Telling Caroline

Picture courtesy of the President John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, Boston

In honor of this week's 50^th anniversary of the assassination in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy, here is my essay about the time I saw him in the flesh a mere four months before he died. The essay was published in American Heritage Magazine in July 2006 under the title "That Smile." 

_______

When I was growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in the early 1960s, the Kennedys were a vivid presence in our household. My father had “Profiles of Courage” on the bookshelf by his special chair, and Jackie Kennedy’s outfits were featured in all my mother’s fashion magazines. Even I - a first-grader - had a Jackie and Caroline paper doll set that I played with all the time. I was fascinated by Caroline because we were almost exactly the same age - she was born a mere five days before me in late 1957.

In August 1963, my family went on vacation to Cape Cod. On the first Sunday of the vacation, my father took a detour from the route we usually took to the beach and pulled into a little parking lot just off a two-lane rural road. Another family was already parked there, and I couldn’t understand why. It seemed an unlikely place to stop. There was nothing to see but the hedge bordering the road, and nothing to hear but the faint sound of waves in the distance.

I was bored. I didn’t understand why we weren’t hightailing it straight to the beach on that fine summer morning instead of stewing in a hot car. Be patient, my father said, something exciting is going to happen, but that was hard to believe. My mother was sitting sideways in the passenger seat, using the flip-down visor mirror to put on her lipstick. My little brother dozed in his car seat. My dad was chatting with the father of the other family, leaning against the side of their car. I tried counting birds flying overhead but hardly any went by. I got out of the car and drifted around the make-shift parking lot, a mere patch of gravel carved out of a field. I began to run round the lot in ever-decreasing circles to see how dizzy I could make myself, round and round. Suddenly I realized I could hear the gathering growl of what sounded like motorbikes in the distance. Intrigued, I glanced up, still running, and caught the toe of my sneaker on something and pitched forward heavily onto the gravel. 

I can distinctly remember the sharp pain in my knees and my howl of shock and outrage. At that exact second, my father shouted, “He’s coming!” and my mother hooked me under the armpits and swung me like a sack to the verge of the road. Along the narrow country lane came two motorcycle outriders and then a long black limo and to my astonishment I saw at the limo's window the unmistakable face of the President of the United States.

When John F. Kennedy caught sight of me, a tearful five-year-old with bloody knees, he said something to his driver and the long, low car slowed to a crawl. The President turned back to the window and smiled and waved - at me. “Wave, wave,” my mother urged me, her own hands still trapped under my armpits, and I did, mesmerized by the President’s dazzling sympathetic smile. At the same time, I could feel trickles of blood oozing down my legs into the elastic of my knee-socks. As the car passed us, we all piled into the road, still waving. The President turned around to look out of the limo’s back window and kept right on waving and smiling and waving and smiling until a bend in the road took him out of our sight.

Forty years later I call still feel the shock of being caught in the spotlight of that famous gaze. For days afterwards, with crisscrossed Band-Aids like a badge of honor on each knee, I basked in the glory of that moment.

What I did not know till later was that the Kennedys’ newborn son Patrick had died only two days earlier. Kennedy had been to Holy Mass alone that morning as Jackie was still in the hospital at Otis Air Force Base, recovering from her ordeal. Later that day, the President took Caroline to the hospital to visit her mother for the first time since the baby’s birth and death. In the press the next day, Caroline was pictured clutching a bunch of daisies and pressing her lips to the back of her daddy’s hand. 

Three months later, I came home from school one afternoon and found my father sitting in front of the television set in tears. I had seen his car in the garage and come running in, full of joy to have him home from work so early, but he had gotten up from his chair and gone into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He hadn’t even said hello. My mother hastened to reassure me that he wasn’t mad at me, he was just upset because something very bad had happened to President Kennedy. It took a few minutes before I fully understood that the President was dead, but when it did, my first terrible thought was that someone, somehow was going to have to break the news to Caroline.  

#####

It was a very good year

My mother smoking a cigar, 1959

I’ve just spent two weeks delicately dismantling the artefacts that make up a life. After a rapid deterioration in her physical health earlier this year, my mother moved into a residential care home in southern England in August and her flat must now be sold to pay the fees. So I went home (yes, I guess I still think of Britain as “home”) to help my brother sort through my mum’s possessions and make the difficult decisions about what to keep and what has to go.

