FROM BERMUDA TO PERRYVILLE

Danna Shirley

It was 1970 and Ron and I were to be stationed in beautiful, stunning Bermuda for two years. I was excited to be there but after the first weekend, we saw everything there was to see on an island only twenty-one square miles.

We rented a room and had kitchen privileges in a home on the island. Ron worked and I was very bored to wander the house or just hang out in our room. The humidity was so penetrating that if I sat on the bed, I got up with my pants damp.

Thankfully, six weeks later we were on a plane back to the States for a new duty assignment. Another tidbit is that we were on the same flight as the famous singer          ←Engelbert Humperdinck. We did bring something wonderful back with us, however; our first child was conceived in beautiful, stunning Bermuda.

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We would now be stationed in Perryville, Maryland, population 2,091 at this time. Perryville was like any other small town. Main Street was just a block long and the Business District was on the other side of the same street. J  

    We stayed here while Ron attended Prep School. He had been accepted into NESEP, Navy Enlisted Scientific Educational Program, and we would be living in Oxford, MS for the next four years while he attended Ole Miss. Prep School was just three months long; it was an intense indoctrination to prepare him for college life.

We found a three-room apartment above a Five and Dime store. It was mid-summer and the air-conditioning barely worked; a necessity for a pregnant woman going through morning sickness.

Our household effects never made it to Bermuda before we received orders to return to the states—and of course we would not take delivery for just a three-month TDY. We bought the bare necessities to set up housekeeping and rented a television from the base. That was life in the Navy on TDY.

Our kitchen had a hole in the floor the shape of an ax head; evidently there had been a fire in the apartment at one time. We could look down on the Five and Dime below and see people walking around. There was a bin of underwear directly beneath the hole. A Navy wife with a two-year-old was visiting one day and the little girl dropped her mom’s keys through the floor. We hustled down the stairs and dug through the underwear to find her keys.

Three-month schools took place often and the landlord seemed to always disappear right before the cleaning deposit was to be refunded. Of course, the guys had to report to their next duty station so they couldn’t wait around for him to return. I’d heard all the horror stories about this man and I was afraid he would do the same thing to us.

The back stairs going down to the garbage cans was very narrow and the third step from the top was only half as wide as it should have been. You had to turn your foot sideways to make the step. I was going down one day when my foot slipped and I took the stairs all the way to the bottom on the soles of my shoes. I didn’t fall to the ground but it could have been a disaster.

I told the landlord if I had miscarried the baby, his name would be mud at the Naval Base and his apartment house would have been boycotted, never to be rented by Navy families again. I guess I put the fear of God in him because we got our cleaning deposit back and headed south to Oxford, MS.