Old Age

OLD AGE

Hurtling down the hill, the bus screeched to a sudden halt, as an elderly woman stepped resolutely into its path.

One of the neighbourhood eccentrics, this woman regularly assumed the role of traffic director. Impeccably groomed in a blue tailored suit, expensive shoes and stockings and a stylish red hat, she would step out in front of oncoming buses with raised arm, forcing the drivers to stop on the precarious descent down the steep hill to the wharf. What could they do but brake abruptly, or skittle her under the wheels? Then, with a forward sweep of her arm, she would beckon the vehicles onward.

‘You can go now, driver,’ she’d announce imperiously, before proceeding to her next shift down at the wharf, where she’d ply the ferryman with instructions.

‘Tie her up now.’

‘No. No. Wait for the people to get on. That’s right. Now you can go. Go on. Go!’

Or there was the woman I called ‘the dancer.’ She was slightly built, with long, dark hair that drooped lankly over her shoulders, and a vacant, cheery face that glowed robustly with generous daubs of rouge. Skipping out in the middle of the road, well clear of the pedestrian crossing, she would dance diagonally across the busy street, frequently stopping and curtseying to us, her audience. Oblivious to the hapless bus drivers who struggled to divert their cumbersome vehicles around her flighty performance, she would miraculously flit safely onto the opposite footpath, to the applause of a collective sigh of relief from anxious commuters.

But one day I realised that these women had disappeared. Where to? Had they had a ‘social assessment’? Been taken ‘into care’? Cracked the code of community tolerance and anonymous exits from the mainstream of life?

How to balance individuality and idiosyncratic intrusions on bland, gentrified demographics is a social conundrum that defies bureaucratic solutions. How to merge mental confusion with a dignified existence is a question that burdens families with guilty decisions.

My mother died in her late sixties, the diminishing quality of her life shackled to her shrinking brain. Having barricaded herself in a prison of grief after the death of yet another son, she maintained the illusion of independence by alienating herself from us, and finally defying, or perhaps denying, her landlady’s constant eviction notices.

‘I gave your mother notice six weeks ago and she refuses to budge. If she’s not gone by tomorrow, I’m putting her out on the footpath. I’m sick of her.’

The landlady’s voice shrilled down the telephone line when I picked up the receiver, over twenty-five years ago. We were in the midst of packing to leave for our annual holiday. The schedule underwent a hasty adjustment as all available family vehicles and members set out on a cavalcade to the south side to my mother’s rented accommodation.

Before embarking on this journey I sought help from the local health centre, but, although technically a community service, it delivered a judgmental and humiliating response. In patronising, pseudo-psycho jargon, the social worker pronounced huffily that ‘these old women were manipulative, and not until she was out in the street would she get the message. It’s the best thing her landlady could do.’

So my mother was removed from her rented flat, and her neighbourhood. We, her family, or specifically I, her eldest child, were confronted with decisions that deprived her of her independence and self-inflicted isolation.

The cold, clinical narrative of the pejorative assessment might have exposed cupboards crammed with cleaning products, but devoid of food. It might have discovered the hidden treasure withdrawn from the bank account, a strategy born of paranoia to protect financial assets. It would have offered the family insights into the relentless decline of this proud, unreasonable woman, their mother.

It might even have come across the small, brown, vinyl-covered notebook with its doodles of spelling in Mum’s neat backhand script. Mum had been a stenographer with an impeccable grasp on spelling and grammar, but the spelling doodles in the notebook told the story of a creeping awareness that she was losing this ability.

‘B-e-r-m-a’ and ‘S-u-n-g-e-r-p-o-u-r-e’ were written on the first page. Burma and Singapore, names all too familiar from World War II, now challenged her mental limits. And what was ‘SOUTLAND?’ Was it an interstate suburb, perhaps ‘South End?’ How must it feel to watch yourself disappearing into shadows, lose basic skills, know that all is not right, but be powerless to stop the decline? Is this how she spent her lonely days and evenings, coming in and out of lucidity, as a disease was shrinking her brain?

But our community experts had stereotyped her as ‘manipulative,’ and only the humiliation of being forced out of her flat onto the street, would atone for the sin of diminishing faculties.

For all its bureaucratic simplicity in its response to the complexities of the confused elderly, an assessment can offer alternatives to abject neglect and vulnerable situations.

Some years ago, as a probation officer, I made a routine home visit to a middle-aged client. A series of physical afflictions had left him severely debilitated, dependent on others for mobility, hygiene and survival. On this day he was in a sorry state, unkempt and abandoned. The young people whose responsibility he had become in return for sharing his accommodation had absconded on the wild goose chase of their lives, relapsing into habits that spruiked resilience against withdrawal into the harsh realities of a daily existence.

His name was famous, or infamous, depending on the observer, and having spent slabs of his adolescence in boys’ homes, he had acquired all the pre-requisites for graduation into the prison system, languishing in gaols for most of his adult years. Prison had been his home, and prison was where he’d formed family ties. A recent offending relapse had breached the trust of staunch supporters and his notoriety had now strained the limits of tolerance. There would be few community care options for him.

His very caring, idealistic doctor expostulated, ‘I can’t put that man in a nursing home, another institution!’
My psychologist colleague acerbically commented that ‘not to put him in an institution would be like denying morphine to the addict.’

I asked the doctor if he would take him into his care, with the result that he was admitted into a nursing home. But this had its positive side. The young people in the group home had not appreciated his criminal heroics; they hadn’t even heard of him, adding a dented ego to his other hardships. And he had no time for this new generation of ‘junkies’ who didn’t know how to conduct themselves, and besmirched the ethical standards of the respectable old time ‘crim.’

But at the nursing home he was a celebrity. The residents and staff had heard of his exploits, had followed his career in the press, and his arrival was a minor festive occasion. As his last parole officer, I continued visiting him until his term of supervision expired. For this man who’d never really integrated into society, the nursing home offered more dignity and safety than the fate of future abandonment in the community.

Mum would also have to be assessed. Moving her and her possessions out of her flat, I ventured into the rank recesses of her wardrobe, sniffing the odour of neglect clinging to the limp, hanging garments. As I surveyed them, I struggled to remember Mum’s fashion choices. My mind dredged up the drab, faded, grey overall of my childhood, which wrapped around her pregnant belly through most of the war years. Then came the dusky pink glamour of Dior’s post-war, mid-calf ‘new look,’ the creation of pattern, fabric and the Singer treadle sewing machine. No other childhood memories of my mother’s fashion preferences survive.

Now I am to become the parent and my mother, the child. I will have to make decisions about her future and choose her fashions.

We flapped around the flat, sorting out her melange of clothes and other belongings, while she trotted doggedly behind us, putting everything back into the cupboards. In desperation we bundled her into the car and buckled her under the seat belt until we had cleared the premises and placated the landlady.

Finally we drove her home, to squash her into a corner of our typical suburban sixties house, economic in its extended space and limited in its capacity to accommodate a growing family.

We settled her in with her retinue of handbags, makeup cases and small carry bags. Sitting in a chair unpacking and re-packing these bags was how Mum liked to spend her days. Like security blankets, these bags would have to accompany her to wherever she was sitting. And their contents increased exponentially, as did my children’s complaints of missing underwear and socks. These and other items were frequently added to her obsessive audits of articles in the bags.

Then began the assessment process. The prognosis was not hopeful, and back in the eighties, Alzheimer was a disease only breathed, rarely uttered. There was no widespread audience clamouring for education about this condition. With the help of a sympathetic local doctor and Mum’s War Veterans’ pension, a room became available at a local, well run nursing home.

But Mum’s move into the regulated nursing home environment entailed the removal of most of her bags, depriving her of her daily pleasures. Merely a nuisance in our home, in the nursing home the bags were safety hazards to visitors, staff and elderly, ambulant residents.

Bereft of all but the comfort of only one handbag, Mum compensated by cramming it with cutlery, drinking glasses, and numerous sets of false teeth that had been fished out of their bedside receptacles.

The situation was even more desperate when she had to be admitted to hospital. To maintain the Florence Nightingale clinical neatness of the wards, nurses removed Mum’s handbag and placed it in her locker, out of her reach. But schooled as she was in the adage that the devil finds work for idle hands, Mum applied herself diligently to removing the cannula from her arm. When the nurses wrapped bandages around the cannula to deter her from this activity, they would find small bundles of neatly rolled bandages laid out beside the removed cannula. Yes, bags may have been a hazard in a nursing home, but a handbag in a hospital was a sinister signifier of a calamitous morbidity!

The handbag was also a particular source of anxiety on shopping excursions to chain stores. With Harpo Marx ingenuity, Mum would transfer items from shelves and displays into her handbag. I would hold my breath at checkouts, hoping that my frantic searches of the contents had retrieved all unsolicited items, but there were some embarrassing moments.

Mum died in the nursing home, aged only sixty-nine. I am her daughter. I have marked each year as a survival post and have now outlived her, but as each birthday approaches, I contemplate the vagaries of old age, the exit passage from life.

The enjoyment from hobbies and activities has been overlaid with the obligation of stimulating brain cells, marshalling them into a neurological exercise regimen to protect them from insidious threats. Crosswords, dictionaries and thesaurus, music, physical exertion, reading, writing, are all subsumed into a litany of prophylaxis for failing faculties.

My mind clicks through its catalogue of memories and images: my mother’s fading life, local eccentrics, smelly old men on the bus. The clarity of the images belies the captions of invisibility: discomfort, denial, aversion, those social bulwarks against unpalatable predictions.

My generation has become the ‘burgeoning ageing population.’ With our increasing longevity, Alzheimer disease has slipped into the lexicon, a nervous catchcry for moments when names, places and facts elude our ageing brains. We inoculate our anxiety with jocular references to memory loss and its connotations.

‘Oh God, I must be getting Alzheimer’s,’ I exclaim in frustration as my memory refuses to cooperate.

‘No, Mum, you just have a lot on your mind,’ is my daughter’s consoling rejoinder.

When I was young we used to call this ‘senile dementia,’ but with our increasing life span, sixty has become the new young for the elderly. No longer a hidden scourge, Alzheimer’s stalks the families of the famous, the wealthy, the prominent, increasing imperatives for research, prevention and antidote.

New industries proliferate as Government budgetary projections are reconfigured to cater for the needs of the ageing demographic. Legal advocates are promoting awareness of unscrupulous offspring who manipulate the wayward faculties of the elderly into prematurely divesting their assets to their progeny. Geriatric, once a pejorative adjective, is now a respectable infiltration into the professional realms of health and retirement services.

In a Dr. Pangloss world, an assessment for care would provide an ideal environment for everyone. But in our real world, some assessments will deliver more than others. A War Veteran’s pension was the passport for good care for my mother. It is not available to me, a divorced old age pensioner.

But what I do have is a more enlightened understanding of old age, easier access to health and community services, opportunities to engage in stimulating activities, a vibrant social and cultural life, mobility to visit friends and go on holidays.

If Alzheimer’s strikes me I tell my family that I must eventually go into care, and have given my daughters power of attorney over my affairs. Conversations on this possibility threaten their comfort zones, but open discussion will allow me to have input into any assessments of my ageing process and my capacity to manage the changes.

And unlike my mother, I’ll be able to share with them the responsibility for decisions taken.

 Cleo Lynch 2009.

