Give Me the World

by Leila Hadley

Overview

Leila Hadley, twenty-five years old, divorced, restless, bored with her succesful career, set off for the Far East with her six-year-old son for an adventure that would last a lifetime. Now available for the first time in many years, Give Me the World is the classic memoir of that trip--to Manilla and Hong Kong, Siam and Singapore, India and Damascus, and on around the world. Told with a remarkable sense of emotion and observation, it is an evocative record of what meets the eye and heart of the traveler. A timeless and moving personal story, Give Me the World is proof of the paradox that a 60-foot-long ship deck can enclose complete and boundless freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466871403
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/13/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	650 KB

About the Author

Leila Hadley was born in New York City, where she lived with her husband, Henry Luce III. The great-great-great-great-grandaughter of James Boswell, she is the author of many travel books, including Give Me the World, Garden By the Sea, and the citically acclaimed A Journey with Elisa Cloud. She died in 2009.

Read an Excerpt

Give Me the World

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By Leila Hadley

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1958 Leila Hadley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7140-3

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CHAPTER 1

Castles in the Air

I had wanted to get away.

Now, after the letters and telegrams had been read, after the steward had placed vases and bowls of flowers on the bureau, and my son Kippy had converted his bunk and the contents of the bon-voyage baskets into an extravagant barricade of outsized jars of caviar, hothouse fruit and chocolate bars, I took off my earrings, my beaded hat from Mr. John's and the scarlet coat from Trigère that still wasn't paid for. I lay down on the other bunk and was dispirited because I derived from the stateroom little of the rapture I had anticipated.

As a child, I had traveled almost every year with my family to England for the summer, and I remembered how each cabin then had seemed more enchanting than the last. Now that I was twenty-five, with a six-year-old child of my own, perhaps I shouldn't have expected to be charmed instantly by a stateroom. But perhaps, I thought, all my preconceived ideas would turn out the same way, flattening with experience into dim shadows, like Mr. Eliot's shadows that fell so gloomily between the idea and the reality.

I wished that I were more like Kippy, artless, untroubled and reacting in accord to a single heart and a single mind. I wondered whether there would ever come a time when I could reconcile what I wanted to do and what I felt I should do with what I did. I hoped that by going away, by being alone with the added stimulation of alien people, sights and customs, I would in some way be able to disentangle myself from the octopus of my doubts and fears and misgivings.

* * *

I had wanted to leave New York — not the city, which I loved — but the life I lived there, which seemed to claim from me barely more than an acceptance. I wanted to be a stranger in a world where everything I saw, heard, touched and tasted would be fresh and new, because wonder and awareness seemed to have disappeared from my life, leaving an excessive familiarity with an existence of routine.

Each day had been as undistinguished as the next. I got up, dressed, went to the office, worked, left the office, stayed home or went out, and fell asleep knowing the whole process would be repeated the following day.

It had started five years before. Disillusioned as one can only be at twenty, having by then already been married and divorced, I wanted to get as far away as possible from my own background and experience. Public relations had seemed to be the answer. But the work that once had offered such scope and excitement had eventually become contained and diminished in the tools of the trade — a typewriter, two telephones with pushbuttons, and a rotary index, the Wheeldex.

I particularly disliked the Wheeldex. It symbolized all that disturbed, all that irritated. Attached to its polished steel frame were a thousand cards, detachable, each bearing a name, address and telephone number. They were small rectangular cards classified by color into the categories of Radio, Television, Newspapers, Magazines, Manufacturers, Advertising Agencies, and a mass of pale-green cards set aside for Friends — a rough and wistful designation for a group of people who were mostly acquaintances and business associates. It seemed to me that I spent most of my time riffling through the Wheeldex calling people I didn't care for who in turn called other people I didn't know to arrange things that meant nothing to me at all.

I became an executive, and for a while I delighted in my job. When the delight wore off, I was afraid to exchange the known devils for the unknown, because by then I had come to terms with the Wheeldex and the thousand people whose names I knew, whose telephone voices were familiar and whose faces I seldom saw.

