Chronicled below are some
of my father’s earliest infidelities from his unpublished autobiography. It
would seem that he recorded only the most memorable dalliances, hinting at
others perhaps less interesting. His extramarital activities seemed to dawn
with the new decade of the 1960s and read something like a bad British comedy
of the period or an Austin Powers-type spoof. My father and mother had moved to
Cambridge so that my father could get his masters and doctorate, which, as his memoirs
reveal, took him at lot longer than it should have.
Mary Ann was seven months pregnant when we sailed August 15th on the TSS New York out of Manhattan for
Southampton. Mary Ann’s parents would come over just before the baby was due—which
was not until the beginning of October. Michaelmas Term, 1958 would commence on
October 4th—the day Jeff was born.
We stayed in a little bed & breakfast place on Trumpington Street
until we found a furnished house through January’s,
the estate agents. Given our young ages and lack of experience, in addition to being
new parents, my mother agreed to supplement our income, if needed. We found a
lovely semi-detached four-bedroom house on Windsor Road—just off the Histon and
Huntingdon Roads north of town. The rent was 8 guineas ($25) a week, but I
would need a bike or a scooter to get around.
It was a spacious place,
which required no further furniture—except some space heaters (it was not centrally heated). Two of the bedrooms
were of decent size (12'x14'), the front would be the master bedroom, the rear
would make a decent study; the remaining two were rather small (only 6'x9'),
but good enough for a nursery and a box room. Downstairs there was a front
sitting room—which would be our dining room—and a back sitting room with french
doors opening onto a large garden. There was a smallish kitchen with an antique
gas stove and an ancient fridge, and there was also a larder. Out back, abutting the garage, was a coal shed which also
had an outside toilet (although there was one toilet and one bathroom upstairs
on the second floor.) The structure was shared with a neighboring house having
the same amenities. It was considered solid, if not upper middle class as
evidenced by the fact that our neighbor, Doug Howarth, was Manager of the local
Legal & General office, one of the country’s insurance companies. He had a
wife and three children (two sons and a daughter), pre-teens. Our Estate Agent,
as it turned out, also had a wife who gave birth at the same place and on the
same date as Jeff.
Our life in Cambridge was one of stereotypical domestic bliss. We lived
fairly well due to a favorable exchange rate—and financial help from my mother.
Mary Ann became pregnant with Mark in February following Jeff’s birth; the boys
would be 13 months apart. Slowly the trappings of family life were surrounding
me.
In the meantime, Cambridge University’s Committee for the History &
Philosophy of Science was busy creating a graduate program in the subject. The
first students would be students who wanted to become science teachers in
secondary schools, and wanted an additional feather in their cap. But it was
difficult for the graduate school to attract competent people versed in
specific sciences. It was difficult to train historians sufficiently in the
sciences for them to do competent graduate work in their history, but seemed
less so to train scientists in the methods of history. This is particularly so
as it is the task of every would-be graduate student in the science to research
the history of his intended area of research. So, the student of proven
competence in a scientific field was the desired
candidate to do grad work in the History of Science. As a result, I was proselytized
by the resident Historians of Science, namely, A. Rupert Hall of Christ’s and
Sydney Smith of St. Catharine’s, to do graduate work in the History of Biology.
To do so, I would have to attend lectures, supervisions, and tutorials for the
graduate Diploma in the History and Philosophy of Science; but to make the
switch over more palatable, I was told that successful attainment of the
Diploma would pretty much guarantee my acceptance as a graduate student in the
History of Science and would also be allowed to count towards 3 of the 9
required semesters towards a Ph.D. I did so in June 1959.
In the spring, at Mary Ann’s suggestion, I wrote to her old Biology
Professor at Northern Michigan College (now University) about a summer school
teaching position. He, in turn, passed on my letter, to another Professor—Holmes
Boynton—who, in turn, offered me a job for that summer of 1959. It didn’t offer
much pay, but it was enough to pay all our passages back to the upper peninsula
of Michigan, where Mary Ann’s parents lived; and where our costs would be
negligible and it would only be a 65-minute drive to Marquette from Michigamme.
