Remembering Mom, on her birthday. She would have been 92 today. A couple of years ago, I wrote the story of her long and extraordinary life, and on both her birthday and departure day I go back and read that story...
Mom loved to talk, and had a phenomenal memory. Her earliest memories were of being a baby just a few months old, in a perambulator. Across the years, she told stories of an astonishing Scots-Irish clan that flourished in the northeast of England for around a century, and is now gone entirely. Fortunately, I was listening ... and my memory ain't so bad! The following story is a brief -- heavily abridged! -- version of the tale I could have told. These are just the high spots, charting My Mother's Life, as a tribute and memorial to an amazing woman (and also, along the way, to my Dad, whose story I might tell separately).
In March, 1929, an illicit courtship took place right under the noses of two unsuspecting families -- both of them Catholic. No one suspected a thing, as pretty young Alexandra -- called “Queenie,” since she was named for Queen Alexandra, wife of King George V -- fell for a romantic, handsome young musician. Fred Callander played the fiddle with a local jazz ensemble and, at 30, was already crippled with the spondylitis that would characterize his whole life: a severe form of arthritis triggered when he was just 15, and fell from the deck into the hold of a ship. The workplace accident, in today’s world, would have seen him “set for life,” through insurance claims. During World War I, no provision was made for people injured at work, and after breaking his back in the fall, Fred soon found himself thrown back onto the support of the enormous, rambling Scots-Irish family where musical talent was so commonplace, no one considered it important.
In his youth, Fred was handsome, slender, still mobile, a fine musician -- irresistible to Queenie who, at 19, fell like the proverbial load of bricks. She would sneak in to see him, where he lived in his Irish mother’s house. Fred was one of the eldest of eleven children. Queenie must have been quite the scamp, light-footed and stealthy, because the inevitable happened. Soon enough, though the Callanders and the Kemps were at loggerheads, the couple married of necessity -- which is saying a lot, when “Callanders and Kemps” was a simile for “Hatfields and McCoys. When they learned the truth (impossible to hide a pregnancy for long!) the families did everything to keep Fred and Queenie apart, and for years after the marriage never spoke to each other. This was 1929: the only single mums were young women widowed in the Great War. No evidence remains, but a safe bet is that marriage was strongly discouraged; Queenie would have been sent to Kemp relatives who lived in the Pennines mountains until the child was born. The baby, Angela, would have been passed to a Catholic orphanage in Manchester or Liverpool, and Queenie would have returned home.
Luckily for Angela, Fred and Queenie disagreed. And on December 10, the love-child was born -- in wedlock, legitimate and all. Angela Cecilia Mary would, in later decades, always grumble about “being born in the twenties” by a matter of weeks, but at the time the child would have been aware only that the Great Depression caused widespread poverty; that her parents soon got over the grand passion that had consumed them, and began to fight “like cat and dog” … and that another war loomed on the horizon.
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| (c) Warner Bros. |
Her childhood memories were of the glorious summers enjoyed by the United Kingdom in the 1930s. Of living in a tiny apartment above a shop on Oxbridge Lane before her parents moved to a little “two up and two down” house on Mary Street; of walking her dog, a wire-haired terrier called Gypsy, in Ropner Park, in the days when her father was still mobile, albeit on crutches; of discovering the magic of films, with Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood, (left) which was to remain one of her “top five” movies, lifelong. But she would never forget the groups of men standing idle on streetcorners, not a job to be found anywhere; the tribe of aunts and uncles, doing their best to “make ends meet,” though the two families steadfastly refused to talk to one another, while the noisy domestic unrest between Fred and Queenie soon became infamous.
At five years old, when the parents were fighting, Angela would run to her Aunt Betsy, or Aunt Nellie -- both clans all lived within a few streets of the small town, Stockton-on-Tees, which had grown to encompass the old hamlet of Oxbridge, where the Kemps and Callanders had lived for generations. Angela’s own grandmother, (Edith Kemp nee Briton, who lived to be 84 and passed away in 1968), remembered her grandfather’s tales of the hamlet, circa 1840, before water was piped into houses. Old great-great-grandfather Briton was a water-carrier, or water-seller, meaning that he brought water by cart to houses where people were too old, frail, or busy, to go to the pump and carry it themselves. Angela would always marvel that she knew where her ancestor was, what he was doing, in the year when the European mega-star Niccolo Paganini “played a gig” at the Green Dragon Yard, “up in the town,” at the time when Stockton and Oxbridge were two different places.
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| Stockton High street c. 1910 -- little had changed by 1960. Just add cars! (Archival) |
Oxbridge Lane still bears the name of that old hamlet. It runs from Stockton High Street down past the old school attended by three generations of the family -- Queenie, in 1920, Angela in the 1930s, and both Jen and Mike in the 1960s -- past the ancient Napoleonic Wars era cemetery, over the “new” roadbridge on Lustrum Beck, and on into meadows which were gradually converted from paddocks to housing projects (and into the playing fields of the upmarket grammar school to which, far in the future, Angela’s daughter would win a scholarship). This was young Angela’s world: from the old, disused Cuckoo Railway line in one direction, and the fields where shire horses pulled plows while cuckoos called in the woods, past the West Villas town houses where the well-to-do lived … under the railway bridge that crossed Oxbridge Lane opposite the school, and on up to the High Street, which, in 2017, still hosts the ancient Saturday market, chartered by King John himself.
Education began when she was five, and she was bright. Like her mother before her and her own daughter decades later, she spent the first six years of her academic life at Oxbridge Junior School. One spent two years in the ”baby classes,” learning “the Three R’s” -- Reading, Riting and Rithmetic! -- before being promoted to the bigger kids’ area of the school, which was quarantined off beyond a high brick wall, where the only concourse between the two was the sound of scores of young voices shrieking and laughing at “playtime.”
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| Oxbridge Lane School ... still open in 2017! (Archival) |
The building was old when Angela took her first classes there in August, 1934 (and not a brick or cobble had changed when Jen took her first class there at the ripe old age of four, over three decades later). She was exceptionally bright, with enormous gifts in English and music. She might have been an academic, but before long her ability to the play the piano, to sight-read a piano score at first look, and her “perfect pitch,” became apparent. She would be called out of the morning assembly to play the marches to which the other students entered and exited the great hall, with its polished parquet floor and high windows.
Marching children? War was looming. By 1939, no one doubted it must happen. Angela actually heard Neville Chamberlaine’s proclamation, live on the radio which was the centerpiece of any house in the decades before television. She felt a great coldness, as if premonition swept through her. She was nine years old -- born over a decade after the Great War, but old enough to have heard and understood the stories told by returning servicemen, such as her Uncle Josie (Joseph). He served in the navy at the Battle of Jutland, aboard the coal-burning battleship Illustrious, which burst its boilers and flooded the lower decks with scalding water. Josie carried the physical and psychological scars of that encounter for life.
