21. "Why Me?" The History and Mystery of my Bronchiectasis.

Painting by Jaqueline Morreau

Darwinian Clash of Biology and Religion

Bugs and Drugs at War

Government Inactivity over Toxic Pollution

Medical Adventures and Misadventures
The End of an Affair

Introduction

In a previous blog [4. My Other Online World] I outlined the current state of my bronchiectasis and promised to research its origins. My final blog of 2011 is my attempt to fulfill that promise. It sets out a rational explanation as to why I have the condition. In trying to do that I have had to improve my understanding of the condition itself and to track back through key events in my life associated with it. There have been a number of surprises along the way.

Like many confronted with serious illness or chronic disability I have asked myself, self-pityingly at times, "Why me?" I get anxious, frustrated, angry, frightened, panicky - a gamut of emotions surrounding my breathlessness. But while my emotional state with all its attendant irrationalities may play a big part in my management of the disease, it has no bearing on the origins of the disease itself. So I am not looking to the psychosomatic or to karma or to some mystical mumbo-jumbo for explanation as to "Why me?". Rather my search for a rational explanation is one that makes sense within the framework of evidence recognisable as appropriate to science and scientific studies.

1. Diagnosis

I first heard the word bronchiectasis in September 1999. I was 59 at the time and blissfully unaware as to what was lurking in the dark recesses of my lungs and what a story it would reveal.

In September 1998 I was fitter than I had been in years. Earlier in the 1990s I had been slowed down by arthritis in my hips (more of that later) but total hip replacements in 1994 had been very successful. I continued to trundle my clubs around the golf course and swam regularly in the sea throughout the summer.

The University of Auckland granted me a full year's research and study leave for the 1998-1999 academic year. My wife and I decided to take the bulk of it in London. She would study for a masters degree in law at King's College and I would work from an office in Senate House provided under the John Adams Fellowship I had been offered by the University of London Institute of United States Studies. Before settling down for a winter in England, we backpacked around Europe for a spell. We stayed in Athens for a few days, walked up to the acropolis from the Plaka district where our hotel was located and then travelled by ferry through the Greek Islands to Crete, Rhodes and the Turkish coast. We took local buses and coaches up the coast to Istanbul, flew to Budapest and went by public riverboat to Esztergom in Western Hungary, then on to Vienna by bus and train. We stayed in youth hostels, backpackers and small hotels, finally abandoning our travels in Vienna when the temperature hit the 90s; we bailed out and flew to London.

I did not winter well in London. We stayed in a London University hostel near Paddington station and I would travel most days either by bus to Senate House or by tube to the British Library near Kings Cross. I soon discovered that the pollution on the tube was creating havoc with my lungs, so much so that at times I was struggling to mount the stairs from the underground to Euston Road and complete the short walk along to the Library. Then, on a crisp December day with the temperature near zero, I ground to a complete halt on a walk along the Grand Union Canal and we had to find a bus to return us to our bedsit in Paddington.

I had recurring colds during that London winter each followed by a persistent cough that would continue for three or four weeks. I was wheezy and breathless when out in cold air. The local doctor I had registered with was reluctant to prescribe antibiotics since it was after all 'just a viral infection.' In May 1999 I had some minor prostate surgery at a hospital in St John's Wood. This was carried out with a spinal injection and I was only in hospital overnight but the anaesthetist was so concerned about the state of my lungs that she advised me to have a complete check up when I returned to New Zealand.

Because of a persistent and irritating cough and my need to clear my throat frequently when lecturing, my local doctor in Howick had decided five or six years earlier that I was a "closet asthmatic''; I had subtle asthma, asthma not readily traceable from the standard lung function tests available at that time. To this day I don't know if I was, am or ever have been asthmatic and the respiratory specialists I have seen seem equally uncertain. No matter. Although my doctor had prescribed regular use of an inhaled steroid, I was becoming progressively more breathless with exertion and beginning to think if this went on I would need to hire a golf cart rather than trundle my clubs around the course. When your health is threatening your golf it's time to do something!

A few months after our return from England in June my doctor sent me to see a respiratory physician. Here is part of his report.

PROBLEMS
1.     Severe airflow obstruction: ?asthma.
2.     Probable bronchiectasis.
3.     Kyphoscoliosis.
4.     ?Mild rhinitis.
5.     Previous surgery: tonsils and adenoids removed in childhood; bilateral hip  replacement; haemorrhoid surgery 1980's; right menisectomy; TURP May 1999; spinal anaesthesia.

Thank you for asking me to see this 59 year old man with a history of asthma and a troublesome cough. He has been a lifelong non-smoker. At the age of 13 years he developed a persistent cough which went on intermittently for several years: the cough was usually non-productive and he wasn't breathless. At the age of 18 his chest x-ray was abnormal and he thinks TB scars were suspected...

Two weeks ago he developed another URTI and has had a moist cough and pale sputum subsequently... He has noticed occasional flecks of blood in his sputum during acute episodes over the last 3-4 years. Currently he is only breathless on exertion and only gets wheezy and tight chested occasionally...

EXAMINATION
He gave a moist cough several times during the interview.

There were at least two fingers on both hands which are strongly suggestive of finger clubbing and all nails have increased curvature whilst the nailbeds are inflamed. He has a kyphoscoliosis with posterior displacement of the right ribs. His chest was fairly quiet with wheezes heard with forced expiration and just an occasional crackle too. There were no localising chest signs. Heart sounds were dual, BP 150/65 and pulse 72/regular. There was no evidence of cardiac failure.

Unfortunately he doesn't have a current x-ray. A CXR report from 1993 describes normal lung fields. FEV1/FEC=0.85/2.65. Using his arm span of 193cm as an estimate of his true height, he is well below predicted normal values of 4.5/5.25.

ASSESSMENT

1. I think it is very likely that he has asthma and one possibilty is that he has allergic broncho-pulmonary aspergillosis as a complication.
2. Another distinct possibility is bronchiectasis, and this is supported by the history of cough in his teenage years, the recurrent minor haemoptysis and his finger clubbing. Additionally, bronchiectasis can be responsible for producing severe airflow obstruction.

Never being one to rush to the medical books or the internet to see what deadly disease a headache might presage, I had not, until now (December 2011), bothered to defuse the arsenal of obfuscating words in the repertoire of a respiratory physician. I knew some of the terms in my specialist's report but by no means all of them. Here is a glossary:

1. Kyphoscoliosis = curvature of the spine.
2. Rhinitis = inflammation of the nasal mucous membranes.
3. Menisectomy = an operation on the cartilage in my right knee (after a sports injury in 1962).
4. TURP = transurethral resection of the prostate.
5. TB, short for tubercle bacillus = pulmonary tuberculosis, a contagious bacterial infection of the lungs. 
6. Dyspnoea = breathlessness.
7. URTI = upper respiratory tract infection.
8. CXR = chest x-ray (should have guessed that one: too obvious?).
9. Allergic broncho-pulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) = [see below]
10. Haemoptysis = coughing up blood or blood-streaked mucus.

