Mother, as all of this was happening? There was no telephone line to Andong, no means of emergency communication. The telegraph was all, and it was cumbersome, with text very limited. Besides, Mother was expected home that same day, and she would be unreachable as she traveled by jitney over seventy miles of rutted roads. The winter daylight was already waning when at last the jitney—a Model T Ford chassis fitted with three crowded seats—entered Taegu and Mother began to look for familiar signs.
They came into the wide street that she knew, but as she looked up, she thought, “That’s strange. I don’t remember an abandoned building there.” Above her, on the hill, there were some empty brick walls—no roof, and windows that were just holes through which she could see the evening sky.
Then suddenly it hit her. “That’s no abandoned building. That’s our house!”
The jitney honked its way, agonizingly slow. It seemed to take forever to reach the corner and turn toward the hospital. But there, before she could move to climb out, a figure came running. It was the sewing-woman. She had been waiting and watching, anticipating how Mother might feel.
“Lady, lady,” she called, “the Doctor is safe, and all the children! It’s all right!”
Mother hugged her, which was unusual in Korean custom. Gradually, as Dad came out to meet her and as she at last reached us at the house where our family would provisionally be lodged, she heard the whole story.
We had a new outsideman, who had been instructed how to light the furnace on a cold morning. He would use the small branches of dry pine needles that were effective in getting the molded balls of soft coal to start burning. But this furnace was large, as everything that these foreigners had seemed to be. He would pack in an extra amount of the resinous pine branches.
When he struck his match, the pine ignited with a whoosh. The almost-instant blaze leaped up the chimney. Flames, perhaps igniting some soot on the way, shot up the sheet-metal flu pipe, all the way to where it bent in the attic, with such heat that the pipe gave way. Quickly, stored items caught fire, with a sound that startled the sewing-woman, who then was terrified to see those small flames licking down around the flu pipe.
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