Wartime school was an exercise in austerity. Little was available to teachers or students, and people “made do.” Children carried gas masks, and tested them in chambers filled with tear gas -- marching in circles, singing, to make sure they knew how to breathe properly in them. Children participated in wartime projects such as raising funds in “Buy a Spitfire Week.” Winter at school was a challenge, since no funding was available to run the heating, while snow lay “up to the window sills.”
Worse yet was the constant bombing: Stockton was a target because of the railway, only yards from the Mary Street house, and Riley’s boiler factory, just four houses away, at the end of the street. Riley’s manufactured boilers for “liberty ships,” and were a major target … which the German bombers contrived to entirely miss. Angela and Queenie would spend many a night in the air raid shelter. Fred, however -- by now on crutches and walking with difficulty -- couldn’t manage the stairs down into the public shelter, and would stand in the doorway with the ARP wardens, sometimes watching fleets of bombers go overhead. Once, he watched an air battle, German bombers against British fighters “scrambled” from the local RAF field. As the war went on, many people became fatalistic. Angela would never forget the conviction that “If you were going to buy it, there was nowhere to hide.” Air raid shelters were known to take direct hits and cave in, burying hundreds of people in one strike. So many people -- the Callander family among them -- eventually just ignored the sirens, turned over and went back to sleep … they also survived the war.
In these years, younger girls like Angela watched those a little older, who were offered three options, upon leaving school (legal leaving age was 14, so long as one had a job waiting, a supporting family, or a pending marriage). Girls could choose the armed forces, the Land Army, or “war work.” Many young women chose “war work,” which placed them in factories and shipyards. Americans think fondly of the iconic “Rosie the Riveter,” and Angela’s future sister-in-law, Edith “Edie” Adamson was already doing this job -- riding a sling, halfway up the side of a ship at the construction yard in Hull, in freezing rain, wrangling red-hot rivets and a welding torch. Angela’s future mother-in-law had worked in a munitions factory in WWI, filling cartridge cases. Angela herself knew she would have chosen the Land Army instead: work “on the land,” perhaps driving the great shire horses that worked in harness when almost every acre of England went under the plow to grow food for an essentially besieged nation…
As a teen, while her health was strong enough, she would have enjoyed working on the land, because she loved to be out -- birds, animals, trees, the open sky. Some of her most precious possessions were books such as “Birds, Trees and Flowers, “Country Pageant,” “Nature Rambles,” and “Out With Romany, by Moor and Dale.” (These books still exist, shelved with the others she bought and kept from the years 1940 and 2000, when her eyesight began to fail. They’re now precious possessions of the next generation.)
In fact, the Callanders had deep roots in the rural community. Uncle George was still farming at the town of Bishopton. His home -- Springfield House -- is now heritage listed. You can find it in the National Trust catalog. But the Callanders as a clan were divided a generation before, when an inheritance caused a rift. One half of the family went into business, prospered … the other headed direct for the pub, and the cash gurgled away down various drains. (Fred, naturally, sprang from the ancestor who liked his libations just a little too much.)
As a teen, Angela spent many a happy week at Bishopton, always welcome at Springfield House, where Uncle George and Aunt Mary had no children and would eventually leave the property to Hilda, the young woman who was their house keeper for so long, she became family. Angela might easily have opted for the Land Army and worked on Uncle George’s farm, if World War II had continued until 1948 or 1950. (In that timeline, she might have inherited Springfield House herself!) Destiny had other ideas.
She was 12 years old when Fred -- growing more crippled with the years, close to house-bound by now and earning money by turning his talented hands to dressmaking, shoe repairs, violin repairs, and teaching music -- took on a new student. The boy’s parents desperately wanted him to be a fine violist, but the truth was soon evident: he had no talent whatsoever. The tortured sounds issuing from his instrument made Angela clap both hands over her ears -- and one day, in a fit of temper, she snatched up her father’s fiddle and said, “I can do better than that!”
A lifelong romance with the violin began that day. Angela was not merely good, she was amazing. In six months, she had begun to consider a professional career; in a year, she dreamed of the spotlight: the career of the concert performer. She might actually have done it, but again, Fate had plans of its own. Her father was a thorough (if harsh and unforgiving) teacher. The young girl would practice in the upstairs bedroom, where the acoustics were best, with the window open, little realizing that she had an avid audience in the neighbors. She learned this much later when Mrs. Roaks, from next door, mentioned how she’d enjoyed the music, and missed it when Angela moved on. These were years when poor folk often didn’t own a radio. If people wanted music, they made it themselves.
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| (Pixabay) |
The violin Angela played throughout her whole musical career was a “special.” Fred had a talent for repairing and refurbishing instruments, and some Callander cousin discovered an amazing fiddle locally … in the hands of little boys who were using it as a cricket bat! It was battered, stringless, beaten up. Fred refurbished it utterly, and the result was unique. This violin was hand-made, not quite the same as any standard or modern instrument. Angela always believed it would have been hand-crafted in a cottage in Ireland, and when it was rebuilt it had the power, the tone, the voice, of a Guanerius (look it up. Right now, there’s an original Joseph Guaneri instrument on eBay, changing hands for US$18m). With this instrument, a phenomenal talent, and her father’s instruction in music theory and violin technique, Angela was on her way. The family owned a radio by 1940, and she would play “in concert” with the day’s virtuoso performers, with her father as her sternest critic.
What became of that unique and amazing instrument? Angela lost track of it in the early 1960s, when it had to be sold to pay bills. Poverty takes no account of sentiment, and when you have two small children, keeping the power turned on and food on the table is paramount. But the bad days were still decades away in the late 1930s --
Before she was 15, Angela was playing with an ensemble that would eventually become the English Folk Song and Dance society, under the auspices of Peter Kennedy. Together, they visited villages and country towns, playing “gigs” at dances and fairs, in the years before recorded music was readily available. One of Angela’s fondest memories was of sitting on a clifftop near Robin Hood’s Bay -- legs dangling over the edge of the cliff -- playing Bach and Mozart “to the seagulls,” as she thought, only to finish, turn around, and discover that farm workers had gathered from the fields to listen.
