Wendy's wordplay

I've been thinking about Wendy and word-play. It was one of the first things that attracted me to her. Word-play and her lovely smile. Within minutes after I picked up those two hitch hikers on Sunday September 25, 1955, Wendy said something in such a way, using such words, that from then on for the rest of that magical day, she had my full attention. She began talking about hitch hiking at first, saying how much more pleasant it was in my cosy little car than in the noisy cab of a transport truck, to have a real conversation in which we could all hear each other clearly. She described a few of her hitch hiking experiences. The way she spoke and even more, what she said, led me to decide not to drop her and her fellow hitcher Louise a few minutes later. They were on the wrong road for their intended destination that day. I'd told them when I picked them up that I could drop them at a convenient cross road ten minutes along my route. Instead I scrapped my golf and spent the whole day and the evening with them. I showed them a little of my favourite small corner of Australia: the dairy-farming and wine-growing country between Adelaide and the south coast, and a bit of the south coast between Cape Jervis and Victor Harbour. Sixty years later I can't remember her exact words or the sequence of the topics of our conversation that day but at the time they captivated me utterly. Her wonderful way with words, and her lovely smile, bewitched me and led 17 months later to our happy, fulfilling marriage which lasted almost 55 years. (She told me a few years after we were safely married that she'd been disconcerted to discover when I first got out of my car, that I was the same height as she. Sitting down I evidently looked as if I was taller. Fortunately she wasn't too discouraged by that revelation, even if she did sometimes say it was unfortunate that I was a midget. Her brother and her father were both 6 feet tall).  

Wendy conversing with John above the beach at Yankalilla,
South Australia on the day we met, Sunday 9/25/1955

She had a witty, sometimes wicked, sometimes bawdy way with words. When we were courting we were out to dinner one evening with friends, acquaintances really, a couple about our age who were just back from a winter holiday in the snow country. Someone asked how to pronounce that word for sliding downhill in the snow on long sticks, was it pronounced ski-ing or shi-ing?  Wendy said to the rather predatory blond lass, my friend's companion, looking at her hand on my arm as she spoke, "I can see that you're more interested in he-ing than she-ing." Our friendship with that couple cooled somewhat after that evening.

We spent most of our honeymoon at a posh resort hotel on the south coast. Television had very recently come to Australia in 1957, so there was only one TV, in a special TV viewing room, and in the evenings most of the hotel's occupants sat bewitched in front of the small screen. A bodice-ripping version of Robin Hood was playing, an episode in which Friar Tuck was a prisoner of the Sheriff of Nottingham, watched in rapt silence by an audience mostly of middle-aged women of the twin-set and pearls variety. Wendy was into Spoonerisms at that time, saying, for instance, Beggs and Aycon for Eggs and Bacon. Without thinking she uttered a variation of a Spoonerism that penetrated the entire room and greatly upset the twin-set and pearls sorority, choosing a moment for this when the TV sound track was silent. Probably the fact that we were on our honeymoon influenced what she said, "I'm not interested in Friar Tuck. I'd rather try a fuck." We left the TV viewing room hastily. Fortunately it was our last night in that hotel. Of course in those days the f-word was completely beyond the pale, not a meaningless punctuation point in teenage conversation as it is now. Throughout our married life, she often seasoned her conversation with earthy remarks and occasionally with unprintable expletives, a legacy perhaps of her former life as a nurse, or more likely just part of her sparkling personality.

Backing up, let me say a little about Phase One of our courtship, our exchange of letters, 125 letters in all, between our initial one-day meeting and Wendy's return to Australia 8 months later. Her letters to me were lively, funny, vividly descriptive, very entertaining to read. My letters to her were rather dull, I think: full of high-falutin language, vacuous philosophy, and impractical plans to go over to New Zealand to get to know her better. And they were increasingly amorous. The amorous tone worked though: in June 1956 she phoned me - an international phone call, a big deal, a really huge deal, in those days - to say she'd arranged a paediatric nursing job in Adelaide, was flying Christchurch to Melbourne on June 7; could I meet her flight and bring her back to Adelaide? Could I ever! On the drive back to Adelaide, a day and a half in those days, we talked nonstop, filling some of the knowledge gaps that remained about each other despite our prolific exchange of letters: most of our letters were 8, 10 even 12 closely written pages. I'm tempted to quote from them but if I got started, how could I stop? Sometime I'll post a few more edited excerpts from them on this blog.

