1959
Greetings!
Lolling about in a fairly easy job with a lot of free time has softened me up to the point where I can hardly bring myself to compose and produce this smooth annual effort, and the glorious California sunshine I’m basking in every day (in grateful contrast to this cold, damp, clouds and fog of England) is not conducive to a Christmassy frame of mind...so if this reaches you late, that’s just too bad!
This has been a year of upheaval, since I completed my employment in London after four wonderful years there, and following a few last-minute travels in Europe, returned to the U.S. to feel completely foreign and out of place--in fact, I’m still not “re-adjusted” to this country. It was quite a wrench to uproot myself from a place I’d grown attached to, and to leave so many wonderful friends… the theatres… and the endless opportunities for travel.
I finished my job at the American Embassy in London just before the Easter holidays and went on another Hellenic Cruise as I had done last year. We went to many of the same places as before (Athens, Olympia, Dalos, Rhodes, Istanbul) and had quite a few of the same passengers (and distinguished lecturers) abroad too, so it was like “old home week.” The new places we visited were Delphi, Sparta, Mistre, Crete and Sounion in Greece, Troy and Ephesus in Turkey, and Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia.
Delphi is a dramatic site on the slope of a mountain overlooking a huge valley & more mts. on the other side….you’ve no doubt heard about its famous Oracle….and maybe how Aesop was pitched over a cliff for his irreverence to the gods, and so on...there are some lovely bits of sculpture & firezes in the little museum, too….
Sparta has practically nothing left of its ancient self so there was nothing to see there in it is a quiet and ordinary town but a few unprepossessing fragment sin the museum. Nearby Mistra is more exciting, a Byzantine city (ruins of course) built right up to the side of a very steep hill, so steep in fact that I couldn’t drag myself all the way up but had to be content with viewing the rosy-gold tile domed churches, etc. through the opera glasses.
If you read Mary Renault’s “The King Must Die,” you have a fair idea of some of the things we saw at Knossos (Crete)....King Minos’ “labyrinth” palace has been partially restored, and really is a good place to get lost in. The remains at Phaestos, on the other side of the island, were the real thing though not restored therefore somehow more appealing. The drive from Heraklion to Phaestos over rough, winding roads through spectacular mountain scenery was exciting, especially when one of the rickety buses in our party lost a wheel, broke down and blocked the road so that nearby Cretan farmers had to come to the rescue by building a wide spot on the road, enabling the rest to get around. We also stopped at Gortyne, a place noted for having its early code of laws inscribed on a large wall.
The ruins of Troy’s 9 layers are almost impossible to “reconstruct mentally,” yet still is was thrilling just to be there, and to hear one of the Greek guides read, from the original Greek, a selection from Homer’s “Iliad” on the walls of the city where it took place. The swarm of Turkish rural types (including many baggy-trousered, black-veiled women) found us all pretty entertaining, too.
Ephesus, which we reached via Izmir (Smyrne--the fig country!) was a fascinating site; since there is more of it left standing, it was a little easier to visualize what it had been like. Many of the ruins were marked with signs, conveniently written in Turkish, German, and English--e.g. “Ask Evi -- Freudenhaus -- Brothel”! Ephesus, one of the various places lived in (and written to) by St. Paul, was the great center of the worship of Diana (Artemis, a sort of lascivious, fertilitytype goddess, (her temple, now vanished, was one of the Seven Wonders), and a brisk trade in images of her was beginning to be sabotaged by St. Paul and his new-fangled religion. One Demetrius and other fellow-silversmiths whose business was thus threatened caused “no small stir” to arise against Paul & Co. We sat in the very theatre where the riot took place and one of our lecturers read the account to us from the Bible (Acts XIX: 23-41), as exciting as if it had just taken place… the typical mob scene, “...And the whole city was filled with confusion...they rushed with one second into the theatre...some therefore cried one thing, and some another: for the assembly was confused, and the more part knew not wherefore they were come together….but when they know…………..all with one voice about the space of two hours cried out, “Great is Diana of the Ephesiens!” ”
Sounion, a short & scenic ride along the coast from Athens, boasta an attractive enough ruin (temple of Poseidon) but was too “touristy,” and unfortunately many people followed the deplorable… I won’t describe “last year’s places” and save in mentioning that in Istanbul, where my English companion and I went to a record shop to buy a bit of Turkish folk music, we found the place full of Turkish teenagers buying all the latest American jazz and rock & roll….laughing at us for listening to their corny local stuff.
