At the National Broadcasting Commission, I was chief adviser to chairman Sam Piniau who was managing a new organisation that had just taken over the local ABC and the Government Broadcasting Service and not much by way of budget.

Chris and I stood on the city street at first lost in reminiscence and then agreeing we would soon get together again to plan some kind of project involving PNG – probably a book.

Well that never happened. Chris was soon off to Argentina, marriage and a new life as the husband of an ambassador.

But, almost as an afterthought at that encounter on the street, Chris told me he’d send me a draft of an article he’d written on two attempts he’d made to write the memoirs of Mick Leahy (1901-1979) and ‘Young’ Tom Leahy, aka Markham Tom (1930-2012), scions of a family whose name became synonymous with the early exploration and subsequent economic and political development of PNG.

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t publish the piece, it could cause me problems,” he said. “But I’d like to know what you think of it.”

I duly received the article, No More Memoirs, and replied to Chris that I thought it told both a intriguing story about publishing as well as insights into one of the great expatriate families that – like the Collins and the Parers – had through adventure not intent – turned out to be key actors in the creation of a nation state.

Chris died in Argentina in May 2021 without us ever meeting again and I kept his trust and refrained from publishing the article that Chris feared might offend the Leahy family that, despite the problems he’d had with Mick and ‘Young’ Tom, he held in awe.

But everything has its time, and it’s time that I published No More Memoirs before it gets lost for all time.  I hope you enjoy it.  And remembering Chris Ashton, the recorder of a time now past in a land we loved so much.

___________

No more memoirs

Chris Ashton

In the early 1960s Richard Leahy put to me that the Irish, while capable of extraordinary feats, were fatally flawed by their capacity for self-destruction.

Irish history bears this out with nationalist and sectarian fuelling civil strife long after the rest of Christendom had called it quits. But he was talking of the personal, not the political, of his Irish heritage on his father's side as distinct from that of his Anglo-Saxon mother. 

I had no inkling then of the degree to which I would become involved with the Leahy, first in managing coffee plantations in the New Guinea Highlands and later, collaborating in memoirs. Much later did I understand what Richard meant.        

From the mid-1950s into the early 1960s he and I journeyed in lockstep through the same educational mill. Born within a month of one another, I joined him, aged 13, at the same Anglican boarding school, attending the same classes, playing in the same rugby teams and prefects in the same boarding house, following which we were inducted as freshmen into the same university college.

He is the eldest of five children of Jeanette and the late Mick Leahy (1900-79). In search of gold in 1930 Mick led the first of several expeditions into New Guinea's mountainous interior. Supported by native bearers he discovered hitherto unknown grassland valleys inhabited by vigorous warrior tribes. 

Realising the enormity of his discovery, in later expeditions into the Highlands he kept diaries recording details of altitude, compass position and his encounters, amicable and hostile, with tribesman.

For months at a time light planes supplied his expeditions with provisions airdropped or landed on rough bush strips built as they progressed. He taught himself photography and cinema-photography.

With a Leica and 16-mm Bolex cine-camera, he has bequeathed a pictorial record, arguably unequalled anywhere in the world, of first contact between European explorers and hitherto unknown tribal peoples.     

In 1935 in the Western Highlands with his younger brother Dan he found alluvial gold in payable quantities; no El Dorado, but sufficient to provide a living.

In 1936 with his diaries and photographs, and accompanied by Dan, he toured Britain, Ireland and the US. Eminent geographical and exploration societies honoured his achievements with public lectures coupled with medals and citations.

Mick was the eldest of nine children of an Irish immigrant couple who settled in Toowoomba in the 1880s. His father Daniel was a railway clerk, a Catholic from County Limerick and his mother, Ellen, nee Stone, was a Protestant from County Kilkenny.

By 1926 Mick was in brother with his brother Tom in a small trucking business. That year gold was discovered in the New Guinea Highlands at Edie Creek, triggering a gold-rush which in its frenzy if not scale, evoked the fabled 19th century discoveries in California, Australia, South Africa and Alaska.

Mick read of Edie Creek gold rush, wrote Tom a letter ceding him their two trucks, withdrew the savings of their joint account and boarded a ship for New Guinea.

In the years following three more brothers, Paddy, Jim and Dan, joined him. In varying combinations they prospected for gold and worked sluice mines for alluvial gold to fund their future prospecting expeditions. 