My mother has moved several times since she and my father left the home in Scotland where I grew up and they subsequently divorced, but in every place she’s managed to reconfigure her belongings to create a beautiful and harmonious living space. She’d been in this particular flat only eight years and yet in every corner I found objects that held echoes of her life and mine. A bookcase built by my father for their first apartment together, a soapstone seal bought at an Eskimo fair in Canada, chairs from Scottish antique shops that my mother restored, a seahorse wall hanging from the island of Crete...

My particular concern was to make sure I had rescued and preserved all the old photographs and files full of important letters and papers - her archive. There is nowhere for these things to be stored at the care home or in my brother’s house so I am having them shipped across the ocean to join my father’s archive and that of my in-laws in our basement in Maryland.

In going through the files to make sure I hadn’t missed anything that ought to be kept, it was brought home to me that my mother hasn’t just been a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother. She’s also a much-exhibited artist with several prizes to her name. And despite not having been in paid employment since before I was born, she was a professional woman. When we lived in Scotland in the 1970s, she was one of the pioneer members of The Children’s Panel, a non-judgmental tribunal dealing with young people who have broken the law or are in care. At each hearing, three community volunteers, in consultation with social workers and the families themselves, come to a decision that is in the best interests of the child. And after moving south to England, she became closely involved in the work of HACRO, the Hertfordshire Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders.

These are the parts of her life – the ones I didn’t pay much attention to in my own teenage and young adult years – that I have come to appreciate now, elbow-deep in the dust of box files that haven’t been opened in decades. The dust that accumulates on everybody’s archive in the end.

My mother’s life may be moving into the last act, but it isn’t over yet. Though her body is debilitated and diminished by osteoporosis, she is still as sharp as ever mentally and has a continued curiosity about the many people who now take care of her. They are men and women from all corners of the globe - Nepal, Albania, Fiji, India, Sicily, the Philippines. She knows about their children, their troubles and preoccupations. They sit on the edge of her bed and tell her their stories. So while I am rediscovering the story of her life, she is learning theirs. And so it goes on...

“But now the days grow short
I’m in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life as vintage wine

From fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
And it poured sweet and clear
It was a very good year.”

It was a Very Good Year by Ervin Drake (click here for the lovely version by the Kingston Trio).


 

Words that Remain

Rose Macauley (1881-1958)

 

I am the archivist in my family. Our basement is full of tubs full of letters, documents, photographs, slides, home movies, even old teddy bears, retrieved from my deceased father’s house. Now I’m about to fly to England to sort through the contents of my mother’s flat as she recently moved into a care home, so no doubt I will soon be taking possession of yet more family memorabilia.

If anyone ever doubted the importance of this kind of ephemera for remembering the people we’ve lost, I would recommend that they read Miss Anstruther’s Letters, a short story by Rose Macauley, truly one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read. As described by Macauley’s biographer Sarah LeFanu,

“Miss Anstruther's lover is recently dead, and her flat has been bombed [in the Blitz]. So raw is Miss Anstruther's grief that she has been unable to reread her lover's letters, but has been saving them for a time when she would be able to without giving way to despair. Now she will never read them again. Only one scrap of paper has escaped the flames: written on it one hurtful phrase that turns all the years of passion into ‘a drift of grey ashes.’”

The story is written from Macauley’s own experience. During World War I, she had worked as secretary to the head of the Italian section at the newly created Ministry of Information, a man named Gerald O'Donovan, an Irish writer and former Jesuit priest. At 47, he was ten years older than Macauley, who was still in the early stages of her writing career. Although O’Donovan was married, the two fell in love and conducted a clandestine affair for 24 years. The publisher Victor Gollancz called their relationship “the best kept secret in London.” Many years later Macauley wrote in her most famous novel, The Towers of Trebizond:

"Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined."

In 1939, O’Donovan was injured in a car accident when the couple were on holiday in the Lake District and suffered a stroke. His health was never the same afterwards, and he died of cancer in July 1942. There was nothing left for Macauley to remember him by because all his love letters to her had been burnrt to a cinder when her London flat was bombed in the Blitz on May 10^th 1941.

