Naughty Nell

By N. Beetham Stark

This true story is intended to awaken sluggish spirits and motivate women to take control of their lives and make the things that they want happen. No woman needs to be chained to a mop and broom or a sink full of dirty dishes for the rest of her life. You can take hold of the events that shape your life, to a certain extent, and turn them in your favor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: N. Beetham Stark
• Release date: May 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780998000091

N. Beetham Stark

Nellie Beetham Stark was born November 20, 1933, in Norwich, Connecticut to Theodore and Dorothy Pendleton Beetham. She attended the Norwich Free Academy and later Connecticut College in New London, CT before graduating with a MA and a Ph.D. degree in Botany (Ecology) from Duke University.Stark worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a botanist for six years and then joined the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada where she worked on desert and forest ecology and later tropical nutrient cycling. She has consulted in many countries, working for some time in Russia, Australia and South America. She developed the theory that explains why tropical white sand soils cannot grow good food crops and described the decline processes of soils. She has also developed a science of surethology, or survival behavior which describes how humans must adapt to their environments if they hope to survive long term. She has 96 professional publications and has published in four languages.Her life long hobby has been English history, with emphasis on naval history. Her family came originally from Tristan Da Cunha in the South Atlantic in the early 1900’s. Her grandfather was a whale ship captain for a time which spurred her interest in naval history. She also paints pictures of sailing ships which she has used as covers for her historical novels. She has built several scale models of sailing ships and does extensive research on ships and naval history, traveling to England once yearly.Stark was awarded the Connecticut Medal by Connecticut College in 1986 and the Distinguished Native Daughter Award for South Eastern Connecticut in 1985. She was named outstanding Forestry Professor three times by the students of the University of Montana, School of Forestry.Today she writes historical novels, mostly set in England. She has published some 21 novels in the past twenty years, mostly on the internet. She lives on a farm in Oregon and raises hay and cows.Stark's two most popular book series are:Early Irish-English History1. The Twins of Torsh, 44 A.D. to 90 A.D.1. Rolf "The Red" MacCanna, 796-8462. An Irishman's Revenge, 1066-11124. Brothers 4, 1180-12165. Edward's Right Hand, 1272-13076. We Three Kings, 1377-1422The Napoleonic Wars at Sea (Benjamin Rundel)1. Humble Launching - A Story of a Little Boy Growing Up at Sea, 17872. Midshipman Rundel - The Wandering Midshipman, 17953. Mediterranean Madness - The Luckless Leftenant Rundel, 17974. The Adventures of Leftenant Rundel, 1797-17995. Forever Leftenant Rundel, 1800-18036. Captain Rundel I – Trafalgar and Beyond, 1803-18067. Captain Rundel II – Give Me a Fair Wind, 1806-18098. Captain Rundel III – Bend Me a Sail, 1810-18139. Admiral Rundel – 1814-1846

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Naughty Nell

An Autobiography, or Frustration Warmed Over

A Story to Inspire the Downtrodden Housewife

A Wild Ride

by N. B. Stark

Copyright © 2022 by N. Beetham Stark

Published in The United States of America

ISBN 978-0-9980-0000-5-3

This book was published in the United States of America by N. Beetham Stark. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be printed or copied without the written permission of the

author or her agents. Paid downloads are acceptable.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 A Long, Lonely Childhood

Chapter 2 The School Years, Blossoming

Chapter 3 Low Times in High Years

Chapter 4 The Starvation Curriculum

Chapter 5 Graduate School

Chapter 6 A Bad Deal - Making the Most of It

Chapter 7 The Great Amazon

Chapter 8 Nice Girls Don't Shake Up the Establishment

Chapter 9 North to Pick Huckleberries

Chapter 10 Life at the Bottom of the Guillotine

Chapter 11 Australia

Chapter 12 Russia and Survival Ecology

Chapter 13 Leaving and Not Grieving

Chapter 14 How to Build Your Own Log House, How Much Aspirin to Buy

Chapter 15 Life in the Good Country

Chapter 16 The Best Time of My Life

Chapter 17 Metal Detecting Adventures and Writing

Food for Thought

Almost the End

About the Author

About the Book

Introduction

Right off the bat my name is not Nell and I leave it to you to decide whether I was naughty or not. If going against the organized male world is naughty, then was I ever bad! I did the opposite of what I was told to do most of the time. I am writing this book anonymously because I am not a celebrity and you wouldn't know who I am if I used my real name any way. Also, I do need to protect the stupid, the inept and the incompetent who helped to shape my life, some of whom still roam this earth today. As a result, no real names are used and few real places are named. But don't let that bother you. What happened and why it happened are more important than where it happened or even to whom it happened. And be assured, every word is true! I am a scientist and do not deal in exaggeration.

