Give Me the World

By Leila Hadley

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: May 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466871403

Leila Hadley

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.

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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

To my husband

Give me the world if thou wilt, but grant me an asylum for my affections.

—from the Icelandic Tulka

INTRODUCTION

by Lance Morrow

There are a dozen great travel memoirs—by which I mean, of course, that I have a dozen or so favorites, including Arthur Kinglake’s Eothan and Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana. On my short list of the very best is Leila Hadley’s Give Me the World, which you have the good luck to be holding in your hands.

First published, to great praise, in 1958, Give Me the World possesses, in tumbling abundance, the qualities that make wonderful travel writing—charm, vitality, curiosity, an uncomplaining, resilient energy, humor (it’s a very funny book), and a kind of eager transparency, the traveler’s eye being open, alert, almost clairvoyantly intelligent.

In another memoir of travel, A Journey with Elsa Cloud, Hadley had written that when she was a child, My grandmother was the only member of my family who had a kind word to say about James Boswell, my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Hadley’s grandmother told her, You should be proud of your heritage. Bozzy had his faults, but he was an excellent journalist. Hadley inherited some of Boswell’s gifts, both as a reporter (she has a dogged and tactile love of facts, a curatorial savor of the strange) and as a lively companion.

When the voyage began, Leila Hadley was twenty-five years old, already married and divorced, with a six-year-old son, Kippy; she was living in New York, spending too much money, and bored with her job in public relations. As she writes in the perfect first sentence of Give Me the World: I had wanted to get away.

Hadley shipped out, with Kippy, on a freighter to Asia: Manila … Hong Kong … Macao. In Bangkok, she happened upon the small, three-masted American schooner California, manned by a crew of four young Americans sailing around the world for the fun of it. With Boswell’s impetuous directness, Hadley begged to go along on the voyage. The boys thought a beautiful young woman aboard would mean nothing but trouble, and refused. She flew on with Kippy to intercept the California at the next port, Singapore, and tried again. The boys were so impressed by her determination that they relented. Hadley was entered in the ship’s papers as cook, and Kippy as cabin boy.

I have read Give Me the World several times in order to study Hadley’s methods as a writer. She is the most sensuous of observers and stylists. Pay attention to the extraordinarily articulate play of image, color, smell, taste, sound, touch—all is fresh and vividly specific. In Manila, Hadley writes, the streets were crowded with people whose skin tones ranged from shades of creamy bister and buff to cinnamon, bronze and raisin color. That bister (a grayish to yellowish brown) is typical of Hadley’s sensuous precision. She notices everything, with an eye that is ruthless, humorous: on the freighter, two squat, bespectacled Japanese businessmen with fat, jiggling bottoms. Life teems with rich specifics; at a gourmet dinner in Hong Kong, she chokes through a procession of dishes, including honey-coated newborn mice and brandied snakes’ eyes.

Smells: In Bangkok, the room was always heavy with that peculiar Far East smell, with the over-smell of charcoal smoke from the kitchens and from street braziers, and the moldy smell of the bedclothes and the long Dutch Wife bolster, and the disinfectant odors of Flit and Dettol.

Sounds: She hears the fugue of small noises that came as a coda to the night and as a prelude to the day—the rustling of cockroaches in the wastepaper basket…

Besides being a lovely describer of life, Hadley is a talented dramatist; part of the book’s secret is that she captures each of the four crewmen of the California as a completely distinctive character, working in quirkish harmony to make the schooner go.

Give Me the World has the purity of a transforming voyage. To my ear, not a syllable rings false. The book makes me think of a scrap of DuBellay: Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage.

CHAPTER ONE

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 push-buttons, 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 TWO

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.

Kippy portioned his time equally among the Captain, a hearty Irishman, who bounced him on his knee and talked to him about boxing; Mike, under whose tutelage he filled a copybook with letters in Morse code and I love my Mom and I will be a good boy written over and over again; and José, our roly-poly Filipino waiter, who taught him phrases in his native Tagalog and gave him a Japanese cigarette box that ground out a tweedling tune as the lid clicked up to release a wooden bird with a cigarette in its bill. Kippy cherished the box and carried it with him everywhere. Cigarette, Johnny? he would ask. Cigarette, Joe? Cigarette, Mike? And when he saw the Captain, he would jump from one foot to the other with excitement, for the Captain always wanted a cigarette.