By planning publicity campaigns, planting stories, sending forth publicity releases, setting up advertising tie-ins, organizing public appearances and guest spots on radio and television, I tried to achieve a state of public awareness and acclaim for clients who rewarded me generously for my efforts.

No matter how much I made, however, I was always in debt. I ran up preposterous bills that took months to pay off. Strangely enough, I bought, I imagined, only what I needed. I just happened to need a lot of things — clothes, books, records, flowers, presents for this friend's birthday and that friend's wedding. The rent for my Fifty-seventh Street apartment was high, and every month there was an irreducible pile of envelopes with cellophane windows billing me for groceries, cleaning, laundry, the telephones — I had three — gas and electricity, the window-cleaner, the doctor, the dentist, the drugstore, the newsstand, and besides all these there would be a mountain of accounts payable to department stores and various shops. I never quite knew how it happened, but I found myself in the comfortless predicament of working at a job I didn't like for the money to pay for a lot of things I didn't need.

Wonderful Mary Greig, who loved Kippy and me as though we were her own, looked after Kippy while I worked. Beset with unknown longings and a hunger for the indefinable, I would often turn to Mrs. Greig and say I was unhappy and that nothing seemed to interest me any more. "No wonder," she would reply tartly, "leading the rat-race you do. You should find yourself a good man and get married." And then as the telephone rang, she would add humphingly, "I suppose this means another late night. Well, enjoy yourself."

And off I would go with someone who perhaps also suffered from a vague, unshakable malaise and feelings of dissatisfaction. Either we would set off on a perpetual scavenger hunt for the new — the new restaurant, the new play, the new game, the newfangled and featured, all of which might have been new but which were never different — or we would chant our troubles back and forth at each other. While agreeing that we needed a change of some sort, we would ruefully condemn ourselves for our apathy and go on living the same old way.

One day, after an infuriating morning at the office, when the susurrus of the air-conditioning machine had interchanged sticky humidity with damp chill; when the cardboard container of black coffee had overturned and flooded the desk; when a publicity campaign I had worked on for seven weeks was rejected, I finally felt, after months of irresolution, that I had reached the breaking point. Something had to be done.

It was too late to cancel my lunch appointment. I went along to the restaurant and waited morosely for the arrival of a man I'll call James. James was late and, having experienced an unproductive morning of work, he was also in a cantankerous mood. We picked at the antipasto and idly guillotined a few acquaintances, and by the time we had drunk two glasses of Orvieto and eaten too much manicotti, we had decided that New York was a hateful place inhabited by hateful people. James, who had just returned from the Far East, was contemplating a trip to Africa.

"I've always wanted to go to the Far East," I said mournfully. "It's one of my favorite castles in the air."

"Well, why don't you go then?" James asked. "At the risk of being a bore, may I quote you something from the last chapter of Walden?" This was a favorite piece of reading of his, and now one of mine, and I believe he knew it almost word for word. "'If you have built your castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put your foundations under them.'"

"Oh, James," I protested, "you know it's not as simple as that. I don't have any money."

"You make enough," he said.

"I know," I said wearily, "and I spend it."

"Well, if you take my advice," he said, "you'll book your passage now and worry about money later."

Another glass of Orvieto added weight to his suggestion. I telephoned my secretary and told her I wouldn't be back for the rest of the afternoon. At James's direction, I floated off to the offices of the American President Lines and emerged an hour or so later a little more knowledgeable about the Far East than I had been before, with the assurance of a cabin for Kippy and myself on a cargo ship sailing in three months' time for Manila and Hong Kong.

* * *

It was astonishing how much better I felt once I had settled on a definite course of action. I embarked on a reading jag about the Orient, plunging into reference books with all the intensity of a schoolchild determined to get the best marks in the class. Having a passion for notebooks, I started a fresh one for recording arbitrary and agreeable information about Far Eastern culture patterns, concepts, whimsies and phenomena. I brooded over the doctrinal complexities of Hinduism and Buddhism, and delighted in the knowledge that birds' nest soup is actually made from birds' nests. I discovered that a bêche de mer is a sea slug and ginseng an aromatic herb, and that both are esteemed by the Chinese as great delicacies. I found that a nilgai is a blue cow indigenous to India, that Far Easterners don't like shaking hands and that in Siam, silver-plated tiger skulls are sold for ashtrays.

