We spent our honeymoon driving
like bats from San Francisco up to Ft. Lewis, Washington so that Ox could
participate in a military exercise.
After eight weeks, the exercise was cut short because of the Cuban
missile crisis; we returned to Monterey, California.
In Monterey we found a furnished
board-and-batten cottage with a large stone fireplace at 405 Congress
Street. It was two blocks from the sea. After a year of marriage, the Army
put Ox on orders for a three year posting at a small NATO agency in London’s Belgravia.
We were given our choice of flying to
England or taking a ship. We chose the ship. The S.S. America was one of those grand old
passenger ships that plied between New York and Europe. We had pleasant small quarters below decks and we had a grand time on the ocean
trip.
When we arrived in England, a plump, dogmatic U.S. Air Force Captain and his plump, dogmatic wife met us. They drove us to the Parkhurst Hotel on the Bayswater side of Hyde Park. The Parkhurst was a small, comfortable, grubby, second-class hotel with small windows facing Hyde Park. After a good night’s sleep, Ox consulted his map, drank his coffee, and walked across the park and around to Sloane Square, where his new office was on Chesham Place.
When we arrived in England, a plump, dogmatic U.S. Air Force Captain and his plump, dogmatic wife met us. They drove us to the Parkhurst Hotel on the Bayswater side of Hyde Park. The Parkhurst was a small, comfortable, grubby, second-class hotel with small windows facing Hyde Park. After a good night’s sleep, Ox consulted his map, drank his coffee, and walked across the park and around to Sloane Square, where his new office was on Chesham Place.
Ox had the good luck to work for an outfit with
mostly English and other European officers and staff. The officers and staff did not wear uniforms. Ox’s organization occupied a building that rumor
said had been Somerset Maugham’s house; it was a grand sort of townhouse.
Very soon after our arrival in England and while we still had the room with the T.V., the Profumo scandal broke. John Profumo was England’s Secretary of State for War. He had met a party girl, Christine Keeler, at a party at Lord Astor’s Cliveden, and started a brief affair with her. Stephen Ward, a disreputable osteopath and party-arranger to the rich, had introduced Profumo and Keeler. Keeler earlier had had extended affairs with men on the outskirts of crime and had an ongoing close friendship with Eugeny Ivanov, a senior Russian naval attaché. Profumo lied to the House of Commons about his relationship with Keeler. When his lie was exposed, he resigned as Secretary of State for War. Because of our prurient interest in the Profumo affair, Ox and I quickly learned the qualities of English newspapers. Every Sunday morning I’d buy 5 or 6 newspapers at the newsagents. We would spend much of the day reading, comparing and quoting from them.
We enjoyed doing the puzzles in several of
the quieter papers. We’d argue about the
solutions, but rarely remembered to check the answers in the next week’s paper
unless the argument had been heated.
Eventually we bought a wonderful used book, Mathematics for All,
a grand source for math information, which helped us solve the trickier
puzzles. The flyleaf still bears the penciled
6/- (price six shillings). We usually
got the Daily Mail or the Sun for sensational news, and always got quieter
papers like the Guardian, the Times and the Telegraph for a more balanced look
at the world as well as the ongoing Profumo affair. We continued getting a variety of Sunday
papers long after poor old Profumo was forgotten and was doing good works among
London’s poor. While stopping at the
Parkhurst, we walked past a placard for a furnished upstairs apartment on
Gloucester Terrace and, after inspection, took the place. We were, by then, glad to lose the television
set.
We conceived Betsy in 1963, in our
apartment on Gloucester Terrace, Bayswater, London W2. It had been a grand regency town house in its
youth, and was then part of an exciting and energetic slum. The Mr. Whippy ice cream truck tinkled by
every afternoon, followed by hoards of children. Every afternoon around rush hour, at the
corner, automobiles hit each other and the apartments of Gloucester Terrace
disgorged their people to gawp. (I was
too hoity-toity and too cowardly to gawp, except from our bay window behind
sheer curtains.) The Bobbies patrolled
in pairs in our neighborhood, as did the prostitutes.
Ox walked across Hyde Park to his
NATO office in Belgravia, near Sloane Square, each morning and back each night. We frequently walked along the serpentine on
beautiful evenings. We enjoyed listening
to the wide variety of harangues at Hyde Park Corner. Ox and I walked everywhere in London, the
pedestrian’s city. When we didn’t walk,
we took the tube (underground); the tube station was a couple of blocks away
from our apartment. We saw the tourist
sites in the city and off-the-track pubs and restaurants.
I salivated when we found a
restaurant called “Wimpey’s”, which advertised American-style hamburgers; I
hankered for one. The burgers were
disgusting. They were flat greasy
squares of gray meat between stale white buns without condiment; they were viler
than any American fast food available at that time! A teashop chain called Lyons offered very
cheap and dull food with cups of tea. More
often than not, however, we’d eat at pubs.
We explored London by foot and
tube. While Ox was at work, I wandered
about London and rode the underground, taking in the flavor and differences in
the English culture. I became addicted
to used-book shops.
Our second floor Gloucester Terrace apartment had lofty ceilings and two large rooms, the living room and the bedroom. Both rooms had bay windows. The living room had competing patterns of large-scale wild green floral wallpaper, wild clashing maroon and gold acanthus leaf carpeting, and ugly beige tile surround to the small electric fire. The living room carpeting continued into the bedroom, that, however, had more peaceful wallpaper. Large white double doors led from the living room to a small hallway. The flat’s entrance door from the stairs fronted this hallway and doors to the tiny and primitive kitchen and bathroom were across the hall. One night we heard a key open the door to our flat, then the bathroom door opened, the toilet flushed, and the front door closed. Ox got up to investigate. He found the toilet tank still filling and the front door locked. This was our sole brush with the supernatural while we were in England.
Our second floor Gloucester Terrace apartment had lofty ceilings and two large rooms, the living room and the bedroom. Both rooms had bay windows. The living room had competing patterns of large-scale wild green floral wallpaper, wild clashing maroon and gold acanthus leaf carpeting, and ugly beige tile surround to the small electric fire. The living room carpeting continued into the bedroom, that, however, had more peaceful wallpaper. Large white double doors led from the living room to a small hallway. The flat’s entrance door from the stairs fronted this hallway and doors to the tiny and primitive kitchen and bathroom were across the hall. One night we heard a key open the door to our flat, then the bathroom door opened, the toilet flushed, and the front door closed. Ox got up to investigate. He found the toilet tank still filling and the front door locked. This was our sole brush with the supernatural while we were in England.
At this time, London was becoming
the focus of the fashion world. On Kings
Road, designers invented such startling fashion enhancements as mini-skirts; I
admired them but didn’t wear one until some years later. Vidal Sassoon invented beautiful geometric
haircuts on models with straight hair.
Twiggy, a London model, was the first anorexic model I’d ever seen.
Nearby, on Portobello Road one could buy anything from cabbages to antiques. My great souvenir of the London years was a small battered wooden pepper mill from a barrow on Portobello Road. I enjoyed the requisite bargaining for the thing. I refinished it and still have it.
Ox came home from work whenever he was ready. One evening he was much later than usual. He told me that he had found himself in the midst of a huge and loud mob of adolescent and pre-adolescent girls. The Bobbies had eyed him suspiciously. As he extricated himself from this mob, a passerby told him the mob was there to see the Beatles.
Nearby, on Portobello Road one could buy anything from cabbages to antiques. My great souvenir of the London years was a small battered wooden pepper mill from a barrow on Portobello Road. I enjoyed the requisite bargaining for the thing. I refinished it and still have it.
Ox came home from work whenever he was ready. One evening he was much later than usual. He told me that he had found himself in the midst of a huge and loud mob of adolescent and pre-adolescent girls. The Bobbies had eyed him suspiciously. As he extricated himself from this mob, a passerby told him the mob was there to see the Beatles.
Our landlady was nervous and wanted
to be thought respectable. She
eventually complained that washing our dishes in our apartment kitchen – right
above her bedroom - after one in the morning - kept her awake. Faced with this unreasonable complaint, Ox
and I decided to move.
Shortly after we made the
decision, Uncle Owl came to visit. The
romantic Owl, as a reaction to disappointment in love and because it was easier
than joining the French Foreign Legion or jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge,
had enlisted in the Army. Because he was
bright, the Army trained Owl to grind lenses for glasses and sent him to Kaiserslaughten,
Germany. Owl hated lenses, the Army and
Germany. Lens grinding in Germany was
too far from the cruel desert sun, winds and sands. Owl and Ox had a night on the town. They came home and continued drinking our
best brandy. Owl noticed a woman in the
second story window across the street.
He leaned out the bay window and started shouting across the street. He was slurring his words badly. I, in the bedroom, jerked Ox’s arm, hissing,
“You’ve got to stop him! You’ve got to
stop him! Fortunately Owl passed out
before the Bobbies walked
by that night.
After we didn’t apply to rent
many furnished apartments that advertised “Europeans only”, we found an
attractively furnished upstairs of a duplex at 95 Mortlake Road in Kew. I’m very glad that we didn’t know that
“Europeans only” was code for whites only; toward the end of our search, we
might have been tempted to try to rent one of those.
The flat we took was a bright and airy second
story apartment in a duplex. It was
furnished with true red rugs, ultramarine blue upholstered sofa and armchair,
and fragile William and Mary dining chairs, table and sideboard. The famed Kew Gardens was a mile away from
our house. Our landlord was Maura
Patron, a sleek Irish redhead. She’d
bought and furnished the house as an investment. Her spouse, John Patron, was a barrister and a
magistrate’s clerk (legal advisor) at the Bow Street Magistrates Court. They both told funny stories, his
illustrating the vagaries of the law. John
said that he would be responsible for the gardening of the downstairs back lawn.