Now that I have begun to work out what all these terms mean I can begin to unravel something of my respiratory history within the context of other events in my life that had previously seemed unconnected. Until today, for example, I didn't know about the aspergillus fungus that had taken up residence in my lungs (ABPA). Apparently this usually develops in people who already have lung problems and grows in the sites of past diseases like TB. There is no complete cure for it so it is a primary and ongoing bugs v drugs drama.

After subsequent sweat, blood and sputum tests and a CT scan, the diagnosis of bronchiectasis was confirmed. Green Lane Imaging's 17th September 1999 report on my CT Scan concluded:

Widespread  bronchiectasis with some evidence of central bronchiectasis, considerable mucous plugging and bronchial wall thickening. These appearances are more consistent with ABPA than typical post-viral bronchiectasis.

Subsequent reports from my respiratory physician identified other exotic trespassers in my sputum cultures plus this major surprise:

Cystic fibrosis variant, heterozygous for the Delta F508 mutation. Sterility investigated in the 1960s.

So this took me back to my genetic history as a starting point in seeking to answer the "Why me?" question.

2. Genetics
My knowledge of genetics is woeful so this is my best understanding of my lung inheritance.

'Normal' people have two working copies of the cystic fibrosis gene, one from each parent.

Those with cystic fibrosis have two non-working mutated copies of the CF gene, one from each parent. There are over a thousand possible mutations but the most common, present in about 70% of cystic fibrosis patients, is Delta 508. This upsets the chemical balance that is needed to clear mucus from the lungs, creating 'a thick, sticky mucus layer that cannot be removed by cilia and traps bacteria, resulting in chronic infections.' The average life expectancy of people with cystic fibrosis is around 37 and around 95% of men with CF are sterile.

More glossary:

1. heterozygous = having two different forms of a particular gene.
2. cilia (the Latin for eyelashes) = tiny hair-like structures that protect the nasal passages and the respiratory system from dust, particles, pollutants and bacteria that we breathe in. They form into rings that wave about to filter and brush out the muck and can beat or swim through mucus. Damage to the cilia is integral to bronchiectasis as the inability of the lungs to self-clean may progressively lead to severe breathing problems.

I now know that I am a heterozygote! I am a carrier of cystic fibrosis.

With a CF variant you have one normal gene and one non-working copy, a mutated unidentified gene; you may be a carrier of CF but in the vast majority of cases you will have none of the disease symptoms. There can be many generations of carriers in a family without anyone being born with the disease, and being a carrier 'will not cause you to be ill or shorten your life in any way.'

Where both parents have a mutated CF gene their child has a 25% chance of cystic fibrosis and a 50% chance of being a carrier. Where only one parent has a mutated gene the child has a 25% chance of being a carrier. About 4% of caucasians are CF carriers.

So that let's biology off the hook, in terms of my bronchiectasis at least, which is not in any way genetic.

3. Standard medical procedures for children in the 1940s and 1950s.
When I was eight years old I had my tonsils and adenoids removed. Tonsils, which sit in the back of the throat, and adenoids, which are higher up behind the nose, protect the body from infection by filtering and trapping germs breathed in through the nose and mouth. I presumed, therefore, that my loss of tonsils and adenoids at a young age increased my exposure to infection and might have a part to play in the development of my bronchiectasis.

In the 1940s and 1950s in Great Britain and the USA, the surgery I had was quite normal for children between the ages of four and eight. Indeed "T's and A's" as they were called (tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies) were the most frequently performed surgical procedure in both countries. In England and Wales the practice peaked in 1930/31 when T's and A's were performed on somewhere between fifty and seventy five percent of elementary and primary school children. There was a further peak in 1951 and estimates for the period from 1945 to the early 1950s were that every year up to a quarter of a million of those school children (about a third of them) had the operation. About forty children a year died from the procedure.

Rather curiously the medical profession at the time, or a significant proportion of it, considered, without any conclusive evidence, that tonsils and adenoids were 'portals of infection'. The medical reasons given for carrying out T's and A's on young children varied but it was a common procedure for dealing with persistent sore throats, nasal catarrh, chronic coughs, wheezy chests, recurrent earaches, transient deafness and enlarged glands in the neck. I do not know which of these conditions applied to me at the time although I do remember that in childhood I suffered badly from chilblains in my fingers, toes and ears. I was the proud possessor of a pair of leather gloves but not so happy about wearing a woolly balaclava when out in the cold. To the best of my knowledge T's and A's were not an answer to that problem, though it is worth remembering that this was a time when doctors were actively involved in advertisements for the health benefits of smoking.

The widescale practice of surgically removing the tonsils and adenoids of young children was questioned by many in the medical community at the time and subsequently discredited. Dr John Fry, in a 1957 article in the British Medical Journal ('Are all "T's and A's" really necessary?'), wrote - in the context of 'apparently unscientific and irrational procedures based on faulty premises, uncontrolled impressions, and rash conclusions' - of the ridiculous sums of money being spent on 'a mass ritual that has never yet been scientifically proved to be necessary.' The much higher operation rates among children of the well-to-do, over ninety percent in some fee-paying schools, he put down to parental pressure. His conclusion from monitoring the health of the children in his practice over a number of years without surgical intervention, was that T's and A's were 'a fashionable and misguided procedure carried out in a desperate attempt to treat a normal phase of child development which... will naturally and spontaneously subside and disappear in the course of two to three years.'

Ah ha I thought. I can put some causal element of my bronchiectasis down to the stupidity of so-called scientific medicine in my childhood. But not so apparently. The subsequent medical studies make it very clear that, while most T's and A's carried out when I was a child were a pointless waste of time and money, the removal of a child's tonsils and adenoids did no harm whatsoever to the child's immune system then or in the future.

So another clue leads nowhere. Neither my genetic history nor, it would appear, a childhood operation have any part to play in the development of my bronchiectasis. Of the operation itself I have no particular memory. Post operatively there was bad news and good news. The bad news was the disgusting semolina I was fed daily for a while. The good news was the ice cream.

4. London smogs
The next cab off the rank of suspects is an environmental one.

We moved home a number of times when I was a child. When I had my tonsils and adenoids removed we were living on the outskirts of Bath where my father, after completing theological studies at Ridley Hall Cambridge, took up his first position as curate of St Phillip's Church Odd Down. It was from there, at the age of nine, that I became a boarder at Wells Cathedral School. Home and school were healthy environments with plenty of fresh air and exercise and I was the kind of child who would happily spend hours at any game that involved kicking or hitting a ball. Photographs of me in those days show a boy of normal build for his age.

