The Kindle version is available here – and the print version will be up by the first of September. And when the third Luna City Compendium is released, around Christmas time, books 7,8 and 9 will be in it. But all good things come to whose who wait, patiently!
It doesn’t have a title yet – but this is another snippet of the letters between two cousins, in the late 1930s. Yes, this will have to do with WWII, and the two woman correspondents are the granddaughters of characters in previous novels.
Letter, dated 24 April 1938, Postmarked Ipoh, Perak – Federated Malay States
Dearest Vennie: We have finally arrived at Tommy’s plantation, after hopscotching by railway, airplane, steamship, railway again, and automobile, until we reached the lovely little town of Ipoh on the River Kinta – all in very jungly and mountainous landscape, and not the least like the ‘great grey green greasy Limpopo, all set about with fever trees!’ We stayed the night at the station hotel, as we arrived very late in the afternoon and we were both exhausted beyond words. I honestly would not have been the least surprised to complete this long journey in a rickshaw! (We rode in one in Manila – a carriage pulled by a carabao – that is, a tame water-buffalo!) Tommy’s household apparently did not get the telegram sent from Singapore alerting them to our arrival. Well, never mind, said Tommy – I’ll telephone in the morning and Chandeep Singh will send the auto for us. (This Chandeep Singh is Tommy’s butler/driver/right-hand manager.)
I wrote to you from Hawaii, before we departed – so I hope that you received my letter, sent via airmail! In case it has gone astray, I had a full account in it, about how Tommy met up with the famous champion Olympic swimmer, Mr. Duke Kahanamoku, who was quite the resident celebrity where we stayed. During our week-long stay at the Royal Hawaiian, Mr. Kahanamoku made fast friends with Tommy – and even favored him with a long session in the water, tutoring him on the technique of riding those long boards at the crest of the waves. Tommy said it was enormously good fun, rather like riding a horse in a steeplechase at full gallop, although he barely had gotten the hang of standing up on the board before we had to move on. My husband has the unerring ability to make friends with so many people, and especially relishes the companionship of those who are expert at so many things. Mr. Kahanamoku was fit as the athlete he was in previous decades, comely and dark brown. I would have thought him a Mexican, on seeing him at first glance, like one of the Becker ranch vaqueros.
Anyway, at the end of our week-long stay, we boarded the Clipper for the long flight to Manila … oh, there were stops at a several miniscule islands scattered at convenient intervals across the Pacific, but we did not linger any significant length of time at them. We stayed a week at the completely luxurious and modern Manila Hotel on Rizal Park, recovering from the rigors (hah!) of the journey from Hawaii. While we were there, an old friend of Daddy’s treated us to a splendid dinner at the Army & Navy Club. Do you remember Daddy mentioning his old friend and pal, Chester, who thought his best bet for a college education was to take an appointment at a military academy? Like Daddy, Chester was the grandson of one of the old original settlers in Fredericksburg. Indeed, Daddy insists that Chester’s grandfather had once courted Great-Grandma Magda in the early days, but she decided to marry Great-Grandfather Becker instead. Still, according to all the family stories, they remained friends, and the Beckers and the Nimitzes were always on the best of terms thereafter. Well, anyway, Daddy’s friend Chester had just finished a tour as the commander of a cruiser in the Asiatic Fleet. Are you impressed? I was, terribly. I expect Daddy sent him a telegram – which caught him as he was heading back to the United States to take over some fearfully responsible duty, something called “The Bureau of Navigation.” Neither Tommy nor I could divine exactly what this meant. Apparently, Chester has spent the last couple of years with the Asiatic Fleet showing off the flag to the obstreperous Japs. Well, someone has to do it, although Tommy reposes enormous confidence in the Royal Navy when it comes to this tiresome obligation. Well, another thing which we must agree to disagree upon, the abilities of the British VS the American navies.
