Shirley Temple in Siberia

I am writing about the odyssey of a Polish girl through Russia, the Middle East, and England during the 1940s. One of her childhood memories is of going to the movies in Lwow and seeing Shirley Temple eat spaghetti. (That would have been Poor Little Rich Girl).

Presumably because of that adventure, she acquired a Shirley Temple doll, and when the NKVD put her on a cattle car to Siberia, of course she took the doll with her. Almost certainly this is the doll--well, not the very same doll, but a sibling. It was manufactured in Poland in the 1930s, and it has blonde hair rather than the brown hair of the original (and of all American Shirley Temple dolls). When I sent her a photo of a typical doll, she that she remembered hers as having lighter hair ("and more bedraggled, naturally"). Gosh, I love discoveries like this! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Manchester, 1954

      We were probably introduced in Caf, the cavernous student cafeteria where we assembled at ten o'clock for cigarettes and coffee, though I don't remember our meeting. I was one of a very few Americans at the redbrick University of Manchester, a Fulbright scholar dismayed to learn that Modern European History, in the English version, had ended in 1898, toward the end of Victoria's reign. (It often seemed that everything in Manchester had come to a close with the Widow at Windsor. Picadilly Gardens uptown, where the 2A bus originated, was overseen by a grand gray statue of the seated queen, holding the world in her hand like an anarchist's bomb. A block or two distant lay Victoria Street, Victoria Square, Victoria Station, and the Victoria and Albert Hotel. And now I find that in 1954 the formal name of my institution of higher learning was Victoria University of Manchester.) Worse, the professor leading the seminar on Edmund Burke believed that a proper reading list comprised the complete writings of my favorite philosopher-politician, and these were not insubstantial. Further, our classrooms weren't heated, at least not by American standards. I was always cold in England, but never colder than in class. In the Burke seminar, we lads developed the habit of leaving the table and perching instead on the radiators beneath the tall, drafty windows, streaked on the outside with sooty raindrops, for the sake of the tepid warmth that gurgled through them from time to time.
      By November, I had stopped going to class. Instead I worked on a short novel whose central character was named--improbably but I suppose inevitably--Stephen Faust, in honor of the young hero of James Joyce's imagination and Goethe's elderly alchemist who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for unbridled experience. I read both Ulysses and Faust that year--read voraciously, whatever I could find in a Penguin paperback for two shillings sixpence the copy. I also wrote for the student newspaper, where Frank the editor had assured me that it was quite all right, perhaps even desirable, if I retained American spelling and usage in my stories. The English were much puzzled by my way of rendering their language. I was variously asked, "Do all Yanks speak as strangely as you?" and "When Yanks put on a play of Shakespeare, do you do it with an American accent?"      I also drank great quantities of room-temperature beer, attended many French and Italian movies dubbed into English, joined the Student Union debates on one side or another--it didn't matter; the debate was the thing--and drank coffee at Caf at ten o'clock each morning. The coffee was dreary, like most things in postwar England: slippery stuff, no doubt adulterated with chicory. (I am being strictly correct when I say England. In 1954, Britain was merely the island comprising the nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and to a lesser extent Cornwell. As for the now popular United Kingdom, that was just a theoretical construct, to enable London to lay claim to Ulster, Antrim, Down, Fermanagh, Tyrone, and Londonderry, the six Irish counties that constituted its last colony, as my father never tired of reminding me in his letters, though he always shortened the last of them to Derry.)
      Somewhere in that cavernous cafeteria there would be a table of journalists manque, most of us drawn from the student newspaper. The group always included the tall Liverpudlian and veteran of the Royal Air Force, Malcolm Hopson, with his mop of black hair and his quiet girlfriend, Sheila, who I never remember speaking. She loved Malcolm and put up with the rest of us because we were his friends. Less often, the editor was there as well. Frank was an army veteran who had served in the Gloucestershire Regiment during the Korean War. I don't remember his last name, though we were pals enough to have hiked through the Lake District together, staying at a youth hostel in an astonishingly deep fall of snow. On our circuitous way back to Manchester, we stopped overnight at his home. Frank gave me the options of sleeping on the floor or sharing the double bed with him; I took the bed, and soon enough I realized that he was massaging my right foot with both of his. "Bloody hell, Frank, what are you doing?" "Oh bloody hell," he said himself. "I thought it was the hot water bottle!" I thought no more about it, for he'd been with Glosters at the Imjin River, when they held the line against a mass of Chinese troops and saved Seoul from recapture. I couldn't reconcile heroism with the homosexuals I had known at the University of New Hampshire, all of them forthrightly effeminate. Anyhow, there were plenty of effeminate lads at the Hotel Wilmslow, and to a man--or boy--they were intensely interested in my seminars on sex and the single woman.
