Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  If you would

  not be forgotten,

  as soon as you are

  dead & rotten,

  either write things

  worth reading,

  or do things

  worth the writing.

  Benjamin Franklin

  I don’t think anyone doubts that Ben was a genius. A fine printer, a great diplomat, an inventor and the man who should be given credit for creating the soundbite, so you’d think someone would have preserved something he once owned — anything in fact. But no.

  The entrance to the museum is promising. There is a replica post office, replica printing house and other replica bits and pieces where you can meet ‘living history interpreters’. Basically these are people who dress up in silly hats and try to pretend they knew Ben or whoever you are visiting. The concept that history needs interpreting strikes me as peculiarly American. Many years ago I was introduced to a Californian woman called Karen who went on to marry Mike McShane, a comic I had done much work with.

  ‘What do you do, Karen?’ I asked early on, having run out of conversation.

  ‘I’m a conservative historian,’ she replied. This rather flummoxed me. Ever on the look-out for a career that had never occurred to me, here was something new.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I enquired. ‘Do you deal with the history of the conservative party?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I reinterpret history from a conservative point of view.’

  Extraordinary idea. I could see history getting a bit skewed because you forgot something or someone steered you a bit wrong but reinterpreting from a political perspective … well, I suppose it’s what politicians do every day. Rum business, truth. Personally, I think Ben would have been appalled.

  We abandoned the living history people and marched out back to the underground museum. The entrance is through some glass doors and then underground (as advertised) via several long slopes. I expect the slopes wind their way down gently in order to accommodate the usual throng of visitors. I don’t know if Mr Franklin is going out of fashion but Paul and I had the place to ourselves. We could have skateboarded in and not bothered a soul.

  The first corridor had a sedan chair on display It was a nice sedan chair and was a replica (on loan) of the sort of sedan chair which Ben might or might not have ridden in at one time if he ever did, in fact, ride in a sedan chair. It was, as it were … very like. An enormous black woman in a security guard uniform appeared at my shoulder.

  ‘There is a movie in there,’ she wheezed. She really was very large and could hardly walk in her Perma Press pants. Her shirt stretched across her chest, held together for modesty with only three buttons and her security badge. She appeared to be suffering some form of breathing difficulty. You had to wonder whether there had been any kind of aptitude considerations when she applied for the job. Is an ability to walk without injuring your thighs a requisite part of guarding historical valuables? We didn’t really want to see the film but she was so breathless I didn’t want to start a conversation either. We were a long way underground and if she had a seizure I doubted anyone else would happen by for some time.

  The cinema was quite large and Paul and I had it entirely to ourselves. We sat and watched the film. Ben’s life was fascinating but I could still hear the vast guard wheezing outside. I was sympathetic but I was also quite tempted to commit a crime for I felt sure that with a guard of such immense proportions there was a fairly high chance of getting away with it. I venture to suggest I could have run off with the sedan chair on my own.

  I was, however, keen to get on for I knew what lay ahead. After the film and the sedan chair you head off through a room full of mirrors. Here neon signs flash in the reflections with individual words like ‘writer’, ‘printer’ and ‘postmaster general’. It’s supposed to be a room that ‘reflects’ the great man’s life but you begin to wonder where the museum part is. That is when you enter the pièce de résistance. The room worth travelling for. The Bell telephone room has not changed in over twenty years. When I was twenty-one the place seemed rather modem. There are banks and banks of telephones on individual stands. In the early eighties these digital phones with push-button dialling in the handset were very new. Now they are very old. Each visitor goes to a phone and looks at a list on the wall. It is a directory of famous people through the ages and their phone numbers. You ring the number of, say, Mark Twain, and he tells you what he thought about Benjamin Franklin. This is the centrepiece of the museum and hours of fun for the whole family. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who is thinking of going but I can tell you that everyone I phoned only had nice things to say about Ben and that Dick Van Dyke appeared to have recorded all the English messages.

  It was a heady experience of living history and I think we had been spoilt by the time we got to the house of Betsy Ross. She was the legendary seamstress said to have made the first American Stars and Stripes flag. We sped around the homestead in which time I learned that they weren’t really sure she had ever lived there or indeed, ever made the flag. Everyone else seemed impressed.

  ‘Look at those knickers!’ said a woman, pointing out a display of old underpants to her child. ‘Isn’t that amazing; they’re done up with buttons.’ So is my cardigan, I thought and we left.

  We didn’t linger long in Philadelphia. Basically the city is much poorer and more depressed than New York. 9/11, as everyone is now calling it, had clearly had a big impact on the city. When we arrived there were state troopers crawling all over the place and it wasn’t exactly visitor friendly. Independence Park was all closed up and there were huge security checks if you wanted to visit the celebrated Liberty Bell. Through a plate-glass window we could see queues of people going through body scanners, personal searches and all sorts to stand beside the bell. You could sense terrorists from very far away managing to yank the American chain. We didn’t bother. You can see the thing through the window. Basically it’s a big … bell.

