Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey by John Masters Page B

bypass the law in special cases. No, it would not help to prove that I was of pure English parentage. There was nothing to be done but wait for my turn on the Indian quota.
    I sat there, staring at him, thinking fast. If I were to accept this place on the Indian quota I would have to take a job here while waiting. What job? And then give it up? Settle my family in, and then uproot them again? Out of the question! What I must do was get to America as a visitor, then, find out whether I could sell the Himalayan tours or the Bra, and take it from there; move on to Canada, perhaps; return beaten to England, perhaps; find a job in the U.S.A., and some way of getting in legally and permanently, as thousands must surely do with such a foolish law as this to contend against.
    I told the bureaucrat I would withdraw my application for an immigrant's visa, and apply instead for a visitor's visa. The man looked almost embarrassed as he mumbled that that was unfortunately now impossible. I felt I was at a mad hatter's tea party. I asked him cautiously why. 'Because you have applied for an immigrant's visa,' he said. 'It's a regulation we have, because so many people who found themselves on long quotas — the delay for Greeks is eighty-one years, you know — would apply for a visitor's visa and then as soon as they got over, disappear. Plenty of them become public charges. So we made this regulation... It may not be so bad,' he said helpfully. 'People drop off the list. You may not have to wait as long as four and a half years.'
    I thanked him as warmly as I could manage, which was only a degree above glacially, and returned to Camberley. I was in a fine rage even before the train left Waterloo and my fellow traveller must have thought he was locked in with a madman, for I glared out of the window, muttered to myself, and scribbled furious notes on pieces of paper. This was downright double-dealing. What right had they to keep me out of the United States if I wanted to go? Wasn't the country built on immigrants, on freedom to come and go? Wasn't it barely a week since I had thrilled to learn what was inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty:
    Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

     
    What generosity, I had thought, what a marvel of welcome! I wasn't sure that I could quite agree to being a huddled mass or a wretched refuse, but I was certainly homeless and yearning to breathe free. What sort of a country would they have now if the Indians (Red) had had an Immigration Service when the Pilgrims set out in 1620?
    Those Pilgrim Fathers had had to fight storms, shipwreck, cold, disease, famine. I saw that this Pilgrim Son would have to battle with the 20th century's stand-ins for natural hazard: red tape, bureaucracy, and ill-written laws.
    I gathered Bill Dodds and all the four American students at my bungalow, told them what had happened, and asked for advice. One shook his head and said, 'You can't fight City Hall,' a remark that I found as irrelevant as baffling. The rest said, keep at it, screw the regulations, hell, a thousand Mexicans are swimming the Rio Grande every week, there are always ways and means, what you need is some influence. Bill was a personal friend of the head of the U.S. Military Mission in Britain. He promised to tell my story to the general, who might be persuaded to talk to the consulate people. Meantime 'It's the Army-Navy game tomorrow,' he said. 'We can get it on the radio. Come and listen.'
    I had seen one game of American football in my life, the Sugar Bowl game of 1939 between Texas Christian and Carnegie Tech, with Davey O'Brien as the hero. That was now nine years ago, and my hazy memories of the great concrete bowl and the yelling crowd were not enough to put any reality behind the announcer's gabble. Second and four on the