Meeting and Courtship

On Sunday September 25, 1955, about 9 a.m. I was off duty in the group medical practice where I was the most junior doctor. I was looking forward to playing golf with three friends at a modest golf course on the southern outskirts of Adelaide, South Australia.

 

Almond trees in blossom near where John Last picked up Jan Wendelken
and Louise Zuhrer on Sunday September 25, 1955. The yellow flowers are the common weed, sour-sobs
(I took this photo a few days after the fateful day when I picked up the two hitch hikers)

It was a lovely spring morning, sun shining, flowers blooming, almond blossom bursting forth, paddocks painted yellow with sour-sobs or purple with salvation Jane, song-birds nesting, magpies yodeling, kookaburras laughing crazily. Soon after I set off on an unfamiliar road to my golf course I picked up two hitch hikers. In those days not long after the end of the war and of petrol rationing, we picked up hitch hikers.  I had hitch hiked in England a year or two before so I had a soft spot for the custom. These two introduced themselves: Louise Zuhrer from Zurich, Switzerland and Jan Wendelken from Christchurch, New Zealand. They were nurses who had just completed a year at Princess Margaret Children’s Hospital in Perth, Western Australia, were aiming to explore as much as they could of Australia in 6 weeks before returning to their homelands.

They were on the wrong road for their intended destination, so I said I would take them to a corner where they could cut across to the road they needed. But in the 10 minutes we took to reach that corner I was so captivated by Jan, the fair-haired New Zealand girl with glasses, that instead of dropping them I offered to drive them myself. I spent the day showing them the dairy farming and wine growing country between Adelaide and the south coast.

It became the most magical day of my life. The spring sunshine was perfect, everything sparkled in the sunshine, and so did our conversation as we told each other who we were, what we had done with our lives to that point, what we hoped for in the future. It had got quite hot by mid-day, so I shed my heavy winter pullover and rolled up my sleeves when we stopped at the little town of Yankalilla to buy pasties and lemonade for our lunch.  Louise took a photo of Jan and me as we sat, earnestly talking, on the side of a hill above the beach.

Jan Wendelken and John Last on a hillside aboveYankalilla
Beach, Sunday September 25, 1955

When Jan got home to New Zealand, she and I wrote increasingly affectionate letters to each other until the winter of 1956, when she came back to Australia and we courted more conventionally until our marriage on St Valentine's Day, February 14, 1957.  

Many members of the Wendelken family were nicknamed Wendy; during our exchange of letters, which soon evolved into something like an old-fashioned 19^th century courtship by correspondence, Jan became Wendy, which I reasoned would be a good way to preserve much of her family name after we married. I think she might have had the same thought. She was Wendy ever afterwards to me and to my family and our friends, Janet or Jan only to her family and surviving childhood friends in New Zealand.

Meeting as we did was due to blind chance, a fluke, a miracle. I'd delivered a baby in the small hours of that morning, went back to the hospital at the far edge of our practice catchment area, 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; my usual playing partners would long since have given up waiting and would have gone ahead without me. Jan and Louise were over an hour later than their intended start that day too, because the landlady of the Bed & Breakfast where they'd stayed the previous night was ill, and Jan had insisted on tidying the place, washing their sheets and towels, getting fresh milk and bread before they set off. Jan went up a long way in my opinion when Louise told me this. Later when we knew each other better, I got used to her spontaneous acts of kindness to strangers that were an integral part of her personality.  

All her friends knew how her smile lit up her surroundings.  The tributes I received after she died included comments like this one: “Her smile was so infectious! It was like a belly laugh that came from somewhere deep inside her, a sense of joy that shone from behind her eyes. Everyone she knew basked in the warmth of her personality and sense of (often wicked) fun.” I was instantly enchanted by her smile when it lit up my little car as she got into it.  And when she described some of her hitch hiking experiences as we drove on, 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 that hung above the head of our bed throughout the 54 years of our marriage. She clearly had the same liberal-left values and beliefs as I, about what was wrong and what was right in the world. It may have been then 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. I didn’t find anything that suggests such powerful emotions as I felt, but she did confess to an affinity towards me in some of her earliest letters to me from New Zealand.

Here is Jan Wendy’s diary for Sunday September 25, 1955:

“A glorious day. Got breakfast in bed for [sick landlady]. Took bus to Darlington. Left camera on bus! Picked up by John Last in little Austin, drove south on coast road, lunch at Yankalilla overlooking sea. Drove to Cape Jervis, looked over narrow sea to Kangaroo Island. On to Victor Harbor. A beautiful drive, rolling hills, native bush, silver and blue sea, kookaburras, rosellas, and good company. Back to Adelaide through forested ranges, past large reservoir. Out to John Last’s home, 238 Melbourne Street, North Adelaide. A very nice person & mother who is most hospitable."

 

Horse-tram on the causeway at Victor Harbor, 2005

On that magical spring day we drove eventually to Victor Harbor, where there is a little island connected to the mainland by a causeway along which an ancient horse-drawn tram plods patiently back and forth during the tourist season. Not that day though, it was too early in the year for the tourist season. So we walked across the causeway and around the island, gazing at huge ocean breakers all the way from Antarctica, dodging the spray as they beat against the rocks on the exposed southern side of the island. 

On the way back to Adelaide the two girls were singing as we drove along, and I did something I'd never done in my life before, I joined in with my hopelessly out of tune voice. By then I knew I definitely wanted to see much more of Jan.  Before we parted at the end of the day we exchanged addresses, promising to write to each other.

My first letter to her, timed to welcome her home, revealed the emotional impact on me of meeting her:  “I have thought of you often in the last few weeks… That was one of the happiest days I can remember, not because it took me back to the carefree days of my own vagabondage, nor because it was such an ideal day to go wandering in the country, but because you and Louise (especially you) were two of the most delightful and charming girls I have ever met.  I am deeply thankful for the odd way of chance, or fate, that took me along that rather out of the way route to the golf links just at the moment you were waiting for some kind stranger to pass by.  I wish you didn’t live so far away though!  I’d dearly love to see more of you, get to know you a whole lot better than was possible in a day.”

Jan Wendelken wrote her first letter to me on the ship that took her from Sydney to Wellington so it was her second and third letters that contained her reactions to what I’d written: “How very sweet of you to have a welcome home letter waiting for me... “  But she went on to show more caution and restraint in her letters, although paradoxically complaining in her third letter that she’d waited a long time to hear again from me:  “For three weeks I have been eagerly scanning the letter rack and I had convinced myself that our correspondence had died a natural death….  It makes me so happy to hear from you …”  (The reason for the gap in our correspondence was an epidemic of respiratory infections that had all of us in the Western Clinic running off our feet from dawn until late at night). But she went on to say “I mistrust swiftly moving events … and any sentimental or romantic thoughts, however sweet to hear, mustn’t spoil our relationship at present.”

Nevertheless I couldn’t, didn’t even try to suppress the affection I felt, affection that grew stronger as her letters eloquently displayed her command of language, her wit and intellect, her empathy for others, and most important, her interest in me, and as our letters continued, her increasing affection for me.

As related in the two previous posts, Wendy and I wrote many letters to each other between November 1955 and May 1956, about 125 altogether. From early June 1956 until our marriage on February 14 1957 we had a more conventional courtship. Our happy marriage lasted for almost 55 years until Wendy’s death on November 15, 2010.