It was quite an enjoyable evening, though. I felt quite at home with Chester, almost as if Daddy had been with us – grave and blond and handsome. He reminisced to us about being a boy in his grandfather’s house, and the doings of Fredericksburg – where his grandfather was simply the most awful man for pranks and tall-tale-telling (or so said Daddy!), with the old Verein-Kirche in the middle of Main Street, his grandfather’s hotel and ballroom all tricked out like a steamboat grounded, and the little Sunday houses for the families from the outlaying properties who came to do business on Saturday and church on Sunday, and marvelous barbeques for any celebration. I would have felt most homesick, hearing him talk about this all, and Tommy nodding with the deepest interest and asking him to tell us more. My husband has done it again, charming the most unlikely people by taking such an intense interest in their doings. We went to see many of the sights of Manila – the hotel had a view over the vast bay where the Navy has moorage and that was simply the most spectacular scene.
Then, on to Singapore, which was really more of the same, only with British accents. This was where we went by steamer. Really, it was quite relaxing. Tommy presented me with a guide to the Malay language, which he says that I will simply have to learn as essential to my new life. I whiled away those days on the puttering passenger steamer, studying the pages of Fraser & Neaves’ Short Malay Handbook in Roman Characters. Tommy says that I will absolutely have to be able to cope in Malay, with the servants and plantation employees. Well – I could swing it in Spanish when I was growing up on the Ranch – now, hard could this be?
Depressingly hard, as it might be after a week or so wrestling with the vocabulary and pronunciation in that little red-covered handbook, although Mr. Song the Chinese cook speaks very passible English. So much for the use of the cooking book that I was given as a wedding present from Ivy. I do not have any use for recipes at all, as Mr. Song does all the cooking and resents very much any interference with his methods and the organization of his kitchen.
Sigh. I am getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Longcot Plantation is named after some grim and moldy stately pile in England, which, if you ask me, would be embarrassed at sharing a name with a plain wooden cottage with a tin roof, even though it sprawls in every direction and boasts a splendid garden and a very green lawn, kept carefully mown by the syce. (More about the resident servants later – Vennie, I now live in a veritable League of Nations when it comes to nationalities!) Tommy’s grandfather had some sentimental connection to the original Longcot House, I guess. But picture a simple wooden sprawl, with deep verandahs all the way around, and large stretches of windows covered sketchily by louvered shutters, if at all. It seems that the whole purpose of walls here is so that they may be as open to admit as much of the wandering and hopefully cooler air as is possible. Of course, mosquitoes and other flying insects are simply ubiquitous – we all sleep under clouds of mosquito netting. Nothing must be done to impede the fresh air, morning and night. It is hot here, which I admit – and humid. You would simply not believe the amount of condensation sweated off a glass filled with plain water and ice, after five minutes! Picture that structure surrounded by tall trees of a jungly-nature, beds of fabulously flowering shrubs, and a sweep of green lawn … it is so green, so lush, so burgeoning with tropical life … honestly, the Hill Country seems to be a barren desert by comparison. (Save in spring, when the wildflowers overwhelm …)
At any rate, when we arrived, all the household staff and the local workers were lined up at the edge of the gravel drive to receive us, as if we were royalty on tour of some splendid pile or enterprise. Honestly, can you imagine anything more personally embarrassing to me, everyone bobbing curtseys and bows, and calling me ‘Mem Peg’ and greeting me as if they were swearing eternal devotion to us and our bloodline? Chandeep Singh practically did; it seems that he served with Tommy’s father in some Indian regiment and followed him after the war to Malaya. Tommy has known Chandeep Singh for all of his own life and regards him as a kind of honorary uncle. Vennie … this whole thing is more complicated than I thought, upon marriage to Tommy. And you are the only one whom I may confide in. I will write you again, in more detail about our dear little house and the conundrums that I find there.
Love, Peggy
PS – how might one be certain of being pregnant? Since you are a nurse and have knowledge of these awkward things. Let me know, soonest.
(This is the WWII novel, the concept of which came to me in a dream, and I woke up in time to recall the concept and characters.)