The Northern position was an NSA-sponsored summer Institute for
Teachers of the Sciences. Most of the attendees were high school science
teachers, most of the lecturers were visitors. There were also a number of
regular college students in attendance that summer, many of them living in the
dorms. I became friendly with many of them. I participated in several evening
bull sessions with the students wherein I told of my own exploits at UCSB and
encouraged one and all to “Question Authority.” Well, word got back to Boynton
that I was promulgating subversion among Northern students and I was summarily
called in—this after 2½ weeks of the session—and told that my services would
now no longer needed. I was given my full pay as severance and there I was, fired from my first job. As this was,
apparently, not going to affect my
career, I could have cared less, but I was embarrassed. I returned, somewhat
chastened, to Cambridge, and the beginning of a graduate career.
My biggest initial help came from Dr. Sydney Smith, Tutor in Natural
Sciences at St. Catharine’s, University Lecturer in Embryology, and member of
the History & Philosophy of Science Committee. Sydney was always helpful, but he was equally on an
on-going ego trip. He was a relative non-achiever—though he did excellent work—who
had to make it up by demeaning those under him. He incessantly told us what
relatively uneducated, sometimes stupid, always ignorant, lot we were. Nonetheless,
out of these meetings, we did obtain vital—and helpful—information.
But Sydney did introduce me to The
Whim, Cambridge’s venerable (now
gone—replaced by a Liberty store)
tea-room. Many an hour was spent talking, visiting, and, occasionally, picking
up girls there. I can remember a whole range of characters from there, from
Elie Zahar, now LSE’s eminent philosopher of science, to Ivan the Terrible
Driving Instructor. The latter was a local Englishman who so very much wanted
to be part of our “crowd;” he also recognized the opportunities that we had
found at the Whim for picking up
girls. Ivan would invariably come in at tea-time and plop himself down with one
of us. But when an attractive group of girls would come in, this gaunt and
somewhat thick-witted chap would hop up and, uninvited, join their table. Ivan
was the only man who I believed could clear out the entire place, simply by
hopping from table to table and precipitating hurried departures!
Two elderly
sisters ran The Whim and they had their decided favorites among the regulars; if
you were polite and reasonably well-dressed and passed the time of day with
them, you were admitted to their sanctum. When they could no longer make a go
of the place in the face of Caius’ mounting rent increases; and when no one person
or institution stepped forward to preserves this landmark, it went the way of
so many Cambridge places: it fell to a local extension of a chain store. Laura
Ashley, Liberty, Dillon’s, Marks & Spencer and the Body Shop; all have
pushed out local store owners by paying the exorbitant rents the
College-landlords have demanded. Pubs like the Bath and the Eagle have
been bought and renovated almost beyond recognition—and even serve pizza as
pub-grub! The “Crit” as the Criterion
pub was known, nestled in the Arts Cinema passageway, was the handwriting on
the wall; then the Still & Sugarloaf,
then the Rose on Rose Crescent—and so
it goes, or, went.
My principal friends in Cambridge from 1958-1962 were, among students—notably
the St. Cat’s trio of Peter Lomas, Alaba Akinsete (from Nigeria), B. K. Wong
(from Malaysia), Alun Steer—reading German at St. Johns and after whom I named
my second son—and various “townies,” such as Janet and Brian Legg, she the Administrative
Secretary of my department, he a Cambridge United footballer—and then there was
Elie and Johanna Zahar, he a brilliant undergraduate mathematician, and she a
German student at the Tech.
During my first academic year, my mentor Sydney Smith—embryologist and
part-time historian of biology—took me under his wing as a fellow Darwin
scholar and showed me around the Darwiniana at the University. There were some
items to be found at the Botany School at the Sedgwick Avenue site; the reason
for this being that Darwin had left most of his scientific collections to his
botanist son, Francis who had become a professor of botany at the University. Botanical
research papers, reprints, collections, found their way here. Darwin’s personal
library, some family letters and papers, zoological specimens and collections
remained at Down House in Kent, which had been preserved and maintained by the
College of Physicians and Surgeons. It had been turned into a school shortly
after Emma Darwin’s death, but reverted to the public domain in the late 20s
and now stands much as the Darwins had left it in the 19th Century. The
University Library contains Darwin’s papers, letters and manuscripts.
Most important for me personally, was Dr. Smith’s taking me to the
Botany School Library. There, some 9' up along the topmost shelf along one
corner wall was a 15' line of manila-wrapped, string-tied packets of 3"-4"
thick book-sized bundles. Dr. Smith invited me to ascend the library ladder
and, pointing to the rightmost side, suggested that I open one. They were
offprints of scientific periodical articles belonging to Sir Francis Darwin. Then,
finding much satisfaction in this smug game of hide-and-seek, he beckoned me to
move a little further to my left and retrieve another bundle. I soon had
packets of articles that had been collected by both Francis and his more
illustrious father; a little further to the left and I was looking at Darwin’s
own personal reprint collection. Containing over a 1,000 books and journal
articles, it also contained a total of over ¼
million words of Darwin’s holograph annotations. This was to be the
researcher’s gold mine and was to form the basis for my doctoral dissertation! I
had the material with which to assay the direct influence of contemporary
sources upon Darwin and his ideas! This was handed to me by Dr. Smith and
became the center around which my research revolved.