If you are the young man or woman who grew up in a less than loving home and now thinks that drudgery behind a sales counter or driving truck somewhere is all that life has to offer, I suggest that you examine your mind deep down inside. Perhaps you might find the inspiration in this book to strike out and try challenging the world on your own. I never dreamed that I could do what I have done in my 88 years. There was nothing in my childhood or my heredity that even hinted that I might have something special to offer the world, but I searched my soul and found the special talents that lay within and am much the happier woman for it. Whatever you do, be good at it and true.

I was not beaten physically as a child, but I did suffer daily psychological abuse from people who probably didn't even know the meaning of the word. You see I cannot tell you who I really am because I don't know myself. I know only whom I have become and how I got there. That should inspire any young woman to give life a good hard try. It's the only chance you'll have. Be prepared for some surprises as you read my story and don't let the dreary early years discourage you. My early life is important because the experiences of those young years helped firm up my resolve to seek my own future. If you can understand how poor old Aunt Minnie and Aunt Rut caused me to think about life and forced me to find my own future, then you can do the same with your own relatives too.

So, pick up a box of hankies and sit down by the fire and prepare for adventures in the top of the Amazonian rain forest, on farmers’ fields in England, in the forests of Russia and in the deserts of the Southwest. I doubt that you will be bored or ever feel alone again.

I have written this true story to inspire the housewife who is stranded for ten hours a day with three boisterous rug rats, a sink full of dirty dishes and a stack of unpaid bills. And note that I have not elaborated or used any literary devices to make things seem worse than they were. What you will read is truth about someone that you do not know, but might enjoy knowing.

Chapter 1 — A Long, Lonely Childhood

My first memories of life were of lying in my crib in the corner of the dining room with badly fouled diapers. I had to do some creative art work on the walls to tell them that it was time to change me. A young neighbor came to look after me while my mother worked. Ma worked at a 5 and 10 and made pennies which she efficiently converted into small hanks of cloth, a little bias binding, a spool of thread. These she stowed away in the back bedroom and by the time that she died, one could not even open the bedroom door. Phinney was a fine girl but sometimes someone else (I called her 'Silly') looked after me and then the care left much to be desired. I remember giving Phinney a thorough bath when she put me in the tub. I think that it was supposed to be the other way around.

But the negligent baby sitter, Silly, managed to leave a bottle of white Watkins furniture polish on the tray of my high chair where I could reach it. I was thirsty and the stuff looked like milk, so I drank the whole thing thinking that my father's cows must be in bad humor to give such awful milk. The result of that was that I got very sick and the family had to postpone a short weekend vacation to the north, but I didn't mind. They didn't waste any time or money taking me to the doctors though. I recovered on my own.

Then when I was three, I contracted pneumonia and it was serious. My paternal grandmother and great grandmother had both died of pneumonia within two days of each other several years earlier. That scared the parents and I was taken to the hospital. But I wasn't feeling particularly bad and there were all those children to play with. I had never even seen another child before. This was great! I went from bed to bed trying to stir up some mischief until someone caught me and tied me in my own bed. When I was brought home after only a few day's stay, I found a surprise awaiting me. Out from beneath the washing machine came a skinny tiger cat. I loved him at once and made him my very own. I took him to my bed and hid him under the covers and talked to him because the adults in the household were not prone to listening to a child. In my lonely life cats have been my best friends for a lifetime. I named him 'Tad Thomas' and played with him frequently.

