Reading aloud to our small children

In a lifetime of innumerable pleasures, the richest pleasure of all was reading aloud to our small children. Wendy and I shared this pleasure but I did most of the reading when I was home to do it.  When our first two children were small, I didn’t get involved much in evening or weekend meetings and hardly ever in out of town meetings, so I was almost always available, giving Wendy a chance to take time off from her full-time job of child rearing and home making – she did by far the lion’s share of all other aspects of rearing our first two kids, as well as everything else.

We began reading to Rebecca and David before they could understand the stories we told them.  On MV Pretoria, the ship that took us from Adelaide to London in 1961, we had some simple verse books, The Little Engine That Could, The Cat in the Hat with doggerel rhymes and nonsensical stories that made them (and us) laugh out loud.  By then Rebecca was 4½ and able to get the point of Doctor Suess’s crazy humour.  My favourites were A A Milne’s poems, When we were very young and Now we are six. We had these in books given to me in the early 1930s, when I was the target age for them. I began to read these poems to Rebecca and David when she was 4 and David wasn't quite 3.  Rebecca appreciated and laughed out loud at some of these poems and so did David, probably not with full understanding but imitating his big sister.

We were really poor in 1961-62, four of us trying to survive in London on a slim scholarship stipend intended for a single man. It was a challenge to pay for food. Food for the mind, however, is as important as food for the body. We bought a few good books for our kids, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, and The Magic Pudding. We read these over and over, at least twice on MV Morelia, the ship returning to Australia in 1962 after our year in London. By then the kids and I who did almost all the reading, were getting a bit bored with these much loved stories.  [Prompted by the kids I made up a story to tell them when we were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, half way between the Red Sea and the coast of Western Australia. The story was about two little children I called Jennifer and Christopher, and the talking parrot they got in a dusty pawnshop near the wharves of an Australian seaport. The parrot had once sat on the shoulder of the leader of a pirate gang, a villainous one-legged ship’s cook.  When I told the story to Rebecca and David I didn’t give him a name but he was obviously Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island. I’d almost forgotten about this story until I was reminded of it when reading Wendy’s diary of our voyage home to Australia in 1962.  I began to write the story down for the first time in the summer of 2014].

Reading aloud to our children became a precious evening ritual during our years in Edinburgh. We had a comfortable, capacious chair with arm rests wide enough to accommodate a child’s bottom. We established a habit we all looked forward to. With Rebecca sitting on one arm of the chair, David on the other, and Jonathan on my lap, I read a succession of classics. I think we began with the four I’ve already mentioned, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, and The Magic Pudding. By 1965 it had been long enough since we’d last read these that the kids and I were ready, indeed eager, to hear them again. And of course Jonathan wasn’t born when we’d read them on the ship on the way back to Australia in 1962.  The other books I read to the kids were an honour roll of great children’s literature: Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-glass, A Christmas Carol, some of Hans Andersen’s stories, The Borrowers, then moving on to middle childhood, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Little Women, Jo’s Boys (two of Wendy’s school prize books); Gulliver’s Travels, King Solomon’s Mines, Oliver Twist (which we abandoned: it asked too much of our kids’ attention spans); Arthur Ransome's stories about boating in the Lake District, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. The Sword in the Stone may have come next; then we began on Tolkein. Our collective pleasure survived through The Hobbit, but by the time we got to Frodo’s adventures when he and his brave companions set off to retrieve the Ring, Rebecca and David were both reading well on their own. The Fellowship of the Ring was too exciting, they were both too impatient, to wait for the evenings of shared reading and listening that I enjoyed at least as much as they did.  By the time we came to the third volume of Tolkein’s trilogy, I was reading just to Jonathan, although from time to time one or both of the two older children would come into the living room to eavesdrop as I read the latest installment of Frodo’s adventures. 

We talked a little about the message or the moral in some of these children’s stories. I tried, unsuccessfully I’m afraid, to show Rebecca and David the rigorous logic behind Lewis Carroll’s/ Charles Dodgson’s apparent craziness.  I had more success talking about the stupidity and futility of going to war over whether eggs should be opened at the sharp or the blunt end – or going to war over almost any of the causes for which tyrants, and many elected leaders, have forced their subjects to fight.  

Not long after we reached that stage in family evolution we migrated again, from Edinburgh to Ottawa, and for a few precious years family togetherness prevailed in several other ways.  I'll say more about that in another post.

Time with the family

Politicians who leave office involuntarily often say they are departing to spend more time with their family.  I know whereof they speak. After 1965 as my professional life got increasingly crowded with research and teaching and cluttered with out of town meetings, I resented the way my work was eroding leisure evening hours and weekend days I wanted to share with Wendy and our children. Looking back on it however, I believe I managed the balance between work and family life well, if more by happenstance than careful planning.

