Across America, 1941

We went via Toronto, where we spent a day looking at the museum, in which the Sturge collection left by our great-uncle of Greek flints is kept. I remember I had a particularly bad migraine in the hotel there, so much so that my mother left me till the very end before packing the bags and calling the bellboy, and when he came into the room he thought I looked so ill that he kept urging her to wake me, because he quite obviously thought that they planned to leave a corpse in the bedroom! From Toronto we caught the train to Chicago where we changed over onto the American [Union] Pacific Line, and spent the next three and a half days on the train travelling west to the Rockies. We passed through arid desert land, all the Mid-West states, before finally arriving at the Rockies themselves, which we saw only briefly as it was night-time when we passed through.

Our sojourn on the train was entirely paid for out of our meagre allocation of dollars, so we had to eat just one meal a day in the restaurant car, and the other meals out of plastic plates in the compartments, usually corn flakes and milk which we could buy on the train. The American passengers took pity on us, and took to treating us to nice meals from time to time. Also the restaurant car attendant was very kind and allowed us to have the children's priced meal but adult helpings so that at least we got one good solid meal a day. Our mother as usual charmed all the other passengers with her amusing stories and anecdotes and was soon accepted as one of the group who met in the observation car situated at the back of the train, which had the scenic views of the mountains as we wound our way through to the coast.

When we arrived at the other end in San Francisco we found to our horror that we had two more days to spend before we could go on board ship, when my mother would be able to cash a cheque. We were fast running out of our resources and we had only 10 dollars left. We asked the taxi driver to take us to a respectable hotel, and went up to the manager with her 10 dollar note and explained our situation, and that this was all we had to last us until we could board the ship in 48 hours. He immediately allowed us to have two double bedrooms with an interconnecting bathroom. We had to take our meals a la carte, which meant that we could eat coffee and rolls for breakfast, and grapes, which were the only things that were really cheap, for the rest of the day. We also took a journey across the Golden Gate bridge of San Francisco, on a tram. This was our sole diversion while in San Francisco because of the lack of money.