The Dressmaker's Daughter (15 page)

I
n 1957, towards the end of the poliomyelitis epidemic, I was sent to the Royal Adelaide’s Infectious Diseases Hospital at Northfield as part of the training we all did. My friend Joanie Pitcher said, ‘You’ll meet Dick Llewellyn. He’s got polio. Tell him we all send our love, and, when he’s allowed visitors, we’ll be out to see him.’ Joanie and her best friend, Krie, knew Richard because they had been to Walford Church of England Girls’ College and they had been to dances with boys from Scotch College, where he had been a boarder.

Another nurse, when she heard I was going to Northfield, said, ‘Watch out. There’s a bloke there called Richard Llewellyn, who, when you roll him over, tries to get his fingers into your suspenders and ping them! Stand well back.’

On my second day at Northfield, where I worked in a children’s ward, I went over to the adults’ ward to borrow
some fluid for urine testing because we had run out of it. We all wore rumpled white doctors’ gowns over our uniforms as part of the sterility procedures for infectious nursing. In this garment, tied in at the waist like a bonbon, I entered the ward to wild wolf-whistles. There were only two patients. One was Richard Llewellyn and the other was a Mr Gay, who had had a tracheotomy as a result of polio. Nonetheless, both, it seemed, could whistle.

Poliomyelitis is more virulent in its effects on the body when it occurs between epidemics. And it was between what was to be the last of the polio epidemics that Richard had woken up one morning and couldn’t get out of bed. He was staying in the house of his grandparents, who were no longer alive. His Aunty Mollie Dutton now lived there in her retirement from running the Bice Ward at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. She knew immediately what to do. He was taken in an ambulance to Northfield Infectious Diseases Hospital and placed in a respirator when his breathing began to fail.

On the day I met him, Richard had been in the respirator for six weeks. It was a coffin-like box that encased the entire body, other than the head. It ran on electricity and had a set of bellows inside it that forced the air into the patient’s lungs. This was needed for Richard because almost his whole body, including his diaphragm, was paralysed. He could move the fingers of one hand and he could speak.

I did not care for the wolf-whistling. I got the chemical for which I had come and left.

The next day I was sent to that ward, where I was to spend the next six weeks. That’s fate.

To describe the reasons for love to take hold is as difficult as trying to describe fire to a person who has never seen it. Richard had charisma. I think that would be generally agreed. Yet what was it that drew me to him lying there, helpless and thin? (So thin, in fact, the nurses used to say they could fit the washing bowl between his hips in the hollow of his abdomen.) Polio and its accompanying fever had wasted him. Already his muscles were disappearing.

Sometimes I think I was in love, or at least ready to be in love, before I ever met this man. Since the paralysis was so extensive, only the use of one hand, his bodily functions and his lungs had remained, and even his lungs had only just recovered. He never got much more movement back.

It would be a mistake to think of me as a martyr as some people once did. The truth is, neither Richard nor I, nor, as far as I know, anybody else, least of all his parents, had any idea that he would never walk again. At that time, plenty of people recovered from polio and, while they may have ended up with a somewhat shrunken limb, to all intents and purposes, they were normal and had the
same life they would have expected before the virus had hit them.

So Richard and I first of all had a flirtation – a little frisson between us. I, in my doctor’s gown, washed him with the help of another nurse, brought his meals, prepared him for sleep, talked to him when there was any time, and polished the old brass light-fittings and switches with Brasso. I decided to do this polishing because I didn’t like to see them tarnished. Because Richard had been to sea, he had been trained to enjoy shining brass, so, although I did not know it, this polishing of mine pleased him mightily. Do I owe our whole story to a tin of Brasso?

Whatever it was between us, it grew quickly. When, after the six weeks of infectious-diseases training, I was due to return to the main hospital, my friend Mary Hickey came into my room, in her white uniform, where I was packing. In a strange foretelling of a similar event fifteen years later, I found I could not stand up. I sat on the floor beside my suitcase and seemed unable to go on.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. I feel terrible. I don’t want to go. I think, perhaps, I must be in love.’

And so the letters began. I wrote to Richard day after day and, when I could, I went out to Northfield in a taxi or with other boys whom I asked to drive me. I laugh now to think that sometimes, at the end of a ball, I would
ask a boy to drive me out to Northfield and, while he waited in his dinner suit in the car, I rushed into Richard’s ward and woke him. I gasped out any news I had, gave him a kiss or two, and left. What the boy in the car thought, I can’t imagine. Certainly I didn’t spell it out to him that I was visiting somebody with whom I was in love; I just would have said that I needed to visit a friend. Obliging to a man, they asked no questions and I hopped back into their car and they drove me back to the nurses’ home on Frome Road with its arching oak trees meeting above the wide street, bare branches interlocked as Richard and I were slowly interlocking, too.

