​The main topic for our April Meeting is “A memoir which has meant something to me”. I have read a few memoirs in the past month but none of them inspired me. People tend to write about the misfortunes in their lives. I don’t find their stories uplifting or inspiring. They have just dealt with what life has thrown at them, which is what most people do without the hype.
 
I have made a last minute decision to write about someone who had an influence in shaping me. This man was our next-door neighbour when I was young. He had polio as a child and as a result he was disabled. It had a huge impact on his life. He could not do manual work and in those days no employer would hire someone with a disability. He didn’t bemoan his unfortunate circumstances. When his father remarried he moved in with his unmarried aunt who lived next door to my family. This happened long before I was born. To us children he was someone who was always there. My siblings and I loved to visit him whenever we felt like it. There were no restrictions on when we could call in. He became a friend. We never questioned why an adult was one of our friends.
 
He had a very limited formal education but this didn’t deter him from advancing his learning. He transformed the sitting room of his aunt’s house into a library. The walls were lined with shelves of books. I was allowed to borrow books. He would discuss classic books and their authors with me even though I had no great interest in them. What he taught me was to love and value books. One year when I was twelve, he gave me my very first proper book for Christmas. Its title was “Knocknagow, or the Homes of Tipperary” by Charles Kickham. I loved that book. I loaned it to a friend. She never gave it back. I’m not sure if she even read it. I learned an important lesson. Be careful to whom you loan books.
 
I got pneumonia when I was seventeen and while I was recovering he kept me supplied with books. He introduced me to P.G. Wodehouse stories about “Jeeves” but they were not my taste. When I hear the name Wodehouse or Jeeves I always think of Jim.
 
Books were not his only interest. He taught himself to draw and paint. He played the piano accordion and other musical instruments. His best friend had a dance band and the instruments were kept at our neighbour’s home. Of course my sister and I had full access to them. He taught us how to play the drums. He had no success in teaching us to play the accordion but we can never complain of not having an opportunity to learn.
 
He was also a playwright. His play “Red Wine of Youth” had its inaugural performance in our local town.  It was successful and was staged across the country.
 
Without realising it, I learned so much from this incredible man. His ability to overcome his physical and financial obstacles and become a respected member of our community taught me that anything is possible. It is just a matter of commitment and dedication.
 
When I went back to Ireland, I visited his grave. I was surprised to see noted on his headstone that he was a Poet Laureate.  A photo of his headstone is attached.
 
A life well lived.

​Elizabeth Kearns
​April 2021

Lifting my fingers from my keyboard I read over the words on my screen. Satisfied I hit print and sit back with my coffee. Another letter completed.

It has been two months since I disconnected from social media. The first few days had been a little strange as I found myself scanning my phone for the familiar app that was no longer there. Sipping my coffee I reflected on how quickly the world had gone from letter writing to phone calls and then to email and finally social media. The last year had been especially tough for me and yet I had found it uncomfortable to “broadcast” our families intimate struggles with life and death through social media. In fact, I confess to being very comfortable no longer being tied to the popular platform.

Retrieving my letter from the printer I sign it and fold it, placing it into an envelope. How would my friend feel when she opened the letter? Letter writing had been something I had grown up with. My family had migrated from our New Zealand home to Canada when I was just 5 years old. We had made the journey by ship. It was an age when phone calls across the world were costly and so letters were the bridge to those we had left behind. Needless to say, I did not receive many letters myself, indeed the only ones I have any memory of were the letters from my Nana.

A letter would arrive. Written on thin “airmail” paper, lined in blue. In deference to my age, each word was constructed in distinctive printed letters rather than the cursive handwriting reserved for her correspondence with my mother. Her letters always started with a comment on the correspondence she had received from me, followed by a story about the farm animals - the principal protagonist was Mrs Duck. At the bottom of every letter Nana, more than a competent artist, would illustrate her story with pen and ink or watercolour signed “love, Nana xxx”.

Nana was a farmer's wife and she filled her letters with news of the farm and its animal inhabitants. These letters remained my most treasured item, each one read and re-read, folded and placed carefully in a small tin adorned with a picture of a young girl cuddling a cat. While the cat’s made me ill, my Nana loved them and therefore they were loved by me. I kept these childhood letters safe until they vanished when I was about 15yrs old. The final letter she wrote to me, weeks before her death at the age of 82yrs is stored safely in my old leather writing case.

My Nana was my anchor and we continued to write to each other throughout my life. As I grew from child to woman, the content of the letters became more intimate and therefore more meaningful. A wise and generous woman, my Nana continues to influence my life long after her death. The mother of eight children and grandmother to more than 38 grandchildren she made a gift of her time to me without hesitation.

Each grandchild remembers Nana a little differently based on the role she played in their lives. I remember her as a strong and independent woman. My Uncle - the keeper of the family stories - recalls she was always this way. She worked as a chauffeur and housemaid from the age of 16 years and was always the driver in her own household. As a young, unmarried woman she worked with the apparently singular purpose of flying with Sir Kingsford Smith, a dream that came true on 2 February 1933. The fact that the ticket from that flight survived her after her death is testimony to the importance of that encounter. She married my Pa in 1934.

I holidayed on the farm on many occasions and my favourite time was the early mornings. Pa would be away in the milking shed and the house was silent. It was a well-understood rule that this quiet interlude was Nana’s exclusive time to begin her day with a cup of tea and the newspaper - a ritual I respected and have taken with me to my adult life. In the early morning, a cup of coffee and the mornings' news at hand, I pay silent homage to the woman that was my Nana.


Michelle Aitken
​April 2021

I have known a lot of people over my life.  I am not convinced that any one person shaped me more than others.  Perhaps different people shaped me in different ways.

There was my mother.  She was a strong, matriarchal figure.  All the women in the family are much the same – her mother, my sister, my daughter, my nieces.  It is a family trait.  My father, like many of his generation, came back from war with what today would be diagnosed as PTSD.  My mother held us together as a family.  Mum led by example to prove that women are just a strong and capable as men.

There was the headmaster at my school.  A loving and gentle man, although very strict.  He was the one who treated the girls and boys equally – no stereotyping for him.  So perhaps he was one of the key people in my life.  He did not think that the sciences were for the boys, unlike one of the other teachers in the school.  A key memory was that the other teacher picked on me around the science and maths subjects.  His report on my Maths result at the end of year 11 was that he did not think that Maths was right for me.  Our headmaster, who taught the other Maths subject, said that he found the opposite.  I was one of the top Maths students in the class!  And was always helping the guys in the Chemistry classes.  I have a Bachelor of Science degree, majoring in Maths.  Who was right?

My husband has always treated me as an equal – he did not expect me to sit at home and look after the house and children.  There were the years of course when I was at home with children as childcare was not easily available in the early 1970s.  But he supported me in returning to work when the children were 4 and 6 years old.  He did not feel belittled over the later years of our working lives when I was in a more senior position and earning more than him.

Were there others?  Of course.  There was one of my work colleagues in recent years who respected me and looked up to me.  Much of the time I was the manager of the team in which he worked, but he never resented working for a woman.  There were some of course who did not like it.  And others who saw only the female, not the intelligence and skills behind the body. 

They also shaped me as they caused me to be more determined to prove that I was as capable as any man in my chosen career of Information Technology.

Because of these people, and many others, I have always refused to feel inferior in a male dominated industry because of my gender.

So, my mother and headmaster shaped me as an independent person, not accepting a female stereotype, and my husband and work colleague (among others) reinforced this.


Joy Shirley 
​(Originally shared in May 2018)