      Oh, and usually Antony Bolcover was at Caf, if I spell his name correctly, a Jewish lad who reminded me of the privileged Oxonians in Brideshead Revisited. The following July I would be hitchhiking north from Bellizona, and making heavy weather of it--unlike the Italians, the Swiss had not yet grasped the concept of sharing their automobiles with young vagabonds--when a Ford Anglia stopped a little distance down the road. The driver stuck his head out the window and said in a wondering voice: "Dan?" He was Antony Bolcover, on a European tour with some friends, none of whom I'd met before. They gave me a lift over the St. Gotthard Pass, on whose Christmas-candy road the Ford's engine vapor-locked, so we had to turn the litle car around and let it roll back toward Italy in gear until the engine farted into life again. We got out at the height-of-land to take one another's photograph: Antony's portrait of me shows a very serious young man with a high forehead and a handsome beard, streaked with blond from the Italian sun. I rode with them to Luzern, where they dropped me at the youth hostel.
      I also have a photo of the gang in Caf: heavy-faced Antony, bushy-haired Malcolm, quiet Sheila, and a bright lad named Ian who lived in the same digs as I did, on Mauldeth Road in the suburb of Withington. This was a four-penny ride on the upper deck of the 2A bus, which ran from London Road railway station, past the gothic University buildings fronting on Oxford Road--a scaled-down House of Parliament, without the gold leaf and with oddly flat-roofed towers, a bit like the Chateau Chenonceau--and down Wilmslow Road to Withington, where I dined too often on fish and chips served in a cone of yesterday's newspaper. "Food for the body and food for the mind!" the vendor cried, handing me sixpence worth of fat-fried codfish, white, flaky, and steaming, together with fourpence worth of fat-fried potato slices, which the English called chips. The chips were heavily salted and flavored with vinegar which the vendor liberally dispensed from a round-bottomed bottle, like a barber with his hair tonic.
      So an evening out in Withington cost tenpence for dinner and sixpence for a seat in the front stalls of the Scala cinema, for a grand total of nineteen U.S. cents at the exchange rate then prevailing. Cheaper, indeed, to go out for dinner and a movie than to stay home and feed shillings into the gas meter.
      The Scala was supposed to be one of the oldest cinemas in England. The building was on a corner and half-timbered behind the marquee, which generally promised Dirk Bogard as a war hero or Alec Guinness dressed up as a woman, transvetism being a rich vein of English humor. Ah, the glow of the projection beam through the shifting veil of cigarette smoke! At the Scala, or indeed any English cinema, one was constantly reminded that a movie was in progress, as we smoked the skinny cigarettes that were jocularly known as coffin nails: each seat was supplied with a tiny ashtray, on the left armrest. In later years the Scala was chopped into three smaller theaters under the name of Cine City, and smoking no doubt was banned, while our fish and chips shop became an Indian restaurant called the Moon. And in this century, both succumbed to more sophisticated competition--a multiplex, a McDonald's--and were boarded up.
      Cigarette smoke was the least of our pollutants. Though Ted and I had a gas fire in our room on Mauldeth Road, most of Manchester depended on coal for its heat, and the coal smoke mixed with the fog to produce what were known as "pea soupers." On one occasion, walking from our digs to Withington, the fog was so thick that I could not see the sidewalk beneath me, and I missed the curb and fell into the street.
      Each morning I bought the Manchester Guardian, as the newspaper was then known, and wrote the previous day's statistics in my diary. Temperature: 55 high, 40 low. Rain: trace. Sunshine: nil.
      Ian's room was on the second story front of Number Two, Mauldeth Road West; he shared it with a room-mate I didn't know. My room-mate was an undergraduate majoring in the sciences; we lived at the back of the house, on the third story. Ted was from Yorkshire, and he spiced my vocabulary with sayings like "N'er shed a clout till May is out" and "If once naught's naught, twice naught must be sommat." We'd met at the Wilmslow Hotel, a rooming house where I had lodged during the autumn term, two meals a day and three on Sunday, consisting mostly of brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, and pot roast, with a pastry smothered in a sweet white semi-liquid called custard. The clientele was entirely male, and all the lads were virgins except for me. I felt quite the Cary Grant at the Wilmslow Hotel.
      If I'm not mistaken, Ted later emigrated to Rhodesia. I recognized his face in a Time magazine photo of white settlers lining up to buy guns, as Rhodesia began a painful transformation into Zimbabwe. I hope that turned out all right for you, Ted. (Oh, what was your last name?)
      Back to Caf! Unlike most spaces in Manchester, it was well heated, mostly no doubt by the body heat of several hundred undergraduates, and the lads at table would often grow uncomfortable in their blazers or tweed jackets, ties, and long university scarves, which tradition required to be one's only garments for the English winter. English shirts, by the way, had detachable collars and cuffs, so that one could get a full week's service out of one garment. And the undershirts were sleeveless. Strangely enough, I don't remember that the lads smelled. Perhaps the temperature never climbed high enough.
      It could be warm in Caf, however--probably that's why we gravitated to it. One morning Ian joked that he was warm enough that he might take off his blazer. This met with no protest, so, looking uneasily around the table, Ian actually did shed the jacket, and sat there rather proud in his shirtsleeves. (Off-the-rack English shirts were sold only by neck size, with sleeves that were too long; the excess was taken up by a sort of garter worn around one's bicep.) One or two others followed his good example, but not Antony Bolcover, in whom gentility ran strong. Antony was also, I think, one of the few students at Manchester not receiving a government grant of forty pounds a month. My own stipend as a Fulbright Fellow was fifty pounds, so for the first time in my life I was just about the wealthiest person of my acquaintance. Fifty quid ($140) bought more beer than a twenty-two-year old could drink, if he knew what was good for him--but who does know what's good for him, at twenty-two? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Forward to the past!