Richard stayed in hospital for a year. He had his twenty-first birthday there. I came out to visit on his birthday and his parents, Gwen and Morrie, were there sitting, on either side of the bed. What we gave him, I can’t remember. He could not read because he could not turn pages, so it was not books we brought to him. Whatever it was, he could not have opened it.

Once, one of his school friends, Doug Wiles, drove out to visit Richard for the first time. Beforehand, Douglas asked me what he could take. I said steak would be welcome. Richard was still very thin and his specialist, on a ward round one day, had remarked that he wasn’t putting on any weight. Richard explained that he had trouble with the food – sausages and fish, which could have bones in it, were difficult to eat. The doctor asked
what Richard liked to eat and was told steak. So a new menu was written out that included a lot of steak. At that time, each sister who was in charge of a ward was in a competition to run her ward with the least expense possible. When Sister saw the new menu the doctor had written, she tore it in two in front of Richard and said that there would be no such extravagance in her ward. Weeks later, when the doctor remarked that Richard still had not put on weight, he was told that there had been no steak because Sister had torn up the menu. What the outcome of that was I don’t remember, but it was for that reason that I told Douglas that steak would be welcome.

There was a small kitchen at the entrance to the ward and the nurses could cook special food for the patients there. Douglas arrived, full of bonhomie and nervous gusto. He walked up to Richard, lying prone in the white bed, and said, ‘Hello, Dick. Get this into you!’ He passed the parcel towards Richard’s hand, which was lying on top of the quilt, and was astonished and horrified to see that the steak remained where it was because Richard could not use his hand to hold it. For years after this, Douglas told me about his feeling of shock and mortification because he felt he had embarrassed Richard. But he hadn’t. That sort of embarrassment had disappeared long before.

I never heard Richard say, ‘Why me?’ or anything else out of self-pity. The day came, though, when the doctors
decided that he should be told that he would not walk again. Whether they had known from the start, or whether it only became increasingly clear to them as the months passed and no movement returned, I don’t know. I was at home on a day off when I ran into a nurse, also on her day off, in the main street of Gawler. She was stationed at Northfield, so I asked her how Richard was. She said, ‘They’ve told him he will never walk again. They have put the screens around him.’ Screens were put around people who were being washed or toileted or dying. If they were dying, the screens were left there.

I rushed to my father, told him what had happened and asked him to drive me to see Richard. He did it without demur. I found Richard behind those white screens, digesting the news. The shock to Richard was profound but he accepted it with stoicism. If he wept, he made sure I didn’t see.

A nurse told me that when Richard was informed he would not walk again, he asked to be sat up on the edge of the bed so that he could try. To move him into that position would have been like trying to move a railway sleeper. The truth was there for him to see as he fell back onto the bed and they lifted up his long, thin legs and laid them out. Like Doubting Thomas, he had needed to see before he could believe.

It was too late for both of us. I could no more say to him that I would now no longer be with him than I could
tip him out of that bed. The waters had closed over our heads.

Richard’s parents came out once a week to visit him from their farm, Aber Avon, near Strathalbyn. With fortitude borne from, perhaps, a family trait of courage or perhaps from having endured the First World War, Gwenneth Kate and Morris Middleton Llewellyn bore the shock of seeing their second son in such a way. Morrie had been at Ypres and had been one of those affected by mustard gas. He had lost his hair and spent months in hospital in England recovering from a psychological collapse. They were to endure more. Later, Jim, their elder son, lost half his hand in an accident with a circular saw on the farm. Morrie’s brother, whom I knew as Uncle Les, had lost his leg in France in the war. His son David died aged forty, playing tennis. Uncle Les’s grandson Mark died driving a car to a school outing, aged sixteen. Then, Jim’s son Philip died from the effects of a motorbike accident when he was almost forty.

You can find what reasons you like, but it is terribly hard to keep a Llewellyn male of this line alive with all his limbs after forty. All this violence that is hurled at them. Mustard gas, bullets, a circular saw, a car, a motorbike. It is only poor David whose own body failed. All the others had fate hurl these particularly masculine
pieces of velocity in the form of iron and steel and gas at them. In Richard’s case, it was a virus and the effect was much the same. These men’s limbs, no matter how strong their genes, could not withstand fate’s catastrophes. Nothing ever happened to the women. The only thing fate decreed for them was longevity.