In 1952, when I was twelve, my father was appointed vicar of St John's Kilburn in London. In August we moved to Queen's Park, four underground stops from Marble Arch on the Bakerloo line so reasonably near the West End and centre of the city. I continued as a boarder at Wells until I left school at eighteen.

The year we arrived in London was the winter of A Proper Pea-Souper: the Terrible London Smog of 1952 (go to this link for excellent photos and details; at the end of it you will find an amusing little video clip of the British Government's 1947 advice as to how to deal with air pollution). The 1952 smog was a major environmental disaster in which an estimated 12,000 people died, primarily from pneumonia, bronchitis, tuberculosis and heart failure. While most of the deaths were among the elderly, unknown thousands were made ill with respiratory complaints and suffered long-term respiratory effects. These included inflammation of the lungs, permanent lung damage and, among children, increased susceptibility to infection.

Smogs (the word is an abbreviation for smoke and fog) were a feature of London life dating back centuries. The toxic darkness of the 1952 smog finally precipitated government action, eventually leading to the Clean Air Act of 1956. This Act put restrictions on the burning of coal in domestic stoves and fireplaces and encouraged the adoption of coke and other smokeless fuels for home heating.

I haven't researched the reasons for British Governments dragging their feet for so long in dealing with the air pollution in London. I would imagine, if the subsequent history of business resistance to the regulation of the tobacco industry is any guide, that the coal industry, prior to and during the general election of 1945, mounted a lobbyful of resistance to clean air legislation. The Labour Government elected in 1945 nationalised a number of industries, including the coal industry. With the setting up of the National Coal Board in 1946 the government itself became the key stakeholder in the coal industry but it was still ten years before clean air legislation was passed.

Smogs of variable intensity continued periodically in winter throughout my teenage years so I was exposed to them during my weeks at home for the Christmas holidays. One winter - I am not certain it was 1952 - I contracted a lung infection which led to a persistent cough and the stunting of my physical development. I stopped growing up and started growing round so that by the time I was eighteen I had a significant scoliosis and was well below the height appropriate for a healthy young man of my age. My nicknames at school became "shrimp" and "squirt" and I was the smallest in all the team photographs I have for that period. At home, when lounging around sprawled over couches and chairs as teenagers do, I was frequently admonished to sit up straight.

While I might be coughing my way through the Christmas holidays at Queen's Park, at school in Somerset I continued to be active and healthy. My developing scoliosis did not hamper me physically in any way and, to the best of my recall, never caused speculation or concern among the school staff. There was nothing in my school reports about my health and when my parents did enquire about my scoliosis it was dismissed, according to my mother's account, as a 'scholarly stoop.' I can only remember one episode of breathlessness when I came to a complete halt on a school run, an activity that was generally restricted to days when it was too wet to use the playing fields. After stopping for a minute or two I regained my breath and carried on running.

At home it was a different story.

5. Acts of Faith
At this point it becomes difficult.

It is clear to me that the London environment of the 1950s was the trigger of my subsequent lung problems. That a simple lung infection one winter should have such long-term consequences brings to the fore the question of the medical treatment I received at the time. The answer, in terms of the conventional medical practices of the 1950s, was none and the reason for that rests with my parents' beliefs. My parents loved and cared for me and were concerned for my health and development, but neither of them believed that conventional medicine had the answer to my lung infection and its subsequent chest problems. I was never, either at home or at school, given the obvious remedy of a course of antibiotics.

My mother was a nurse. She was trained at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in the 1930s, something she was immensely proud of, and ran a clinic in Nigeria for a spell before the outbreak of the Second World War. Both her training and her hands-on practice predated the general introduction of penicillin into the germbuster arsenal of local GPs. Although Alexander Fleming discovered the use of penicillin in killing bacteria back in 1928, it wasn't until the end of the War that it came into general use, heralding a post-1945 period described as 'the era of antibiotics.'

What my mother had adopted at the time of her medical training was a commitment to homeopathic medicines. Our doctor in Scotland, where we lived until I was six years old, was a homeopath. He was also a close family friend so that even after we moved to England he continued to provide advice on, and occasional supply of, the little white pills to be taken for different family ailments. When I developed lung problems in the early fifties, I was taken to see our homeopathic doctor in North London and prescribed, I presume, some pills to take.

We are all prisoners to some degree of the mindsets we develop in our early adulthood and professional training. Some medical historians consider that, until antibiotics came along, medical interventions were likely to do as much harm as good to the patient. In the 1930s a belief in homeopathy, which, when all its bogus scientific claims are stripped away, is simply the administration of a placebo, was as good a faith as any for my mother to adopt. There is nothing wrong with placebos, especially when the placebo effect flows from the care and attention of a sympathetic homeopathic practitioner as well as from a credulous patient hungry for a remedy to their illness. So we shouldn't pass too harsh a judgment on past medical practices seen through the lens of today. No doubt, in fifty years time, the currently mainstream treatment I have received for my bronchiectasis will appear hopelessly outdated and misguided.

My father's contribution to the management of my teenage health was somewhat different to that of my mother. When I was at home for the holidays with one of those hacking coughs that to this day provides a winter serenade on the top decks of London buses, he would sit on my bed at night and exert me to develop the willpower to stop my coughing. It seemed to me that, from his perspective, my cough was a product of a lack of self-control and the remedy was Willpower and Faith in God. Since at that time I was a dutifully religious boy, it must be my willpower that is in short supply. A physiological rather than psychological rationale for my coughing wasn't, as far as I can tell, part of Dad's understanding of my condition, which is surprising in a man who was a science teacher. Perhaps he lost his faith in science at the time his faith in God burgeoned. If so it would be the mirror image of the trajectory of my later teenage years when I rejected creationism and a designer universe and plumped on science to provide me with a better understanding of the world around me.

Yes, I do think of Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse and your Mum and Dad not meaning to fuck you up, especially when contemplating the infertility that stemmed either from my mutant CF gene or from my teenage flirtation with TB. But then I also, on a more positive note, agree with J. K. Rowling in her splendid 2008 Harvard Commencement Speech that 'there is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.'

6. Subsequent developments
I left school in 1958 aged eighteen and worked for two years prior to starting university. The second of my jobs was as an unskilled nightshift worker in a food factory in North Acton so after my brief interview I was put through a routine chest x-ray. This turned up scarring on my lungs so I was kept off the food production lines until I had my condition checked out by the company's medical personnel. They put the scarring down to some tubercular infection which had since cleared. I was permitted to work on production lines and advised to have regular six monthly checks with my own doctor. I continued with these checks for three or four years but my condition was clearly stable and they were discontinued.