Half a world away, Venetia Stoneman, third-year student nurse sat, kicking her heels on the Galveston seawall, with her bicycle propped against the inland angle of the wall, looking out on the shifting gray-blue waves in the Gulf of Mexico and considering things. Things like – what she would do with herself after graduating from the Sealy Nursing College as a qualified nurse.
Not go home to Deming, New Mexico – of that, she was certain. Not to hang around the home ranch, putting antiseptic dressings on her older brother’s hired hands when they had done themselves a physical damage, and riding with them in the bumpy back of a farm truck to the hospital in Deming, or more settled points. It went without saying that at some point in all the work that ranch hands were heir to simply spectacular medical emergencies. Bloody and near-fatal injuries. That was a given – and a situation with which Vinnie did not want to deal. Family obligations has limits, Vinnie told herself. Besides, Fred can deal with it all. I want to live my own life, a life on my terms. I love my brothers and sisters – but I’m almost twenty-two years of age. Free and white, twenty-one and all that. Spread my wings …
Out over the blue-gray Gulf, the white gulls spread their almost-motionless wings, rising and falling on the thermal updrafts.
“I want …” Vennie said aloud and left the sentence unfinished. For truly – she did not know what she wanted, aside from a mildly envious wish left over from childhood to be tall and blond and pretty. Like Peg – but she was not at all structured physically in the same glamorous mode as Cousin Peg. Vennie had long ago come to terms with this. Vennie was slight and small, with tightly curly light-blond hair, grey eyes, and fine features. Also of an intellectual inclination, which had made the decision to attend nursing college a fairly easy one.
“What do you want, then,” a familiar feminine voice spoke from the sidewalk at her back. Vennie turned and smiled at the interloper to her private thoughts; Helen Drinkwater – her roommate at the Sealy nursing college. “I’m not interrupting, am I, Vennie? Privacy is so rare a thing for us …”
“Not at all,” Vennie smiled – no, Helen was a welcome interlocutor. Now the other girl climbed onto the seawall, her trouser-clad legs hanging over the edge. Helen was – as someone with a modicum of easy wit had remarked – a long tall drink of water: lanky and dark-haired, and of a cynical turn of mind. Helen fished in her handbag for a crumpled packet of cigarettes and her lighter. “Smoke?”
“Sure,” Vennie replied. “I was just looking at the sea, and wondering what I would do with myself, when we graduate the program.”
“Get a job,” Helen replied. She blew out a puff of cigarette smoke from her new-lit cigarette. “Things are picking up again. Jobs in plenty. Besides,” she applied the lighter to the end of Vennie’s cigarette. “You can always go back to your brother’s ranch, if everything falls through. Or work at the Sealy.”
“Ugh,” Vennie replied. “Three years is enough. I like the Island well enough, but not well enough to stay here. I want to go somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
They kicked their heels against the sea wall, regarding the ceaseless churn of blue-grey Gulf water, dashing against the sandy strand below their feet. Vennie privately relished being in the open air, alone but for a quiet friend, after a full week of confinement within walls, obedient and required to be silent. Nursing school, she realized early on, had a certain element of hazing to it, of the kind which she had observed on the ranch, with new hands. An aspect of being tried and tested by the older hands and with luck, eventually found worthy. She had shared this insight early on with Helen; Helen, who was inclined to stand on dignity, and demand why … why were the student nurses being required to do this and that humiliating task? Helen had nodded in acquiescence, upon seeing the sense of it all, and been accommodating, once Vennie had pointed out the real reason.
“I’m going to apply for a job with the Red Cross,” Helen said, abruptly. “Because there’ll be a war on, in a couple of years. The Red Cross is a reserve for military nurses. Have you considered that option, Vennie?”
“I have not,” Vennie replied, rather startled. “What reason do you think that there will be a war?”
“My brother is in the Army,” Helen replied. “Eugene. He works in … well, his specialty is in planning and strategy. He thinks that that this awful Hitler man in Germany is planning for a war in Europe. Eugene says that since Germany lost the last war, they are building up their military and spoiling for another round; one they think they have a fair chance of winning. He is quite serious about it. Haven’t you seen the newsreels?”