  There were bag check places set up in shops, one of which was offering ‘Gas masks at $24.99. No return.’

  I thought no return was an unfortunate phrase. It suggested a finality about your purchase which, anyway, gave you the face of an elephant.

  Rarely is the question asked: ‘Is our children learning?’

  George W Bush, 11 Jan 2000

  We rose the next morning to find Bush addressing the nation. He looked rather startled as if he were surprised to have been woken up. Since my last visit he had not only been elected president but had taken his country to war. After all the election uncertainty I kept trying to find out what the actual vote count had been but no one seemed interested any more. There had been some magical transformation in the White House and the idiot jester of the court was now revered as the king. As far as I could work out, one Supreme Court judge cast the final vote to elect him, which in terms of history means that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor created the presidency on her own. ‘Dubya’, as he seems to like to be called, had quite a knack for the bon mot, calling Nigeria an ‘important continent’ and remarking how more and more American imports are coming ‘from overseas’. Still, he followed in the footsteps of the previous Republican genius, Ronald Reagan, who believed that ‘facts are stupid things’.

  In other news a small girl of six had been kidnapped from some leafy town in New Jersey. Her family had previously used the house just for weekends but had moved there full-time after 9/11 because it felt safe. Now a ransom note for their child had been found attached to a flagpole. The relentless cameras showed her father almost speechless at the obligatory press conference. You don’t know what will get you in the end but no one in America felt safe any more.

  Our bargain-basement map was vague about actual routes out of town but we left Philly driving north on the 611. It was a dismal experience. US flags were still everywhere but here was a side of American life you rarely see on TV. Endless shops where everything was a dollar, pawn parlours and rows of dark brown t
erraced houses whose porches were either depressed or collapsing. A man pushed a small child on a trolley piled high with black rubbish bags while a large crowd of black men wearing white gloves attended a huge funeral. It was an odd Al Jolson image.

  You’ll want to know a few things about New Jersey. It’s not a big place and operates as a kind of crossroads for the east. It is a place where many people live while actually working in either New York or Philadelphia.

  Bird — Eastern goldfinch

  Flower — Violet

  Tree — Red Oak

  Memorial Tree — Dogwood. I don’t know memorial to who or what or when, in fact, it would be appropriate. Answers on a postcard, please.

  Animal — Horse

  Shell — Knobbed Whelk, which I think is quite unpleasant

  Dinosaur — Hadrosaurus. This is getting silly.

  We were due to meet Sue for dinner. Actually it was a pleasant trip and I would recommend it. We came up the east side of Pennsylvania through somewhere called Bucks County. It’s a pretty place full of folk-art galleries, coffee shops and farmers ‘markets. We stopped in Doylestown to see the rather curious concrete castle of Henry Mercer. Here I hummed the words of their native son Oscar Hammerstein while trying to buy clean underwear. It turned out not to be that sort of place. In Doylestown you can get great pastry but not underpants. Underpants, a woman in a shop told me, you buy out of town at factory outlet stores. There you can buy as many underpants as you want. We drove out of town and found a large knicker selection but only in man-made fibres. I was desperate-for clean knickers and put on a new pair in the changing room at the shop. I normally wear cotton and I swear I sparked as I walked from the premises.

  We drove north, me sparking, Paul trying to work out which direction the sun was in so that we could continue north. We crossed small rivers by covered bridges. We stopped, and took photographs, not just of the wooden structures but of the enormous number of warning signs at the entrance to each bridge. A montage of legal precaution in this most litigious of countries.

  We were heading for a place called Clinton, New Jersey. According to the leaflets I collected it is ‘Historic Clinton’, the ‘quintessential small American town’. I don’t know if I can vouch for all that as I really only saw a motel and the Cracker Barrel restaurant. I do think, however, that it says something about the place that the people of the town petitioned to have the name changed when Bill Clinton became president.

  Sue had not taken offence at my phone message and after several hundred miles with no guide but the sun and the electrical impulses from my underpants, we found her exactly on time on the porch of the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Clinton. Who needs planning? The restaurateurs had gone to some lengths to make the almost new building on the edge of a highway and a shopping mall look old. The entire front of the building had been clad with a long wooden porch. As we pulled up, Sue was sitting there amid a mass of white rocking chairs which were for sale. Indeed the whole shop was selling some kind of homey ‘on the porch’ vision of America. A Martha Stewart image without the need to do any of the work yourself. Sue smiled at me and stood up for a hug. Still a comfortable woman with longish hair and a centre-parting. As I might have expected she had made little concession to the more girly aspects of grooming and her hair had been allowed to go the grey it wanted. From a distance she looked like her mother. She stood and smiled out of the corner of her mouth. We hugged and it felt good.

  The Cracker Barrel restaurant, it will not surprise you to learn, is a franchise. A franchise where no alcohol is served because it is ‘family dining’. There is a curious American notion that alcohol must be banned from anything connected with the family, or parents will succumb to its evil temptation, leaving the children to trawl through the pudding menu at will. At Disneyland in both Florida and California there is no alcohol served anywhere. They tried to institute the same principle in Paris but the French just laughed.

