Yet there is a system. I can’t think how to describe it, but it must be good because (cross fingers!) I have never lost one page, one letter, diary, illustration or book.
Books cost an author money, health, even life itself, but short of having your hands tied behind your back and your brain quick-frozen there is nothing a writer can do about it. Friends remain only if they know how to fit into the writer’s lifestyle. If not, they go, and there is little regret.
Friends have played a great part in my life, much more so than if I had been in a lifetime partnership; some of my friends have been backstops as well as friends.
A totally involved author has only one goal: to tell the story. There is no escape, you are engaged for life, like it or lump it you are shackled. When one works on huge concepts like some of my books, such as The Anzacs and The Shearers, one cannot afford to lose the thread, the impetus. You must give it your whole life or give it up. I cannot imagine how I would live if I was stopped from writing. I have never wanted to do any other thing.
When I collapsed after completing Prisoners of War the publisher’s book designer was with me. I made it to the last page and then let go. I came to the next day to be informed by the surgeons at the end of the bed that they had ‘tried but failed’. So now I wait. Nothing more can be done. My legs are hideous, one scarred in an unbroken line from ankle to pelvis with a horizontal wound across the shin bone and another scar on the thigh; my left leg is scarred even more so, with a shattered ankle bone plus a foot-to-knee wound that became gangrenous and opened up, vast and wide. It ate deep into flesh until bone was exposed and prevented me from walking at all for two months. I was in a wheelchair, and then hobbled on a stick for seven months. And there was more. I have been in for open-heart surgery three times (the third time hardly counts as my heart stopped when I was on the slab and the operation was aborted). There were six other operations. My bosom is no longer the pretty sight it once was. None of me is. And to cap it all, three lesser but still termed ‘serious’ operations and two separate large ‘donor grafts’ were necessary to patch up open wounds.
And you think I don’t smart when a reviewer mocks ‘She speaks of her “wounds”.’ What else are they if not wounds?
There is no point in trying to describe the pain gangrene causes on a body because the pain is such that one lies whimpering like a dog beaten near death but afraid to draw attention in case worse is inflicted. When it was being discussed as to whether or not amputation could be the final relief it was not to me they spoke but to one another, as if this gibbering, near-to-collapse patient was no part of the scene. A surgeon came to the end of my bed, ordered two sisters to hold me down, and debrided the gangrenous leg – with no pain-killers at all although the sisters begged him to give them. He just pulled my legs apart and stood in my crotch with his scalpel, making one sister hold my open legs, the other hold my body down.
Only one month previously I had climbed the Kokoda Trail and the mountains, and been photographed on the way by the BBC crew who had been photographing me from Anzac Cove to Egypt, France, Darwin and stockmen riding in Kimberley – but now I was no more than a piece of meat. The effect was lasting on me, and I believed I should speak up.
Much of this could and should have been avoided and, with the advice of many professional people, I sued the hospital – and won. Sick as only the very sick know with the vast debilitation that comes with such a long and overwhelming battering to so many parts of the body, I went through the trial by fire of being sent by lawyers to separate surgeons for assessment of the damage done to me: some were furious at my ‘temerity’ in questioning the surgeon’s behaviour. They showed this by not even reading the reports their own ‘side’ had sent ahead and always, without looking at it, dismissing the material my lawyers had collected. One prominent man put me in his surgery, banged the door shut behind him and I never saw him again. I waited until it grew dark before I gave up hope and tried to get out of the building but there was no one there, the rooms all empty. It was eerie; I was frightened. Later a cleaner came, she wasn’t happy and at first thought I was a thief on the prowl, but she did realise I was very ill and turned the key and let me out. Another man lectured me on the temerity and ‘thanklessness’ of anyone questioning a man – him or any other surgeon – ‘who had given up his life to save others’. Of course, all this was after the worst of my condition had lessened and I was able to hobble along on a stick.
The nurses were splendid. When it was thought my leg must go this team began dressing it every two hours for forty-eight hours. I would feel them gently removing the cradle and inserting tiny pipettes along the gangrenous wound. And they hated having to inflict more pain. As soon as I could put one foot to the ground I was wheeled out and my son, who had returned from Canada (where he had lived for a year), and my daughter cared for me and slowly, painfully, with specialist surgical dressers visiting twice a day, I was able to stagger around.
I now walk upright. I am scarred like a road map, but I am here. And sometimes I don’t feel so bad. However, I am always conscious that I am here because of the work of one, great, caring physician who took over when my faith in surgeons was quite destroyed.
As fortune strikes a mother I’ve been lucky in that my two children and grandchildren are close-knit, loving and each quite free to develop whichever way suits. Tragedy has struck our little family twice, cruel and unyielding and unending to death, and we close in even tighter with love, while living as if this is what life is about – and it is: the good, bad, sad, the unbearable that you have to bear.
Near the end, Mum had said ‘You’ve run a good race, you’ve run a long way and you’ve taken me with you.’ The run I began when I was born didn’t impress or dismay me, but I was pleased Mum recognised that it was a part of me, not a conscious thing, I couldn’t be anything other than what I was, am. If Mum had repressed this birthright we would have lost the bond we had – and it was an amazing and deeply loving bond.
Luck? I’ve had it all my life. It began at my birth when I fell into the arms of a mother few could have excelled or could have suited me so well. The only trauma I have about my birth is the fear of the poor thing life would have been for me had I been accepted by a dour, non-dancing, non-workingclass, proselytising family, weighted down with wealth and dreams of more wealth and fame, and weighted down damnably, silent, lest the secret leap out and shame them for eternity with the unspeakable weight of me in their midst.
While they lived with the fear of my birth being exposed for what it was, I lived on with Mum and Dad and my sister with love, fun, whacks when I deserved them (and sometimes when I didn’t and Mum felt like letting off steam). Life has been good to me. Few could have had better.
A journalist once asked me if I was fearful of death. He wrote:
She is a fighter and has no fear. ‘I always was a fighter. I want to get the best out of everything. Even death. There’s a lot I still want to do, and to say, and if the man with the sickle comes for me before I’ve got it all on paper I’ll be very disappointed because, as the old saying goes, I have played the game fair and square and taken the bad with the good. I haven’t asked anyone to share my tears; perhaps that was a fault but they burnt so fiercely I was afraid friends could never understand and they would be embarrassed. I was too proud to expose the pain.’
The journalist asked if I shared my Mother’s Catholicism. My reply was ‘I haven’t got the necessary grain of mustard seed. I envied my Mother who was certain there was something after life. You can’t help but envy people who believe this. But I can’t.’
It doesn’t worry me one way or another but it would be great fun if there was a hereafter, and I could sit again with Mum and Dad, and Kathleen would come in calling, ‘How ya going, eh?’ And Dad, who loved her, would say, ‘By Joves, look who’s blown in!’ And we’d yarn and laugh together and have a game of crib on the kitchen table, and pots of tea and home-made cakes …
With the great good lu
ck I’ve had all my life I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Goodbye Girlie Page 28