Nothing of any relevance to this story happened between 1958 and 1998/9 when, as I have indicated, I spent a winter in London. After the diagnosis of bronchiectasis on my return to New Zealand I commenced the programme of antibiotics, inhalers and chest clearing exercises recommended by my respiratory physician. There were bad patches, particularly when the weather was humid, but for the most part I was able to function well. Sharon and I had a big overseas trip in 2004 and again in 2008 after a further and very successful hip resection the previous year. We did not stay in London but did take day trips into the city from my daughter Sacha's place in Hemel Hempstead.

In the autumn of 2010 it became clear that my other hip would also need a resection and I was placed on the waiting list for surgery. The surgery was carried out in September and this time it did not go quite to plan. My exercise fell away and I was struggling even to play croquet. In 2011 I deteriorated rapidly in spite of an eight week pulmonary rehab programme in March and April. During the course of the year I had four series of intravenous antibiotics and, after a variety of tests, was issued with an oxygen concentrator for home use sixteen hours in every twenty four and portable oxygen to help me get out and about.

7. "And the end of all our exploring...
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time." (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets - Little Gidding)

So what does it all add up to?

These seem to be the reasons as to why I have bronchiectasis:

1. I was exposed to toxic pollution in London in my childhood.
2. My lung infection at that time was not properly treated.

And these the reasons as to why it has now developed to such an extent:

1. I unwisely spent a winter in London in my late fifties.
2. My exercise fell away before and after hip surgery in 2010.

Not much to it really. I guess my love affair with London wasn't reciprocated. Never mind. I still love London, in memory at least. But I won't be cosying up to her again.

______________________________________________________________________

Jan 11th 2012. Crippling smog in Beijing this week.

London smogs
Discovered my notes on Peter Ackroyd's London:The Biography (2001) chapter 47 'A Foggy Day'.
In 1257 'Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III, complained about the smoke and pollution of London.'
'On the afternoon of 16 January 1955 there was almost total darkness... People who experienced the phenomenon said it seemed as if the world was coming to an end.'
In spite of the 1956 Clean Air Act there was another lethal smog during the winter of 1962. A more extensive Clean Air Act was passed in 1968.

And just came across this entry in my 1959 diary:
Thursday 29 January 1959
Quite a fog this evening, real pea-souper smog, ‘a London particular’. London is an uncanny place during the fog - dank, dark, dirty, quite Dickensian. And so still. Shadows loom from the fog and pass noiselessly, and the light from houses, cars and streetlamps gleams gingerly through the gloom. Sounds travel as though from the bottom of a deep pool. I feel the clammy hand of death as the fog stings my eyes, burns my throat, makes me cough and cough and cough. No wonder Robert Browning linked the fog in his throat with death. And a lot of old people have died this winter. Again. But home from the fog there’s the warmth of a coal fire, hot soup and a cosy bed.

[See blog 89. Musings on Ageing and Dependency (plus a little Walt Whitman), 26th January 2014, for some discussion on managing my bronchiectasis.]

20. London Love Affair

Heidelberg, Sunday 7th April 1985

Soon as I arrived I realised how much of a European I am. How I’ll never come to terms with America, California-style at least. I feel more at home in Germany, where I hardly speak the language, than I did in LA or San Diego. Cobbled streets, tramcars, narrow bridges, barges on the river, people walking from place to place. I love all that. And air that you can breathe. In LA the air was so bad I found myself trying not to take deep breaths. I sort of sucked it in between my teeth. The locals talked about haze but my lungs screamed smog.

 

London, 8th May 1985, 50th Anniversary of VE Day
Went walkabout to the Cenotaph where there was a VE ceremony conducted by the United Nations Association, children in their national costumes putting flowers on the monument. A ceremony of reconciliation. Sweet, but you couldn’t hear the speakers above the traffic noise. On the way back here I was solicited by a gorgeous young lady outside the Cumberland Hotel – my God, do I look that desperate?!! I always think of great ripostes afterwards to the question “Do you want a girl?” but at the time I was so surprised I put my head down and walked on. It made me feel quite strange.

Thursday May 9th 1985

Last night I headed for the Greater London Council HQ by the Thames to watch the VE Day fireworks display. Fantastic. £50,000 worth of fireworks and it looked like it, the bangs reverberating round the central city and the fireworks reflected in the glass of the high-rise office blocks. Very spectacular.

I have been re-acquainting myself, when work pressure allows, with the sights, sounds and smells of London. Long walks through favourite places. The central city parks – St James’, Green Park, Hyde Park - are beautiful in the spring. Full of tourists and locals enjoying being out in the fresh air. And all the time so many memories and echoes from the past and such a familiarity with this city, bred of twenty years of living here and loving the place. Nothing much has changed physically, but I am so changed it is disconcerting. I can see the whiz-kid that I was in the sixties, part of Harold Wilson’s white-hot technological revolution, commuting to work in my company car, staff and budgets and contracts to manage, expense account lunches, hospitality allowance, a long-legged, mini-skirted personal secretary to lust after, all the goodies of the corporate life. So up myself it wasn’t true. Can feel in myself the continuity of the person I was then as though thirteen years away count for nothing. Up with the latest trends, avidly reading the newspapers and journals (God, it’s nice to have intelligent reading material so readily to hand), seeing the latest plays and films, all those heady things that great cities like this have to offer. Plus that unspoken understanding that you are at the centre of the universe. And yet I can also see that my intellectuality covered an emotional sterility, a lack of emotional development, of growing up. I needed New Zealand for that. Perhaps Mary's death even. The intellectual in me is a product of Europe but the humanity in me comes from my experience in the South Pacific. I suppose that's what I was looking for, was programmed for, in seeing the Pacific as a place where I could free myself from the status-conscious class-ridden crap of Europe and find a rich sensual emotionally-charged life. So, whereas my head can enjoy what is here, my heart and my soul are in New Zealand.

19. In London, In Love

Photograph by Trevor Watson, Portfolio Gallery

Note:

The italicised text below is taken from a tape recording made by Mary on our trip to the USA and Europe in 1981-82.

The normal text records some of my memories of London triggered by listening recently to Mary's tape of our journey on a number six bus.

“It’s Monday December the seventh nineteen eighty one and we’re in London, riding on the top of a red double-decker bus, a number six, up at the front. Great view. John’s favourite route, he tells me, all the way to… Where was it?"

“West Kilburn, Queen’s Park.”

