Excerpts from Wendy's diaries

Where better to begin than this! Janet Wendelken and Louise Zuhrer took the train from Perth to Adelaide. They stayed with a nursing friend, visited the Koala bear reserve, Windy Point lookout in the Adelaide Hills, the South Australian Museum; then on Sunday "Took a bus to Darlington. Left my camera in bus! Picked up by John Last in a little Austin, took us to Cape Jervis and [Victor Harbor]& home again. Stayed in South Terrace [hotel/guest house]. Went out [to John Last's home]for evening." Several years ago when I asked Wendy to check her diary for the date we met, she looked and told me it had been Sunday August 7, 1955; her diary gives a later date, Sunday September 29, but her dating in the notebook she used for that diary is inconsistent and rather eccentric, so I'll stick with the date she told me after counting up on her fingers from a fixed point, the date they left Perth. At the back of that diary she wrote a more lengthy account of that momentous day in our lives.
For now I'll pass over her diary for 1956 where there are many references to our increasingly affectionate letters back and forth, then an account of our courtship. I haven't found her diaries for 1957 or 1958, and suspect they don't exist. On Saturday-Sunday March 28-29, 1959 she wrote: "Hot & humid. Cleaned veranda windows & mirrors. Did washing & swabbed decks. Mother did all chores & dinner. U Malcolm to dinner. Sat around all evening. Took castor oil to no effect. Into hospital 11.30 pm, started labour about 12.30 am. Had 2 Doriden tabs about 1 am, half a doz hard contractions then into theatre, 2 painful contractions then John arrived to hold hands, three fast powerful pushes, holding back as much as possible, then head arrived 3 am. Dry retching till 4.30. Felt awful." Thus David entered the world.
Here is her diary entry for Saturday-Sunday June 8-9 1963: "Had a quiet day. Did some hand-washing & tidied up. Wrote to Dodie and Jan Gilfillan [Fry]. John got lunch ready & took kids for a run on beach while I made choc cake, meringues & fruit cake. Had a rush to get ready for Cullen's dinner party. Home 11.30, straight to Mater Hosp. 3 pushes & Jonathan born." I barely had time to wash my hands and ease Jonathan into the world, because the midwife was busy trying to phone our doctor, who arrived eventually about an hour later. We managed fine without that GP, who missed the very loud heart murmur that I heard when I examined Jonathan a few weeks later on a Sunday night because we were worried about his persistent cough and breathlessness; from then on, Jonathan was in the care of a pediatric cardiologist.

Janet Wendy's diaries

Wendy began keeping a daily diary in 1951 when she left New Zealand to live in Edinburgh, where she provided baby-sitting and domestic help to her brother John's wife Peggy-Anne. She worked for several months in the long-stay orthopaedic wing of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary at Fairmilehead on the southern outskirts of the city, not far from where we later lived for 5 years at 5 Greenbank Crescent with a superb view south over Braidburn Park to the Pentland Hills; we could see that orthopaedic hospital from our upstairs windows. Most of her remaining years of that first visit to the UK she private-nursed, first in Scotland, living with a family named Aird, caring for their 'delicate' 3-year old; here she had an attic room above Princes Street looking directly at the Castle. She went south to Bristol where her patient was Sarah James, a 22-year old woman with MS, daughter of the Lord Mayor of Bristol; after over a year there she moved to the private wing of the Royal Northern Hospital, was there over the same period that I spent at the Highgate Wing of the Whittington Hospital about a mile west; we used the same tube station (Archway) to get to central London, but didn't meet at that time. She spoke often of her work and travels during those years but her diaries haven't survived. The oldest I found among her possessions after she died is her diary for the eventful year 1954 during which took a few weeks off to hitch-hike in Europe then returned homeward as far as Perth, Western Australia. After a year nursing at the Princess Margaret pediatric hospital in Perth, she and another nurse, Louise Zuhrer from Zurich, Switzerland, hitch-hiked to explore Australia. She recorded our meeting in 1955, and our courtship in 1956, but I haven't found her diaries for 1957 or 1958. I never saw her write in a diary in those first two years of our married life and it's possible that she gave up the habit for a while. But in 1959 and thereafter it was always part of her daily routine to write down a brief summary of that day's events. While she lived I never looked at her diaries, except very rarely when she asked me to. They were part of her private space, and I respected her privacy. After she died I retrieved them from the box in our basement locker where she kept these and her scrap books. Here they are, lined up on the desk that formerly held her desktop computer, along with several of her scrapbooks and some of her correspondence files. The tall green-covered volume is a ten-year diary David's family gave her, covering the years from 1994 to 2003. I'm not sure what I will ultimately do with her diaries and correspondence files but they are a very precious, indeed unique, record of our lives over almost the entire course of our married life. In future posts I will quote her version of several critically important events from our original chance meeting until June 2010 when she stopped because her fingers could no longer write. Sometimes she ventilated her feelings and wrote words of praise (or the reverse) about my behaviour or our children's; when we traveled she wrote briefly about where we went, what we saw and what we did; she mentioned people we met, entertainments we enjoyed, and most often, described her daily chores, washing, gardening, making and mending clothes, buying provisions at neighbourhood markets; and momentous events including the birth of two of our children. Not our marriage, early married life, Rebecca's birth, because diaries for 1957 or 1958 aren't in the collection. Did she record the events of her life in those two years? I never saw her doing so; or she may have discarded or destroyed the diaries for those two years, which were sometimes stormy as well as eventful. She told me in 1959, when we'd become comfortable and confident in a secure partnership with each other, that she kept a little stash of money just in case, so she could fly back to New Zealand if our marriage failed. A few times in our first two years together we both were unhappy enough to wonder if we had made a terrible mistake. Perhaps Wendy recorded her unhappiness then looked back when she was happier and decided to do away with her account of those early years. But I think it's more likely that she simply didn't keep diaries in 1957 and 1958.

How long is long enough?

I come from long-lived genetic stock. My paternal grandfather and grandmother both lived well into their 90s, my mother into her 80s. I'm more familiar with my father's last years than with those of others but all were similar: they became dependent upon others after lifetimes of autonomy in which they had been the master of their fate, the captain of their soul as W E Henley put it in Invictus. This has been my mantra all my adult life, and could have been theirs too, especially my father's. Unlike his father, my father drank, smoked and womanized, which may be part of the reason he didn't quite make it to 90 years but died a few months short of that goal. It would be hard to find anyone more fiercely autonomous, more independent, more the master of his fate, the captain of his soul, than my father. All his life until soon after his 85th birthday no one else mattered: he was probably the most selfish man I ever knew. Then rather rapidly, everything changed. He went blind - macular and vascular degeneration did that to him, as it had to his father before him, and likely will to me too in time. He lost his sense of balance, and soon after that, he lost control of his bladder and bowels. What fate could be worse than this for someone so ego-centred! He was reduced to a state of dependency and infantilism requiring nurses to change his diaper, feed, wash and dress him in clean pyjamas. He had chosen to live his final two decades in Malta because of the generous tax laws. The people of Malta are more Catholic than the Pope, so he was lovingly cared for by nursing sisters of a devout and somewhat ascetic order and fed with plentiful quantities of plain and wholesome food that were the obverse of the gourmet meals he had conspicuously enjoyed in his previous life. I know that he lamented his fate, cursing - blaspheming - loudly and often when being moved about in his bed caused apparently excruciating pain in his arthritic spine and neck. He tried to die with dignity but he was acutely aware of the harsh reality that he was condemned to a long drawn-out death. I resemble him in many ways and among these is the high probability that my fate will be similar, despite differences in life style: I don't smoke, drink very moderately nowadays, and have never womanized. If anything these differences might prolong my life well into that period of dependency. Like my father I am an atheist, do not believe in an afterlife: when I die there will be oblivion only, so in this respect, being alive is preferable to being dead and expecting eternal paradise, or eternal damnation or some variation of these alternatives. Curiosity will keep me going if I lose my autonomy before I lose my life. I'm fond of saying that I want to live long enough to find out what my grand-children, and the children or grand-children of a few others among my close friends, do with their lives; and this quite simply is my main, maybe my only reason for desiring a longer time alive than the almost 85 years I've already had. This long period I've been granted, well over four score years, has been overwhelmingly enjoyable, at times almost transcendentally so. Looking forward, I can expect much that will be unpleasant, uncomfortable, perhaps painful. But that curiosity about what will become of the generation next but one after my own will keep me going after all other things that give me pleasure have been taken away. I live on the 11th floor of our condominium apartment building. I've often said that when life ceases to be enjoyable, I'll take a swallow dive off of our balcony. My curiosity will trump that action as far into my future as I can see. Maybe changing circumstances at some future time will alter my view of this, but I doubt it. I don't believe there is an afterlife so it's obviously desirable to make the most of the only life I will have.

Blossom time

The weather gods were kind: the cool, drizzly days lasted long enough to preserve the tulips, daffodils, lilac, and cherry blossom until this holiday weekend. I took all these photos today, all within 1-300 meters of our front door. There are many much lovelier displays further afield all over Ottawa but I'd have to get the car out, negotiate traffic jams and road closures. Life is too short for that. A year ago today I drove Wendy around to see the tulips and cherry blossom at their best, on what turned out to be our final pleasure drive. After that, we drove only to and from the ALS Clinic.

Benefits of a cool, damp spring

I've often been regarded as a bit of a weirdo, out of step with most other people, and I wear this label proudly. Many are complaining about the cool, drizzly weather we have had lately, but I'm not. My contentment with it was reinforced as I drove to my Tai Chi class this morning through a gentle misty sort of rain. This weather is preserving the tulips and cherry blossom which often have wilted and gone altogether by this date. Today the brilliant colours looked almost incandescent, seeming to light up my way along the road beside the Rideau Canal. The huge magnolia tree on the next street north from here hasn't fared quite so well -- its blossoms have wilted and many have fallen. You can't win 'em all. Otherwise I welcome this cool weather, but fear that it will be gone, and many of the tulips with it, by the end of the holiday weekend that's about to begin.

Memoirs again, and other matters

The photo shows Bernice Trollope, her daughter Karen Trollope Kumar and our guide at the old printery on the Niagara River Parkway.
On Friday 13 May, Christina's 25th birthday, I flew Porter Airlines, the one my daughter-in-law Desre says is tops, from Ottawa to Toronto Island Airport. Porter is as good as Desre says it is: how delightful to be pampered again on an airplane! I'd almost forgotten what it feels like. Karen Trollope Kumar met me and drove us both to the Kumar family home in Hamilton. Karen had printed some copies of her memoir, Cloud Messenger, and we spent several hours going over the complete book. I think her memoir of the years that she and Pradeep lived and worked in the Garhwal Himalayas is fascinating and very well written. However, this is a first draft, and inevitably there are a few glitches. I advised her to put the book away for a month at least, then go over it again -- hard advice to follow as I know full well. When I've followed the advice the result has always been an improvement in the quality of the finished product, and I'm sure Karen will discover this too. We didn't spend the whole weekend working on her book. She, her 89-year old mother and I drove to Niagara on the Lake and saw two plays in this year's Shaw Festival. I was sad to see the creeping expansion of NOTL into the surrounding orchards and vineyards; there are new 'developments' (sinister word!) everywhere we looked. But it's still an attractive village and the theatrical company is as good as ever. The Shaw play that we saw was "Heartbreak House" -- one of Shaw's wordy, preachy plays, rather incomprehensible in places, salvaged to some extent by a spectacular set. The other play, by Shaw's contemporary Lennox Robinson, was a very good comedy called "Drama at Inish" and carried me back to my school days when an English teacher who had worked as a stage hand at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, introduced my classmates and me to a whole host of Anglo-Irish poets and playwrights. It was dismally wet and not very warm for which the consolation is that the profusion of flowers, especially the lovely tulips, might flourish longer than they would in the searing heat that Wendy and I have sometimes encountered at NOTL. To escape from the drizzle, we dropped in at the old William Lyon MacKenzie printing works on the Niagara River Parkway, now a small museum. It evokes memories of my favourite Uncle Lester's printery at Orooroo in rural South Australia, where Uncle Lester let me use his linotype machine when I was about 7 or 8 years old, to make a slug of my name so I could stamp it in my books -- some still on my shelves after all these years and multiple moves. The slug is still here somewhere too among a lifetime of pack-rattery. Raman, Karen and Pradeep Kumar's son, is the same age as my grandson Peter; he graduates from McMaster's general arts and sciences program this year and goes straight on to medical school. He is a very impressive young man and provides another reason besides my own grandchildren's future careers, why I'd like to live at least another ten years, so I can see what he decides to do with his life. I briefly saw Sonia Kumar too, and was happy to see how she has improved since I last saw her. She looks comfortable in her own skin; I'm sorry there wasn't a chance to chat to her at greater length. My cleaning lady Sue Ng collected the mail and newspapers while I was away. I was dismayed to find a letter from Canada Revenue Agency demanding a notarized copy of Wendy's death certificate, because I know they already have this -- obviously their left hand knoweth not what their right hand doeth. I suppose in due course all such wrinkles will get sorted out, but it's annoying, even distressing, when this sort of thing happens.

If....

On April 28 I posted a note in this blog about Tim Flannery's new book, Here on Earth; a Natural History of the Planet. Distractions like Retreating at Pembroke last weekend, and many others, delayed me so I've just finished the book this evening. It is powerful, persuasive stuff, eloquently written withal, and a book I will spread among my grandchildren with the hope that they may be among the gallant band in their generation who can undo some of the harm that my generation and many preceding mine, have done to Gaia, planet earth, our only home. The final sentence in the book should be carved above the entrance to every legislature in the world: "...I am certain of one thing -- if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further progress is possible here on earth."