Macauley wrote Miss Anstruther’s Letters after her flat was destroyed and as Gerald lay dying. Though she changed the order of the events, the emotional core of the story – the lost last remnants of a human voice – is painfully on target.

“She went on digging till twilight came. What she looked for was not there. She was grimed from head to foot; her only clothes were ruined; she stood knee-deep in drifts of burnt rubbish that had been carpets, beds, curtains, furniture, pictures, and books; the smoke that smouldered up from them made her cry and cough. What she looked for was not there; it was ashes, it was no more. She had not rescued it while she could, she had forgotten it, and now it was ashes. All but one torn, burnt corner of note-paper, which she picked up out of a battered saucepan belonging to the basement tenant. It was niggled over with close small writing, the only words left of the thousands of words in that hand that she looked for. She put it in her note-case and went on looking till dark; then she went back to her bed-sitting-room, which she filled each night with dirt and sorrow and a few blackened cups.”

This Curious Light

 

I recently finished reading a novel by the English novelist, Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975). A Wreath of Roses is set just after World War II in an English town in the summertime. Two young women come to stay with their former teacher, Frances, who since retiring has become a painter of some renown. The main plot revolves around one of the younger women, Camilla, and her relationship with a charming but disconcerting stranger whom she meets on a train. But it is Frances who provides the powerful core of the story, Frances who Taylor hints may be dying and cannot stop thinking about the notion of immortality.

“The moonlight was enough to read by, the air humid as the inside of a flower. Orion seemed to hang and swing out across the sky like a man on a trapeze and, lifting her head, she thought, ‘One glance at the sky finishes religion for me. I know then that we and all the clutter we have made upon the face of the earth – our fantasies and our myths – count for nothing. The scum of little houses, the Parthenon itself, all of our frail properties, will fly like dust into the abyss. For all civilizations are like elaborate campings-out, a complicated picnic in the face of nature’s discomforts. And upon this impermanence we set up our easels and paint our pictures. What goes onto the canvas is the ticking of our hearts, the pulse of our lives. Yet when we die, what will happen? Other men and women will paint over our work; or those manifestoes of ours against the indifference of the world will lie, face down, among old books and ornaments in junk-shops, in attics... In the end, my heart-beats, my life’s work will fade away along with the rest, the Parthenon will go down on its knees like an aged elephant, and the embalmed words of the great will count for no more than Liz and Camilla chattering away up there in the lighted bedroom.’”

Interest in Taylor was revived in 2012 when two of her novels – Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek – were reissued by New York Review of Books. (Click here to read reviews in the New York Times and The Guardian.) Themes that reoccurs throughout her quiet, domestic novels are how women in the mid-20^th century can find ways to express themselves and the struggle to capture the world through art.

Here is Frances picnicking on a hill with her guests when the weather takes a turn, and she suddenly sees the act of painting, which has been her sustaining happiness, in a new light.

 “The blue was thickening into lavender as if evening were coming already. ‘This curious light,” Frances began, and then stopped. She put her parasol away and shaded her eyes with her hand, looking to left and right along the valley. She sighed, ‘Oh it flies away,’ she thought, striking her hands together in her lap, ‘It can’t ever be caught or described. For it is one earth one moment and another earth in a second or two. Life itself is an unfinished sentence, or a few haphazard brush-strokes. Nothing stays. Nothing is completed. I can make nothing whole from it, however small. Pinned down, like a butterfly, it ceases to be itself, just as the butterfly becomes something else; dead, unmoving, its brightness gone. The meaning of a painting is a voice crying out: I saw it. Before it vanished, it was thus. An honest painting would never be finished; an honest novel would stop in the middle of a sentence. There is no shutting life up in a cage, turning the key with a full-stop, with a stroke of paint.’” 

“Before it vanished, it was thus.” That’s all the motivation one should need to paint, write, create. Producing a personal testimony of a moment of vision, sufficient unto itself – regardless of the outside world’s approbation or scorn. Words worth pasting to our laptops or easels and remembering as we carry on with the ticking of our hearts and the pulse of our lives.


 

Tongues of Men and Angels

 

This week I finally got around to seeing Joe’s Wright’s extraordinary movie Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley at her least mannered and most impressive. I remembered the critics as being widely divided about the staging of the movie’s action within an old theatre, some seeing it as “deliberate, showy artifice” (Chicago Reader) and “artistic hubris” (New York Times), while others declared it “an intoxicating spectacle” (USA Today) that “sings, dances, and finally soars” (Washington Post).

