The Adelaide Star

The Adelaide Star

It was fitting that the Adelaide Star, the freighter on which I hitched a ride back to Australia in 1954, was named for my home town. She was a refrigerator ship, 12,000 tons burden, carrying general cargo from Tilbury Docks in London via Teneriffe in the Canary Islands, around the Cape of Good Hope to Adelaide, the first Australian landfall.  As the ship's surgeon, I had to continue beyond Adelaide to Melbourne and Sydney where I got my discharge papers and certificate of good conduct.

In previous posts on this blog I’ve waxed eloquent on the delights of long ocean crossings (see posts in July 2010).  This voyage in 1954 was undoubtedly one of the highlights of my life, rich in sensory experiences in climates ranging from cool temperate in the English Channel, balmy sunshine off the Canary Islands, baking hot, flat calm tropics as we crossed the equator, sunny and cool off Cape Town, then the cool to cold and blustery seas of the Roaring Forties deep in the Southern Ocean on the great circle route from the Cape of Good Hope to landfall off Kangaroo Island at the mouth of St Vincent’s Gulf as we approached Adelaide.  We had four weeks at sea without calling at any ports, long enough to get to know all the passengers and most of the crew of this small, closed community, long enough to read a great many books.

The Adelaide Star was a comfortable ship with a restful pitch fore and aft and little port to starboard roll, with a dining saloon forward, from which as we ate we could watch the bows plunging into heavy seas as they broke green over the forepeak. I’ve written about this in an earlier post so I won’t repeat myself. I got on well with the officers whom I met professionally and socially, especially the electrical engineer Gene Johnson who hailed from South Shields on Tyneside, John Mordecai, the chief steward who had been torpedoed several times, once spending a few weeks in a lifeboat in the Indian Ocean, and Jack Thomas the first mate, who sat at table with me. The passengers included Minna Lazarus, wife of a well-known Australian labour and criminal lawyer, Jack Lazarus; Miss Dunnett, the matron of the Royal North Shore Hospital, a wealthy pastoralist from Queensland, and several Brits on their way to jobs in Australia, or for three of them, New Guinea or Fiji. One of the passengers bound for New Guinea whose name I have forgotten, was a hard-drinking tough little man from Glasgow, who a couple of days after we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, had a massive hematemesis, vomited up about a pint of bright red blood. That was when I discovered there was no drip chamber on board. I ordered him to stop drinking. If he’d continued to bleed he could have died but fortunately the bleeding stopped.

Before this, the day after we rounded the Cape of Good Hope, I took out the remains of one of the chief engineer's teeth. When I was a medical student, we had been required to do a great many procedures, getting each of them signed up in a document that resembled a larger and longer version of a school report card. Some of my classmates and I eagerly attended the dental clinic behind the Royal Adelaide Hospital, not because of the need to get signed up for the statutory number of dental extractions but because a remarkably beautiful young woman worked there as a chairside assistant to the dentist who taught us how to extract teeth. On hot days she worked wearing a white coat over her underwear but no dress, and some testosterone-laden medical students tried to invite her on dates.  No dates, but at least I learnt how to extract teeth, which one does by using the points of the dental forceps as wedges, pushing down hard on the tooth to loosen it in its socket. Since my student days I had used this skill once before in general practice at Angaston but that had been while the patient was under a general anaesthetic and a loose tooth threatened to choke her. This time it was different; the chief engineer was a curmudgeonly old man, and my life in this small closed and highly critical community wouldn't have been worth living if I had fluffed this simple operation, made necessary when he broke off the entire remaining cusp of a premolar tooth and was in agony with exposed nerve endings. Injecting local anesthetic around the gum was the hardest part, and luckily for me this worked well enough - with reinforcement from a stiff brandy or two. I gave the local and the brandy plenty of time to work, applied the forceps and pushed down as hard as I knew how. The remains of the tooth practically popped out into my waiting hand. Though I say so myself, it was elegantly done, and it established my reputation for competence among the ship’s company. It’s curious that the well-equipped surgery on the Adelaide Star had a whole kit of dental forceps, never before used by the look of them, yet lacked a drip chamber, because assuredly everything else imaginable was there, including a wide range of obstetric instruments, even the bizarre and horrific tools needed to perform a destructive operation on an undeliverable fetus.