We were scheduled to visit Cyrene in Libya, but the sea was too rough for us to lend at the port of Derus, so my knowledge of the North African coast is somewhat superficial still...the offshore view was not much help.
Dubrovnik (Yugoslavia) proved to be an attractive small medieval city (formerly known as Saguea, a fairly powerful independent city-state in its time, with its own fleet, etc.) and in fact looked more like “The Merchant of Venice” then Venice does… we fully expected to see Shakespearean characters pop out of doorways and side alleys any minute. There is a cathedral there built by Richard the Lion-Hearted,by the way. The Dubrovnik of today apparently exists mostly on the tourist trade (summer holidaymakers from colder climates) and the natives, although quite a good-looking people, seemed a bit glum in temperament.
As before, the cruise ended in Venice (gondola travel with a full load of passengers and suitcases in the rain is not the gay, romantic mode of transport generally ballyhooed in the films, in once you’re interested---but has its amusing moments!), I left the party there, and proceeded up to Austria- -Innsbruck & St. Johann in the Tyrolean Alps--brr! and those mountains are just too big for my taste--Salzburg (where a Prince-Bishop of some centuries past built a lovely palace for his mistress and 11 children, and another summer palace full of practical jokes, i.e. spraying water all over his unsuspecting guests at every turn in the garden, etc.)--and Vienna. The latter still retains some of its charm and spirit despite all it has been through, and has the added beauty of being relatively cheap; a good place to indulge in a bit of “luxury” at a low price. Schonbrunn Palace was really gorgeous… where old Frans Joseph slept amidst gilded decor in a small, plain iron bed. A ride through the “Vienne Woods” is lovely too… and the opera...the food...etc. etc. but the outstanding show was, I think, the performance of the Spanish Riding School, a lovely fragment of the aristocratic past, with the Lipizzan horses and their handsome riders in a sort of “equestrian ballet: as it were, to music, in a riding hall that looked more like a ballroom.
I returned to London for various Cruise reunions and then went up to Scotland for a short and less glamorous “cruise” by local mail & cargo ships to the Orkneys and Shetlands. Cold, bleak and treeless, pest bogs, Shetland ponies, and fishing boats from various Northern countries ind, clear invigorating air, white sands blue sea… Shetland was appealing in its way. (Orkney not so interesting, apart from the Scapa Flow where so many ships were sunk and a little Nissen hut converted into a Baroque-type chapel by Italian prisoners of war with considerable artistic flair.) But on the mainland of Shetland we had a bus trip to Sumburgh, where the various ruins (called “Jarlshof” - Sir Walter Scott’s idea) of iron oge, Pictish, Viking, and some medieval Scottish dwellings are tidily preserved. (Shetland was settled by Vikings, and only came into Scottish hands because the King of Denmark pawned it to the King of Scotland as part of his daughter’s dowry and never redeemed it). Proceeding farther north by smaller ship, the sea became rougher and rougher, and I only left my healthy bunk when we stopped to load or unload some of the local cargo (maybe a cow, a sheep, a sick man on a litter, a few carts of food or other vital supplies) but at one point before I had retreated back to the bunk, the Captain invited me up to the bridge, and I just COULDN’T be sick there, so queasily & politely listened to his tales of island life, and the Norwegian weather forecast, which he could understand and give a running translation of, even the various Norse dialects. We made our most northerly stop at Baltasound (island of Unst) where we had a little bus ride up to view the Muckle Flugga Lighthouse (yes, Muckle Flugga) which is the northernmost point in Great Britain, and I’d say it would be a toss-up as to which is the loneliest outpost at which to be stationed, that, or the nearby RAF station; but the natives, a happy, contented and very nice looking people, say it is a very busy and pleasant place to live.
