and decided that numbered  highways would make it a lot easier all round…!  

As I say – bit of a shame, really.

But I wasn’t here to gripe at the lack of sentiment exhibited by materialistic, sharp-suited, modern Americans. The fact that the brilliant, entrepreneurial colour of a bygone age probably was lost on today’s mushrooming, super-duper technocrat mentality was nothing to do with me.

I was hot on the trail of my cousin, Rose.