Our front lawn was a double driveway.
Kew had a tiny supermarket, a
Sainsbury’s, one and one half miles from our house. We had a small pre-Sainsbury’s size
refrigerator, the height of the kitchen counter. Each day I would push my basket on wheels to
downtown Kew, where the greengrocer, the baker and the butcher held forth, and
shop for the day’s meals. There was also a “variety shop”; it sold mostly
fabrics, sewing notions, wools, hair-pins and other miscellany. The hardware shop, or ironmongers, was across
the tube station, a block further on.
[Our towel bars kept falling from the wall; it took several weeks before
the ironmongers figured out what we meant, with the aid of a diagram, when we
asked for a toggle bolt. Before the
Molly bolt diagram the ironmonger kept assuring me “You can’t screw screws into
plarster!”]
I took Ox’s shirts and our
tablecloth and napkins a mile south to the Kew laundry, which inked a letter Q
on all the hems. When I see the Q on the
hems today, I still suffer nostalgia attacks.
Once an American man rushed into the Laundry and asked the clerk and me
“How can I tell an Englishman from an American?”
I blurted that English people
tended to walk with their feet splayed and Americans tended to walk with their
feet parallel. I have always since
wondered why the American wanted to know so urgently.
Our apartment had amenities. It had an electric fire for the living room,
and another that we could carry around our flat wherever we needed warmth. The living room electric fire sat on a hearth
in front of a cemented-in fireplace with a plain grey marble mantelpiece of
simple, elegant lines. [The English had
created smoke-free zones in London to clear the air; coal and wood fires were
no longer allowed. As a result of that
law, and of some scrubbing of old buildings, Londoners discovered that many
landmark buildings were bright and beautiful rather than sooty black.] The water heater was an on-demand geyser in
the room with the bathtub. The geyser
took up about three square feet of space in front of the bathtub. The toilet was in a separate room. The bathroom geyser and separate toilet are plumbing
enhancements I still covet.
The kitchen had been a largish
bedroom. It was papered in yellow roses;
it had a full sized stove, the tiny fridge, a sink and some cupboards. We had use of the back yard, which the
landlord mowed a few times while we lived in the house. The garden, grass gone to seed, was one of
those English suburban long narrow rectangles surrounded by tall wooden fencing
on three sides with a gate to the area where the dustbin was kept.
The house had no washing machine or
dryer. I put our laundry in our wheeled
basket and took it on the bus to the nearest Laundromat, next to the Brentford
Gas Works. I was slow to learn the
Laundromat’s unspoken rule that the customer could only use the dryer once so
that other people could dry their clothes.
It was O.K. to use the dryer again after everyone on hand had a
turn. It was there, while waiting for my
turn to dry a second time, that a dear old stick of a man explained to me, in
minute detail, the rules and strategies of cricket. Other launderers stuck in their oars (or
bats) from time to time.
My brother Jack married his dear
Rauna in June of 1963, in her hometown, Helsinki, Finland. My parents and Polly went to the wedding and
Daddy said he’d pay for my lodgings if I could go. I went without Ox. Polly and I shared a room. Our spacious hotel room had thick white
walls and a high ceiling, with gilded trim around the ceiling.
The windows were double-glazed, with a foot between the glass panes.
Rauna’s grandmother was a grand old dowager who
had brought up Juha, Rauna’s younger brother, and Rauna after their mother
died. Rauna’s father
had died in 1944.
Juha and Rauna showed us around Helsinki. Helsinki, on the shore of the
Gulf of Finland, was a clean and sparkling city. Rauna's Grandmother met with us several times. Rauna and Jack’s first, legal, wedding was in
the office of the mayor of Helsinki. It
was conducted in French as a language common to Rauna, Jack and the mayor. French wasn't very common to the mayor, who read from a script. Jack had difficulty deciphering the mayor's Finnish-accented French. When the mayor paused and looked at Jack,
Jack replied “oui”. Jack thought that he
and Rauna were married; the real marriage, however, only happened after the
church wedding the next day. For that
wedding too, Rauna was a beautiful bride.
She wore Hilly von Laue’s long, simple wedding dress. (Rauna wrote me later that our mother had altered the dress to fit. In a picture of Hilly's wedding to Theo, the dress had a modest lace insert that didn't make it to Rauna. Rauna said that she would have liked to wear the insert.) The dress was too short to fit one of Hilly's daughters and the other didn't marry; Rauna was the last to wear it. The church was beautiful too, and the
music. After the wedding, we ate a wedding lunch with Rauna's family friends at a local hotel. I returned to Kew, and Polly and my parents went on to a tour of Russia.
Once we settled in Kew, we
subscribed to three or four daily and Sunday newspapers. Ox found himself unable to part with these
once read, and piled them against the fireplace wall; the next winter the wall
of newspapers provided excellent insulation.
We were given a ride to a rare
office party in the city by an English Major and his wife who lived nearby. The major asked as we got in the car if we
had heard that John Kennedy had been shot.
Because no president in my lifetime had been shot I didn’t believe
it. I flippantly asked, “What’s the
punch line”?
The car radio reported that the President had died. Up to that night, I had only ever heard about South American assassinations. The news of Kennedy’s death depressed us all, and the party folded in short order.
The car radio reported that the President had died. Up to that night, I had only ever heard about South American assassinations. The news of Kennedy’s death depressed us all, and the party folded in short order.
I, with a strong need to cherish
somebody else, wanted a dog. The new
landlord was happy for us to have one. I
traveled by underground to Battersea Dog’s Home and adopted a charming bitch we
named Frannie after my mother. She slept
in our spare bedroom. The day after we
got Frannie, she had several seizures. These became more frequent during
the week. When we took Frannie to the
vet, he asked to keep her overnight.
I had been growing thick waisted
and sleepy and my doctor had taken blood and urine. The vet told me one morning that Frannie
should be killed because she had distemper.
That same morning the doctor told me by phone that I was pregnant. I took the tube and walked to an office party
at Chesham Place with a safety pin holding my skirt together and tears coursing
down my face, my emotional elevators cycled madly.
I acquired many useful used books
after I knew I was pregnant, including the terrifying Pædiatric Nursing,
the source of a few nightmares. Pædiatric
Nursing had pictures of all possible sick and damaged babies, and some of
the more draconian fixes for them.
In the months before Betsy was
born, we fixed up the small bedroom next to ours, which we had used as a box
room, to be the new baby’s bedroom. This
bedroom had a large storage cupboard about three feet off the ground where we
put the tiny clothes and diapers for the baby.
We hung light yellow striped curtains at the window and bought an
Italian oil-filled electric heater with a thermostat, which warmed the small
space very well. We found a swinging
cradle for the baby’s bed.
Our medical needs were taken care
of at the USAF station hospital at South Ruislip, a half-hour tube ride
away. I had a friend who’d had a baby
easily with the help of Grantly Dick Read’s natural childbirth method. I looked around for support for natural
childbirth and stumbled upon a book about
the Lamaze method of having babies. I found a local Lamaze class. The Lamaze method improved on the Read method
by providing relaxation and breathing exercises in addition to cheer-leading. Each time I went to Ruislip on a pre-natal
visit, I told the always new to me Doctor that I intended to have my baby without
anesthesia. Always they replied words to
the effect of “There, there, don’t worry your little head about it; we’ll see
when the time comes”. I felt passionate
about the issue. I wanted what was best
for the baby.
In those days, it was well known
that it was unhealthy for the baby when a pregnant woman gained too much
weight. The doctors gave me a specific menu,
which I followed to the letter, except that after weighing in at a doctor
visit, I’d cheat with a square of lemon-frosted lemon cake at the PX snack
bar. I remember best about my printed
diet that one suppertime I was required to down 2 cups of green beans, a feat I
have never replicated. Because of the
diet, I weighed the same the week after Betsy was born as I weighed the night we
conceived her.
My mother sent me a bunch of
snazzy maternity tents as soon as I wrote her the news. I was so proud to be pregnant that I wore
those tents a month and a half before I really looked pregnant. I found myself sticking out my belly to look
more pregnant. The pregnancy went smoothly. I was occasionally queasy in the evening and
always sleepy. I attended Lamaze classes
religiously and became an advocate of natural childbirth. Towards the end of pregnancy, I visited the
doctors weekly – Ox was Rh+ and I, negative.
This was about a year before Rhogam, which kept the mother from forming antibodies
against Rh+ blood, was discovered. Though it
wasn’t of great concern for a first baby, my antibodies against Ox’s blood
needed monitoring lest the antibodies damage the fetus.
I had taken an adult education portrait
painting course in Richmond, a tube stop away from home; I hadn’t painted since
college. The teacher worked at getting
us a variety of ages, genders and races as models. I enjoyed the course very much. I have pronounced been “bean”, and again
“agayne” ever since our cousins Ros and Gordon came to live with us for a while
after World War II. I had to defend the
pronunciations during elementary school.
One of the male painting students said my pronunciations were
provincial. Having used them most of my
life, and having defended them in elementary school, I continued as I always
had and remained quite happily provincial.
My father’s half-sister, Aunt
Elsie, who had been the first woman mayor in England, lived in a charming
cottage in Richmond. This was a long walk from our place on Mortlake Road. Aunt Elsie was short, stooped, thin, old and
very kind. Elsie had had a long and
happy marriage with Joseph Simpson. She
still wore her hair in long thin gray braids coiled around her ears and she
still wore cloche hats because Joseph had liked the way she looked in these
fashions. Elsie lived with her stepdaughter
Nancy who was a solid, tall, intelligent woman much involved with Dr.
Bernardo’s Homes for Children. Elsie
spent her time baking cakes for, and visiting, the old men in the Star and Garter
old soldier’s home. Elsie taught me to
make omelets. Because I was pregnant,
she often fetched footstools for me and advised me to put my feet up.