The balancing act began imperceptibly and without thought on my part or Wendy’s. In early 1960 we drove our Holden station wagon from Adelaide to Sydney where I did my first year of public health training. We traveled leisurely, staying overnight with friends Jan and Alan Fry on their farm near Bordertown, then at motels along our route. We repeated the process on the return journey to Adelaide at the end of the academic year in November. Those two road trips, each of 3 or 4 days, thrust us all together at close quarters, Wendy and I on the front seat, Rebecca and David in the back.

Near Canberra en route between Sydney
and Adelaide, 1960

Rebecca supervising Alan Fry and his son John

Those were happy times, the whole family at close quarters for several days, two adults, two tiny tots and Helen our dachshund bitch. Wendy and I were aware of the stress on our two toddlers and bribed them shamelessly with frequent doses of candy and ice-cream. At weekends after we reached Sydney we explored the ocean surfing beaches and the spectacular harbour. Rebecca and David loved to guddle in the sand, so we spent many leisure hours at the ocean beaches, some on the crowded harbour beaches. I’d have been bored if I hadn’t got so much vicarious pleasure from watching our children digging in the sand during those all-together family times.

In 1961 we all traveled to England where I had a 12-month visiting scholar position in the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit in London. As almost everyone did until the late 1960s we traveled by ship; air travel was prohibitively expensive in those days. We chose to travel on a cargo ship carrying 12 passengers, rather than a regular passenger liner. It was an inspired choice. Wendy and I had a marvelous time, meals at the captain’s table with a cabin steward minding the kids while we ate. The cabin steward was a rather plump young woman and one day David, who was teething, bit her arm. She carried tooth marks for a fortnight and we were too poor to tip her as generously as we ought to have done. In all other respects that sea voyage was a wonderful experience and helped to bond our family. 

Wendy and Rebecca stride past the leaning tower

Wendy and Rebecca beside the Arno
and the Ponte Vecchio, 1962 

The return journey to Adelaide in 1962 further strengthened the family bonds with the added bonus of interesting ports of call. We boarded our ship in Rotterdam and took on more cargo at Antwerp, Marseille, Genoa, Livorno (near Pisa and Florence with time to visit both) and the Turkish port of Iskanderum, at the North-East corner of the Mediterranean. All were interesting, child-friendly ports, and we had plenty of time to explore them. 

Michelangelo's David

R and D on a Marseille sidewalk, 1962

At sea I began the much loved custom of reading to the kids from Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web and The Magic Pudding. (When we ran out of kids’ books in the Indian Ocean, I made up the story I began to write down for the first time 52 years later in 2014).

Our 3 kids on deck, Brisbane

Climbing to the upper deck, 1964

In January-February 1964 we had another long sea voyage, from Sydney to Brisbane, across the Pacific through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, Vera Cruz, Mexico, then up the eastern seaboard of the USA. I signed on as ship's surgeon and got a free passage with greatly reduced fares for the family - and luxury accommodation in a spacious air-conditioned cabin. There were three kids now, the youngest, Jonathan, six months old and very fragile, born with a life threatening congenital heart defect.  He wasn’t given much chance of surviving but reconstructive heart surgery a few years later was spectacularly successful. Nearly 50 years later he is still going strong. I’ve described that sea voyage in detail elsewhere.  We were en route to Burlington, Vermont where I’d been invited to become assistant professor of epidemiology and community medicine at the medical college of the University of Vermont. We bought a Volkswagen van to get about with space for all the paraphernalia small children need, and in my time off we explored the North-East corner of the USA rather thoroughly. That was more family bonding time.   

A year later a choice between two invitations didn’t challenge us: should I take the family to live in the ancient city of Edinburgh, Scotland, or to Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, 50 miles from Washington DC, with a salary twice as high?  In Baltimore we’d have to live at least an hour’s commute from my office, probably more.  Long working hours, frequent evening meetings and a lot of travel to distant research sites would reduce family time drastically. Besides that, we were out of sync with American values and customs like the use of guns to solve problems.

Jonathan beside our VW camper at Loch Lomond, 1967 

In Edinburgh we bought another VW bus, this one equipped as a camper. In fact we bought two, because the first one didn’t accommodate all of us when we camped. We traded it in for one with a lift-up roof, which provided space for Rebecca and David to sleep above us in bunks, and delicate little Jonathan slept at the back on the flat area above the engine.  Boomer, our Labrador, slept on the floor below the queen-size bed for Wendy and me, adding fragrance to the air with his uniquely pungent doggy farts. 