It was frustrating to sail across the mouth of Table Bay without calling in, so close we could see the cables of the cable car that goes to the top of Table Mountain, could see people distinctly, see the colours of dresses the girls were wearing - several randy young officers said they could smell their perfume.

Deep in the Roaring Forties

I love the sea, and have many evocative sensual memories of life on ships. The smell of paint and tar pervaded the alleyways. The constant throb of the engines is like a heartbeat, overlaid by the creaks and groans of steel plates and rivets working imperceptibly like a living, breathing creature as the ship pitches and rolls. From time to time in a heavy sea, there is a crash and rattle as something that wasn't properly stowed slides from a shelf or cupboard to the deck, or a door bangs open and shut. In a really heavy sea, the ship shudders as she heaves herself out of the great waves that break over the deck, and the spray hisses against the portholes. I am a good sailor, and enjoy nothing more than a healthy spell of rough weather, of which we had plenty as we followed the great circle route from the Cape of Good Hope across the Southern Ocean in late winter. We went far enough south to see in the distance the high peaks of Kerguelen Island, and thereabouts we saw a rich profusion of seabirds, gannets, terns and the gracefully gliding albatross that accompanied us all the way from the Cape to Kangaroo Island as they hovered for hours at a time in the slipstream above the stern, not moving a muscle and staring inscrutably at us. One of the books I had with me was Apsley Gerry-Garrard's Worst Journey in the World which describes how to catch an albatross by trailing a line with a heavy weight on the end; the albatross thinks this is a fish as it bobs just below the surface in the ship's wake. It swoops to grab the fish, the line and lead weight tangle around the bird's leg, and the bird can be hauled on board.

We demonstrated to the captain’s anger that this system works. What upset the captain was that the albatross we hauled on board immediately loosened its bowels, making the most terrible mess. The captain ordered us to clean it up, so I and one of the junior engineer officers and the young English passenger who had shared this jape had to get buckets and brooms and spent several hours scrubbing before we had successfully disposed of this huge and smelly mess of guano. The albatross seemed bewildered by the experience and wouldn’t fly away, remaining perched at the stern, gazing balefully at us and occasionally loosening its bowels again - now leaving a trail of excrement down over the stern, out of the captain's sight. Eventually one of the deck officers launched it by running along the deck into the wind, as if launching a kite into a gale.

There was a rich profusion of other life in the sea in those high latitudes. We saw whales, and some huge basking sharks, one that was asleep or perhaps floating dead on the surface that we sliced up with the bows and the propellers, leaving a great mess of flesh and blood in our wake, that created a boiling, screaming quarrel of gulls fighting over the remains until they all dipped below the horizon.

This was a hard-drinking shipload, the passenger who vomited blood was just one of a dozen or more who overdid it. I didn't overdo it - I have very rarely used liquor on that scale; I am a cheap drunk, getting the worse for liquor all too easily. As on other occasions in my life, once bitten twice shy: I indulged once just out of Teneriffe, and felt so awful for several days afterwards that henceforth I had only one drink a day. My sobriety gave me good opportunities to observe others the worse for liquor. It was never a pretty sight.

I had plenty of reading along on this voyage, and was glad of it. I worked my way through translations of many of the Greek classics, through all six volumes of Churchill's history of the second world war, novels by Stendhal, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and re-read Jane Austen and some Dickens.

It was also the occasion for me to think through what I had done so far with my life, and what more I might do in the future - but then as later, the future remained clouded. I had no clearer idea about what I would do with the rest of my life after pondering the matter for five weeks at sea than I had when we cleared Tilbury Docks. I assumed I would go into general practice but I had no money, no capital for a down-payment on a practice - not enough money even to buy a car; in fact I was coming home to Adelaide with no more money accumulated than I had when I set off three years earlier. All I had was many happy memories, an unsettling sense of the worth while places of the world all being far away from where I was heading, and a deep sense of detribalization, of alienation almost, from the former home town to which I was returning. It was a combination that boded ill for a stable future in general practice.