Elsie introduced us to her
American ex-pat friend Dot, who had probably worked for the OSS during the war,
and who had stayed on in London after the war. Dot had us all to dinner along with my Australian
Aunt Meg Wood and cousin Patrick, darling, Meg’s spoiled adult son who were
visiting Elsie at the time. I had a
dislike of Patrick dating from the time, not long after the war, that Meg
visited us in California with him. He
was a fat little boy on stick legs who whined all the time when he wasn’t
extorting his Mama some other way. In
our hearing, he bossily demanded of his mother, obviously not quoting the movie, “Mama, Peel me a grape!” She did! Dot entertained the party guests
by showing us how to pick locks, a skill Ox had begun to develop in high
school.
Our greengrocer was a large,
friendly Cockney woman, who asked personal questions without
embarrassment. She used the information
when she introduced me to people who became my some of my good friends in
England. I was very lonely when we first
moved to Kew. The grocer called her
customers ‘Lovey’, and ‘Ducks’, a custom that warmed and charmed me. I was fond of friends the grocer had
introduced to me: Carol Watson, who had two daughters, and Robin, a New Zealander who lived with her
husband and her baby Felicity in a small house built in the 1600s. Carol Watson was about as short as a
twelve-year old. Her husband, John, did
the graphics for the Beatles, Monty Python and other BBC productions. These were witty and often slightly risqué. Carol had two daughters, Chastity, about three, and Felicity, one and a half. Carol told of the time that she answered the
door to a candidate for office. Carol
had Felicity, a huge baby, on her hip.
The candidate handed her a pamphlet and asked to speak with the woman of
the house. Carol said, “I am the woman of the house.” The candidate turned maroon and
fled.
Robin and Graham Wilson, the New
Zealanders, lived half a mile down Mortlake Road and down an alley. They rented a Tudor cottage, a dependency of
a larger house with a large garden.
Robin had a baby girl, whose pram was very grand – an item of pride in
England at the time. Robin and Graham
had Ox and me to dinner one fall night. Graham told us the story of the American
Army officer who was invited to a pig-stick in New Zealand. The officer amused his hosts by bringing his Tommy
gun as a weapon. Graham explained
sardonically that the object of a pig stick was to leap on the boar’s back and kill
it with a dagger.
When I was 8 months pregnant I
said to Ox “It’s a shame we don’t have a costume party in the works.”’
Ox replied, “I see you as a beach
ball.” So he transformed me. I gathered seldom-used lipstick, eye shadow,
eye pencil and Ox drew a dandy beach ball on my belly, Betsy provided moving
lumps on the ball’s surface. We were amused. I had forgotten, however, that I had an
appointment at South Ruislip the next day.
That night in the bath, I scrubbed the remains of the beach ball in the
bath with a soapy fingernail brush, and then with bleach powder. The saturated colors of the beach-ball were
bleached but not erased. The next
morning the obstetrician had a peculiar expression on his face as he examined
me, but he tactfully refrained from comment.
We chose Betsy’s name in a
sensible manner. Ox prioritized a list
of his favorite boy and girl names and I did the same. We then combined the names that matched and,
after discussion, prioritized the combined list. When my mother-in-law, Virginia Betton Burton,
demanded to know what we intended to name the baby, I wrote her that it would
be Francis Holyoke Burton, if a boy and Elizabeth Boyer Burton if a girl. She wrote back waspishly “Why Francis?”
I wrote her “I thought Francis
was the given name of your father” and something about Elisabeth. (I had not known that Frank could be a
stand-alone name.)
She wrote back that Ox’s
grandfather’s given name was Frank and then “Well, is it going to be Elizabeth
or Elisabeth; you’ve written it both ways”.
Piqued, I wrote back that we liked
Elisabeth. (I hadn’t realized that I’d
written Elisabeth two ways, but I liked the way Elisabeth looked on the paper;
I heartily disliked the nickname Lizzy; and I hoped that Virginia would be
annoyed by the “s”.)
Throughout the pregnancy I
secretly hoped for a boy, although I always said “…as long as it’s healthy . . .”
Shortly before Betsy was due, at about eight and one half months of pregnancy, Ox and I took a last vacation before the baby complicated taking vacations. I looked on a map to find a place on the ocean and on a rail line. Worthing was on the rail and looked like a good place. I booked two seats on the train and a room at a hotel by the ocean for a week. The train was one of those delightful English trains that had rooms and corridors. When we arrived in Worthing, we saw many old people. Worthing turned out to be a resort that catered especially to ancient and infirm people. Our hotel fee included breakfast. We walked into the dining room the morning after we arrived. The thin gray waitress with permed curls said, as she showed us to our table, “We’ve put you with the other young people”. The other young people were a newly married couple on their honeymoon.
Shortly before Betsy was due, at about eight and one half months of pregnancy, Ox and I took a last vacation before the baby complicated taking vacations. I looked on a map to find a place on the ocean and on a rail line. Worthing was on the rail and looked like a good place. I booked two seats on the train and a room at a hotel by the ocean for a week. The train was one of those delightful English trains that had rooms and corridors. When we arrived in Worthing, we saw many old people. Worthing turned out to be a resort that catered especially to ancient and infirm people. Our hotel fee included breakfast. We walked into the dining room the morning after we arrived. The thin gray waitress with permed curls said, as she showed us to our table, “We’ve put you with the other young people”. The other young people were a newly married couple on their honeymoon.
The waitress announced, “For the first course, we have orange juice,
cornflakes or prunes.”
It was clear from her inflection
that prunes was the class solution. We
chose orange juice. The nice young
couple made polite conversation, but were mostly interested in each other.
We walked for miles along the
stony beaches and boardwalk of this cold, gray, foggy town. I came to appreciate the foggy
landscape. We could see the stony beach
from our window. When a wave came up the
surf went plash, rattle, rattle, rattle.
When a wave went down the surf went rattle, rattle, rattle, even at
night. The high point of our week was a
practice rescue run the Royal National Lifeboat Rescue workers made. The practice involved boats, helicopters, and
an empty boat. We watched from our room
for hours.
I had made an appointment to have
my hair done at Vidal Sassoon’s salon the week before Betsy was due. I was feeling like a whale at this point and
very much wanted to feel pretty. The
hairdresser, one of Sassoon’s acolytes, did a grand job of making me feel
elegant, piling my hair on top of my head.
This was the only haircut I got in England. I was surprised and delighted that the
hairdressers served the customers coffee.
I had planned, on the birth-day,
to travel to South Ruislip on the tube.
Ox, however, wanted a car. He
found and bought a relatively inexpensive and very sporty red Triumph
convertible about a week before the birth.
It was a very satisfying automobile.
Betsy was two weeks tardy. July 28, the night before Betsy would start
to make her appearance; Ox gave me a ride to the Laundromat in Brentford in the
new Triumph. It was late enough at night
that the Laundromat was deserted. I washed the dirty clothes, and, without
guilt, dried them until they were entirely dry.
I’d arranged with Ox to pick me up in two hours. As I sat reading and waiting, a Bobby came
into the Laundromat and asked what I was doing.
I explained that the baby was due in the next few days and that I wanted
our clothing, sheets and towels to be clean for the event. I reassured him that my husband was due to
pick me up within the next half hour. As
he left he said, “Well, if it’s a boy you could call him Paddy, after me. Paddy’s short for Patrick”.
The day before Betsy was born I
had “show"; I knew that the baby would come soon. Housewifeliness had overcome me the day
before that, and it continued that day. I scrubbed the bathroom, and vacuumed
and dusted, and picked up Ox’s shirts at the laundry, saying proudly, “I’m going
to have the baby today”.
I’d told Ox the baby might come today
as he went out the door to work. We’d read
that first babies could take hours or days to come out. He went to the office, asking me to
“telephone when things heat up”.
When he came home that night, I was having mild contractions. We played chess, and, for the first time in our married lives, I won. I’ve refused ever since to play chess with him. About 9:00 p.m., we packed up and drove to Ruislip. I continued to have stronger contractions. The obstetrician on duty that night, the new chief of obstetrics at Ruislip, was an Air Force doctor from Texas. I assertively told him that I intended to have this baby by the Lamaze method and that I had taken Lamaze classes. Instead of telling me not to worry my little head about it, he said, “A friend of my wife’s did that. She looks a lot like you. We’ll try it and see what happens.” The battle was won for a dismayingly unscientific reason.
When he came home that night, I was having mild contractions. We played chess, and, for the first time in our married lives, I won. I’ve refused ever since to play chess with him. About 9:00 p.m., we packed up and drove to Ruislip. I continued to have stronger contractions. The obstetrician on duty that night, the new chief of obstetrics at Ruislip, was an Air Force doctor from Texas. I assertively told him that I intended to have this baby by the Lamaze method and that I had taken Lamaze classes. Instead of telling me not to worry my little head about it, he said, “A friend of my wife’s did that. She looks a lot like you. We’ll try it and see what happens.” The battle was won for a dismayingly unscientific reason.
Once I’d been prepped for birth,
I reclined in the labor room. Ox and I
did our exercises. Ox rubbed my back,
fed me ice chips, and breathed with me.
The contractions got harder. Ox
read Wind in the Willows to me. I
started to get very uncomfortable and irritable, especially annoyed at a woman
in the delivery room who moaned and cried out periodically. I began to have a hateful and paranoid cast
of mind, thinking that the baby was ready to emerge and the Doctors weren’t
letting me have it because the woman next door was hogging the delivery room.
My obstetrician finally entered
the labor room. I said to him rudely, “Can we PLEASE get on with delivering
this baby.”
He looked surprised. He said “sure” as he wheeled my gurney into
the delivery room. He examined me and said,
“You can push now.”