Pack up the Purple

PACK UP THE PURPLE

It was a bleak winter’s morning. Huddled in thermal layers, pedestrians jostled precariously on the kerbside, bracing themselves for the marathon scramble across the road, before the fickle lights blinked allegiance to the metal cavalcade that menaced wayward stragglers.

Abandoning myself to the crowd like a surfer in a mosh pit, I landed on the other side, and then stopped abruptly. Standing in front of me was a tall, fair, elderly woman, whose erect, unwavering posture belied any simulation of old age. Oblivious to the peak hour turmoil fanning out around her, she was intently scanning a piece of paper in her hand.

She may have been my age, a little more, a little less, which with some reluctance I note, would classify her as elderly. But it was her clothes, not her age, or perhaps the combination of her clothes and her age, which riveted my attention and marked out her individuality. Or some might say, her eccentricity, because she was, from head to toe, a statuesque jangle of vintage fashion, poised imperiously on the windy catwalk of this city street.

A royal blue overcoat buttoned precisely around her tall, slim form, surging an electric charge through the bleak, wintry grey. Below the hem, at mid-calf, a pale pink pathos of organdie dangled in a limp, uneven frill. Crumpled under the snugly fitted coat, it hinted listlessly at faded memories of restrained elegance, perhaps a garden party, a wedding, the theatre, some event of social significance.

Two slender, bare white legs startled from beneath the hem, tapering into strappy, silver, dancing shoes. Once de rigueur for a Ginger Rogers routine, or the smouldering staccato of a tango, the flimsy sandals bared her ageing extremities to the bitter winter chill. But if she felt their discomfort, the woman gave no sign. Perhaps the shoes pulsated with subliminal rhythms, rekindling sparks of toe-tapping memories, insulating her from the cold.

Towering over this curious assemblage was the piece de resistance, a wide-brimmed hat of leopard fur. Tilted skittishly on her head in tonal defiance of the royal blue,
insipid pink and glitzy silver, the hat’s sumptuous fabric brashly trumpeted a perennial superior status in the fashion stakes.

There was something fiercely defensive about the hat and its animal overtones, perhaps because it cradled the repository of the faculties that dictated this scramble of mixed and mis-matched fashion choices. Or perhaps because it precipitated the make believe world of Neverland into an oblique reality of the vulnerability and social aberration of demented old age.

The woman’s face, a delicate profile of the practised art of camouflage, exposed only subtle hints of age, as she frowned over the piece of paper. But it was her clothes that resonated uncomfortably with me. Thinking of my own wardrobe, and my mother’s lapse into Alzheimers, I squirmed at this confronting, confused collage of old age.

Because I too am a mix of vintage and modern, with a penchant for vibrant colour combinations, and a weakness for shoes and hats that add an individual flair. As a young woman I gave little thought to fashion and colour, carelessly choosing what appealed to me. Neither did I give much thought to the impact of how I looked to others, an innocence that equated uncomfortably with the unselfconscious air of my footpath vintage model. Over the years I’ve been reminded of some of my choices.

‘I’ll never forget the time I first saw you,’ a female work colleague enthused. ‘You were wearing that black Spanish skirt patterned with big, red flowers. You really looked something!’

Really? That skirt had such a history, starting with a ball held at the high school our children attended. Stretched for funds and time, and unwilling to buy some concoction that would probably never be worn again, I had teamed it with a black peasant blouse and mesh stockings. After all, the venue was a school hall out in the suburbs, not the Hilton.

I remember feeling confident and assured until a member of our party, an Englishwoman, dressed in full evening regalia, chastised me with, ‘Reah-lly! Is this what you
we-ahr to balls in Orstrahlia? It doesn’t look very formal.’

Well of course it didn’t. It was a Katies’ number.

A bit of a body blow that, to my spontaneous gestures to fashion, and it pricked me into an unaccustomed self-consciousness about how I looked to other people. I liked clothes that didn’t have to sit squashed up in neglected corners of the shared built-in, waiting never to be worn again; clothes that had to multi-task, as did the wearer who had to rear a family, work and study, and maintain some vestige of individuality within limited finances.

That skirt was pressed into service on a number of different occasions. There were the times when, without warning, vivid red blotches would spurt from my womb, precursors of its eventual surgical removal. The black Spanish skirt with its pattern of red and pink roses was a more effective camouflage in such unpredictable emergencies, than the requisite beige uniform of my hospital employment.

I wore that skirt to death. I’d still be wearing it if middle age weight gain hadn’t squelched me out of it. It went to an op shop, hopefully recycled into another life, and worn, I hope, with the panache it deserves.

And leopard skin patterns?

‘Love those shoes,’ a friend raved, as I stepped out in leopard skin patterned pumps, an extravagance born of panic in my first week on the old age pension. In that steep decline from salary to pension, paroxysms of anxiety had plagued the purchase of even a cup of coffee. Yet impulsively, carelessly, I bought those shoes, because of their leopard skin pattern. Had I already begun the downward skid towards irrationality?

And colour! My favourite colour is not the royal blue of the street model’s overcoat, but a vibrant purple. I think purple is in my DNA, although my grandmother would disagree. She would sniff disdainfully that ‘only tarts wear purple.’ The colour purple was marginalised in the trough between first and second wave feminism, social phenomena that had had no resonance with my grandmother. But for me, purple was the most wonderful colour, and in support of any tart-like tendencies I would search out rare dyes to paint my shoes purple.

‘Can I touch it please’? asked the young girl at the ferry wharf, eager to stroke the velvety purple of my Indian coat, an embarrassment which my daughters tactfully, but pointedly ignore.

‘I just had to get you this Gran. They’re so your colours,’ my granddaughter waved a multi-purple-coloured scarf she’d bought in the souks at Qatar, on her reporting assignment at the Asian Games. I treasure this scarf not just because of its colours, but because of the pride I have in this young woman, who has stepped out into a world which at her age, I didn’t even know existed. And the scarf symbolises a generation gap where the fashion embarrassments of a mother mutate into the acceptable eccentricities of a grandmother.

And hats! ‘Really Mum, you and hats,’ commented my daughter in a tone straining for tolerance. It’s true, I have a fondness for hats. But is it now dangerous to court fondness, with its linguistic connotation of folly?

My wardrobe is a collection of op shop purchases and other more extravagant splurges. There’s the cape from Paris, the woollen shawl from Scotland, the boots from the Casablanca souks, the kitsch bag with the Eiffel Tower key ring, and garments splashed with reds, greens, oranges and purples.

But what if I lose the knack of putting together the right items? What if my brain starts sending out confused signals of jumbled seasons and jarring colours, discordant fashion notes of an ageing diva?

My mother died young, the diminishing quality of her life linked to her shrinking brain. She never wore purple, eschewing it and anything leopard skin pattern as the epitome of bad taste, in uncharacteristic harmony with my grandmother, with whom she had conducted a lifelong feud, and agreed on nothing.

I carry her genes. For one jolting moment I am the model on the footpath. My vintage fashions, an indulgence in luxurious fabrics and colours; my love affairs with shoes and hats, are suddenly risky fashion signatures. The spontaneous affinity with colour and style of my younger days is now scrutinised and analysed through the self-conscious prism of old age.

Should I pack up the purples and the more edgy items, consign them to an op shop? Stock the wardrobe with muted colours and unobtrusive accessories, the monochromatic monotony of blandness?

But then who would I be? Colour and style are so integral to how we feel and who we are. I once tried to adapt, and bought a pale apricot ensemble. It seemed to suit my colouring, but it cloyed my psyche into a pastel imitation of my own imagined identity, reducing it to a limp, lifeless prototype of the demure little housewife, teetering precariously on the edge of a suburban backwater.

Appropriating styles from other eras, reviving fashion heirlooms, experimenting with a palette of vibrant colours, can too easily splash a ludicrous collage onto a deceptive canvas of eternal youth.

My mind clicks through its catalogue of memories and images. Should I discard my habitual indulgences, pack up the purple and fade into a non-descript, compliant profile of unavoidable old age?

Or should I run the gamut of the purple and old age in a gaudy splash of colour, enjoy it while I can, and trust to my instincts to tame extravagant fashion forays?

And does it really matter if an innocent oblivion protects the mind from creeping, imperceptible assaults on ageing faculties?

 Cleo Lynch 2009.

ANZAC

ANZAC

Ninety-four years ago today my grandfather lay wounded on Gallipoli. ‘He had his eye shot out by the Turks,’ I would boast to school friends as his prothesis glazed over us from its resting place on the mantelpiece. My grandfather rarely spoke about his war. His glass eye was the main reminder of Gallipoli. He obviously suffered much, but as a child, I was only aware of the suffering his war caused his women and children. Everyday life, not national pride, shaped my attitude to the Anzac debacle.

My grandfather, father, uncles, aunt and father-in-law were veterans of war, fighting in conditions so appalling, I physically flinch when my imagination gropes for the details. Yet in all my life I have paid little attention to Anzac Day, and attended few parades. Each year as its grey amorphous gloom descended, I wrapped myself in a protective cloak of cool detachment, burying deep any vestige of sympathy or empathy. This was to be, in Viktor Frankel’s eloquent description of survival, my reprieve from reality.

I can still see my father, handsome in his RAAF uniform, coming home on leave from Darwin. I remember the excitement as he unpacked his kitbag, and how he and I ate a whole jar of pickles when my mother was out shopping. Food was rationed, and she was furious.

But her memories were reflected through a darker lens; stark reminders of pregnancies after brief reunions, of birthing these conceptions in his absence, and of being left after the war to shoulder responsibility for his lack of it. He didn’t desert the battlefront in wartime; better the home front in peacetime.

During the Japanese bombing of Darwin I am sure there were many deeds of valour on the battlefront. I am equally sure that my father participated in none of them. His service records were remarkable only for his lapses from grace, and copies of correspondence from my paternal grandfather mounting pressing arguments to have him discharged early under the Manpower Legislation.

His war had abandoned his wife and children to their fate, and gave me no inspiration to commemorate Anzac Day.

My favourite uncle had volunteered for the Second World War. The story goes he’d put his age up to enlist, perhaps to escape the misery of my grandfather’s war which had continued to rage on the home front in the intervening years between his old war and the new one. My mother said he fought in the Middle East, as we then referred to Egypt, Libya and Tobruk, and had a piece of shrapnel lodged in his side. I can still see the scar. Brought home when the Japanese were encroaching on Australia, he was sent to New Guinea. I loved my Uncle. But he drowned his war in alcohol, breaking my grandmother’s heart.

‘Honey,’ he said to me one day, ‘if I promise not to have a drink, will you come to the tennis with me?’

The tennis was at Milton in Brisbane, where Davis Cup greats like Rod Laver slammed the ball around the court. I waited and waited, but he didn’t arrive.

‘Drunk again,’ I judged in my nineteen year old intolerance with men and how they lived.

They recovered his body from the river, the day after my grandmother had taken delivery of two new suits he’d ordered from T.C. Beirne’s.*

I loved that favourite uncle, but he too had left me, surviving the war, but surrendering to the turbulence of peace.

My disillusionment with war almost obliterated Anzac from my life.

Another uncle, the cliché of tall, dark and handsome, clearly my grandmother’s favourite, or perhaps her favourite worry, was not a man we children warmed to. He also was in New Guinea, which left him with malaria and fits of night terrors that would grip him in his sleep. He was a timber worker and when camping out one night, he fell asleep beside the fire he’d lit for warmth. But the fits and tremors of his war pursued him even there, writhing and rolling him in uncontrollable movements, extinguishing his troubled life in a bizarre holocaust.