When Japan invaded New Guinea in 1942 Mick's brothers enlisted in the Australian New Guinea Army Administrative Unit (ANGAU), assigned to support Australia's armed forces in such roles reconnaissance behind enemy lines, recruiting tribesmen as porters and rescuing European civilians.

Incensed at the idea of serving in non-commissioned ranks under government patrol officers lacking his own experience of the country, Mick offered himself to the US Fifth Air Force, serving with it for the duration of the war, a special adviser with the rank of honorary colonel.

The Japanese invasion changed how Australia viewed its Pacific Island territories. Papua and New Guinea were merged for the first time under a single colonial administration.

To safeguard Australia from further incursions from its near north--the Communists took power in China in 1949--successive federal governments invested massively new roads, airstrips, patrol posts, schools and hospitals and in the manpower to staff them. 

The New Guinea Highlands of those early postwar years offered rich pickings for anyone with an eye to the main chance. Dan and Jim Leahy were the first to plant coffee; Jim was the first to harvest coffee commercially.

Inspired by their example, thirteen teenage nephews migrated from Queensland to New Guinea to work for one uncle or another before striking out on their own. ‘Old’ Tom, the only brother who remained in Queensland, contributed his five sons, as did his sister Molly, married to Alwyn Collins. Two other Leahy sisters added three more sons to the Leahy Diaspora.

According to Professor Donald Denoon, former history lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea and Director of the Australian National University's School of Asian and Pacific Studies, the Collins-Leahy clan as "the most important Australian family in Papua New Guinea during the Australian era" and "the leading Australian pioneers for at least two generations."           

No one at first meeting with Mick could doubt his force of personality. It was written on his face, his eyes, his deep, melodic voice, in his passion as he spoke of his adopted country, in his energy and enthusiasm.  

I first met him in December 1960. Richard had invited me to join his family for Christmas. His parents met us off the plane from Sydney in Lae, New Guinea's principal mainland port settlement.

From there we drove fifty miles on a winding dirt road, first through dense tropical rainforest, over bridges across broad, fast-flowing rivers but always climbing until, at 4,000 feet, the jungle dissolved into steep, open grassland.

Here was Zenag, the homestead and farm Mick had built after World War II. With a fleet of US army Ford trucks acquired at the war's end, his drivers, mostly Papua New Guineans, were delivering farm produce - milk, vegetables, eggs, poultry, pork and beef—to shops in Wau and Bulolo, two European settlements on the upper slopes of the Markham Valley, and to Lae.

Following Christmas at Zenag, I was dispatched to Goroka, administrative centre of the Eastern Highlands District, to stay with Mick's brother, Jim, at his coffee plantation, Erinvale.

Each Sunday the nephews living in or about Goroka would gather for lunch, tennis and business talk. Most of them bore the surname Collins or Leahy and were in their 20s or 30s, single and managed their own businesses - trade-stores, plantations, long-haul trucking and timber-milling.

I was a mute spectator to robust discussion of prospective businesses, in particular the buying, processing and export of coffee grown by villagers. I heard scarifying appraisals of government officers, business associates and rivals who might obstruct the clan's business interests or be turned to advantage. By turns cantankerous or charming, Jim was family patriarch, a role he relished.

To this day I cherish memories of truck journeys through the New Guinea Highlands; of wide grassland valleys girded by sheer mountain walls, of tribesmen adorned with Bird of Paradise headdresses, torsos shining with pig-grease and armed with spears, stone-headed axes and bows and arrows, emblems of warrior status.

Never mind that patrol officers—kiaps in Pidgin English—had by then largely ended tribal warfare. No less than the grandeur of the Highlands and its people, gatherings of the Leahy clan offered me a glimpse of a world light years removed from my own.  I was 19 years old. I was agog. 

The following summer, during the three-month university vacation, I returned to New Guinea to work for Jim, first as a plantation assistant, then as a caretaker manager in the Western Highlands.

I knew nothing of coffee, but I was farm-born and had spent a year between school and university jackarooing a huge sheep station. From the nephews I learned the rudiments of plantation management and mastered Pidgin English.  

In the years which followed I kept in touch with Richard's family, if only by Christmas cards, until 1969 when I started as a journalist in Sydney. Thereafter Mick and I corresponded regularly.