This blog began as a class assignment four years ago when I began an MA "programme" in War in the Modern World. The army that I served as a draftee in 1956-1958, and even the one I accompanied for a few months in Vietnam, was essentially the same as the one that fought Germany and Japan in World War II. It was a whole new military that invaded Iraq in March 2003, and I wanted to know more about it. But now I am going from what is certainly the best book about that campaign--Nate Fick's wonderfully engrossing One Bullet Away--all the way back to 1939, when a much more important war began.

World War II has been described as the worst thing that ever happened in the history of man. It didn't affect me that way, because I was quartered safe in various corners of New England, but others were not nearly so fortunate. So what I am reading at this moment is Wladyslaw Anders's Army in Exile, the story of the Polish army corps that was recruited out of the prison camps of the Soviet Union, and that won a strange sort of glory on the heights of Monte Cassino in 1944, breaking the German line and opening the way to Rome. Most of these men, of course, would never go home, because Stalin (with the reluctant agreement of Churchill and Roosevelt) took their home away from them. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The pirate's cave, Lerici

One afternoon Enrico rowed us to the Grotta Azzurra, the blue grotto on a point of land a few hundred meters south of the castle. He was a fisherman in his twenties, tall for the time and well built; he evidently made it a practice to visit the castle and hit upon the foreign girls, on the no doubt well-founded theory that they were more readily available than the young women of his village, which most likely was Fiascherino or Tellaro, farther along the coast. Further, I judged that when the foreigners didn't cooperate, he switched his attention to their male colleagues. I can't be sure of this, because he never hit on me.

Google tells me that there is indeed a Blue Grotto in the Gulf of Poets, but places it four kilometers across the bay on the island of Palmaria, and on the western shore to boot. So the place Enrico took us can only be the Tana del Brigantino, the pirate's cave well known to local boys. There's a shallow bay just below the castle, into which the German bicyclists liked to dive from the heights, then a sharp promontory about 500 meters south in a straight line. This is the Maralunga peninsula, all rocky cliffs on its squared-off seaward edge and along its southern coast.