The one adult in my life who seemed to care for me was my grandfather. Now I should explain that the man that I called 'father' was probably not my real father and 'mother ' was definitely not my real mother. But grandpa was either my real father or my grandfather. There is no doubt about that. As I grew up I noticed similarities in our hands and features that cannot be accidental. My first memories of Gramps were hearing his Hupmobile cough to a stop outside the front gate. Then the gate would squeak and it seemed to take a long time for him to reach the porch. He always brought a crisp little white bag from Whitings Dairy with a small box of French vanilla ice cream with a wooden paddle. How I loved that ice cream and the fine old man who sat with me and watched me eat it. And he even talked to me as well. To this day, French vanilla brings back wonderful memories.

I learned that it was grandfather who named me. My so-called parents had wanted a boy and so were not prepared for a girl. I was told, as soon as I could understand, that I was of no use because I was just a girl. After three months they still had not named me. I lay in my crib and was called either 'stinky' or 'the baby.' My grandfather came daily to see me and asked each time what they had named me. My mother always answered, The baby. After three months of that nonsense, he took matters into his own hands and one day he walked through the door and said, The child's name is to be ___ after my dead wife, her grandmother, and I'll hear nothing more of it! And that is how I was named.

In later years I learned that my parents had a boy born in May of 1933. I was born in November of the same year. It was clear to me that these people were not my true parents. I was not a premature baby. There is evidence but not proof that my real mother was a surgeon from a very prominent family. She had been good friends with my grandmother and after Granny's death, she continued to be friends with my grandfather. In mid-1933, she left for England by boat. When she returned she had a tiny infant girl in her arms. She claimed that the child needed medical attention that was not available in England and that she was bringing the child here to see to its medical needs. What I believe happened was that she handed the child, who was probably me, over to my grandfather and said, Here, you ordered this, now you will have to take possession. My grandfather was single at the time and so was the good doctor. But her politically and socially prominent family would never have accepted an illegitimate child. She had to do something and she did. My grandfather knew that his son and wife had just lost a boy child, so he asked them to take me and raise me. There were no adoption papers, no formal arrangements and no birth certificate. I wrote my own birth certificate when I went to get my social security card. The son and wife were most unhappy because they wanted only a boy and I did not come with the proper equipment, but there was no sending me back. They kept me but I am sure they regretted every day that I was there. I was probably born in the Lake States of England. My 'father' was probably my half-brother.

I grew to love my grandfather dearly. It was he who took me out and set me on his lap when he drove the tractor. When he grew tired, for he was not well, he would set me on a stone wall and tell me stories of the island where he had grown up far away in the South Atlantic. I was spellbound and to this day still want to go there. He told wondrous true tales of ship wrecks and of a ghost ship with all persons aboard found dead but no clear explanation of how they had died. He told of great whales and whaling ships and of pirates and buried treasure. My eyes must have sparkled with excitement. There were invasions by rats and ratting expeditions to drive the rats out from the stone walls on the island. The potato crop was essential to these people and he told of hours of digging potatoes and fishing in some of the wildest seas on earth. He had been captain of his own whaling ship and had worked out of Capetown.

One fascinating story was about his decision to come to the U.S. The island depended on an annual visit from a supply ship to bring flour, sugar, cloth, mail. People were so desperate for thread to mend their clothes that they were tearing the binding out of books for thread. The nearest store was over 1,200 miles away across wild seas. They were truly isolated on the loneliest island in the world. The ship was overdue by several months and every eye was trained to the horizon watching for its appearance. When a ship, The Westward Riding, finally did appear, it was flying no flag. That was most unusual, but the islanders were desperate for supplies. A group of men, nearly all the able-bodied men on the island, took to their canvas boats and rowed out to the ship. My ancestors did not go because they were trying out a whale on the beach and were busy. Grandfather came from a family of seven boys and two girls. As the boats approached the strange ship, she turned and headed out to sea, leaving them to follow. But the islanders wanted to get some food if nothing else, so they doggedly followed the ship over the horizon, rowing as hard as they could. Apparently a severe storm blew up and the ship and boats were all sunk. They were never seen or heard from again. A passing ship captain told the islanders later that he had seen the boats overturned in heavy seas, but all of these men were expert swimmers. Someone would have managed to swim back to the island or at least their bodies would have washed ashore with the wreckage of their boats, but none was ever seen. For sport they often rowed the young boys out to sea and set them overboard to swim some fifteen miles back to shore. That was a daunting challenge for a teenager in those high seas, but they became excellent swimmers. Drowning was an unlikely explanation. The Islanders believed that they were taken aboard the strange ship and sold into slavery. Another version says that they were lost in the severe storm. None of these men was ever able to contact the families on the island again. But there was mail delivery only once a year and no radio contact. Getting word back to their families would have been difficult, especially if they were sold into slavery.