Thoroughly grounded in music theory, she was also teaching young piano students, bringing them up to a certain level where they could be passed on to qualified teachers. While still at school -- by now high school, the Catholic convent school, Newlands, about which she loathed everything -- she was able to out-earn much older girls working “proper jobs” in offices. Her father could have -- should have -- encouraged her to qualify in music, at least with the object of becoming a teacher; but Fred never considered music a serious career choice. Instead, he persuaded her to attend a secretarial course in the months after she left Newlands. At Miss Ridley’s college she learned “shorthand/typing” … scored a job working in the office at Riley’s Boiler Works, the industrial site of which was twenty yards down Mary Street from the tiny house her parents rented. This was a smart move, since her secondary education came to a shuddering halt in 1944 --
She was fifteen, already earning more than those office girls, playing the piano and violin professionally, touring the northeast with Peter Kennedy. School surely must have become a sheer inconvenience, and attending a convent school would have been a source of intense aggravation to one who had walked away from Catholicism while still a child. (She told a story of attending church with her Irish-born granny, Mary Armstrong, who was traditional, deeply devout. Gran told the six year old to take her hat off in church, or “Saint Peter will come down off that balcony --” pointing at a statue “-- and smack you.” Childe Angela stuck out her chin at the statue, daring Saint Peter do do it. He didn’t. Faith became wobbly right there and came unstuck altogether in the next few years.)
At Newlands, a secondary school renowned as a solid track to university, she learned to despise the nuns in general, and their boss, Mother Mary Monica, most of all. One day, when Angela was fifteen -- quite old enough to leave school legally -- one of the teachers (yes, a nun) made the utterly dumbfounding blunder of whacking the student across the shoulder with a closed-up (hardcover, obviously) book. The “crime” was a drift of attention in a boring class, which caused Angela to be reading the wrong book … the consequence?
Irish temper. Fury. Angela had been the only girl of her year who, upon Confirmation into the Catholic faith, chose the saint’s name Joan (as in, Joan of Arc) as her Confirmation name. All the others were Marys, Anns, Theresas, Brigits. Now, whacked by this idiotic nun, she stood, slammed her own book closed, gave the offending woman a red-eyed glare that would have withered an oak (causing said nun to change color and jump back) … walked out, and kept walking.
This was one of the pivot points of her life; perhaps the most critical of all. Next came that quick shorthand/typing course, demanded by her father, and a short-lived position with Riley’s. The job was comprehensively sabotaged by an older woman who saw the pretty teenage newcomer as a threat, and determined to get rid of her by undermining her at every turn. Angela walked away from the job -- she had no need of it, in any case. By the time she was sixteen she was playing ragtime and honkey tonk piano (look it up: go to YouTube, search on Winfred Atwell, Black and White Rag … uh huh) in pubs and clubs, for five pounds a night, plus tips -- a fortune in the late 1940s, much less when measured against wages for a girl still in her teens.
Angela could have stayed in this line of work and done very well. London clubs, real money, recording contracts (she was that good. Jen heard her in the 1960s, when Angela taught her young daughter to play). But by 1945 her father was now very badly crippled. Ankylosing spoundylitis is a cruel degenerative disease which begins slowly and gradually leaves the victim utterly incapacitated. For years, Fred and Queenie had been living in poverty alleviated only by the cash their daughter was handing over: Angela would give them everything she earned and take back pocket money. They made sure she was well clothed and shod, and her money kept the small family in a degree of comfort they would otherwise not have enjoyed. Angela stuck close to her parents, perhaps bitten by the responsibility bug, since she knew her mother was far out of her depth as a care-giver. Fred was cared for mostly by his sisters, the aunts, Betsy and Nelly, till his death in 1965. Queenie was seldom to be found where she was needed.
But at seventeen, Angela made a major bid for freedom: music college, over the border in Scotland. She attended the Athenaeum in Glasgow (which would later be subsumed into the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama). She studied the violin and piano, and to say that she was “good” is a tremendous understatement. The problem was, she was also broke, because the student grant from Stockton Council only covered fees, her parents could afford very little to help with living expenses, and the college had a rule graven in granite: no student was allowed to earn money playing professionally … the work she was offered, and wasn’t allowed to take.
Life in Glasgow was rough, but she relished the study, the community -- and made friends. Invited for a summer vacation, she went out with a friend to the Oban area, stayed at a cottage on a loch and enjoyed the weeks she would always look back on as her life’s most golden time. Back in Glasgow, she left the student hostelry for lodging with a lovely woman, Pat Campbell, and her aged aunt, "Auntie Jean" -- these were good months in which Angela worked well with her teachers, played chamber music in a string quartet formed from her fellow students, set her sights on the career of a solo violinist on the concert platform, and … ignored the advice of a kindly, elderly professor who had actually found the solution to her financial dilemma.
“Forget about performing solo,” Professor Peebles-Conn advised. “Seek orchestra work … and forget about playing with the First Violin section -- they work too hard. The next time the BBC Symphony Orchestra is auditioning,” he said, “take the train to London.” He knew she would score a wonderful job as a professional musician right there: her life would have been set, secure, at the age of eighteen.
Perhaps Angela did consider this, because the financial challenge was near insurmountable, given that the Athanaeum forbade students to support themselves through the very work she could find so easily, and do so well. The encroaching Scottish winter made life even harder, and in fact, by her late teens, her health had begun to fail.
The first episodes of the Crohn’s Disease which was to characterize the remaining seven decades of her life began in this period. She struggled through, not knowing what it was, nor that luck had turned against her. Glasgow grew icy in November. She fell on a flight of steps, landed heavily and injured her left arm. For a violinist -- disaster. Treatment for rheumatic neuritis at the Buckingham Clinic only remedied the problem to a degree, and she found herself unable to keep up the rigorous practice schedule demanded of the student.
Reluctant, angry, disillusioned, she returned to the little house on Mary Street. By 1950, she was earning excellent money again “in season,” playing in pit orchestras accompanying musical shows and Britain’s ever-popular pantomime theater. Her first job was a windfall, when the orchestra’s first violinist was indisposed and the conductor and producer were so desperate, they gave her a chance: could the teenager step in, now, tonight, sight-read a score she’d never laid eyes on before? Piece of cake. One problem, only discovered after-the-fact: she wasn’t a Musician’s Union member. The producer was technically banned from hiring her -- which touched off a blazing argument between him and the Union’s “shop steward.” The fight culminated in the producer bawling that he would sooner sack the rest and retain Angela … the Union rep backdated her membership to validate the engagement.