My social life revolved around the Leggs, Alun Steer and his Yugoslavia
girlfriend, Nuja, my journalistic efforts (held over from my Santa Barbara
days) and my college friends. Through my
friend Alaba (Vincent) Akinsete at Cat’s I met Bittan (Mai-Britt) Hallquist, a
Swedish student studying English in Cambridge. We became good friends, having
had many lunches, etc., together with the boys from Cat’s, at The Gardenia,
The Whim, The Copper Kettle, and all those other places that students piss away
their indolent hours when they should be studying. Socio-sexually inexperienced
that I was, I enjoyed the attentions of Bittan. I was most curious about
Sweden. So, with Alun Steer having gone off to Germany to study for the
Michaelmas term of 1960 and his heading home to England for Christmas, I
contrived a little trip to the Continent: from Tilbury to Gothenberg, Sweden
via North Sea ferry, thence by train to Stockholm, where I would then train
down the 20 miles to see Bittan in Tumba, then back up to Stockholm and then
train, via Copenhagen to Hamburg, where I would meet up with Alun and then we’d
return home to England on a student train, arriving on December 23rd. It was an
interesting trip—Mary Ann making no objection, providing I was back before
Christmas.
Bittan met me, along with heavily falling snow, when I arrived at the
station in Tumba. She told me it was Santa
Lucia night and there would be a small festival down at the local school. This
was the formal arrival of winter, the festival of lights, wherein one 13-year-old
school girl who’d been elected to the role of Lucia, would lead a candlelight procession from one part of town
down to the school. This was to be followed by a dinner of nearly all the
adults in the town. It was quite impressive to see the strings of hand-held
candles coming from all the different lanes, converging on the High Street and
moving en masse down to the school. Dinner
was quite gay and I was one of the centers of attraction. I was taught how to skål and consumed many of the little
chilled shots of aquavit. The next
day Bittan offered to accompany me up to Stockholm and spend my last day in
Stockholm with me before I left on the train to Copenhagen. It was a fun day
and we ended up at the Regina Hotel, a modest place in the center of town. We
each got single rooms—on different floors. We said a warm farewell at the train
station the following day—I would be in Copenhagen by late afternoon.
I can’t remember much about Copenhagen and Hamburg except that I knew
no one in the former and Alan was not very helpful, socially, in the latter. We
enjoyed several evenings in the student beer cellars and I was introduced to
several English-speaking students. I remember but one problem with the
English-German translating. There was this young couple, Hans and Gerda, quite
attractive, in their mid-20s. They seemed quite attached and quite vivacious. In
an effort to get to know them better I asked them how long they had been “going
together.” What I didn’t know was that the term, translated literally into
German, means “having sexual intercourse”—as in “how long have the cow and bull
been going together?” There was a hushed pause in the conversation, the two
looked at each other, blushed visibly, then burst out laughing. They realized
that my question, quite innocent, had missed its meaning in translation. My
puzzlement in their laughter was allayed by Alun’s explanation and the good
times continued.
As it turned out, Alun had much work undone and he would be unable to
accompany me back to England. I was disappointed at having to make the long
haul back on my own. But he introduced me to three Art students who were
travelling in that direction, so I would have some companionship. They were an
Italian, an Englishman, and a German—it looked like, with my French, we had all
the language bases covered, if needed.
I remembered we arrived at the Hamburg railway station on the day of
our travel quite late at night. It seemed quite eerie and foreboding to me;
winter, late night, foreign country. And the German love of uniforms. It seemed
that even the S-Bahn conductors looked like SS men in their black uniforms with
their peaked caps. I felt like I was in an old black & white B movie and
expected Conrad Veidt to emerge any minute in a Gestapo uniform. The German I
heard in the background certainly helped to set the mood.
The bahnhof was quiet, with a
moderate number of people; one or two had laid out on the long benches in the
waiting room, at least one sound asleep. The four of us students sat on a bench
opposite the sleeper, keeping our eye on the electric notice board above for
the platform number of our train to Dunquerque.