It was on the front page of the newspapers.
*Sydney had DJs, Brisbane had TCs).

My Aunt served in the Army Medical Corps. There she met her future husband, a volunteer for the mustard gas experiment in North Queensland. After that searing experience he was drafted to the Pacific. When the war was over he and my aunt were married in a big society wedding.

They returned to his home in the frontier steel town of a southern state where he became a pillar of the RSL, and she became an exile from her family and home state. It was a family truism that he would attend no family event, no matter how significant, if it clashed with Anzac Day.
But the constant demands of allegiance to the RSL and Anzac Day had wrecked his physical system, and he had to stop drinking. That was the end for him. Alcohol had been his social lubricant. Without it he lost touch with the world.

At his funeral service someone sitting in front of me muttered ‘Bastard!’ In the eulogy, the elder son mitigated his father’s impact on their lives with an account of the harsh environment that had scarred his life. He also told the story of how, in Rabaul, his father and others had saved their alcohol rations, and in a heady binge of drinking, burnt down the officers’ quarters. They then defied the order not to save the alcohol by burying it in the beach, only to discover that corrosion had let the beer run free. He paused as we all laughed.

‘Y’know,’ he said, ‘Dad never saw the funny side of that story in all the times he told it.’

Anzac was that uncle’s annual ritual. But it was never mine.

My childhood memories are of a war endured by women. In the early 1940s we lived in Bundaberg next door to Mrs. Cullen. In those days, whether it was the times or just the war, there was an easy familiarity between neighbours, so I was no stranger to their home. On this particular occasion they were preparing for a big party, a homecoming for the pilot husband of one of the daughters. He was returning from the UK on leave. There was singing and dancing and joking banter. She, the wife, was a big girl, her shoulder length hair turned under in a roll at the ends, in the style of the day favoured too, by my aunts.

Dressed in wide legged, pleated Betty Grable shorts, in the way we women defer to fashion even when it does little to flatter our individual shapes and sizes, she wiggled her hips to the hokey pokey. In the excitement I remember teasing their caged sulphur-crested cockatoo, poking my finger through the bars, and then yelping indignantly when he nipped it before I could withdraw it. It was all part of the infectious, chaotic excitement that this wartime concession sparked.

But there was no party. My mother later explained that the pilot had volunteered for one more mission before taking leave. He never returned. In that brief interlude the girl in the Betty Grable shorts had become a war widow, and the homecoming party a wake. Even now, over sixty-six years later, the tears still come to my eyes when I recall this time, and the collapse of joy into grief. And when I do the hokey pokey with my grandchildren, I still see the girl in the Betty Grable shorts.

That was war. It demanded much, but delivered little.

Although as a little girl I had participated in the jubilant celebrations when Japan was defeated, and the war was finally over. My aunts took me into the city, where the streets pulsed and vibrated to the cheering and dancing of the crowds that thronged there. Money, even two shilling pieces, was tossed from the buildings overhead. Two shillings, a florin, was a financial bonanza for a child, far surpassing the value of its modern counterpart, the twenty cent piece.

It was an exciting time, but as I realised when I grew older, it was even more exciting for my mother and aunts, women who had endured the war on the home front, raised the children, worked in munition factories, and carried a daily burden of anxiety and fear for the safety of husbands and brothers fighting in enemy territory. My strongest memory of the war is the stoic resilience of the women. The men were too far away, and when they returned they brought with them the remnants of war’s aftermath that continued to rage random shots and explosions that pelted the women and children, scarring and wounding the captive targets.

I came to Sydney and met my future husband. His father had also served in World War I, on the Western Front. He didn’t talk about the war. In fact, he spoke very little at all during the time I knew him, because he was now very deaf, and for reasons known only to himself, he rarely turned his hearing aid on. Perhaps he preferred his world of silence. He had, I learnt later, suffered much after the war, requiring aggressive therapy to rehabilitate him into civilian life. Slowly over the years we learned more about the Western Front, where the loss of lives had far surpassed that of Gallipoli.

Neither was there any escape from war during peace, when friendly fire replaced the enemy’s attacks. Hurrying home from work in 1960, I saw the newspaper headlines reporting the shelling of the Tobruk. I stopped in shock. My brother was on the Tobruk. But as it transpired, she had been accidentally hit by one of our own. He was not a casualty of peace.

And then, just after the birth of my third baby, a second son, peace was shattered again. HMAS Melbourne had sliced the destroyer Voyager in two. My other brother was on the Melbourne. He suffered some injury, and was eventually medically discharged.

There was no escape from war or peace, no escape from Anzac.

Now with sons of my own I let my protective cloak of detachment loosen and slip, and allowed myself to think of what the men in my life, in my country, had confronted in war. I let the atrocities into my mind, and put my sons’ feet in soldiers’ shoes. I started to think about Anzac, allow the word into my lexicon. I slowly relented and thought about going to the Dawn Service. But the day before Anzac Day that year the car had coughed and spluttered its way back to the workshop, where it spent the Anzac holiday.

My next tenuous commitment was to attend the march through the city. I didn’t go in often, but this time I stood in the pouring rain, and felt the welling-up of emotion as I clapped and applauded the ever-diminishing gathering of veterans, crippled, semi-blind, walking with assistance, hobbling along on canes, tripods and walking frames, being pushed in wheelchairs, driven in Army vehicles. How had I never really thought about their war, their lost youth, their physical and psychological scars?

It was, I think, because the men I knew never spoke much about the war. They dealt with it in their own way. The war was something to forget, and everyone just got on with their lives.

It’s 2009, my year for an Anzac reconciliation. This was going to be my liberation year, another VP Day.

We left early to get a spot at the barricade. I watched in pride as our female governor, Marie Bashir, led the march. Then came the RSL taxis for those too frail to march. I waved, one hand, both hands, I clapped, made reciprocal victory signs, gave the thumbs up. My whole body throbbed with exhilaration. On they marched and hobbled, eyes fixed on dogged steps, or heads held high, becoming again the straight young bodies that went to battle, bearers, medical corps, transport corps, airfield constructors, engineers, signallers, spotters, as well as soldiers, sailors and airmen. Standing up in jeeps, waving, smiling. From our ringside position we infected each other with jubilation and pride.

Was that the racing form guide cheekily sticking out of the back pocket of the veteran expansively acknowledging the adulation of the crowd from a land rover?

There was the lone marcher, in full khaki serge, whose knees continued to raise high to the beat of the drums, even though a temporary halt had been called to the march. He’d show them how it was done.

And the women, the nurses, medical corps, the WRAAF, the Army Corps. And the lone woman, regaled in a purple hat and purple dress ensemble. I knew there was a reason I’d defied my mother and grandmother to keep a lifelong passion for the colour purple. It was a strong colour, a colour for women like this wonderful survivor marching alone down the middle of George Street. And another woman was wearing a hat festooned with wide purple and gold tinsel. I poured myself into enthusiastic clapping and waving for these extraordinary women. My paper flag was disintegrating from vigorous flapping.

I jigged and sang to the familiar tunes that rolled over the drums, blared from the brass and whistled through the flutes, Waltzing Matilda, Pack up your Troubles, Kiss me Goodnight Sergeant Major, It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. And even when the bagpipes wailed out the notes of a little jingle we sang as kids,

Chase me Charlie, chase me Charlie
I’ve lost a pair o’ me drawers.
If you find ‘em, starch and iron ‘em
Send ‘em back to the wars.

Banners unfurled place names, Palestine, El Alamein, Tobruk, Kokoda, Aitape, Ambon, Borneo, Bougainville, Libya, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Java, Singapore, Sumatra, Darwin, Lae, Madang, Middle East, Rabaul, New Britain, even Dutch New Guinea, a place no longer recognised in contemporary cartography.

And the ‘Under 16’s’ Memorial Banner. Oh my God, the children who put up their ages to go to war.

And what’s this banner? Descendants of WWI Veterans? That’s me!

We clapped every one in the parade.

For over four hours we stood there, and instead of wilting I was excited, energetic, overcome with pride. This was my grown-up VP day, this was my liberation day, my Anzac Day. I felt light and happy. I’d had the time of my life.

Later in the day we were standing beside a marcher wearing a green beret and blazer. Turning to his mate he growled, ‘I said I’m sober, so fuckin’ drive me home will ya.’

Oh dear! I would have clapped him too. That’s the darker side of Anzac, and it will always be a part of my history, but only a part, not the whole. And it will never again obliterate the memory of what men and women, my grandparents, father, mother, uncles and aunts suffered because of war.

Cleo Lynch
 2009

Patient Lives

PATIENT LIVES

She stood there, a small, stocky dog with short, light-brown fur and squat legs squarely planted on her rug. A leash trailed listlessly beside her. I passed by her as I obeyed the therapist’s direction to walk briskly around the edge of the gymnasium floor, with my fellow participants in the heart rehabilitation program.

Her eyes bored into me before I actually saw her. Large, doleful, brown eyes, fixed expectantly on the walkers and their shuffling responses to the therapist’s directive to walk briskly.

Not an especially beautiful animal, yet without moving a muscle, she inveigled her way into your awareness with an unwavering, pleading stare. Undaunted by the disorganized pedestrian shambles, the dog gazed wistfully at us, patiently alert to the semblance of a nod, a sound rising on a positive inflection, any human sign which could be interpreted as an invitation to trot along with us around the edge of the gymnasium floor.

But, bound by canine obedience, she remained rigid on the rug, only her eyes giving any hint of movement. Although one day during exercise class, her owner suddenly broke off in the middle of neck stretches, and, reiterating sternly ‘No, no,’ left the class and marched over to where the dog waited.

Or rather, to where she should have been waiting.

But the rug was vacant. The dog had moved sideways to squat in front of two elderly women. Their sympathetic noises, and invitations to patting and stroking and other doggie indulgences, had proven irresistible. Succumbing to this attention and affection, the dog had recklessly abandoned her rug, to grovel in canine subservience at the feet of the indulgers. Inevitably there were consequences for this breach of obedience, and with stern reminders of her canine status, her owner asserted his authority, and herded her back to her rug, where she resumed her mournful vigil.

As she rivets me to her gaze, mounting her silent plea, my mind swirls with memories of another dog, whose photo sits on my bookshelf, a ginger haired mixture of beagle and labrador. Of average size, and well proportioned, she was bigger than the dog at the hospital. White fur patched her face, and flecked her coat. Her doggie eyes gaze out at me from the photo, feigning a look of innocent naivety, which masks an innate, canine cunning. Her name was Kelly.

Years ago, Kelly inhabited our household. Mind you, she was meant to inhabit it externally, but with passive canine persistence, she crept vigilantly around identified obstacles until, voila, she finally succeeded in beguiling her way through the back door to the laundry. Tail wagging incessantly, she feigned an air of deceptive innocence, to distract from this boundary breach. Once in the laundry, it was only an elongated slink to human company and the comforts of kitchen and lounge room.

There were, inevitably, some lapses of judgment, such as the ill-advised attack on the baked chicken I had rested momentarily on the open oven door, right beside the laundry. A quick canine calculation balanced the disadvantages of resisting temptation against the consequent explosive, but short-lived, tirade of anger and outrage. Indeed, that dog established a case for virtuous innocence, portraying herself as the confused victim, powerlessly wafted through the open door on the aroma of the chicken.