I recently learned of a different version of this story from my then only existent cousin in the UK. The islanders were hard up for supplies and they saw a ship coming close to land. The men all rowed out to the ship and apparently boarded her in very high seas. Before they could return to land, the storm became so violent that the ship capsized and every one aboard was drowned. I tend to believe this story, but have never been able to understand why my family gave me the wrong version.

This left about fifty widowed women with no husbands. Most of my grandfather's six brothers were unmarried. And most were related to the widowed women. My grandfather was not the oldest of the family, but he was the one who was their leader. He proposed that they should not marry into their own families, but should go to either Australia or the U.S. in search of women to marry. He favored Australia, but it was a long way away. He went off to Capetown to work in the shipyards to earn money for passage of the family to a new land. He was quickly found to be one of the most effective overseers that they had ever had. He encouraged the native workers to move close to town and he threw away the whips. He treated the natives like human beings and they loved him. He regularly sent money to the island so that his relatives could buy passage to the U.S. from passing ships. He sent everyone of his immediate family off ahead and then he booked his own passage to the eastern U.S. They had agreed to meet in a certain area when the last one had arrived. One sister wished to stay behind on the island. But when grandfather went to board his ship, he noticed rats crawling down the lines and falling into the water, swimming frantically for shore. He, being a seaman and superstitious, canceled his passage and booked passage on a later ship. Eleven days later word came with an incoming ship that the first ship that Grandfather was planning to take had been seen to sink in the South Atlantic with all hands lost. Thanks to a seaman's superstition, I am here today!

But you can imagine how a small child could be fascinated by this fine old man. Unfortunately for me, he soon became too sick to get about and he died when I was eight. I was not allowed to see him for almost four years before he died. After that I was extremely lonely. In fact, I thought that the Hell that I knew as a child would never end and that I would never, ever grow up. Time was marching slowly through knee-deep mud.

My parents never read to me or played with me. I was just 'The Baby' and was lucky to get fed. One day they left me in a playpen in the front yard. Now the area had a good healthy population of deadly poisonous snakes. When they returned a while later, they found me in my playpen, holding a deadly poisonous snake in my hands and petting it! I would never do that now, but as a child, I had no fear. They had no idea what to do and I am sure that they had written me off as soon as they saw the snake. But the snake was not hurt and it seemed to sense that I was a juvenile. It eventually just slithered away without leaving as much as a tooth mark on me.

I had a neighbor who lived just a mile away. They always called us, 'cousins,' but as an adult I now know that we are not related. Cousin Jack was a strange boy. We managed to get together about two or three times a year to play. He was a year older than I and liked to play house. When asked, I always wanted to play cowboys and Indians. In winter sometimes we would slide on our sleds over the snow through our hayfield. Sometimes it was icy and I liked to grab the tail end of his sled and nose him into the cold snow. That would almost always send him home crying to his mother. His mother was a fine, sweet woman who made the second best cookies that I have ever eaten. His father was a man who stood six feet eleven with shoes the size of coal scoops. I didn't know it then, but I realized later that he was gay. His wife was lonely and managed to slip into his bed one night and got herself pregnant. The son that she got was much like his father, but he did love his mother and was a good son to her. At Christmas we would always go to visit and often shared dinner with them. Jack lived in a house that was stuffed with priceless old antiques that I could only admire. We had few antiques and yet I loved the older furniture. I remember that he had a toy train that was set up to run around the living room at Christmas. How I would have enjoyed a toy train, but there was never one under my tree. I could look for some underwear and maybe a pair of socks for Christmas.