The tenor of his 20-odd letters which I still hold are courteous, fleshed out with details of his five children, the younger of them still at school, the older ones at university or building their own businesses. But his central concern the role I might play in editing his memoir for publication.  

__________

 EXTRACTS FROM THE LEAHY LETTERS

16/2/69: I have written up an account of our wanderings from 1930 to 1935 and as a sort of insurance against being summarily kicked out of here on the say-so of some of the present-day do-gooders and visionaries inciting the locals to what they are pleased to call independence, I am trying to have it published in America where I imagine it would be worth enough to educate the youngest and see Jeanette and me over old age, but I have been unable to find a publisher so far. All the diaries and what I consider the most comprehensive photographic record of a white man's first contact is in the National Library in Canberra should you get up that way and have time to look it over. I will keep you posted as to the fate of my MS in the United States. I should hear from them soon. The world has forgotten about the white man's contact with Stone Age people and is not interested either.

4/6/69: My main reason for starting to rewrite the whole account is the uncertainty of our POLITICAL FUTURE up here. I thought and still think it may become a "breadwinner" if I could salvage enough from here to see the kids educated and us "out'…If you would not mind your name being associated with some of my opinions on New Guinea natives in particular and the Negroid people in general. You would also be near enough to Canberra to delve into the negatives they have and the diaries if needed and select what you consider the appropriate material. I could send the MS to you right away if you would like to have a look over it.

5/8/69: My MS evidently had little reader interest in the US. Publishers wanted guarantees to publish it. I am no writer, never thought I was, so am not too disappointed.

1/2/70: The village life goes on as usual in their age-old routines, oblivious of the narrow, ill-informed vapourings of a few disgruntled would-be dictators who have been tried and found wanting in even the most elementary places of economic and educational ability to become more than what the Bible still proclaims, Hewers of wood and drawers of water and servants of servants.

__________

Never mind that my judgement, devoid of publishing experience, reflected the innocence and optimism of youth and awe and admiration of Mick. Alarm bells were ringing ("If you do not mind being associated with some of my opinions…") but I did not hear them. The manuscript was rambling and repetitive but the diaries held by the Australian National Library convinced me that his story, properly edited and illustrated by his photographs, would find a publisher. 

__________

5/3/70: Don't worry about my screeds—I just jot down thoughts as I boil over from the unrealism that is going to turn this country and its people into a pre-white man recapitulation of primitive inter-tribal savagery and cannibalism but with the white man's much more lethal arms to simplify their innate savagery and make their age-old cowardly ambush attacks less risky.

10/9/71: I would like to be kept fully informed about the proposed publications, dates, etc. I do not want to be associated with statements that are not IN MY OPINION true to experience (mine). Between us we could, I feel sure, produce something that it will confirm even my pessimism, and future events will not repudiate...

25/11/71: As I understand it any agreement you make with the publishers will be in our joint names with provision for a 50-50 interest to each of us. That agreement will serve to give legal aspect to our arrangements about any books published. 

__________

From time to time I drove from Sydney to Canberra to trawl through Mick's bequest to the National Library. From the liveliest passages of his diaries, incorporated into his memoir, I compiled a leaner, tighter text, and with prints from his pictorial archive, despatched them to Australian publishing houses. 

Mick had been right. The world had forgotten, or no longer cared, for stories of first contact between European explorers and tribesmen. The response was almost wholly negative. Only Jacaranda Press, a publisher committed to Papua New Guinea, voiced cautious interest, conditional on changing the balance to less words and more pictures, a request I tried to accommodate.  

__________

19/4/72: I think it has been too "edited" to the point where it is not much more than a lengthy caption for the photographs you have. I am not happy about it as final account of our explorations in this country.

__________

Working as a journalist in Sydney, I continued in thrall to Papua New Guinea. By 1969, with prospect of winning office after 23 years in opposition, Federal Labor Party leader Gough Whitlam promised immediate independence to Papua New Guinea, arguing that colonial rule was morally untenable.

