Diaries again

I've spent many of my waking hours lately reading Wendy's diaries. I began at the beginning (1954) and today I started on 1975, 20 years after I came into Wendy's life. As I've mentioned, there's a gap, no diaries for 1957 or 1958, unless they are squirrelled away in some unlikely place I haven't yet explored. What an eventful period it was for us! We started our married lives in early 1957 in suburban general practice in Adelaide, moved to Sydney in 1960 for me to begin training in public health, had a year in London in 1961-62 where I was a research fellow in the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit; then back to Sydney for 18 months until I accepted an invitation to work at the University of Vermont; in early 1965 we moved on to the University of Edinburgh where I had five wonderfully productive years, and then at the end of 1969 we came to Ottawa. I have relished reliving our experiences from Wendy's viewpoint. In 1961 we traveled from Adelaide to Liverpool via the Suez Canal on a freighter carrying 12 passengers, plus our two toddlers; I had a lightning tour of British medical school departments of Social Medicine then rejoined Wendy, Rebecca and David in a lovely old ramshackle house, Cromwell Lodge, 30 Newington Green, inner north London, where we lived for a year in dire but happy poverty. She describes our struggle for existence cheerfully, skimming over the worries and dwelling on the joy we got from life that year. A cryptic word that crops up once or twice reminded me of our very satisfying sex lives, a form of entertainment that cost almost nothing. (She didn't describe an occasion I vividly remember, a summer Sunday morning when our version of a Kama Sutra position was interrupted by 3 1/2 year-old Rebecca's question in a horrifed, querulous tone, "What's Mummy doing to Daddy?!" We hastily withdrew under the bedclothes, turned and saw Rebecca and David who had woken unusually early, holding hands as they often did, wide-eyed with wonder at the foot of our bed. We didn't explain and they were too young to remember so we don't think their psyches were forever warped). She does record many energetic, sometimes exhausting trips to the Ridley Road street market about a mile and a half away, where a week's provisions could be stacked on the stroller, one or both kids perched atop of it all, and safely brought back to our front door. In our Burlington, Vermont and Edinburgh, Scotland years, she recorded our very active social lives, and the names of many among the large numbers we entertained, or who entertained us. She describes our trips to old ruined castles in Scotland, Boomer, our undisciplined golden Labrador farting in our VW camper van with all the windows closed against the drenching Scottish rain; our wonderful European camping holidays; and our sorrowful but ultimately triumphant relocation from Edinburgh to Ottawa. I was preoccupied building a large new academic department and traveled widely and often in our early years in Ottawa, and until I read her diaries I had not appreciated how rapidly or how well she adjusted to her new life in Canada, formed a large new friendship network, and immersed herself in community activities including PTA, head-start kindergarten, and local activist politics. She sometimes kept separate and more detailed diaries of our important travels, for example to Australia in 1968 (conferences in Canberra and Sydney for me; Wendy helped my mother wind up her little row house and move into assisted care living); and to New Zealand in 1970. We left Rebecca and David in Katamavik summer camp while Wendy accompanied Jonathan to Auckland for open-heart surgery to repair his life-endangering congenital heart defect, I attended a conference in Dunedin and gave talks in various major centres in the USA on my way home. I had not appreciated until I read her diary how stressful this time was for her. It may be a challenge but I will do my best to incorporate excerpts from Wendy's diaries in my memoirs. And I still have over 30 more years of her life with me to read about. The four photos above were taken in Sydney in 1960 (Left); Trafalgar Square, London in 1961 (Middle Right); and Adelaide, December 1963, just before we sailed away across the Pacific to the Panama Canal, and on to the USA (Bottom Right), and about to fly out of Adelaide to Sydney (Top Right).