But that brazen, illicit sampling of roast chicken was a severe setback on the course of domestic integration, and strategically, she literally went to ground, practicing every fawning gesture of subservience, as she sought to ingratiate herself back into the forbidden domestic boundaries. During long doggie days she would watch and wait, plot and plan, alert to the smallest gap through which she could slither, and begin to pad her stealthy path back through the laundry door.

As usual, she would frequently sabotage her best efforts with minor, petulant canine outbursts, when she felt excluded and starved of attention. Unfortunately, digging up the newly planted garden as payback for being left home alone was the wrong sort of attention, and she knew it. But so pathological was this canine need to be noticed, she would herself alert us to the wrongdoing, responding to our cheerful calls with head hung down and tail between her legs, sure indicators of a guilty doggie conscience. Any kind of attention, it seemed, was worth the consequences.

There was the time when she took advantage of my trustful inattention. Walking into the lounge room to collect something, I caught a furtive movement from the corner of my eye, and turned my head to investigate. There, slinking down from the sofa to the floor, like one of those slinky toys that oozes its way down steps, was Kelly, in a contorted simulation of slink and grovel. Had she not moved, I would never have known she was there. But some vestige of canine obedience pricked her into a guilty retreat, exposing her to an outraged reprimand. To be in the lounge room was one thing. But to be lying on the sofa! This wilful flaunting of boundaries flabbergasted me.

But for Kelly, it was only a minor distraction. Perseverance and patience, those dogged qualities, which over centuries had defined the relationship between her species and ours, had imbued her with an indefatigable ability to triumph over any adversity presented by humans.

Predictably, she was eventually ensconced in the house, fixing us with that same steady, mournful gaze calculated to make you feel guilty, like the dog at the hospital. A brief snack, the indulgence of a meat pie, would see her planted squarely in front of your feet, doleful eyes scrutinizing every mouthful taken. No matter that she may have just been fed, or rewarded with some titbits. Nothing deterred her from this guilt laying-on ritual. You felt like a glutton stuffing yourself in the presence of a starving waif.

That dog! Always contriving to present as an innocent, dumb animal, while maintaining a vigilant alert to any disruption to her comfort. We would only have to mouth the word ‘bath,’ and she would disappear, way under the house, where we couldn’t reach her. Her bathtub, the wheelbarrow, was anathema to her, regarded with heightened suspicion, even when used for its legitimate purpose. Human wiliness had to be pitted against canine resistance, to cajole her out from her hiding place to endure the indignity of a bath.

Beagles are fetchers, invaluable to hunters, and in the absence of birds and small animals, Kelly had evolved into an obsessive fetcher of balls and sticks. Strategically placed on each back step was a stick, each a mute symbol of canine optimism that one of them might be thrown out into the yard so she could indulge her passion.

New neighbours, beguiled by this benign, tail wagging creature, whose friendly overtures were always accompanied by a stick, would enthusiastically hurl the stick, only to find it back at their feet faster than a returning boomerang. Enthusiasm would soon subside into exasperation, as the exhausted stick-throwing victims tried stoically to ignore this pesky animal.

But the obsession with balls was a boon to the neighbourhood cricket team. Kelly was always on the team, a fast, reliable fielder. All the kids in the street loved Kelly. She never tired of fetching the ball, which enthusiastic batsmen belted up and down the street, over fences and down gutters. She could even catch it on the full. And she played to the rules of the game, always surrendering the ball, drooling with saliva, immediately she had retrieved it. No one seemed to worry about doggie germs back then, as the ball was immediately scooped up, in an attempt to run the batsman out.

She was an energetic dog who exuded robust health, but there was no escaping the onset of old age. An intermittent limp was the first symptom, attributable, the vet claimed, to degenerative rheumatism. He had a simple remedy. She was he said, to rest, and stop running after sticks and balls. But this dog was the Peta Pan of canines. Not for her a quiet, dignified old age. She relished youthful exuberance, revelled in the attention and affection that rewarded her feats with sticks and balls, and jigged around expectantly, waiting for the game to begin. The pain from a gammy leg could not compete with the thrill of the chase.

And then, one day, quite suddenly, in mid-ball catch, she staggered and collapsed. She had sustained a stroke. The vet was cautious in his prognosis. She might survive he said, but if she did, would be unable to get about, and remain dependent on intensive medical treatment. So it was to be vale to Kelly. Tears still come to my eyes, as I cast myself back to that day when I had to make the decision to determine Kelly’s fate. I have never heard, before or since, such anguished cries as those of my son, although as the youngest of six, he had already set an unrivalled precedent for volume. It was his birthday, but Kelly’s demise rendered celebration impossible. He would always, he loudly sobbed, connect his birthday with her death.

Kelly had been his companion since he was a toddler. Like him, she was an unplanned addition to our family. A phone call had come from an erstwhile brother. One could never judge the accuracy of the information in such phone calls, but, as we had just lost a dog, we decided to risk the veracity of this call. Friends of his, he said, were expecting their first baby. They wanted to give away their dog, because they felt she wouldn’t adjust to competing for attention with the new arrival. The dog had undergone, my brother assured us, obedience and other training, although given many of Kelly’s later lapses, it is doubtful that she ever graduated. So telling the children we were collecting a surprise for them, we crossed Sydney, and took ownership of the dog.

When they saw her, they were ecstatic. This was a surprise beyond their expectations, as our house extensions were still not finished. To our youngest child, the dog became an inseparable companion, a reliable source of unquestioning affection. Kelly for her part, revelled in her new surroundings, and seemed to have no qualms in relinquishing her old home and settling in with us. If the children were all out, she went in search of them, taking advantage of the unfinished back fence to make her escape. She would go no further than the local school, where the attention she craved was lavished on her. Kelly quickly became a neighbourhood identity, and the school would either notify us, or children would make a detour to ensure that she arrived home safely.

For a number of reasons we never replaced Kelly. For me, she could never be replaced. But as the dog at the hospital fixes us with its gaze, I am overcome with nostalgia for that time in my life when a dog’s tricks, a dog’s antics, a dog’s personality, a dog’s needs, were a part of my everyday existence.

As its owner berates the dog at the hospital for daring to move from its rug, I am reminded of the chicken, the sofa, the dug-up gardens, the dogged canine persistence in inveigling its way into our hearth and our hearts.

But for now, I can only look at the photograph on my bookshelf, and treasure my memories of the Kelly era.

 2007
Cleo Lynch

The Attack

THE ATTACK

It was a gradual, sinister assault. My instincts, dulled with complacency and devoid of fear, colluded with the onslaught, dismissing it as an imaginary irritation. Early morning warnings, strange intrusions that disturbed my sleep and shadowed my movements over days, were ignored until their frequency and intensity invaded my consciousness and hammered relentlessly at my stubborn naivety. Only when denial succumbed to spasms of anxiety did I concede there might be a problem.

But too late! Too much time had elapsed; too many warnings ignored. In the dim light of the deserted platform of the underground railway the shadowy spectre attacked, spiralling me into chaos and panic. Galvanised into action I cried out for help. Railway staff quickly responded, an ambulance was called, and the assailant vanished. I was heaved onto a stretcher and freighted publicly and unceremoniously through the city’s centre, to the ambulance vehicle.

Plying me with oral and intravenous therapies, the ambulance officers radioed for the nearest vacant emergency bed. They didn’t say, and I didn’t then know, that a tentative culprit was under scrutiny. I was to learn that the identity had been subsequently confirmed from a line-up of suspect pathology and radiology tests.

My assailant was a major blocked artery. For three days it had been sending out warning symptoms, which I had dismissed as minor irritations.

The slight numbness in my left fingers had masqueraded as my hand having gone to sleep, convincing me that I had been lying on it. The insidious persistence of discomfort in my left forearm over the next couple of days was rationalised as a minor, temporary inconvenience. The cumulative depletion of energy levels became the result of ‘doing too much.’ ‘Listen to your body,’ is my mantra for days like this.

So I listened, slowed down, and had a heart attack.

I didn’t know then that fifty thousand Australians die of heart disease every year. Neither did I know that heart disease is the single most common cause of death for women. I didn’t know that I would have to reconcile to a new reality; that my body, so taken for granted, was suddenly vulnerable; that age, which I’d worn as an emblem of endurance, was now a signpost on a finite journey.

As the trolley trundled through the emergency entrance of the old, inner city hospital, I felt a curious detachment from this surreal environment. The white, shapeless hospital gown swathed me in an unaccustomed acquiescence, a passive acceptance of hospital routines and protocols.

Divested of all but my name, I lay on the emergency bed and waited for someone to tell me about me.

THE HOSPITAL

What a fateful coincidence! This was the same hospital where, a quarter of a century earlier, the ambulance had delivered my brother, dead on arrival. Not on a train station, but on a train, he had suffered a massive coronary occlusion and couldn’t be revived.

How frightening for him, powerless, in the grip of this attack! The pain choking his life as it flashed before him, poignant visions of family fading without a hug, a warm clasp, a final word! It’s too awful for me to grasp. What devastation for our mother! Was this the grief that finally crushed her spirit and released her into the anaesthetising oblivion of Alzheimer disease?

I too had been on a train but had disembarked before the attack, and was able to get help.

The old inner city hospital is of royal patronage, commemorating the recovery of a royal personage from an assassination attempt.* It is also the acknowledged province of the prestigious, adjoining university and a teaching facility for its medical faculty. Indeed, a vigilant cohort of the medical fraternity had ensured that its hallowed halls and revered reputation would maintain immunity from political interference.

A one-time minister for health had seen his reputation ruined for daring to suggest that inner city beds and

* Assassination attempt on Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh in 1868
health resources be diverted to the ever-burgeoning outer suburbs, which had the highest incidence of paediatric morbidity, obstetric events and other medical conditions. Because it was to these suburbs that young couples had migrated, to afford the Australian dream of owning a home, and to establish families of their own.

But the doctors had aggressively resisted undertaking similar migratory patterns and clung like leaches to their waterfront suburbs, close to inner city and other selected hospitals.

And the fate of the former health minister? Mysteriously, this experienced politician ‘forgot’ to renominate for his seat by the required time. And everyone ‘forgot’ to tell him that the nomination date had been brought forward at a cabinet meeting that he’d been unable to attend.

Powerful interests protect public services, but perhaps not always in the best interests of the public.

And there was the family in our street whose experience with mental illness still resonates. While the age of enlightenment for the mentally ill had begun to dawn, it shone only on the patients, casting the families into shadows of exclusion and ignorance. Blamed for the problem, shoulder the responsibility and pick up the pieces, but do it on your own, was the clear message delivered to that family. Until eventually the patient was despatched back to the bosom of the maligned family who had endured such humiliation at the hands of ‘enlightened’ medical staff.

And for the privilege of those humiliations the family undertook the daily trek from the suburbs to this inner city hospital. And the perpetrators of those humiliations were revered practitioners of this inner city hospital where I now awaited emergency treatment.

But those recollections were far from my consciousness as I was transferred from the trolley to a bed in the emergency ward.

Like the mentally patient and family I was now a passive recipient of any treatment and advice dispensed.

But unlike my brother, I was alive.