Her facility with words came out in her poetry, only a little of which survives.  She often wrote witty little verses in her letters to her mother and sister in New Zealand. After they both died we asked Wendy's nieces to send us those letters if they still had them. Alas, they didn't: Philistines all, they hadn't kept any of Wendy's letters to them. The poems we published in Selected Works of Janet Wendy Last in 2009 are all we have, just a small fragment of her lifetime creative output.

Wendy on August 16, 1956, the day we got engaged

Reminiscing about Wendy when we celebrated her life soon after she died, I didn't tell that story about Friar Tuck. It would have been unsuitable for that occasion, more suitable for our 50th wedding anniversary banquet in 2007 if we'd thought of it. In fact, I don't recall ever telling it before; but like so many other wonderful, unforgettable things she said, that off-colour remark was typical of her and it endeared her to me indelibly.

                       (Recycled and expanded from my Facebook page)

I considered rounding out this post with a selection of photos of Wendy, but I've already posted many of my favourites, on November 27 2010, less than a fortnight after she died.   Here's one I've never posted before:  Here are Wendy and me larking about on a sofa at the home of our dear friends Karen Trollope Kumar and Pradeep Kumar in Hamilton, some time in the late 1990s.  Photo by Karen.

The seacoast of my childhood

I taught myself to swim when I was 6, sliding on my belly in warm, shallow pools left behind 

a sandbank when the tide went out. I realized I was floating and that if I kicked my legs and

used my hands to paddle, I could swim. It was clumsy but it worked and I improved with 

practice. By the end of that summer in the early 1930s, I could swim from the jetty to boats 

moored a hundred yards away, using an uncoordinated small boy’s version of the overarm 

crawl.

The sea was crystal clear in those days. More than swimming I enjoyed observing the 

creatures below the surface, shrimps, cockles, little black and white striped ‘zebra fish’ and

 translucent ‘whitebait’ that were destined to grow into whiting my mother sometimes got for 

our meals. A facemask with a large glass front brought everything below the surface into

 sharp focus and transformed my vision of the marvellous underwater world.

A mile south the hills came down to the coast and the clean white sand gave way to rocks that were no bother to my almost prehensile toes. This part of the coast was more interesting because the rock pools were home to a profusion of tiny crabs, starfish and sea anenomes. Many rock pools were large enough for me to immerse with my facemask and study this magical marine world close-up at leisure. There was more beside the rock pools. Little tunnels in the sand between the rocks above high tide level held fairy penguins’ roosts.  If you put your ear close to the mouth of one of these tunnels you could hear fledgling penguins calling for their parents to come home from the sea and feed them.

 

John Last and Fairy Penguin, South Australia, 1938

Rebecca and our dachshund Helen, West Beach,
Adelaide, 1958

Throughout my childhood the sea was five minutes walk from home. Two minutes on my bike and I was on the beach and striding into a calm clear sea on a sheltered coast. After swimming and lazily sunbathing all day I’d come home sated, body caked with sand and sea salt that made my sunburnt skin feel stiff but satisfied. Late in my teens I sat in my lonely room studying anatomy, biochemistry, pathology, with the distant sound of multitudes enjoying themselves on the beach as the days got longer and hotter in October, November, while I prepared for exams in the heat of early December. All the time I studied I longed for the sea to cool me. To be a medical student in such a climate and setting, one had to be a masochist.  What joy it was in the week before Christmas to plunge into the sea's healing embrace and wash away the worry of study!

Those sunny summers were spent mostly in and on the sea. We could swim from October until April. Hardier folk swam all year long. In August after the winter storms the beaches were clogged with seaweed, great heaps of it washed ashore from the undersea forest of kelp and seagrass that made the sea a few hundred yards from the beach appear to be a deeper blue than closer inshore. It was safe to swim in the shallow sea with a sandy bottom but grown-ups warned us that it was dangerous beyond the "blue line" where the undersea forest began, because one couldn't see sharks against the darker background. Sharks were our deadliest enemy. On the foreshore of my seaside village a granite drinking fountain commemorated a girl who had been taken by a shark. But sharks do come into very shallow water with a sandy bottom, so that childhood rule would not have worked if put to the test. Years later when I was married with small children of my own a young woman was savagely mauled by a shark while she was paddling in water up to her knees; she died of shock and blood loss before help could reach her. This was at the sandy beach where we sometimes took our children.

There were many other creatures in the sea in my childhood. We could cast a line over the side of a boat and haul in unlimited numbers of tasty whiting, snapper, flatheads, as well as dogfish, small sharks, stingrays and skates that we regarded as inedible. The fishing was especially good in bays on the north coast of Kangaroo Island which shelters Adelaide’s beaches from the Southern Ocean. Occasionally we saw huge schools of yellowtail tuna, often accompanied by dolphins that leapt and frolicked among them in an underwater and aerial game that all seemed to enjoy.