Investiture, November 23, 2012

November 23 2012 was a very special day that I would have given my right arm to have been able to share with my beloved Janet Wendy. I was thinking of her throughout the day, and if I looked sad when I should have been happy, if I seemed distracted when people engaged me in conversation, that was the reason. It was the day of my investiture as an Officer of the Order of Canada. The ceremony took place at Rideau Hall, the home of the Governor General of Canada.  Last time I was there was in 2003 to applaud Wendy when she got the Governor General's Caring Canadian Award in recognition of her dedicated volunteer activities, and a good deal of the time she was with me, in my thoughts, as the ceremony progressed. David drove me to Rideau Hall well before the scheduled time for the start of the day's festivities.  This was necessary because those of us getting the Order of Canada had been told to arrive in time for a briefing, which was detailed and of course in both French and English. We walked into the large "Tent Room" in Rideau Hall in procession, to the applause of family members and other guests.  The Governor General, His Excellency David Johnson, made a short, witty speech, welcoming us all to the "Snowflake Club" then one by one we were called up to stand beside him as our citation was read aloud to the audience. Then he presented each of us in turn with our handsome medal.  Members' medals, slightly smaller than Officers' medals, were placed on a sort of hook that had previously been pinned to their lapels; Officers' medals were hung around each of our necks, David Johnson (whom I'd met several times before when he was President of Waterloo University) said a few words to each of us, shook our hands warmly, we signed the honour roll of the Order of Canada, and returned to our seats.

Here's a photo from today's Ottawa Citizen of His Excellency David Johnson shaking my hand after hanging the handsome "snowflake" medal around my neck (photo complete with blemishes not to be seen in the flesh).

I will get a colour copy of this photo and several others eventually, as well as a DVD of the entire ceremony









After the ceremony, we had a chance to tour Rideau Hall, similar to the tour we made when Wendy got her award in 2003, and during this tour, one of the uniformed young soldiers from the Governor General's Foot Guards, took the only other photo I have so far, of David and me:

David is wearing his military medals and looks decidedly more handsome than I do. But I think my medal is larger than any of his, even the full sized ones rather than these miniaturized copies.  We were in the spectacular and very beautiful greenhouse of Rideau Hall.







In the evening, I returned to Rideau Hall with my "date" for the evening, David's wife Desre.  We had a magnificent, rather exotic feast at a banquet, during which David Johnson circulated among the guests  and presented each of the newly appointed holders of the Order of Canada with a second medal, Queen  Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee Medal, which like the Order of Canada, I am expected to wear on ceremonial occasions.

With David's wife, Desre (Kramer) in the Reception Hall of Rideau Hall, after the banquet on the evening of Nov 23, 2012
















When I get more photos, I might add them to this post, starting with these two:

His Excellency David Johnson with Rebecca, David, Jonathan and Rebecca's husband Richard Guenette, and me too of course

Enjoying a glass of Perrier Water
after many chats at the reception

Spring and Summer 1954 - Back-packing to Italy

Early in 1954, I developed a small inguinal hernia, which could probably have been left alone for a long time without causing harm. But with visions in my mind of obstruction or strangulation at some inconvenient time and place, I asked a thoracic surgeon at Clare Hall Hospital, Mr Laird, to repair it. He and the others on the staff were solid and competent. I worked under the direction of the medical superintendent, a wise old fox, FAH Simmonds; I lived in, along with a very pleasant Parsee from Bombay, another thoracic surgeon called Mehta, and ate daily with two other registrars who lived out and with whom I hitched rides into London - Alan Buckley and Dick Harvey-Samuel, both alas now dead, though no older than I, both perhaps victims of radiation.

I was attracted to all sorts of exotica, and if it hadn't been for some hard thinking I did while convalescing from the hernia operation, I might have taken up one of these exciting options. I met and discussed going along with a team of young Brits who planned to drive a Sunbeam sports car from Alaska to Terra del Fuego - but decided that they were too erratic and irresponsible for me to take chances with them. Another option that I examined with greater care came, like the Sunbeam sports car enthusiasts, from the “Agony” column of the Times. This was to go as medical officer with a team doing under-water archeology with aqualungs off the island of Rhodes. I doubt if I would have survived the rigorous selection process for this post, but it has always been a tantalizing speculation - “What if?...”

So there remained just a few more odd jobs, locum registrar posts as casualty officer at Poplar Hospital far out in the East End, and finally back to Hillingdon again as a locum casualty officer, before my final tour of Europe in the summer of 1954. I still remained undecided about my future career, my love life was in disarray - neither of the two Australian girls I had taken to plays, restaurants, concerts, had taken me seriously (nor was I really serious about them despite tryimg to pretend to myself that I was).