CASUALTY
The acute care casualty ward was a long, wide dormitory, accommodating both men and women in a row of beds against each wall. Under the relentless glare of the harsh, functional lighting, the décor of drab, cream paint infected the atmosphere with a jaundiced pallor. Curtained screens provided furtive discretion when necessary, but otherwise remained drawn back to allow the nurses to observe their charges.

Confident that I’d be discharged from hospital the next morning, I’d deferred requests to contact my daughter.

‘I can ring her myself when I get home tomorrow, and minimise any shock waves.’

But I was to learn that I’d still be here tomorrow, as all the tests had confirmed heart pain, and I would have to see a cardiologist. Reluctantly I gave permission for my daughter to be contacted.

‘But,’ I directed, clinging to the illusion of some vestige of parental authority, ‘tell her not to rush in tonight. I’m being well taken care of, and there’s nothing she can do.’

Predictably my protestations were ignored.

‘Of course she would say that, wouldn’t she? She’s my mother,’ was my daughter’s dismissive response. ‘And you need to know that my mother has a high pain threshold, a very high pain threshold,’ she emphasised.

Over my prostrate body she and the nurse conducted a discourse on my response to pain, with the nurse brandishing my five out of ten rating, to collude with my daughter’s complaint.

My opinion was not sought, but had they consulted me, I would have asked, ‘What is pain?’ I would have told them there is some pain I’d rate twenty out of ten. But that’s the pain no one wants to know about; that’s the pain you deflect from other people’s lives; that’s the pain that disturbs the dynamics of reciprocal contracts of conditions and expectations of friendships and relationships; that’s the pain that twists the contours of the psyche into tight little knots. My heart pain was physical discomfort, and I couldn’t rate it high on a scale of pain.

But being in no position to debate, I lay there meekly as the roles reversed, and my daughter became the parent. Asserting that she’d be back early in the morning to see the cardiologist, my daughter/mother then departed to resume her next shift as wife/mother, and I was left to grapple with this unexpected life event.

Sleep was difficult, tethered as I was to various apparatus; plastic tubes dripping fluids into my veins, instruments pumping up my arm at scheduled intervals by remote control from the nurses’ station for blood pressure readings and oxygen levels. A cumbersome oxygen mask added to my discomfort and I dozed fitfully.

Through the night, a young woman who had overdosed on pills was admitted into the bed beside me. Her name, I overheard with a stab of pain that lurched my heart off the scale of ten, was Debbie. We used to have a Debbie in our family. How ironic to be beside a Debbie in this hospital that had also taken delivery of my brother’s lifeless body.

The medicos were questioning her about suicide attempts and relationships; and did she still want to die, or now want to live. I heard, but tried not to hear. How old was she, and what did she look like, this Debbie in the curtain-surrounded bed next to me, whose fractured life had been freighted here to be pumped out, patched up, prescribed and programmed into a precipitous recovery, and plugged back into a world that had plunged her into black despair.

If only hope could be formulated into an antidote of intravenous drips!

It’s now Monday morning and the next shift is cracking into action, relieving the wilting night staff of their duties. The pace accelerated into manic activity, as ambulance officers trundled in their cargo, approaching the nursing staff with notes and medical observations.

‘Yep. Sounds like he’s ours. Better bring him in here,’ a nurse responded to an ambulance officer’s medical summary.

There was the well-spoken man insisting he had to be out of here by lunchtime for an afternoon appointment on a construction site. He was still there when I left the ward in the afternoon.

And the man two beds down, injured in a car accident, making frantic calls on his mobile phone, trying to locate his vehicle.

A plump, olive-complexioned, middle-aged woman was in the bed opposite, or rather, not in the bed opposite, because she kept stubbornly marching towards the door with her bags. When harassed nurses stoically marshalled her back to her bed, she accused them in tirades of abuse of molesting her. Eventually an infusion of drugs anchors the truant to rigid protocol, scheduling her to a sedated reprieve from her chaotic reality.

Over in the corner a young man, wriggling and squirming, was hooked up on a cannula. When left to his own devices, he relayed repeated messages for the toilet, scurrying the staff backwards and forwards to his insistent demands. But nothing soothed his agitation, and he continued to devote his energy to disconnecting himself from the cannula. He was out of the bed, over the bed, twisted in sheets, entwined in tangles of plastic tubing, until finally he ripped the cannula from his arm, spraying crimson spots of blood in random daubs.

Unimpressed with his antics, the nurse stripped and remade the bed, cleaned him up and inserted another cannula. However, when next I looked he’d disappeared, perhaps escaping to avail himself of some alternative medical treatment that promised more immediate relief from his symptoms.

My daughter arrived early to see the cardiologist, but he didn’t appear at eight, or at nine. Ten o’clock came and went, and like extras in a grand production, we watched the main actors play out their human dramas in this acute care ward.

Eventually the busy specialist appeared and outlined my impending medical intervention in precise clinical terms of diagnosis, prognosis, procedures and risk. Risk! How could I apply the bland, bureaucratic indicators of risk assessment, while macabre technicolour flashes of red dye draining into an artery via my groin were infusing me with panic and fear?

Perhaps, I volunteered to the cardiologist, dehydration would deliver me from this fate, as I’d not had anything to eat or drink since the previous evening. This was quickly remedied with an immediate insertion of yet another drip, of saline and sugar.

My offspring crowded around my bed, bewildered, distressed, unwittingly puncturing me with jolting jabs of panic, as I lay there in a prison of monitors and plastic pathways flowing with unfamiliar fluids.

‘I can put a tube in you if you want, and you can have some of Granny’s goodies,’ a nurse teasingly offered my grandson, but his curiosity faltered at my bedside. This was not some familiar cyberspace alien invading a technological fantasy world; this was an alien Granny, a bizarre image that distorted the screen into a reality world infiltrated by an invisible enemy.

Complete with oxygen mask I must have given my family a shock. Mothers are supposed to be so durable, and here I was, a helpless captive of tangled plastic restraints.

And I too am a little anxious. My mother died at sixty-nine. At only sixty-six, will I make it to that age? I had been so serene in my vision of longevity. Bugger!

The family dispersed, and finally I was trundled up to the coronary care unit, where surrounded by doctors and nurses, I signed the informed consent for the procedure, and for the possibility of having to pay for a special, expensive stent, should there be complications. Not for the first time did I ponder the concept of informed consent, and the tenuousness of a legality premised on the circumstances under which crucial information is imparted.

Scratching my signature onto the proffered form, I dutifully inoculated the hospital against future litigious liability.

And then, I was wheeled into the theatre.

THEATRE

The theatre was a clinical clutter of imaging screens and bulky pieces of equipment, a hostile landscape starkly illuminated by the extra-terrestrial fluorescence of harsh, probing lights. Gowned, gloved and masked aliens muttered a perfunctory acknowledgement of my presence when, like a creature paralysed in the glare of impending disaster, I lay trapped in their midst.

The doctor who had supervised my informed consent was there, and another figure detached himself from the faceless group to tell me he was a close colleague of the cardiologist. The medical team was jocular and talkative, bantering amongst themselves.

I knew I did not want to have this procedure, that I would have given anything to avoid it. My normal stoic approach to these situations nearly deserted me, and as I was wheeled through the door, I surrendered to a wave of self-pity and distress. But confronted with the inevitability of the moment, I desperately dredged up my age-old strategy of focusing on when it all would be over. In my past religious moments, I would contemplate Christ’s three hours on the cross. If He could hang on the cross, I’d reason, then I could endure the dentist’s drill, the doctor’s knife, the needle in the vein or whatever other procedure punctured my life. Now in my agnostic phase, bereft of religious consolation, I resorted to the abbreviated version, that is, to hang in there because nothing goes on forever.

My squeamishness was justified; it was one of the most unpleasant procedures I’ve experienced, all under a local anaesthetic. A passive participant in this surgical ensemble, I was excluded from the medical dialogue, except for cursory instructions to breathe deeply, breathe normally, hold my breath. The medicos, absorbed in the images on the screens, a visual entertainment that I was happy to forego, sometimes forgot about the breathing routine, until my choking compliance distracted them.

‘What’s the matter?’ they queried.

‘I can’t hold my breath any longer,’ I gasped.

‘Oh, sorry-y, we forgot to tell you to breathe again.’

Eventually they located the blockage, a narrowing of the left anterior descending artery, the LAD, which pumps blood into the left ventricle. Flippantly they announced that they’d have to use the expensive stent. As this would add over two thousand dollars to my already mounting disquiet, I interrupted the proceedings.

‘Hang on boys (as in ‘cowboys’)’, I interjected. Is ‘cowboys’ a synonym for doctors, I wonder? ‘Let’s make sure that I’m understanding this properly,’ and then explained my understanding of the need for this stent.

‘Yep,’ they chorused, ‘and this is just such a situation.’ Lying there on the operating table, tubes dangling from my body and cocktails of drugs shooting up my veins, I had little choice but to succumb to the dictates of informed consent and permit the insertion of the deluxe prothesis.

But the procedure dragged on, with muttered references to ‘the difficulty of the angle,’ ‘sharp,’ ‘acute,’ adding anxiety to my discomfort. Finally I asked if they would be able to insert the stent, or would I have to undergo surgery. They assured me that they would be able to complete this procedure. And eventually they did, although I was again left with the now familiar, nagging, heavy sensation in my left arm.

Various explanations were offered for this anomaly, such as the insertion of the balloon and stent mimicking the blocking of the artery, or the insertion of the stent damaging a branch of the artery. The latter, at least, is true, as I was told I now have two damaged areas. But this was one of the identified risks, and the problematic configuration of my artery had raised the stakes.

Wheeled back into a private room, I had now graduated from the status of a pre-operative, to that of a post-operative patient. But there was to be no alleviation from discomfort, rather a continuation of existing restrictions, with the addition of new ones.

Various apparatus again tethered me to the bed, and although I was no longer ‘Nil by Mouth,’ I had to remain flat on my back with my legs apart, and keep my right leg immobile, as the stent procedure had been performed through my right groin. The result was indigestion from swallowing while trying to eat lying flat on my back. And indigestion pain is itself a concern in the context of a diagnosed heart attack.

And I still had to keep convincing myself that I’d suffered a heart attack, with damage to the heart muscle. It still seemed so surreal.

Next morning I was allowed to move my right leg, leave the bed, wheel my drip into the shower and sit up to eat breakfast. During the morning ancillary staff visited me, to mete out my life in measured doses of medication and physical limitations. The pharmacist delivered scripts and pills, and a verdict of lifelong dosage. The rehabilitation worker prescribed restricted walking and lifting, a traffic authority mandate of no driving for a fortnight, and an out-patient rehabilitation program.

Then my eldest son arrived.

‘You’re not as invincible as you thought you were,’ he offered, helpfully.

‘Well no, I never thought I was invincible, just a little more durable,’ I replied. But I think what he was really saying was ‘You’re not as permanent as I’ve always taken for granted you were.’ Just a reality check about parents’ mortality kicking in.

And then, suddenly, the health system, earmarking my bed for another coronary emergency, ejected me from my room and discharged me to the care of my local doctor, all before lunchtime. After just over two days in hospital with a critical life event, I arrived home complete with heart history and stent, to begin life anew under these changed circumstances.

I’d been well looked after, and family and friends were solicitous and attentive. Genetics, an inescapable predictor of health and longevity was, I was told, the major indicator for my heart attack.

