the S. S. Sphinx and Beyond
In Korea, as I was growing up, the term of service for Presbyterian missionaries was seven years, followed by a one-year furlough in the United States to be used for rest and refreshing. The furlough was also for promoting the mission cause—visiting churches, renewing contacts, spreading information, and inspiring a positive response.
Because Dad’s medical leave extended the furlough during which I was born, he and Mother offered to extend their succeeding term to eight years. Having returned to Korea in 1920, they would leave in 1928. Dad, who always had a plan in mind, had learned that our family of five could make the journey “by the ports” for not much more than going straight across the Pacific and the continental United States. “By the ports” meant boarding in Japan a ship that would cruise down the coast of China, around the Malay Peninsula, across the Indian Ocean, up through the Red Sea and Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean; then, by a different vessel and after travel in Europe, across the Atlantic to New York.
There would be stops in numerous fascinating ports along the way, as well as opportunities for land excursions. We children would be a bit young to get the full benefit—Elsie just twelve, Archie close to eleven, and I nine-and-a-half. But the next furlough would find all three of us in college.
Dad secured passage on the S.S. Sphinx, a ship of the French line Messageries Maritimes. It was my good fortune that, in Hong Kong, a British family with a son named David came on board. Now I had a playmate who was just my age. There were quite a few other children, particularly after the ship made port in Saigon, then the capital of French Indo-China. But they all spoke French and couldn’t understand us; nor we, them.
David and I learned our way around the ship. As she cruised into equatorial waters, canvas awnings were stretched above the open deck aft, where we Second-Class passengers could stroll or sit. David and I discovered that we could walk and even bounce on the taut canvas, although as our coal-burning vessel steamed along and soot gathered on the awning, we heard loud objections from below when some of it sifted through. That was French that we could understand, without knowing the words.
Another time, in our games we made us a flag. We went to the extreme aft rail of the ship, to the short flag pole, and started to haul down the red-white-and-blue of the French national flag so that we could raise our own. A sailor saw us and came swiftly to push us aside. We got the gist well enough, through his shower of French expletives, as he angrily restored the Tricolor of France to its rightful place.
There was no air-conditioning as yet—the Sphinx steamed along with portholes open. One evening, at the early Children’s Dinner, I was seated below one of them when a freak wave struck the ship’s side and the frothy crest surged through the porthole, drenching me, to the stifled merriment of several nearby tables. I felt deeply chagrined, as Elsie took me back to our cabin to get changed. It was a long voyage—though longer, I’m sure, for our parents than for us three. But eventually we reached Suez, at the southern end of the Suez Canal, and there left our ship, to take a train to Cairo.
I won’t catalog all of our travels. In retrospect, I admire how Dad and Mother were able to stretch what they had saved over the seven or eight years, so that our family of five could manage modest accommodations and a considerable amount of tourism. In Egypt it was just Cairo and its environs—then on to the Holy Land, British-controlled Palestine. Our parents were people of devout faith, well-versed in the Gospel story. To be in Jerusalem, to visit Bethlehem, the Jordan River, Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee—these places, and the sites said to be linked with the life of Jesus, all were meaningful to them, and perhaps somewhat so to my siblings.
For me, it was just new and different to be moving constantly from place to place, even if the sites seemed much the same. I do remember one encounter with a shepherd boy who showed us his skill with a Palestinian sling—how he put a stone in the pouch fitted with two long thongs. Holding both of them in one hand, he set the stone pouch to whirling around his head at a dizzying speed, until, with incredible timing, he released one thong, letting fly with the stone straight at his target, which it hit with a frightening crack. This was a sight for a nine-year-old tourist to remember.
Another memory, both of sight and sensation, was sinking up to my neck in clear, cool water of the Sea of Galilee. Dad had found a small inn on the lakeshore that had a sheltered cove at one side. We had no bathing suits in our luggage; but Mother decided that the cove was private enough for us to go swimming in our underwear. The day was hot, and it did feel wonderful, just to settle into that limpid, refreshing water. There were smooth stones on the bottom, and when I raised my eyes, the far shore lifted and wavered a little in the hot air on that tranquil lake surface. It was, for a mature Christian, a holy shrine, as it would be for me later in life. For then, it was just a completely delightful setting to experience.
After Palestine we returned to Suez, at the northern end of the canal, to take another ship of the French line. Through some cross-up, there was no reservation for the Fletchers. Dad, the experienced negotiator, argued our case and got all five of us quartered on hospital beds in the single, quite large room that was the medical department’s isolation ward. This served very well for the voyage across the Mediterranean to Marseilles, France, our ship’s home port. What I remember from that voyage is Stromboli, the isolated island that is just a volcanic cone thrust out of the sea, off the north coast of Sicily.
We passed near enough to see tiny houses clustered on one slope, beneath a small cloud of smoke that hovered over the crest. A good while later, as our ship steamed away and the summer dusk was gathering, I could gaze aft and glimpse, on the underside of the volcano’s plume, a ruddy tinge from the burning lava in its cone. The far, shadowy glow still lives in my brain’s memory.
That memory retains little else from the rest of our family’s journey to the United States. Our funds would not reach for spending much time in Europe. I have only a blurred recollection of the gloom of some lofty cathedral naves, of flights of stone steps, and the hallways and casements of museums. What I do recall, in Paris, was the purchase, for Archie and me, of navy-blue serge suits with short pants, and a British-style cap to complete them. The cap I remember, because I put mine down in the Louvre, at the feet of the Dying Gladiator (a.k.a. Dying Gaul), making Dad return with me to hunt until we found it. That gladiator is one statue I didn’t forget, as I also remember the crisp feel of the serge suit—an extraordinary and extravagant purchase, it seemed to me.
Apparently, time and money did not allow for any tourism in the United Kingdom. We crossed the Channel only to proceed directly to Southampton, to board ship for New York City.
*****
In Princeton, New Jersey, on Alexander Street, stands a discreetly handsome, three-story building, Payne Hall, which houses twelve apartments designated, preferentially, for missionary families on furlough. It was a natural fit for us. We were given the use of Apartment D–3, on the third floor at one end of the building. From its balcony we could look down at traffic—still a novelty to us children, used to the isolated mission compound in Taegu—and across the street to the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary, the chief Presbyterian school training men for the ministry (no women graduates in those days).
The summer was past, public school was the new venture. The Calvert School course, with which we had been home-schooled in Taegu, was an accelerated program designed to prepare a student for high school in six years, rather than eight. When we left Taegu, Elsie and Archie were finishing Calvert’s fifth year, and I was half-way through fourth. The public school in Princeton placed them in seventh grade and me in sixth.
The rather long walk to and from school took us through a central part of Princeton University’s campus. My siblings’ junior high school dismissed its students later than my elementary school did. Doing the return walk alone, I could loiter, to admire carved tigers on a stone gateway and absorb something of the neo-Gothic feel of what was then the university’s Lower Campus. All of this was new, as so much else about suburban life in the United States in that year spanning 1928–1929.
In the Payne Hall apartments, there was another family on furlough, missionaries to some country in Southeast Asia, I think, who had two daughters. Jean, between Elsie and Archie