All of a sudden—so it seemed—the double swinging doors on the street
side of the waiting room burst open and two black-uniformed policemen came
striding into the room. At that point I felt my Jewish blood curdling in my
veins—it was the 1940s again and they were surely looking for me!
They had black leather boots on and they strode down either side of the
main central aisle, glaring down at each person waiting. As they reached our
aisle—I was already feeling so guilty; of something—in
one alarming swoop the cop had unleashed his billy club and THWACK! thumped a reclined sleeper on
the soles of his shoes. He shot up in an instant—God knows if he had had a
heart condition he would have died of a coronary right then and there! I could
see from the frozen expressions of my pals that they shared my terrified
thoughts. We all felt like camp escapees trying to make our way out of Nazi
Germany: the railway station waiting room in the dead of a winter night was the
perfect setting. I really expected
the cop to approach me and demand to see my “papers;” but they passed on,
scrambling another sleeper and, seemingly appropriately, escorting him out of
the station. We sighed and visibly relaxed when the announcement board
indicated our train’s platform and we rushed for it.
We were lucky that the train was not crowded. We split up, three of us
in one compartment, the Italian Franco, the Englishman Bob, and I in one
compartment and our other friend had one all to himself for the time being.
As the train trundled Westward through the night, we quickly learned
that the best way to guarantee our privacy was to draw the three curtains on
the aisle side of the compartment—one on each side of the sliding door and one
on the door itself. We found that the seats slid slightly forward, allowing
them to recline at about 30º and thus, if there was no one in the seat
opposite, it would make a veritable bed. Unfortunately, there was no lock on the
sliding door of the compartment, so at nearly every stop someone noisily slid
open our door and jolted us awake; no doubt stirring the recent memory of
jackbooted Gestapo agents catching us at last!
Finally, around 2:30 a.m. Franco got the bright idea of resting the
foot of his left leg and propping it up against the door lever. By
straightening out his leg he created a virtual bar against the opening of the
door. The way some travelling schweinhunds responded to this erstwhile
challenge by wrestling with the unopenable door was something to behold. At one
point I imagined three or four putting their muscles together in an effort to
get inside! Obviously, there was little peace and precious little rest on that
trip. By 7:30 a.m. with what looked to be the influx of commuters as we crossed
into Belgium, someone had summoned the conductor to “unlock” our compartment and
we were aggressively rousted into sitting positions as three grumbling German
commuters slammed the now-empty seats upright and plopped themselves into their
seats, glaring at us student-bums all the while.
Apparently, the train-ferry connection was not too well planned, for we
were told that the ferry was just leaving as we pulled into the dockside
siding. Being holiday time, all the ferries were booked to capacity and thus,
if we missed this one, there was no telling when the hell we’d ever get off the
continent. As it was we had to jump onto a moving ferry. With the dangerous gap
already widening, I almost had second thoughts, but my wife and kids sitting
expectantly around a Christmas tree flashed in my mind and I leapt onto the
ferry. I was home by late afternoon of the 23rd.
The year 1960 ended and all seemed quite normal on Windsor Road. My
research was proceeding slowly but surely. We were living fairly comfortably on
$300 a month; paying as we were only $108 for the rental of our four-bedroom
furnished house.
We were able to entertain, even throwing the occasional party for
groups of our friends: the Jocks of Christs and the Mummers—two totally and
diametrically opposite social groups. Rugby players like Vic Harding, Dave
MacSweeny, Donald MacBean, Ron Hoare, and embryonic actors and comedians from
the Mummers and the A. D. C.
Much to the occasional
chagrin of my bourgeois neighbors—who had to look out their windows in the
morning to see what looked like the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme with
bodies strewn everywhere.
Towards the summer of 1961 I had begun to feel that I was letting
myself get too out of shape. To that end I inveigled soccer-playing Brian Legg
to play whiffle ball with me in our backyard, against the side of our garage
and I began a diet. By the beginning of term I had gone from about 208 lbs.
down to 154—9 lbs. below my ideal weight. By Christmas I would treat myself to
a host of new clothes.