“I don’t see that it has anything to do with us in America,” Vennie replied, stoutly. “Why should we care? We got pulled into the last War over a lot of hooey over atrocities, atrocities which got played up in the newspapers! Why should we want a lot of our boys killed in a new one … all for nothing and in a fight that really wasn’t any of our business anyway?”
“A lot of people feel that way,” Helen acknowledged, frankly. “I can’t blame them in the least. Some bloody war in Europe ought not to be any of our affair, at all. Our uncle was a soldier in the AEF and died in a skirmish on the Western Front. Didn’t your people come from Germany, back in the day?”
“They sure did,” Vennie replied with heat. “A hundred years ago, and just to get away from being conscripted to fight in some stupid nobleman’s stupid bloodthirsty war with his equally stupid and bloodthirsty neighbor. We’re Americans now – and I’m an American, too. I don’t want to see us in America get caught up in another fight between who gets to be the big man in Europe.”
“Noted,” Helen sighed, and tossed the butt of her finished cigarette into the churning waves below. “Of course, no one really does. But Eugene says that there’s kind of a toss-up between those who really want to try out their new martial toys and theories and those who thing that we might be pushed to it, reluctantly. Do you even pay attention to the news, Vennie?”
“No – I’m too tired from cleaning bathrooms and patient rooms and staying up late, trying to catch up reviewing my lecture notes. That brother of yours seems like he has war on the brain, since he is a soldier, after all.”
“You ought to make a bit of an effort to keep up with current events,” Helen chided her. She took out another cigarette from the battered packet in her handbag and lit it. “Another? No … Well, I’ve never known Eugene to be wrong about this kind of thing. He has such a big brain; I’m surprised that bits of them aren’t oozing out of his ears. There are patterns to things, he says. Look at events, and how they fit all together, and follow the breadcrumb clues with an open mind. Herr Hitler is a nasty piece of work – you did see how his hooligans went out and began beating up and arresting Jews and smashing their shop windows, while the police stood by and did nothing at all? It was in all the newspapers, a couple of weeks ago,” Helen added with a touch of mild sarcasm. “Well, Eugene says that was just for practice. A warm-up exercise; preparatory to taking over the Sudetenland and annexing Austria. Who knows what the little maniac with the Charley Chaplain mustache will want next? Poland, Eugene says – on the excuse of claiming that the German elements there along the borders are being harassed and persecuted, or that those nasty Slavs are planning brutal war on the poor persecuted German minority, and that his noble master race must come riding to the rescue … and then Britain and France will have to do something, after having said ‘this much and no more’ so many times.”
“I don’t much care,” Vennie replied. “Let Europe go hang – we have enough troubles of our own. My folks left Europe a hundred years ago, and why should we feel any obligation to Europeans, if they didn’t have the nerve to get shed of a stupidly blinded ruling class and emigrate to America?”
“Your point is accepted,” Helen dragged deeply on her new cigarette. They watched the seagulls, wheeling over the grey-blue waves, rattling the shingle and sand at their feet, relishing the long ocean vista and the relative silence. “The thing is,” Helen observed after that long silence. “We might not be interested in war. But Eugene says – war might eventually be interested in us.”
After That Fateful Lightning, of course. The book with the WWII setting, which picks up with a pair of cousins, granddaughters of characters in The Quivera Trail and Sunset and Steel Rails.
At mid-morning, in a tropical lagoon, Peggy Becker – no, she was now Mrs. Thomas Morehouse – stepped carefully off the ramp from the magnificent flying boat which had brought her and her new husband a thousand miles and more across the Pacific Ocean and onto the floating dock, which rocked gently in a vivid blue ocean bay, only slightly less blue than the sky above, framed by the distant eminence of Diamond Head, slashing up into that horizon like a vast sleeping stone lion. A brilliant sea bird, the Pan-Am four-engine Clipper had settled into the crystal-blue waters, as if no more than slightly wearied after a day and a nighttime flight from San Francisco. The dock abutted a lush green lawn shaded by graceful coconut palm trees – a vision of tropical beauty only slightly marred by the view in the other direction; a grim and functional view of docks and mooring places for a crowding of grey-painted naval vessels, whose masts and gun muzzles gave to lie to a vision of a peaceful Pacific island paradise.
