1-1
CAROLINE
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EARLY DAYS, MOSTLY AT COLLEGE
I know that
remembering my birth is considered unlikely, and perhaps it is not a true
memory, just one my mind has created from hearing about it many times. Anyway, when I was very small, my Mother
kept me wrapped in a blanket because it was winter, and we didn't have central
heating. In the first few months,
mother kept me in one of two rooms, the master bedroom out of which I could see
a large stone building built of white and block stones, and a sitting room where
I nursed. Sometimes she would let
my brother, Henry, watch, and I could feel his jealousy. He would act up trying
to get Mother's attention. The days
went by fast since I slept a lot.
Then the days
got warmer and I was crawling on a blanket Mother had spread under an olive tree
in the front yard on a small patch of grass. Eyah, our maid, often gave me my
bath, and as I got older and didn't nurse as often, took care of me more and
Mother was away at the big stone building more and more. From Eyah I learned Turkish before I
learned English. Of course it was
the backward dialect that Eyah spoke.
Ever afterwards, the cultured Turkish folk would ask where I had learned
to speak Turkish.
When I started to walk
by myself and say things nobody seemed to understand, a big change happened all
of a sudden. A large machine the
big people called a truck showed up at the gate and everything we had was piled
up. When enough things were put in
the truck to fill it, Henry got into it with a lot of men and it made a big
noise and went away for a while.
Then it came back and took more things, but this time Henry played with
his rocks instead of going on the truck.
When the truck had taken everything away, mother picked me up and took me
with her and got into the front of the truck. Dad and Henry got in the back, With a loud noise, the truck jerked and
started to move. Dirt and dust got in my eyes and I started to
cry.
I opened my eyes when
the truck stopped and we were in a very strange place I hadn't seen before. We were backed up to the front of a
house made of white stone, with a large stone porch. The roof of the porch was falling
down. There was no soft lawn to
play on, just hard packed dirt and a few neglected flower beds down the
hill. There was another house
several hundred feet away, but it didn't look lived in.
I heard Henry asking
why we couldn't live at home and Dad answered saying Dr. Dewey and his family
were coming in a few days, and it was important for the doctor to be near the
hospital, which I now knew was the large building of black and white stone that
I used to see out of our bedroom.
When Henry began to whine, Dad tried to cheer him up by saying that the
Deweys had lots of children that we could play with.
I didn't think it was
so bad. I had all my dolls, my
white crib was in the corner of Mon and Dad's bedroom, and Eyah, our maid, still
came every day to take care of me.
The new house was a very exciting place and I soon forgot the one where I
had been born. Our new house was
bigger: the stairs were not as steep and I soon was allowed to climb them. Dad had a pipe put across the upstairs
hall and some workman put our swings there to use on a rainy day. As I got a little older, I got to have a
regular bed in the very large room where Henry and Mary Frances had their beds,
each of us got a corner. The floor
was very smooth wood and we used to slide around on it on our chairs when no one
was watching.
We were allowed nearly
a free run outside because our house was in the middle of a walled compound that
was more than a mile around so that we could not get lost easily. There was only one large gate and a man
who lived with his family in a house above the gate wouldn't let us go out by
ourselves. Sometimes we visited in
the gatehouse and the gatekeeper's wife gave us tasty things to eat like raw
meatballs. The gate was on the
ground level and the house was round and built above it. There were walnut trees
near the gate and we picked them up off the ground and cracked them to
eat.
One day a big box came
on a truck that was too big to go into our house. The workman took out a thing mother
called a piano and put it in one of the rooms downstairs. Mother would make nice sounds with her
fingers and sing at the same time.
She showed me how to make the sounds but they weren't nice like
hers. For months afterwards, the
box was left outside and we got to play house in it. I was very sad when they took it
away.
Lynda Dewey was the
same age as Henry and when they were older, one of the Dewey servants would
bring her over on a large scooter, and Henry and Lynda would play school. Mother would play with them and tell me
to run outside and play. I was very
sad and lonely that I wasn't allowed to play school, so I began to imagine I had
someone to play with. I gave him a name, Johnny. Johnny became very real and after a
while I could see him out of the corner of my eyes. After a few months, Johnny stopped being
shy and we did everything together and talked to each other, except I learned
not to talk to Johnny when other people were there because they couldn't see him
or hear him. Johnny was MY special
friend. One thing was strange,
Johnny didn't sleep with us. When I
got ready to go to sleep, he would say goodnight and he would be gone until I
got up in the morning.
We didn't have
electricity, just a few gasoline lanterns, so we often went to bed early and Mon
and Dad spend their evening downstairs with the lantern. In the summer, our beds
were moved out onto our sleeping porch which had room for about 7 beds. Each bed had a mosquito net because they
were bad in summer and lots of people got malaria. The porch had no roof so we could watch
the stars before falling asleep.
Dad knew the names of a lot of the stars and used to say that one of the
stars in the big dipper was the Isely star. I didn't understand what having a family
star was since everyone else could see it too. We didn't have to worry about our beds
getting wet in the rain because I don't remember it ever raining in the
summer. The air was so clear and
clean that we could see shooting stars almost every night. We played a game to see who could count
the most number of shooting starts before we fell asleep.