But while my physiology had been repaired, my psychology was in turmoil. Confidence, optimism, strength of purpose, had now mutated into tentativeness, vulnerability and uncertainty. It seems weird, facing the future with a heart problem, when I continue to feel and look so healthy.

The feeling that control of my life had been wrested from me plunged me into an identity crisis. Normal coping mechanisms deserted me. I’d always thought I knew what was best for me, even if I didn’t always abide by it. Now my life was to be framed within new guidelines, the unpalatable parameters of experts.

Of course I could choose to ignore these opinions and therapies. But rebellion is the province of adolescents. Responsibility is the obligation of adults. I fretfully stifled my childish protests of ‘it’s not fair,’ and ‘why me?’ and resigned myself to the next phase of my heart adventure, the hospital out-patient rehabilitation program.

REHABILITATION
In recovery from a heart attack, I was plunged into an identity crisis. Who was I now? What are my capabilities? Instead of walking briskly, I gingerly moved one foot after the other in a tentative excursion to the corner shop, feeling about ninety, and not even a sprightly ninety. The news filtered through to my friends, sending shock palpitations through the various networks.

‘You look so well.’ ‘You’ve always had so much energy.’ ‘You’ve always looked after yourself, bringing your own lunch to work, not eating junk food.’

Sheer disbelief was the general reaction. I received many calls and visits, which filled my days, and initially, left me gratefully exhausted.

Easter came and went, and my daughters and their families were attentive and supportive. I religiously consulted the structured program for walking. Now I could walk for longer; now I could graduate from a stroll to a comfortable lope; now I could stride out. But sometimes even I had to admit that I overdid it. One day I had to sit down in the gutter, I felt so faint, my head giddy, my legs jelly-weak.

And then there was the medication. I avoid drugs, preferring homespun remedies, which I concoct and dispense. This was to change dramatically, as I was now on medication for life. Where once I could decide when to take medication, now I had to ‘take as directed.’ The hospital had given me a medication card, ticking the various columns of type, amount and frequency. It took me weeks to perform the daily medication ritual without referring to that card. Being dependent on medication conflicts with my ideal of being healthy and independent. But to stay healthy and independent I am now to be dependent on pills.

Busy with visitors over Easter, I delayed enrolling for the hospital rehabilitation program and then found myself on a waiting list. Finally, on the nominated day, I navigated my way through the sprawling precincts of the inner city hospital to the gymnasium.

On the first day the staff assess you, recording blood pressure and pulse rate, and printing out your heart rhythm from a machine. Then you are dispatched to various supervised activities, such as walking around the circuit, and peddling on the exercise bike. You are warned not to overdo it or become breathless. Well, there was no risk of that on the exercise bike. I was either going to die of boredom, or my legs would drop off before my heart felt any exertion.

Over the weeks I was gradually introduced to the equipment in the gymnasium. As part of the exercise sessions we also had to walk down the hospital corridors, targets of curious stares from other clients.

‘Come on now, walk briskly,’ the therapist would encourage, with more energy in her voice than sparked in our legs. Walking briskly translated into lumbering heavily for some of the group.

I surveyed the surroundings and the motley collection of my fellow travellers on the path to rehabilitation. On a table littered with journals, jugs of water and paper cups, a copy of The Daily Telegraph displayed the preferred source of written news for at least one of the participants.
Studying it attentively was a woman well into middle age, whose dyed hair struggled dully to revive some claim to glamour. A multi-coloured top hung loosely over black tights, completing an image of listlessness masquerading as energy. I haven’t seen her since that first day. Perhaps she completed the program.

Then there is a younger man, slightly built, whose sparse hair is pulled back in a ponytail. He brings a small, stocky dog on a lead. As we all walk our laps around the edge of the gymnasium floor, the dog stands wistfully on the sideline, its leash trailing listlessly along the ground. Obedience deprives it of participating in this harmless activity, one of the few rewards in the life of an inner city doggie. The rehabilitation introductory program officially lasts six weeks, but someone joked that since this man had been coming for the last six years, maybe the dog was now the patient.

One man looks so like Rene Rivkin, I was sure he must be a relative. He confided that he is constantly mistaken for Rene, and has been mobbed by people here and overseas. Well poor Rene is now tragically dead, or perhaps, now free of a tragic life. I suggested that the Rivkin look-alike have a T-shirt emblazoned ‘Haunting ASIC,’ and flaunt it around the Stock Exchange.

Our group includes academics, a solicitor, a film scriptwriter, a couple of younger men, and a significant number of persons with English as a second language. The gender balance varies from week to week, but is tilted in favour of males.

We women also have our little foibles. There’s myself, a dedicated stranger to gymnasiums, feeling distinctly self-conscious and a bit of a fake in sports shoes and related gear. I long ago had instructed my children to inscribe my epitaph, ‘Mum never entered a gym.’

Another woman, tall, slim and attractive, wears jewellery complete with necklace, and horror of horrors, jeans with perfectly ironed, sharp creases. No untidy railway tracks here. Jeans ironed with trouser creases are anathema to me, whose prowess with an iron has always lacked many degrees of excellence, and has never been wasted on jeans. This aversion, coupled with the woman’s perfect grooming with never a hair out place, made me wonder why she attended our group, and my fears are confirmed. While we all conscientiously lift the hand weights slowly to our shoulders, she swings hers effortlessly up over her head, executing many more swings than the rest of us. When directed to walk briskly around the edge of the gym floor, those of us unlucky enough to be behind her straggle helplessly as, strolling relaxedly, she increases the gap between us and the rest of the group, until eventually the gap becomes a lap.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the top heavy Italian woman, who scurries past all of us on the inside, arms and legs moving frenetically in a power walk. I also have an aversion to the word ‘power’ and avoid any activities with that intimidating tag. As I struggle on the treadmill, clinging desperately to the supports so as not to tumble backwards, she is flashing along on the machine beside me, legs striding out, arms swinging vigorously, with never a hint that she may overbalance. Such commitment renders me a gauche spectacle, a fish out of water in a gymnasium, the story of my athletic life.

The exercise program was followed by information sessions on nutrition, heart attacks, treatment, the impact and effects of this incident and the benefits of rehabilitation. We are exhorted to share the positives and negatives of this life-changing occurrence.

The negatives are generally grouped around food; diligence and deprivation are not alas, regularly rewarded by ongoing weight loss. Copious quantities of carrot snacks, bread sparingly smeared with margarine, pieces of fruit with the accompanying intake of fructose, are not universally conducive to celebrating that sensuous relationship most of us have cultivated with food.

For some, the change has been drastic. The elimination of sugar, sweets, fat and junk food leaves a big gap in lifestyles, which is not easily filled by substitutions of fruit, boiled vegetables and wholemeal products. Cravings plague them as they grieve for the loss of one lifestyle, while trying with grim resentment, to adjust to another. Overcome with guilt when they relapse, they remain static on a weight plateau.

Neither do I think many of us benefited from the sincere empathy shown by the counselling staff conducting these sessions. Pleasant, well-meaning, earnestly sincere young women, they ‘shared’ with us that, while they hadn’t had heart attacks, they too were on special diets. One seemed to suffer from unidentified stresses and allergies, and another was on some kind of elimination diet, which seems to have had the counter-indication of eliminating any colour from her personality. Had these women been vibrant and sparkling, they might have exuded energy and encouragement. But they were plain, dowdy, sweetly sincere and positively uninteresting, and while appreciating their efforts, I felt determinedly reluctant to be cloyed into this syrup of empathy.

I’d been making changes to my eating habits since the day I accidentally caught sight of my weight while on the scales in the doctor’s surgery, well before my heart attack. I’d even felt constrained to acquire a set of scales, admittedly only a cast-off set in the rubbish bay. The possibility of a heart attack had never entered my mind, but I was shamed by this accidental truth which straining zips had trussed up in tight denial.

Latte coffee nearly disappeared off the menu, as I tried to adjust to the substitution of long blacks. But this almost destroyed the ambience of the coffee lounge. A latte was one of my few concessions to milk, and I refused to tamper with it. How could ‘a skinny, decaf, soy’ possibly be classed as coffee? I have compromised with substitutes of plain cocoa, and green tea. One of my friends drinks green tea diligently each day, claiming that it was ‘purifying.’ However, as she is also a liberal consumer of wine, we challenged her to calculate the ratio of purification to alcohol consumption.

While sugar is not a problem for me, maintaining the recommended fibre intake has become a challenge. To ingest enough fibre requires a commitment to eating quantities of the right food, which is in conflict with reducing an overall food intake. And anyway, who wants to spend all day eating fibre?

The session on salt and alcohol was quite depressing. While I eat a nominally salt-free diet, I was now obliged to scrutinise more closely labels specifically designed to avoid scrutiny.

The session on alcohol began positively, as the young, fresh-faced nutritionist projected an overhead slide proclaiming the ‘Benefits of Alcohol.’ But before this positive information could be savoured, she’d replaced it with the next slide which was so prescriptive of alcohol intake, you’d be struggling to imbibe enough to accumulate any benefits, and could eliminate purifying green tea from the diet altogether. And as my family and friends know, red wine, ‘krasnya vino,’ as the Russians say, is one of my favourite indulgences. Since the heart attack I’ve been dribbling puny amounts into my glass, to generate a psychological satisfaction, a petty embargo on this small pleasure.

Of course, the caring and sharing group about stress is a real hit, especially with the men, who vehemently challenge the role of stress in a heart attack, stressfully stressing that stress is good, and good stress is conducive to productivity, and they couldn’t do their jobs without it. It seems to have escaped them that right now they’re not actually doing their jobs, but attending a heart rehabilitation group. The notion of how stress can develop a life of its own, and the resources the body has to marshal to manage stress doesn’t get a guernsey.

The ‘feeling’ word is also given a wide berth, with diverse suggestions of rational substitutes for this component. It seems always thus, that men generally are unwilling, or indeed unable, to tease out their emotions and fears. The relative brevity of the rehabilitation program, with the attendant change of group members as some drop out, and others come in, inhibits the opportunity to create the safety net of trust so critical for disclosures of vulnerabilities. Women have had more practice, but this seems a very iffy concept in a male world.

But the session on physical exertion, specifically sex, is a winner, generating many anxious enquiries. When might it be safe to resume? How energetic should it be? All are valid concerns, particularly in the context of the layers of meaning of the words ‘die’ and ‘death’ through the ages. Theatre audiences of past centuries well understood that if a character exclaimed ‘I die,’ he was depicting an experience more salacious than a heart attack. And in our day, ambulance logs would confirm instances of hapless individuals trapped under the dead weight of a fatal climax.

The group facilitation process puzzles me. After the social worker has elaborated briefly on the written comments and questions on the whiteboard, she informs us that this is the extent of her contribution. The rest, she said, is up to us. The trouble is that there are many different kinds of us. There are men and there are women; there are extroverts and there are introverts; those who commandeer the group dynamics and drive us to the brink of boredom; and those who just politely listen, while furtively noting the time; those whose first language is English; and those who nurture a different culture and language. I’d always thought the role of the facilitator was to ensure that the group functioned, rather than dys-functioned and found myself inwardly chafing against what I perceived to be a lack of professionalism in this process.

