Eighty Not Out (19 page)

Pumpkins carved to make lanterns, pumpkins stuffed, the whole panoply of traditional feasts dominated the scene in International House in the weeks leading up to Christmas. I bought an Elna sewing machine, which was to do service for the next fifteen years. Our Iraqi doctor friend Edward, who had not brought his wife to Boston, was a frequent visitor, often sharing our evening meal before he and Fergus embarked on their study of epidemiology or statistics, which often continued, joined by other students, into the small hours. He was enthusiastic about my casseroled leg of lamb with vegetables, but told me how wrong it was to use garlic and onions in the same dish.

I felt it behove Fergus, as house chairman, to make some seasonal gesture of hospitality for those unfortunates, far from their homes, who would be remaining in Boston over the Christmas holidays. He did not feel the same, at least not so forcibly, but gave in when I pointed out that most of the stress would fall on me – he would only have to foot the bill. It was a huge success; I did not count the heads, but over thirty packed into our small space, screaming at each other through a smoke screen, against a background din of Beatles records I had borrowed for the occasion. Drink flowed from the cramped bar in the kitchen, where some guests spent the entire evening. We found the Chinese and Japanese difficult, inclined to sit together in self-protective clumps and leaving as early as they decently could. I felt bad about this, as some brought gifts in gratitude for lessons in English. The girls fortunately slept until after midnight, when both woke and joined the party.

We had a warm invitation to visit Hartford, Connecticut, where Grandma's cousin Helen, a retired professor of history at the university, and her two brothers, Charles and Homer, lived. We were to stay with Charles and his wife Carleta, the parents of my putative pen-pal, Jane, now married with two children. Memories of my duplicity returned, and I dreaded our meeting.

Edward, who was going to stay with friends at the embassy in Washington, said he would be happy to drive us to Hartford. It was our first experience of a turnpike system and spaghetti junctions, and I was terrified by the many drivers who defied regulations, blithely swinging in and out of lanes, and the enormous trucks belting along at 60 m.p.h. The countryside between Boston and Hartford struck us as tame – gently undulating and densely wooded with young birches, and studded with small lakes and reservoirs. There was housing almost all the way, but because the houses were not built in rigid lines, and most were clad with cedar shingle, the general effect was pleasant: we liked the fact that each owner was not constrained – as in
UK
– to fence his patch, which was in any case much larger, so that the houses appeared to nestle naturally on their sites.

We located Helen's house only after much argument over the minute map she had scribbled in pencil on a torn-off sheet of notepad. She rushed out to greet us, quite a small figure, her face reminiscent of a benign gargoyle, but with a mass of pretty white hair. There was a definite resemblance to Grandma, and the family penchant for purple was evident in Helen's clothes. (The gene was first noticed when Eileen reached the last stage of the full mourning she adopted on the demise of ‘dear Dav' in 1921. The first stage was all black, which she wore with a long widow's veil, through shades of grey in the thirties, to variations on a lavender, lilac and purple theme at the time of her death. During visits to Belfast, she always took me along to appointments with ‘dear Mr Dunne', her tailor in Wellington Place, to help in choosing suiting for two new costumes she ordered every year: towards the end, the purple verged on vulgar. Her favourite ring was a large antique amethyst, reputedly once owned by a bishop – sadly the original stone had been replaced by a dishonest jeweller, so what I inherited was well-worn glass. I recently had the stone replaced and the ring looks glorious. The gene is very persistent: I am fond of the colour; Katharine, whose birth stone is amethyst, loves it; and my design-conscious only granddaughter is not averse to wearing the royal colour.)

Helen was an uninhibited extrovert, chattering nervously throughout a nice lunch she had prepared, but she quieted down gradually, and before Edward made his escape to Washington found time to tell him how well she thought some of these Middle Eastern countries were coming on! She had a collection of ornaments from her travels, some very nice, others truly awful, and it was nerve-wracking to keep an eye on the children lest curiosity should tempt them to touch. We were relieved when she decided it was time to drive us to Charles's house, and more so to get there in one piece – erratic driving was another thing she had in common with Grandma. Snow was falling steadily when we got there, and Charles came out to give instructions on how and where to park, but she ignored his gestures and parked where she wanted. We could see from his expression that he was accustomed to this, sighing perceptibly as he helped us through ankle deep snow to the porch, where he had cleared a space for the car.