That December
of 1961, Mary Ann and I decided that she would return home for Christmas in
Michigan with the boys. As I was to be finished with my dissertation by June, I
could fly back for good at the beginning of summer. To that end, I secured
myself a small flat on the 3rd floor of a friend’s house on Huntingdon Road,
just around the corner from Windsor Road. This was the house of Maurice and
Beryl Frost, who I got to know through Maurice’s job as Registrar of Births,
Deaths and Marriages. There was just the two of them and their five-year-old
daughter in a big Victorian house. I had just run into Maurice on the street
and he looked terrible. He had lost about 50 lbs. due to the sudden onset of
Diabetes. He had also lost his job. It being a dead-end position, he was not
fit for anything really but another civil service job—and there weren’t any of
those going around. Beryl worked as a secretary/accountant for a local dairy;
they were only just scraping by at the time. When I mentioned that I would be
moving out of Windsor Road and still wanting to stay for another six months in
Cambridge, the idea came to Maurice that he could solve both our problems by
renting me the 3rd floor two-room flat at the top of his house and £2 a week
seemed good for both of us. All I needed to bring was a desk, a couple of kerosene
heaters, books, bedclothes, typewriter, a gas cooking ring and a couple of
utensils.
I turned the
two small rooms into a cozy little apartment. I brought a large carpet which
effectively became wall-to-wall in the front sitting room. I had a couch, a
desk and chair, a coffee table and a couple of lamps. The heater which had
heated the Windsor Road living room made the small sitting room quite toasty. In
the other room was the big double bed, a bureau and a night table. In the hall landing
there was a large cupboard where I kept utensils, crockery, and light food.
I had flown
back to America with my family, intending to return on New Year’s Eve. The
first and only dance party at the International Centre on Trinity Street was to
be a New Year’s party—and I didn’t want to miss it, replete with new duds and a
slender 154 lb. body. I can still remember that party. The place was packed—wall
to wall with attractive Scandinavian girls—and all my “gunslinger” pals. I was
like a kid locked in a candy store! They even managed to serve drinks that
night—something one could normally never get at the Centre.
The only girl I remember from that night was Tula, a slight brassy
Finnish girl. She was a lusty thing who, true-to-form, drank much that night. She
weighed in at about 90 lbs. and was so limp from inebriation that I found it
easier to dance with her by carrying her entire weight so her feet never
touched the dance floor. It was like making love vertically. I was in seventh
heaven! This was a token of things to come!
I think I spent nearly every day of the first five months of 1962 in
the Centre. The lunch cafeteria was my venue; so much so that Anita, the German
cook, had become an ally of mine as the place became my living room.
I can even remember the night, having come home after a particularly
wild evening, seen my desktop full of uncompleted work and, opening the desk
drawer, swept everything on top into it, not to open it again for six months!
One of my more memorable affairs was with the Coroner’s wife. This
woman’s husband had also hoped to become Cambridge’s next mayor. They lived
around the corner from where I was living and I had met her on one of our many
joint appearances at Lloyd’s Bank. She was both flirtatious and chatty—she was
then about 36 years old, Irish, with dark hair and sparkling, come-hither eyes. I can remember, shortly after Mary Ann left, running across
her and, engaging her in conversation over a coffee at the Kenya coffee house,
I invited her to come ’round and see how students live. As it was but a two-minute
walk from her house, she did so on the following day. It was not a difficult conquest;
indeed, I was the seducee! It was
chiefly memorable for the fact that she kept blurting out, at the most inappropriate times, “Do you know
what my husband would do if he ever caught us?!” Or, at the moment of orgasmic
truth ... “My husband is a violent man!” I vowed then to leave this neurotic
woman alone thereafter and to have more respect where I parked my Willy! As
Coroner, I could just see him standing over my dead body—having been murdered
by this irate husband—and stating: “Death by Misadventure.” I was definitely
going to give that woman a pass.
That winter I was, as they say, a “slut”. I remember dating a little
Finnish bird called Eino. I had been trying, for some weeks, to get into her
pants, unsuccessfully. One evening, on what I determined would be our last
Platonic date, we went to a party at Pete Andres’ on Emmanuel Road and the
liquor, as usual, was flowing like water. I had even brought my own bottle of
Vodka which I had stuck to chill in his fridge.
In the course
of the evening the effect of all the alcohol brought on an “I don’t give a damn”
attitude towards this girl. I had resigned myself to never enjoying her slim
dancer’s body carnally. I pointedly let her dance with any guy who asked her,
and enjoyed dances with a few nubile beauties myself—almost to the point of
ignoring her. This had the unexpected but much desired effect of getting her
competitive dander up and, after another half-an-hour she insisted that we
leave. I told her she could find a cab across the street at the Drummer Street
bus station, but she leaned into me, pulling on my lapel, and whispered “I want
you to take me back to your place!” She had decided. I heard the victory bell
go off in my head, and, draining my last water glass of vodka, grabbed her and
steered her out of the busy party and out, onto my scooter, and vroomed off to
Huntingdon Road. The cold night air on the scooter ride really caused the
effect of the vodka to take hold on both of us; by the time we dismounted in
front of the house, I wasn’t quite sure that I could make the long flights up
to the 3rd floor. It was bone-chilling cold and I would be lured up those
stairs by the thought of my warm toasty, over-heated apartment.