I had told him earlier that I
wanted Ox to be there; he wasn’t too surprised when I said, “I’m waiting for Ox”.
Ox was gowned and masked and in
the room in no time at all, and I began to push. As I pushed, the doctor sang Home, Home on
the Range at the top of his lungs. I
made horrible loud grunts between the three pushes, explaining, “It’s not pain;
I’m just working”.
Betsy, then Elisabeth, popped out
at 7:00 am. They spanked her, cleaned the cheese off her and handed her to me. As soon as I held her, I realized that I’d really always wanted a girl. Then they whisked her away and put her behind
glass, like a cabbage. After I hugged Ox,
they whisked me off to the obstetrics ward, where I slept for ages.
The OB ward was full to the
plimsol mark with twelve women. For the
first time, women were sent home two and a half days after vaginal births; me
too. I had sewn a green sundress to wear
home, slimmer than my pre-pregnancy dresses as I had not gained weight. I barely fit the dress with my new large
breasts and my belly pouch – no one had warned me. A neighbor in the ward helped close the
zipper, I put on a sweater to hide the bulging zipper and we went home. I was a little scared of having charge of
this delicate 8 1/2 lb baby. When we got
home, I was tired, and sat on the blue sofa to nurse Betsy. Ox went to the kitchen to scramble eggs. He called from the kitchen, “Jennie, how do
you scramble eggs?”
Forgetting that he had been a
short-order cook just before college, I leapt into the breach. He held Betsy while I washed the dishes he’d
rinsed and stacked in my absence, and I scrambled the eggs. We ate and I went to bed.
Two days later, I sat on the
sofa, with Betsy on one side and a pile of clean, unfolded diapers on the
other. A stack of folded clean diapers
rested on the coffee table on a stack of magazines. The doorbell rang.
Ox went downstairs to answer the
door. Soon he appeared in the living
room doorway with a bemused expression, “The baby inspector is here.”
I had no idea what he meant. In England at that time, a visiting health nurse made a home visit to every newborn living in her district. This visit served the state to ensure that every baby had a suitable environment in which to thrive. The visiting nurse looked Betsy over. I feared that Betsy would starve because I was nursing and couldn’t measure her intake. The visiting nurse was encouraging about Betsy’s health. The nurse left information about a weekly free clinic in Kew, where parents could weigh and measure their infants and get free diaper crème when needed. This clinic kept women in touch with each other and out of isolation. The visiting nurse was an excellent investment by the state in the health and welfare of England’s children.
I had no idea what he meant. In England at that time, a visiting health nurse made a home visit to every newborn living in her district. This visit served the state to ensure that every baby had a suitable environment in which to thrive. The visiting nurse looked Betsy over. I feared that Betsy would starve because I was nursing and couldn’t measure her intake. The visiting nurse was encouraging about Betsy’s health. The nurse left information about a weekly free clinic in Kew, where parents could weigh and measure their infants and get free diaper crème when needed. This clinic kept women in touch with each other and out of isolation. The visiting nurse was an excellent investment by the state in the health and welfare of England’s children.
Betsy was a beautiful baby. She was chubby, and very pink and white. Her black hair soon fell out leaving her egg-bald. She was alert and smiled readily. Strangers in London and Kew often asked how
old my boy was though she wore mostly pink clothes. We bought a well-used pram that could be
lifted out of its frame to make a carry bed.
The grocer, the butcher, the baker all inhabited small stores that had
no room for prams; the custom was to leave the pram and baby outside the shop
yet visible from inside. At that time,
Dr Spock recommended that babies should sleep on their stomachs. The old English women knew better. I’d often dash out of the shops to keep some
dear old woman from un-strapping sleeping Betsy and turning her onto her back. Of course, it turned out that the old English
women knew better than Dr. Spock did, but Spock was my expert at the time. Spock also recommended beer for nursing
mothers. I took Dr. Spock’s advice with
gusto, to the detriment of my brain and waistline.
I made friends from the crew of women who regularly attended the well-baby clinic. Many of them had older children, and when they formed a play group, they invited Betsy and me. Betsy, who tended to be a watcher – a trait my father said demonstrated intelligence – watched the children interact with great interest. We met in member’s living rooms, with the babies in the middle poking and patting each other, and the older children playing on the periphery. I provided fresh coffee grounds from the PX, as coffee was scarce then, and was coming to be very popular.
I made friends from the crew of women who regularly attended the well-baby clinic. Many of them had older children, and when they formed a play group, they invited Betsy and me. Betsy, who tended to be a watcher – a trait my father said demonstrated intelligence – watched the children interact with great interest. We met in member’s living rooms, with the babies in the middle poking and patting each other, and the older children playing on the periphery. I provided fresh coffee grounds from the PX, as coffee was scarce then, and was coming to be very popular.
On my first visit with the pediatrician
at Ruislip, the doctor said, “This infant is obese! Stop nursing her! Give her skim milk!” I set great store by nursing and wasn’t about
to stop doing it. My friends from the playgroup
and the visiting nurse all advised me to just cut down on the nursing time, and
substitute a bottle of skim milk for a nursing session or two. I did this, and cut down on the beer too. On our next Ruislip visit, the doctor didn’t
comment on Betsy’s weight.
One of the playgroup mothers canvassed for the Liberal party for a coming election; I liked the Liberal party. One day we set out with our prams stuffed full of our babies and pamphlets. I happily handed out pamphlets with my friend. That night when Ox and I exchanged news of the day, I bragged about my foray into English politics. Ox was appalled. I had interfered in the politics of a foreign nation, something the Status of Forces agreement specifically prohibited. It took me years before I dared to do anything political again, even after we returned to the United States.
I was beginning to feel a little housebound. Ox volunteered to babysit once a week so that I could continue my painting class. I looked around our sparsely furnished flat and asked him if he would babysit while I took a woodworking class instead; I felt that we really didn’t need many portraits of strangers. The class was taught by a cabinetmaker and perfectionist. It was very well taught and I became focused on learning to do woodworking. The teacher did not much like teaching a woman, but he taught me anyway. I subscribed to Woodworking magazine for several years after the class ended.
Every year since, I have been grateful that I had that class. I made Ox a footstool, an elegant and simple piece of furniture. I took great care with the joints. On Ox’s birthday, I presented him with this footstool. He sat on it; I grimaced. He wiggled back and forth; I held my hands over my ears. It broke, I frowned. That was the day that I learned that woodworking with cheap softwood from the ironmongers was probably a waste of time. I took consolation from the fact that the beautiful joints held while the wood split beyond the joints.
Our downstairs neighbor on the north was said to be a displaced Russian Countess. She invited Betsy and me for tea often and delighted in the baby. She was hunched and plump. Her apartment was furnished with too many too large pieces of furniture, on top of one of which was a samovar. She often gave me a Tobler chocolate bar for Betsy, which I accepted with thanks and ate myself once we got home. When Betsy was about eight months old, a Pakistani and his English wife, Bashir and Mary, moved in next door on the other side. Betsy and their child, Nargis became dear friends, though Nargis was a five-year-old.
Before Betsy could walk, we’d push the pram to Kew Gardens with Nargis and Mary. Once, when Betsy and I went alone to Kew Gardens, I bought us each a biscuit at the tea shop there. A bird, with excellent aim, swooped down onto Betsy’s cookie and flew away with it. Betsy cried. I gave her mine.
Once Betsy could almost walk, and given her delight in veering toward the sometimes-busy Mortlake Road, I bought Betsy a harness and leash. This very sensible arrangement allowed Betsy great freedom, especially from nagging. When she was an early walker, the leash kept her from falling. Mary and the patient Nargis often accompanied us on our long walks. Occasionally people looked askance at the child on the leash, but mother and child were comfortable with it.
New people moved in downstairs. Mavis and Dick Streeton were newly married. Mavis was from South Africa and Dick was a sports writer for Reuters. Dick shared with Ox a strong liking for Sherlock Holmes. In my wandering around London, I found and bought some of the original Strand magazines with Holmes stories. I gave them to Dick, because he and Mavis were good friends and neighbors to us. I’ve kind of wished since that I’d kept the magazines.
On the death of his first wife, my grandfather had sent his first litter of children to his childless sister Jenny who lived in London and Vienna. Aunt Elsie was the eldest, then Meg, and Rudolph, who died during War II, and Aunt Bish, the youngest. Bish was called that because when she was born she’d been red as a bishop. After World War II ended, Bish and Harold Elliott came to visit with two of their children, Ros and Gordon. They weren’t allowed to take money out of post war-England. My family sponsored them in the U.S. and they sponsored us later in the U.K. I remember with joy Uncle Harold sitting on the piano bench with me, helping me practice Fleecy Clouds when I was six, and then indulging his own joy in playing the piano. Until then I had felt nothing brighter than lonely while practicing piano.
Bish and Harold left Ros, about 18, and Gordon, younger, with us for about a year. Ros was one of those young Englishwomen with dark hair, very pink cheeks, and a beautiful complexion. She was quiet, competent and witty. Ros was smitten with the young man she later married, Michael Ash. When Michael was seventeen, he had been captured at Dunkirk; he spent the war in a German POW camp. Gordon was wittier, even, than Ros. He told stories with panache. We loved him also because he taught us how to drive a stick shift automobile (without turning on the motor.)
Uncle Harold had been a World War I and a World War II experimental pilot. In WWI, he had flown balloons over enemy territory. When we had visited the Elliotts when I was 18, Uncle Harold showed me scrapbooks with pictures of the balloons, biplanes and monoplanes he had flown, including a couple of crashes. Uncle Harold had been friends with a Cadbury who was also a pilot. From after the first war the Elliotts lived in Chadwick Hall, which belonged to the Cadburys, on Rednal Lane near Birmingham. Uncle Harold loved to garden; his was the first beautiful English garden I noticed. Aunt Bish was a magistrate and very bright, matter-of-fact, and sensible. Uncle Harold had died and Gordon had moved to Canada by the time Ox and I moved to England.