When Jack graduated from High School he left for college and I never saw him again. He has never married and has become terribly rich, owning large buildings in LA and elsewhere. We do write to one another at Christmas still. I am amazed at the person that he has become. I was sad to learn of his death a few years back. He had become gay and was most likely the victim of AIDS.

My mother insisted on working and so, hired a live-in baby sitter to care for me during my preschool years. Phinney had since gone off to join the armed forces. But Silly was a bad one! She had my father out of the fields and into the bed in no time flat. I didn't comprehend what was going on, but I knew that somehow it was all wrong. There were certain times of day when I was ushered outdoors with you, rain or shine or even snow. Go play became a familiar phrase. I grew used to playing by myself, pretending to make submarine sandwiches from leftover garden produce or playing with my cat.

I could not relate to my mother at all. She was there on the weekends and fixed Sunday dinner, but she was not someone that I could ever talk to. The only thing that she made that I really liked were wild blueberry pies and I would pick wild blue berries until dark to assure that she had no excuse for not making pie.

Until his death, my grandfather was still the head of the family, even though he was not the oldest. There were about five relatives who lived close to the farm. Grandpa liked to hold a Thanksgiving dinner there at the farm for the entire family. He had married an Indian woman after my grandmother died and the new wife was somewhat less than cooperative, but he hated to give up the tradition. I can remember only one of those dinners. The oak floor boards of the old house which were at least a foot wide had buckled from constant moisture from the basement. As a result, it was like walking over hard waves to cross from one side of the dining room to the other. Then two of my esteemed male relatives on my father's side managed to get into an argument. My family was known for being fond of fighting. It comes from the early Irish that is in us. Grandpa would stand for just so much of that. He calmly got up from his seat and knocked the two men's heads together so hard that we thought we could hear them crack. They stopped fighting promptly. Many years later, my father would tear up the dining room floor and sell the aged oak lumber, some boards over a foot wide, to a picture frame maker for a small fortune. There will be more about the relatives later.

Gramps liked to visit. He could spend all day just sitting with a bunch of old men from the nearby village and chatting. He was not only a fine conversationalist, but he was most knowledgeable for an uneducated man. And he was often lonely. He started making a special kind of wine that was called One shot because most men couldn't handle more than one glass of the stuff in an entire day. I never knew what he put in it, but it did have a lot of herbs. One day my father tried to drink a glass of the stuff when he was still a boy and he fell asleep for sixteen hours. My grandfather was never seen to take as much as a sip of the stuff himself, but it was a grand lure that brought all of the old codgers from town out on a Sunday afternoon for a bit of visiting and a good drink. They came in horse and carriage and Model 'T's'. After Gramps died, we found a large barrel of the stuff in the cellar of the old house. I took a cautious sip when my father wasn't looking. It tasted quite good, but we dumped the entire barrel on the ground. My father thought that it was made by the devil himself and didn't want the stuff around.

Once when I was about three years old they took me to a fireworks display at the fairgrounds. My father held me up so I could see, but I didn't want to see. The terrible booming scared me half to death! I grabbed his neck with both arms and put a strangle hold on him, not on purpose, but I was really scared. Soon he began to choke. They people next to him tied to pry me loose, but they couldn't release my small hands. I had them clamped tightly together in a death grip. Finally, they managed to walk my choking father away from the fireworks and I released my grip. I will admit that there were times later in life when I would not have felt so badly about choking the old coot.

By the time I was age five, my father decided that Little Stupid should be put in the fields weeding mangle beets. He never called me anything but 'Little Stupid' or 'Little Stinky' during my childhood. It was demoralizing. We had a dairy farm and had to raise mangle beets to substitute for grain during the war years. My father didn't have time to weed the beets, so he put me out there all day long. I was overwhelmed! The weeds were much taller than I was and their roots went deep into the soil. I could pull weeds for about a week or two. By that time they were so tall that I was unable to get them out of the ground, but I was kept in the hot field just the same, all day long, all summer long. It was a lonely and frustrating time. I was told, A boy could do that simple job easily. That was thrown at me daily, that I was not a boy and so, could do nothing right.