“We’re not going that far though. Only to the West End… We arrived last night. I was so tired. John’s sister Ruth and her husband Trevor met us at Heathrow. Driving through Piccadilly Circus and St. Paul’s was like riding through Universal Studios for me. It looked unreal, as though it was all a façade. We’re staying at Hackney Wick with John’s brother Stuart and his wife Jutka. It’s very coh-oh-old, and very grey, and everything is, first impression is, very very old.

We’ve stopped. The driver and conductor have just changed. I can see an inspector out here. Looks like a character from On The Buses. Trees are as bare as bare, very wintry.

Going past Petticoat Lane now. There’s a market thing going on, and the city’s changed, more lively, the shops are all working here. We’ve just come through an area where everything was closed and broken down. A lot of manufacture-and-sell-on-site places, tailors and shoe manufacturers and coat makers and cabinetmakers and things like that.

Going past St. Paul’s. Had to stop there on the way from the airport while I found the toilet, had my first English crap. Gosh, St. Paul’s looks great. There’s something on at St. Paul’s. Carol service. Not on a Monday surely?”

“Probably would be. Perhaps we can go to one. I once took Stuart to the Lord Mayor’s Show and stood just over there.”

In Paternoster Square. Stuart’s on my shoulders so he can see. Pat and I live at Finsbury Park. Stuart is three. I have a vague recollection of being taken to the Lord Mayor’s Show by Dad and Uncle Geoff when I’m tiny. Before they built the dreadful Paternoster House. At Churchill’s funeral Pat and I stand near the top of Ludgate Hill. See the gun carriage with Churchill’s coffin on it coming round St. Paul’s and setting off down to Ludgate Circus. Must be the January after we marry. Before Stuart is born. We rent in Wood Green at Mrs. Tanczos’ place. She’s Anglo-Indian. I can walk to White Hart Lane to watch Spurs. Still have the commemorative Churchill coin somewhere.

“Well, it’s certainly hotting up now. Lots of bustle around on the streets.”

“That’s Fleet Street straight ahead. Look, Reuters. Coming up on the left. I went there about a job after I left school. Thought I’d be a journalist. Met a friend of my Dad’s, there. Told me to go away and learn shorthand and typing.”

Marco. Helps Boris Pasternak smuggle the manuscript of Dr. Zhivago out of Russia. It’s published in Italy. Sounds wonderfully exotic to me. More than reason enough to want to be a journalist. How did Dad know Marco? I have no idea. Must have been a parishioner.

“I didn’t know you could do shorthand.”

“I can’t.”

“Piccadilly Railway, Strand – an underground station, all locked up. Why’s that?”

“Don’t know love. Can’t be used any more, I suppose.”

Spooky. Just last month I dreamt of the dead Mary in an abandoned underground station. Happily supervising a ghostly crew of make-up artists. Preparing souls for the after life.

"Now where are we?”

“Charing Cross.”

“Charing Cross. What’s that monument down there?”

“That’s the Charing Cross.”

“Oh, that is the Charing Cross.”

“Monument for Queen Eleanor of somewhere or other, Aquitaine I think, Henry the Second’s wife. When she died her body was brought down from up north and he had a cross erected at all the places where it rested overnight – they’re all known as Eleanor Crosses.”

“Oh, how sweet, would you do that for me, darling?”

“And the brass band too? You’ll be lucky!”

I sound so authoritative behind the casual façade of my speculation. I am wrong. Wrong Eleanor. Wrong King. I just checked the internet. Habits of a lifetime as a researcher and analyst are hard to break. The queen is Eleanor of Castile. Died 1290. The king is Edward I. She bore him sixteen children, poor thing. Twelve crosses erected at the stops along the route from Lincoln, where Eleanor died, to Westminster Abbey where she’s buried. A few survive. One at Waltham Cross. Just up the road from St. George’s on the Enfield Highway where Dad’s the vicar for many years. Charing Cross one’s a nineteenth century replica. Still, as Mary always said to her staff and apprentices: “When in doubt, Fake It”!

“Admiralty Arch. Where they came through for Princess Di’s Wedding, wasn’t it?”

“Right, only they opened the gates in the centre arch… Look! Back down there, down Whitehall.”

“Oh, there it is, Big Ben – have to go and get the chimes on the tape. Oh, and Nelson sitting on the top. And pigeons everywhere. It’s absolutely gorgeous, fountains going. Although it’s cold and grey outside it’s not raining. There’s a man with birds all over him. Look at that lion. It’s enormous isn’t it, Nelson’s column, I don’t know how big I thought it was going to be. 

Two Bank of New Zealands we’ve passed, making me feel happy, not so far from home. We’re coming up to Piccadilly Circus. What’s that? Crimea War Memorial.

Here we are, Piccadilly Circus, with Eros in the middle, a big Coca-Cola sign and the streets and the old lamps, looks like old gas lamps. We’re turning into Regent Street, oohhh and all the Christmas decorations are across the street, aren’t they beautiful? About seven big Christmas trees with big loops of tinsel, bunting linking them all up and they’re hanging across the street for, oh, a mile? Easily a mile right down the street.

We’re going past all the shops in Regent Street, it looks very exciting out there, lots of people around. Even a sale on before Christmas. There’s verandas on the shop fronts which seems strange - they haven’t got a sunshine problem.

A clown in the window of Hamley’s toy shop and across the top there’s fairies and animals. And Christmas pageanty sort of stuff, and a big By Appointment, and red lights on the front all the way up. The Christmas trees on the front of this shop called Jaeger – oh, and there’s Carnaby Street! – are all tiny little lights and they’re really effective. Liberty’s, all black and glitter. Ohh! Fur Coats! Coloured tinsely sort of dresses, bright colours, covered in lurex. Oh, Dickens and Jones. Clothing store. I think I wrote away for material once to Dickens and Jones.

Oxford Circus and we’re turning down

Oxford Street. Oh, there’s a lot of people here. Is that the underground they’re going down or just the way they’re crossing the street?”

“It’s both.”

“All the big stores are down here. John Lewis and Selfridges, full of lurexy clothes and those little tiny Christmas lights.”

“It’s buses and taxis only up and down here.”

“No cars. Buses and taxis only. D.H. Evans store, oh it’s covered in Christmas trees and lights and the trees on the pavement outside have got lights flickering on and off, isn’t that pretty!

Debenhams.

We’ve just stopped outside Denise’s fur shop. I can see a fur coat in there. Two hundred and eighty five pounds. What a lot of people. And it’s Monday morning. Oh, it’s actually after lunch on Monday, we slept in until half past ten after our long flight.

Matty’s, natty little trousers and gear. Lilley Skinner. No, Lilley and Skinner, shoes by the million.”

