The Japanese police arrested the hapless outsideman. They needed someone to blame and to arrest and would have clapped him into their feared prison; but Dad argued his case—he was simply trying to do his job very well. Reluctantly, they let him go.
Were we children scarred for life? Not so. But Mother told me later that, at times that winter and the next, when she would lift the lid of the pot-bellied stove in our bedroom, letting a few flickers light the ceiling, I would get tearful and want to hold on to her. That much stayed with me.
*****
In Taegu, after some families with children were moved and Mrs. Gordon’s school could no longer be maintained, Mother turned to an educational resource used by US expatriated families across the world—the excellent Calvert School in Baltimore, Maryland. We three became familiar with its label on printed materials and complete supplies, down to pencils and erasers. Mother kept Elsie and Archie in one grade and started me in the next. I would listen in, avidly, on their lessons.
We were assigned to teachers in the far-off Calvert School. Some of our completed tests and important papers were sent there; but boat mail was slow—no trans-Pacific airmail yet—so such contact was tenuous. Mother was our resource for learning, bolstered by the superb Calvert School materials, including fine reproductions of classic art and architecture.
There were fewer children, now, in Taegu Station. Two or three older ones, like our neighbors’ daughter, Harriet, were away at boarding school in Pyongyang or in college back in the US. Our age group numbered four—we three Fletchers and Huldah Blair. Huldah had two older sisters; but the age gap was wide. She was now the only Blair child living at home.
The Blairs’ house was the last one at the other end of the compound from ours. As we four found ourselves left to our own resources outside of home-school time, Elsie, Archie, and I became familiar with the trek along the clay road, the whole length of the compound ridge, to play with Huldah. Mother kept our school work to week-day mornings; but sometimes, when we turned up at Blairs’ in the afternoon, we might be told that Huldah, who was also in Calvert School, wouldn’t be out for an hour or two that day because she was behind in her lessons.
Let me add here an interesting aside. Huldah was just a couple of months older than Archie. Both were born at home in Taegu in the mid-summer heat of 1917. One morning, Mother, her own pregnancy far advanced, had gone to help with Susie Blair’s new baby when, on the way home, she felt the first signs that Archie was on the way. So those two—indeed, we four—grew up together and went off to college. Archie studied medicine, enlisted in the US Army, and was in Germany with the Medical Corp during the occupation after World War II; while Huldah, now an RN, served in a mission hospital in Costa Rica.
Their contact during and after college had been only casual. But now a warm correspondence developed, and soon they realized—by mail—that they were in love. That led to a long and happy marriage; a medical missionary career in India, during which five sons were born; and a serene retirement in Southern California.
As children in Taegu, we four played games, inventing new ones as we could. The side yard of our house was gravel, just a thin layer over rock. It was on the sunny side of the building, and Mother was determined to grow some flowers. The outsideman went to work with a pick, chipping at the sedimentary rock a short while each day, until there was a rectangular basin deep enough to hold the soil for a small flower plot.
Then we took over. In the basement we found half of a packing case for an upright piano. The size was just right, to cover that flower-bed excavation. We also found some rice straw to make it more comfortable inside. One could wriggle through an opening we left at one end, and a few—if not all four—of us could squeeze inside our shadowy “barrow.” It was a special place. A point of protocol established that anyone, on entering, must be chewing one of the faintly sweetish stalks of the rice straw.
In those brief childhood years, I had no awareness of choices our parents were making. On the table there was always hot food for dinner. I didn’t think about where it came from. I did know that Pak, the outsideman, had a bicycle on which he would bring back purchases from the market, such as a pair of chickens tied together at the legs and slung over the handlebars.
The trouble, it seemed, was that those chickens had spent their short lives scratching and foraging for food, which meant that they were lean and tough. Dad, the former farm boy, found an answer. He directed the construction of a lath-and-wire-netting pen in our backyard, complete with an enclosed hen house with a roost and nests. We would have occasional fresh eggs, plus a well-fed chicken for the table.
The experiment succeeded so well that, in time, there were broods of fluffy chicks—all quite fascinating for us children. But then the trouble began. There was commotion in the hen house at night—loud squawking—and in the morning some baby chicks were gone. Arming himself with sticks of firewood, Dad positioned himself at an upstairs window, from which he could let fly at any marauding animal.
That helped for a while. Then, one night, the squawking was unusually loud and frantic. Dad hurled his stock of firewood, aiming as close to the chicken pen as he dared, and eventually there was silence; but in the morning his favorite brooding hen was bloody all around her head, and only two of her chicks were left. The afternoon before, while we were playing in the backyard, we thought we glimpsed a slim, brown shadow that disappeared behind the wood pile.
Dad brought a trap from the hospital. It had an end compartment, where he could shut in a live chicken. Then there was a larger compartment with a treadle and a trap door. When an animal entered there and stepped on the treadle, the door would drop shut behind it.
Dad set the trap inside the chicken pen, and it worked! In the morning there was a very frightened chicken in the end compartment and, shut in next to it, a small, snarling, unbelievably ferocious animal—a weasel. We tried to feed the weasel bits of raw meat through the wire of its cage, but it ignored the food, its ferocity intact. After only two days, the wild creature died.
I haven’t mentioned Tootsie, our small dog. She was of an uncertain ancestry, white, with some brown markings, cute and lively, with a suggestion of Pekingese. Dad had spoken for her from a friend and colleague in another mission station, where the family dog had produced a litter. The doctor friend came to us by train. It was winter, and he brought the pup in his overcoat pocket, keeping her quiet by letting her suck on his fingers. We named her Tootsie, from a popular song of the 1920s, and she became our constant companion.
About the weasel, though, she was sensibly wary. She barked at it in its cage, ruffling her neck fur and showing her teeth, but not coming very close. After the weasel died, and Dad found a taxidermist downtown, who stuffed it in a life-like pose, mounting it on a wooden stand, just a sniff of it would send Tootie (we usually dropped the “s”) into a paroxysm of scrambling and barking. After some months, moths got into the weasel’s fur, where it was put away while we were gone for the summer. It had to be disposed of; but we kept the end of its tail, and for a long time after—when we children were older, and Tootie, too—producing that tip of tail and giving her a sniff would set her to racing wildly around, as if the snarling creature were right there again.
*****
In Taegu there were other experiences—trivial childhood happenings—but such as left impressions on memory that are still there, after some ninety years. In two of these, it was an unexpected act of kindness that made the impression.
Archie and I were getting interested in kite flying, which at the time constituted almost a major sport in our region of Korea. Of a long spring or summer evening, if there was a stiff breeze, we could perhaps perch on the top of our back wall and see the kite masters in an open street below. There might be two of them, standing thirty or forty feet apart, each surrounded by his group of cheering onlookers. All would have their eyes fixed on a patch of sky where two square kites were battling, climbing and diving, or moving laterally, as their expert handlers worked the thin kite strings. Those strings hung, in an inverted arc, from the reels of the handlers, up and away through the evening air, to their tiny, darting squares fifty or eighty yards away.
The