Pit orchestra work was fine, fun, well paid, easy. Angela rubbed shoulders with actors and players, some of them nationally famous. The problem was, pantomime season is usually only October to Christmas, so the rest of the year was a mad scramble to find work, if she wanted to avoid the pub atmosphere, which she hated. Through her mother’s connections, she got a “gig” playing with a concert party -- a troupe of entertainers who took engagements where live entertainment was wanted. Musicians, dancers, a stand-up comic …
One of the top “turns” in the concert party was an accordionist, saxophonist and trumpet player, also an award-winning tap dancer and stand-up comedian. In 1947-48 he’d performed with ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association, founded in 1939 by Basil Dean and Leslie Henson to provide entertainment for British armed forces during WWII. It was the British Army’s equivalent of the USO). And this young performer had also toured for years with Don Ross’s Circus, doing every job from roustabout to elephant handler, via knockabout clown and bandsman. His name was Billy Adamson. He was 25 or so when Angela met him and, at that age, smolderingly good looking, with thick, black wavy hair, and a “Johnny Depp complexion” inherited from his Romanian mother, Elspeth “Elsie” Adamson nee Hill…
Elsie was a Gypsy. Seriously. Born in a caravan circa 1890 -- her birthdate was uncertain, since she never had a birth certificate. The name of “Hill” was apparently a common name assumed by the “Georgio” people: gypsies who settled in one place. The clan’s original name was Cornelescu, mispronounced in England as Cornelius. Angela’s Bill -- Charles William, in fact, named for his father and grandfather -- was Elsie’s third born, long after two daughters, both of whom were stage performers in what Britain called Music Hall, and Americans knew as Vaudeville. Elsie was stage-struck, and propelled her children into show biz via music and dancing lessons. All three were performers before and during the War. Angela’s Bill won trophies in dancing competitions; the medals awarded for second and third placings still exist, but Elsie kept the first place trophies, and what became of them is a mystery.
Thrown together as performers, Angela and Bill could hardly ignore each other’s talent, and … nature took its course. Their courtship was about touring the northcountry on powerful motorcycles, and in later years Bill would always say he knew at first glance, Angela was “The One.” He had only one small problem --
At that moment, Bill was still waiting for his divorce to be finalized; and in those days, divorce took years. Like no few young men doing enforced National Service in the years after WWII, he had been made use of by a young woman. Ruby -- a girl from Portsmouth, on England’s south coast -- had rather fancied herself in uniform … enlisted, then decided she wanted out. She and Bill enjoyed a romance in Germany (serving with BAOR, British Army of the Rhine, and with the RASC, the Royal Army Service Corps), and when Ruby fell pregnant, they married. Pregnancy freed Ruby from military service. Since she was carrying Bill’s first child, she went to live with his mother in Middlesbrough, the town five miles up the “Wilderness Road” from Stockton.
In due course, a daughter -- Wendy -- was born, and Bill finished his National Service. But things in the Adamson household were hardly conducive to a happy marriage, with eight or ten people crowded into a not-so-large home. So Ruby took Wendy, returned south to her own mother and filed for divorce, most likely citing irreconcilable differences. Time chugged along through the years (yes, years!) it took for a marriage to be dissolved in the 1950s.
These were the years in which Princess Elizabeth was crowned Queen of England, and Edmund Hillary climbed mount Everest. In 1955, the divorce finalized, and Angela and Bill married … though Angela had been having second, third and fourth thoughts about it. To begin with, she couldn’t stand Elsie (then again, no one could. It was said of the Gypsy woman, she could “have a fight in an empty house”). However, she got along well with Elsie’s husband, Bill -- known to all as “Pop,” possibly because of the plethora of Bills in this community. Pop was of Norwegian descent. His father had “come over on the timber boat” from Norway, which had strong connections with Stockton -- providing the colossal Christmas trees which were illuminated in the High Street each year. The name was originally Adamsen; the spelling changed in the nineteenth century to the English norm. So Angela knew she could get along with Pop, and a few of the others on the Adamson side -- and she knew by now, she was becoming increasingly ill with the repeated events of …. something. She didn’t yet know it was Crohn’s Disease. But without anything more promising on the horizon, she married Bill on May 25, 1955. (Left: on her wedding day.)
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| In the early years of marriage, and good times... |
In fact, though she could not know it at the time, these were her life’s most golden years. She and Bill explored Britain on a superbike, traveling more in a couple of years than she ever had before, or ever would again. Nursing the arm and shoulder injury, she left behind the career of the musician and used the secretarial certificate to get work first in the Post Office, and -- after placing fifth out of the entire UK in a national examination (which she only sat for fun) -- with the Admiralty Department of the Navy, working at the Eaglescliff Depot. There, she wrangled paperwork to outfit ships at naval dockyards across the world … there, she was offered a promotion to Embassy work which would have taken her around the globe. Bill, however, was uninterested in traveling; the job would have meant estrangement.
She might have taken that option, but illness was creeping up gradually. Good times helped to smother the encroaching sickness, and she reveled in these years. Serving with the RASC, Bill had been a dispatch rider, truck and tank-transporter driver, and a road convoy scout during the “forgotten war” … the war against the black marketeers and stubborn pockets of resistance that bedeviled Germany for years after the War. He had his own plans for the future: he had learned to love motorbikes as a kid in uniform, serving in Germany (what stories he told of his adventures!), and in civvy street wanted to open a motorcycle workshop.
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| (c) Network |
Bill saw a lucrative future, and was prepared to work for it. Around 1950, he drove “ballast” trucks in England -- carrying gravel for road construction (look up a 1957 movie, Hell Drivers … yup) to raise the stake money. He also worked at the Dorman Long steel works in Middlesbrough -- a plant around a century old, functioning on yesteryear’s technology, with all its inherent dangers. It was the last steel works to be completely manually operated according to nineteenth century methods. Bill’s father had also worked there, years before -- it was not a job a man could do for very long. (Pop was a demolition specialist, following training in WWI, and worked on sites where buildings and chimneys were taken down.)
Dorman Long Middlesbrough provided the job from hell: blast furnaces roaring, flooring so hot, it burned the soles off a man’s boots, molten steel being “puddled,” poured and rolled into girder and plate. It was a young man’s job with colossal risks, and the pay was correspondingly high. Bill held the job until the inevitable injuries began to accumulate -- numerous burns … steel fragments in his eyes. Workplace safety regulations were virtually nonexistent at the time: British steel workers did not wear the firesuits common in Pittsburgh, US. When the 1952 American movie Steel Town screened in local cinemas, depicting American methods, the “macho beyond all sanity” steel men of Teesside roared with laughter. But Dorman Long paid very good money to any man who could do the job. This was the company, and plant, that rolled the steel for the iconic sister bridges, the Tyne Bridge and (commencing in 1924) the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Men died in this line of work … Bill did it long enough to raise the money for his business venture -- while Angela was, at least twice, left to pick up the pieces when he was delivered home by ambulance, badly burned and, once, temporarily blinded. Angela told the story of the night one of the mill’s massive rolls broke with a sound like a colossal explosion, or the derailment of a steam locomotive --
She wanted him out of Dorman’s. She tried to nag him into attending Constantine College, the technical college, and becoming an engineer; tried to convince him to come and work with her, at the naval spare parts depot outside the village of Eaglescliff, but Bill was stubborn. He had his own plans and was determined to stick to them. Angela was frustrated, annoyed, but didn’t have long to wait to reap the benefits of Bill’s vision.