Retreating

On Thursday of last week, I drove to Pembroke, about 150 Km up the Ottawa River with two interesting passengers, all of us bound for Marguerite Centre, a former convent and now among other things a venue for meetings, conferences and the like. While our backs were turned, spring blossoms and leaves exploded all over Ottawa and when we returned on Sunday afternoon colourful beds of tulips and trees laden with magnolia and cherry blossoms, and delicate new green leaves greeted us everywhere. A few days earlier we had advanced on Pembroke to attend a Writers' Retreat, where a small group of us, eleven in all, engaged in intensive discussions about how to write memoirs. Mine are already written. I began in about 1990, revised, rewrote, and added to them about ten years later, and now I want to weave Wendy's version of events into mine wherever I can, using her diaries and letters as source material. I found the retreat, especially the interchange of ideas among all of us who went there to learn how to write memoirs, very helpful. Yet I still have much to learn, and might take a formal course in the autumn, if the course is offered again this year. Last year I was a full time care-giver for Wendy and too emotionally preoccupied to cope with it. After reading Karen Trollope Kumar's memoir of the years that she and her husband Pradeep lived and worked in the Himalayas, and after reading several other memoirs, I'm all fired up to use the techniques of creative non-fiction, especially invented dialogue that is reconstructed from remembered events; although I've long forgotten the actual words spoken by others and me, I can recall the occasions when the conversations occurred, so I know what's required: dialogues that capture the sense of what was said, if not the actual words that were uttered. Memoir writers and others have been doing this since Plato recorded the dialogues of Socrates, so it's hardly a recent innovation, but it's one that if I can use it successfully, will help to breathe life into what I think is now a very dull and boring record of the events of my life. Of course some snatches of conversation are carved into my brain. "Sit down. What are the causes of tetany" was an oral examiner's greeting to me when I failed the examination for membership of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1952. And "Never think thoughts like that if you want to work for the Commonwealth Health Department!" was the unveiled threat of a senior bureaucrat in Canberra when I proposed a modest health care research project that could have answered a worth while question, whether it makes a difference if a qualified surgeon or an experienced GP does straightforward abdominal operations like repairing an inguinal hernia and taking out an inflamed appendix. That bureaucrat went on to tell me that I was there to do what the government told me to do, not to "behave like an academic" -- which I was, because I'd been recruited as a lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, not as a public servant. This threat to my inquiring mind led directly to my family's departure from Australia and our relocation in the academically friendlier atmosphere of the University of Vermont in Burlington, and all the academic progress I've made since 1963. I've wondered sometimes how our lives would have turned out if instead of hostility and negativism, my research proposal had been received with enthusiasm. In fact it was more than 30 years before an answer to the question was forthcoming in Australia. But I digress (or do I?). That unpleasant conversation was a major turning point in life for me and my family. I've mentioned it in my memoirs. Perhaps I should enlarge on that event, add some creative non-fictional dialogue. We didn't hear much about creative non-fiction at the writers' retreat, but its use was implied in what several participants and our facilitator said. Creating 'conversation' from remembered fragments is probably easier than creating invented conversations as most novelists do. I've tried it, and I am not very skillful at doing it. Probably, I hope, I'll improve with practice. (The photo shows our group, with Emily-Jane Hills Orford, our facilitator in a red shirt; and Carl Dow, of Ottawa Independent Writers second from the left, and perhaps it captures our enthusiasm for memoir-writing).

changes

After a wet week, miraculously we had a fine and lovely weekend. I took several gentle strolls through our neighbourhood. The Canal is still reduced to its wintry state, just a puddle at the bottom of an untidy-looking ditch. Usually the lock gates downtown are closed and the Canal is filled before the end of April, but this year I suppose that auspicious event has been postponed because repair work on the walls isn't quite finished. Almost all the gardens near here have crocuses, some have tulips already flowering; we have both in the little patch of garden outside our condo. I heard, but didn't see, at least two robins singing for mates, saw several redwing blackbirds, and saw a large, plump bird in the dove or pigeon family that I've never seen in these parts before. Today it's raining again; well, it's Monday, so who cares? It's also election day, and eerily quiet, as though the nation is holding its breath while we await our fate. It's too much to hope that the right-wing populist, closet fascists who have misruled Canada for the past five years will be flung out of office, but I'm encouraged by the reports of larger numbers of young people voting than ever before. The crazy electoral system here often leads to government by a party that gets only a third of the votes, and so it will probably be again this time when the dust settles. Canada, the USA, and the UK are the only so-called democracies where this bizarre system exists; everyone else uses proportional representation or preferential voting as we had in Australia. If we had that in Canada, the results of this election would be dramatically different, and a truer picture of what people really want. Well, we will know in a few hours whether the divide and rule approach of the incumbents is working. I hope it isn't, hope there is a change for the better. I wrote this yesterday afternoon while people were voting, voting in large numbers. Now the worst has happened. A majority of Canadians have ignored the crimes and misdemeanors of these extreme right-wing populists whose first action when disagreeable facts are presented to them by scientific advisers is to fire the adviser and listen instead to their own ideology which is uninformed by facts. The census is gutted, nuclear safety is determined by sales, the RCMP complaints commission has no commissioner, the chief electoral officer and the parliamentary budget officer are ignored, will probably be fired and political flunkeys will be appointed in place of the skilled advisers who held their offices because of their merit, not their political affiliation. And Canada's international reputation? We have none. We just do what the Israeli government tells us to do, like the USA; decades of trust, our national reputation for impartiality, have been swept away in a region desperate for impartial judgements. Yes, it's a sad day.