Incidentally, Shetland has some of the most marvelous place names: Mouses, Grutness, Fitful, Haad, Pepa Stour, Scatote, Vidlin Voe, Lunna Nose, Yell!
That cruise ended at Aberdeen, and from there I proceeded down to the North of England to visit friends in Billingham, who took me to see Durham Cathedral - one of the most imposing in the country. I had long wanted to see Hadrian's Wall, and there were not ours running this early in the year, so I made my way from Newcastle by local trains and buses to one of the Roman camps (“Checters”) and there found a party of school boys in chartered buses, whose headmaster kindly let me come along with them, to see other sites of interest along the wall, including the best preserved portion of Housestenda. I can’t think of a better way to “do” this well than with this bright bunch of lads, who were most amusing playing “Picts” and “Romans” fighting on the wall.
My last sightseeing in the North was the so-called Holy Island (Lindisfarne), accessible only by dilapidated taxi at low tide, not frightfully thrilling when you got there, but an historic site from the standpoint of early British Christianity, the abbey founded by St. Aidan from the parent community at Ions in Scotland.
I returned to London for a last farewell, and sailed from Southampton May 27 on a ghastly military transport ship (my own fault, I could have flown). Arrived in New York June 3 in my heavy British woolens and nearly collapsed in the 96º-or-so heat, but crawled around dazed and awestruck at the variety and volume of beautiful clothes, feeling like a foreigner, with my profusion of pleases and thank-yous and sorrys and waiting for buses on the wrong side of the street and thinking every American I saw was a tourist till I remembered I was back on home ground...felt very strange indeed. I spent awhile on the east coast and then came home to California & spent the summer at home in Morro Bay, unpacking, sorting, washing, cleaning (the English soot will never come out), and then re-packing to come up north, i.e. to Palo Alto, to look for a job.
There are a lot of aircraft and electronics firms around here but I’d had such a bellyful of that kind of subject matter on my previous job, so I decided to investigate office jobs at Stanford University (the “alma mater”): however, on seeing my application (dazzled by this “American Embassy - London” background) they seemed to think I was just the thing for the directorship of one of the girls’ dormitories (Union Res. to be exact). My reaction was “ugh!” - not my cup of tea at all - the prospect of having to cope with 80 adolescent American females was, to say the least, revolting. However, the university was desperate (the previous lady having suddenly quit on them at the last minute, school was about to start, and no staff), so they gave me a big line of bull about how the academic standards had risen to unprecedented heights, students now more serious minded, etc. (not much!) But what really enabled them to railroad me into this job was sheer greed on my part -- for the room & board, long vacations, daily maid service, & lots of free time during the day, so I capitulated, and plunged right in with all four feet and fur flying, an exhausting round of orientation meetings for new staff, then the tribulations of getting the place opened and everyone settled in, and so on. The first month was pretty hectic, but now things have calmed down and I’m beginning to have some idea of what I’m doing. It’s like being a hotel manager, mother confessor and general crying towel for all the little darlings under one’s care. This particular dorm had always been the hangout for the Bluestocking-Bohemian set, who have recently been inundated by a swarm of more conventional sweet young things and social butterflies, etc., arbitrarily assigned here under the university’s new housing policy. This mixing may have a salubrious effect on both camps.
As jobs go, it’s fairly easy, as I say with free time during the day, but being “on call” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and having to eat with - and listen to - nothing but adolescents all the time gets a bit annoying sometimes. However, for the present time, the many advantages make it worth my while, & it’s nice being (for the most part) my own boss. The only “trip” I’ve taken since I came here was a weekend down to Carmel and Monterey, most charming, and in fact almost like being back in Europe again
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Cheerio for now, and have a happy Christmas and New Year….