In the Army, he learned motorcycle mechanics, and he was this good: he built the bike that won the 500cc class of the Manx Grand Prix, the Tourist Trophy, in 1957. That year, Angela and Bill had the tiger by the tail. They were driving a Jaguar. They sailed boats on Ullswater and the Norfolk Broads. They chartered a plane to the Isle of Man for the Grand Prix. Their business had moved from the original small premises on Falklands Street, to a major location on Newport Road, Middlesbrough. They had bought a home -- things were nothing short of amazing, and Angela (though she later never admitted it) must have been fairly dizzy with their success. (Left: sailing on Ullswater, 1956-ish.)
But shadows had begun to gather already: her health was slowly, steadily deteriorating. She left the job at Admiralty and took over account keeping for Bill’s increasingly successful motorcycle workshops … and she warned him repeatedly against going into a business partnership with the handsome, hot-shot bike racer who rode the machine that won that Grand Prix trophy. But Frank Reynolds was an entrepreneur as well as a racer. Being something of a celebrity after the win, he had financial backers to fill a showroom with machines for sale. It would have looked like an offer impossible to refuse … and Bill signed the documents for a full partnership.
It was bad medicine between Frank and Angela from day one. Something “sly” she perceived about Frank warned her not to trust him. Things remained kosher with her eagle eye on the paperwork, even when she became pregnant with her first child. But full-term pregnancy and natural childbirth were the last things a Crohn’s Disease sufferer could see through without disaster.
Long before 1960, Angela knew she was in dead trouble -- literally -- though the baby, named Jennifer Jane, was doted upon after being (without exaggeration) “born dead.” After 30 hours in labor the baby was born blue, resuscitated by the staff at the Barton House maternity hospital, and spent the first few days of her life in an oxygen tent. Angela and Bill suffered through this, and Bill could hardly be unaware of what was happening to his wife, who was still not quite 28.
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| Bill at about 32, and baby Jennifer |
Always a Junoesque figure, Angela was losing weight steadily: not merely slender, but getting thin, which might have looked fashionable in the Audrey Hepburn era, but in Angela’s case was simply unhealthy. A danger sign. She should have seen a doctor months earlier, but there was one major problem. Bill’s father -- “Pop” to all -- was dying of gallbladder cancer. Angela knew that if she mentioned being ill herself, the redoubtable and intimidating Elsie would launch into a fury, claiming Angela was trying to undermine Pop’s terminal condition.
So Angela kept silent, not even mentioning her health to her own parents. Her father was by now hopelessly crippled with the sponlylitis; Queenie was absent as often as possible, trying to squeeze something for herself out of an impossible life. And Fred Callander had never been a sympathetic ear, when it came to Angela complaining of an ailment. Probably as a reaction to his own chronic condition, he refused to believe anything could possibly be wrong with his daughter.
Angela was on her own, until the inevitable collapse. Pop died in 1960. Angela very nearly followed him, and two years of hospitalization began, ‘60-61. Baby Jennifer was sent to be raised by grandparents Fred and Queenie, while for Angela, this was “where the fun began.” Five major abdominal surgeries, the last of which she was extraordinarily lucky to survive. Floating in morphine following the procedure, she encountered “The Guide,” who had come to take her away. He led her down a long corridor with a light from around the corner at the end, and only at the last minute did she remember, “No, I can’t go. I’ve got a baby at home.” The Guide permitted her to change her mind. “Next time, then,” he said … and she woke, in Eston General Hospital, amid blood transfusions, IVs, pain and pandemonium.
She made it home in 1961, but was never fully well again, as long as she lived. So much of her gut had been removed, life would never be the same. Slowly she regained the pounds she’d lost, going from “the hospital skeleton,” whose weight had dropped to under 70lbs, to a rounded figure … she reopened the account books for the business --
And discovered big discrepancies. The bad juju between her and Frank had escalated during the years of her hospitalization: he utterly refused to have her “keep the books” for his side of the business -- the showroom sales. The result was that shoddy business practice ran amok. Frank was enormously in debt; and as his documented partner, Bill was carrying those debts via the repair and maintenance workshop, to keep the business afloat.
The situation was near to impossible. Money was close to nonexistent; Ruby still demanded child support for Wendy (who didn’t turn 18 till 1967), and Angela would never be fully healthy again. By the time she was a toddler, Jennifer was already helping to change surgical dressings: the work of the care-giver had begun, and would continue for more than half a century.
Angela and Bill “hit bottom” when they paid a small sum to buy a tiny house on Alexandra Street, around the corner from Mary Street, where Fred and Queenie lived. No indoor plumbing. One bedroom upstairs. One room downstairs. A lean-to kitchen, which Bill built on in timber. No bathroom or laundry room. From here, they had no place to go but up, but it was a long, hard road to get there, and in July, 1962, to complicate matters further, Angela fell pregnant again. Charles William Michael (known as Mike to all … it was either that or Charles William IV) was born on April 7, 1963 -- and was “born normal,” to the relief and disbelief of all. Though no one had told Angela, the baby was tipped to be hideously deformed due to the misshapen nature of Angela’s insides, from the multiple surgeries. The doctors were wrong: the baby was physically perfect and would, in due course, go on to be a PhD archaeologist.
In August 1963, Jennifer started in the “baby class” at the at same school where Angela and Queenie had attended, and Bill found a solution to the problem of the wobbling business: he would sell out the whole gone-rotten thing to Frank, and be done with it. Frank drove a hard bargain. Bill signed over the documents of ownership and continued to work there, running the workshop which brought in most of the business’s income. His wages were modest; Ruby never remarried -- child support dragged on and on, leaving Jennifer and Mike to grow up in poverty which would astonish many people today. Angela struggled through the hardest years, 1962-65.
In 1962, Bill’s mother, Elsie, married again. She was over 70 but looked ten years younger and her new husband, Bill Garvey (yes, another Bill!) thought he was the elder, though he was just 60. The marriage was never happy, but it endured till Elsie’s death, just short of her 100th birthday. Around 1990, she passed away in her sleep in her own home. After finishing the day’s baking, she told her husband, “I’m tired, I’ll have a nap before tea.” She sat in the armchair by the hearth, put her head back, and was gone long before he went to wake her.
Angela and Elsie had never seen eye to eye, but in the years 1962-65, even Elsie -- now Mrs. Garvey -- couldn’t fail to notice how rough things were for her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. She provided good working lunches for her son, and haunted the stalls at the “thrift markets” near her home in North Ormesby, for clothes that kept Angela and the kids dressed. Somehow, they survived. For this alone, “Nana Garvey” deserves honorable mention … though the cash Pop had set aside from their various business ventures was soon spent by the Garveys, and upon Elsie’s death, there was no bequest.