“Tommy,” she exclaimed to her new husband, as he took her arm. “It’s absolutely beautiful here – I love it already.”
“Wait until you see Ipoh Perak,” he replied. “It’s a garden of Eden in comparison.”
Peggy was tall and model-slender, an athletic girl with stick-straight hair the color of ripe wheat-straw, hair which defied every attempt to curl it in accordance with the current fashion. Her countenance was oval, pleasingly featured, accented with sky-colored blue eyes and shapely lips which owed little to brilliant red lipstick in accentuating their kissable attraction. Attraction to Tommy Morehouse most of all; Tommy was wiry and charming, as tall as his wife, but possessed of a personal magnetism which drew the attention of everyone in any room where he appeared.
Peggy had not quite figured it out – that attraction. Any room where Tommy appeared – he was instantly the star, for all that he wasn’t tall for a man and didn’t look anything like a movie star. Tommy was … Tommy was Tommy; grey eyes and undistinguished brown hair – dunduckety, was how one of the Vining cousins had described him; lanky and angular, rather like an English version of a young Abraham Lincoln. Her cousin Vinnie Stoneman had attempted an explanation. ‘Tommy looks at you and talks to you as if you are the most singular and fascinating person in the room. He does this with everyone, and the thing is – he is completely sincere. Tommy loves people, he is interested in every single person he meets. And that is why most everyone loves him in response.”
Peggy had fallen for him almost from the moment of meeting, an encounter at a family dinner with her grandparents, in their big old house in the oldest part of Alamo Heights. A distant cousin of the family, her father had said vaguely, English and kin to Great-Aunt Lottie’s husband in some degree, by way of explaining the presence of a stranger among the scattering of cousins, uncles and aunts in Granny Jane’s parlor on a rainy January Sunday.
“He’s returning from home leave in England, the long way around,” Daddy explained. “Quite pleasant when I spoke to him on the telephone; he had all kinds of questions. He works in Malaya, overseeing a rubber plantation.”
“Boring! And yet another cousin,” seventeen-year-old Ivy grumbled. “Don’t we ever meet anyone who isn’t a cousin?”
“He’s not bad looking at all,” Peggy murmured, and her heart had skipped a beat as hers and Tommy’s eyes met. He had been leaning up against the upright parlor piano, talking to Grandpa Sam – something to do with the property up north in the Palo Duro country.
It was an instant connection, as if they had known each other always – or as Vinnie observed humorously – as if they had known and loved each other in a previous life. Surely one couldn’t in this modern day, fall in love at first glance? But Peg and Tommy had. The talks between them – about the family ranch in the Hill Country where Peggy had spent most of the years growing up, the property that he managed in the Malayan foothills – were as meaningful and momentous as the companionable silences. Barely a week later he proposed; a month and a half later, married and boarding Pan American’s luxurious China Clipper, resting now like a motorized water-lily leaf in San Francisco Bay.
“How long are we going to stay here, then,” Peggy asked, as Tommy took her elbow. The morning breeze smelt a little of aviation fuel, with an overlay of salt water – but teased a little now and again with the scent of flowers; ginger, plumeria, jasmine and gardenia. She inhaled, relishing the fresh air and the flowers, palm leaves rustling in an endless dance overhead.
“A week here, and a week or two again in Manila,” Tommy replied, as half a dozen young women rushed forward, their arms filled with flower garlands, dark hair flowing unbound around their shoulders. They wore colorful bandeaus around their breasts, shell necklaces and more garlands of live flowers woven into their hair and around their necks, and shin-length skirts composed of some long fiber that looked like green raffia.
“Aloha!” the women chorused, flinging a garland around the neck of every departing passenger. “Aloha! Welcome to Hawai’i! Aloha!”
