Winters in Southern Australia are cold, wet and rather gloomy but mercifully short. By the middle of August, spring is in the air, days are sunny and warm, flowers and trees burst into blossom, song birds are nesting.
On the first fine Sunday morning in the spring of 1955, I was off duty in the group medical practice where I worked, and running late for a golf game with three friends at a modest little golf course on the southern outskirts of Adelaide. I had delivered a baby in the wee small hours, and called at the hospital on my way to play golf to make sure mother and baby were OK. They were, so to catch up time I took a road I didn't normally use to get to the golf club.
Some way along it, I saw two young women hitch-hikers by the side of the road. In those days not long after the end of the war and of petrol rationing, we picked up hitch-hikers. I had done a bit of hitch-hiking myself in England not long before then, so I had a soft spot for the custom. The two I picked up were heading for the South-East, and could not possibly get there on that road. I said I'd take them to a junction a few miles further on, where they could cut across to the road they needed.
The young women introduced themselves, Louise and Jan (short for Janet). They were nurses, Louise from Zürich in Switzerland, Jan from Christchurch in New Zealand. They had been nursing in Perth for a year, had just come across from the west on the train – hitch-hiking would not have been feasible in that deserted part of Australia. They intended to see as much as they could in a month or so, were making ultimately for Sydney, where they would part and each would go home.
All this emerged in a conversation lasting perhaps ten minutes, until we reached the corner where I should have dropped them. But by then I had decided I wanted to see more of the one called Jan, and I made a snap decision that changed both our lives. I was so late for my golf game my partners would have started without me anyway, I'd have had to find someone else, a stranger probably, to partner. It was a lovely spring day. I said I would drive them to the south coast, show them some of the sights along the way, then bring them back to Adelaide and they could set off on the right road to the south-east next day.
Thus began the most magical day of my life. The spring sunshine was perfect, everything sparkled in the sunshine, and so did our conversation as we told each other who we were, what we had done with our lives to that point, what we hoped for in the future. It had got quite hot by mid-day, so I shed my heavy winter pullover and rolled up my sleeves when we stopped at the little town of Yankalilla to buy pasties and lemonade for our lunch. Louise took a photo of Jan and me as we sat, earnestly talking, on the side of a hill above the beach.
We drove eventually to Victor Harbour, where there is a little island connected to the mainland by a causeway along which an ancient horse-drawn tram plods patiently back and forth during the tourist season. Not that day though, it was too early for the tourist season. So we walked across the causeway and around the island, gazing at huge ocean breakers all the way from Antarctica and dodging the spray as they beat against the rocks on the exposed southern side of the island.
On the way back to Adelaide the two girls were singing as we drove along, and I did something I'd never done in my life before, I joined in with my hopelessly out of tune voice. By then I knew I definitely wanted to see much more of Jan.
When we parted at the end of the day, we exchanged addresses, and not long after Jan returned home to New Zealand, I had my first letter from her. Soon there was a drawer full of letters, and another drawer full at her end. Jan's family name was Wendelken, and like all her family, she was nicknamed Wendy. During our intense exchange of letters, which was really an old-fashioned 19th century kind of courtship by correspondence, Jan became Wendy, and she's been Wendy ever since.
Wendy came back to Australia in July (the winter) of 1956, and I drove through sleety rain in the Adelaide Hills, across to Melbourne to collect her from the airport and bring her back to Adelaide where she nursed at the Adelaide Children's Hospital for the next six months, while we conducted a more conventional 20th century courtship. We were married on February 14th – Saint Valentine's Day – of 1957. That photo Louise took as we sat talking on the hillside on the coast near Yankalilla has hung above our marriage bed ever since, coming with us to each of the homes in which we have lived. It is among our most precious family possessions.
We've had a wonderful, rewarding, and richly interesting life together. I think it's safe to say that we've made the magic last.
A few minutes listening to Wendy revealed her adventurous spirit and her sense of fun, as she described briefly and modestly some of her hitch hiking experiences. The conversation merged with more serious talk of oppression, injustice, wrong-doing by the powerful and rich who control the levers of societal decision-making. Clearly Wendy and I shared the same values on all the important issues in life. I knew before the morning became lunch time and we talked earnestly on the hillside above Yankalilla beach, that she was the maid for me.
ReplyDelete