In my humble opinion, it was a triumph. I’d had my own doubts about how the setting would work, but they were swept away almost immediately by the beauty and originality of the visual effects. The movie has been called hyper-stylized, which is true but the staging not only didn’t deflect attention from the characters and their tortured emotions, it actually enhanced the unfolding of the drama. Click here to see a video about the genesis of Joe Wright’s concept.

The movie is choreographed (by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui) more like ballet than a traditional stage play, which added a welcome freshness to the depiction of the social context in which Anna’s doomed love story unfolds. The costumes (by Jacqueline Durran) are utterly stunning – just enough off-center to surprise and dazzle but not distract.  And once again (see my earlier post about his adaption of Parade’s End) Tom Stoppard does an extraordinary job of extracting the heart and soul of novel and transferring its essence to the screen.

Of course seeing the movie took me back to the book, which has long been on my top five list of novels for its complex characters and immaculate structure. All the climactic scenes that had resonated with me in Tolstoy's book were gratifyingly made flesh in the film. For example, take the ballroom scene where young Kitty Shcherbatsky, who had expected to receive a proposal of marriage from Count Vronsky, sees that he has eyes for no one but Anna. Compare Joe Wright's depiction of the scene here (note the innovative choreography) with Tolstoy’s description below:  

“[Kitty] saw that they felt as if they were alone in the crowded ballroom. And she was struck by the bewildered look of submission on Vronsky’s face, usually so firm and self-possessed – an expression like that of an intelligent dog conscious of having done wrong. If Anna smiled, he smiled in reply. If she grew thoughtful, he looked serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was charming in her simple black gown, her rounded arms were charming with their bracelets, charming the firm neck with the string of pearls, charming the unruly curls, charming the graceful, easy movements of her little hands and feet, charming the lovely, animated face: but in that charm there was something terrible and cruel.”

 

And here’s a still (above) and Tolstoy’s description (below) of the climactic horse race where Vronsky has a terrible fall and Anna cannot hide her feelings from her husband or the rest of the aristocratic crowd that surrounds her:

“... at that moment the race began and all conversation ceased. Karenin, too, fell silent as everyone stood up and turned towards the stream. Karenin was not interested in the race and so did not watch the riders but began listlessly scanning the spectators with his weary eyes. His eyes rested on Anna. Her face was pale and set. She was obviously seeing nothing and nobody but one man. Her hand convulsively clutched her fan and she held her breath. He looked at her and hurriedly turned away... when Vronsky fell and Anna moaned aloud there was nothing very out of the way in it. But immediately after, a change came over Anna’s face which was positively unseemly. She completely lost her head. She began fluttering like a caged bird, at one moment getting up to go, at the next turning to Betsy.

      ‘Let us go, let us go,” she said.

      But Betsy did not hear her. She was leaning over and talking to a general who had come up to her.  Karenin approached Anna and courteously offered her his arm.

      “We can go if you like,” he said in French; but Anna was listening to what the general was saying and did not notice her husband.

      ‘He’s broken his leg too, they say,” said the general. “This is beyond everything.’ ....

      She now saw an officer running across the course towards the pavilion, from the place of Vronsky’s accident. Betsy waved her handkerchief to him. The officer brought news that the rider was not killed but the horse had broken its back.

      On hearing this Anna sat down hurriedly and hid her face behind her fan. Karenin saw that she was weeping and that she was unable to keep back either her tears or the sobs shaking her bosom.”

 
All I can say is see the movie and read the book - in whatever order you prefer. They are both masterpieces.

 

Blessed are the Peacemakers

Senator Mitchell surrounded by colleagues on the Congressional Iran-Contra Committee - July 1987

On July 13, 1987, I was standing around with my colleagues in the offices of London Weekend Television (where I worked at the time) watching live TV coverage of the US Congress’s hearings into the Iran-Contra affair. The Reagan administration had been accused of selling arms illegally to Iran and funnelling the proceeds to the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua in direct contravention of the law.