Ruins of the Foro Romano

Lorelei Rock (cliff) on the Rhine, 1954

I set off with a pack on my back, but with some train tickets in my pocket, to visit the Rhine Valley, Switzerland, Italy, Paris, to crowd into a six week tour as much as I could of the culture and civilization of western Europe before reluctantly and with bad grace, 
turning my back on all this and going home to Adelaide to start an honest medical career.

Castel St'Angelo

Florence

That European tour went very well all the way, full of interest and with several pleasant social encounters. I went along the Rhine by steamer from Bingen to Koblenz, seeing that fortified stretch of the Rhine at its spectacular best. I passed through Luzern, and Innsbruck; then on into Italy, to Rome, Florence and Venice. On the bus between Rome and Florence I fell into conversation with Ira and Ann Zane, Americans, and struck up a friendship with them that lasted until Ira was killed a few years later when the plane he was on crashed into the East River as it was taking off from La Guardia airport. In Florence, I stayed overnight in a cheap pensione where I spread my sleeping bag on a couch beside a long table in the dining room. I slept in the nude then, and woke next morning with a very full bladder, to see a very full table of voluble Italians engaged in animated discussion, or argument. I managed to reach my underpants and get them on before making a run for the gabinetto in the hallway outside the dining room. I had a tiny room to myself for the rest of my week in Florence. In Venice one morning I sipped coffee at an outdoor table of Florian's superb restaurant  on St Mark's Square, reading the International Herald Tribune. A dark-haired young woman with what I took to be an American accent asked me if she could borrow my newspaper to look at the hockey scores. She wasn't American of course, but Canadian, Lorie, from Winnipeg, staying as I was, at the rather scruffy youth hostel. At her suggestion, we left the youth hostel and shared a room and a bed in a cheap pensione, had two happy days sight-seeing, two night of steamy 'making out' (her phrase, new to me) before parting to go on our separate ways, in my case north into Switzerland via the spectacular corkscrew tunnels of the St Gothard Pass to Lugano. In Paris and again on the channel ferry returning to England, I met more Americans, found them pleasant and attractive people, decided after all perhaps they had some claims to being civilized; but they were all poor correspondents, so like others I met then and before and since, no friendship grew out of these meetings.

Venice - The Lagoon

Lorie in Piaza San Marco

The covered bridge in Lucerne, 1954

But all the while as I wandered through art galleries, gazed at spectacular scenery, had desultory conversations with people casually met in youth hostels and while sight-seeing, I was haunted by the thought of how on the one hand I had nothing tangible to show for over four years of experience since graduating from medical school, and on the other I was about to give up all this stimulation and excitement to go back to the most humdrum, mundane existence it was possible to imagine, in the dull, worse-than-provincial atmosphere of Adelaide. I wasn't even sure what I would find when I got there. My mother had sold the beloved house where we had lived in Glenelg, and was now in what sounded a much less attractive place at North Adelaide. And anyway what on earth would I do when I got back to Adelaide? I couldn't imagine going on any longer with the succession of hospital posts - they were beginning to bore me. I would have to go into practice, but although I found the idea not at all daunting, it would mean tying myself down, and I felt this was something I didn't want to do.

Further experiences in UK and Europe, 1952-54

My second hospital job in London in 1952 was at the Edgware General Hospital, half an hour from Oxford Circus on the Northern Line of the Underground - closer to the heart of the city, but not as intellectually stimulating nor as pleasant socially as Hillingdon Hospital  had been. I had good clinical experience in pediatrics under the direction of Margaret Baber, but at this hospital I learnt more both medically and culturally from the senior registrar, Fred Binks. Sadly I note that he, along with “Baron” Barnes, Jack Mickerson, and several others with whom I worked later in those years in England, have all died recently. With the exception of the Baron, all were close to me in age too. On weekends off duty that summer, I went hitch-hiking several times, travelling to the Cotswolds, Norwich, Cambridge. Encouraged by Fred Binks, I explored London's theatres and cinemas.  The Everyman Cinema at Hampstead was a few stops towards London on the Tube, and there it was always possible to see wonderful old art movies.    

