What attracted me to Wendy

Jan Wendelken ("Wendy") and John Last earnestly talking on a hillside above Yankalilla beach, South Australia, September 1955

Photo by Louise Zuhrer








There hasn't been a day since she died that I haven't thought about Wendy. I went public with the story of our meeting when Shelagh Rogers, at the time the host of a CBC Radio classical music request program, asked her listeners who had married on St Valentine's Day to describe how they had met. I dashed off a brief account of how I'd picked up two hitch hikers when on my way to play golf one Sunday morning in the spring of 1955, and instead of dropping them 10 minutes later, spent the day driving them around. After that magical day one of the hitch hikers and I wrote increasingly passionate letters to each other until the winter of 1956, when she came back from New Zealand to Adelaide and we courted more conventionally until our marriage on St Valentine's Day 1957. I posted the story I told Shelagh Rogers on my blog on May 2, 2012. Shelagh phoned me to check  a few details, and read my account on our 40th wedding anniversary, on 14 February 1997.  She awarded me the prize (a CD of chamber music by Mozart) for the best story she had received.

It was a miracle that we met. I'd delivered a baby in the small hours of that morning, went back to the hospital at the far edge of our practice to make sure mother and baby were OK, so I was approaching my golf club on a road I'd never used previously to get there, and running an hour late. The two girls were running over an hour later than their intended start that day too, because the landlady of the B&B where they'd stayed the previous night was ill, and Wendy had insisted on tidying the place, washing their sheets and towels, getting fresh milk and bread before they set off. Wendy went up a long way in my estimation when Louise told me that. As we got better acquainted I got used to Wendy's spontaneous  acts of altruism and generosity that were integral parts of her personality.  She never boasted about these acts but in her memoir fragment "The Smile" which was published 2 months ago in Capital Writers, an anthology of stories by Ottawa writers, she casually mentions how she wrapped a TB patient's meals in towels and ran all the way to his hut at the sanatorium, to ensure that his meals reached him hot rather than cold. I wonder how many other student nurses would have done this? 

Everyone who knew Wendy knew how her smile lit up her surroundings. I was instantly captivated by her smile when it lit up my little car as she got on board;  and when she described some of her hitch hiking experiences as we drove on from the place where I'd picked up the two girls, her adventurous spirit and sense of fun attracted me further. Later that day as we sat on a hillside eating our lunch she was near tears as she spoke of the injustices and inequities she had observed in her nursing career. She was talking of this when Louise took the photo at the head of this post. She clearly had the same attitudes and beliefs as I, about what was wrong and what was right in the world. It was then if not sooner that I decided she was the maid for me.  When I began reading her diaries after she died, I was hoping to find remarks pointing to her similar instant attraction to me, but although she writes warmly about me, she doesn't say anything that suggests such powerful emotions as I felt.  But she does in later diary entries during our courtship after she came back to Adelaide.  I'll have to decide whether I should allow anyone else to read her rather steamy 1956 diary...  

John and Wendy about 1997

Photo by Karen Trollope Kumar