Long before I was bitten by the gardening bug, the English love of gardening was amusing to me. I used to make fun of the BBC radio’s frequent programs about mulching your roses, how to deal with insect pests, and bird lore. I would very much enjoy those programs today.
One of the playgroup mothers canvassed for the Liberal party for a coming election; I liked the Liberal party. One day we set out with our prams stuffed full of our babies and pamphlets. I happily handed out pamphlets with my friend. That night when Ox and I exchanged news of the day, I bragged about my foray into English politics. Ox was appalled. I had interfered in the politics of a foreign nation, something the Status of Forces agreement specifically prohibited. It took me years before I dared to do anything political again, even after we returned to the United States.
I was beginning to feel a little housebound. Ox volunteered to babysit once a week so that I could continue my painting class. I looked around our sparsely furnished flat and asked him if he would babysit while I took a woodworking class instead; I felt that we really didn’t need many portraits of strangers. The class was taught by a cabinetmaker and perfectionist. It was very well taught and I became focused on learning to do woodworking. The teacher did not much like teaching a woman, but he taught me anyway. I subscribed to Woodworking magazine for several years after the class ended.
Every year since, I have been grateful that I had that class. I made Ox a footstool, an elegant and simple piece of furniture. I took great care with the joints. On Ox’s birthday, I presented him with this footstool. He sat on it; I grimaced. He wiggled back and forth; I held my hands over my ears. It broke, I frowned. That was the day that I learned that woodworking with cheap softwood from the ironmongers was probably a waste of time. I took consolation from the fact that the beautiful joints held while the wood split beyond the joints.
Our downstairs neighbor on the north was said to be a displaced Russian Countess. She invited Betsy and me for tea often and delighted in the baby. She was hunched and plump. Her apartment was furnished with too many too large pieces of furniture, on top of one of which was a samovar. She often gave me a Tobler chocolate bar for Betsy, which I accepted with thanks and ate myself once we got home. When Betsy was about eight months old, a Pakistani and his English wife, Bashir and Mary, moved in next door on the other side. Betsy and their child, Nargis became dear friends, though Nargis was a five-year-old.
Before Betsy could walk, we’d push the pram to Kew Gardens with Nargis and Mary. Once, when Betsy and I went alone to Kew Gardens, I bought us each a biscuit at the tea shop there. A bird, with excellent aim, swooped down onto Betsy’s cookie and flew away with it. Betsy cried. I gave her mine.
Once Betsy could almost walk, and given her delight in veering toward the sometimes-busy Mortlake Road, I bought Betsy a harness and leash. This very sensible arrangement allowed Betsy great freedom, especially from nagging. When she was an early walker, the leash kept her from falling. Mary and the patient Nargis often accompanied us on our long walks. Occasionally people looked askance at the child on the leash, but mother and child were comfortable with it.
New people moved in downstairs. Mavis and Dick Streeton were newly married. Mavis was from South Africa and Dick was a sports writer for Reuters. Dick shared with Ox a strong liking for Sherlock Holmes. In my wandering around London, I found and bought some of the original Strand magazines with Holmes stories. I gave them to Dick, because he and Mavis were good friends and neighbors to us. I’ve kind of wished since that I’d kept the magazines.
On the death of his first wife, my grandfather had sent his first litter of children to his childless sister Jenny who lived in London and Vienna. Aunt Elsie was the eldest, then Meg, and Rudolph, who died during War II, and Aunt Bish, the youngest. Bish was called that because when she was born she’d been red as a bishop. After World War II ended, Bish and Harold Elliott came to visit with two of their children, Ros and Gordon. They weren’t allowed to take money out of post war-England. My family sponsored them in the U.S. and they sponsored us later in the U.K. I remember with joy Uncle Harold sitting on the piano bench with me, helping me practice Fleecy Clouds when I was six, and then indulging his own joy in playing the piano. Until then I had felt nothing brighter than lonely while practicing piano.
Bish and Harold left Ros, about 18, and Gordon, younger, with us for about a year. Ros was one of those young Englishwomen with dark hair, very pink cheeks, and a beautiful complexion. She was quiet, competent and witty. Ros was smitten with the young man she later married, Michael Ash. When Michael was seventeen, he had been captured at Dunkirk; he spent the war in a German POW camp. Gordon was wittier, even, than Ros. He told stories with panache. We loved him also because he taught us how to drive a stick shift automobile (without turning on the motor.)
Uncle Harold had been a World War I and a World War II experimental pilot. In WWI, he had flown balloons over enemy territory. When we had visited the Elliotts when I was 18, Uncle Harold showed me scrapbooks with pictures of the balloons, biplanes and monoplanes he had flown, including a couple of crashes. Uncle Harold had been friends with a Cadbury who was also a pilot. From after the first war the Elliotts lived in Chadwick Hall, which belonged to the Cadburys, on Rednal Lane near Birmingham. Uncle Harold loved to garden; his was the first beautiful English garden I noticed. Aunt Bish was a magistrate and very bright, matter-of-fact, and sensible. Uncle Harold had died and Gordon had moved to Canada by the time Ox and I moved to England.
Long before I was bitten by the gardening bug, the English love of gardening was amusing to me. I used to make fun of the BBC radio’s frequent programs about mulching your roses, how to deal with insect pests, and bird lore. I would very much enjoy those programs today.
The
ribald, riotous, BBC radio show Beyond Our Ken, with Kenneth Horne,
Kenneth Williams et al. performing silly sketches, was the high point of our
radio week. Beyond Our Ken was
succeeded by Round the Horne with a similar cast and quite as much
double entendre. We were avid listeners
to BBC news and music.
My parents came over to see their new grandchild and Daddy’s sisters when Betsy was 4 months old. Daddy hired a car to drive Mother, me and Betsy to the countryside near Birmingham to see Bish, Ros and Michael, and older sister Cath, who had stayed a summer a few years later with us in California after she finished an internship with Colombia Children’s Hospital.
The drive was sunny and the sky blue with fleecy clouds. We stopped for a delicious tea in the Cotswolds in one of the beautiful golden stone cottages along the way. We passed by Oxford’s spires glowing in the late afternoon sun and arrived late evening at Bish’s house. On our arrival, Bish gave us supper and then dictated who could bathe when. She was so directive because Chadwick Hall’s hot water system was not up to three baths in a row
To our pleasure, friends of my family members often visited Ox and me. We discovered the amazing review Beyond the Fringe, born in Oxford, by Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. We took almost all our visitors to this review, and never tired of it. We attended My Fair Lady with visiting firemen, and Sleuth. Though I don’t remember taking visitors to concerts in London, Ox and I went to a bunch of them. Before Betsy was born, we went to a Tchaikovsky concert in Albert Hall. I remember a splendid rendering of the First Violin Concerto with passionate catches in the violin’s throat. Better, I remember the 1812 Overture, because Betsy kicked in time to the music; this convinced me that the Betton Burton musical genes dominated.
My parents’ friends Alec and Louise Scott visited us. We took them to Beyond the Fringe and another day to Brown’s Hotel, for the traditional tea. They took us to Les Ambassadeurs, a private club in Mayfair, for dinner. The dinner was delicious and the customers richer than Croesus. Halfway through our meal, conversation in the club stopped. People in front of us swiveled around. Louise Scott quietly said that the Beatles had just come in with their wives/birds. I thought it rude to stare at celebrities, and pretended to myself to feel disgust that London’s rich were so crass. I made a point as we left, however, of a sidewise glance to make sure it really was the Beatles.
On Jan 24, 1965, Winston Churchill died at the age of 90 after a series of strokes and a long decline. Betsy was 6 months old then. Ox had a great admiration for the man who saved England and Europe from Hitler. Churchill’s body rested in state for three days in Westminster Hall. After a state funeral at St. Paul’s, his coffin was carried up the Thames to Festival Pier. Dockers lowered their crane jibs in salute as the ship passed with the coffin. The coffin was carried the short distance to Waterloo Station to begin its trip on a special railroad train to Churchill’s burial place north of Oxford. Ox read the train’s route and took himself to a part of the tracks where he could view the funeral train. For one of the few occasions in our English tour, he wore his uniform and saluted the train with coffin as it passed. This was very important to him.
When Betsy was 10 months old, an old friend of Ox’s, who was in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, wrote that she was, in a couple of months, to be married in Athens to another Peace Corps volunteer. Sally asked Ox to give her hand in marriage; her father was unable to travel at the time. We decided to take a month’s leave to drive to Athens and back. Except for the week at Worthing, this was our only vacation together in our three year London tour.
I made a very stupid decision. Because of an overpowering shyness about nursing in public, I decided that Betsy should be weaned at ten months. Ox was beginning to make remarks about my misuse of breasts anyway. Betsy, who was getting bottles of skim milk frequently, objected a little, but not strongly. I made a point of holding her close when I bottle-fed her. I had a popular English solution called Milton for sterilizing bottles and fed her powdered skim milk mixed with sterilized water. What I lacked for the trip, and didn’t know it, was the ability to ask for bottled still water in Greek.
Ox got leave beginning about four days before the wedding was scheduled. We loaded the Triumph with boxes of powdered skim milk, diapers, and the top bed section of Betsy’s pram, much other baby paraphernalia, and a few good clothes for us all. After the Dover to Calais ferry we drove, with great speed, a snick of France then the Autostrada del Sol down the zipper of Italy’s boot. We embarked on the Brindisi-to-Patras ferry in the evening. Betsy was crying as we drove aboard. A kindly Greek crew member distracted Betsy by dangling his worry beads within her reach. She grabbed them. He insisted that we keep them. She happily played with the worry beads until time for us to disembark. We gave the kind crew member back his worry beads and Betsy started crying just in time to get us passed through customs quickly.