Angela and Bill started to get ahead in 1965 and were able to move across Oxbridge Lane to a much better house on Eton Road. It was an old house, which Bill fully restored, from rebuilding the kitchen to installing a bathroom. And it was a larger house, with three bedrooms, and -- gasp! -- a small garden outside the bay window of its parlor. Angela planted marigolds, which the butterflies soon discovered; Jennifer collected bright green caterpillars, which she kept in a jam jar and watched them chrysalis. Somewhere deep under the plot where the butterflies discovered those marigolds is the shell of a Moroccan tortoise … the last remains of Jennifer’s first pet (not counting several ill-fated goldfish), which didn’t live very long, and died “egg bound,” as many young female tortoises apparently do, if no one knows what the problem is, and how to remedy it.
In 1965, Fred Callander passed away at home, quite peacefully, of a cerebral hemorrhage, aged 66. It was the third time he’d been to the brink of death; he’d received last rights twice before and rallied to live on (not so bad for a man whose parents had once been told he couldn’t possibly live past 30). But by the summer of ‘65, Queenie was old enough to receive the widow’s pension, and Fred knew he could let go. Angela was astonished by the number of people who lined Oxbridge Lane to pay their respects as the hearse passed on its way to the old cemetery, where he was buried near so many of the old family, whose ranks had begun to grow sparse. He was survived by just a couple of sisters -- Betsy, Nellie, Florrie (Elizabeth, Helen and Florence), and a handful of in-laws. The sun shone the day he was buried; skylarks sang. After a lifetime of illness and pain, Fred was free at last. Later, Angela said she sang like those lark at the service, watched the skylarks soar at the graveside, and never shed a tear … and Queenie soon discovered the good companion she had lost without ever really knowing the value of him.
The late 1960s were the first stable time for almost a decade. Angela’s health settled somewhat, though she was never strong and always beset by the maladies of the malnutrition brought about by the radical surgeries. But she was young enough to cope -- still not 40. The kids were at junior school, soon preoccupied with Project Apollo, the Mexico ‘68 Olympics, and -- predictably -- Star Trek, which for Mike would come to rival the worlds of Gerry Anderson. Angela could relax a little … coast, especially when Wendy’s child support finally came to an end and there was a little money to spare.
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| 1960s Postcard |
First: a short holiday for the first time in over a decade (first time ever, in the kids’ lives). Four days in the beautiful Lake District, at the historic White Lion Hotel in the tiny village of Patterdale, near Ullswater. Then -- the big decision, the enormity of which would be faced again over 30 years later, by Jen and her new husband…
Australia.
The English winters were increasingly rough on Angela, who was never well. Understandably, Bill dreamed of a new start, somewhere far away. And Australia did a terrific job of selling itself to English migrants in the 60s, with magazine ads, posters at bus shelters, commercials on TV. “Walk Tall in Australia,” read the ads, accompanied by pictures of sun-bronzed kids cavorting on beaches beside green seas. Irresistible. Pamphlets were sent for … forms lodged. An invitation was made to attend an interview in Leeds.
Angela, Bill and kids piled into the car and drove down the motorway: strange city, strange people … Australia House. The immigration officer conducting the interview was “an Adee man,” who recommended the capital of South Australia as a great option, and provided newspapers and magazines to give a taste of the flavor of the fair city of Adelaide. The decision was soon made, the wheels set in motion. First, the medical … and how the doctors ever passed Angela, in her condition, remains a mystery; though one of them admitted, “It isn’t you we want, Mrs. Adamson, it’s your children.” (This decision, made at Australian Government level, would cost Australia rather dearly -- but those days still lay twelve or fourteen years in the future, on the day the immigration application was approved.)
What Australia’s immigration promotions carefully neglected to mention was that the whole country was settling into a depression that would usher in the worst financial time since the War. The depression of the 70s was going to catch those kids the county had wanted so badly -- but Angela and Bill could not know this.
The preparations for immigration were overwhelming. The Eton Road house was redecorated for sale … the dog was rehomed, and lucky enough to stay right where he was. The young couple who bought the house took him too. The black-and-tan hound, Sandy, was about five months old when Angela closed up the house for the last time and walked away. The buyers had taken every piece of furniture, crockery, cutlery, curtains, the lot. Angela filled the teapot and kettle, set cups and saucers ready for tea … locked the door behind her. The house shone. The kids were with Queenie that afternoon. The new owners had taken Sandy for a romp in the nearby park … when they returned, they walked into the house and it was their home. Sandy must have searched for his old family, but soon forgot, as pups will. Months later, when Angela returned with some final paperwork to be signed, the young lady of the house had had her baby; Sandy was fiercely protective of the child, and at first set up the alarm as Angela knocked at what had recently been her own front door. Then, all at once, Sandy recognized her.
But where was the Adamson family during these months? The immigration process required applicants to sell their homes, put everything into storage and … wait. They would be held on a three-day alert, never knowing when they would fly out. Just … wait. And wait. Four years before, Queenie had moved from the Mary Street house after Fred passed away, and rented a small apartment in a block across town, on Dunmail Road. When the Eton Road house sold, she went to live with her sister, Connie, so Angela, Bill and kids could stay at her place while they waited … and waited.
Christmas came, and they were still waiting. Jennifer’s education suffered a major shake-up, when serious illness (early stages of the infection that would hospitalize her in just eight more months) and the impending move required her to leave the prestigious Grangefield Grammar School, to which she had won a scholarship in mid-1970. (If Jen is honest, she was glad to leave the place. Every memory remains awful, half a century later -- though Grangefield would have set her feet on the career path in the UK … a promising future Angela always swore the move to Australia unraveled.) The kids enjoyed a hiatus from school, October to January --
Then, on January 10, 1971, a rap at the door announced a telegram from Australia House: Angela and family were booked on QF-732, to Sydney, Australia, the following Friday. They must at London’s Heathrow Airport with two hours to spare to check in --
Oh yes, and along the way, with 72 hours to spare, pack everything you own, get it across the country to the docks at Liverpool, put it on a ship; and pack one tea-chest for each family member, send it on ahead to London, for air freight on your Qantas Boeing 707 … instant frenzy.
Packing was close to impossible because of the constraints of time, space and the weather. That January was a blizzard. Bill drove the crates of sea freight across the mountains to Liverpool in blinding snow, while Angela and the kids tried to cram a lifetime into a few oddly small boxes. The hours flew, but somehow it was done. The alarms were already set for 4:30am, Friday morning, when Queenie came to farewell a daughter she would never see again. She and Angela embraced (to the astonishment of Jen, who had only ever seen them disagreeing, arguing), and later Angela said, “The years rolled away,” and for a moment she was a young girl again. She must have known she would never see her mother again, though Queenie lived into her early 70s and passed away of medically-acquired colon cancer … the “cobalt bomb” had been inflicted on her following a hysterectomy for fibroids, in 1968.