Inside, the house looked like the cover of a Christmas edition of
Ideal Home
, and plump Carleta came trotting out to give us a genuinely warm welcome. We were taken into a large sitting room with a blazing log fire, and introduced to Jane, her stolid husband, and two children – a girl of eight and a five-year-old son. There followed a ritual opening of children's stockings, containing token offerings only, and we were presented with a book of lovely photographs of fine examples of New England architecture. Fortunately I had brought two expensive cakes and small gifts for Jane's children, otherwise we should have been overwhelmed. Snacks and delicious dips were handed around, and a giant antique silver bowl of warm punch sat on a side table.

When I left to put the girls to bed, Carleta scuttled off to the kitchen, having put on a professional-looking apron over her cocktail dress, with which she wore a tiny black plate hat with a veil reminiscent of Jessie Matthews in a thirties film. Fergus was left to make polite conversation, which he did not find easy, as common interests were few. These were hardheaded businessmen: Charles a stockbroker and Jane's husband in real estate, their sports were baseball and American football, and neither played golf. Politics would be dangerous, as Fergus had no idea where their sympathies lay, although he suspected Republican. Helen sounded as if she might be a Democrat, but she had gone quiet and nodded off from time to time. Medicine, and the control of diseases encountered in tropical zones, were topics about which they knew no more than could be gleaned from the pages of
Reader's Digest
. Fergus's relief was plain to see when I returned to the room and Carleta announced that dinner was ready.

We returned to Boston by Greyhound bus, relieved to be back in our dreary apartment. I had managed to liven it up by sticking my version of Mondrian paintings made from stiff coloured paper on some of the doors in the entrance hall, but nothing could compensate for the lack of daylight. Sybil and I decided to organise a New Year's Eve celebration, without prior consultation with the house mother. We played Scottish and Irish music, much alcohol was consumed, and it was acclaimed a great success, but it had been noticed that we had ‘borrowed' some of the Christmas decorations. We were summoned to the house mother's office where we were carpeted like sixth formers – ‘pained to have to say so', ‘should have known better', ‘surprised that you of all people', and so on. That Fergus had been a participant was not mentioned – she had a soft spot where he was concerned.

The next trouble I got into was the result of organising a skating party on a pond in Fenway Park. This was a popular event but illegal because of dangerous currents under the ice. A great pity because the natural ice had a delightful spring in contrast to the alternative flooded and frozen football pitch littered with bottle tops, fag ends and twigs. I felt guilty because one of the wives, a nervous woman, bulldozed by her husband into taking healthy exercise, fell just minutes after talking to me about her fear of falling. Going at a snail's pace, she tripped and went down heavily; clearly in great pain, her husband took her to hospital, where examination revealed a double fracture of the tibia and severe muscle tears. After an operation, she returned in plaster from thigh to foot and remained so for six weeks. Their children, about the same age as Katharine and Mary, were looked after in turn by all the females in the house. I had them for a couple of days, doing all their smelly, unrinsed washing: mercifully her mother, from Oregon, came to the rescue.

The Japanese ladies, who had begun to emerge from their shells, organised classes in the formalities of Ikebana flower arrangement. They emphasised that to master the art would take many years, so we would learn only the basic rules. We were to report with a selection of blooms, twigs, berries, dried grasses – anything we thought had potential. They were, without exception, as delicate as some of the blossoms, and I was not alone in feeling gross and clumsy; they never verbalised criticism, but would quietly remove an offending flower or twitch a twig to another angle. There were also Chinese cookery classes, and most of the American women who attended, belonging to the Constance Spry generation, were ill at ease. Unlike the flowerarranging classes, the cookery sessions were led by a massive matron, whose family had settled in Vancouver at the turn of the century. She was a tyrant, displeased when I queried the length of time taken to steam little parcels of minced pork and was tactless enough to mention the risk of tapeworm from undercooked pig meat.