“I love this place, already!” Peg exclaimed again; the garland brought a richer scent of flowers to her than the erratic breeze. “I cannot imagine a place more different than Texas.”
“Indeed,” Tommy grinned. “Certainly, more different than Oxfordshire. A bit more like Malaya, though. Come on, Peggy – the hotel where we are staying is right on the beach. I believe, though,” he confessed as he and the other passengers took their places in a handful of taxis and a small bus tricked out in the colors and emblem of PAA – Pacific Air Ways. “That this is a welcome laid on by the airline … certainly very considerate of them to do so.”
“I don’t care – I love Hawaii anyway,” Peg replied. “And I’m certain that I’ll love Longcot Plantation even more. Tell me about the house again. I love to hear you talk about it.”
“It’s in the foothills above Ipoh,” Tommy began with a wry smile, for this was a story told many times, like a fairy story to a child at bedtime. “Over seventy hectares of mature rubber trees – my father and my grandfather began planting them when the coffee crop failed, back before the War. The house is not a large one – two stories tall, and on tall pilings to catch the breezes. It has deep porches all around. Every room of it opens onto a porch, through tall French doors. The afternoon heat, y’know…”
“I know about heat,” Peg replied, knowingly. “Summer in Texas means living in an oven … although it always seemed to be cooler in the Hills. I’m used to heat, Tommy.”
“Mumma – my mother started a garden when she married Father,” Tommy continued. “She has always said that the soil was so rich, it was a matter of planting a seed or a sprig, and then having to leap backwards as it grew so fast that it might hit you in the eye!”
“She lives in … Australia now?” Peg wanted to refresh her memory of Tommy’s family – none of whom were able to attend the ceremony, due to Tommy’s impulsive haste and the long distance from Texas between his remaining family and friends; his side of the church had been practically deserted on their wedding day. His parents and half-sister were stiff figures in black and white photos, formal or caught on casual snaps on a small simple Brownie camera, pictures which he just happened to have carried with him on his ‘home leave’. Neither of his parents really looked like Tommy. It was if he were a changeling child, deposited by the fae in the Morehouse family cradle, in faraway Malaya.
The taxi in which they were riding was skirting the harbor – a shining stretch of water on one side, and a precipitously-rising range of mountains on the other, mountains clad in lush greenery, attended by blue skies in which a range of clouds floated, like something arranged by a scenic painter. Peg spared a look outside the windows; now they were passing by the fringes of the naval base; nothing there but grim concrete and industrial metal, broken now and again by exuberant outcrops of palm trees and banks of lush plants. Yes, things grew in the tropics, as Tommy’s mother said of her garden. Stand back, or it will hit you in the eye.
But always beyond that vista of cranes, docks and steel was the ocean, dark and brooding, even in the morning sunshine now slanting over those mountains, a deep blue ocean trimmed with the white of cresting waves.
“Yes,” Tommy replied, and even though he spoke with typical English stoicism, Peg sensed the grief and loss which her husband must have felt. “Father was gassed in the War. Never entirely fit and well again afterwards. He died in 1921. I was at school then, of course. I was twelve – being sent Home even before the War. It wasn’t thought healthy for us English children to be kept in the East after about five or so. And Mumma married Stanley a few years later. Stanley’s a good sort of chap. He was an agent for some enterprise which had an office in Kuala Lumpor. They met at one of the Club do’s – can’t recall the occasion, since I wasn’t there. Of course. Social life in Malaya revolves around the local club.”
“He’s not a wicked stepfather?” Peg smiled sideways at her husband, and he covered her hand with his and smiled in return. “No, he’s not. Stanley’s a jolly decent sort. He makes Mumma happy, and now he and Mumma and Mavis all live in Brisbane. They all write to me without fail, every week. Now, your turn. Tell me about your home.”
“You never got to see it, in all the rush of the wedding,” Peg replied, with regret. “I’m sorry for that – because I loved the place so. Daddy managed it for Great-Uncle Dolph, and Ivy and I lived there on weekends and holidays. We boarded at St. Mary’s Hall, during the week.”