A truck took the tea chests to London on Thursday, and the outbound Adamson family took a taxi to Stockton railway station before dawn the next day. The snow was deep, the wind blisteringly cold. Angela did notice the date. Little wonder the Australian Government had made the free plane tickets available on this day … QF-732 was empty as it left London, riding the “kangaroo route” south: Frankfurt, Damascus, Bahrain, Bangkok, Singapore, Sydney. The flight crossed three war zones … on Friday 13th, on both sides of the dateline. Germany was fighting a war against terrorism in which airliners were often targets. The Middle East was a mess of conflict, and in 1971 the Vietnam War was still close to full throttle. Who would buy a ticket to fly on Friday 13th, on that route?
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| Qantas Boeing 707. The "Jumbo Jet" wasn't yet in service. Archival. |
At Frankfurt, the plane was surrounded by security vehicles (think Munich, 1972, the PLO … yep) while it stopped to take on one passenger and fuel -- and was de-iced before it took off again. At Damascus, more security: Sikh troops in khaki battledress and turbans, armed with assault rifles -- British Commonwealth troops more than likely guarding a Qantas aircraft transiting (at the time) dangerous Islamic territory. More fuel. One passenger left the plane. At Bahrain, a more major layover, late at night. Mechanics had begun to work on one of the 707’s four engines, and passengers were deplaned for a couple of hours spent in the terminal -- listening to local music, watching hawkers selling clockwork monkeys, buying postcards. Jen bought a book to read on the rest of the flight, mammalian zoology, in paperback. (It’s still in the house, somewhere -- packed, like so much else.)
By now, the pattern for the rest of the flight was set: Bill was airsick. He spent the whole two-day flight across the world huddled under his overcoat on an empty jetliner which was kept at freezing temperatures. The haul to Bangkok was long, and stepping out onto the top of the tall steps, for the walk across the taxiway to the terminal, was the family’s first exposure to high heat and humidity. It seemed one walked face-first into a wall. At Singapore, passengers did not deplane while the jet took on fuel … and the 707 filled with Aussie tourists returning to Sydney. Now, it was noisy, crowded, hot. Bill was airsick as ever; Angela and the kids were just “sick and tired” and wanting the “adventure” to be over.
Was anyone watching from the port-side windows, and seeing the long snake-tails of flame streaming out of one of the engines? On Friday 13th. (Jen was … and did wonder how normal this could possibly be.) The engine was shut down, and QF-732 came home to Sydney on three engines … releasing its load of passengers into the complete turmoil of an airport workers’ strike. Adelaide passengers were compelled to fly through Melbourne -- first on Ansett Airlines, then on TAA; and both flights were delayed and delayed -- then no food was loaded aboard. Harassed stewardesses served tea and bikkies and polite apologies.
Hours late, exhausted, Angela shepherded the family to the migrant hostel in Glenelg, where a cabin was reserved. They all fell down and slept through much of the weekend, before the “adventure” of getting their bearings began. Forty-eight hours before, after a headlong rush in a taxi from King’s Cross Station at the end of the train ride, through snowy Trafalgar Square, to Heathrow and the beginning of the two-day flight, Angela and family had been coping with sub-zero temperatures. But January in Adelaide, South Australia is … hot.
This was high summer. The old timber cabin had no air conditioning (a/c was rare in Australia in the 70s), no insulation, and no bathroom. You wanted the bathroom, you walked over to the communal block of showers and toilets … not good news for a Crohn’s Disease sufferer with two kids, one of whom was just seven.
First: a car. Monday morning, Bill tracked down a good used vehicle -- a pale green 1963 Ford Falcon station wagon, which he kept for several years. In that car, the family would travel a lot of SA’s lovely Fleurieu Peninsula, and up as far north as Port Wakefield, as far east as Tailem Bend.
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| Ours was mint green, same car, to the wheel hubs! Pixabay. |
Next: a job. And this was the point where the Aussie “depression of the 1970s” began to bite. Jobs were scarce, but a mechanic with Bill’s suite of skills found work at once, because he was prepared to work long hours for low pay. He took on crash repairs, (panel beating at a workshop, DCS Crash Repairs in Beverley, across the airport from Glenelg), while he looked further afield for better opportunities. Six months later, he was working at Carcycles, the Honda -- and later Harley -- dealership, on Pirie Street, downtown. He remained there the rest of his working life, before long becoming Workshop Manager.
Escaping the migrant hostel turned out to be more difficult than finding work. Australians of the day believed the hostel was free -- that incoming migrants got off to a flying start in their new country by paying nothing for rent and food. The truth was very different. Hostel fees were so high, saving was difficult, and signing a lease on a rental house required a month’s rent in advance. This added up to a four-month period of working, scrimping and saving. Life dealt Angela and Bill another challenge: they opened the air freighted packages of their belongings to discover some of their possessions gone altogether, and much of the remainder smashed. Why would Customs seize a family’s bedding? No; it was simply stolen. Asked why the crockery was smashed, the children’s books sliced open down the spines, Customs explained that drug smugglers were known to bake heroin into plates and saucers, and pack heroin into the spines of books. Uh…huh. Angela had no choice but to accept this, but it would rankle forever.
Just ten days after arrival in Australia, the school year began. The shade temperature was 100 degrees Fahrenheit; the school was a mile or more away, through baking canyon streets. Fun stuff for kids who’d been wading in snow so recently. No one was permitted any period of acclimation. Two weeks after building snowmen in England, Jen was standing in the noonday sun, fielding on a Grade 7 cricket team … and growing ill, though no one yet knew. She was bitten by a snake in February, in the grounds of the migrant hostel, and limped through March, to the derision of her fellow students. Through her daughter’s bitter school experiences, Angela began to learn that English people -- migrants in general -- were not actually welcome in Australia. If you had an accent, you were the outsider. European migrants banded together into communities to make safe places for themselves, but English folk seldom did. They were expected to integrate -- and many tried to.
With the depression of the 70s running amok and her health failing, the only work Angela could get was domestic cleaning. She did it as long as she could, but her strength had never returned after the surgeries only a decade before (and it never would). She struggled to work until her body would do no more, but luckily, Bill soon made the move to Carcycles. Financially, the situation eased enough for the couple to begin to save for a house deposit.
Angela and Bill found a house to rent on Alyson Street, Glenelg -- an eccentric old place that had been a farmhouse c. 1900, when the area was rural. They moved in, in May, just as winter was settling; and one day, a week later, opened the glass front door at the top of the steps to find a tabby cat, six months old, waiting to come inside. She was so young, she still had the stitches from being “fixed,” and had made her way back from a house beyond the airport, to which the previous tenants had moved, taking their three cats. The other two cats didn’t “come home,” but the little tabby did … and the landlord was unhappy. The lease Angela and Bill had signed prohibited pets -- never mind the fact the kitten had returned to her own home. The landlord wanted the cat out. Angela stood up and fought … the landlord backed down. The tabby lived to be around eleven, and remained with her new family till she passed away from the kidney problems that bedevil felines who won’t drink.
