Chap 1: Now and then - Turkey

In 2013 I returned to Istanbul to try and retrace and chase some dormant memories or enliven the stories I had heard over the years. Strangely, it has always been isolated words or brief visual vignettes that have linked me to those stories and now they leapt into life during an amazing five days of track tracing. So much was still there, so much felt once more, so many realisations.

First came Istanbul station, the final destination of the legendary Simplon Orient Express from London. The station has been restored to all its pre-war glory and magnificence and is now a tourist site with only one train running annually and no people thronging the platforms, ticket halls, waiting rooms, cafés and restaurants. No steam, no crescendos of sound, no doors slamming, no running feet and shouts in an effort to catch the departing monster on its daily epic, no whistle heralding an arrival or departure; just an eerie quiet. But there were some beautiful shiny wooden swing doors with large brass handles. A delicious smell of Turkish coffee seeped out from within. I open the doors and the memories come flooding back in a jumble as the tears start falling. There are many words boiling up from a deep well inside me: Wagons-lits, Maître d’, Golden Arrow, Visa, Troops, the Balkans, Passport, Simplon, Verboten, Zata, Barkiff, Frontiers, Germany, The Axis Powers, Currency, Exchange, Restaurant Car and many more, most of which I had not originally understood or cognitively matched to their referent.

But, at last, in my memories I ‘see’ Daddy about whom I am a bit tentative in these bustling and strange surroundings so far from that peaceful garden and home we had left behind. He is in tears too as (in my current imagination) he holds us tight and then takes me from my mother’s arms. But that is long ago and now I am here at the station again. As I gather myself I note that the restaurant is now a museum to those very years including to Agatha Christie and her blockbuster “Murder on the Orient Express”. There are some evocative memorabilia—tickets, timetables, brochures, dining car effects—and some wonderful photographs and prints. The coffee awaits. I am with two friends and we sit quietly sipping our thick, sweet dark drink brought to us on a salver with a curvaceous silver Turkish coffee pot, small glasses and some real Turkish delight.

I am immediately tempted to slurp my coffee loudly in appreciation. Apparently as a child of about three I had done so with my glass of milk in such a café among the locals, mostly men. My mother reprimanded me in embarrassment. I felt really indignant explaining loudly: “Well, that is what they’re doing.” A small example of a confused child doing her best to adapt culturally as her mother tries to keep to her own idea of ‘manners’. How we have laughed about such memories since. Now, 75 years later, I immediately have the urge to slurp again and do so in front of my two friends. Like children we giggled.

Istanbul station with the modern Orient Express. Seen on my return to Turkey in 2013

After this coffee break I noticed a small poster featuring the original Orient Express. Without my knowledge my friend Jane purchased one and later gave it to me as a surprise gift. It is a great treasure hanging in my Australian home. I look at it daily and happily recall one memory or another. It depicts the train arriving and a young woman in 1930s fashion alighting, a porter in attendance, and a young man rushing along the platform to greet her. I pause in tears of deep emotion. In my mind I put myself as a baby into her arms and wonder about our reaction at the time. How did my mother feel after over a week on a train, crossing so many countries preparing for war, not speaking their languages and with a not- yet-ambulant one year old? She must have been so relieved to be with my father once more and able to hand over some of the responsibility to him. How had she coped with my weight going to a dining car some ten swaying carriages away? What did it do to her when the train stopped for hours miles from anywhere in the middle of the night or when the lights on the train went out in a blackout and it went backwards? How did she cope with herself and her child? Did she have any idea where she was in Europe given that all the station signs were covered or removed to confuse potential cross-frontier invaders? Could she manage the different currencies and visas and the sometime angry voices of stern interrogators and soldiers stamping their jackboots and shouting orders as they marched along the platforms peering into the carriages? She must have been fearful they would discover most of the money she had concealed under the carpet of our compartment for safekeeping.

I do not know the answer to these questions except for the snippets she told me over the years. However I do know that I have apparently been in no way traumatised or plagued by anxiety or phobias. But I did learn to adapt, I now believe, by quickly searching for interest in all the new people, places and situations, then telling my two little Norah Welling dolls about it while tucking them up or preparing them for the day. A new sound, taste, smell, person or object was fascinating and needed understanding and co-opting into my library of experience. New challenges of interest were always there if one looked hard enough. They seemed to have been either selectively reassuring or discarded until later understanding allowed acceptance. Perhaps it was the process and the reassuring maternal explanations and tones that brought interest and concentration, fascination and reassurance. Perhaps my mother and I shared a mutual process, each at our own levels of understanding. In retrospect I realise this was also a very useful adaptive survival process for later years.

As I write our world spirals down into another Middle Eastern vortex of confrontation. I reflect upon my own level of response then and wonder at the wisdom or otherwise of the current repeated visual representations of war and terror on TV and visual media in general. One incident is reported again and again. Young children see the scenes and hear the sounds of horror again and again, whereas I experienced everything once and then moved on. How do they, their mothers and all of us adapt to this contemporary battering? Now there is a collective sense of foreboding and anxiety after each terrorist attack anywhere in the world but little response to a local multi vehicle car crash. There is something about actually being there that seems to provide an adaptive psychological shelter, as if one still has agency over some sort of situational improvement. Experiencing real, even terrible danger, appears not to be interpreted and felt in the same way as repetitive current media representation and discussion. How is it that avalanches, typhoons, earthquakes, even murder in the region or the terrible reality of global warming do not seem to bring about the same malaise as a single act of terrorism?

My contemporaries and I experienced the meaning of war. We felt it in one way or another, yet we do not appear to be plagued by equal levels of anxiety, depression. fear and caution. I have become particularly aware of this during the time of Covid-19. The collective anxiety is at its height yet I did not feel its equal through all the experiences described in this memoir. I hold this in mind as I write. The world and some of its leaders sometimes appear to use this as manipulative strategy for political gain. Many of the exaggerated headlines and pictures across the media seem to be written solely to attract readers; even if they evoke greater fear and anxiety at the expense of factual and proportionate information and a measure of hope.

Another relevant memory comes to mind….