What times we had in that VW camper van!  We got to know very well the ancient city of Edinburgh and its environs. We visited Edinburgh Castle more times than I can count and never tired of it. At weekends we went several times to Loch Lomond and on to the west coast, gazing out from the Argyle hills to the islands in and near the Firth of Clyde.  Our kids loved pottering about in the ruins of mediaeval castles, Dirleton on the Firth of Forth, Tantallan on the North Sea coast near the lovely little fishing village of Dunbar, and the grim bottle dungeon beside the castle at St Andrews. A bottle dungeon is so called because it is shaped like a bottle, a narrow neck at ground level and underground below it, slimy inward sloping walls no miscreant could possibly climb, opening out to a level space at the bottom, large enough to hold perhaps a dozen or twenty criminals who remained there until they died. Bottle dungeons appealed to David’s macabre mind; but he never told us whom it was he’d like to incarcerate.   

Wendy and kids at Dirleton Castle, 1968

We had some truly wonderful weekend excursions in our VW camper van. We had a few disasters too. There was the weekend it never stopped raining, a soft, but infinitely penetrating rain that soaked anyone foolish enough to venture out of shelter for even a minute or so – as all of us had to from time to time to inspect the toilets some distance away. It was the season of midges too. Midges are tiny flying insects that particularly troubled Wendy because they got behind her glasses to feast on the moisture in the corners of her eyes. The kids were miserable and grizzly. Boomer tried to drive the midges away by emitting pungent farts even more poisonous than usual.  As we drove away over the pass called Rest and Be Thankful at the end of that weekend fiasco, all of us smelling like wet dogs, Wendy and I resolved that next summer we’d cross the sea to the continent of Europe, away from all the rain and the midges, to lands of warm sunshine, Mediterranean beaches, bountiful fruits, tasty cheeses and wines fit for the gods.

Wendy about to prepare lunch,
Austrian Tyrol, 1967

Swiss Alps from Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse

We had European VW camping holidays in 1967 and 1969, two near-perfect experiences, holidays replete with memories enough for several lifetimes. We took much the same route for both: south from Edinburgh on the A1/M1 to Harwich, car ferry to ‘S Gravenhaage (“Hook of Holland”) and along the Rhine to south Germany, the Black Forest, then along the autobahn through Bavaria to the Austrian Tyrol, over precipitous passes, Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse, Furkapass, St Bernard’s Pass, down into northern Italy, eastward to Venezia, on a further 30 Km beyond Venice to the wide sandy beach at Iesolo. This was a perfect beach for small children with calm warm seas to adults’ hip level 15-20 meters from the shore, like an enormous paddle pool. We camped everywhere at the very well set up European camp grounds.  We stayed 7-10 days at the Iesolo camp, eating fresh fruit, spicy barbecued chicken from the camp store, bread and gorgonzola which David loved as much as I do, though fortunately he didn’t acquire a taste for the wine that Wendy and I consumed by the flask.  In 1969 we went on from Iesolo to camp by the Arno at Florence, re-introduced Rebecca and David to Piazza della Signore, the statues in the loggia, Michelangelo’s David outside the Palazzo, and the delicious food of Tuscany. We went to Sienna which the kids enjoyed more than Florence because there were no crowds, and San Giminiano with its towers, and Poggibonsi because the name captivated the kids and because it’s whence comes the best chianti.  We took 4-5 days to reach Italy from Holland, and a week to get back via Switzerland, camping usually in places noted for their beauty, artistic and cultural treasures, historical significance, or all of these qualities. We visited Mad King Ludwig’s castle at Neueschwanstein, some of the castles along the spectacular fortified stretch of the Rhine, had a brief cruise on a Rhine steamer, visited Venice and had a ride in a gondola. Wendy and I stored memories to last a lifetime, knowing by the time of the 1969 holiday that we would soon be leaving Edinburgh for Ottawa, uncertain whether we’d ever have another chance to see these wonderful places.