Somewhere along here, I think, was Enrico's cave. He assured us that it was prettier than Capri's famous Blue Grotto. I have no way of comparing them, having never been south of the Tiber River. But it will serve: silent in the limpid afternoon, the water dripping from Enrico's oars, illuminated in blue indeed, the light coming up through the seawater to reflect upon the walls of the cave. It was one of those enchanting reversals, as when a southern sea is warmer than the breeze blowing across it. In this case, the water contained more light than the air, so that it was our primary illumination. And we were young and would never die.

On the way back to the castle, Letitia began to ruminate upon men and their hairy chests. Enrico's chest hair--curly and black--struck her as very decorative, compared to my mine, which was considerably more sparse and a less masculine brown--a brown, morever, that was blonding almost daily under the sun. As for Giorgio, his chest was quite hairless.

Enrico smiled sweetly, understanding that whatever we were saying, he was the subject of our chat. To change the subject, he took out a pack of Nazionale and handed it around. We each took one except Giorgio, who did not smoke. Enrico smiled more broadly and said: "Will you take it from my lips?" (Letitia translated for me, since Enrico and I were the only monoglots in the party.) Ah, poor Giorgio! Enrico put a Nazionale in his mouth, lit it, took a drag on it, and passed it to Giorgio. Thus he smoked his first cigarette, much as with my help he had learned to make his own bed.

I don't think the two of them ever got it on. Giorgio often left us of an evening and took the tram to La Spezia, to cruise the waterfront for American sailors.

What was Enrico's experience during the war? I didn't ask, and not because we didn't have a language in common. (Letitia would have interpreted, as she did for the quip about the mouth-to-mouth Nazionale.) Enrico would have been a lad in 1945, but boys did their share in the war, on both sides. Nor would his pretty homeland have been spared. Not far north of Lerici, on the Italian Riviera, there's a village I came to know fairly well in later years, Vernazza by name. No road serves Vernazza, though Mussolini drove railway tracks along the shore, so it has had train service since the 1930s. Hard by the railroad station there's a plaque with the village's war dead, roughly divided in thirds: twenty or so young men who died in North Africa, about the same number Caduta in Russia--and what a shock that frozen winter on the Eastern Front must have been, to fishermen from the Mediterranean--and a final twenty or so who were killed in the Resistance. Enrico must have experienced some of that, if only at second hand.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Madi, queen of the castle

     In Britain where I had come from, and in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany where I traveled later, a 1950s youth hostel was a rather idealistic affair, owned by a national or sub-national association and run for the betterment of young people, generally defined as someone no older than twenty-five, mostly hikers, bicyclists, and those traveling by public transport. Hitchhikers were tolerated, but anybody who drove up to a youth hostel would be summarily turned away. This was not the case in France and Italy. In Italy, especially, each hostel seemed to be a private affair, run by an individual or a couple as their livelihood, and the rules were enforced with a generous hand. On the Adriatic coast, I met a German family, touring Italy by car; the hostel was a flat-roofed building, and the five of them dragged mattresses up to the roof, there to sleep in familial privacy. And our little gang lived at the castle in Lerici for the better part of two weeks, though three nights was supposed to be the outside limit for a hostel stay.
     At Lerici, Madi made the rules. I find that her name was Maddalena di Carlo, and that she had some local fame as comunista e partigiana, Communist and guerrilla fighter, who carried the Red Flag in the annual May Day parade. I can find no one to tell me, however, what her career as partigiana amounted to. Did she blow up German supply trains, carry a rifle in the mountains, turn the crank on a mimeograph machine, or merely grumble about the fascists? I don't know; I didn't ask, young and stupid as I was.
    Postwar, Madi became custode amata del castello di Lerici, the beloved custodian of the castle, which was her home and source of income until she was evicted. In 1974 the citizens of Lerici concluded that she could no longer provide her young charges with "an effective and hygienic management," as one of her fans explained the situation to me. By that time Madi was quite the crone, all but sexless in her cropped gray hair, lean face, and cast-off clothing. I don't remember her particularly, but as the flower children of a later generation replaced the vagabondi of mine, she became hugely popular among the them, which likely caused her to become less popular among the townspeople. Not only did the "Lericini" get rid of Madi as hostel keeper; in time they also voted to close the hostel. "The flow of young people ended," my email friend recalled. "They did not carry money and they created disorder." I suppose that was true. Our gang was fairly well-behaved, I think, but we were products of an earlier time. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford