We shared a room in the Marshal House, my father and I, during our first month in Milford. The family remained behind in London, packing up the home we had leased as our initial encampment in the U.K. My father thought it important to enroll me in my new school as early in the term as possible, however, so brought me along to his new posting, to the boulder-strewn Pembroke coast. On Sundays, we called from a telephone in a small kiosk adjacent to the front desk. My father would ask my mother how the packing-up was coming and tell my brothers and sister he couldn’t wait to see them. Then I would make my hellos as well.
We set up quarters on the second floor, in a cozy room decorated with faintly dingy, flowered wallpaper, and a big window that faced the Haven. Our furnishings consisted of two beds, a chest of drawers, a dusty wardrobe, a small desk that wobbled slightly, and two old wooden chairs. The desk sat beside the window and afforded an unencumbered view across the broad, blue vista of water, toward the west, where the sun faded into the sea and fans of color unfurled in the evenings. I believe there was also a chamber pot, which we did not use.
In no time at all, we established a simple routine. My father woke first in the morning, and showered while I dozed. Upon finishing, he cracked the window open and, in my semi-slumber, I would first sense, then smell, then feel, the heavy stream of fresh, bracing air pouring in from off the Haven. I would become aware of my father moving lightly about the room, the cries of the birds drifting softly on the cool currents, and, floating placidly between sleep and consciousness, pull the blanket tight around my neck – till shortly he shook me awake, and I rose reluctantly from my warm sheets to dress; after which we trotted downstairs for another one of Mrs. Zelinski's staunch and stalwart breakfasts, before launching off into the day.
As the month progressed, we watched the lodgers come and go, struck up acquaintances with those who stayed a few days or more, began to adopt a vaguely proprietary attitude, and generally settled in. We rarely saw the secretive Mr. Zelinski in the mornings. His wife was in constant sight and motion, however, sweeping in and out of the kitchen, checking old guests out, checking new ones in, superintending the help, refilling empty tea or coffee cups, wiping up, refolding newspapers, answering the telephone, and making jovial chatter all around. It seemed to be a matter of special importance that her lodgers should enjoy their meals. Every morning, therefore, she interrogated each guest as to their satisfaction with the fare.
“Are the eggs to your liking today, Mr. Barnes?”
“The bacon crisp enough for you, is it, Mr. Anthony? I know that's how you like it.”
“More tea, Miss Fox? Care for some more cream?”
“The strawberry jam is quite nice, isn’t it, Mr. Crowson? We had a new lot in from London on Monday!”
The questions were unnecessary, however, as the answers were always the same, the lodgers thumping their midriffs and pronouncing themselves well pleased indeed. And how could it be otherwise, I would wonder, stuffing another forkful of bangers into my mouth? Nonetheless, as if performing a ritual, Mrs. Zelinski propounded her entreaties every morning; the slightest frown shadowing her brow, a wary look creeping into her eyes, as if each new guest might be that fated one who would finally deliver a damning verdict in the negative, presaged perhaps by a moment's hesitation, signaling disapproval of the eggs – were they too runny? Or the bacon – too soft? Or the service – inexcusably tardy? Never, however, did I hear uttered anything remotely resembling a grievance. All was well, always, when it came to Mrs. Zelinski's morning victuals.
After breakfast, my father headed off to work at the refinery site, in Waterston, a small, nondescript village of stone buildings situated upon a bluff two miles east of Milford's boundary-proper. The first weekend following our arrival, he had driven me out for a look. We made the short trip in a four-speed grey Austin sedan he had acquired from somewhere, and I remember noticing that manhandling the gears of the manual transmission seemed to be providing him unusual enjoyment – we had never before owned a stick shift, nor had I ever ridden in one, or even seen one operated. I had no idea how it worked, and so observed carefully, hoping to memorize the arcane manipulations, sensing that skill with such an apparatus might be a thing worth showing off some day. Thus, we banged along the narrow road winding up from the Haven, the gears churning under my father's enthusiastic touch, his eyes bright and shining, to the site.
In truth, however, there was at this early point little of consequence to observe, for construction was barely underway. From one standpoint, the site was nothing more than a huge dirt clearing stretched out above the water, surrounded by a random assortment of colorless, age-worn structures, which appeared to be small, abandoned residences, and a ragged collection of sickly trees. Indeed, such was my initial impression; unimpressed, underwhelmed.
The more we toured about, however, a different perspective began to form. A realization crept over me – an awareness of something seething behind the flat and uninteresting scene, of huge reserves of machinery and manpower poised to leap into action, and I perceived in my father his excitement at the transformation soon to commence, as if the refinery's massive edifices were already ascending from the ground before his gaze. His eyes grew wide as he described what was to be built where, guided me over the muddy site toward the cliff overlooking the Haven, there to explain how the giant tankers would eventually dock and unload their enormous cargoes of crude oil, refill with cargoes of refined oil, and set off again on their endless journeys.
“See there,” he pointed across a bluff. “That's where they’ll offload. Then,” tracing an imaginary line with his finger, “the pipes will run all the way up there, that's where the refinery's going to be. Then back out,” tracing another line back toward the bluff, where the refined oil would be loaded into new tankers, bound for new destinations.
We sat in the car and a dreamy look entered his eye. “Think about it,” he said. “First they have to find it. Then they have to get it out of the ground. Then they have to get it refined so people can use it. So they ship it here. Then we make it useable, then it goes out again, all over the world, constantly in motion. Keeping everything else in motion.” He turned to me. “It's an amazing thing, isn’t it, when you think about it!”
And I nodded and said Yes, it was – for it truly was a stirring proposition, with a certain technician's romance, this notion of being at the center of a machinery, a spider-web, that spun literally across the globe. It fired my father's imagination, and my own as well.
So, dirt was being turned, small mountains of steel and wood and iron and piping lay piled on the ground keen to be erected, straining almost palpably to be stood up, measured, fit together, and then rise into the sky. Men were moving and doing, and it seemed to me the more my father spoke that something fantastic was, indeed, going to take place, and that I, through him, was going to be part of it - and the light flashing in my father's face, the vibration in his voice, drew me into that prospect too. Already, emerging sleepily from our train that first morning of our arrival, I had felt something electrical, magnetic, chemical, sweeping through my every nerve and every sense. Now it seemed as if my father was charged too, and me in his wake, breathing in his ardor. His pleasure became my own, and I must have intuited that if something in this place could bring my father such happiness, then surely I would find felicity here as well.
From the very beginning, therefore – from that dreamlike emergence out of our berth on the Great Western express, from my first glimpse of the Haven's waters calm and quiet as a sheet of silver glass, the cathedral-like spires of the refineries framing the hills on the southern shore, from my first hearing of the gulls’ wild cacophony – I opened myself completely to our new home, because that was what I saw and sensed my father doing too. And during this first month, lodging at the Marshal House as if it were a sort of base camp, I felt as if we were explorers together, on a private mission, and that every day brought new discoveries to us both.
After school, I walked. The refinery site connected to the main railway line by a fresh-laid spur, and this spur ran alongside the Haven down below the embankment; which itself ran along Hamilton Terrace, in front of the Marshal House. In the afternoons during that first month as boarders, while my father was still at work, I would walk this spur as it curved along the north side of the Haven, above what I came later to know as Scotch Bay. The tankers would float slowly in the tranquil shelter of the waterway, surrounded by coveys of tugboats painted red and blue, and smaller craft would dart about, skirting the larger boats, ferrying people on various tasks from ship to shore, and from shore to shore across the Haven. Then, as dusk approached, the trawlers crept in from the sea, eased tiredly into the docks, and discharged crews of rugged-looking men, to unload the day's catch and scrub down their boats. Always, vast numbers of birds arced overhead, crying plaintively and carving great, graceful figures in the sky. Always there was the thick salt-smell of the water, the seaweed, the mud, the fish, and always the wind turning and shifting, rising and falling. I rarely encountered anyone on the tracks, and enjoyed the solitude, a little cocoon of discovery, within which I was able to absorb and reflect without interruption upon the fresh and unfamiliar sights and sounds.
I viewed these excursions as a kind of reconnoitering. Taking stock of this new place. And, as befitted a reliable scout, I paid close attention and made mental notes of everything I saw, cataloging new findings in order to recount them to my father over dinner.
I threw rocks into the water, or sat on grassy mounds observing with quiet pleasure the changing colors on the water's surface as the sun descended in the west, beyond the cliffs at St. Anne's Head, where the purple twilight seemed to rush in like a fast tide. When an engine happened to shunt along the spur, I hopped off the tracks and scrambled up the hillside, and the crewmen and I stared at each other as they passed, their visages unreadable. Always, without fail, I found something new and interesting on each of my daily jaunts.
Occasionally, my forays took me almost all the way to the Gulf site, where around a long bend in the tracks I could make out foundations being laid, and the vast tangle of pipes spilling over the top of the escarpment, to tie eventually into the offloading facilities. By then, however, the shadows would be creeping up the hills and the day's warmth fading, and I would turn and head back to the Marshal. Passing the docks on my return, the fishing crews had finished their work and were drifting off home, or lounging and talking, smoking cigarettes and flicking the butts into the water. The watercraft were tying up for the night, the few tugboats still on the water had turned on their lights, and the tankers were lit up like floating cities. Flocks of white birds tip-toed daintily along the mudflats and rock-pools, joined occasionally by orange-billed oystercatchers, pecking at whatever special debris the day's tide had left behind. The spur ran slightly downhill as it exited town, so my return to the Marshal required an uphill climb, which left me breathing heavily, and just as the sharp air began to chaff the back of my throat, the hotel's lights would come into view and I would clamber up from the rail line, jump the wall of the embankment along Hamilton Terrace, and another afternoon's rambling would be done. Then my father and I would eat dinner together in the warm, cheerful dining room, and he would quiz me about what I had seen and done that day, where I had gone, who I had met; then regale me, in something of a conspiratorial manner, with what had transpired at the refinery site – sharing our discoveries together as it grew dark outside – and then it was up the stairs to our snug and spartan quarters, and off to sleep.
And how could I not have arrived in Milford a vessel waiting to be filled with adventures? From earliest childhood, my father had filled us with tales of travel and discovery. He himself had been raised on an apple farm in northern Virginia, during the Depression, but was seized hard and early by a thirst to see the world; an impulse of unknown origin, with no particular precedent among his stolid predecessors, but an impulse that proved strong and demanding. By the time he was twenty-two, he had indeed departed the apple farm, departed Virginia, departed the United States even, and was serving as Engineering Officer aboard the USS Greenwich Bay, sailing the ports of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Altogether, my father spent three years in the Navy – and I always had the feeling they may have been his happiest.
As a consequence of his nautical ramblings, settled much later into the staid routines of middle-class civilian life, our family dinners often revolved around recitations from his rich and perhaps-embellished collection of exotic memories. Vivid descriptions of the officers dining in a tent somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, invited guests of some dignitary, seated around a lavish meal featuring healthy helpings of memorable local delicacies, such as goat's eyes, wet and dripping in some delicate, slippery juice. Or the crew foregoing sleep three days straight, evacuating desperate survivors from tiny villages on the eastern coast of Greece that had been flattened by an earthquake, ferrying old men and woman and children to temporary shelters along the mainland to the south. Or the unspeakably filthy ports of India, the awful poverty and wretchedness he had witnessed there; yet, too, the sublime beauty, the timbre of his voice shimmering, as he painted for us a picture of the Taj Mahal's floating domes, or endeavored to describe the sight of thousands of pilgrims and devotees lowering themselves into the Ganges, rippling and stinking in the red morning sun. And then, the subject of India never failed to summon forth rousing lines from Kipling, their martial beat evident even to my young ears, my father declaiming verse after memorized verse as the light sifted away outside our window. In this way, we ate wide-eyed at our little table, listening to stories, my imagination roaming free and unfettered, following my father in his explorations across the world.
Many was the time, in the evening after dinner, that he would rummage in the hallway closet and pull out an old blue bag, decorated with a faded tartan pattern, turn it upside down, and pour out a stack of coins and bills which he had collected and brought home from these faraway places. We gathered around the table as the foreign objects came spilling forth, a whiff of must and dust exuding from the upturned bag. We examined the strange writings, the peculiar faces and inscriptions, and I would muse with a kind of childish wonder that the coin I was rubbing between my fingers had, at some time in the past, rested in the pocket of some unknown person in Calcutta or Cairo. I would imagine the coin passing from hand to hand, through infinite numbers of exchanges, between infinitely mysterious people, from the foothills of the Himalayas to the sands of Egypt – all a mere prelude to its final exchange with a young American naval officer, who would then carry the coin across the sea to its final resting place in a faded tartan pouch on the upper shelf of a crowded hallway closet; a sad and undignified sort of end, I would reflect with a wistful pang, for a thing that had enjoyed a life of such freedom and abandon.
Then, there were other occasions, when my father would fish out a collection of slides from his Navy years, hang a sheet on the wall, and narrate a two-hour guided tour through the Mediterranean Sea, starting at Gibraltar, stopping at Naples, passing Malta, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, around Arabia, across the Indian Ocean, to a colorful termination in Bombay. There were slides and slides and slides displaying nothing but blue-gray vistas of water, and an endless parade of docks and ships that all looked the same. The crickets chirped outside in the hot, humid Florida night, the images flashed brightly onto the sheet in the darkness, and my father, immersed in his memories, described every detail of the ships, the routes, the sights, the sounds, his friends among the other officers, the antics of the enlisted men, the escapades and travails. And the images I had seen flashing across the sheet on our living room wall would play endlessly through my imagination later as I lay in bed and drifted off to sleep and to dream.
So how, indeed, could I myself not have arrived on the rocky coast of southwest Wales as a willing vessel, eager and ready to be filled with adventures of my own?
There were times, that first month in Milford, when I brought Alan, the Zelinski's son, along on my excursions above Scotch Bay. He was a solemn sort of boy, an only child, and spoke little; which suited well my own contemplative nature, as I had no desire to spend my walks nattering, when I should be watching and weighing. And thus, Alan and I would stroll along the tracks and toss stones and scrutinize the activity on the docks below, while the shadows crept across the Haven and the soft breeze washed over the town and the water and the hills, the lowering sun casting a pale orange light upon the undersides of the clouds that scurried overhead. Occasionally we discussed some event at school, or he would ask about life in America, but mainly we walked in silence.
“How did your father get that scar?” I asked him once, however, on one of our larks. Every time I saw Mr. Zelinski, I wondered about the scar, and it nagged at my curiosity.
“I don’t know,” Alan had shrugged disinterestedly. “Something in the war, I think. I know he was in the war.”
“What did he do?”
Alan shrugged again. “Don’t know, I never asked.”
One evening, returning to the Marshal just as night fell and the sky was turning a dark, deep blue, Alan went to the kitchen to speak with his mother and I continued on my way toward the stairs, when I caught sight of Mr. Zelinski sitting in a wooden chair in the parlor, staring out a window. He was alone, and something drew me to enter the room and approach his seated figure. He was dressed in a black suit and white shirt, with a thin sky-blue tie, and had his head turned gazing through and beyond the window. His thin gray hair was combed impeccably back, and seemed to shimmer. The pool of light from a lamp on a nearby table illuminated the left side of his face, and again I saw clearly the thin white scar running the length of his cheek. He turned slowly as I approached and his pale blue eyes were eerily flat, his face bereft of expression. Neither of us spoke for a moment, till I said, “Hello, Mr. Zelinski.”
He sat silently for another moment, then replied, somewhat formally, “Good evening. May I help you?”
I had no idea why I had entered the dim room, much less ventured near his chair, and replied awkwardly, “No sir.” I paused and stood before him, unsure whether to leave or to speak. “I just wondered what you were looking at,” I continued hesitantly.
He lifted his lips almost imperceptibly and turned his face again towards the window. The evening now was black as pitch; lights sparkled from the jetties across the Haven, but all else lay in blackness. Peering intently out the darkened glass, in which his reflection from the lone lamp quivered, Mr. Zelinski seemed to have forgotten my presence. I prepared to back away and continue on to our room. Just then, however, he said, “Nothing. I’m not looking at anything, just remembering when I was a boy, like you.” He paused. “My brother and I used to help my father plant in the springtime. I was thinking about the planting in the springtime. It was always warm in the springtime, after the cold winter, and it was good to get started with the planting.”
Again, he was silent.
“I met some Americans in the war,” he said then, absently, followed again by silence.
I fidgeted uncomfortably.
“Was your father in the war?” he resumed, looking not at me, but beyond the window.
“No sir.”
“I didn’t believe so,” he nodded. “Just a little too young perhaps. A young man, safe in America.”
I lingered a moment longer, thinking he might say more, or that I should offer some comment myself. I wanted to ask how and where he had gotten the scar on his face, which seemed almost pulsing and alive in the illumination from the little lamp. And if it was connected to his limp. I wanted to ask what he had done in the war, and how he came to Milford. But he said nothing further. His eyes remained fixed on the lights twinkling in the darkness outside the window, and he again seemed unaware of my presence, so I slowly turned and left and tiptoed up to our room.