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Metamorphoses
Memoirs of a Life in Medicine
By William G. Anlyan Duke University Press
Copyright © 2004 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8591-2
CHAPTER 1
THE ROAD TO NORTH CAROLINA
I was born in Alexandria, in the British protectorate of Egypt, on October 14, 1925, the second of three sons of Armenian parents. My mother and father had both grown up in Alexandria, in families that had left Turkey in the late nineteenth century. My mother's grandparents came from the town of Ayinkaf; my father's grandfather, from Diyarbakir. He had left in 1873, in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, bringing with him his two sons and their families. The younger son went to Boston; the elder stayed in Alexandria with his father, where he set up business in textiles and proved a shrewd businessman.
Growing up in such an environment, at such a point in history, would leave its mark on anyone, and I was no exception. Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city with a rich history and a vibrant cultural life. We lived in the suburb of Ibrahimieh in a comfortable villa with grounds ample enough to accommodate flower gardens, our own little vineyard and vegetable garden, servants quarters, garages, and storage sheds. My paternal grandparents lived on the second floor in their own apartment and went about their own business, joining us for meals only on special holidays. In 1939, when the Second World War broke out, I was a schoolboy, attending Victoria College, a British school that had been founded in 1901, the year of Queen Victoria's death. My schoolmates included the sons of British families living in the Middle East and the scions of prominent families from Egypt to Singapore: princes from Ethiopia, Iraq, and Jordan, and the son of the prime minister of Egypt, who once invited me to watch the fireworks celebrating the marriage of King Farouk to the shah of Iran's daughter from the balcony of the San Stefano Hotel.
My father, Armand Anlyan, was an intellectual at heart. Born in 1892 in Alexandria and educated in a Swiss school in Alexandria, he had wanted to be a physician but ended up, like his own father, in commerce. We children were not privy to the family's financial matters, but I suspect my father was not an adept businessman. On one occasion my frugal grandfather told me that his son had learned only to spend money. My father was not a communicative man, and we did not see very much of him. I once asked him what it was that he did, and he told me it was none of my business. He was, however, interested in making sure his sons got a good education and worked diligently at school. If we earned less than an A in any course, we had to answer to him. He also believed we should develop physical stamina, making us get up at six every morning. We jumped rope and took turns at boxing with him, and he usually beat us hands down. I learned many years later that he had worked for British Intelligence during the war. Because he was fluent in German and could tell which region of Germany someone came from just from the person's accent and choice of words, he was assigned to debrief captured German Army and Luftwaffe personnel and to pick up German spies who tried to pass themselves off as Afrikaners. Once, when the city was threatened with attack, he asked me to help him burn his files, though I did not know what they contained and did not dare ask.
My mother, Emmy Nazaretian, was born in 1900, in Alexandria, like my father, and, like my father, was educated in French schools in Alexandria. Though we used English and French at home, my mother would speak Turkish to our cook, colloquial Arabic to the other servants, and Armenian with her older relatives, often mixed with English, Turkish, or French, adding to the multiplicity of languages around us. I learned classical Arabic at school partly at her insistence, in case I ended up remaining in Egypt. I saw more of my mother than I did of my father, mainly because she monitored our musical education: the violin for my older brother, John, and the piano for Fred and me. Music had figured largely in her own life, at least as a social accomplishment: she and her sisters, Lucy and Rose, had been expected to supply the after-dinner entertainment in their family's home, singing and playing the piano for guests. For a while, my family nurtured the hope that I might become a concert pianist, and for two or three hours a day I would practice under my mother's supervision, even though I could hardly reach the pedals and keyboard. While my friends were playing outdoors, I had to work on my exercises, with tears rolling down my cheeks (according to my older brother, John, who was able to give up the violin when his teacher said that the family was wasting its resources in teaching him music). Other than these occasional interventions in our education, my mother's main interests were those of a society woman. In August 1938, when I was a teenager, she preceded John to the United States, where he was bound for Yale University. She took my younger brother, Fred, with her, and they stayed in New Haven with her sister, Rose, and her family for almost two years.
It was in many ways an extraordinary and privileged childhood, and not an unhappy one, despite the emotional distance of my parents and grandparents, despite the enforced boxing and music lessons and the pressure on us to succeed in school, despite being the second son, living always in the shadow of my older brother, John. I learned to swim and in the summer months swam for hours in the Mediterranean. My mother's brother, George, and his wife, Agnes, from Holland, included me in many gatherings. I learned to enjoy music and looked forward to my lessons with Maestro Amideus Bottari, our Neapolitan piano teacher. At the age of fourteen, when I was preparing to play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor, I realized that I just did not have enough talent to tackle it, and I abandoned the idea of becoming a professional pianist. But I never lost my interest in music and widened it to include modern music and musical shows, performing in and directing musical events at school and beyond.