“Boarding school,” Tommy had a particular wry grin on his face. “How very English of you all.”
The taxi had now passed the outlaying establishments of the naval base, and now traveling along a good road; houses and small enterprises set in lush green plots and among thickets of tropical trees and vines. The green mountains rose up precipitously on the horizon to their left, and out to the right, between buildings, houses and stands of trees, the deep blue Pacific beckoned. Tommy had arranged for a week-long stay at the splendid pink hotel on the very beach, before continuing their journey.
“It was school – and we had to be there,” Peg was indignant. “A very good school, I will have you know! Anyway – the Becker ranch was established by my … I think, great-grandfather. Maybe another grand on top of that. I can’t be certain, as it was simply ages ago. Anyway, he built a stone house for his wife, or the woman that he hoped would be his wife, and it was the first and oldest stone house anywhere in the neighborhood. That’s the family story, anyway. There’s a carving over the front door, of a bird in the nest of an apple tree and the date 1847…”
“Practically modern, then,” Tommy commented.
Peg was indignant all over again. “No, you beast! For Texas that is old, as old as the hills! The great-great-grand had land for his service as a soldier, and later Great-Uncle Dolph and his kin went into trailing cattle, all up the long trail to Kansas. Daddy says that this was how they made the original fortune after opening a general store after the War Between the States, and lucky we were to hold on to it, too.” Peg settled against Tommy’s shoulder with a sigh. “I loved the place. I wish I could have shown it to you. A lovely old house with gardens all around, and a walled apple-orchard supposed to have been planted by Great Uncle Dolphs’ father. And Great Uncle Dolph planted an avenue of red-bud trees, all along the drive from the gate to the Home Ranch. His wife designed and set out the gardens. She was English, you know. It’s a lovely place … when we have home leave once again, I can show it to you. We learned to ride there, Ivy and I, but she is better in the saddle than I am, and Cousin Vinnie is better than either of us.”
“Your cousin who was your chief bridesmaid,” Tommy replied with a nod and a brief look of satisfaction at having recalled the names and the web of relations. “And quite an excellent dancer, too – I did several turns around the floor with her, at the reception dance. Did she also grow up on the family ranch with you?”
“Oh, no,” Peg replied. “The Stonemans own a big place in New Mexico – they visited now and again, for family things. I can’t recall the exact connection, it’s terribly complicated, I think she is a second cousin, but I love her like a sister. Now, the funny thing, and the new thing that I have just remembered is that Stoneman isn’t their real name – they changed it from Steinmetz about twenty years ago.”
“To sound less Jewish?” Tommy ventured, and Peg giggled.
“No, silly – to sound less German. Because of the War! All the Beckers and the Stonemans came from Germany, about a hundred years ago! Vinnie’s father decided around 1915 or so that he didn’t really want the grief of being considered foreigners and hostile foreigners at that. They were American, and that was an end to it, and if it took changing the name to something less tiresomely Germanic, then he could go to the courthouse and change it and solve all their problems.”
“I understand that our very own dear royals had the same problem,” Tommy chuckled – a rather cynical sound, and at Peg’s baffled expression, he enlarged. “Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was formerly the family name, since Prince Albert the blessed, espoused of our own good Queen Victoria was of the old German nobility. They changed it to Windsor and vacated all their German titles after Kaiser Wilhelm and his filthy Huns dropped bombs on England during the War.”
“You see? Problem solved,” Peg replied, thinking privately that she had been so blessed in her impulsive choice of husband. She nestled into his shoulder and watched the passing landscape in blissful silence for the remainder of the journey into town from the Pacific Airways landing dock. The taxi was descending into the city now, a space of wide avenues, which now and again crossed over watery canals and ocean inlets. “Are we going to dance at the Royal Hawaiian? I expect they have a band…”
“For a certainty, they do,” Tommy kissed her hand. “Every dance with me, Mrs. Morehouse?”
