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.

Another weekend at Galilee Centre

About a year ago I began to write the children's story I made up in 1962 to tell our two toddlers, Rebecca (5) and David (4), when we were on a ship in the Indian Ocean about halfway between the Red Sea and the West Australian coast.  The story was about 9-year old twins, Jennifer and Christopher, and a talking parrot that had once been in the possession of pirates.  I'd almost forgotten the story until I was reading Wendy's diary for 1962. Her description of that voyage home to Adelaide after our wonderful year in London revived the memory of my story. 

As I began to write, the characters came to life in my head. I could almost see the twins, Jennifer and Christopher, their Mum and Dad, and Gloriana the parrot, and the villains with whom they clashed, and I was able to imagine the beginning and middle stages of their adventures.  Then the threads of the plot got tangled up a bit.  I wasn't suffering from writer's block, or the indolence of old age. It was simpler than that. My problem was a common one: I was perplexed about how best to unravel the tangled threads I'd created. 

A long weekend at Galilee Centre in Arnprior at a workshop convened by Susan Jennings of Ottawa Independent Writers and led by Nerys Parry was all I needed to provide the inspiration and momentum to untangle it all and bring my story to a happy conclusion. 

Susan Jennings and OIW call this annual long weekend event a 'retreat' - a word I find inappropriate. Retreat rhymes with defeat, and evokes images like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. I know 'retreat' has another meaning, signifying a reflective, contemplative withdrawal from the hurly-burly of everyday life, but I prefer to use another word to describe the experience. 'Workshop' or 'writers group' work for me, especially when the experience is as positive and productive as mine was this year.

Nerys Parry, our facilitator, mentor, provocateur, has a lot to do with it. She is very bright, very effective, very stimulating leader of a diverse group of writers such as we had at this workshop. There were nine of us altogether.

Nerys Parry inspiring us at Galilee Centre

Writers group at Galilee Centre, June 28, 2015,
missing Susan Jennings who took this photo.

The Galilee Centre is a handsome mansion on the right bank of the Ottawa River where it is joined by the Madawaska River. It is exactly 200 years old this year, and was originally the home of a timber baron. It became the property of an order of the Catholic church (I forget whether it was the Grey Sisters or the Oblate Order; both were once strong in the Ottawa Valley). It is now owned and run by a non-profit foundation. It is comfortable, has a splendid setting and grounds, and is ideal for small groups like ours to get away from the world. I think all of us in this small group found our experience as richly rewarding as I did. Nerys Parry deserves almost all the credit for this, but shares a little with the atmosphere of the Galilee Centre and with Susan Jennings who has organized these annual OIW events for the past few years. I am beholden to both, and will remember to mention them by name in the Acknowledgements when Gloriana is published.

With fellow writer Ian Prattis

Writers group, including Susan Jennings

Nerys Parry discoursing on finer points
of creative writing

Reading aloud to our small children

In a lifetime of innumerable pleasures, the richest pleasure of all was reading aloud to our small children. Wendy and I shared this pleasure but I did most of the reading when I was home to do it.  When our first two children were small, I didn’t get involved much in evening or weekend meetings and hardly ever in out of town meetings, so I was almost always available, giving Wendy a chance to take time off from her full-time job of child rearing and home making – she did by far the lion’s share of all other aspects of rearing our first two kids, as well as everything else.

We began reading to Rebecca and David before they could understand the stories we told them.  On MV Pretoria, the ship that took us from Adelaide to London in 1961, we had some simple verse books, The Little Engine That Could, The Cat in the Hat with doggerel rhymes and nonsensical stories that made them (and us) laugh out loud.  By then Rebecca was 4½ and able to get the point of Doctor Suess’s crazy humour.  My favourites were A A Milne’s poems, When we were very young and Now we are six. We had these in books given to me in the early 1930s, when I was the target age for them. I began to read these poems to Rebecca and David when she was 4 and David wasn't quite 3.  Rebecca appreciated and laughed out loud at some of these poems and so did David, probably not with full understanding but imitating his big sister.

We were really poor in 1961-62, four of us trying to survive in London on a slim scholarship stipend intended for a single man. It was a challenge to pay for food. Food for the mind, however, is as important as food for the body. We bought a few good books for our kids, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, and The Magic Pudding. We read these over and over, at least twice on MV Morelia, the ship returning to Australia in 1962 after our year in London. By then the kids and I who did almost all the reading, were getting a bit bored with these much loved stories.  [Prompted by the kids I made up a story to tell them when we were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, half way between the Red Sea and the coast of Western Australia. The story was about two little children I called Jennifer and Christopher, and the talking parrot they got in a dusty pawnshop near the wharves of an Australian seaport. The parrot had once sat on the shoulder of the leader of a pirate gang, a villainous one-legged ship’s cook.  When I told the story to Rebecca and David I didn’t give him a name but he was obviously Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island. I’d almost forgotten about this story until I was reminded of it when reading Wendy’s diary of our voyage home to Australia in 1962.  I began to write the story down for the first time in the summer of 2014].

Reading aloud to our children became a precious evening ritual during our years in Edinburgh. We had a comfortable, capacious chair with arm rests wide enough to accommodate a child’s bottom. We established a habit we all looked forward to. With Rebecca sitting on one arm of the chair, David on the other, and Jonathan on my lap, I read a succession of classics. I think we began with the four I’ve already mentioned, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, and The Magic Pudding. By 1965 it had been long enough since we’d last read these that the kids and I were ready, indeed eager, to hear them again. And of course Jonathan wasn’t born when we’d read them on the ship on the way back to Australia in 1962.  The other books I read to the kids were an honour roll of great children’s literature: Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-glass, A Christmas Carol, some of Hans Andersen’s stories, The Borrowers, then moving on to middle childhood, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Little Women, Jo’s Boys (two of Wendy’s school prize books); Gulliver’s Travels, King Solomon’s Mines, Oliver Twist (which we abandoned: it asked too much of our kids’ attention spans); Arthur Ransome's stories about boating in the Lake District, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. The Sword in the Stone may have come next; then we began on Tolkein. Our collective pleasure survived through The Hobbit, but by the time we got to Frodo’s adventures when he and his brave companions set off to retrieve the Ring, Rebecca and David were both reading well on their own. The Fellowship of the Ring was too exciting, they were both too impatient, to wait for the evenings of shared reading and listening that I enjoyed at least as much as they did.  By the time we came to the third volume of Tolkein’s trilogy, I was reading just to Jonathan, although from time to time one or both of the two older children would come into the living room to eavesdrop as I read the latest installment of Frodo’s adventures. 

We talked a little about the message or the moral in some of these children’s stories. I tried, unsuccessfully I’m afraid, to show Rebecca and David the rigorous logic behind Lewis Carroll’s/ Charles Dodgson’s apparent craziness.  I had more success talking about the stupidity and futility of going to war over whether eggs should be opened at the sharp or the blunt end – or going to war over almost any of the causes for which tyrants, and many elected leaders, have forced their subjects to fight.  

Not long after we reached that stage in family evolution we migrated again, from Edinburgh to Ottawa, and for a few precious years family togetherness prevailed in several other ways.  I'll say more about that in another post.