Ox has always been good at reading maps; he forgot, however, that we would have to decipher the Greek alphabet. Fortunately, I had learned enough about the Greek alphabet in college, as an observer only of sororities and fraternities. I was able to point him to the road to Corinth and Athens. I had learned the polite and necessary Greek words before we embarked on our trip. Sally had made a reservation for us at a hotel in Athens for the following night. We arrived at a hotel between Corinth and Athens hot and disheveled late that night, and I asked for water with the aid of a guidebook. They brought us carbonated grape juice. We asked again for water. They told us that they had no bottled water. I gave Betsy milk mixed with grape soda, and that night Betsy vomited a staining purple on the Hotel’s crib mattress.
The next morning we arrived in Athens and checked into our grand Hotel Olympia. Sally’s fiancée Garber’s family advised us that we should be discreet about the fact that Ox was in the American army; Greece was delicate politically and America was in bad odor. Garber’s father was a newspaper reporter who kept up. We wandered around Athens, carrying Betsy, face forward, in a child carrier. People were unfailingly kind to us. That night we went to a light supper at a sidewalk café on Syntagma (Constitution) square. There, we had front row seats on a scary demonstration. Many people were assembled and cheerfully, at first, shouting “Pap-an-dre-ou, Pap-an-dre-ou”, while marching and pumping their arms and fists.
As we watched, phalanxes of policemen in riot gear (helmets, Plexiglas faceplates and padded vests) appeared out of nowhere. They made for people in the front of the demonstration with billy clubs in their hands. I think that tear gas was released, but we were not near enough to smell it. The demonstration dispersed soon after the police round up, leaving everyone shaken.
The next day we had Sally and Garber’s wedding rehearsal in a small church in Athens. I got to play the congregation. Afterwards, our babysitter provided by the hotel, we went to dinner at the apartment of Garber’s mother’s friend. The dinner in this formal dining room consisted of course after delicious course, served by the friend and her mother, who spoke little English. They did not sit with us until we had finished the food and were working on feta and Ouzo (a popular Greek aperitif). The warmth, kindness and hospitality of this family remain my strongest image of Greek people. As dark descended, we saw, from their upper story apartment, families preparing to sleep outside on the flat roofs of lower apartments.
The morning of the wedding, I woke very early, long before Ox. I strapped Betsy into the baby carrier and wandered out into Athens. I found a small café, with outdoor tables. There were a couple of Greek Orthodox priests sitting at one of the tables playing chess. I ordered a coffee. I stared at the Parthenon as I drank my first Greek coffee in a tiny cup, thick, grainy, and full of oomph.
Sally and Garber’s wedding was, as weddings should be, beautiful. The church was quiet. Sally wore her mother’s wedding dress a simple long white satin dress with a train. Ox wore his best suit to give her away. Garber’s kindly father was Garber’s best man. The grandness of the occasion made up for the smallness of the party in the big church.
My parents came over to see their new grandchild and Daddy’s sisters when Betsy was 4 months old. Daddy hired a car to drive Mother, me and Betsy to the countryside near Birmingham to see Bish, Ros and Michael, and older sister Cath, who had stayed a summer a few years later with us in California after she finished an internship with Colombia Children’s Hospital.
The drive was sunny and the sky blue with fleecy clouds. We stopped for a delicious tea in the Cotswolds in one of the beautiful golden stone cottages along the way. We passed by Oxford’s spires glowing in the late afternoon sun and arrived late evening at Bish’s house. On our arrival, Bish gave us supper and then dictated who could bathe when. She was so directive because Chadwick Hall’s hot water system was not up to three baths in a row
To our pleasure, friends of my family members often visited Ox and me. We discovered the amazing review Beyond the Fringe, born in Oxford, by Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. We took almost all our visitors to this review, and never tired of it. We attended My Fair Lady with visiting firemen, and Sleuth. Though I don’t remember taking visitors to concerts in London, Ox and I went to a bunch of them. Before Betsy was born, we went to a Tchaikovsky concert in Albert Hall. I remember a splendid rendering of the First Violin Concerto with passionate catches in the violin’s throat. Better, I remember the 1812 Overture, because Betsy kicked in time to the music; this convinced me that the Betton Burton musical genes dominated.
My parents’ friends Alec and Louise Scott visited us. We took them to Beyond the Fringe and another day to Brown’s Hotel, for the traditional tea. They took us to Les Ambassadeurs, a private club in Mayfair, for dinner. The dinner was delicious and the customers richer than Croesus. Halfway through our meal, conversation in the club stopped. People in front of us swiveled around. Louise Scott quietly said that the Beatles had just come in with their wives/birds. I thought it rude to stare at celebrities, and pretended to myself to feel disgust that London’s rich were so crass. I made a point as we left, however, of a sidewise glance to make sure it really was the Beatles.
On Jan 24, 1965, Winston Churchill died at the age of 90 after a series of strokes and a long decline. Betsy was 6 months old then. Ox had a great admiration for the man who saved England and Europe from Hitler. Churchill’s body rested in state for three days in Westminster Hall. After a state funeral at St. Paul’s, his coffin was carried up the Thames to Festival Pier. Dockers lowered their crane jibs in salute as the ship passed with the coffin. The coffin was carried the short distance to Waterloo Station to begin its trip on a special railroad train to Churchill’s burial place north of Oxford. Ox read the train’s route and took himself to a part of the tracks where he could view the funeral train. For one of the few occasions in our English tour, he wore his uniform and saluted the train with coffin as it passed. This was very important to him.
When Betsy was 10 months old, an old friend of Ox’s, who was in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, wrote that she was, in a couple of months, to be married in Athens to another Peace Corps volunteer. Sally asked Ox to give her hand in marriage; her father was unable to travel at the time. We decided to take a month’s leave to drive to Athens and back. Except for the week at Worthing, this was our only vacation together in our three year London tour.
I made a very stupid decision. Because of an overpowering shyness about nursing in public, I decided that Betsy should be weaned at ten months. Ox was beginning to make remarks about my misuse of breasts anyway. Betsy, who was getting bottles of skim milk frequently, objected a little, but not strongly. I made a point of holding her close when I bottle-fed her. I had a popular English solution called Milton for sterilizing bottles and fed her powdered skim milk mixed with sterilized water. What I lacked for the trip, and didn’t know it, was the ability to ask for bottled still water in Greek.
Ox got leave beginning about four days before the wedding was scheduled. We loaded the Triumph with boxes of powdered skim milk, diapers, and the top bed section of Betsy’s pram, much other baby paraphernalia, and a few good clothes for us all. After the Dover to Calais ferry we drove, with great speed, a snick of France then the Autostrada del Sol down the zipper of Italy’s boot. We embarked on the Brindisi-to-Patras ferry in the evening. Betsy was crying as we drove aboard. A kindly Greek crew member distracted Betsy by dangling his worry beads within her reach. She grabbed them. He insisted that we keep them. She happily played with the worry beads until time for us to disembark. We gave the kind crew member back his worry beads and Betsy started crying just in time to get us passed through customs quickly.
Ox has always been good at reading maps; he forgot, however, that we would have to decipher the Greek alphabet. Fortunately, I had learned enough about the Greek alphabet in college, as an observer only of sororities and fraternities. I was able to point him to the road to Corinth and Athens. I had learned the polite and necessary Greek words before we embarked on our trip. Sally had made a reservation for us at a hotel in Athens for the following night. We arrived at a hotel between Corinth and Athens hot and disheveled late that night, and I asked for water with the aid of a guidebook. They brought us carbonated grape juice. We asked again for water. They told us that they had no bottled water. I gave Betsy milk mixed with grape soda, and that night Betsy vomited a staining purple on the Hotel’s crib mattress.
The next morning we arrived in Athens and checked into our grand Hotel Olympia. Sally’s fiancée Garber’s family advised us that we should be discreet about the fact that Ox was in the American army; Greece was delicate politically and America was in bad odor. Garber’s father was a newspaper reporter who kept up. We wandered around Athens, carrying Betsy, face forward, in a child carrier. People were unfailingly kind to us. That night we went to a light supper at a sidewalk café on Syntagma (Constitution) square. There, we had front row seats on a scary demonstration. Many people were assembled and cheerfully, at first, shouting “Pap-an-dre-ou, Pap-an-dre-ou”, while marching and pumping their arms and fists.
As we watched, phalanxes of policemen in riot gear (helmets, Plexiglas faceplates and padded vests) appeared out of nowhere. They made for people in the front of the demonstration with billy clubs in their hands. I think that tear gas was released, but we were not near enough to smell it. The demonstration dispersed soon after the police round up, leaving everyone shaken.
The next day we had Sally and Garber’s wedding rehearsal in a small church in Athens. I got to play the congregation. Afterwards, our babysitter provided by the hotel, we went to dinner at the apartment of Garber’s mother’s friend. The dinner in this formal dining room consisted of course after delicious course, served by the friend and her mother, who spoke little English. They did not sit with us until we had finished the food and were working on feta and Ouzo (a popular Greek aperitif). The warmth, kindness and hospitality of this family remain my strongest image of Greek people. As dark descended, we saw, from their upper story apartment, families preparing to sleep outside on the flat roofs of lower apartments.
The morning of the wedding, I woke very early, long before Ox. I strapped Betsy into the baby carrier and wandered out into Athens. I found a small café, with outdoor tables. There were a couple of Greek Orthodox priests sitting at one of the tables playing chess. I ordered a coffee. I stared at the Parthenon as I drank my first Greek coffee in a tiny cup, thick, grainy, and full of oomph.