This was regardless of what most Papua New Guineans wished, a gradual transition to statehood. Something I had imagined would unfold over a generation was suddenly at hand. In 1972 I departed Sydney for Port Moresby to work as a freelance ‘stringer’ for Australian Financial Review and its sister weekly, National Times.  Mick's resolve to see his memoir published was undiminished: 

__________

25/6/72: I do not think it would even be worth the effort to have it published in Australia as far as I am concerned the American market is the only market where it MAY be worth the effort…I don't like the manuscript in its present form. It is really just an enlarged caption for the photographs…

__________

The darker side of Mick was a hair-trigger temper, a readiness to imagine malice and treachery and to quarrel with business associates, government personnel and extended family.

In the early 1980s the Sydney-based husband-and-wife filmmakers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson produced a documentary film, First Contact, the story of Mick's journeys into the New Guinea Highlands.

Drawing on his film and photographs, complemented by interviews with his surviving brothers, Jim and Dan—Mick had died in 1979—and with Highlanders, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary. Their book of the same title, First Contact, followed, quoting one of Mick's nephews, Bob Fraser:

__________

I was saddened by the way Mick kept going on and on about the injustice of the Administration, the stupidity of the kiaps, the lack of discipline in the community and the fact that they'd [the Australians] all be kicked out on their arses, that the country was too good for the people in it, that they were going to ruin it and slide back into barbarism. There was some sort of mental block. I think he sat there at Zenag and brooded so much that in the end he started to believe what he was saying. He was listening to the news eight or nine times a day. He had an idea fixe. It was disappointing to go there because he never stopped fuming about it. When he did stop fuming he was his old charming self.

__________

Suddenly I was persona non grata, guilty of gutting—as Mick put it, ‘bowdlerizing’—his memoir, and I was sent packing. It was as if someone I admired had suddenly turned to strike me in the face.

There was no formal agreement, no question of recompense for my time. Fearful that I might pursue publication without him—an idea which never occurred to me--he instructed the National Library to attach a covering note to his diaries and photographs denying me access.

At his behest Richard, by now a self-employed charter-pilot based in Lae, flew to Port Moresby to reclaim his father's manuscript, the rolls of borrowed negatives and prints I had ordered from the National Library. As he left he said, "This is all very embarrassing." 

I vowed never again to collaborate in anyone else's memoir.

In 1998 my path crossed by chance with Tom Leahy, eldest son of ‘Old’ Tom, the brother who remained in Queensland, a pioneer wheat-farmer in the Darling Downs. 

I had first met ‘Young’ Tom in 1960 at Mick's farm, Zenag. In the early 1970s we met occasionally in Port Moresby but following Papua New Guinean independence in 1975 I departed and we had lost touch, traveling different paths for more than twenty years.

In 1998 we met again. Tom had meantime settled in the Darling Downs. I was researching a book set in Papua New Guinea, and called him from Sydney seeking an interview. He at once agreed and over two or three days we traded recollections of an era long gone.

Months later he contacted me to ask I would collaborate in his own memoir, focusing particularly on his 34 years in Papua New Guinea, a story intended expressly for his children and grandchildren. We agreed on a fee, I returned to the Darling Downs to interview him.

Head and shoulders taller than Mick, Tom mirrored his uncle in his deep, resonant voice, his charm and way with words, his resolve to get on in the world in his own way, in his fierce pride and temper. No surprise, then, that they regarded one another with affection and respect. In Tom's words:    

__________

Mick was the greatest man I ever met…He had a philosophy, he held true to it, and he found it difficult to accept any change. In his last years he resisted any change because he foresaw the chaos after independence…As things turned out, he was fairly right. He was a warrior through and through…He was our Moses. He led us into the land of milk and honey.  

__________

The difference was that where Mick in his declining years was devoured by rage at how his world had changed, Tom is temperamentally more placid.  Long after his first marriage ended, in his early 50s he had married one Pam Young, whose father had befriended the 16-year old Tom when he quarreled with his father and fled home. In their marriage Tom found a peace which eluded his uncle in his waning years. 

Born in 1930, Tom was a child of the Great Depression, raised in Toowoomba where his grandparents had settled half a century before. One of eight children, he recalled the awe in which, with he and his brothers and sisters, he held the four uncles, who would descend at intervals from New Guinea, to which they departed in the 1930s to seek their fortune.

As early as the law allowed him, his father, "Old" Tom removed each of his five sons from school to work his wheat farms. At 16 "Young" Tom could take it no longer, walked out and found farm-work elsewhere. That was until 1947 when his Uncle Mick, in need of staff he could trust, summoned Tom and his younger brother Dan to Zenag to work for him.

