The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [69]
There were a few memorable occasions. After our first overseas flight, we arrived in London very tired. We left Heathrow heading for Stratford, because that was something we had all heard of in England. Our first night was spent in a park in a town west of London. We remember the bobby who helped us into the city park and to a park bench for a bed, and then promised to look in on us from time to time overnight.
We went to a Shakespeare play in Stratford the next day. I fell asleep, but Lois was enthralled by it all, seeing Shakespeare as it was meant to be for the first time. Staying in youth hostels was a wonderful experience. They ranged from rude sheds to ancient castles. One near Inverness had statuary in all the halls and was more like a museum.
In Ostende, we joined a group of young men for an overnight in a loft over a pub. I was impressed that Lois was able to remove her bra right in front of the crowd, but completely under her shirt. I never have figured out how that was done.
You met young people from all over the world doing the same thing. It was automatic that they were interesting, particularly the ones from Australia and New Zealand, places that seemed so far away to us. What a sad thing it is that people have become so untrustworthy as to make this remarkable diplomatic activity a danger and that it never grew the same way in the U.S. One wonders how much different the world would be if more people had had this cross-cultural exposure in their youth.
The rides were something interesting as well. The most comfortable was a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud driven by a Member of Parliament. He pointed out the straight sections of road built by the German prisoners of war in World War II and the telephone poles along both sides to discourage their use as landing fields. And then there was the back of a truckload of American onions on the ride over the "Devil's Elbow" in Scotland—we were given a few samples and added them to our stew for supper, and it probably took a week to air the hostel out afterward. We were picked up by a just-wedded couple in Belgium in a Citroen—the one with the corrugated steel sides that wobbles along the road. I think they just wanted to tell someone.
Some of the scenery probably has helped Lois in her descriptions. I'm sure the lake in Spirit Ring is modeled after Lake Como. Baocia's bony soil looks like some of Scotland, although colored by her later visits to Spain under plusher circumstances. The castles described may have been in part from this trip.
Lois joined my older brother—an accomplished sailplane pilot who occasionally finds time for work or other life activities—and me long before we had any sense of where babies came from. I think she had the usual experience of the youngest of siblings and I suppose we can blame ourselves that she was something of an introvert in her early years. Somehow that turned out okay as it led her to the Trekkie counterculture that, combined with a large collection of science fiction novels in Dad's library, may have had a small part in sending her down the path she has taken.
Lois used to drag home the most motley-looking collection of characters—I think they were fellow Trekkies, or at minimum early incarnations of hippies, the counterculture norm of behavior for those who wanted to be different, but they all looked the same to me. Some of these folks have gone on in the science fiction field. Lillian Stewart Carl was a frequent visitor to our house, and is a successful fantasy writer and remains a close friend of Lois to this day. Her dad was also a professor at the university, in Agricultural