Sally and Garber’s wedding was, as weddings should be, beautiful. The church was quiet. Sally wore her mother’s wedding dress a simple long white satin dress with a train. Ox wore his best suit to give her away. Garber’s kindly father was Garber’s best man. The grandness of the occasion made up for the smallness of the party in the big church.
After the ceremony, we drove to Kalamos,
for a few days on the beach. We stayed
in a modern motel with a balcony overlooking the beach.
After a few days by the ocean, we began our trek north up the Grecian countryside. I had been in love since Northern Italy - the landscape was so reminiscent of the best of southern California. The first extended sunshine of our two years in England followed us through Italy and Greece. We encountered the colors found only in semi-arid landscapes. Mountains, oh real and wonderful mountains, were everywhere. I had grown up with this vegetation. Everywhere we drove place names brought back stories from the myths I had devoured in childhood.
After we left the coast, we drove for hours along increasingly deserted roads. We began to leave Auberge (hotel) signs behind. Increasingly, those we passed posted NO (for no vacancy). The road was headed up the mountains. We spent the hottest day of our trip; Ox and I were thirsty; we all were filthy. It was getting dark. Betsy was fretful and had diarrhea, which escaped onto my skirt. I whined at Ox, and asked him to find any lodging and to get me in unseen.
To my wonder, after dark, Ox found a three-story hotel in a small village. The hotel had showers in the rooms and an elevator to our room on the second floor. Ox preceded Betsy and me into the lobby, hiding my dirty self with his body. Betsy turned cheerful. I have never felt so refreshed in my life, as I did in that hotel, after bathing Betsy and showering myself. Though he was disinclined ever to use room service, dear Ox ordered a simple room service meal for our supper. We went directly to bed afterwards. The next morning we awoke to the sound of bells. It was a sunny clear market day in the square below our balcony and people were leading cows, sheep and goats into the square. Women stood behind tables with colorful vegetables and flowers. People bantered with each other.
Over our drive, we accumulated bottled water bottles to turn in for deposit money. One mountainous afternoon we pulled into a small village. A crowd of boys swarmed excitedly around our car. The spokesboy quizzed Ox about the Triumph. When I started toward a small grocery with a large armful of empty bottles, the swarm detached from the car and followed me into the store for the afternoon’s entertainment. I returned our bottles, bought more water and lumbered back to the car counting the bottles in Greek. The boys started counting with me, and continued, in a teaching vein, after I reached the limit of the bottles and my knowledge. I echoed them with the new words till we got into the hundreds. They, and I, were happy with the teaching age-reversal. We bid them farewell, fondly, and drove on.
We came to a bridge across a chasm. The bridge was suspended on cables and was floored with wooden planks. Many of the planks were missing, but it looked as if those left were close enough to keep an auto’s wheels from getting caught between. Ox stopped before the bridge and got out of the car to reconnoiter. Another car came by and slowly crossed the bridge. The bridge swayed; the planks clattered. We had reservations on the Igoumenitsa – Brindisi ferry and it would take a week or two to backtrack and find a better road. A little boy came out of nowhere and asked Ox admiring questions about the Triumph. Ox asked the boy about the bridge. Ox made up his mind that we would try to get across the bridge. He offered me the option of walking across the bridge with Betsy. I’ve always been uneasy about heights; I felt that we would be safer in the car than we would walking across. We stayed in the car, I closed my eyes, and Ox drove skillfully and slowly across. I felt every sway and heard every clatter of the bridge with terror. On the other side, we pulled off the road, caught our breaths and were thankful to be alive on terra firma.
After a few days by the ocean, we began our trek north up the Grecian countryside. I had been in love since Northern Italy - the landscape was so reminiscent of the best of southern California. The first extended sunshine of our two years in England followed us through Italy and Greece. We encountered the colors found only in semi-arid landscapes. Mountains, oh real and wonderful mountains, were everywhere. I had grown up with this vegetation. Everywhere we drove place names brought back stories from the myths I had devoured in childhood.
After we left the coast, we drove for hours along increasingly deserted roads. We began to leave Auberge (hotel) signs behind. Increasingly, those we passed posted NO (for no vacancy). The road was headed up the mountains. We spent the hottest day of our trip; Ox and I were thirsty; we all were filthy. It was getting dark. Betsy was fretful and had diarrhea, which escaped onto my skirt. I whined at Ox, and asked him to find any lodging and to get me in unseen.
To my wonder, after dark, Ox found a three-story hotel in a small village. The hotel had showers in the rooms and an elevator to our room on the second floor. Ox preceded Betsy and me into the lobby, hiding my dirty self with his body. Betsy turned cheerful. I have never felt so refreshed in my life, as I did in that hotel, after bathing Betsy and showering myself. Though he was disinclined ever to use room service, dear Ox ordered a simple room service meal for our supper. We went directly to bed afterwards. The next morning we awoke to the sound of bells. It was a sunny clear market day in the square below our balcony and people were leading cows, sheep and goats into the square. Women stood behind tables with colorful vegetables and flowers. People bantered with each other.
Over our drive, we accumulated bottled water bottles to turn in for deposit money. One mountainous afternoon we pulled into a small village. A crowd of boys swarmed excitedly around our car. The spokesboy quizzed Ox about the Triumph. When I started toward a small grocery with a large armful of empty bottles, the swarm detached from the car and followed me into the store for the afternoon’s entertainment. I returned our bottles, bought more water and lumbered back to the car counting the bottles in Greek. The boys started counting with me, and continued, in a teaching vein, after I reached the limit of the bottles and my knowledge. I echoed them with the new words till we got into the hundreds. They, and I, were happy with the teaching age-reversal. We bid them farewell, fondly, and drove on.
We came to a bridge across a chasm. The bridge was suspended on cables and was floored with wooden planks. Many of the planks were missing, but it looked as if those left were close enough to keep an auto’s wheels from getting caught between. Ox stopped before the bridge and got out of the car to reconnoiter. Another car came by and slowly crossed the bridge. The bridge swayed; the planks clattered. We had reservations on the Igoumenitsa – Brindisi ferry and it would take a week or two to backtrack and find a better road. A little boy came out of nowhere and asked Ox admiring questions about the Triumph. Ox asked the boy about the bridge. Ox made up his mind that we would try to get across the bridge. He offered me the option of walking across the bridge with Betsy. I’ve always been uneasy about heights; I felt that we would be safer in the car than we would walking across. We stayed in the car, I closed my eyes, and Ox drove skillfully and slowly across. I felt every sway and heard every clatter of the bridge with terror. On the other side, we pulled off the road, caught our breaths and were thankful to be alive on terra firma.
Soon after the killer bridge, we
came to the beautiful town of Delphi. (Because we had survived the bridge, we didn’t
need to consult the oracle; we knew life was to be good.)
For the first time in weeks, we could see the ocean far below. The houses along the road were cheek by jowl, white, with balconies. They had that beauty the Greek and Italian village houses have. Ox found us a small auberge among these houses and we settled in. We walked to a café, where we had a wonderful Greek supper – greens, feta, tomatoes, and olives. We walked to the deep and spectacular theatre with glorious mountain views behind, and the ruins of the temple of Apollo, and the Doric columns of the Tholos at the base of Mt. Parnassus.
The next morning we drove a very long winding gentle descent to Igoumenitsa in time to meet our ferry. In Igoumenitsa, we stopped at a café to eat and wait for the ferry to come.
Betsy turned one year old on this day. We spent most of the day on the ferry from Igoumenitsa to Brindisi. The ferry had a swimming pool. While Ox took pictures, Betsy and I cooled off in the pool. I had no swimsuit handy, so I hitched my skirts up to my knees, held Betsy in the shallows and bounced her up and down. Betsy and I finished water play. We had lunch and cake. Ox realized that he had left the car’s title and his passport behind somewhere in Greece. We were uneasy about passing through Italian customs without these, but Betsy came through - she cried as we easily passed through customs.
Betsy was on my passport. Ox, who still had his Army I.D., took my passport and his I.D., along with his orders for leave to the nearest office of the Carabinieri and explained the loss of papers. The Carabinieri noted that Betsy was Elisabeth Burton. Elizabeth Taylor had starred with Richard Burton in the movie Cleopatra in 1963, beginning a very public torrid affair then. The affair had led to the messy public divorces of both Taylor and Burton, who had then married each other. This made Elizabeth Taylor Elizabeth Burton. Betsy’s name provided endless amusement to these cops. They blithely advised Ox that he was unlikely to have any difficulty with customs on the way to England. Oddly, this was not very comforting to either of us.
We decided to drive up the Adriatic coast. We settled in a hotel not too far from the ferry. The next morning we set off with Betsy to the beach. We were the only people on the beach, except for a 50ish man with a square face who wore glasses and bathing trunks. The sun was warm. We let Betsy play on the beach naked, with her head protected by her little red and white striped sunhat. She was at the stage of crawling most of the time, or walking if there was anything to hold onto. She crawled on the beach happily putting shells in her mouth. The professor said with alarm, “your baby is eating rocks!” Dr. Spock, again, had said not to be too worried about a child’s eating dirt. On reflection, I thought that Dr. Spock probably didn’t know much about Italian shells. I kept Betsy from mouthing any more shells.
The kind professor conversed with us at some length. He said that his wife and son were staying the night at the hotel; he was returning to the University of Perugia, where he was on the science faculty. That night at dinner we saw the wife and young adult son across the dining room. I regret that we were both too shy to approach them, and thus lost another chance to come to know interesting people.
We traveled part of the way up the Adriatic Coast then headed inland towards Lake Como. We stopped several times to admire the scenery at Lake Como, then drove on to Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where we spent the night at the Lier’s house. I had spent a summer here when I was in college, ostensibly to learn French. (In fact the Lier children all wanted to polish their English; they got more English conversation than I French). Lier père and mère were away but Anne Lier treated us royally.