In the winter, we
would gather around the wood stove in our bedroom and mother would read us
stories from the My Bookhouse set of books. I wanted stories from the first books of
the set. Mary Frances wanted
stories from the last ones. So
Henry usually got what he wanted since they were in-between. It would rain some in the winter and
since there was no attic floor above our bedroom the rain would make a roar from
hitting the tin roof of our house.
Sometimes during the day when it was raining we would go up into the
attic where the roar was even louder.
The rain was
important, since in the beginning we got all our water for the whole year from
the rain that was stored in a large cistern carved into the limestone alongside
our house. It had to be cleaned out
every year, and I remember one time we children were lowered some twenty feet in
baskets on the ends of ropes to see what the cistern was like. It was scary and
seemed dark because we only had one lantern lowered with us. Dad said if you turned out the lantern
and looked up through the opening of the cistern during the daytime and looked
in the right place, you could see stars.
I don't remember seeing any.
A lot of things
happened when I was three. The
compound we stayed in was an old college that had been closed during World War
One and didn't open again because it had been damaged in the war and there
wasn't money to pay for teachers.
But the grounds were big enough to turn it into an agricultural
school. The Pence family came from
California to run the school and I was so happy because they had three boys
around my age. They moved into the house next to ours that had been empty since
we had moved. Jimmy was close to my
age, and I thought he was fun to play with. About this time some workmen had built a
tree house in our back yard in an almond tree, and we had a lot of fun in
it.
About the time of my
third birthday, my sister and I got a very high fever. We also had spots on our arms. Mother was very worried and then she and
Dad got sick too. Only Henry wasn't
affected. The doctor came and took
our temperatures and looked at our tongues and spots and said that we had
scarlet fever. As we were getting
better Henry got sicker than any of us. When I was playing with him on one of
our beds, I found a big red swelling on the side of his neck which made him cry
and Mother came running. They took
Henry into Mom and Dad's bedroom and when I saw him the next morning he had a
big bandage around his neck. Mother
said the doctor had to cut his neck to let a lot of poisons come
out.
I think it was the
next summer that we went camping up into the hills west of where we lived where
there are a lot of red cliffs. Trucks took us part of the way and then we had to
get on donkeys and horses to go on.
Henry, Lynda Dewey, and I were put in empty grape boxes that were tied
onto both sides of a large donkey, It was very rough and bumpy, so we were very
glad to get off at the campsite.
From the top of the cliffs we could see all the way back to
Gaziantep.
Another summer we got
to go with Dad to Istanbul, about four hundred miles away, for a month's long
meeting. Where we stayed was a
girl's school, but they were home for the summer. We hadn't seen electricity before. Henry found an old bulb and was beating
it on a cucumber and it broke. The
school was beside a sea and we were beginning to learn to swim. Henry thought he
was so smart he could be like the lifeguard and he jumped off the pier and
nearly drowned.
We did have a lot of
fun when we went on the ferryboats that went on the Bosphorus which separates
European from Asiatic Turkey. They
played music on their loudspeakers which could be heard far
away.
As I got older, Mother
let me play more with the older kids.
I remember they used to tease Henry that he was a crybaby. When there were enough kids together we
always played King's Base. When it
snowed, we got our sleds out and coasted down the hill. Sometimes we made snowmen or had
snowball fights. When the snow was
deep enough we would tramp out a round pattern and play Fox and
Geese.
The Pences had brought
a windmill with them when they came from America, and it was put up on the
highest hill at the college next to the ruined building. When our parents were busy, we would
sneak away and climb up to the top and look down on the roof of the three-story
building. One time we were
exploring in the ruined building and found a nest of wild cats. Edward and Henry both captured kittens
and took them home even through they got scratched a lot. When our cat got big, it had kittens
every year and we had to drown them.
The ruined building
had a clock tower with a clock that still worked and Henry and Dad used to climb
up the tower to wind the clock and also to set the hands. I don't think I was ever allowed in the
tower. There was a room on the
third floor near the tower where we played sometimes. It was a little scary to
get to because some of the stairs to the third floor were
gone.
There were a lot of
fruit trees on the college grounds and it was Henry's job many times to pick
some fruit each morning for breakfast.
I did get to go out with him in the Fall to eat grapes off the
vines. The yellow ones were the
best. Also in the Fall our Turkish
servants would bring in great piles of grapes and put them in a big vat and we
would stomp on them to make grape juice.
This was then boiled down and poured out on sheets to get hard so we
would have it to eat in the winter.
Then a very sad time
came. Mother said it was because
there wasn't enough money from America, but the Pences had to go back to America
and the agricultural school was closed.
I missed Jimmy Pence very much and went back to playing with Johnny
again. The whole college property
had to be sold and we had to move again.
Before we moved, the large college building was taken down one stone at a
time and sold for use in new buildings.
They built a gigantic temporary slide so that the stones could be slid
down from the top floors without breaking.