Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey by John Masters

sailed at night, the Manhattan gliding down the Hudson and I, alone by the rail, hungering for the banked lights of the city. Then I had been a tourist, and though I had had little money in my pocket I had been coming from a secure place, and knew I would return to it — the 4th Gurkhas, a career, a pensioned retirement — unless the bullets got me first. Now, in the last grey of night, the giant throb of the ship almost silenced as the Sandy Hook pilot clambered aboard, lights sparkling along a low lying coast to the north, I felt as I had when the battalion approached the shore of Iraq in 1941. I challenged the unseen land — friend or foe? Would it answer me with gifts, or with shot and shell? A cold wind whined among the forecastle derricks and I huddled deeper into my coat behind the glass of the promenade deck, peering forward.
    As we glided through the Narrows the dawn spread up and out, and the magic city rose at the head of the Upper Bay.
    Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships
    And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
    Only Marlowe's 'mighty line' came to me, and would not go. I did not try to analyse the application of the line, to wonder whether New York was the face, or the topless towers — and mine the face. The light slanted cold from the east across a bitter, cloud-streamered sky. The west sides of the buildings were dark exclamations, the east bright, the water black but aglitter with points of light on the thrown waves. We forged on through grinding floes and shattered blocks of ice, past the Statue of Liberty, past Governor's Island. For a moment Lower Broadway opened a long canyon, then the walls closed. We passed into the North River. We docked.
    I had arrived. Surely no immigrant ever greeted the city and the world with a greater exhilaration, a greater passion of excitement and determination.
    Alice Mathews, who had been Alice Westfeldt when her family were my hosts in New Orleans in '38, met me at the pier and took me off to Morningside Heights, where her husband was adviser to foreign students at Columbia University. After a few days there I moved to a small hotel in the east 30s, where I got a small room on the seventh floor for $19 a week. The cockroaches had left the place in disgust some years earlier, but it suited me. For $18 I bought a typewriter, which may have been Mr Sholes's first demonstration model, and opened my Himalayan Holidays file. I was in business.
    I took a day or two off to walk about the city and arrange my thoughts. The family were supposed to move — somewhere — by mid June, but I ought to have a firm plan by the end of April. That gave me three months to make good with the Himalayan Holidays, The Bra, or whatever else I could unearth. I must live as cheaply as possible; I did not know how cheaply that would be, but I thought I could get by on $42 a week, all in. Above that, I must obviously be prepared to spend something on pushing my two plans. $200 seemed a proper sum of money to allot to them. When that was spent, I would have to decide whether to allot more time and money to them, or turn to something else. What else, I had no idea.
    New York began to awaken at half past seven every morning, when I went out for breakfast. Dirty snow, left over from the Big Snow of December 26, 1947, lay packed along walls and sidewalks. Each morning, as the snow melted, new objects emerged from it — a pocket-book, a set of false teeth, an overshoe, a snow shovel. I ate at a tiny diner next door to the hotel, run by two Greek brothers. They closed at 3 a.m. and opened at 5.30 a.m. The food was not great, but it was acceptable, and I ate there because it made me feel good to think that the owners, whose accents were stronger than mine, could make a living by sheer determination. In the long reaches of the night one used to sleep under the counter, while the other stood sentry.
    The bars also were open all day and most of the night and though my drinking was severely