I had been watching my father pitch on hay, climb on the load to distribute it, climb down to drive the truck forward and then repeat the process. One hot day I simply blew up. I jumped over the stone wall out of the beet field and headed for the hay truck. I sat on the seat, or rather with my rump against the seat's edge because I was so small. I was all of seven years old and didn't weigh a hundred pounds. I grabbed the wheel and refused to budge until my father taught me how to drive. He finally gave in and showed me how to shift and steer. I already knew how to stop the truck. So from that day on, I was free of weeding beets which I couldn't do and I became a driver. I must admit that I had a bit of trouble learning how to ease the truck forward and jerked the truck many times, dumping my father over in the hay, but that was fun too!

In the late 1930's the area suffered a severe hurricane. I was five years old and not in school yet. I remember the winds blowing everything that was loose away. Then the shingles on the house began to rattle. My father came home and put me in my green coat and green and white cap. We stood by the front door, my father with axe in hand, with water dripping around us everywhere as the shingles were blown off. My father had built the house about seven years earlier and I wondered if it would hold up. We had an old collie dog, 'Buzzer', who stood by my side, shifting from one foot to the other uncomfortably and panting nervously. I was able to see the barn that my grandmother had built many years earlier lifted from its foundation and set in a pile of rubble in the middle of the hay field. Fortunately, the cows were all out in the pasture, now huddled down in the forest for protection from the storm.

But this was no usual storm. We had two rows of one hundred and sixty year old maple trees that lined the road that went from our house to the family homestead up the road. When the hurricane had finally finished with us, there were only two maple trees left standing. Even they were stripped of many of their limbs and stood like naked ladies. The road was totally blocked and remained so for many weeks. Our house had suffered severe roof damage, but we were able to put buckets and cooking pots under the drips and we kept one bed dry. The rest of the house was wet. Surprisingly, the farm house where my grandfather lived was still standing, roof intact and few leaks. It was built in 1680. He had lain within during the entire storm, a sickly invalid. It was framed of chestnut and pegged with ash. But grandpa's Hupmobile had a maple tree flat on top of it and the farm shed was stove in.

We knew nothing of my mother. She was in town about six miles away working in a local clothing store. There were no phone lines left so it was impossible to call and find out where she was. My father simply had to forget that he had a wife for over two weeks. The roads were fully blocked and there was no way to get word to anyone. We lived out in the country and on a high hill. It was already September and the nights were growing cold. Later we learned that my mother had tried to make it home but had seen a woman slit in two by a large plate glass window that was blown out of a store front as she walked by. That caused my mother to lose her nerve. She ran for my aunt's house which was in a brick building several blocks away and she just managed to make it. She stayed there until the phone lines were repaired and she was able to call my father.

I never realized until recently how much my father must have suffered during those days right after the storm. First, my grandfather was ill and could be of little help. I was just a child of five and we had no live-in baby sitter just then. He had to feed and care for me, although I was an extremely good child and was little trouble. After a harried night trying to sleep in a damp bed, and wracked with many worries as the last of the winds made the house bounce on its foundation, my father had to get up before dawn and try to find the cows. They were scattered all through the woods and scared out of their wits. But they were desperately in need of milking too. Worse still, there were so many trees down that when he did find a cow he had trouble finding a way to get her home to milk her. All of the cows were milking at that time. He set up a long rope and simply tied each cow to it. We had about 28 head milking. Then he went from cow to cow milking them by hand. It took almost all day to round them up and do the milking. But once the milk was collected, there was no electricity and no refrigeration, so the milk had to be spilled on the ground. There was no way to deliver it to Collie's Dairy as we usually did. It was almost three weeks before anyone could get a vehicle through the blocked roads.

With the cows tended to, my father had to begin clearing a path up the county road. We had no chain saws in those days, so all he could do was to drive the tractor up to a big tree trunk and nibble at it with a circular saw mounted on the front of the tractor. It was run by a belt from the fly wheel on the tractor. Somehow, he managed to get a small path cleared through the trees on the county road so that after three weeks people could drive through, but only most carefully.

As soon as he could, he went to town for shingles and made repairs to the roof of the house.