For two years Tom drove trucks for Mick and for another two years supervised and  recruited indentured labour for a mining company sluicing for alluvial gold. Thereafter he managed Zenag for six months while Mick and Jeanette took leave.

When the Australian Government opened the Markham Valley for the first time to commercial farming, he applied, and was granted, a 3,000-acre block. Without capital, he nonetheless tried every breed of livestock and cash crop suitable to tropical farming, he married, fathered a family and eventually prospered.

From time to time he also trekked for days into the foothills of the Markham Valley, camping in so-called rest-houses built for patrolling kiaps.  The villagers responded to his fascination and more than that, respect for their culture, so much so as to elect him a councilor in the first local government election in 1964.

Thus did he acquire a taste for politics. Four years later he was elected to the national parliament, the House of Assembly.

The Australian Administrator of Papua New Guinea, David Hay, impressed at his fluency in Pidgin English and rapport with indigenous MPs, appointed him Spokesman for the Administrator's Executive Council—in essence, chief minister--of the country's first elected cabinet, empowered for the first time to initiate and enact legislation.

His four-year term of office exposed him to experiences beyond all expectation. It was not simply the bear-pit of parliament but a three-month posting to New York to monitor the United Nations General Assembly in session, and as a member of the House of Assembly constitutional planning committee, visiting African countries for the lessons they offered, for good or ill, of statehood since  colonial rule. 

After his narrow defeat in the 1972 parliamentary election Tom returned to his farm. Following Papua New Guinea independence he was told, to his dismay, that as a non-indigenous permanent resident, and prospective citizen, he was banned from specific crops, among which were peanuts which he had introduced to the Markham Valley twenty years before. In disgust, he sold up and returned to Queensland.     

He was 48 years old, grieving the loss of his adopted country, divorced and had no idea what lay ahead. One of his sisters, married and living in Dublin, found him a cottage in the Wicklow Hills, and for two years, accompanied by Pam, his future wife, he researched his family's ancestral roots. 

Dublin newspaper archives offered reports and pictures of the mayor of Dublin hosting a civic reception in tribute to his uncles, Mick and Dan. As he and Pam explored Ireland wherever they went Tom inquired after local Leahys who always claimed common kinship, though without hard evidence.

Advertising in Irish newspapers he eventually unearthed kinsmen living on the border of Cork and Limerick Counties. "I was struck by the similarity of the Irish, in their clannishness," he recalled, "to the people of Papua New Guinea," he recalled.

Now a widower, he lives outside the town of Dalby on a small farm-block tending livestock and poultry.  Since 1994 he was has served on the local shire council. Politics, he insists, is still in the blood. His gift of the gab runs tandem with the politician's craving for public approval and readiness to adjust his position as his interests dictate.

As Tom's recollections of his years in Papua New Guinea unfolded over in twenty hours of interviews, I was persuaded they would command a readership far beyond his children and grandchildren. Nearly 30 years Mick Leahy had sent me on my way, I put it to Tom that I should edit his long, sprawling memoir for publication.

Sceptical of its commercial prospects, his response was swift, wary and emphatic. I had done all he had asked of me, he said, and had been paid. He had no intention of investing anything more. I should feel free if I wished to edit the manuscript in my own time at my own expense. If I found a publisher, I was welcome to the royalties.

I accepted his terms. I cut by half the 125,000-word manuscript, divided it into chapters, chose the title, Markham Tom, and wrote a 2,000-word introduction placing Tom and the Leahy clan in the wider context of Papua New Guinea from the 1930s to the 1980s.

I wrote captions for photographs, compiled an index and commissioned a preface from someone Tom much admired, the Melbourne Age columnist Peter Ryan, author of Fear Drive My Feet and other non-fiction set in Papua New Guinea.   

Preparing Markham Tom for publication was child's play compared to finding a publisher. Publishing houses conceded its merit but insisted that nothing set in Papua Guinea could hope to recover its investment.

Twenty-five years after its independence, the hopes, expectations and goodwill of Australians had curdled into public perception of successive governments, corrupt, venal and unstable, mismanaging a broken-backed state. Australia, it seemed, didn't want to hear about it.

