1966

Chronicle of a Special Year

Brigitte & Kit

„On ne voit bien qu‘avec le cœur. L‘essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.“ — Le Petit Prince, chap. XXI

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944)

1966

January, On the „Fair Sky“

February, Italy and Michelangelo

March, Swiss Mountains

April, Perugia 1

May, Perugia 2

June, Perugia 3

July, The Cave

August, Siena 1

September, Siena 2 – Zurich

October, Vienna

November, Zurich

December, Paris

Epilogue, 1967

January: On the “Fair Sky”

A well know New Zealand disease is: “going overseas”, “doing the big trip” or as it was still called in the 60s “visiting the old country” or even “going home” (to Britain). It is a direct consequence of being planted on a couple of islands as remote as is possible from everywhere else in the world. The nearest neighbour, Australia, was in those days to all but the very rich, at least two days sailing away and if you went to the trouble to save enough to “go overseas” then rather a bit more for a bit further and rather not to a country with exactly the same culture and problems as New Zealand.

After four years of teaching mathematics at Linwood High School, I had saved enough to be able to “do the big trip”, but in my case I was determined not to do what everybody else was doing. My aim was to learn more about my main passion: Composition. Although I could have done this very well in “the old country”, I was quite sure I wanted to do it somewhere else –– anywhere else, where the culture would be different from everything I knew so far. My mother, Betty, had already done such a trip, a three months course of study at the University for Foreigners (L’Università per stranieri) in Perugia. She had returned from there a few years earlier and had started teaching Italian at Victoria University (in Wellington) and in so doing she was fulfilling a life long dream of involvement in an academic life. As I left the university with my science degree she had started her arts course and her enthusiasm for Italian language and culture had not only given her a first class degree, it had inspired me to learn the language too.

In the middle of December 1965 therefore, I boarded the “Fair Sky” with four hundred pounds in my pocket and a ticket to Italy where I would first extend my basic knowledge of the Italian language and then find an Italian composition teacher. My first choice of teacher was Luciano Berio in Milan, but Berio had already left for foreign shores and was working in America. The fact that I really didn’t know another name in Italy didn’t bother me too much, I was quite sure I would find someone.

On the wharf to see me off were my parents and a few friends:

But yes, it was awful, the departure from Wellington cos a ship goes away much more slowly than a plane. I left it till the very last moment to go on board. All went well and after a while I lost sight of the family and group of friends who were there all together in the middle of the enormous crowd. Then all of a sudden I saw Betty –– she was waving her coat or something large. It was very funny and then very sad. I had to cry.

Leaving Wellington — photo: Tim Ashcroft

Two days later we reached Sydney and for one day we were allowed to roam the city. I found out that in fact Australia was quite different from New Zealand. It was bigger and hotter and had many more flies and the centre of Sydney was blessed with a most interesting modern architecture –– tall buildings on slender supports, something I hadn’t seen in earthquake prone New Zealand.

A few days later we sailed up the Brisbane river and stopped again for a whole day. This time I visited a sort of open zoo and saw my first kangaroos, emus and koalas. The hot dry eucalyptus smell was certainly not like New Zealand bush.

From here the ship travelled further north between the mainland and the Great Barrier Reef, rounded the corner at the top of Australia and headed through tropical waters towards Singapore. I was delighted with shipboard life, we celebrated Christmas, New Year and Crossing the Equator all in quick succession. I found lots of interesting people to talk to, to eat and dance with. Dancing on board was particularly amusing, because if the ship rolled a little all the dancers could find themselves suddenly in a pile on one side of the dance floor.

Since it was an Italian ship there were Italian lessons offered which I was delighted to take part in and I also tried to overhear what the crew members were talking about together. I was bitterly disappointed; I understood not one word. Later I heard that most of the crew were Sicilians and therefore had been speaking their dialect. I also got to know Jenny and Peter Murray who were on their way to Britain to further their studies, Peter as an English doctoral student with special interest in Jonathon Swift and Jenny a historian.

Singapore was the first really foreign port. Everything was different: the climate (unbearably hot and damp), the Chinesey faces, the busy clean look. I joined a tour which took us to the botanic gardens where we were suddenly surprised by monkeys which descended on us out of the trees like trapeze acrobats. These were rhesus monkeys we were told and it was here in Singapore that the original work on blood groups was done with monkeys of this species, which gave its name to the Rh factor.

From Singapore there was now another long sail to Colombo (where I was shocked to see a taxi driver lean out of his car and spit blood red onto the pavement –– not knowing it was betel nut, I thought he had some terrible disease!) and a further even longer stretch to Aden, the largest city of Yemen at the foot of the Saudi peninsular. Here we were warned not to go ashore but I was too curious to stay on the ship the whole day. I was fascinated with this poor dry country wherepeople often had their beds on the street and were anxious to sell us the little that they had. There was a very strong military presence and people and cars were often stopped and searched. I returned to the ship in the evening thankful to be still in one piece but delighted with these new experiences. As we sailed away into the Red Sea I looked back on the city with its backdrop of a stone mountain riddled with holes and completely void of green. Here was a culture much older than anything I had seen before but apparently without the barest essentials (vegetation and water) that a culture needed.