When I got to
my landing I lurched directly into the bedroom and, pulling off my clothes in
one big go, I collapsed onto the bed. Eino was miffed at the idea of having
committed herself to this act, she was going to have to forego any notions of
romantic foreplay. I was totally drunk and getting less compos mentis by the minute. She hovered over the bed with me lying
prostrate in it looking quite perturbed as she shucked off her coat and blouse.
The room started swimming around me as I looked up at her luscious body and
well-formed breasts and saw her unfastening her dress. As it slid to the floor
and she slid her panties down to her ankles (thank God for the over-heated
room!), I realized that nothing but 20 miles of bad neural road lay between my
eager brain and my sleeping Willy!
Could I
summon up the roving molecules of hormonal chemistry? Could I somehow direct
them to the appropriate source? That was the question. Obviously, Willy was not being a stand-up guy. And Eino,
sure that her disrobing gestures would have had the appropriate effect, was not
too happy with the flaccid results.
With a slight
shrug, she seemed to resign herself to a more overt form of stimulation and
slid in and down on top of me, running her hands all over my bod. I kept
repeating in my mind this little prayer ...” God, if you love me, you’ll make
me sober. Just a little sober; just get my blood to the right parts; just for
ten minutes. God make me sober.” But this was not to be the case; there was a
backlog of gastric alcohol that was still entering my blood and the latter was
not going anywhere useful. Eino was getting more and more passionate. I could
feel her body on mine getting hotter and hotter; she was no paragon of sobriety—yet
the alcohol was having the effect on her that I had been praying it would have
on me. The 20 miles of bad road between brain and schlong was stretching into
40, or was totally blocked—fellatio even
by a sexually dedicated Brigitte Bardot would have had no effect. Eino tried
for about a quarter of an hour: she would have rubbed Willy raw if I hadn’t
told her to forget it. We’d try it in the morning I assured her.
Then something went click in her mind; and her overheated and dedicated
passion turned to quiet rage. She jumped out of the bed and, with me mumbling
my fervent tumescent mantra, proceeded to dress herself. But my mind swam as
the room whirled and my eyes circled helplessly in their sockets. I could
barely discern that delicious body as it was being covered up. Talk about
frustration!
I begged her
to stay, promising untold ecstasies in a few hours, but she wasn’t having any
of it. She turned, put on her jacket, and, before she left, she strode over to
the window, threw it fully open, and looked out, cursing that it was starting
to snow and she was about half-a-mile from home. She strode out, slamming the
door, not having shut the wide-open window in the face of what has since held
to be Cambridge’s worst winter storm in this century! Outside, and faced with
the prospect of a long, freezing walk home in the snow, she found some
satisfaction in leaning down and letting the air out of both tires of my scooter.
In the morning
I opened my eyes and looked down at my uncovered body. It was blue! I couldn’t believe it! I could barely move: I
was suffering from exposure. My head was pounding, that was how I knew I was
alive. As I cast my mind back to the night before, I winced in painful memory
of how badly I had blown it with the lovely Eino—after weeks of frustrating
anticipation! I had to shout down for Maurice’s assistance, as I was
incapacitated. I asked him to draw me a warm bath, help me up and help me
downstairs to thaw. I reckon that all the alcohol I had drunk had acted as an
anti-freeze—particularly when I saw the two feet of snow that had accumulated
during the night at the foot of the still-wide-open window! Nearly two feet of
snow had fallen on Cambridge during that night. The city was paralyzed. As it
turned out, it had to borrow emergency snowplows from the city of Stevenage, 25
miles south, to clear the main roads in and out of Cambridge.
After I had
recovered sufficiently to be ambulatory, I decided to take my scooter into
town. Fat luck! I then discovered what Eino had done in her fit of pique. I had
to remove one tire and carry it down about 500 yards to the nearest petrol
station for a refill, put on the spare tire as well, then go refill the second
tire. Also, it was near-lethal trying to navigate that scooter down the Castle
Hill: it was sliding all over the place. That was one winter I shall never
forget!