The storm had damaged much of the hay, but he was able to find some for the cows. They spent the next month and a half tied outside the remains of the old barn. Once the roads were passable, my father began to take the milk to the dairy again and he ordered some cement blocks, sand and cement. I never knew where he got the money from to rebuild the barn, but by late November he had put up the foundation of a new barn behind where the original barn had stood. The walls were of cement blocks and he put a temporary roof on it to last the winter. I never did know how he got hay for the cows for that winter. Eventually the wreck of the old barn was burned and by the next year, the new barn was built and roofed. But remnants of the great old maple trees remained on the edge of the county road for several years. I know that we had maple wood to burn for almost eight years.

Not long after on a warm fall night, a neighbor’s barn caught fire from spontaneous combustion of the damp hay. We got out of bed and dressed to watch it burn. The nearest fire engine was far away and the barn was nearly gone by the time the truck arrived.

My father became a local fire warden. It was his job to report any wild land fires to the fire department and then head for the spot as the first attack team. Sometimes I went with him. By age eight I could carry an Indian back pack full of water up a hill to my father. I kept him supplied, but he wouldn't let me near any of the other men. We put out a good many oak forest fires that had just started.

I wasn't permitted to go to kindergarten which would have been a great help to me. Since I grew up alone with only two disinterested adults in the house, I knew nothing about children. And I was called Stinky by my father even after I started to school. That gradually changed to Stupid, which gave me zero confidence in myself. But my first day in first grade was not as traumatic as it was for many children. I didn't miss 'Mommy' at all and I had no reason to cry. No one called me, Little Stinky or Little Stupid! in school I jumped into the new adventure with eagerness and joy, but a terrible lack of confidence. To this day I have a tendency to think and speak poorly of myself and my accomplishments because of those early years of being mentally abused.

All went well for the first couple of months in first grade. Then my father got into an argument with my grandfather. I knew they often argued over the way I was treated, but this must have been something much bigger than that. My father pulled up stakes, loaded the car, an Oldsmobile, with necessities and we moved north about three hundred miles where he took a job on an apple farm. He was taking a chance because we would soon be at war and he might have been drafted if he was no longer needed on the family farm, but I doubt that the draft ever entered his mind. It was harvest time and I enjoyed watching the fine MacIntosh apples come into the barn where they were cooled and stored. They made excellent cider and I watched the press as it was worked by two men. They had an old International Trac Tractor which my father drove to bring in firewood and plow snow. I used to take the levers in hand and steer the tractor. We lived above the barn in a small apartment. I could look out on almost any winter day and see a herd of thirty or more deer feeding on the apple branches. It was a great place to slide too because there was lots of snow. I managed to slide under a tree one day and the sled suddenly fell through the crusty snow, sending me traveling head first over the ice and into an adjacent tree, face first! It was then that I learned about thermal cover and I had a badly swollen lip to remind me of my stupidity. No boy would have slid clear off his sled when it stopped in soft snow. No boy would ram his mouth into an apple tree! I was told. I also got scolded when I fell out of the bed the first night there. There was nothing to stop me from moving off the head end and I dented my skull on the door jamb. Stupid girl! I still have the dent in my forehead.

I was put in school there in the nearest town and did quite well. I had been a straight 'A' student at home and proceeded to do just as well in my new school. I met a boy there who was most friendly and made me feel comfortable in the new school. It was during the long winter that we lived there that my father decided to make a useful robot out of me. He had a copy of the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Every Sunday afternoon he would put me in his lap and point out various tools and parts of equipment that he might someday need me to fetch. Hence, I became a well-trained 'gopher!'

That's an open-end wrench and that's a brake shoe. That's used for dehorning cattle and that's an adjustable wrench to fit any size nut, he would say to me. I didn't mind learning the parts and tools. It was the most attention that I had ever received from my father so far in my young life. I now realized that the more I looked and acted like a boy, the more acceptable I would be. I was an attentive student. Every child wants to please his parent, at least at first, and acceptance was important to me. Maybe that's why I still prefer jeans today and have no qualms about doing a man's work. My mother stayed home during that time and she began to deteriorate mentally. It was nothing serious, but she missed the excitement of talking some customer into buying this or that which had been her life's work.