Marine Lieutenant Oliver North had been a key staff member for the National Security Council, which was the government body accused of carrying out these illegal operations. For several days resplendent in his be-medalled uniform Colonel North had testified to the committee, defiantly claiming responsibility for the illegal scheme and for covering it up when word of the scheme had leaked out to the media. He was brash, unrepentant, and adamant that his actions – though illegal – were right. He claimed to have defied the law of the land because of the intensity of his love of God and Country.

On this particular day, it was the turn of a bespectacled wonky-looking Senator to question Colonel North. As his allotted time drew to a close, the Senator in a gentle New England drawl made a powerful statement (watch it here) that firmly but with great courtesy undermined the bombastic testimony of Colonel North.

“Of all the qualities the American people find compelling about you, none is more impressive than your obvious deep devotion to this country. Please remember that others share that devotion and recognize that it is possible for an American to disagree with you on aid to the Contras and still love God and still love this country as much as you do.

Although he is regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics, and in America disagreement with the policies of the government is not evidence of lack of patriotism... Indeed, it’s the very fact that Americans can criticize their government openly and without fear of reprisal that is the essence of our freedom and that will keep us free.”

This legislator with the large, red-framed glasses and a way with words was Senator George J. Mitchell, Democrat of Maine. From that moment on, I became his devoted fan and I wasn’t alone. The Senator received thousands of letters and phone calls of support from people who were delighted that someone had finally said what they’d been thinking throughout the long investigations into the Iran-Contra affair.

Senator Mitchell went on to be elected Majority Leader of the Senate in 1988 and to fight for health care reform alongside then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. But it wasn’t until after he had retired from the Senate in 1994 that he went on to his greatest achievement so far – brokering a hard-fought peace agreement that ended the decades-long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.

In the Senate, he had garnered a reputation for being a skilled, patient, and judicious mediator between sometimes implacable opponents and that was what made President Bill Clinton see him as the ideal man for the Northern Ireland job.  

For more than two years, Mitchell flew back and forth across the Atlantic every week – from New York, to London, to Belfast, and back again. The fact that he came to be enormously respected by all factions was the glue that kept the talks going, but as the negotiations neared a climax in April 1998, his master stroke was to set a rigid deadline. As he explained in his 1999 book Making Peace, he told the delegates:

“When we start on Thursday morning, it has to be clear to everyone that we’ll continue until we finish, one way or the other. There can be no discussion of a pause or a break...There’s not going to be a break, not for a week, not for a day, not for an hour. We’re here till we finish. We’ll either get an agreement or we’ll fail to get an agreement. Then we’ll all go out together and explain to the press and the waiting world how we succeeded or why we failed.”

His determination worked. At 5pm on April 10, 1998 - Good Friday – Senator Mitchell was able to announce to the world that “the two governments [of the UK and Ireland] and the political parties of Northern Ireland have reached agreement.” When the agreement was put to the ballot, it was overwhelmingly welcomed by the population on both sides of the border - 71.2 percent of people in Northern Ireland and 94.39 percent in the Republic of Ireland voted Yes. And in the 15 years that have followed, violence in the Province has been minimal and the two communities – Catholic and Protestant – have lived together in cautious harmony.

The Irish writer Colum McCann has called Mitchell “The most incredible politician that I know of from our times, for certain.” In an article in the New York Times in March of this year called “Remembering an Easter Miracle in Northern Ireland,” McCann wrote, “Mr. Mitchell’s great skill was that he learned to embrace silence. He sat at his table and listened to speech after speech... He was unpaid and initially unheralded, but he fell in love with the people and allowed them to talk through their vitriol... He kept listening. He tolerated death threats. He pleaded, he cajoled. And even after the agreement was signed, he understood that only history would bring it home."    

In his most recent novel, Transatlantic, McCann – a National Book Award recipient – ventures to fictionalize George Mitchell’s thoughts and feelings as he strives to bring peace to Northern Ireland.

“Welcome to Belfast International. Contents in the overhead bin may have shifted during flight. The stewardesses fuss with his jacket. He is whisked through security once more, out past the small café and the newsagent’s where he takes a quick glance at the newspaper headlines on the small metal racks. Nothing of damage. A good sign. Outside, the vague smell of farmland manure hangs in the air. Three cars waiting. Gerald, his driver, greets him with a nod and a lift of the case. In the car Gerald passes back a sheet of numbers. A small jump in his chest that it might be bad news, but it’s the baseball scores, copied from Reuters, handwritten. He scans them quickly. Opening Day. Ah, yes, Hail and hallelujah. The Sox have won.”