 I was commended eventually to a small publishing house owned and managed by a former university lecturer with an affinity for Papua New Guinea. To him I assigned the publishing rights in January 2002. Nine months later Markham Tom was launched in a church hall, an annex of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Toowoomba, where the Leahy family had settled 120 years before.

Tom's gift with the spoken word, coupled with a captive audience of Darling Downs worthies and a legion of Leahy kinsmen, ensured a personal triumph. The 200 copies of Markham Tom supplied for the launch were snapped up within the hour.

In the weeks which followed Tom was inundated with inquiries, spread by word-of-mouth, asking where his memoir could be bought, a response both surprised and touched him. Publication of his life-story validated all he had achieved.

His euphoria was tempered - as was mine - because the publisher had not, indeed, could not, place Markham Tom with retail outlets. Days after its launch an accountancy firm was appointed to liquidate the publishing house.

The publisher then faxed me requesting that I covertly reassign the publishing rights to his new publishing house which, like Phoenix, had risen from the ashes of the old. The liquidator, I was assured, knew nothing about Markham Tom.  

I declined, convinced that despite its Papua New Guinean setting, it would find another publisher. What I hadn't reckoned with was the former publisher's resolve to claim the title for his new publishing house, nor how gullible Tom would be to the argument that he, and he alone, owned the copyright.  

When I protested that this violated our agreement Tom sought advice from his Toowoomba solicitor. For a fee of nearly $1,000, he reassured Tom that he was free to do with his memoir as he wished. Tom then reassigned the publishing rights to the previous publisher and sold short print-runs of Markham Tom from his homestead, posting out others ordered from further afield.

__________

24^th May 2005: Chris—a little upset by your email, I'll answer it as best I can… I have had another 170 books in total published, 100 to pay our joint legal and other major costs including the launch…had you been able to find another publisher I would most certainly have agreed to go ahead, but nothing has happened…As I see where you and I stand, I am the author and publisher, you advise me and I have always agreed with your thoughts and very much value them, can't think of any time when I haven't…We are not equal partners, you are the editor and are entitled to be paid royalties, I own all rights, I hope you see it that way also…

__________

 When the publisher failed to deliver on a promise of a further print-run of 1,000 copies for sale in Papua New Guinea, Tom finally accepted that I should explore prospects for publishing Markham Tom elsewhere. But on the question of copyright ownership he continued adamant that it was his and his alone. We went our separate ways. Again, the sudden fist in the face.

Through a third party to whom I provided the relevant documents, I sought the advice of Dr Jeremy Fisher, Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors. He replied:  

__________

20/7/06: Christopher Ashton is the author of this work…As the owner of the copyright, Mr Ashton has the exclusive right to reproduce the work and to publish it (section 31 of the Copyright Act 1968)…The Australian Society of Authors is concerned to promote respect for copyright and to protect the interests of our members when their copyright is infringed…

__________

 I sent this to Tom who replied: 

__________

 5/10/06: I don't agree with a number of the statements contained in your letters and certain of the enclosures to your letter of 8 September 2006 raise concerns for me. I am not currently interested in securing a new publisher for Markham Tom. Should this change I will contact you. To avoid any further misunderstanding, I advise that you are not authorized by me to enter into any agreements regarding Markham Tom. I trust this resolves the matter.

__________

 To the charge that in collaborating in the memoirs of successive generations of Leahys I was a soft touch, I plead guilty.

Are some writers putty in the hands of knockabout characters wanting help with their unpublished memoirs? Clearly, yes. What of the idea that the Irish, or those of Irish descent, wreak havoc on themselves and those about them?

In my book national stereotypes, however politically incorrect, have more than a grain of truth. Epithets like the fighting Irish have to be earned. But they're pointers--not absolutes. Legions of Irish and of Irish descent, not least Mick Leahy's own children, are the antithesis of the fighting Irish.  

For the Collins-Leahys clan, Papua New Guinea promised and in varying degrees provided the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But they gave as good as they got. In developing the commercial infrastructure for the purchase, processing and export of coffee, while others built a chain of trade-stores across the Highlands, two generations of the clan introduced its people into the cash economy.

I don't regret my long association with the Leahy family. Quite to the  contrary, I am indebted to them for their kindnesses and the doors they opened to me.

But no more memoirs.