  If you like mashed potato then the Cracker Barrel is the place for you. Everything, including I think a few desserts, comes with mash and everything appears to have been fried, not once but several times. The menu was vast with little choice. In the end I ordered ‘chicken fried chicken’, which basically seemed to be the low-cholesterol option in that it had only been fried twice.

  ‘Do you want it just as it is on the menu?’ asked Michelle, who was my waitress for the evening and hoped that I would be having an enjoyable meal and if I wasn’t I was sure to say so that she could make it enjoyable.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, doing that English thing of trying to be no trouble to serving staff. ‘Doesn’t everybody have it just as it is on the menu?’

  Michelle laughed. ‘No, everybody changes everything.’

  ‘And you keep smiling,’ I said.

  ‘It goes with the job,’ she said and smiled. I liked Michelle. I was sure she was going to make my meal enjoyable but now, after our conversation, I didn’t know whether she was smiling because it was her job or because she actually liked me. I have no idea why this was worrying me, as the chances of me ever repeating my dining experience in that establishment in that part of the world were slim.

  The whole interaction with serving people is very complicated in America. Basically it comes in two forms. The first is a kind of therapy for the customer whereby the waiter takes an enormous interest in their food selection and never fails to say that something is a ‘good choice’. Served and server do brief bonding and one goes home feeling better and the other gets a good tip. The second is where no words are exchanged because the food is too cheap and too fast and you don’t speak because no one is pretending either one of you has fluent language skills. I don’t know which I prefer. I suspect I am too British now for the therapy version.

  Exactly as I remembered, Sue had little time for general conversation and we swept into her life and her business. Before she entered the dog world full time, Sue worked as a stage manager in the theatre. Indeed she stage-managed a play in London at one time and organised some auditions for a hideous corporate show I once directed in the United States. (Never ask me about contract industrial cleaning — I am something of a world expert.) Since I had known Sue, she had always had dogs but now they were her life and indeed, other people’s.

  She looked tired and blamed it on 9/11. Everyone else did too but in her case it was true. ‘Pet assisted therapy’ is very big in America and something she works with a great deal. After the Trade Center ‘incident’, she was asked to go down and help at a centre by the water on the New Jersey side. She kept describing the place in the same way over and over again. ‘It’s a rock concert down there, a complete rock concert.’

  This is about the worst thing a professional theatre person can say about an event. It means it is badly organised and is flying by the seat of its pants. It seems Sue arrived with her dogs only to find two other teams of dog people had also been called. She was asked to coordinate things and there appears to have been much political backbiting. It was all volunteer work, something Sue has filled much of her life with. She underplayed this during the meal, which was typical. It wasn’t till we got to the office that I saw a dark blue plate on the wall, The Governor’s Award for Volunteer Service 2001, and learned of her invitation to breakfast at the New Jersey Governor’s mansion. Not just a good volunteer worker for the state, but the best. Before 9/11 she had worked in hospitals, helping people who need to walk with a brace and cane learn their skill by leaning on a specially trained dog, helping children who need to take medicine but won’t and many other things her animals are trained to deal with.

  At the 9/11 centre the work had been varied. Sue told us that immediately after the disaster, when it had been people filling out missing person forms and providing DNA samples and so on, it was different — there still seemed to be some hope. The dogs were used to pry the children away from the adults so the adults could get on with what they needed to do. Often they would use a dog to distract a child and get it to leave its paren
ts and come to the care centre. Frequently it was the rescue workers themselves who needed to stroke the dogs. They told Sue the truth of what they were seeing, which was being sanitised on TV, and she had many sleepless nights.

  Now things are slowly changing. People are collecting death certificates and everyone has to give a formal deposition: ‘When did you last see the person?’ ‘What makes you believe they were in the area?’ etc. She said some people just sit on the floor, hugging one of her dogs while they sob and try to get through it. They have children who have elective mutism and she teaches them to do tricks with a dog. Fools them into speaking by saying, ‘Oh listen, I have to get something. Could you just tell the dog to sit?’

  Dealing with grief and pain, her concern is focused not just on the people but on the animals.

  ‘Dogs are sensitive,’ she explained. ‘They are trained to do many things but not to have adults throw their arms around their necks and sob and wail for half an hour.’

  After a session like that she has to take the dog out and play with it for twice as long as the session took. The dogs too have had to deal with the grief. She spoke of the huge problems with the specialist search and rescue dogs who worked at the disaster scene in the beginning. No one could fly anywhere so the New York authorities were forced to use only local teams. Everyone, man and beast, worked fourteen hours a day as they all scrambled about in the hope of finding anyone alive. By the end the dogs, were exhausted and, not surprisingly, depressed. Rescue dogs are schooled to expect a reward when they find someone alive but there was no one to find. Occasionally the workers would hide someone just to please the animals but it wasn’t real. It didn’t feel real. The only animals getting true satisfaction were the specialist ‘cadaver’ dogs. They are trained to seek the dead and had no problem finding body parts.