The stress of cramming for forthcoming examinations continued to permeate the building – students from outside the
US
did not relish having their grades posted on a board for all to see – and many, including Fergus, were unsure where they would go during the next year, and by whom they would be employed. Fergus was again offered the job of biologist on the Bilharziasis Advisory Team, although it had not been decided where it was to be based or, more importantly, who the other members of the team would be. Vague offers abounded: ‘Oh, you must come to Jamaica … Iraq … Iran … Thailand … my father is the minister of health and will fix it all for you', and so on. All nebulous, and with the threat of continued life involving suitcases, boxes and furnished apartments, we felt that much of our exhaustion and nervous irritability was due to uncertainty about the next move.

The succession of letters sent to headquarters over the winter months and into the spring resulted in more positive signals from Geneva. There were two jobs in Africa – one on the Jos plateau in Northern Nigeria, the other in Tanzania – one in Geneva, for which Fergus had been shortlisted, and one based at the regional office in Alexandria, which would have been preferable to the regional office at Brazzaville. He was also offered a career service appointment, meaning he would no longer limp along on a two-year-contract basis; the drawback being that
WHO
could, in theory, send their ‘expert adviser' to some hell-hole in the middle of a desert.

By the end of March we were all suffering from ‘cabin fever', having been confined too long in an overheated, infectionladen atmosphere. There were subtle signs of spring, but I was worrying about the onset of summer – the interval between seasons in Connecticut is short – and the urgent need to buy or make suitable clothes for myself and the girls. With Sybil and her husband, Iain, we booked a chalet on Cape Cod for two weeks at the end of June, just after graduation day. Once the ceremony was over, Fergus planned to visit his older brother, Woodrow, who had settled near Toronto, before driving down to join us at Cape Cod with Edward, who had decided to hang onto his car until the last minute before returning to Iraq.

At the end of May, while sharing one of our evening meals, Edward looked at me and announced without preamble: ‘You're pregnant.' I denied this, but he insisted, saying, ‘It's something about the eyes – you'll see, I'm never wrong.' He wasn't.

Sybil bravely drove me, Katharine, Mary and her own child, Angus, for hours through the outskirts of Boston before we reached anything approaching open countryside. Cape Cod, in my romantic imagination, would have crashing waves and black towering cliffs, but was in reality limitless beaches and dunes, sparsely vegetated with poison ivy and sea holly. Rarely one glimpsed, at the end of a drive marked ‘Strictly Private', a cluster of dwarfed conifer surrounding a holiday home owned by one of Boston's super-rich. We visited Provincetown at the northern tip of the Cape, where for the first time I used a supermarket trolley; our local A & P store used brown paper bags. We went to the famous aquarium where many monstrosities of the deep appeared to be in good health: Katharine still recalls a menacing wide-mouthed, sharp-toothed specimen which eyeballed her through the thick glass. We all remember the hairy caterpillars which abounded around our cabin, the sting of which induced a red, intensely itchy reaction, and the inland pond where a small sea-plane landed just before Mary waded out of her depth, with me, a poor swimmer even in salt water, squelching through the soft mud in pursuit, yelling ‘Come back' to the heedless child.

Only when I was back in Ireland did I gather courage to tell my mother that another child was due. In the autumn of 1966 Fergus joined me and the girls for a short break in our new house at Craigavad, before flying to the regional office in Brazzaville, from which he was to conduct surveys of snail populations in Gabon and Cameroon. Afterwards he was to report at headquarters in Geneva for briefing on a new bilharziasis pilot control project to be started, at the request of the Tanzanian Ministry of Health, in March 1967. Officially called the
WHO
/Tanzania Schistosomiasis Pilot Control and Training Project, it was to be based at the East African Medical Research Institute in Mwanza on the southern shore of Lake Victoria, with Fergus as project leader. His national counterpart, the director of the institute, would be Dr Valentine Eyakuze, a brilliant clinician but renowned for indiscriminate outbursts of vitriol.