Cigarette? the Captain would boom delightedly. Why you must have read my mind. Yes, indeed, I’ll have one, my boy. As Kippy would press the catch so enthusiastically that his fingernail would go quite purple, the box would squeak and tweedle and up would pop the wooden bird with the cigarette. The Captain never failed to express surprise and pleasure.

*   *   *

The voyage lasted twenty-one or twenty-two days. I was never certain which, for we lost a day when we crossed the 180th Meridian. One day it was Tuesday and we were in the Western Hemisphere, and the next it was Thursday and we were in the Eastern Hemisphere, and Wednesday was completely gone, mysteriously made to disappear by the legerdemain of time operative at the International Date Line. To have a day suddenly thieved away gave me an uneasy feeling, and it seemed odd to me that all the others, who undoubtedly would have complained rather testily had a hat or a book blown overboard, should accept the loss of a whole Wednesday with such stoical reserve. But then, as Johnny had said, I was lacking the scientific turn of mind necessary to understand such matters.

Until the Tuesday that had been followed so precipitately by a Thursday, the wind had been sharp and cold, the sunshine thin, the sea relentlessly gray and rolling. There would be a brief show of color in the sky when the sun rose, a corrugated banner of pink and red mottled like the feathers of a Plymouth Rock hen. Then the color would fade into fogginess, and sky and sea would blend with each other in grayness until the sun set, pale and pink. Then would come a dark night with few stars. Lying in my bunk, trying to read, I would see out of the corner of my eye the measured sliding of Kippy’s hairbrush from one raised edge of the bureau to the other and find myself waiting for my shoes to skate across the cupboard floor and thump in time with the lurching of the ship. I could usually hear faint music below. On relatively calm nights, Dick would play The Barber of Seville, Faust, Madame Butterfly or something of Beethoven’s on his gramophone. On less calm nights, Johnny would play a lilting Swedish folk song called Nicolina over and over again on his tape recorder, and on some nights I could hear a metallic orchestral outburst before the news came through on the ship’s radio. But on nights when the hairbrush leaped over its barriers and the chair fell on its back and slithered aimlessly about the floor like a toppled turtle, I could only hear the clamorous creaking and straining of the ship, the clattering in our cabin, and the muffled noise of the sea hurling itself against us.

Thursday had been such a night, and I woke up Friday to the clanking of buckets and the brushing sibilance of deck-scrubbing. I poked my head out of the porthole expecting to see another slate-colored day, but the sky was lustrous and pearly, and the water that sloped out of sight and then wallowed up again was sapphiric and sparkling in the light. By noon the day had warmed, and the sky was a dazzling blue. The warmth lasted and in the next few days intensified to summery heat. Arms and legs were bared. The officers put on white shorts. Cold glasses left wet circles on the tablecloth at mealtimes. Fans were turned on. At night the stars were diamond bright, the wind indolent and gentle. In the ambient heat it was strange not to hear the humming of cicadas and only the throbbing of the engines as we steamed along.

I saw my first school of flying fish and was astonished to see how little they were. I had expected them to resemble creatures from a medieval bestiary, to be as big as marlin, with great wing fins, and I was a bit disappointed to see instead how modern and utilitarian they looked, unlike either bird or fish, more like small aluminum rockets skimming across the sea toward the dark line of the horizon. Yet I could watch them endlessly. Isolated in a world where we were always in the center of a floor of water beneath the radiant emptiness of the sky, any sign of life in the surrounding void produced a trancelike state of wondering contemplation. With the same musing concentration of someone watching a pot of water and waiting for it to come to a boil, I would gaze out at the puff of smoke or the glimmer of lights of a distant ship, or stare at a lone black frigate bird until it disappeared, a thousand miles from land, gliding and swooping in the wind. Five days before we reached Manila, I saw a tropic bird of almost enameled whiteness, with two extraordinarily long yellow tail feathers, and that night, for the first time, I saw the four stars of the Southern Cross.

The night before we were to arrive in Manila, I hardly slept at all, and by five-thirty I was up and looking out the porthole.

*   *   *

The rim of the porthole smelled of salt and brass polish. There was no land in sight.

Are we in Manila yet? Kippy asked in a soft voice.