It is like something from a Greek tragedy, the curse on this particular line of Llewellyn men. At this rate, the line direct from Richard’s Grandfather Llewellyn – who came to South Australia from Aber Avon in Wales and became a schoolmaster at Moonta, where the Welsh miners worked bringing out copper – will soon pass away. Thank God my grandson is not a Llewellyn but a Karski because his father is Polish. Whatever curses the Poles have had as a nation, and few nations have had to endure more, Jack is not in that direct line. Perhaps this is only superstition, but nobody could look at these events and not feel wonder.

It was 1958 and I had just graduated from the hospital. I was writing almost daily to Richard, who was still in hospital. Neither of us had any idea of when he might be discharged or what would happen to him.

I had taken a private nursing job, as had several of my friends. This was a good way to make money quickly and, because several of us were saving either to go to Europe or to get married, we looked on it as good fortune. I had
no plans other than to wait for Richard to get out of hospital and return home to live with his parents in their grand old house in Fullarton, rather than on the farm at Strathalbyn. I see now that all my life I have had a curious ability to not think ahead. Like a shell in the ocean, I let myself be turned by the tide with no thought of the consequences of what I was doing. I simply gave myself up to fate as if I had cut the strings of a parachute as it floated to earth.

My new work involved staying overnight with a frail old man who was cared for during the day by his family. It was pleasant sitting beside him as he slept, and when he woke we had conversations that did not strain me. On the contrary, I found his courtly manners and sweet demeanour easy. The nights passed pleasantly.

In the daytime I slept a while and then rushed around shopping or going to bridal showers or weddings.

Here is a letter to Richard that I wrote while at work at Glen Osmond. Northfield Infectious Diseases Hospital was ten miles out of the city and it was a continual problem to him that I did not visit him often enough.

Wednesday

Richard,

You haven’t written. If by some chance, it’s anything to do with my not coming out to see you this week, I’m not excusing myself, Richard,
but you must realise I haven’t had much opportunity.

Today I slept at Babs’ [one of the nurses who had just graduated] after working last night. I call it work, but it’s not really, as we drank orange juice and smoked cigarettes together half the night. Tonight when I came here, the old man [my patient] was sitting up in the lounge playing canasta and refusing to stop. Therefore, I sat on a cushion by the fire and knitted your jumper.

Today Babs and I drove up to her new house at Norton Summit after lunch and scrubbed and cleaned. You would have laughed to see us.

Babs is quite helpless, although touchingly willing to learn. We swept walls and scrubbed the floors and washed windows until we were too tired. Patrick [her fiancé] rang up three times to see how we were progressing. We completely cleaned two large rooms.

The property and house I would like you to see, but as that’s not possible yet, I’ll tell you about it. The house is only five years old, and has five rooms. It’s red brick with a red roof. On all sides there are breathtaking views. One of the city, which is magnificent at night. One of Morialta Falls, which, incidentally, you can even hear, and two different views of hills. There are a couple of acres of land also
with small trees such as wattles and little gums. Babs’ mother still hasn’t seen it.

We must have looked funny with brooms and buckets and brushes and detergent which Mrs Pak Poy [Patrick’s mother] gave us. We were dressed up in jodhpurs and very ancient jumpers and bright socks.

There’s a million things to tell you when I see you.

Mummy told me that if I pass [I was still waiting for my final results], she will give me a beautiful antique silver tea service that belonged to her great-aunt.

Next week I have a million things to do. It makes my head whirl to think of it. On Saturday, Mummy and I are going to the races after I’ve had a little sleep.

On Sunday I want to go to church as I haven’t done any strong praying for a long time. On Sunday night Mary Jolley is having a party for Babs.

These people – my employers – have asked me to work next week. Wednesday, Christobel Sage is having a luncheon for Babs, and then Babs and I are going to have a Turkish bath. Wednesday night, Kit Dunstan is having a party. Saturday is the wedding (Babs and Patrick’s) at 4 pm.

Forgive me for going into all these details but you must be told to comprehend them.

I was going to pick some of the rosemary to send to you that is growing all over Babs and Patrick’s garden but I forgot. Oh heavens, they are going to be poor – they paid 5,000 pounds for that property so goodness knows what would happen if Babs has a baby (Patrick’s a Catholic too). They’d lose their home, as she is going to work.

Good night, Richard.

From Jill