Dining al fresco, Florence, 1969

Jonathan at our camp in Iesolo

David in the sea at Iesolo

In a gondola, Venice, 1969

  

Those European camping holidays were uniformly happy times, although not 100% happy 100% of the time.  Wendy’s feet are marred by unsuccessful bunion surgery when she was a teenager. For the first 25 or so years of our married life I spent many hours waiting for her in shoe shops where she tried in vain to find elegant shoes to fit. In Venice she insisted against all my protestations in buying a costly pair of fashionable sandals. A few days later she complained that they pinched her toes: she couldn’t wear them any more.  I made an ill-considered sarcastic remark, whereupon she erupted like a volcano and thus began the worst quarrel ever in our 55 years together. The kids who observed it all were terrified that the parents they loved were breaking up forever. It blew over like a passing summer storm after an hour. Wendy and I forgot it and moved on, but months later a remark of Rebecca’s reminded us how impressionable children can be, how easy it is for them to become emotionally disturbed by seeing and hearing their parents fight. I knew this well of course from scrappy memories of the fights in my parents’ doomed marriage.  Wendy and I were blessed by a harmonious union in which that tumultuous dispute on our last day in Iesolo was a rare blemish. We soon forgot it, buried it under innumerable happy and even hilarious memories, some captured in photos illustrating this memoir fragment.

Here are a few fragments of happier memory:

On a one-lane track in the west of Scotland we came over a hummock to be confronted by shaggy highland cattle, one of them barely 2 meters away on the track glaring us down, its long prehistoric horns aimed menacingly at us. We couldn’t advance until it got out of our way, which it took interminable time to do.

Immobilized in a traffic jam on the autostrada near Milan, David was overcome by an irresistible urge to void his bowels.  We had a miniature potty for Jonathan so David was obliged to perch precariously upon this. Somehow in the jerks of frequent stops and starts he managed to do what he had to do without spilling anything, despite filling the tiny potty almost to the rim.

Driving desperately to reach Harwich for the early morning ferry, we couldn’t find the campground where we’d planned to stay the night before embarking. Darkness descended. We found an open space that appeared to be common land, and tucked in for the night, R and D above us, J behind us atop the engine. We were awakened at dawn by heavy trucks grinding their gears as they tried to pass our camper van to enter the landfill site where we’d partially blocked the entrance.

Camped next to us at Loch Lomond on that infamous wet weekend were a young couple who arrived on a motor bike and set up a tiny pup tent with commendable efficiency. All we saw of them after that was a hand and arm that emerged from the tent to flip the steak or sausage they grilled on a small spirit stove. The tent was too small for them to stand up but Wendy and I thought they looked randy enough not to be interested in standing up anyway. They probably enjoyed their weekend more than we enjoyed ours. 

On the autobahn outside Cologne we wanted to find a quieter road. Wendy consulted our excellent road map and directed me to an exit. We found ourselves to be not on a road but on a wide pathway in a municipal park with law-abiding Germans pushing babies in strollers, gazing disapprovingly at these barbaric Britishers who couldn’t tell a road from a pedestrian path.  

We were camped in Bavaria during the first moon landing; near our VW camper bus was a German caravan with all the latest bells and whistles, including a TV.  It was a small screen and black and white, with commentary in German that I translated as best I could for Wendy and our kids - and it turned out, for dozens of others in the rather large crowd that gathered to see this spectacle. We watched for well over an hour, quite late in the evening, keeping the kids up long past their regular bed time. It was a lovely, warm, velvety summer night with a full moon. It gave all of us memories to last a lifetime.

More photos to finish off --

Bath time on MV Pretoria (1961)

Rebecca's dolls' party in our cabin
on MV Morelia (1962)

Admiring scenery of Suez Canal (1962)

Heavy seas off Queensland (1964)

David, Rebecca, Wendy in Ship's Pool (1964)