In the early morning his voice was always soft, his eyes gentle, his gestures leisurely. I loved Kippy especially in the morning. It was the only time of day when his whole being was as flowing and artless as a curve. In an hour or so he would tauten to tense angularity, and by noon he would be transformed into a flying wedge, charged with curiosity, bristling with energy, a missile that more than likely I would feel like dodging.

Are we there yet?

No, I said, tugging a comb through my hair. Mind you don’t step on the suitcase. I’ve just got everything straightened out.

Kippy mumbled about and said I had packed his belt and that his pants wouldn’t stay up without it. I discovered I had also packed my sneakers, and had to drag forth one of the strapped suitcases, unlock it and burrow through three layers of tissue paper and belongings before I found them. And then another search to dig up Kippy’s belt. I relocked the suitcase, tucked Kippy’s shirt temporarily in his trousers and mislaid the luggage keys several times before we were ready to go down to breakfast.

Miss Slater, looking more like a myopic squirrel than ever, was the only other passenger still eating. She nodded good morning and continued chewing rhythmically on a piece of buttered toast.

I tried to be calm and promptly upset my coffee cup.

Mike glanced over from the officers’ table. Guess you have channel fever, he said, grinning. He explained to Kippy that channel fever had nothing to do with being sick. It’s a nice feeling, he said. Sort of like waiting for your birthday to come.

Miss Slater pushed her chair back scrapingly and nearly collided with José, who was bringing me a fresh cup of coffee.

Salamat po, Kippy shrilled.

José beamed. That’s a smart boy, that kid.

Ah, he’s my pal, Mike said. Hey, Kip, tell Joe how you say pretty girl.

Magandang dalaga, Kippy said. Ini ibi kita, he added.

José rolled his eyes in mock astonishment. Mike winked at me. See? Pretty girl and he loves her. Kip’ll be all right. Kip can keep me company in the radio shack any time.

Kippy looked at Mike with adoration.

At eight o’clock Johnny came down from the watch and slid into place. Kippy reported that I had channel fever. Oh, that. Johnny smiled. Two eggs over easy, Joe. He shook out his napkin with a flap and spread it over his knees. Channel fever, hey? You should’ve seen how steamed up I was on my first trip around. But hell, after ten years, one port’s the same as another. He shrugged. Manila’s just another cargo to work. He began to discuss stevedores with Mike.

The Captain strode into the saloon, and Kippy and he went into their cigarette routine. I felt a little left out, alone in my jitters and excitement.

Before going on deck, I looked once more at the wardroom chart. The route of the day before had been inked in. Now where were we? It was only eight-fifteen. Hours yet before we were scheduled to dock. Dishes rattled in the pantry. Someone down the passageway was stropping a Rolls Razor. A murmur of conversation came from the saloon. An aria from Madame Butterfly trilled from Dick’s gramophone. The minutes seemed to be passing in slow motion.

I was still staring at the chart when Johnny strolled along and explained that we had passed Cape Bolinao and Palauig Point the night before and were now nearing the Scarface Islands, which we would be passing any minute off to port. He started to walk away and then turned suddenly. Hey, he said gruffly. I didn’t mean to be a wet blanket this morning. It’s really great to see someone all hopped up about coming into port. I wish to hell this was my first taste of the old East. Off he went with his sailor’s angling gait. Half way down the passageway he stopped. Good luck, kid, he called over his shoulder.

I went out on deck. At first I could see nothing but the South China Sea, calmer and greener than it had been earlier. Then a rocky cluster of islands appeared almost magically out of the haze. Craggy and barren, bearded with sooty scrub, the mountains somberly surveyed the sea, a scarf cloud suspended over the highest peak accentuating their jutting harshness. Far away, on a narrow spit of land, I could see a lighthouse, a shining white cube which was blocked from view when a rusty red and black cargo ship steamed by, its Plimsoll mark high off the water. As we sailed closer inshore, land appeared on the starboard side as well. The haze lifted and Bataan Peninsula came as a surprise. All of a sudden there was land—substantial hills, thickly wooded, looking extravagantly green after three weeks at sea.

Crested combers rolled sensuously toward the shore and broke over black rocks in a delicate shower of foam and spray. Beyond, on the astonishingly vivid island slopes, I could see tousled palms and marshy rice fields and sugar-cane plantations, and across the land a sprinkling of pale and tiny thatch huts.

The sounding lead swung past me in a silver arc.