I devoted another section of my notebook to more practical agenda — reminders to get a joint passport for Kippy and myself, to get visas, to get a tenant for my apartment, to get inoculations against plague, cholera, typhoid and tetanus. It was somewhat discouraging to find out that the process of escape was largely a matter of routine paper work and visits to the doctor.

At the same time that I was entering pages of medical advice into my notebook, I gathered together introductory letters and addresses of people that I might call upon.

A month from my departure there remained only one uncompleted detail: the apartment had to be rented. After that I would pack, and Kippy and I would leave for the coast, and at last be on our way.

A real-estate agent produced a host of prospective tenants who for three weeks traipsed through the apartment, finding it alternately too large, too noisy, inadequately furnished, overly furnished, too small, overpriced, anything and everything, but never right. Then, mirabile dictu — tenants, and I began to pack.

In a pandemonium of blue tissue paper and lists, overturned boxes and cartons, the dining-room table awash with a chaotic hodgepodge, Mary Greig and I faced supreme decisions.

Ought Kippy to have six pairs of shoes, or would four be enough?

Where was the extra socket for the traveling iron? Was there room for my black silk suit? Should I take Kleenex and camera film, or would I be able to buy them along the way?

Were there any books I wanted to take that I could do without?

Finally, the luggage was packed. All was in order.

I went to my last farewell party in New York.

And three days later Kippy and I were aboard the President Madison, a cargo ship sailing from San Francisco, bound for Manila and Hong Kong.

CHAPTER 2

Getting Away from It All

It was beginning — the departure and the escape that I longed for.

There was an air of seedy festivity about the paper serpentines writhing and catching at each other and tangling in the sharp wind. From the deck, Kippy and I threw unwinding rolls of dingy pink and green paper to the people on the pier below. A representative of the ship's company was the only person I recognized in the pale sunlight where the crowd stood in front of the gray pier shed. From time to time, he would look up at Kippy and me and wave and shout good-by. I would wave back at him and smile until it felt awkward, and then we would both invent something to look away at.

The gangway was clankily secured alongside. The hawsers were hauled in and the cables cast loose. The ship's siren blasted. And then the engines were going. Everyone waved more vigorously than before. The paper streamers broke and fell in the water as the ship began to slip slowly away from the pier. As the space widened between us and the people we were leaving behind, I felt weary, relaxed and relieved, and somewhat downcast that I felt no great elation at departure. I stayed on deck with Kippy until the fog closed in, and the Golden Gate Bridge was only a series of pyramiding supports, its glamorous superstructure lost in the haze. And then I went back to the stateroom and its bright baskets of fruit and flowers.

For three months I had planned and worked and prepared for one future moment, until I was so filled with the thought of it that I could think of nothing else. Even more than I imagined depended upon this moment's coming into being. It was a moment that would turn my living to another direction. It was a moment of singular importance, this moment of departure, and yet it had come and gone, and I had scarcely sensed its passing. Lying on the bunk, absent-mindedly eating sweet, seedless grapes, I felt unsure of myself, uneasy that perhaps I had done the wrong thing, a little worried that the change and escape I had ardently contemplated might, after all, not turn out as I hoped.

But the fit of the blues I thought I was in for was soon gently dissipated by the soothing routine of ship's life. Living was at once simplified. As there were only eight other passengers, there were no attempts at organized entertainment, no committees, no competitions. With set limits on what I could do and see, I felt deliciously free from the pull of guilt at doing nothing much at all. I walked around the deck, looked at the sea, read desultorily, slept and ate. This exterior simplification of living seemed to bring about a corresponding interior one. Forgetful of the past and quite mindless of the future, I experienced a sort of languor and calmly surrendered myself to the idling progression of time.

