Memoir - Corpus

War injuries – they ripple on

23 April 2018 5 Comments

Sue Walthert

Physician, poet and soldier John McCrae (1872-1918)

The moving poem “In Flanders Fields” was written in 1915 by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae for the men he buried in Ypres, Belgium, during World War 1. Recently our Flagstaff Community Choir has been singing the lyrics. In the second verse, a drum takes up the beat and the words connect with me.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

My Grandfather Pops, an ANZAC soldier, marched in Flanders fields and in Gallipoli. He was decorated twice for bravery, imprisoned once for forgery and twice badly wounded. He returned home, his life muddied by war. He tried to wash that mud away – unfortunately, with alcohol. His life was one of suffering and sadness. That suffering is still felt through the generations.

Diagnosis: papyrophile.

23 April 2018 2 Comments

Dad was a papyrophile; he loved paper. Not necessarily what was written on it, but the feel of it, the size, length and shape of it. He viewed paper in its various forms in a way that most people don’t: as the end-point of a long, careful process of ruling, sizing, cutting, fitting into a desired product.

He began his working life as an apprentice ‘ruler’ for Coulls Somerville Wilkie in Dunedin, New Zealand (known in the trade as ‘Coulls’) at the age of 14 years old. His is not a unique story: with three brothers at the war and an invalided father, his mother accompanied him to his first and only ever interview and an apprentice he became, staying on with the same firm for forty-five years.

Polio and me

16 April 2018 1 Comment

Marlayna Zucchiatti

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” Adolf Hitler.

Here comes Polio

In 1957, I was 17 months old, our family’s fifth and youngest child. I was, my mother says, just “nicely learning to walk”. Then I got polio. It came to me at my uncle Bap’s remote cabin one weekend in Northern Ontario, Canada. Close to midnight and engulfed by an angry storm, my mother, my father, my polio and I were taken across the dark, choppy lake to the car, to the hospital, to the dreaded news. There was no doubt. Polio: 1.

The predicted blueprint of my life had taken a detour. And I had a new, annoying companion to travel with: from now on it was Polio and me.

[Read more…] about Polio and me

Free with his fists: trying to make sense of it (Part Two)

26 March 2018 5 Comments

Carolyn McCurdie

(Read the first part of Carolyn McCurdie’s reflections on this topic here.)

There are many, many victim-blaming questions that are asked. Most of them arise from cultural assumptions and I’m as much a product of this culture as anyone. There’s no blaming that anyone could do that I haven’t done to myself. One that caused me years of soul-searching is: but didn’t you see the signs? Surely you should have known.

Yes and no. With hindsight and maturity I can see that he was extremely narcissistic. Everything was about him. I didn’t recognise that. He was a heavy drinker. Every young man I knew was a heavy drinker. I wasn’t alert for trouble. I didn’t know I should be. There was no violence at all. This didn’t begin until about a year into the relationship. By that time I was committed.

So why didn’t I leave? Such a common question, and one much easier to answer.

Free with his fists: trying to make sense of it (Part One)

19 March 2018 1 Comment

Carolyn McCurdie

I told myself it wasn’t so bad. After he’d knocked me down, he never kicked me. He never broke bones, never did anything that needed medical attention. In eight years, he forgot discretion only twice. Then I had the black eyes, fat lip, swollen, discoloured face that the world could see. I hid inside, rang in sick, made carefree jokes about walking into cupboard doors.

But mostly he punched my upper arms. Often it had nothing much to do with anything I’d said or done. It was stress relief, when life hadn’t gone the way he thought it should. “Pete never allows for a stubbed toe, does he,” someone remarked when she’d witnessed the beginnings of a tantrum, controlled because people were there. I bought blouses with voluminous sleeves, because at those times my arms were too swollen to fit into ordinary sleeves.

The Stone

5 March 2018 2 Comments

Sandra Arnold

In 2003, a year after our youngest daughter died, my husband Chris and I travelled from our home in New Zealand to Oman to live and work for a year. The challenges of living in this fascinating culture helped us learn to live with our grief in a way we couldn’t at home. Gradually I regained my ability to write. When we got back to New Zealand, I started recording our experiences from that time. This is one of the stories.

[Read more…] about The Stone