The purser passed out red pasteboard landing tickets.

Kippy tugged me from the rail to go below for lunch.

*   *   *

Just after lunch the engines stopped, a launch swung alongside, and the pilot, immigration officer and quarantine inspector came aboard. The examination of visas, health certificates and passports was reassuringly simple. We started to move toward Manila Bay.

Across the harbor, Manila was a long low sweep of red-roofed white buildings. The water was a brilliant emerald and clouds were outlined like steel in a cobalt-blue sky. Launches and tugs swirled around us. The hulls of foundered Japanese and American battleships pierced the water to thrust their rigging at us like bayonets. The passengers were now all out on deck.

We drifted slowly past the breakwater. Windrift and garbage floated by. It was half past five by the customs clock tower when the Madison eased into its berth, flanked by the Straat Makassar, a Dutch passenger ship, and a Pacific Far East Line freighter with an Indian bear trade-mark on its funnel. On either side of us, smokestacks stretched in an erratic line as far as I could see. Plank shacks, tilting recklessly, perched on the sterns of the loading barges. Through the door of one of them I could see a mother suckling her baby, while two children in magenta polo shirts played tag around a flapping clothes line.

A friend of James’s, Paul Wood, a lean, gray-haired man with an air of authority, bustled Kippy and me down the gangway and through customs. Then Kippy and I were whisked into a limousine with white linen seat covers and driven off to a hotel furnished with all the comforts air conditioning, modern plumbing and functional furniture provide. I suppose the knowledge that American culture had been firmly rooted in the Philippines for over fifty years should have prepared me for this, but such was not the case, and I felt rather let down to have the doors shut so suddenly on my first glimpse of the East.

Paul treated us to a dinner of local specialties—lapu-lapu fish swimming in a sweet and sour sauce of pimientos, onions and green peppers; roast suckling pig garlanded with hibiscus; rum-soaked pineapple—I was certain Kippy would have nightmares all night, but he didn’t.

*   *   *

The following morning, after breakfasting on coffee so permeated with chicory that I had to drink water instead (It is boiled, isn’t it?), and fresh unseeded papaya which I naïvely mistook for a slice of cantaloupe spread with large-grained caviar, Kippy and I set off to see what we could of Manila.

As we wandered along colonnaded streets lined with doorless shops in a city which otherwise seemed structurally like most Western cities, vendors jogged after us rattling trays of shoelaces, candy, cough drops and combs. Child beggars, many no older than Kippy, coaxed and wheedled and reached after us with curving hands, looking at us beseechingly, their eyes luminous, large and dark, like the eyes of young animals, with only the faintest trace of white beyond the iris.

The streets were crowded with people whose skin tones ranged from shades of creamy bister and buff to cinnamon, bronze and raisin color. There were Chinese women with hair so neatly arranged that it seemed glazed to their heads. There were picture-book Indians wearing geranium-pink turbans and Malays wearing velvet fezzes. And there were many Europeans—a term which outside America and Europe is applied indiscriminately to all whites.

Four small boys, as darkly handsome as Murillo gamins, top-heavy with shining black hair, squatted in a circle on the sidewalk playing dice, looking as if they would be engulfed by the crowd, but the crowd surged up to them, parted infinitesimally, passed them, and closed together again.

I spied some bolts of piña cloth in a shopwindow. The cloth was lovely stuff, made from pineapple fiber, filmy and woven with complex and delicate designs, and I bought enough of it for a dress.

Why didn’t you bargain, Mummy? Kippy asked. Johnny said you should never buy anything without bargaining first. The salesgirl smiled thinly. For the purchaser’s lagniappe, customary in the East, Kippy was given a miniature

Reviews for Give Me the World

[dramman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Autobiographical account of a Round The World trip in the 1950's by a woman and her small child - best for the chapters about passage on the Schooner California, crewed by four ex US Navy men.

[cestovatela · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Newly divorced Audrey Hepburn lookalike Leila Hadley packs up her 4-year-old son and extensive wardrobe for a journey around Southeast Asia. It's a daring choice for a woman in the 1950s, but Hadley views herself as a person doing what her heart wants, not a feminist crusader. It's not long before she's talked her way onto a small boat crewed by Navy veterans on a round-the-world voyage. Hadley is a vivid, perceptive and adventurous writer and this is one of my all-time favorite travel books.