I can recount them all, all the big stores from one end of Oxford Street to the other. This is Kilburn work territory. Half my friends in St. John’s Youth Club work here as shop assistants and warehousemen. I gravitate to Knightsbridge when I leave school and work in Harrods for a spell. Brenda breaks the mould too by working in a bank in Pall Mall. Meets Jimmy there. But most of the girls don’t have the requisite accent for the Regent Street or Knightsbridge stores. Or can’t be bothered to fake one. Dark haired Jean is a shop assistant at John Lewis, all tight black hobble skirt and white blouse, neat and trim and just the trace of a Welsh accent. Even at sixteen she has a sadness, a brittleness about her. Her childhood sweetheart electrocutes himself showing off to her and her friends on a power pylon. I kiss her on a Sunday evening after church. Very sweet sixteen it is too. I board the weekly coach to the Billy Graham crusade at Haringey the following Thursday, thinking I will sit next to her. She ignores me completely. I’m totally perplexed.

Dad finds Freddy Mayes a job as a pageboy at The Cumberland, Marble Arch, after he catches him stealing lead off the church roof and signs him up for the youth club. You can see mischievous Freddy from the bus. So handsome standing there with the doorman in his green and gold-braided uniform, his peaked hat covering his golden hair. He has a terrible temper and kills his girlfriend. While I’m in Italy, I think. Around the time Khrushchev is banging his shoe up and down at the United Nations over the U2 spy plane incident and Princess Margaret is marrying Tony Armstrong Jones.

For years Dad visits Freddy in prisons around the country. Freddy does get released occasionally but never for long and he becomes progressively institutionalised. He's been in and out for over fifty years now. After Dad dies Elizabeth, bless her heart, takes over the visiting. You have to give it to these compassionate Christians who care for every little sparrow that falls in the wayside.

Dawn’s dad – Dawn lives next door to us at Queen’s Park - is a store walker at Peter Robinsons, Oxford Circus. Dawn works there in the school holidays. Her brother Cedric breeds tortoises in their back garden. He’s featured in the local paper. When Dawn reaches ten she becomes self-conscious, flat-chested though she is, about being in the garden in just her underpants. If she sees me through the wire fence, she covers her nipples with her index fingers and runs inside. Later, as a well-endowed bobbysoxer and newly branded ‘teenager’, she screams herself hoarse at Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock performance at the Gaumont State in Kilburn High Road. I think that’s totally crass, but I still ask her to go with me to see West Side Story. She says no. I go with Jill, one of the trainee teachers who lodges with us in Kingswood Avenue.

A lot of the older folk in the parish have never been to the West End. It’s only half a dozen stops or so down the Bakerloo Line or a twenty-minute bus ride. But then, after more than thirty years in New Zealand, I had never been to Dunedin until a few years ago. When Elizabeth and Ruth visited I finally came full circle and visited the city that, in name at least, is the antipodean image of my birthplace.

“Time to get off.”

“Bob wants to go to the toilet. That’s a nice change; it’s usually me that has to go. You should see Selfridges’ windows, full of Christmas scenes and ladies in bright pink gowns. I think window dressing must be an art form here.”

From the other direction, travelling to the West End from Kingswood Avenue, I often take a number six, usually one terminating at Aldwych. The underground would be quicker. I board the bus just south of the bridge at Queen’s Park Station, where N.W.6 changes to W.9 and clerical and artisan avenues give way to unskilled working roads. All my Kilburn teenage friends live within walking distance of that bus route. In a triangle between Carlton Vale, the High Road and the railway line. Brenda lives in Ashmore Road with her mum, her dad, her kid sister Norma. Her dad dies. Hardly a surprise really. He’s an ashen-faced chain smoker. Runs a newspaper and cigarette kiosk on a spot outside Victoria Station. I find excuses to go and see Brenda in the evenings. Her dad sits with his cup of tea in the corner of the living room, beneath the plastic ducks, hacking away as only Londoners can hack.

On the train from Bath, going home for the school holidays, I meet another girl who lives in Ashmore Road. I’m sitting at the window seat with my back to the engine. Opposite me is this stunning West Indian girl. About my age. I can stare at her reflection as I gaze casually out the window at the passing landscape. Somewhere along the way, perhaps as early as the Box Hill Tunnel, our stretched out legs touch. Neither of us pull away to break the contact. I must eventually have spoken with her, though I can’t believe it would have been me who broke the ice. She’s a student nurse. Lives in Ashmore Road, a predominately white neighbourhood then. We travel on the underground from Paddington to Queens Park. When we part at the top of the station bridge I’m too shy to ask for her address. I never see her again.

Mind, it might have been frowned upon if I had dated her, judging by Dad’s reaction when Ruth had a West Indian boyfriend, Winston I think his name was. Notwithstanding all his missionary work in Nigeria and the Sudan, or perhaps because of it, Dad takes the view - he says it’s Albert Schweitzer’s - that black men are our brothers, but younger brothers. Needing guidance and leadership. There’s the social divide too to consider. The divisions of railway lines and high street shops. North of us, on the other side of the North London line, is Brondesbury, rich Jewish territory. South of the old London, Midland, Scottish line at Queens Park is white unskilled working class. Further towards the southwest, beyond the tracks laid down by the Great Western Railway, is Westbourne Grove. Post-war immigrant black territory, noisy and poor. Dad takes me there with him to visit a parishioner. I’m shocked at the decay and poverty, the peeling paint, flaking plaster, numbers hanging precariously from apartment doors, the smell of urine and cats in the corridors. This gritty reality removes the gloss from my romantic images of working class life. And from my enjoyment of the representations of it then so fashionable in the West End theatre’s kitchen sink dramas.

My friends Matthew, Bob and John, who in memory of their state primary school like to refer to themselves mockingly as The Granville Road Old Boys, all live in side streets off Shirland Road. John plays the saxophone. Escapes by joining an Army Music Corps. Bob, who is a Teddy Boy before my Dad rounds him up for the youth club and sets him on the road towards righteousness, joins an army of a different kind, The Church Army. In his smart uniform, he wows all the girls, especially our teacher trainee lodgers from Tunbridge Wells. Matthew is the sombre intellectual of the group. Always in black. He and I share deep angst ridden discussions about Sartre, Camus and existentialism. We cultivate an image as radical outsiders. After years of evening study, financed by his struggling war widow mother, Matthew makes it to university. Ends up a professor of psychology in one of those new universities up north. We are both in love with Brenda. She looks so virginal in her choir uniform - frilly white blouse buttoned to the neck, black robes and cap, black court shoes. All the boys in the youth club are in love with Brenda.

