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.