Then towards spring, my father moved again. Whether he had a disagreement with the owner of the apple farm or whether there simply wasn't enough work to keep him on, I will never know. He did use the tractor to plow the deep snow from the county road, but by spring the snow was beginning to melt and he wouldn't be needed until the next harvest season. The owner of the apple farm was a man who had once been homeless in N.Y.C. and had been saved by a priest. He was a most interesting man and I hated to leave. Fifty years later I stopped at the apple farm and met the man's son. They still had the Trac Tractor and the buildings hadn't changed much at all except that everything looked much smaller. And the original owner was then retired and living near to town. All was the same except that everything looked much smaller.

Our next stop was to the south east and was on a truck garden farm. We lived in a plain house and I remember that there was a house nearby which had hundreds of canaries living inside. It burned down while we were there. There was a lot of 'roast chicken smell' in the air for days afterwards. Again my mother didn't work, but my father supervised a crew of Portuguese laborers. I was left alone all day to amuse myself. But soon they put me in school. It was the first grade again, which I had never finished. It was March of my first year in school. I came home the first night in tears. I told my parents that I couldn't understand a word that the teacher or students were saying. I was told, You're just stupid. That's all. You don't pay attention.

But the next day was the same and every day after that until early June when school was out. I managed to bring home report cards with straight F's at first. Then, I started to catch onto the language a bit and I managed to bring home some C's and D's. There is no way to tell anyone how those terrible grades hurt me. The report cards were signed, but neither parent said anything about my poor grades. They could have cared less! They should at least have noticed that I had straight 'A's in the other two schools. And I frequently told them that I could not understand the teacher, but it did no good. I said that she spoke some foreign language, but they only accused me of being stupid. My mother sat at home less than two miles from the school and never bothered to get in the car and come to see what was wrong. I heard a lot of, Stupid girl stuff. That was all.

The truth hit my mother on June 10 when she came to take me out of school to go back to our original home. My father had grown tired of working for other people and wanted to be his own boss again. My mother stepped into the class room just as the teacher was wishing the students a happy summer. She was speaking in Portuguese! They had enrolled me in a Portuguese speaking school and had not even thought to check the place out. It was then that I knew for certain that I was an unwanted child. I did learn some Portuguese out of all that which did come in handy many years later when I went to do research in Brazil, but I had suffered terrible abuse at the hands of my fellow students. They taunted me and tried to tear my clothes. I was, after all, the bosses daughter. I grew to understand some of the things they were calling me and it dropped my self-esteem even lower than it had been before. I felt like a wet, dirty, whipped puppy when I left there, no thanks to my parents!

Chapter 2 — The School Years, Blossoming

It was good to be home again and to see my grandpa, even though he was bed ridden now. The war was on too and that changed things. My father was happy to stay and work the farm as long as he didn't have to pick up a rifle and go to war. He let his cousin, Rick, shoulder the rifle for him. Rick would survive the war well enough, but he lost his wife in the process. He had married just before he left for overseas. Two years later while he was fighting over seas, he received a Dear John telling him that his wife was divorcing him and that he was a free man. He could go step in front of a German bullet now. It wouldn't matter to her.

That fall I went back to my original school. I had to repeat the first grade because of my poor grades from the Portuguese speaking school. That had a very bad psychological effect on me. I felt terribly inferior and I was most unhappy to see my old friends in the second grade while I breezed through the first grade. Today they would have seen that I was able to handle the first grade and would have advanced me to the second grade with the rest. But then that was unheard of. It would have made a great difference to me and might have saved me a good bit of suffering. To this day I still feel somewhat of a failure for my repeating the first grade. I suffered through several poor teachers before encountering the good ones. No one can realize what a strong influence a teacher can have on a lonely child, one who is in need of adult companionship. I learned to do the opposite of what the poor teachers did and to mimic the actions of the good ones. Still when I brought the report cards home for signing, there was no comment. I had straight 'A's' throughout most of elementary school, and no one made any thing of it. I doubt that anything would have been said if I had straight D's! But I was learning and I was building self-confidence, slowly and painfully. When I found some of my father's old report cards from his elementary school days, I realized that excellence in academia meant little to him. He carried a 'D' average