"In Debenhams now, having afternoon tea. I’ve just seen a brilliant fur coat I adore and I’m deciding whether or not to go and buy it. It’s a steal in a furshop – reduced. All the mink coats in the store are reduced, the twelve hundred pound coats to six ninety five, that’s for a ranch mink jacket. But I’m not really considering one of those…

Well, we bought my coat and I look scruummy in my cream and tweed fur and I feel very much more London than I did before. It’s ten to five and getting dark already. We’re going down Oxford Street and all the Christmas lights are glittering away in front of the stores. We’re going to see the decorations in Regent Street.”

The rush hour is upon us. In the dark the Christmas decorations look even more spectacular than before, so, like children who, having enjoyed a ride at the fairground, immediately clamour for another, we climb back on a bus (I don’t remember the number), staying downstairs with our shopping bags this time, and retrace our journey back round Oxford Circus, down Regent Street, and into the Haymarket where we push our way off through the commuter crowd scrabbling to alight. A brief walk into Panton Street and we are in the warmth of The Stock Pot, a budget favourite of mine from student days, snugly ensconced arm-in-arm in an upstairs cubicle. We order the minestrone soup and share a carafe of the house red to take away the winter chill, and then I have the spaghetti carbonara and Mary the escalope of veal.

As we’re drinking hot chocolate and chattering away about our purchases and the Christmas presents we are yet to buy, a tall saturnine gentleman in a black vicuna overcoat approaches our cubicle with his coffee and sits down opposite us. He has silver hair, a lugubrious face and elegant, if skinny, hands. Beneath the open overcoat, he’s wearing a tailor-made pinstripe suit that has seen better days, a crumpled white business shirt and a black tie. He sits and looks piercingly at us. We are silent now.

After what seems a long time in this impasse, he fishes into a pocket of his overcoat and pulls out a small piece of paper. He smoothes it out on the table and considers it intently. Then he puts a bony manicured forefinger on top of the piece of paper, fixes his gaze on us again, and wordlessly pushes it across, slowly and deliberately. It has writing on it, which we both stare at, nonplussed. The words, handwritten in spidery capitals with pen and ink, make no sense. He looks at us for some response and when, after a further pause, this isn’t forthcoming, he digs into his pockets again and repeats the process. The message this time, if that is what it is, is in some runic, middle earth or hieroglyphic language. We look at him, not knowing what to say.

This ritual is repeated five or six times, none of the silent messages, no matter what the script, being intelligible to us. If he had burst into song I don’t think we could have been more surprised. He finishes his coffee without taking his eyes from us, stands up, buttons up his overcoat, bows his head slightly in our direction, crosses the room, walking with a slow measured gait, as though his shoes pinch or he has an artificial hip, collects his black trilby from the coat stand in the corner and, with a final backward glance at us, disappears silently down the stairs. Mary and I look at each other.

“Wouldn’t want him at your wedding, would you?” I say.

We collapse into laughter.

Having agreed that the poor man is off the planet, we finish our drinks, and set off for Cambridge Circus to catch our show. It’s raining now so, laden with shopping bags, we skitter along the back alleys and side streets between Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue, hugging close to the buildings in an effort to keep as dry as we can and avoid the perils of wet and icy pavements. With time to kill before the show, we find a cosy pub, buy some drinks and tell jokes.

“What do you get if you work your fingers to the bone?”

“Bony fingers!” we chorus together:

“The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on!”

“It’s the fickle finger of fate and it’s pointing at…?”

“You!”

And I put on my best nasal Brummie accent and mimic Jasper Carrot’s The Nutter on the Bus sketch.

“When the nutter gets on the bus, does the nutter sit next to you?”

“I’m in my first English pub. It’s called The Cambridge. We got drenched in the rain. Got my new fur coat all wet, my feet are killing me, we’ve been walking around all day and I’m absolutely stuffed. We had an Italian dinner and next we are off to the Phoenix Theatre to see a show called One Mo’ Time.”

It’s still raining when we come out of the theatre. Fortunately, it being a Monday night, taxis are plentiful and I don’t need to risk life and limb rushing out into Charing Cross Road to hail one to take us back to Hackney. We’re both tired so it’s nice to slump in the back of the cab and reflect on a good day, a magic day in many ways. I always loved London, especially at Christmas, but seeing it entrance Mary, and listening to her prattle on excitedly and happily, makes me mellow and content. I realise how deeply rooted London is in the New Zealand psyche, even for someone of German ancestry, and how important it is to Mary to have finally arrived in a place she has heard so much about back home and visited so often in the coffee table clutter of her fashion and hairdressing magazines. She has even made shopping an enjoyable experience for me, an avid anti-shopper.

“Well, that was excerpts from One Mo’ Time. It was this wonderful show. We had a lovely day yesterday and such a fun evening, I thought I’d die laughing! I’d let the show run on to the end of the tape and I was going to post this off today, but I’ve just woken up, it’s Tuesday, what, the seventh? …eighth of December, and it’s snowing! All the rooftops out of the window are covered with snow, and the cars outside in the street. It’s fluttering down just like the snow machine in Universal Studios. I couldn’t believe it, it’s the first time it has snowed before Christmas as long as Stuart and Jutka can remember, since they’ve been living in this house in, in Hackney. So I don’t know quite how we’re going to cope with snow, it’s almost, oh, it looks about three or four inches deep out on the pavement already. There’s some people have been trotting through it, but it’s so beautiful, absolutely wonderful...

It’s strange to be back in the East End after so many years. Pat and I meet in Bethnal Green in January of my final year at Cambridge. We are both at the Institute of Community Studies as part of our university programmes. Well, it’s a Cambridge University programme actually, run by Michael Young who teaches social survey methods and arranges for the class to stay at the Institute for a week to develop our interviewing skills and do some fieldwork on kinship ties in the East End. If I recall correctly, we survey the influence of mother-daughter relationships on brand preferences and purchases, particularly soap powders and washing machines. We visit old folk marooned on the thirteenth floor of tower blocks, who optimistically embraced their pristine new apartments, the demolition of the terraced streets of their childhoods and the relocation of their offspring to the new towns of Essex, but are now fearful of muggers in the stairwells and petrol-sniffing teenagers crapping in the lifts. Three or four students from other universities are along, including Pat and a friend of hers from Birmingham.

Pat lives in Southall, but her mum’s family are from the East End, from Hoxton. (I’m amazed to find, when I spend a year in London in 1998-1999, that Hoxton is now a trendy place for the arty set to live and that property values there are skyrocketing; back in the sixties you could hardly give the place away.) I don’t know where Pat’s dad’s family are from, or how they ended up in Southall for most of their married life, ultimately becoming the only non-Asian family in Endsleigh Road.