The other passengers were all paired off and quite content to stay that way. There were two squat, bespectacled Japanese businessmen with fat, jiggling bottoms. They picked their teeth at the table and sucked their breath in sharply when they spoke, and marched round and round the deck with bent heads.

There were two spinsters who were missionaries. For the most part, they sat on deck, the pages of their open Biblical commentaries whipped by the wind to a frenzied flapping. They were both middle-aged women with large, clumsy bodies and thick buns of braided brown hair. One had a prim, girlish face ending with a small mouth and falling away into a ruddy wattle. The other wore pince-nez spectacles and looked like a myopic squirrel. She had gone up to all the passengers on the first day out and said, "My name is Miss Slater, and I'm pleased to meet you." But her aggressive friendliness had met with no response, and although she chatted volubly to her companion, after the second day she hardly spoke to anyone else.

There was a Filipino lady and her American husband. She was so stout and ungainly that it was almost impossible to imagine that she had ever been a child who could skip and run. Her husband, a retired Navy man, had the blotchy, purple-veined skin of an alcoholic. They spent most of their time in their cabin and only appeared for meals during calm weather.

Then there was a Mrs. Fulton and her mother; they sat at our table. Mrs. Fulton was a divorcee from Nashville with eyes like a hungry bird's, a fussy little person doted upon by her tiny gray mother. They were on a six-weeks' vacation trip and they were both disappointed that they hadn't chosen a larger ship. It was a shame, the mother said, that there was no dressing up for dinner and that there were neither horse races nor movies to pass the time. Mrs. Fulton said that she wished there were some nice men aboard, and she and her mother baaed back and forth to each other like tired sheep. I was relieved beyond measure when the rough weather came and drove them back to their cabin.

Fortunately, in between meals, Mrs. Fulton and her mother kept to themselves. So did the rest of the passengers, each couple aware of the others only for the sake of politeness. Our relationship, for the whole voyage, resembled nothing so much as the close-range remoteness of passengers traveling in an elevator. This was fine with me. There was no one around to claim my freedom, no one for me to disoblige or avoid, and, better yet, there was no disarming soul to pry from me confidences that afterward I would wish had gone unsaid.

I was not lonely, however, for in their off hours there were always the ship's officers to talk to. They were generally bursting with information of an intensely nautical character and willingly explained the ship's appointments and radar equipment to Kippy and me. They were good men, efficient, sensible and considerate, and unaffectedly nice in their manner and bearing. They seemed so sure of themselves as they spoke of meteorology and walked about leaning without stumbling against the roll of the ship. Johnny, the second mate; Dick, the third mate; and Mike, the wireless operator — I liked them best.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Give Me the World by Leila Hadley. Copyright © 1958 Leila Hadley. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Introduction by Lance Morrow,
Chapter 1. Castles in the Air,
Chapter 2. Getting Away from It All,
Chapter 3. Hong Kong and the Wickedest City of the Far East,
Chapter 4. Bangkok, the City of the Gods,
Chapter 5. The Schooner,
Chapter 6. The Voyage to Penang,
Chapter 7. Penang and the Ritual of Thaipusam,
Chapter 8. Voyage to the Nicobars,
Chapter 9. The Nicobar Islands on the Magic Side of Time,
Chapter 10. Voyage to Ceylon,
Chapter 11. Ceylon,
Chapter 12. Bombay,
Chapter 13. We Don't All Live in Grass Huts,
Chapter 14. The Root of Life,
Chapter 15. Portraits,
Chapter 16. Monument to an Empress, Fatehpur Sikri, and the Fever of the Wind,
Chapter 17. Ellora and Ajanta,
Chapter 18. The Oman-Trucial Coast,
Chapter 19. The Road to Beirut,
Chapter 20. Land of Milk and Honey,
Chapter 21. Northeast to Cyprus,
Chapter 22. Along the Anatolian Coast to Rhodes,
Chapter 23. Voyage to Crete and Malta,
Chapter 24. Malta,
Chapter 25. Home,
Also by Leila Hadley,
Copyright,