Our grand tour was winding down. We headed to France where we spend the night in a stuffy French hotel room with a fussy Betsy. Betsy sat grizzeling in her pram bed before supper. I handed her a treasured bracelet that Ox had given me for our second anniversary. He had got it in London in Audley Street - turquoise scarabs set in heavy silver links. I hoped that Betsy would play with it, as she had with the worry beads and be quiet until dinner. She showed great interest in the bracelet, mouthing the thing and prodding it. Ten minutes later, I took it back and we went down to a delicious supper. When we came back to the room I noticed that one scarab was missing. We took the pram bed apart. We looked under every piece of furniture and in our bedding. We took the rug up. The scarab was nowhere. I even checked Betsy’s diapers for a couple of days after the disappearance, thinking that she might have swallowed it. Years later, in the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia, I found a similar scarab, bought it and mounted it. It fit very well. I wear the scarab bracelet when I want to feel elegant.
We drove to Calais to get the ferry to Dover. After a short trip across the channel we saw the famed white cliffs and felt we were coming home. We also felt great unease because of our lost papers. The day was uncharacteristically hot as we waited in a long line of automobiles and discussed how to make Betsy cry to get us through the border; Ox suggested pinching her. It turned out to be unnecessary. When immigration officials got to our car, they waved us on through without looking at our papers. We drove home to Kew. We were tired, relaxed and refreshed after a long adventurous vacation.
Polly and Mike married in summer 1965 in California. I didn’t go. The wedding seemed very remote and I felt homesick for my family. I made the first transatlantic telephone call of my life to Polly the day she married. Our conversation was necessarily short. Nonetheless Polly vividly portrayed the wedding preparations over the phone.
When the time came to return to the U.S., we opted to fly, we didn’t want to chance loosing Betsy at sea. We scheduled movers to pack up our sparse belongings. I persuaded Ox that it was unreasonable to ask the U.S. taxpayers to pay for moving his entire newspaper collection. He gave me permission to sacrifice the remaining wall of newspapers after he sorted them. He kept a few historic ones. I carried armload after armload of newspapers down to the dustbin area the night before the movers were to come - this was a little before newspapers could be recycled.
The movers packed every bit of what we had into in a big wooden crate; our belongings filled about a fourth of the crate. A mover then asked Ox if we didn’t have anything, like old newspapers, that they could stuff the rest of the crate with, to keep our stuff from rattling around. Ox pointed them to the newspaper collection in the dustbin area. Thus the Burton newspaper collection moved from London to Indianapolis. Because I had been given permission to dump the newspaper collection in Kew, I spent my first hours in Indianapolis running with armloads of old newspapers from our quarters to the area Dempster Dumpster to finish what we had started.
The flight back to U.S. was rough. We were in a military transport airplane. Betsy cried for most of the way across the ocean. The stewards and fellow passengers said it was ear pressure, and all tried to help. Poor Betsy just wailed. We arrived at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, tired beyond tired. Betsy and I sat on suitcases in a large, noisy warehouse-like area while Ox stood in line for hours to go through customs. We had to pick up our auto in Philadelphia. As we left McGuire, I looked back. The sign I saw said, “Welcome to McGuire Air Force Base, Home of the Atom Bomb”. I have suffered culture shock ever since.
For the first time in weeks, we could see the ocean far below. The houses along the road were cheek by jowl, white, with balconies. They had that beauty the Greek and Italian village houses have. Ox found us a small auberge among these houses and we settled in. We walked to a café, where we had a wonderful Greek supper – greens, feta, tomatoes, and olives. We walked to the deep and spectacular theatre with glorious mountain views behind, and the ruins of the temple of Apollo, and the Doric columns of the Tholos at the base of Mt. Parnassus.
The next morning we drove a very long winding gentle descent to Igoumenitsa in time to meet our ferry. In Igoumenitsa, we stopped at a café to eat and wait for the ferry to come.
Betsy turned one year old on this day. We spent most of the day on the ferry from Igoumenitsa to Brindisi. The ferry had a swimming pool. While Ox took pictures, Betsy and I cooled off in the pool. I had no swimsuit handy, so I hitched my skirts up to my knees, held Betsy in the shallows and bounced her up and down. Betsy and I finished water play. We had lunch and cake. Ox realized that he had left the car’s title and his passport behind somewhere in Greece. We were uneasy about passing through Italian customs without these, but Betsy came through - she cried as we easily passed through customs.
Betsy was on my passport. Ox, who still had his Army I.D., took my passport and his I.D., along with his orders for leave to the nearest office of the Carabinieri and explained the loss of papers. The Carabinieri noted that Betsy was Elisabeth Burton. Elizabeth Taylor had starred with Richard Burton in the movie Cleopatra in 1963, beginning a very public torrid affair then. The affair had led to the messy public divorces of both Taylor and Burton, who had then married each other. This made Elizabeth Taylor Elizabeth Burton. Betsy’s name provided endless amusement to these cops. They blithely advised Ox that he was unlikely to have any difficulty with customs on the way to England. Oddly, this was not very comforting to either of us.
We decided to drive up the Adriatic coast. We settled in a hotel not too far from the ferry. The next morning we set off with Betsy to the beach. We were the only people on the beach, except for a 50ish man with a square face who wore glasses and bathing trunks. The sun was warm. We let Betsy play on the beach naked, with her head protected by her little red and white striped sunhat. She was at the stage of crawling most of the time, or walking if there was anything to hold onto. She crawled on the beach happily putting shells in her mouth. The professor said with alarm, “your baby is eating rocks!” Dr. Spock, again, had said not to be too worried about a child’s eating dirt. On reflection, I thought that Dr. Spock probably didn’t know much about Italian shells. I kept Betsy from mouthing any more shells.
The kind professor conversed with us at some length. He said that his wife and son were staying the night at the hotel; he was returning to the University of Perugia, where he was on the science faculty. That night at dinner we saw the wife and young adult son across the dining room. I regret that we were both too shy to approach them, and thus lost another chance to come to know interesting people.
We traveled part of the way up the Adriatic Coast then headed inland towards Lake Como. We stopped several times to admire the scenery at Lake Como, then drove on to Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where we spent the night at the Lier’s house. I had spent a summer here when I was in college, ostensibly to learn French. (In fact the Lier children all wanted to polish their English; they got more English conversation than I French). Lier père and mère were away but Anne Lier treated us royally.
Our grand tour was winding down. We headed to France where we spend the night in a stuffy French hotel room with a fussy Betsy. Betsy sat grizzeling in her pram bed before supper. I handed her a treasured bracelet that Ox had given me for our second anniversary. He had got it in London in Audley Street - turquoise scarabs set in heavy silver links. I hoped that Betsy would play with it, as she had with the worry beads and be quiet until dinner. She showed great interest in the bracelet, mouthing the thing and prodding it. Ten minutes later, I took it back and we went down to a delicious supper. When we came back to the room I noticed that one scarab was missing. We took the pram bed apart. We looked under every piece of furniture and in our bedding. We took the rug up. The scarab was nowhere. I even checked Betsy’s diapers for a couple of days after the disappearance, thinking that she might have swallowed it. Years later, in the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia, I found a similar scarab, bought it and mounted it. It fit very well. I wear the scarab bracelet when I want to feel elegant.
We drove to Calais to get the ferry to Dover. After a short trip across the channel we saw the famed white cliffs and felt we were coming home. We also felt great unease because of our lost papers. The day was uncharacteristically hot as we waited in a long line of automobiles and discussed how to make Betsy cry to get us through the border; Ox suggested pinching her. It turned out to be unnecessary. When immigration officials got to our car, they waved us on through without looking at our papers. We drove home to Kew. We were tired, relaxed and refreshed after a long adventurous vacation.
Polly and Mike married in summer 1965 in California. I didn’t go. The wedding seemed very remote and I felt homesick for my family. I made the first transatlantic telephone call of my life to Polly the day she married. Our conversation was necessarily short. Nonetheless Polly vividly portrayed the wedding preparations over the phone.
When the time came to return to the U.S., we opted to fly, we didn’t want to chance loosing Betsy at sea. We scheduled movers to pack up our sparse belongings. I persuaded Ox that it was unreasonable to ask the U.S. taxpayers to pay for moving his entire newspaper collection. He gave me permission to sacrifice the remaining wall of newspapers after he sorted them. He kept a few historic ones. I carried armload after armload of newspapers down to the dustbin area the night before the movers were to come - this was a little before newspapers could be recycled.
The movers packed every bit of what we had into in a big wooden crate; our belongings filled about a fourth of the crate. A mover then asked Ox if we didn’t have anything, like old newspapers, that they could stuff the rest of the crate with, to keep our stuff from rattling around. Ox pointed them to the newspaper collection in the dustbin area. Thus the Burton newspaper collection moved from London to Indianapolis. Because I had been given permission to dump the newspaper collection in Kew, I spent my first hours in Indianapolis running with armloads of old newspapers from our quarters to the area Dempster Dumpster to finish what we had started.
The flight back to U.S. was rough. We were in a military transport airplane. Betsy cried for most of the way across the ocean. The stewards and fellow passengers said it was ear pressure, and all tried to help. Poor Betsy just wailed. We arrived at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, tired beyond tired. Betsy and I sat on suitcases in a large, noisy warehouse-like area while Ox stood in line for hours to go through customs. We had to pick up our auto in Philadelphia. As we left McGuire, I looked back. The sign I saw said, “Welcome to McGuire Air Force Base, Home of the Atom Bomb”. I have suffered culture shock ever since.
End
note: I am unsure of our route in
Greece. I know that we traveled north in
mountainous terrain, and then drove south toward Delphi. Looking at the map Igoumenitsa seems a very
long way from Delphi, but my memory tells me that we drove down to the ocean at
Igoumenitsa from Delphi.