Pat and I go to a number of family celebrations in Hoxton, real knees-up occasions. Her mum drinks Advocaat snowballs, her aunts stoke up on the gin and her dad, a quiet cautious barely literate man who drives his own truck for a living, has a quiet beer or two. I love it. It’s such a change from crustless salmon and cucumber sandwiches and cups of tea delicately poised, little pinkies crooked in line with Grandma Deeks’ directives, desperately minding our Ps and Qs, and Grandma only a publican’s daughter for all that. It’s not as though we’re exactly classy on Grandad Deeks’ side either, he the son of a cashier in a mining company and grandson of a Mayfair hairdresser.

Pat's folk are initially a bit bemused by my Cambridge tag. When I meet her mum for the first time, she greets me with: “We’re just ordinary folk here, you’ll have to take us as you find us.” Which I’m more than happy to do. Later, when working in John Dale’s engineering factory at Southgate, I go with Mickey, our chief shop steward, to a number of social functions in Hackney Wick or join him and his Labour Party friends at an East End pub for a drink. Mickey is instrumental in Pat and I joining the Labour Party and campaigning in the Wood Green electorate in 1964. For Dorothy Butler I think her name was. (No, not Dorothy. Dorothy Butler published children’s books and had premises on the corner of Sunnybrae and Archers Roads. It was Joyce Butler.) Once, when out canvassing, I bang on a door, which is opened by an unshaven shirt-sleeved man of about forty in yellow braces. Seeing my red rosette, he spits “Harold Wilson, Shit!” and slams the door in my face - so much for the party intellectuals masquerading as the white hot heat of the technological revolution.

Those rosettes amuse me since I associate them, other than during election campaigns, with the prizewinners in agricultural or dog shows (1^st Prize, Rhubarb; or Best Old English Sheepdog), or with Thewell cartoons of little girls on shaggy ponies competing in local gymkhana. By the time I’m out campaigning with Mickey I’ve acquired a passable East End accent and can hang out as some sort of Cockney manqué, a fashionable affectation in those days. During the course at the Institute, in the evenings after dinner, we invariably take off in a posse to a local pub to enjoy the crush, the singing, the joking, the talent night entertainment, long before Eastenders popularised such middle class slumming. Mostly it’s The Rising Sun just down the road – I’m sure that’s the pub’s name but memories of Eric Burden and The Animals’ famous hit may be confusing me here. A couple of times we take the bus to The Duragon in Hackney Road where Ray Martine is resident comedian.

On the last evening at the Institute, there’s a social. Pat and I dance together most of the evening, kiss goodnight, and agree on a first date. After we’re married, renting at Wood Green or living in our first flat in Finsbury Park, if Spurs aren’t playing at home, and Arsenal not playing a visiting team that have a good chance of beating them, I go to Upton Park to watch West Ham and sing “We are forever blowing bubbles.”

Working in the furniture industry in the late sixties, I make frequent forays to the East End, visiting little businesses along the mean streets or tucked away in back alleys, most of them Jewish family firms, the descendants of immigrant entrepreneurs who fled the wave of pogroms in Russia after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Their foothold is still precarious, sustained by a mixture of commercial acumen, family commitment and community networks. The tales they tell me, only half in jest, of ‘Jewish lightning’ – small factories torched for the insurance – and owners running into the street to wave away the fire engines (“Not today! Tomorrow, you fools!”) – speak to the insecurities of a dying way of life. Most of these furniture businesses in Hoxton and Islington are set up as domestic workshops, often trading on the street. As they grow, if they grow, manufacturing invades the whole house, then the garden, then neighbouring houses, and then the owners start looking to migrate to larger purpose-made premises further afield. John Betjeman Esquire, who Mum and Dad are so thrilled to meet after he presents me with the Grant Memorial Prize for English at the 1957 School Speech Day, comes from such a family firm, established in Clerkenwell and later moving to Pentonville Road. Successful firms move away from their roots. The less so struggle for a generation or two and die. Contrary to entrepreneurial mythology, few of the acorns become oaks.

Uncharitably, I cannot for the life of me remember what Pat and I do on our first date – probably meet up in the West End and go for a meal and a movie. I do remember that’s exactly what we’re doing the night that Kennedy is assassinated because we’re on a Circle Line train around midnight and read the headlines on another passenger’s late night edition of the Evening Standard. And it’s not as though I can’t remember some of our other dates, very romantic ones too. Walking along the backs in Cambridge after a curry dinner at an Indian restaurant, the silently falling snow glistening in the riverside lights, Pat in her white fur hat and thigh length boots looking like Julie Christie’s Lara in Dr Zhivago. Dancing in the moonlight at the Selwyn College May Ball, Pat bright eyed and edible in a strapless turquoise ballgown. So I don’t think I am particularly shutting out memories of the good times that Pat and I share all those years ago.

I do vividly remember, in contrast, the first time that Mary and I, having made the critical transition from having an affair to being ‘an item’, go together to a function. Ironically it’s to Pureora Cemetery in Remuera for the funeral of a friend of hers – also the patient of an incompetent GP - who has died of cervical cancer, and, New Zealand being the small place it is, my old neighbours from the top of our drive at Sunnybrae Road are there. Sad in retrospect that our first ‘outing’ should be to the cemetery. One day, I thought, that will be our last outing too, bringing us full circle. But I wasn’t to know then that we were travelling all too rapidly towards that particular stop. And now here we are mercifully out from the underground for a spell, enjoying London life, I loving Mary and her company and the many pasts the city and I share. Mary’s wonder and excitement refresh London for me, let me see it with renewed pleasure, and still give me the happiest of memories to add to my recollection of the good times we spend together.

[For sequel to this blog see 93. 'A Wedding in Luxembourg', 19th February 2014.]

18. Christmas Greetings and Reflections

Pohutukawa, the New Zealand Christmas Tree, in full flower

Thank you for reading entries in my blog. I hope you have found something of interest to enjoy.

Readers to date are spread across eleven countries. These are, in order of pagereads, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Russia, the USA, Australia, Germany, France, Chile, Ireland, Switzerland and Thailand.

Christmas Greetings to you all.

Pohutukawa and Norfolk Pine, Orewa Beach

And a poem to reflect upon.

REFLECTIONS

                              At Christmas we rummage through the family photos

                              Tunnelling back to laugh at images of ourselves in earlier times

                              (“Mum, how could you make me wear that dress?”)

                              To retell our pasts

                              Each with different memories, stories, perceptions

                              Of the past as we think it was

                              Or would like it to have been.

                             

                              Turning the weathered leaves of old albums,

                              We watch ourselves grow, age, mature

                              Reflecting on who we were, who we are, and who we will become.