Rather than make any effort to contribute, I opted for passive withdrawal, daydreaming my way through the relentless monologues of a group dominator’s litany of self-righteous martyrdom. Anyway, I’d almost completed this segment of rehabilitation and was soon to move on to the ‘Wednesday group,’ whatever that entailed.

And rather than try to find out more information, I chose to treat it like an adventure into the unknown, and take things as they come.

THE WEDNESDAY GROUP

Two days a week attending the initial rehabilitation program had disrupted my life. Instead of settling into a predictable rhythm, I felt disjointed and unable to achieve some harmonious flow to my weeks. To provide some distraction from this disrupting impact I enrolled in evening courses in singing, writing and philosophy, hoping to establish a pattern where the focus would not be on my heart attack.

After completing the introductory rehabilitation sessions, I graduated to the Wednesday group. Although I knew a few faces, I felt quite disconnected. The group is huge, a blend of stereotypical academic and genteel respectability, and inner city battlers. But I got the impression that for some participants, it is more a social occasion than an exercise session. While we waited for the staff to arrive, the conversation ranged around topics from local politics to football.

‘I go for two teams every weekend,’ an inner city loyalist boasted, ‘Balmain, and whoever plays against Manly.’

I forbore to mention that my kids and grandchildren all barracked for Easts, who’d maintained a steady losing streak that season. Although, to insure himself against any disappointments on Grand Final Day, my eight-year-old grandson confided that he was now going for six teams, Balmain being high in the optimistic stakes.

The gymnasium doors finally opened and we all forged in. I felt lost in chaos, but as the morning progressed, began to understand how the program worked. The Rivkin look-a-like was there, as was the film scriptwriter. Both are pleased with their progress, and have made positive adjustments to their lives post-heart incident.

A university student on placement was to be assessed on a presentation that day, a contributing factor, one of the staff confided, to the chaos, assuring us that it wasn’t usually like this. Another student conducted the circuit under the supervision of a humourless young woman, who insisted on a full two minutes for each activity. It soon became obvious that this time far exceeded the norm, and the responses ranged from moans and complaints to open revolt and anarchy. Little sympathy was shown for the protestors, who were brusquely exhorted to work harder.

The next few weeks will be another period of adjustment as I adapt to the new program and its dynamics. But the place was so crowded. The co-ordinator agreed, and said there would be a cull in the immediate future.

Shortly after I commenced the Wednesday group I took a short holiday and on my return, found that there had indeed been a cull. With much-reduced numbers the crowded chaos had been streamlined into a smaller, more manageable group, and tentative attempts at socialisation were not so daunting.

Most of us arrived well before the staff, who were often delayed on the wards. Queued up this day, waiting for the doors to open, I was caught in the crossfire of conversation and complaints about the young woman who’d insisted on a more rigorous approach to the circuit exercises.

‘And if we get that ethnic girl today, I’m going to tell her that I know how hard I can exercise. She’s not going to tell me how hard I should be working. I know what I can do,’ one elderly woman was holding forth to the group.

Giving every appearance of having lived through tough times, she had paid strict attention to her grooming. Her hair was cut short, accentuating, rather than softening, a squarish face, and spiked up in a harsh bid to distract from her stocky, middle-aged stature. Today she was wearing a carefully chosen ensemble, a white T-shirt, with decorative red loops, to team with red, cotton capri pants. Protruding from the pants, her bare calves and ankles dragged the eye down to matching red and white joggers on her feet. On a cold August day, was this an optimistic prediction of an early spring? Or a defiant rebuttal of the resolute waning of bygone springs?

‘You weren’t here before,’ another woman turned to me. ‘We used to have such fun. You could have a joke and talk,’ she grieved. This is the raffle lady, who maintains a position of benevolent importance.

‘Oh,’ I said, trying to inject a degree of tolerance into the dynamics, ‘we get it for nothing, so I’m happy to come along and do whatever.’

‘Ya not gettin’ it f’nuthin,’ grated the middle-aged man beside me, a short, stocky figure, sporting the well-padded emblem of the inner city, working-class battler. ‘Y’ve bin payin’ ya Medicare levy f’years.’

The flat, definitive monotone signalled an end to the conversation.

Always desperately in need of new equipment, the gymnasium seems to be a low priority in the hospital’s budget, and raffles are run to raise funds. The prizes are reminiscent of the Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day gifts in school stalls, and indeed, may very well be the recycled offerings of grandchildren. A tempting range of goodies, including cakes of soap, hand knitted knickknacks, soft toys, biscuits, chocolates and little ornaments, is meant to be the irresistible inducement to purchasing tickets. I once won a cake of soap in a hand-knitted container that smelt so strongly of naphthalene, I almost had an asthma attack.

This year the Father’s Day raffle had an impressive line-up of prizes. There was a bottle of port, gift boxed with a glass, and a small, wrought iron wine rack, one of those ubiquitous wares in the myriads of gift shops that have proliferated. Or perhaps it was the discarded prize of another raffle, or a bowls competition?

Whatever, raffle drawing assumed all the trappings of a special occasion, with the raffle lady decked out in carefully creased slacks, and a white cotton top resplendent with glittering purple swirls. Quite clearly the emphasis for her today was to be on a more important function than the mundane activities designed to rehabilitate one from a heart incident.
Many tasks seemed to assume greater importance than those aligned with health maintenance, and served to exonerate the organisers from participating in the physical exercises. More tickets had to be sold to those who had missed out in the previous weeks. Then the tickets had to be folded and placed in a container.

Finally, the moment of excitement arrived, when various volunteers were withdrawn from the circuit to draw the lucky tickets, to the accompaniment of distracted applause from staff as they tried to maintain the training schedule. And by the time the raffle lady had fussed and tidied up, put everything back in order, and smoothed down her neatly creased slacks, the program was nearing the time limit. Rehabilitation had undergone a re-interpretation.

The Wednesday group is like a social event, although another cull sent the raffle lady and other sundry participants on their way. Staff now organise the raffles. Unlike the ‘we used to have such fun’ mentality of turning up and doing little, for most of us rehabilitation and working co-operatively with our bodies and the therapists is the main objective of attending the Wednesday group.

But we do have fun in the way that people who feel at ease with one another can interact, laughing at ourselves, and sharing our fears and setbacks. Newcomers come on board, and some drop off after a short while, while others attend spasmodically.

We occasionally resort to minor sabotage, as when the young male therapist inflicts his loud doof-doof CDs on us. A collective objection prevails to the ramping up of our action to his pace. The sound is particularly jarring to the professor of mediaeval music in our group, and it is not unknown for the offending CDs to have been temporarily mislaid, until the session is over.

A regular Wednesday group attendee, I am now an established client, one of a core group of old timers on the program. If one of us is absent once, twice or more, then we know that the others miss us, are concerned for our wellbeing, and alert staff to our concerns.

‘She’s been very depressed lately.’ ‘OK. We’ll give her a ring. Thanks for letting us know.’ ‘He had an appointment with a specialist, and hasn’t been back since.’ ‘Right. We’ll try to contact him.’ It is reassuring to know that others are thinking of you.

There are still days of chaos, as elderly figures shuffle aimlessly around the circuit, looking for an exercise they ‘can do.’ By the time they’ve fixed on one, it’s time to move on, and so begins another shambolic search for another ‘can do.’ This is particularly frustrating when students on placement conduct the sessions; it is difficult for young people to assert authority over reluctant or insecure participants. And they deliver their instructions in tentative tones, too soft to penetrate the resistant hearing of senior citizens who, like recalcitrant children, are only too willing to deploy diversionary tactics.

On these days I become exhausted when I observe the energy invested in avoidance, and feel that the therapists would be justified in resorting to something much stronger than caffeine to restore their sanity and professional equilibrium.

I attended the Wednesday group for over three years, but it seemed that a lifetime had elapsed since my heart attack. The event itself still seems surreal, it happened so quickly. The hospitalisation and medical procedure washed over me like a blur. It did change my life, but not too drastically, although the cost of travel insurance triggers a reality check.

Funding was withdrawn from the program, and although it was subsequently reinstated, I opted to move on and organise my own fitness and nutritional regime. My local doctor supervises ongoing health prophylaxis and concerns.

The children and grandchildren have recovered from my shock, and slotted me back into the role of hardy survivor, as they press on with their busy schedules. The attack has been factored into a predictability of durability. The stent, I am told, has a long life, all going well. I’ve become a statistic, adding to the survivors of heart attacks, and boosting the number of women who’ve succumbed to a heart attack.

But as long as I remain a fluid entity in the burgeoning ageing population, I’ll always be thankful for my health and a daily engagement with life.

Cleo Lynch  2008

The Westons Biscuit Factory

THE WESTONS BISCUIT FACTORY

‘www.thebiscuitfactory.com’ scanned into my vision at a Parramatta Road bus stop. This must be the redeveloped site of the Westons Biscuit Factory, one of the oldest remaining manufacturing sites in Sydney.

How quickly the present glides into the past to recede into history. Fortunately two photographers were able to chronicle the history of this Camperdown factory before it subsided into the rubble of redevelopment. The result, The Biscuit Factory, was exhibited at the Museum of Sydney, and since a fragment of my own history resonates with that of this factory, it was obligatory viewing.

We lived far from Camperdown, in the northwest suburbs, where trees and shrubs proliferated, and Victa mowers gouged through grassy nature strips. Camperdown, with its labyrinth of narrow streets, and rows of cottages cramped along thin verges of asphalt, was the antitheses of that suburbia. But as it was the location of the Children’s Hospital, this inner city suburb became one of my frequent haunts.

I dredged up old memories of our Valiant station wagon, laden with children and all their accoutrements. Desperate quests for a parking spot entailed coaxing and guiding it around miniature handkerchief corners, while the execution of impossible three point turns rendered my shoulder and neck muscles regular hostages to the lumbering vehicle. On hot days when the sun deflected relentless heat from the bitumen surrounds, the car became an oven.

But wafting over the air, a balmy antidote to these frustrating travails, was the tantalising aroma from Westons. Hovering over the hospital, it drifted through the clinical environs, titillating the tastebuds, banishing momentarily the antiseptic reminders of swabs, injections and other less edifying smells. It lingered over the sprawling buildings as I steered my stumbling entourage through the cumbersome hospital protocols.

But in the pressing priorities of the day, I gave no thought to the human component in the industrial enterprise of the Westons factory. Trawling through the exhibition I realised that while we were melting in the car, the factory employees were sweltering in 40 degree heat, oversighting large ovens that baked nearly four thousand biscuits per minute! The smells were so familiar to the employees that they could tell which biscuits were being baked. Coconut smells broadcast the baking of Nice, while cinnamon and nutmeg were the distinctive smells of Wagon Wheels.

The Wagon Wheel, one of the most popular of the seventy biscuit varieties, is attributed to the founder of the Camperdown factory. The son of a Canadian biscuit dynasty, Garry Weston established the factory in 1951 and remained attached to it throughout his life. The factory employed over two hundred and fifty people, and it was said that a migrant could walk straight off the boat into a job at Westons. How can one not feel nostalgia for this slice of history?

With a canny insight into his employer, the foreman interviewed for the exhibition predicted that persistent rumours of takeovers and mergers would not get traction while Garry Weston was alive. He died in 2002. The last Wagon Wheel rolled off the Camperdown production line in 2004.