Stowe on the Wold 

Ruins of Tintern Abbey

Interior of Wells Cathedral 

Polpero Harbour, Cornwall 

Warwick Castle

King's College, Cambridge 

I was doing a little study too. I had decided that I ought to take a formal postgraduate course, and after some exploratory inquiries I enrolled in the three-month course that was then held annually at the University of Edinburgh. This sounded better value for money, and more relevant to my interests than the course at the Hammersmith postgraduate medical school in London.

As the summer faded into a damp autumn, I took the overnight bus to Edinburgh, and went to stay at the Victoria League in the West End of Edinburgh. From there I walked daily to and from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, to sit all day in an uncomfortable lecture theatre as the stars of clinical medicine and medical science from the University of Edinburgh trotted out their latest wares. Many were superb teachers, and I learnt a lot, though not as much as I had hoped - I had been expecting it to be a simple and painless process, which of course it was not. Unwisely I chose the most difficult of all specialties, cardiology, and although this brought me in touch with Rae Gilchrist and his two junior colleagues Bobbie Marquis and Michael Oliver (both of whom I got to know much better a few years later) the details of clinical cardiology were too much for me most of the time. I got more out of the stimulating lectures of Peter Michaeljohn, the nutritionist/epidemiologst, and had I the wit to see it then, could probably have made my way in epidemiology from then on. On the whole, it was for the best that I continued on my eclectic way for a few more years, getting experiences that made me a well-rounded physician and contributed to a convincing career trajectory.

At the Victoria League, the company was excellent, including several stimulating South Africans as well as some Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians. The South Africans included Theo James, who became a life-long corresponding friend, Solly Marks, later a distinguished gastroenterologist, and a wild raffish man from Johannesburg, who drove me back as far as Warwick at the end of the three months - a journey I was lucky to survive because of his crazy driving. The New Zealanders included Joe Dobson, who had been with me at Hillingdon. I was on excellent terms with all these and others, but they were less energetic letter-writers than I, so over time the ties of friendship have weakened and eventually atrophied from disuse.

On Saturday nights the Victoria League had a regular weekly session of Scottish Country Dancing, which those of us who lived there watched rather sourly from the sidelines - they made so much noise it was impossible to study while this din was going on, but we were all Sassenachs or colonials with no interest in Scottish Country Dancing.  Among those who came dancing there on some of those Saturday nights was a young woman from New Zealand, Janet Wendelken. We were destined to meet a few years later under very different circumstances.

Towards the end of my time in Edinburgh I began looking for my next job. I went south twice to interviews, the first time to the National Heart Institute, where I was interviewed for a house officer post at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital at Taplow in Buckinghamshire. I didn't particularly want this job, buried as it was in a remote rural area far from public transport; and the interview with Eric Bywaters went badly when I started asking how he told parents that their children might get a placebo rather than an active drug, in one of the randomized trials then in progress. If I had got that job, I would very likely then have become an epidemiologist, like Alvan Feinstein who worked there at about that time. The days I spent in London for that interview coincided with the great smog that killed several thousand people. This great smog at times was so dense that as I walked along Piccadilly I remember looking down and being unable to see my feet - my legs disappeared into the murk just below knee level.

My other interview had a happier outcome; I came south again towards the end of my stay in Edinburgh, and was offered and accepted a position as senior house officer at the Highgate Wing of the Whittington Hospital, in the acute medical service directed by Dr. Howard Pearson.

Like Hillingdon, this was an excellent hospital, on the fringe of another London teaching hospital just as Hillingdon had been. The linkage was with University College Hospital; several of the chiefs at the Whittington Hospital had staff appointments at UCH. Severalof them were at the summit of their specialties; these included John Yudkin, a nutritionist, and Adrian Exton-Smith who became the doyen of British gerontology. As at the other hospitals where I worked in England, I lived in the residents’ quarters, where I had interesting and worth-while room-mates: Sula Woolf who later married the psychiatrist Henry Walton with whom I worked very closely in Edinburgh a few years later; and Eleanor Till, wife of a distinguished medical scientist and friend of several film stars of the era. I went to several parties that included some of these film people, mostly heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking loud-mouthed bores; an exception was Deborah Kerr, who was quiet, witty, intelligent, and a modest and unassuming young woman.