Thus can great political acts inspire literature.

Holding the signed Good Friday Agreement - with Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahearne (left)
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (right)- April 1998

Where the Sky Meets the Sea

Bali Ha'i - a still from the 1958 movie South Pacific

Across just a short stretch of ocean from Tahiti lies the mysterious island of Moorea, nine miles NW to be precise. According to Polynesian legend, the island’s volcanic ridges constitute the second dorsal fin of the fish that became the island of Tahiti – that’s how close the two islands are. Anyone standing on the shores of north-western Tahiti has a magnificent view of Moorea’s dramatic jagged skyline, made famous around the world by the film South Pacific, in which it appeared as a stand-in for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s invented island of Bali Ha’i.

Throughout many years of research in library reading rooms and hunched over my computer, I’d read account after account of this awe-inspiring view of Moorea and had come to think of it as being almost a mythical place, like Shangri-La - or indeed Bali Ha’i itself.

Herman Melville (the author of Moby Dick) wrote in 1842 of the “the romantic elevations of Eimeo [the old name for Moorea], high above which a lone peak... shot up its verdant spire.” Thirty five years later, the Scottish artist, Constance Gordon-Cumming described the island as looking “weirdly grand; huge basaltic pinnacles of most fantastic shape towering from out of the sea of billowy white clouds, which drifted along those black crags.” In 1891, the American painter John La Farge brought an artist’s perspective to his description of the sunsets behind Moorea, “the fantastic island that has made a distance of blue and gold to our days at Papeete... even in the evening or in the afterglow, when the sunset lights up in yellow and purple the sky behind it.”  

In 1914, the American writer and traveller Frederick O’Brien described Moorea as:

“the most astonishing sight upon the ocean that my eyes had ever gazed on... Its heights were not green like Tahiti’s, but bare and black … a long sierra of broken pinnacles and crags which had all the semblance of a weathered and dismantled castle... The confused mass of lofty ridges resolved into chasms and combes, dark, sunless ravines, moist with the spray of many waterfalls, which nearer became velvet valleys of pale green, masses of foliage and light and shadow. The mountains of Moorea were only half the height of Tahiti’s, but so artfully had they been piled in their fantastic arrangement that they seemed as high, though they were entirely different in their impress upon the beholder.”

And in 1951, James Michener, whose stories of his wartime experiences in French Polynesia were the source for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s libretto for South Pacific, wrote, “From Tahiti, Moorea seems to have about 40 separate summits: fat thumbs of basalt, spires tipped at impossible angles, brooding domes compelling to the eye. But the peaks that can never be forgotten are the jagged saw-edges that look like the spines of some forgotten dinosaur.” 

I longed to stand where these people had stood, looking out at that haunting island with its primordial mountainous skyline, but the cost of a trip to Polynesia was more than my husband and I could justify. But in late November 2007, encouraged by my then agent, we took a leap of faith, maxed out a credit card, and got on a plane to Tahiti so I could see the place I was writing about with my own eyes. 

After a long delay at LAX and an eight-hour flight across the Pacific, we arrived in Tahiti at night, dog tired and travel stained. We were driven in a rickety cab through the humid darkness to our hotel. It was very late and we were dying for sleep, but the air conditioning in our room refused to work, which meant a laborious process of repacking and moving to another room before we could fall into bed.  

We woke next morning to a hot and beautiful day. Our room looked out onto the cargo ships docked in the port of Papeete and the green hills behind the town. An interesting view, especially as everything in Tahiti related in some way to my book, but with nothing very fantastical or mystical about it. But then my husband, who had gone off to explore the hotel while I showered and dressed, came back to the room in a state of suppressed excitement. He led me down a flight of stairs and out to the edge of the hotel’s infinity pool and pointed.

And there it was on the horizon, looking exactly as I expected, exactly how it had been described. And that was the moment when I realized I was finally there, standing in the land where I’d been living in my imagination for so long - and promptly burst into tears.

Moorea in the morning

 

 

Moorea in the evening