School also interested me, and I still remember clearly many of my teachers and the lessons they taught me, passages memorized from Shakespeare, Chaucer, the history of Europe and America from the British perspective, the caning I got from the headmaster, Mr. Reed, for some infraction I no longer recall, my year as head boy (following in the footsteps of John), our stints as troop leaders in the Boy Scouts and later as assistant scoutmasters (it was in the Scouts that I learned to tie a square knot, later so useful to me in surgery). I graduated in 1943 with my Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate in physics, chemistry, and biology, and was set to follow John to Yale, as soon as the passage could be arranged to America.
The war marked a turning point in our lives, but living as we did in Alexandria, we were sheltered from its worst effects. Victoria College was converted into a military hospital, wooden buildings were erected on the soccer fields to accommodate the wounded soldiers, and the school moved into the San Stefano Hotel, from where I had watched the fireworks only a few years before. We moved out of our large villa into an apartment in Cleopatra, another suburb of the city, just one mile from the British Army headquarters at Sidi Gaber. My mother and two brothers were still in the United States when the first enemy air raids rattled the city, in May 1940. They were carried out by the Italian Air Force, which never penetrated the airspace over Alexandria but dropped their bombs over the Mediterranean and then flew back to their base in Libya. In June 1941, however, the Luftwaffe took over from the Italians, and for the first time, the bombs came close. We took these raids seriously and would go down to the air raid shelter when the alarm sounded. From then on, we had air raids most evenings for two years. The Germans were systematic – in general the raids began one hour after the moon rose, so you could plan your social life ahead. The nearest bomb to where we lived fell half a mile away, jolting our building but hurting no one. You learned to move in the dark without streetlights and to drive without headlights. All the houses had heavy curtains. In August of 1942 my father was monitoring Radio Berlin, and I remember distinctly hearing the announcement "Alexandrie ist gefallen." We expected at any moment that Hitler's Afrika Korps, commanded by the charismatic General Rommel, would come rolling in. They never came: General Montgomery had routed the German forces at the battle of El Alamein, and life in the city returned to its peacetime rhythms.
Sometime in the summer of 1943 my father received a call from the U.S. War Shipping Administration in Cairo to say that I would be given a passage to the United States on a U.S. merchant vessel in late August. I was to "disappear," without letting anyone know where I was going or why, and report to Port Said, at the north end of the Suez Canal, to wait further instructions. Because I was under eighteen years old, my parents were, to my great relief, allowed to accompany me. So, without farewells to friends and other relatives, we left, by train from Alexandria, changing once in the town of Tanta.
The Port Said harbor was filled with large numbers of ships, including British warships. My parents and I assumed I would be assigned to a convoy going down the canal to the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope, on a slow voyage to an unknown destination in the United States. The plan was for me to find my way to New Haven, where I would join my brother John at Yale. Port Said had no historic sites or museums and only one large trading store, so the days of waiting seemed interminable and dull. I found a small spinet piano in the hotel and kept busy playing from the sheet music and albums I had brought with me to take to the United States. After five days, my father got word that I was to be at a certain dock at a specified time, ready to embark on the U.S. liberty ship SS Louis Hennepin. My father gave me a money belt containing five thousand dollars, which I was to keep on me or within direct vision at all times. So we said our goodbyes at the dockside, and I boarded the ship. This voyage was going to be very different from the one my brother took in 1939, in a comfortable cabin aboard the passenger ship SS President Wilson of the President Lines.
The Hennepin had been built by the Kaiser Company, and, although rumored to be structurally weak, it was commissioned to deliver military supplies from San Francisco to support the Pacific war. Having delivered its cargo in Australia, it was now making its way home to the United States. Its captain, Captain Simon, had been master of a dynamite barge in the Gulf of Mexico before being given command of the Hennepin. I was assigned to a cabin with three junior officers and, as the only civilian aboard, was to have the privilege of sitting at the captain's table in the officer's dining room. The ship weighed anchor after I fell asleep. When I awoke the next morning, much to my surprise, I saw the Mediterranean beaches of Egypt instead of the Red Sea. That afternoon, we docked in Alexandria; I was overcome by homesickness and had to fight back the temptation to find the captain and ask to disembark and be returned to my family and friends.
The next morning we set sail once again, part of a sixty-ship convoy that would be the first to cross the Mediterranean in wartime by hugging the coastline of North Africa. A British destroyer escort of First World War vintage crisscrossed the waters at the head of the convoy, which was moving at about seven and a half knots. On either side were several tugboats that would occasionally drop depth charges to "neutralize" enemy submarines lurking nearby. With the help of the Hennepin's first officer, Commander Anderson, I moved to a single cabin, the deck engineer's cabin behind the engine room. The engineer was apparently in the brig, for reasons that were never clear to me. The cabin was very hot, and the portholes were sealed because of blackout restrictions. But I remembered from my physics class that white sheets hung in the doorway would deflect some of the heat, and that helped.