“Of course!” Peg promised. That was one of the silly things that she loved about her husband – that he was a good dancer. They fitted together, on the floor, the music binding them, every move, turn and gesture a magic thing, as if they sensed it without words. Now the taxi approached the grand hotel, a sprawling and eccentric edifice the color of pink cotton candy, set in groves of palm trees and gardens, with the dark blue pacific rolling in upon a sugar-white strand beyond. It was a palatial hotel, even the name reflected it. “What a lovely place for our honeymoon trip!” Peg sighed in absolute bliss. Everything was perfect. Her wedding, her husband, and now their lives together could not fail to fall short of such a perfect beginning.
The Daughter Unit was a little over two years old when we went to live in Greece, and almost kindergarten age when we left, and during that period we lived in a second-floor apartment in suburban Athens and hardly ever watched television. (I had a television set, but it was 110v, and Greece was a 220v country, and anyway, I was almost never at home in the evenings, the exception being when we went to our neighbors to watch Jewel in the Crown when it aired with subtitles on Greek TV.) This was at a time before wide-spread adoption of video players, before cable, way before streaming video. It was, in bald point of fact, rather like the three to five broadcast channels available when I was growing up. So, no, I didn’t miss TV much, and nor did the Daughter Unit, because we had books.
Heaps and heaps of books; my parents took the opportunity of the Daughter Unit being a military dependent and entitled to have her personal items shipped to Greece gratis to include almost all of the kid-lit that Mom had accumulated for my brothers and sister and I. (Mom and Dad were in the process of moving into a travel trailer parked on the building site of their eventual retirement home, and so took every opportunity to down-size what they didn’t need or want. Like … that part of the personal library.) Off that shipment went to Athens, augmented with new books that I bought through an English mail-order service which offered lovely catalogs aimed mostly at expatriates whiling away the decades in locations devoid of English-language bookstores, and a children’s bookstore in what passed for a mall in Voula or Vouliagmeni, which featured Greek, English and I think German and French-language books. It was a small place, barely one twenty-foot square room in size, with each wall dedicated to a language. I am pretty certain that I bought the Daughter Unit’s favorite comic book series there; the Asterix and Obelix books.
Asterix and Obelix; the series was translated from the French original and available everywhere in Europe; an epic and pun-laden series of books about the heroes; Asterix the canny warrior, his sidekick, the hefty menhir-deliveryman Obelix, and all the residents of the lone Gaulish village holding out against the Roman invaders, thanks to a magical potion brewed up by the Druid Getafix. Asterix and Obelix lived to beat up or out-wile the Romans, have adventures in far exotic lands, and to eat wild boar, presumably nicely roasted, crunchy and with appropriate sauces at a feast to follow their triumphant return. The illustrations were colorful and even surprisingly accurate when it came to Roman art and architecture, and the adventures were easy to follow. They became my daughter’s favorite bedtime story material, mostly because she could follow along. Not for her bland and simplistic materiel like Dr. Seuss; no, not when there were Romans and indomitable Gauls. (True Fact: in the midst of our road-trip through Europe in the autumn of 1985, when I told her that we were about to cross over from Germany into France, which used to be called ‘Gaul’ she perked up and asked if we were going to meet any Indominable Gauls.)
During that wandering journey, she encountered other fans of Asterix; a German teenager in Baden-Baden, who alternated with the Daughter Unit in naming all the cast of reoccurring characters – Getafix the Druid, Vitalstatistix the chieftain, Cacofonix the Bard, Fullyautomatix the blacksmith, Geriatrix the tribe’s senior citizen, and Asterix’s canine pet Dogmatix. In a small town on the edge of the Morvan national park in central France, we walked by a community billboard where there were pictures posted of a recent parade – for Bastille Day, perhaps? Among them was a home-made float on a towed trailer, and an assortment of children and teenagers dressed as characters from the series on the float. The Daughter Unit, of course, recognized them right away. All across Europe, she spotted the series on sale (the covers are very distinctive) and asked for the issues that she hadn’t seen, and of course I had to confess that … I couldn’t buy her those particular volumes, since they were in Italian or French.
And that, my friends – is how the Daughter Unit learned to read. From the English translations of a French comic book series.
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