SUDBURY

The best way of getting to Sudbury in the old days was to take Chambers bus #84 from the Colchester Bus Station. The distance is just under seventeen miles on the A134; only Chambers bus #84 doesn’t go that way.

Instead, it crossed and re-crossed the A134 along its route through northern Essex and southern Suffolk through a Constable countryside, passing the village of Little Horkesley on the south bank of the Stour River and the Anchor Inn in picturesque Nayland.

Once at the Sudbury bus station, it is an easy walk downhill to the ancient Water Meadows and branches of the Stour. The dogs – a host of Beagles, Border Collies, Spaniels, Terriers and a magnificent Saluki – with attendant Wellingtons in the Constable light and a full moon rising in the mists “e noi fatti d’aria al mattino.”

The Persian Gates

It began when Professor von Hagen came to Shiraz in the Spring of 1976. He had been following the Royal Road from Turkey through Iraq into Iran. Queen Farah Diba had provided him with a helicopter in an effort to find the final stage, between Susa and Persepolis. From the talk he gave at the Iran-American Society and our conversation that followed, it was clear he had not found the place. I retain a clipping from the Kayhan International newspaper captioned “Not a Trace of the of the Persian Gates.”

Well, we thought, why not go and have a picnic and find these “Persian Gates” (Darvazeh-ye Fars). After all, von Hagen said Sir Auriel Stein had found the site.

Henry Speck, “Alexander at the Persian Gates: A Study in Historiography and Topography,” American Journal of Ancient History, n.s. 1.1 (2002) 15-234. http://www.livius.org/pen-pg/persian_gate/persian_gate.html

FOURAS

My father had been recalled to the army and was attached as Protestant Chaplain to a hospital unit in La Rochelle, France.

My mother and I flew from New York on a propellor aircraft to Gandor, Newfandland, then Shannon, Ireland, and finally Frankfort, Germany – almost 24 hours all told – to join him.

He had rented “Villa la Paloma” at the far end of Rue du Paradis in the French seaside resort of Fouras some 34km south of La Rochelle to which he commuted five days a week

What my mother did all day I have no idea but I spent much of my time reading the plots of operas and playing the piano scores of the great arias on a field organ my father, as Chaplain, had “borrowed” from the base in La Rochelle.

Villa La Paloma was a major misnomer. It consisted of a small “sitting room” with a black-bellied stove that had to be fired with wood during the cold season, a dining room table and a very narrow bed where I slept; a larger room where my parents slept with the field organ and a small, stone paved kitchen of sorts.

Outside the house were a kind of unkempt vegetable garden, a storage shed, and an outhouse which stank in summer and froze one’s ass off in winter. It reminded me of the scene in John Updike’s “Pigeon Feathers” (which I heard him read years later at The American University in Cairo) where David goes to the outhouse and has a vision of Hell.

Fortunately, a Master Sargent who lived with his family in a large and well appointed house on the main road let me sit beside a small, portable gramophone in the sitting room and listen to my first 33 1/3rd rpm gramophone recording. I had purchased it at the Base PX with my minuscule allowance. “Au fond du Temple Saint” made Villa la Paloma bearable; almost. Listening to Björling and Merrill, it made no difference that summers in Fouras were Monsieur Hulot all over again, the hotels and plage crammed with Les Bourgeoisie.

The Vistafyord

“Excuse me, are you our lecturer?” she asked.

It was dinner, formal dress, crystal, the whole nine yards.

The other three at table were the cartoonist, his wife and my father, whom I had invited as my guest on this Five-Star Cunard cruise of the western Mediterranean, starting and ending in Southampton but stopping at Santiago Compostella, Florence, Villefranche, Mallorca, Lisbon and Guernsey.

I looked up at her. She was standing next to me. She must have been in her eighties with wonderfully coiffed grey hair, dressed in a simple black evening dress.

“Yes,” I said. “I give the historical lectures.”

“I thought so,” she replied. “You sound exactly like ‘Books on Tape.’”

Trikala

According to my diary, it was Sunday 29 July 1962 about 8:00 o’clock in the evening.

I have spent thirty minutes sitting on a wall of the acropolis, “talking” to a Greek soldier,
a handsome young man of perhaps eighteen with dark hair and a deep tan. He speaks
softly but with confidence. The eyes are intent but full of melancholy, as is his speech.

How do I know this? I do not know. I said nothing. He spoke continuously.

He is leaving the city early tomorrow morning with his fellow soldiers, who are
convened in the square below. He has come to the acropolis for one last look at his city.

The night is coming on. Music issues from all sides of these tumbling 16th century walls. He wanted to tell someone and I could understand little. But I could comprehend and my heart is broken for him. This is his city, his country. He may never come here again. He leaves it behind forever. He is not alone. The band is playing in the square and his comrades share his fate.

It may be that he will walk the windy plains of Troy where once the dark Achilles trod
or sink beneath the wine-dark sea to speak with fair Odysseus and his lusty crew. I do
not know but I have met a kindred spirit in this ancient place of shades and stones. “A
wind is rising and the rivers flow.”

Avenue F

I don’t remember the street number – I think it must have been 4206 – but I know the house was located in the middle of the block on the west side of the street.

It was an older house. My room looked out on the front porch and small front yard.
I went to school at Baker Junior High School – now part of the Austin ISD – and was Captain of the Honor Patrol. We had to get to school by 8:00 a.m. I rode my bicycle the twelve blocks across Speedway Avenue. We put on our uniforms and took up our assigned positions at the four intersections of the school to direct traffic. It was a serious responsibility for a thirteen-year-old. We were allowed an extra ten minutes to report to first period. We had to secure our uniforms and equipment.

I remember driving a fast ball through a window of the school some considerable distance from home-plate but the girl who broke her arm when she fell from the jungle gym made me physically sick.

It all began in when our music teacher – I wish I could remember her name – played a bit of Bizet’s “Carmen“ for the class. That was it, one of those moments that forms and informs one’s life. I wanted to be an opera singer. “Ach, Isolde. Wie schön bist Du.”

I had a terrier named “Scottie.” She died from a case of Mange. We buried her in the back yard. I remember worrying whether that was legal. My father said it was, but he had a compost pile near the alley and I knew that was illegal.

Twice a week, in the evenings, I had to wash dishes. The kitchen faced the backyard, and compost pile. It was ok because I got to listen to the radio. “I’m back in the saddle again …. This is Gene Autry for Wriggly’s Spearmint chewing gum.” And Roy Rogers, and the Lone Ranger.

I remember one afternoon I discovered a volume of the Chicago Great Books series edited by J Mortimer Adler devoted to Plato and sat on the front porch and trying, unsuccessfully, to make much of anything of the dialogues. I later discovered and still read “Platero y Yo.”

I recently drove by the house and wondered who lives there now. Perhaps I will stop and ask next time.

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