Four days out of Alexandria, a general alert was sounded. We donned life jackets and reported to our lifeboats; the fifty U.S. naval personnel on board to protect the ship went to battle stations. About twenty-five minutes after the alert, we learned that the bulk of the Italian Navy was heading straight toward us. The good news was that they were on their way to surrender in the Port of Tunis, thus ending their participation in the war. Battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and a couple of aircraft carriers, steamed by our port side. The men crowded on their decks were waving and cheering as they sailed past, music was playing loudly; the Italians were clearly overjoyed to be going out of the war.
After four more days, we dropped anchor in Gibraltar Bay, among hundreds of other warships and transports, in a vast enclosure bounded by anti-submarine netting. We remained there for six days awaiting the formation of our transatlantic convoy, under the watchful eyes of the German consulate, which was strategically located on a hillside in Algeciras, Spain, overlooking the entire bay. Each night, British patrol boats moved among the ships and dropped small depth charges to prevent anti-Allied divers from attaching suction bombs to the hulls of the anchored ships. With the exception of Captain Simon, no one had shore leave. On the third day, the captain decided to run an abandon ship drill. After the incident with the Italian Navy, I had been wondering how the lifeboat and safety systems worked, and now I was to learn. He sounded the signal, and I reported to my assigned lifeboat, number 3. We got in, but the pulleys to lower the boat did not work. Ninety minutes later, we finally came down to the level of the water, and the ropes to the pulleys were disconnected. No one had considered that this would set us adrift. For the next thirty minutes, the third mate, Mr. Pollard, tried in vain to start the inboard motor engine. When Pollard finally commanded, "Man the oars," two of the sailors muttered, "What?" They had never been in a rowboat before. Finally, a British patrol boat arrived to tow us back to the Hennepin, where the captain was waiting to excoriate the third mate mercilessly and publicly. At that point, I decided that in the event of another abandon ship order, I would take a running dive off the side and swim as fast as I could.
In the late afternoon of the sixth day, we weighed anchor, along with dozens of other ships, all heading east. No one except the captain knew what our course would be. Were we going back to the eastern Mediterranean? If so, where? It was only the next morning that I discovered we had in the night slipped past the U-boats nested outside the Straits of Gibraltar and were in the middle of a 120-ship convoy, headed west, across the Atlantic Ocean. The convoy was commanded by a commodore, who was aboard a large U.S. destroyer that tacked back and forth at relatively high speed in front of the other ships. Several smaller destroyers and a converted aircraft carrier sailed alongside for protection, and we could watch reconnaissance aircraft coming in for landing and being snapped to a halt by "the hook." It felt good to be in the middle of the convoy. But our joy was short-lived. At noon on the first day, our captain ordered, "Stop the engines," causing the ships behind us to swerve right and left to avoid a collision. The captain was on the bridge with his rusty sextant (the first mate later told me he didn't know which end of the sextant was which), supposedly recording his ship's position, a function assumed in a convoy by the commodore. The commodore's vessel was blinking commands at a rapid pace. It took us until sundown to get back to our assigned positions in the convoy. The next day, precisely at noon, Captain Simon repeated his "Stop the engines" routine. More swerving of ships, more brisk signals from the commodore. By mid-afternoon, we were assigned a new position in the convoy: the back corner known as "torpedo junction." For the rest of our two-week journey, we stopped engines at noon, the sextant came out, and, by the time the captain was satisfied with his reading of our position, the rest of the convoy had disappeared over the horizon. We would then spend all night at full speed ahead to get back to torpedo junction. The commodore had clearly written us off.
The convoy managed to reach a point north of Bermuda unscathed. We were by then beginning to run out of food – he captain had somehow forgotten to reprovision in Gibraltar – and were eating potatoes twice a day. There was not much to do. The lounge on our ship was just the officers' dining room, and it was served by a very young cabin boy, who was so scared he never took off his life jacket. He did not know how to swim and was afraid of drowning. Everyone understood his situation, and nobody kidded him. I would tap out Chopin waltzes or Beethoven's Sonata no. 8 on the table when no one was watching.
At Bermuda, about half the ships turned north, while our half stayed on a course headed southwest. The U.S. Navy vessels accompanying us split evenly, with the aircraft carrier going north. Three days later, we entered Norfolk harbor through Hampton Roads, and I had my first view of my future homeland. I had grown so accustomed to the rolling and pitching of the ship that I walked very unsteadily onshore, as we made our way to the U. S. Customs house. The customs officers were clean-cut, polite young men in uniform, and the main thing they were concerned with was how much money was I carrying. I replied honestly, that I had five thousand dollars, to pay for my tuition and living expenses at Yale and was very surprised to be told by the head customs officer that I was allowed to bring in only fifty dollars. I would have to petition through the courts for the remainder of the money. There was no recourse. So I accepted a receipt for the confiscated money, took my two large suitcases, and followed directions to the railway station.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Metamorphoses by William G. Anlyan. Copyright © 2004 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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