Inks and Derek: Art and the Cricket Scores

In the early 1970s my husband Danny accepted a stint in his company’s London office.   (See Laundry Day in London,   Kinky Boots,  Valentine’s Day in Foggytown,  Intro to Cookery,  and Munro)

He’d be working for a guy named Derek whom I hadn’t met,  but Danny assured me I’d soon come to adore Derek and his wife Inks – and I did!

In fact soon after we’d settled into our Chelsea flat,  Inks took me under her wing,  and we realized that we shared a passion for art.  And so Inks took me to museum and gallery exhibits all over London,  and we enjoyed lovely lunches together in elegant members’ dining rooms.  Inks,  I learned,  also collected art and sculpture  – both British and African – much of it displayed in their house in St. John’s Wood and their wonderful country retreat in the Cotswolds.

And she and Derek took us to concerts and theater,  memorably to Athol Fugard’s stirring Master Harold and the Boys, and Trooping the Colour in honor of the Queen’s birthday.

And years later when we were back in the States we drove down to Richmond, Virginia to join Inks and Derek in celebrating their eldest son’s wedding.

And we joined them on a wonderful trip to South Africa – Derek’s homeland – and met them at a business conference in Barcelona where we explored Gaudi’s amazing Sagrada Familia together.

Over the years we’d see each other whenever we were in London or they in New York,  and I always found Derek to be larger than life – warm, bright, generous of spirit,  and an outstanding athlete who played cricket well into his 70s with teammates half his age.  And I was always touched by the way he ended emails and phone calls  “With fondest love.”

Then four years ago we got the devastating news that Derek had been diagnosed with cancer.  We kept in touch with Inks and their sons about his condition, and when Derek died we asked about his last days.

He was quite weak at the end,  we were told,  but he always asked for the latest cricket scores.

Thinking of Inks and remembering Derek – both with fondest love.

–  Dana Susan Lehrman 

Monsoons are more than just rainy days.  They are the wet season, the dry season’s counterpoint.  The rains are intense downpours, not drizzly affairs, and they sweep in ferociously. They are the annual water renewal that makes life possible.  Of course, that is changing along with the rest of the climate, but still.

The small commercial plane carrying me, my two sisters and my parents pitched and rolled through the monsoon clouds on its way to a bumpy touch down in Dacca (now Dhaka) in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1962.  Below us were glimpses of the saturated great green delta, so prone to flood and cyclone.  After a disorienting drive through humid gray streets, we arrived at our temporary house and wondered what the future held.

There was air conditioning.  The house had some servants assigned to it, dressed in loose white cotton.  Michael the cook served us rice pudding for dessert and he had a pet Alsatian dog with small puppies we couldn’t play with. My sisters sneaked sips of purloined crème de menthe from a preceding plane flight while my parents had their grownup discussion in another room.  I would later hear my mother summarize this as, “what god-forsaken place have you brought us to?”

That first impression was hardly improved when we awoke the following morning to find our house essentially an island in a dull watery lake.   The tanks (manmade water catchment ponds) had overflowed, the road runoff had overwhelmed the ditches on the side which served as open sewers, and we were going nowhere until the waters receded.  Michael and the rest of the crew were nonetheless unfazed, and we were soon visited by the cheerful and chaotic family across the street, the one we were replacing with our two-year posting. Welcome!

The monsoon season passed and the land dried up. Our new life developed its routine. We moved to a new house, the kids started school, met new people, got to know the city better. We ate dry season vegetables of pumpkin and okra. It was still hot.  Always humid and hot.

One sweltering day, I walked a few blocks over to visit my friend Pam..  She was blond and freckled, energetic, a year behind me in school and cursed with an obnoxious younger brother named Larry.  Her parents weren’t home.  She showed me how to make burnt-sugar candy in a frying pan, maybe a little too burnt, maybe sticking to the pan too much.  Uh oh.  To get out of the heat of the kitchen, she led us up the stairs to the flat roof for a bit of breeze.

Red-faced and overheated, I stepped outside and turned towards a quickening wind with an unexpected freshness.   The clouds had become very dark and we felt the weather turn.  And then it came, the astonishing wall of water, heavy drops sweeping across the roof, starting at one edge and swiftly advancing in a distinct line, a knife-edge front.  It raced forward and then washed over us, quenching our heat, giving relief, making us giddy.

Hooray, the rains are back!

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