During one summer holiday the sea almost swallowed me when I was body surfing off a beach near Perth, Western Australia. The surf there has powerful currents and tide rips where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet, but from the shore it looked innocuous that day. I was seized, tumbled over and over, and sucked into deeper water where my feet flailed vainly for a grasp on the reassuring sand. The ocean there is warmer than anywhere on the south coast but it almost did for me that morning, before it spat me out and allowed me to crawl from it like one of those prehistoric beasts that came out of the sea to the land hundreds of millions of years ago. I gasped painfully at the edge of the ocean for half an hour, too exhausted after my struggle to move away from the wavelets that lapped at my legs, thanking the sea for giving me back my life.

            After I left Australia I swam at Corfu in the Mediterranean, in the Atlantic off Cape Cod, in the Persian Gulf off Kuwait, in the Bay of Bengal, and several places in the Caribbean including Varadero in Cuba and Cartagena, Colombia. Most were very pleasant but all are polluted and the sea off Cape Cod is not only polluted but ice-cold because of the Labrador Current. No other sea is as clear, clean and welcoming as the sea of my childhood.

Ear worms

Ever had an earworm of snatches of verse? It's usually bad popular music or an advertising jingle that buzzes irritatingly in the brain, displacing all other thoughts whether noble or ignoble; but one night last week I couldn't sleep because some incomplete verses by one-time poet laureate John Masefield kept buzzing about in my brain. Or I thought they were John Masefield's poems. ODTAA, as Masefield put it in the title of one of his novels (ODTAA = One Damned Thing After Another). For inscrutable reasons I felt impelled to recover the lines I couldn't remember. They aren't even very good poetry. 

It turned out that there were two poems I couldn't remember completely,  both with a 'nautical' theme. Why did they leap unbidden into consciousness?  Probably it was because I've been writing some reminiscences about the sea, my experience with storms at sea as observed from cargo ships, and learning to swim in the sea when I was about 6 years old.  It took me a while to track down my two poems, because I was sure John Masefield was responsible for both, and because I misremembered the first line of one of the poems -- once I'd established that my poetic earworms came from two poets, not one, things began to fall into place: "Drake's Drum" isn't by John Masefield, but by Sir Henry Newbolt, a jingoist late 19th century poet who lived on in obscurity into the third decade of the 20th Century.

Here are the lines from Newbolt's "Drake's Drum" that teased me into wakefulness last week:

"Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore, 
Strike et when your powder's runnin' low; 
If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven, 
An' drum 'em up the Channel as we drumm'd 'em long ago." 

Don't ask why that was churning and bubbling in my brain. No explanation makes sense. These lines, by the way, are from somewhere in the middle of the poem. Missing a word here and there, they were the lines that teased me into wakefulness one night last week, along with other lines that are indubitably Masefield's.

I went back to my Sixth Form Albatross Book of Living Verse, which I've kept since 1943 because it is such an excellent anthology, and discovered that excellent though it is, it is poorly indexed. It didn't help at all to fill the blanks in my memory of Masefield's poem called "Cargoes" - which isn't in the Albatross Book of Living Verse - but I didn't help my initially fruitless search by misremembering the first line of the first verse. The line that swirled in my aged brain was the first line of the third verse, not the first. The first line of the first verse begins: 

  "Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir..."

And the verse I wanted is the third, which goes:

"Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays."

The troublesome third, fourth and fifth lines didn't make it into conscious memory so they were missing from my earworm. Why does any of this matter?  It doesn't. I merely want to embellish some seafaring reminiscences. Maybe I can find a place to quote Masefield's "Cargoes" which is marginally relevant to the stuff I'm writing about traveling the world as a ship's surgeon on passenger-carrying cargo ships, a series of experiences that were high points of my life. And it's a rollicking set of verses withal.

Neither poem, by the way, is in that splendid Sixth Form anthology, which contains mostly more cerebral poetry. "Drake's Drum" and "Cargoes" would both have been in a collection more suitable for younger schoolboys. Probably we had to study them and perhaps had to learn them by heart, when I was in the Fourth Form, two years earlier. I'm in Google's debt, not any of my books of poetry, for coming to the aid of my imperfect memory.

All that said, browsing that anthology of poems, and a few other volumes of poems on my shelves,  has been time very well spent this weekend. 

