Wendy's wordplay

I've been thinking about Wendy and word-play. It was one of the first things that attracted me to her. Word-play and her lovely smile. Within minutes after I picked up those two hitch hikers on Sunday September 25, 1955, Wendy said something in such a way, using such words, that from then on for the rest of that magical day, she had my full attention. She began talking about hitch hiking at first, saying how much more pleasant it was in my cosy little car than in the noisy cab of a transport truck, to have a real conversation in which we could all hear each other clearly. She described a few of her hitch hiking experiences. The way she spoke and even more, what she said, led me to decide not to drop her and her fellow hitcher Louise a few minutes later. They were on the wrong road for their intended destination that day. I'd told them when I picked them up that I could drop them at a convenient cross road ten minutes along my route. Instead I scrapped my golf and spent the whole day and the evening with them. I showed them a little of my favourite small corner of Australia: the dairy-farming and wine-growing country between Adelaide and the south coast, and a bit of the south coast between Cape Jervis and Victor Harbour. Sixty years later I can't remember her exact words or the sequence of the topics of our conversation that day but at the time they captivated me utterly. Her wonderful way with words, and her lovely smile, bewitched me and led 17 months later to our happy, fulfilling marriage which lasted almost 55 years. (She told me a few years after we were safely married that she'd been disconcerted to discover when I first got out of my car, that I was the same height as she. Sitting down I evidently looked as if I was taller. Fortunately she wasn't too discouraged by that revelation, even if she did sometimes say it was unfortunate that I was a midget. Her brother and her father were both 6 feet tall).  

Wendy conversing with John above the beach at Yankalilla,
South Australia on the day we met, Sunday 9/25/1955

She had a witty, sometimes wicked, sometimes bawdy way with words. When we were courting we were out to dinner one evening with friends, acquaintances really, a couple about our age who were just back from a winter holiday in the snow country. Someone asked how to pronounce that word for sliding downhill in the snow on long sticks, was it pronounced ski-ing or shi-ing?  Wendy said to the rather predatory blond lass, my friend's companion, looking at her hand on my arm as she spoke, "I can see that you're more interested in he-ing than she-ing." Our friendship with that couple cooled somewhat after that evening.

We spent most of our honeymoon at a posh resort hotel on the south coast. Television had very recently come to Australia in 1957, so there was only one TV, in a special TV viewing room, and in the evenings most of the hotel's occupants sat bewitched in front of the small screen. A bodice-ripping version of Robin Hood was playing, an episode in which Friar Tuck was a prisoner of the Sheriff of Nottingham, watched in rapt silence by an audience mostly of middle-aged women of the twin-set and pearls variety. Wendy was into Spoonerisms at that time, saying, for instance, Beggs and Aycon for Eggs and Bacon. Without thinking she uttered a variation of a Spoonerism that penetrated the entire room and greatly upset the twin-set and pearls sorority, choosing a moment for this when the TV sound track was silent. Probably the fact that we were on our honeymoon influenced what she said, "I'm not interested in Friar Tuck. I'd rather try a fuck." We left the TV viewing room hastily. Fortunately it was our last night in that hotel. Of course in those days the f-word was completely beyond the pale, not a meaningless punctuation point in teenage conversation as it is now. Throughout our married life, she often seasoned her conversation with earthy remarks and occasionally with unprintable expletives, a legacy perhaps of her former life as a nurse, or more likely just part of her sparkling personality.

Backing up, let me say a little about Phase One of our courtship, our exchange of letters, 125 letters in all, between our initial one-day meeting and Wendy's return to Australia 8 months later. Her letters to me were lively, funny, vividly descriptive, very entertaining to read. My letters to her were rather dull, I think: full of high-falutin language, vacuous philosophy, and impractical plans to go over to New Zealand to get to know her better. And they were increasingly amorous. The amorous tone worked though: in June 1956 she phoned me - an international phone call, a big deal, a really huge deal, in those days - to say she'd arranged a paediatric nursing job in Adelaide, was flying Christchurch to Melbourne on June 7; could I meet her flight and bring her back to Adelaide? Could I ever! On the drive back to Adelaide, a day and a half in those days, we talked nonstop, filling some of the knowledge gaps that remained about each other despite our prolific exchange of letters: most of our letters were 8, 10 even 12 closely written pages. I'm tempted to quote from them but if I got started, how could I stop? Sometime I'll post a few more edited excerpts from them on this blog.

Her facility with words came out in her poetry, only a little of which survives.  She often wrote witty little verses in her letters to her mother and sister in New Zealand. After they both died we asked Wendy's nieces to send us those letters if they still had them. Alas, they didn't: Philistines all, they hadn't kept any of Wendy's letters to them. The poems we published in Selected Works of Janet Wendy Last in 2009 are all we have, just a small fragment of her lifetime creative output.

Wendy on August 16, 1956, the day we got engaged

Reminiscing about Wendy when we celebrated her life soon after she died, I didn't tell that story about Friar Tuck. It would have been unsuitable for that occasion, more suitable for our 50th wedding anniversary banquet in 2007 if we'd thought of it. In fact, I don't recall ever telling it before; but like so many other wonderful, unforgettable things she said, that off-colour remark was typical of her and it endeared her to me indelibly.

                       (Recycled and expanded from my Facebook page)

I considered rounding out this post with a selection of photos of Wendy, but I've already posted many of my favourites, on November 27 2010, less than a fortnight after she died.   Here's one I've never posted before:  Here are Wendy and me larking about on a sofa at the home of our dear friends Karen Trollope Kumar and Pradeep Kumar in Hamilton, some time in the late 1990s.  Photo by Karen.