From gloomy shadow to bright sunshine

In my previous post I described the rather uncertain first two years of our marriage. The cause of our uneasiness was a combination of Wendy’s depression, her fear of birth defects, her doubts about her competence as a mother, and my developing conviction that despite my fondness for general practice I needed to change the direction in which my career was heading: I needed to refocus on public health sciences, especially epidemiology.

Rebecca and Helen at the beach, 1959

Rebecca with great grannie Last, 1959

Waving to a ship on Sydney Harbour,
Autumn 1960

Fortunately there were many reasons for us to be happy. Despite our troubles, despite the doubts we both experienced, we were bonding, growing closer in innumerable ways. Even when she worried about her fitness as a mother, Wendy was sustained by her sense of fun, her ability to laugh at herself, and more important, to laugh at me, to lift my spirits from dour moods to a cheerful, positive thankfulness for all the ways in which we were blessed.  

Her first pregnancy proceeded smoothly after a brief bout of morning sickness.  One lasting benefit of that morning sickness is that the smell of tobacco smoke on my breath nauseated Wendy: for the first time I had an unassailable motive to quit smoking, and after several unsuccessful attempts since the first epidemiological studies of smoking and lung cancer were published in 1951, this time my incentive to quit was more powerful than the addictive, seductive pull of nicotine. I haven’t smoked since about 7 months before Rebecca was born on December 31, 1957.

Being present during most of Wendy’s labour and for Rebecca’s birth was a powerful bonding experience. I reassured Wendy as Rebecca emerged into the world that our baby was perfectly formed, had none of the stigmata of Down’s syndrome, could cry lustily as Wendy could hear for herself, and possessed facial features of both sides of her ancestry – as did our other two children in due course. Having the father present throughout labour and childbirth was almost never even permitted in 1957, but we both insisted, and beyond doubt it did much to forge secure bonds that united all of us as a family. When we repeated the process at David’s birth 15 months later and Jonathan’s birth 4 years after that, these bonds became truly unbreakable. Wendy and I never lost that conviction of a lifelong bond that held all of us together. In the next ten years of wandering over the surface of the world from one side of it to the other, this conviction that we were an indissoluble unit was very comforting. It gave us the feeling that we were impregnable, could withstand whatever adversity life put in our way. (Of course we had occasional disputes, even very rarely a shouting/screaming argument, but like a summer thunderstorm, these always passed by rapidly, leaving no scars, physical or emotional).

Wendy’s spirits lifted when I left general practice and started my new career in public health sciences. For the first year of this I was a full time student and we lived on my savings. I could have got salaried work in one of the public health departments which would have given me leave to do the lowest level public health training after a few years of service, but I didn’t want to go in that direction: I had ambitions to become a scholar, aspirations to study and do research on some of the public health problems that were prevalent in Australian society. I was intrigued about the obvious differences in illness-related behaviour I had observed in my general practice, between “new Australians” – the post-war immigrants, refugees and displaced persons, voluntary settlers from the British Isles, the Netherlands, Germany, the Baltic states, Italy and Greece. Did these differences have a cultural or ethnic basis? There were enough immigrants from Italy in my general practice population to motivate me to learn to speak Italian so I could communicate better with them. I talked to Wendy about these ideas. She was enthusiastic, supported me whole-heartedly, encouraged me, and contributed her own ideas. I’d begun corresponding with Professor W D Borrie at the Australian National University when I was still in practice at the Western Clinic, and when he offered me a research assistant position I was attracted by the idea of going to ANU as a research worker on social demography in his department. But the salary he could provide was derisory.  I’d also begun to explore the possibility of working in the UK Medical Research Council’s Social Medicine Research Unit as a visiting scholar.  This had the advantage of advanced training in epidemiology. The visiting scholar’s modest stipend was intended for a single man without dependents; I had a wife and two small children, so we had to augment the stipend with what remained of my savings. We were poorer than church-mice during that year in London in 1961-62. Yet we were happier than we had ever been since our marriage. All the dark clouds had rolled away, Wendy demonstrated all her skills and abilities to run a household on almost nothing, we explored all the wonderful free entertainment that London had to offer, Wendy and our two toddlers Rebecca and David made the most of these during the week, I joined in at weekends, and we had a fantastic, deliriously happy time. 

Eating candy floss at Clissold Park fair

Glamour girl Rebecca outside
Buckingham Palace

Beside the Round Pond
Summer 1961

With Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

R & D in our back garden
30 Newington Green

Rebecca beside our snowman
January 1962

On the little bridge at Bourton on the Water

Beside the Thames, looking towards Big Ben

At the end of our year in London in 1961-62 we returned to Australia on another cargo ship carrying 12 passengers, this time boarding in Rotterdam, calling at Antwerp, Marseille, Genoa, Livorno (close to Florence and Pisa), Iskanderen in Turkey, then through the Suez Canal and Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle and Adelaide. I spent a lot of time on that interesting voyage writing up the research I'd been doing, but abundant time remained to enjoy the voyage and the fascinating ports of call, to read to our kids and to make up a story to tell them when we'd all begun to tire of hearing yet again about Winnie the Pooh and his friends, Mole and Ratty, Toad of Toad Hall, and Charlotte, Wilbur and Fern. 

Wendy and Rebecca striding past
 the Leaning Tower of Pisa

Wendy and Rebecca in Florence,
Ponte Vecchio in background

Iskanderen, Turkey

What a pity it was, though, that our kids were too young to retain any more than hazy memories of that wonderful year and the sea voyages at each end of it!