The Red Sea although no different in colour from the other seas was comforting in that land was always in sight. It can be very disturbing sailing for weeks without being able to see land and one wonders how our forefathers managed with this problem, who travelled from the “old country” in sailing vessels which took about three times as long as modern ships. No doubt the strict discipline of shipboard life, cleaning, preparing food and taking part in the church services three times a day would have helped to distract them from the psychological stress of the endless ocean.

Before we reached the Suez Canal we were informed that those who wished to visit Cairo could leave the ship at the Port of Suez, travel by bus to Cairo, visit the Pyramids, Sphinx and Cairo Museum and then go on by bus to Port Said to pick up the boat again after its passage through the Canal. It was a difficult decision because, attractive as the trip was, it meant forgoing the experience of the Canal itself. But I decided on Cairo and set out in a full bus through the dry treeless landscape. Next to me sat a girl who after an hour or so confided in me that she needed to go to the lavatory. It was obviously quite urgent or she would never have spoken of such a thing. I offered to go to the driver and ask him to stop. She looked out again at the desert on all sides and it was painfully clear that there was not the slightest shelter for her to relieve herself without being in full view of everyone in the bus. She refused my offer. After that she spoke very little and tried as best she could to bare the pain. Before we arrived in the city, tears were rolling down her cheeks.

Although very commercial the Pyramids were most impressive. The pictures we had seen at school of slaves pulling these massive blocks of stone, rolling them over tree trunks, up slopes of earth that would later be removed, had given me no real idea of the enormity of the task. And about how the blocks were cut in the first place nobody had ever spoken. We were taken as a group into the bowels of one of these World Wonders, a long dark passage with even longer staircases to reach the burial chamber of some long forgotten and long plundered pharaoh. Leaving this chamber and returning down the stairs was (for me at least) a more difficult operation since it had obviously been constructed for much smaller people (which makes the miracle of its construction even greater). There was almost no light and one had to grope as best one could, holding a railing with one hand and feeling for the steps with the feet and at the same time doubled over forwards because of the low ceiling. In this rather uncomfortable attitude I heard something drop very close to me and immediately after noticed something soft on the step I was about to place my foot on. I bent down and picked up the object. It was my own passport which I had fondly imagined to be very safely stored in the inside pocket of my jacket. But because of my bent-over stance it had been free to drop out and lose itself in an Egyptian pyramid had I not by chance felt it with my foot.

After a camel ride we drove off to the city centre to visit the Cairo Museum. At this time it was very difficult to assess what this place had to offer. It promised to offer very much, but it was so badly exhibited that it was almost impossible to see the wood for the trees. If a tenth of the objects had been well set out, one would have come away with a much more positive feeling of having learnt something about ancient Egypt. So we left the museum rather despondently and gathered in a street café where the locals were drinking coffee. One elderly gentleman addressed us in beautiful English and asked where we came from. We were all New Zealanders. “Ah”, he said, “you’re pakeha” (pakeha = non-Maori). To hear this Maori word outside New Zealand was very unexpected. But he went on to explain. The Maori battalion had been stationed in Cairo during the war. From there they left to fight the Germans under the legendary General Rommel, the “Desert Fox”. The Maoris obviously had had the sympathy of the Egyptian people. The elderly man went on to defend them, even although nothing had been levelled against them. We assumed that sometimes their behaviour had been a bit rough, a bit too boisterous for guests in a foreign country. “But if you knew” he went on, “that you may not return from the next battle, you would also want to enjoy your last sure moment of freedom”. We all sat there, admiring his wisdom and being proud to be from the same country as this famous battalion.

Before we left Cairo we were told that the plans had been changed. Since our ship was still waiting in a queue to enter the Suez Canal and we would therefore return to Suez and be on board for the trip through the canal.

I was very excited and was up before dawn keeping watch over every movement the ship made. It was so big and the canal so narrow it was hard to imagine that it could possibly fit. Of course it did, but there was no room for passing or overtaking. For this there were “parking bays” something that looked totally surrealistic: a ship parked in the desert. Alongside the canal there was a narrow strip of green and beyond as far as the eye could see sand and more sand. And then like an apparition with its under parts covered by sand dunes, a waiting ship. The passage took a full day so I was eventually forced to go to bed and when I awoke next morning there were the happy painted cascades of coloured buildings in Port Said. We had entered the Mediterranean.

And we had also entered winter, not bitterly cold but it was the end of the swimming pool on board and the beginning of pullovers and jackets. The ship sailed northwest towards the Straits of Messina and just before Naples there was one last surprise: Stromboli was active: This island volcano was glowing in the night with a stream of lava from the tip down to the sea.

I packed away my few possessions, said goodbye to Jenny and Peter Murray who would disembark in London and arranged to meet them again in Italy. Told the cabin steward that I was not prepared to carry his hubble-bubble through the customs for him and descended onto Italian soil.