A talented family

Last weekend I was honoured and privileged to be invited to attend a family reunion.  I think I was one of only two from outside the family who was there. Wendy and I always used to look forward to these occasions with this family when once or twice a year they invited us to join them. They folded us into their family, made us feel at home, as if we truly belonged. They are a lovely family, talented, handsome, multilingual. I first met them in the early 1980s when three members of the rising generation were my students in the medical school. I supervised their longterm overseas elective experiences and helped to arrange placements with colleagues in Britain, Israel, India, Sri Lanka and Australia. These young men have become lifelong friends since their medical school days. They are nearly two meters tall, so standing next to them I feel like a wrinkled little dwarf. When one of them hugs me I almost disappear. Fortunately their Colombian mother is my height so hugging her is more egalitarian. In conversation they switch easily and naturally from English to Spanish, and this being bilingual Ottawa with one son married to a French-Canadian wife, they are as comfortable in French. My protege, Rob, married a Dutch girl who is obliged to live close to her widowed mother. So Rob settled just outside Rotterdam where he is a huisarts - a family doctor. His working language and his children's first language is Dutch. The multilingual chattering of the little children is musical. This reunion celebrated Rob's return to his family home in Ottawa for summer holidays.

I looked upon this large and happy family approvingly, noticing some of the young children absorbed in reading printouts of my children's story. Observing them all, I reflected on my frequent lament in posts on this blog and elsewhere about our overpopulated, dangerously stressed planet. Yes, I still believe planet Earth is over-populated, probably by as much as an order of magnitude. There is no contradiction between my conviction that the earth is afflicted with a surfeit of humans, and my whole-hearted approval of the fecundity of this talented family. We are the better for their presence among us. We need more like them.
   

Gloriana

I've completed a first rough draft of my story for children. I did this mainly by cutting several episodes that didn't advance the story. It reads like a textbook or technical manual in many places, and it has a touch of Alice's complaint about the book her sister was reading (just before Alice saw the White Rabbit): lack of conversation. There's a little, but not nearly enough. I have a few months more of revising and rewriting before I'll be satisfied.

This story is based on one I made up in 1962 to tell two toddlers who were bored after too many re-readings of Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web and The Magic Pudding. We were on a cargo ship carrying 12 passengers, in the Indian Ocean about halfway between the Red Sea and the Western Australian coast. I couldn’t pop out to a book shop to get more reading matter for small children.  They asked me to make up a story and tell it to them.

I thank those two toddlers, Rebecca and David Last, for provoking me into making up the precursor to this story, and I thank my beloved late wife Wendy for recording details of that sea voyage in her diary for 1962.  When I read her diary for the first time in 2014, several years after she died, I was reminded of the story I made up and I began to write it down for the first time. The characters came to life in my head and took over their story. Gloriana is the result.

The story is set in Australia in the early 1930s and is based partly on my memories of the country and its people at that time. The characters in the story, however, do not resemble any real people, living or dead. I have taken some liberties with the facts. Rosella parrots can live a long time, but not 300 years and do not have Gloriana’s conversational abilities. Bon-Bon station was on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia, not in Northern New South Wales. I don't think it exists now. The land was expropriated by the government in the 1950s, and became a rocket range and I think a nuclear weapons testing ground. 

I need to show more behaviours that will tell readers about the characters. There's a bit now but more is needed. One of the leading characters, the most important character in many ways, is Gloriana, a 300 year old Rosella parrot. Despite living with pirates for 200 of those years, she is a monarchist, perhaps because she spent the first three years of her life in Queen Elizabeth's court. She does exhibit some behaviour and says a few things indicative of her devotion to Good Queen Bess but I need to do more about her. I need to do more about other characters too, the 9-10 year old twins who are the other heroes, and the three villains.  I've picked up a few clues about how to do this from classic literature.  Jane Austen does characters brilliantly: think of Elizabeth Bennet, Wickham, Emma and many of her other unforgettable characters. Charles Dickens succeeds too in showing what manner of people populate his stories. Scrooge comes to life in Dickens's words, so do Mr Pickwick, Fagan and many others among the vast cast in his novels. Not many contemporary writers are as skillful. John Updike's characters are almost all cardboard cutouts. Ian MacEwan is sometimes more successful. Hilary Mantel brings Thomas Cromwell to multidimensional life, but many of her other characters - Henry VIII, Anne Bolyn, Woolsey et al - are closer to caricature than character. Recently I reread Kent Haruf's wonderful little novel Plainsong. This is a wonderful novel for several reasons, including the way Haruf displays how his characters behave, and the social nuances of the town of Holt, Colorado, in a few telling phrases scattered here and there through the novel.  I don't have the literary skills to come anywhere even close to this level of literary craftsmanship, but it will be fun to try in the coming months.