More than just a static pictorial record of this remnant of the inner city’s industrial history, this exhibition pulsated with the stories of human camaraderie in a time when loyalty and job security were the quid pro quo between workers and bosses. The factory’s closure was a business decision for the owners, but it was the end of an era for the employees. Once members of a ‘big happy family,’ they had to uproot their lives and seek alternative employment in new factories in the outer suburbs and other locations.

Ironically, it was from the outer suburbs that I once had to travel to Camperdown. When the Children’s Hospital was relocated to Westmead, belatedly aligning paediatric services with demographic morbidity, I gave little thought to Camperdown’s changing landscape. History happens in the present, but we recognize it in the past.

The heritage façade is all that remains of the biscuit factory. Real estate spin glosses over its past, hyping into future annals the ‘innovative Biscuit Factory Soho District.’ But it seems a frenetically vacuous vision alongside the chronicled history of a Camperdown drenchedwith the heady aromas drifting languidly from its  industrial hub, the Westons Biscuit Factory.

 2007
Cleo Lynch

With two children with cystic fibrosis, I had to travel from our home in the north-west to Camperdown Children’s Hospital, because in the late sixties and onwards, the necessary paediatric services were available only at Camperdown and Kensington (Prince of Wales). The delicious aromas from Westons were a balm for the hassles and traffic which were always a feature of these days.

As the article relates, I was waiting at a bus stop, when I saw the sign advertising the website address of the redeveloped Westons Biscuit Factory. When I read that two industrial photographers, Peter Campbell and Murray Fredericks had mounted an exhibition for The Museum of Sydney, I went to see it. It was an interactive exhibition, with prosaic and pictorial exhibits and interviews with personnel, interpreting the site and its history.

Progress is inevitable, but it is sad to see such industry and camaraderie overlaid with an upmarket apartment development, with a population so socially unaligned with the original inner city dwellers.

Pyrmont Markets

PYRMONT MARKETS

It was a glorious day when spring had not yet surrendered to summer, and I was making a rare trip to the Growers’ Markets at Pyrmont Park. The ferry chugged across the harbour, shredding curtains of mist that trailed listlessly into the atmosphere, exposing cobalt patches of sky.

Impossible to miss the markets when the ferry docked! The park was submerged under a canopy of umbrellas. Although I had caught the earliest ferry, it was evident that I was not early, and the prospect of lingering over a leisurely breakfast soon dissipated in the thronging crowds.

Stalls bordered the waters edge and the immediate boundaries of the park. Some encroached on the centre, and others formed an endless line on the far side. Everywhere crowds bustled and jostled their way to the counters to look, to touch, to taste, to carry off produce in triumph.

There were bread stalls with myriads of varieties of freshly baked organic loaves. Mouth-watering fruit loaves, their fresh dough crumpled with fruit and dimpled with whole almonds, tumbled seductively against robust, gluten- free sourdoughs. The pale, diffused gold of pumpkin loaves was a delicate contrast to hearty Aussie dampers.

Home baked, culinary creations festooned the cake stalls. The ginger cake was clearly a masterpiece, its unique flavour attributable we were assured, to a spicy secret harbouring three different types of ginger. Australian Bush Christmas cakes, heavy with fruit and spice and decorated with opulent glace flora, were nostalgic reminders of an era when the icing on the cake was the artistic signature of the dedicated, homespun expert.

Wandering from stall to stall, I salivated over swollen, plump knobs of marinated baby figs luxuriating in rich, dark liquid. Jars of jam, lids removed to flaunt their decadence, flagrantly touted for business from stall counters. Bunches of riotous colours paraded along the edges of flower stalls, and the smell of fresh blossoms permeated the air, throwing out a sensory challenge to the irresistible reminders of brewed coffee.

The creamy textures of butters, cheeses, yoghurts and their marinated medleys enticed the wayward wanderer to indulge in furtive flirtations with the lurking dangers of cholesterol. Fruit and vegetable stalls, chaotic displays of fresh, organic produce, attracted relentless crowds. Moisture glistened on the greens, and the wild rocket conjured up visions of vigorous salads bursting with reckless energy. Bunches of miniature beetroot promised colourful embellishments to mundane meals.

The crowds surged around. Dog walkers, stoically claiming their right to space, presided with benevolent tolerance over territorial canine clashes, which threatened to disrupt this spectacular event of organic harmony. Young parents manoeuvred deluxe model pushers with unwavering purpose, scattering careless loiterers from their path. Venturing back to the stalls, I joined a short coffee queue, and performed a precarious balancing act with the morning paper, a shopping bag and a takeaway coffee.

Having resolved on a ‘look, but don’t buy’ day, I limited my purchases, but was already planning for future indulgences, such as the wild hibiscus flowers to drop into glasses of champagne. We called these rosellas when I was growing up, and rosella jam was a common, everyday jam, stockpiled plentifully at every fete and street stall. But now, no longer the Cinderellas crushed for jam and boiled with sugar, the whole, red, transparent flowers are packed in jars of syrup, waiting to burst into bloom with the kiss of champagne in a wine glass.

I strolled back to the wharf. The bright sunlight cavorted on the water, glinting and shimmering like quivering diamond facets. Exotic images and aromas pursued my senses as the ferry chugged back across the bay. Growers’ markets are a modern renaissance, a luscious display of human endeavour and creativity.

Senses sated and spirit nourished, I felt the balmy tranquillity of the morning seep through me, lifting me above the jangles of a world that is never quite right, and harmonising discord into a celebration of life’s simplicity.

Cleo Lynch
 2006

Love Thy Neighbour

LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR

The slight, sprightly frame embodies precision and rigidity, those steely accessories of domination and control. A tousle of straggly strands, grimly marshalled to simulate luxuriant growth, frames a small, severe face. Leathery creases, those furrowed repositories of spontaneous expression, are set firm with prejudicial judgment and condemnation. The eyes dart like a bowerbird’s, ever alert for a glittering fragment, a hint of deviance from a dogmatic norm.

Belying the small stature, her voice booms with perfect pitch and diction. Well schooled in professional and personal drama, she decries, with rounded vowels, human lapses and foibles that breach her uniformed code of black and white. The rich resonance jangles the nerves, and its jarring vibrations trigger a turbulence of frustration and intolerance.

Demanding attention, dismissive of others, she invites an instinctive reluctance to engage in tactile gestures of friendship. But a contrary opinion, or indeed any opinion at all, will incite the grasping intrusion of long, bony fingers, which extend to imprison the wrist and clamp the circulation, while emphatic points of a bizarre, fabricated by-law are drilled into the hapless hostage.

There is no aura of delicate vulnerability, no distinctive waft of decadent indulgence. The scent of intimacy is rendered impotent in the contrived atmosphere of theatrical explosions.

Was she ever caressed, kissed, savoured? Intellect ponders, but imagination falters. The aromatic, conciliatory coffee churns into bitter dregs. A lingering sense of futility hovers over the short-lived ambience, as the taste receptors file a sour sensation in the psyche’s memory.

 2005
Cleo Lynch

The 433

THE 433

One morning, all trusting, I set off to be
A committed commuter of the 433.
I studied the timetable diligently
And judged the 9.15 of the 433
To provide timely transport
From Balmain to the city.
Alas, how misguided! I did not foresee
That the 9.15 of the 433
Became a 9.30,
Which time did prove too late for me.

I wanted to be tolerant, understanding, you see,
Of the difficulties which beset
The transport melee.
‘All right my girl, don’t be twee.
You’ll just have to front up for the 9.03,’
The 9.03 of the 433.

But disappointment prevails with no guarantee
Of the 9.03 of the 433.
Sometimes it’s 9.20 or 9.30,
Neither of which could I see
On the timetable I studied diligently.
It continued to arrive too late for me
That elusive, fugitive, 433.

I thought at first it was just me.
But huddled at bus stops small groups did I see
Blaspheming vociferously, blatantly
Damning to hell the 433.

Stories emerging, surely fantasy,
Of buses on Darling Street thundering past in a spree,
Ignoring commuters waiting patiently,
Displaying ‘Triple 0, Not in Service’ for all to see.
Then up past the lights out of the traffic melee
‘Tis attested that ‘Triple 0’ changes to 433.
O what searing mockery!

I feel it now incumbent on me
To discourse with the hallowed on the 433.
Do not, Minister, I beseech thee,
Visit on me the liturgical spin of bureaucracy.
We know those parables well you see.
The well-worn woes of the emperor and his clothes,
Or even more sinister, of Pinnochio and his nose.

‘Dunno,’ says the driver, accosted repeatedly
By the frustrated commuters of the 433.
‘We’ve ‘ad a breakdown, luv, don’t yer see?’
Or ‘Yer mistaken, luv. Deerie me!
It’s left the depot, the 433.’

We know if we endure, patiently,
Rewards are dispensed in eternity,
Where a crown of glory waits for me
For my martyred perseverance
With the 433.

But instant gratification is human frailty,
And a martyred crown worn in perpetuity
Is far too remote to satisfy me.
I do crave today to receive unto me
The cursed promise of the 433.

O Minister most merciful, from thy supplicant don’t turn.
Her pleas do not spurn.
My faith and my trust I place solely in thee.
Please grant unto me,
Timetabled impeccably,
By heavenly decree,
That raft of redemption,
The 433.

 2004
Cleo Lynch

Dear Resident of No.16

DEAR RESIDENT OF NO. 16

Although we’ve never met in the eighteen months since I moved here, I feel that not only do I know you, I know you intimately. Late at night, or in the early hours of the morning, I am able to track, somewhat reluctantly, your very audible movements. I share, rather unwillingly, a range of your activities with you as you wander from the bathroom, to the bedroom, to the lounge room. And have you, I wonder, thought of WD40 for your windows? I would be happy to give you mine if this would subdue some of your nocturnal operational activities.

The fluid sounds from your bathroom have particular resonance, as they tinkle unhindered through hollow, aqueous conduits. Or perhaps, more accurately, stream down like Niagara Falls surging through a narrow spout. That’s how I deduced that you have a particular appendage suggestive of the male of the species. You know, I have just read that apartments in Switzerland have by-laws regulating males to sit, rather than stand, when performing functional rituals at a late hour. I know this is not Switzerland. We live in the legendary land of the tough where ‘the boys don’t cry,’ and a dead-eye dick aim is a long bow from an apple on a Swiss hero’s head.

And I do understand that every Tarzan needs his Jane. But in keeping with evolutionary progress, you and your Jane don’t swing in a hammock slung between the tops of trees. Rather, you plump down on a somewhat rickety bed, which creaks loud complaints in time with the rhythmic stresses percussing its unstable frame. And your Jane is a vocal spirit, who soars off into operatic shrieks of ecstasy. Allow me to congratulate you on an admirable application of skills and equipment.

It’s not that I’m a prude. I have thought of a remote participation in a ménage de trois, but by the time the bed
rocks into my consciousness, the action is already underway. I don’t know an easy solution for this. Perhaps I should withdraw the offer of the WD40, and suggest you keep your windows closed, to muffle the crescendo of climactic trills.

I have one last request. As you lumber around your space, would it be possible to tread more lightly on your floors which, in their natural, uncarpeted splendour adjoin the flimsy, porous substance of my bedroom ceiling? So could you try not to drop whatever it is you drop on the floor? And to refrain from dragging furniture, or dead bodies or whatever it is that you drag around, at such uninviting hours?

Yours of the bathroom and bedroom below in

Unit No. 8
 2004
Cleo Lynch