Efes - Ephesus

Posting this on 12 September 2017 - Again 45 years late.

Postcard my mother wrote from Ephesus. I suspect a few days sightseeing while my father was busy walking around the local cotton fields inspecting them for bugs. Part of a project for his company BP (Agricultural Division) trying to develop safer crop spraying chemical and techniques to replace DDT which had up until then been in widespread use.

After WWII in which he served in India, he returned to the UK in 1946 and sought a job somewhere in a tropical climate, joining a small oil company Trinidad Petroleum Development Co in Trinidad, British West Indies on 17 December 1947 as a chartered surveyor for which he had studied just before the outbreak of war.

For the next 22 years and also after the company had been bought by BP, he was often asked to get involved in agricultural affairs. After BP sold out in 1970, he returned to the UK but was asked to spend most of that year in Greece and following that 1971 and 1972 in Turkey on this cotton project.

The significance of the words from my Mum on the postcard she sent me, are to be read on yesterday's entry. I think she had a hard time with this as she no doubt had with sending her son and only child of to boarding school at the age of 8 and seeing him at best for two school holidays a year and in some years, just one.

In 1990, I was to visit Ephesus for a day with my family. The second of three of the seven wonders of the ancient world I have had the privilege to visit in my lifetime - up until now (2017).