Rebecca flirting with 2nd Engineer

Windswept mid-Pacific

Getting Hallowe'en pumpkin
Northern Vermont 1964

Souvenirs of Vera Cruz

Winter in Vermont 1964-65

Last's patented ice yacht on Lake Champlain,
winter 1964-65

Tantallan castle ruins and Bass Rock

Wendy and David beside lagoon, Venice, 1967

Ahab's Wife

Somewhere in the rich prose of Herman Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick, there is a short paragraph in which Melville tells his readers that Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, has a wife. Sena Jeter Naslund, distinguished teaching professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, constructed from that brief allusion the story of Una Spencer, the Kentucky farm girl who became Ahab's Wife. I remember reading reviews of Ahab's Wife when it came out in 1999. The New York Times rated it one of the best books of the year. For the past few days I've been reading Ahab's Wife with pleasure, admiration and wonder. It is a magnificently imagined picaresque novel that follows Una Spencer from early adolescence to middle age, from her parents' farm in Kentucky to her aunt and uncle's home on an island off the Massachusetts coast where they tend the lighthouse. Una was schooled in Shakespeare and Keats by her mother, and by her early teens her mind is well formed, full of ideas and independent, sceptical thoughts. She is attracted to two young men, Kit Sparrow and Giles Bonebright, who come to repair the lighthouse. She follows them to New Bedford, disguises herself as a boy and goes to sea with them on a whaling ship, the Sussex, signing on as the captain's cabin boy. One day she glimpses Captain Ahab, master of the Pequod, through the captain's telescope when the two ships are sailing close together. Her keen eyes and excellent vision lead to her task as lookout for whales from the vantage point of the crow's nest high on the ship's mast. Una and the two young men are appalled by the bloody barbarity of whaling but accept it as a necessary part of the American economy. Then the Sussex is rammed by an aggressive whale - perhaps Moby Dick, though it's never stated - and sinks. Una, Kit and Giles, the captain, the captain's little son, and some sailors drift for many days in an open boat. All but Una, Kit and Giles die, or are killed and eaten, before the three survivors are rescued by another ship, the Albatross. Giles falls or jumps from the mast into the sea and drowns. Kit and Una transfer from the Albatross to the Pequod which is homeward bound to Nantucket; they are married at sea by Captain Ahab, but Kit goes mad and after arriving at Nantucket, Una survives by sewing and helping a couple who run an inn on the outskirts of the town. She meets Captain Ahab again and after a whirlwind courtship, marries him. He establishes her in his substantial but almost empty mansion with enough funds to furnish it comfortably. Overnight Una becomes a wealthy woman. She goes to Boston with her neighbour the judge as escort to buy furniture for Ahab's mansion, meets the journalist and feminist Margaret Fuller, and through her meets Ralph Waldo Emerson and other notable New England intellectuals both real and imaginary. Other memorable characters populate this long, opulent literary fiction: a runaway slave girl, a dwarf slave catcher, the Mitchell father and daughter who are amateur scientists on Nantucket. Una is a fascinating young woman: highly intelligent, eager to learn much more than the secure foundation of Shakespeare and Keats she had from her mother, outgoing, adventurous, capable.  

Novels populated by characters invented from the background figures in great literary masterpieces have a special appeal to me. I've tried my hand at writing one myself. The parrot that sat on Long John Silver's shoulder in Robert Louis Stephenson's Treasure Island is the hero - heroine, actually - in the children's story I've been working on for the past year or so. Many others have tried, few have succeeded. Lloyd Jones succeeds in Mister Pip, but this is loosely linked more to Charles Dickens than to Pip in Great Expectations. Sena Jeter Naslund has succeeded brilliantly. I found Ahab's Wife as richly erudite as Moby Dick, easier to read (like others with whom I've discussed it, I found Moby Dick best taken in small doses when I read it 50-60 years ago and life's too short for a second reading). I'll be recommending Ahab's Wife to all my friends who love books and reading. 

Our Souls at Night

A few years ago I read and admired Plainsong. I admired the writing: not a wasted word, not a superfluous word in it. It's a simple story about ordinary people and their ordinary lives. At the time I had a great pile of other books on the bedside table, so I passed on without further ado. I didn't even register consciously the name of the author. 

Now I have. The author was Kent Haruf. I was intrigued about the provenance of his family name until I discovered in his obituary that it is the Americanized spelling of a German name which challenged many who saw it written but couldn't pronounce it correctly. He was an eminent writer, winner of a Wallace Stegner Award, a PEN-Hemingway Award among other distinctions. His final book, published in 2015 just after his death aged 71, is Our Souls at Night. This is a beautiful little book, prose like poetry, a keeper that will go on the shelves with other books I treasure. The story is set in Holt, the fictional Colorado town where all Kent Haruf's novels are set - all of which I now feel impelled to read. Our Souls at Night  describes a year or so late in the life of Addie Moore, an elderly widow who calls on her neighbour Louis Waters and invites him into her bed, not for what my beloved Wendy called wee romps, but for company, for pillow talk, and as she gets to know him better, to hold her hand as she drifts off to sleep. In that small town where everyone knew everyone else, they had known each other all their lives. Some are scandalized by the behaviour of this elderly pair, some are envious, some perhaps admire Addie and Louis.  Louis's wife had been Addie's good friend until her death from cancer. Addie's son Gene's marriage is breaking up and her 6-year old grandson Jamie comes to stay. He cries himself to sleep, so he too shares Addie's king-size bed. Louis gets Jamie a dog. After a few months, Gene and his wife try again to save their marriage; Jamie and the dog go home. Gene is ashamed about his mother Addie's 'immoral' relationship with Louis; he moves  her to an assisted living residence. After that Addie and Louis have occasional, secretive phone conversations, secretive because Gene disapproves. This is a simple, commonplace story about ordinary people, joyful and sad like life itself. Kent Haruf wrote only six small novels: it's a slender portfolio; but if each is as perfectly polished as this, there will be much pleasure in store when I read all of them.