Queen Elizabeth's golden coach

The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was in early June 1953, towards the end of my time at the Wittington Hospital. My mother came to England to see this and we had seats in a stand near Westminster Abbey, among a large number of other Adelaide people, so it was like a reunion of sorts as well as an unforgettable occasion.

Leaving Club Med Camp, Corfu, 1953

At the end of my six month appointment at the Whittington Hospital I went to Corfu and Athens with a Club Mediterranee group. I took the train and ferry to Paris, and on the appointed morning, met a large and noisy group of young people - noisy because all were chattering at the tops of their voices in French. Naively I had assumed at least some would be speaking English! By signs and occasional pidgin English, we communicated with each other, and I joined the party on the train that would take us to Venice. I sat quietly reading Pickwick Papers, one of the two books I had brought along (I never go anywhere without books; the other one on that occasion was Homer’s Iliad); somewhere between Dijon and the Simplon Tunnel, a tall young man speaking English came into the compartment, and introduced himself to me. This was Peter Collett, and our meeting was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. We discovered that there were two others of British origin in the group, Thetis Hill, daughter of an archeologist, and Bob Cairns, a militant Scottish nationalist, a school-teacher from Aberdeen who had taken part in at least one terrorist attack (he called it liberation): blowing up a high-voltage power pylon carrying good Scottish electricity south to the vile Sassenachs. On this trip, however, he was very civilized and quite harmless.

The train deposited us in Venice, where we had a wonderful day sight-seeing, and stayed overnight at the Hotel Splendide-Suisse to which I returned the following year on my own. Then next morning we travelled down the Adriatic as deck passengers on a little Greek coastal steamer, calling briefly and in darkness at a port in Yugoslavia, then at Brindisi, before crossing the bottom of the Adriatic to the Ionian island of Ithaca. There had been a severe earthquake not long before; the entire ancient town that had clung precariously to the steep slopes of the horseshoe-shaped bay perhaps since the mythical days of Odysseus and Penelope, had slid down into the water. What remained among the ruins was enough to show what a lovely place it must once have been. Here as at the other ports where we stopped, we took on deck cargo such as crates of live chickens and piglets, and many peasants travelling from one island to the next. In the morning when I woke up my sleeping bag was surrounded by crates of live chickens and piglets The magic of the wine-dark sea began to communicate itself to me, perhaps to all of us. The sea really was wine-dark, it looked bottomless, deep, going on forever. The jagged mountains of the islands and the mainland, the softer profile of the Peloponnesis, the fragrant scent of flowers, the familiar aroma of eucalyptus from the many Australian gum trees that have proliferated throughout the Mediterranean, all this made me feel as if at home. I wanted to spend much longer in this part of the world than time allowed.

Our next port was Kekyra - Corfu - where most of the Club Mediterranee party got off; but Peter Collett and I, and some twenty of our French colleagues went on, first to Patras, then through the Gulf of Corinth to the port of Athens, Pireas. In Athens we stayed at a comfortable, spotlessly clean hotel where the daily room charge was half a million drachmae, an astronomical sum that translated into only a few shillings, because the drachma had just been devalued.

Temple of Zeus, Athens; Acropolis in the background

Temple of Apollo, Delphi

Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sunion

Tholos at Temple of Artemis, Delphi

In Athens we met a Greek guide whose French was so bad that a good deal of the time I could understand him better than the French people could. We went to the Akropolis, the Parthenon, the Archeological Museum of which I saw little other than the inside of a toilet, thanks to an untimely bout of diarrhea, the ancient and the modern Olympic stadium, the temple of Poseidon at Cape Sunion, where the Greeks had defeated the invading Persians 2500 years ago and strolled in the Plaka, the jumbled mediaeval streets and markets, where I bought a magnificent book of photos of Greece that I still have, and a few souvenirs. 

 We went on a day trip to Delphi, to see the temples and the spectacularly beautiful mountain scenery; our bus deposited us on a ridge half way up Mount Parnassus and we climbed a good deal of the rest of the way, pausing to drink from a bubbling spring - which I later regretted when I got another acute attack of diarrhea. The temple of Apollo at Delphi is among the most esthetically perfect sites and settings I have seen anywhere in the world; my powers of description, like the photos I took of it, can't do it justice. I hope I can go back there one day to see it again. (I wrote this long before our visit to Greece and Turkey in 2004).

Dancing at Club Med camp, Corfu, 1953