The family settled in on Alyson Street while the Aussie winter hit with unexpected cold. Then -- drama. In July, 1971, Angela was suddenly looking at the real possibility she would lose her daughter. Jen was so seriously ill, she was rushed to a hospital in Grange for emergency throat surgery. Thanks to the swift action of Doctor Reece Jennings, Childe Jen survived to be writing this biography, 46 years later. She finished Grade 7 at St. Leonard’s in Glenelg, and progressed to Plympton High. School years were miserable; teenage health was dreadful.
Angela fought many a battle on Jen’s behalf, with staff who could not, or would not, understand that chronic illness can beset young people, they will loose school time as a consequence, and there’s a need for help to keep up. No one wanted to offer such help at high school level in the 70s … Angela’s battles were largely fought in vain -- but she fought them and, in a way, won. Almost all the educational changes she nominated in the 70s were adopted eventually, decades later.
With a house deposit organized, the next question was -- build or buy? Angela and Bill discovered it was cheaper to build, and one wound up with a house one wanted, rather than buying someone else’s dream. Till May, 1975, they lived on Alyson Street, and during the first half of ‘75, watched the house on Whiteley Drive, Trott Park constructed. Things were definitely looking up -- though Bill was working seven days a week to make this “go.” He took a Sunday job, managing a service station at O’Halloran Hill, for extra cash, and the Trott Park house happened.
Nice house, four bedrooms, bathroom, the lot -- but poor choice of location, as Angela soon discovered. Her new house was only the second built at Trott Park, a new subdivision many miles from … anything. Local government pledged bus services, but these took years to materialize. It was an hour’s walk to the nearest bus … too long, too far, for a Crohn’s Disease sufferer who might need bathroom access in a hurry, without warning. (Too long and far, also, in fierce summer heat.) From 1975 to 1980, Bill was content, with a job he enjoyed, friends at work, reasonably good money, and a brand-new house. Things were not so good for Angela. She was rendered house-bound by the Crohn’s and the absence of any accessible bus. Her health began to wind down.
As the kids grew up, more and more they found themselves responsible for the situation. When Jen was old enough to drive, and bought a 1967 HR Holden, things improved somewhat for Angela: she was able to get out of the house again, though she never felt comfortable as a “passenger,” always worried the kids wouldn’t want Mom tagging along. In fact, this was never an issue. Jen had been the care-giver since her toddling years -- she was not about to quit now. Angela, Jen and Mike would travel around a little, and by 1978, when Star Wars was playing at the Hoyts Cinemas in the Regent Arcade, downtown, jaunts to the movies became a regular pleasure.
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| The HR-Holden ... and a little freedom. Archival. |
Angela always enjoyed films. In her youth, it was Errol Flynn -- Robin Hood, Captain Blood, The Seahawke. She was a week short of giving birth to Jen when she went to see The Vikings, with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis -- which, in its day, was close to X-rated. In the early 70s, via Enter the Dragon she discovered Bruce Lee and a love for all things oriental -- and the exposure to Lee’s films opened the door to a long fascination with Taoism and Buddhism. She collected quite a library (Allan Watts, Christmas Humphreys, John Blofield), joined India’s Sri Aurobindo Society, read and read. She romanced herself into a blend of Taoism and Buddhism, then romanced herself right back out of it again by 1990, which left her spirituality, temporarily, something of a question mark.
Right up to 1980, with the new freedom of that HR Holden, cinema jaunts were all about Star Wars, Sinbad, Conan, James Bond, Indiana Jones. Angela had some small freedom, and some good times. But the horizon was shadowed again: ill health was looming, and this time it wasn’t Angela herself, nor Jen. It was Bill - and life was about to change utterly. Permanently. By 1980 he was repeatedly ill with night sweats, fatigue, muscle weakness and a general malaise which, in those days, proved tough to diagnose. He switched doctors, to the GP serving the Trott Park, Sheidow Park area, and had x-rays. The initial diagnosis will forever remain a mystery: he was told he had an enlarged heart … which subsequently vanished when, in 1982, seriously ill, he had more x-rays and was informed he had extremely advanced cancer in his right lung. (Left: Angela's 50th birthday photo, by Jen.)
In less than a fortnight, he was rushed to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the lung was removed … and the paperwork botched. Like most people in those days, Bill had no private medical insurance. But someone in the secretarial pipeline checked the wrong box, and recorded that he had. A huge account was served for surgery and hospitalization. To call it “unpayable” was an absurd understatement. The shock made Angela ill, and Jen -- by now 23 -- picked up the gauntlet. Fought the hospital. Fought the bank, when the mortgage became unpayable. Negotiated with real estate agents to wrangle the sale of the house … hunted for a rental that would accept a couple of invalids who owned a dog.
The canine part was the hardest: landlords were dead-set against pets. The tabby cat who’d found her way home to the house in Glenelg had passed away in 1982, but the family had recently got the Kelpie/cattledog pup, a beauty called Max. Now, must Max be consigned to an RSPCA shelter, because with Bill so sick and the family compelled to vacate the house by a set date, a rental had to be secured, no matter what? Angela and Jen fought side by side in these weeks … found a place through a sheer stroke of luck on Angela’s part -- and kept Max (who lived to be just seven years old, and at last passed away of renal failure, the result of surgery for endometriosis).
The months of the move from Trott Park were a blur of confusion, misery and incredible poverty. Best jump to the end: the family finally moved to Seacombe Gardens, at an affordable rent. Bill never recovered and was permanently disabled -- in April 1984, he collapsed again, and scans showed the cancer had metastasized to his brain. More surgery, at FMC … he survived, but damage was done. He would certainly never work again, though his health began to stabilize after its own fashion. The domestic scene settled somewhat. Jennifer picked up the reins of the carer and enabler, finding ways to make things work, including a career of her own.
Angela never properly came to grips with the life of a semi-invalid, married to an invalid, increasingly house-bound and getting … older. She was in her late 50s and those menopausal years worked their own nasty alchemy. Life was about managing her own illness, coping with Bill, who was “difficult” to say the least … losing the beloved dog, Max … and finding two more pups, litter mates, Patch and Sandy, (also Kelpie crosses) when a neighbor knocked at the door one evening and asked if there was any chance we could take one. His dog had produced a large litter -- he brought two to show us; we took both. These sisters lived to be eleven years old and died just one month apart.
So life for Angela in the 80s and 90s was about home, garden, dogs, VHS video movies, following cricket on TV, and watching her kids work their own way toward some measure of success, while Bill steadily declined. Surgery after surgery followed. Money was scarce; times got little easier … but Jen gradually worked up a DTP trade, and the years from 1989 to 2000 were unexpectedly and surprisingly lucrative. Before the advent of cheap software, which meant anyone, everyone, could do it all for themselves on their own PC, useful money was to be earned in “office services for people who don’t own offices,” and in DTP.
Angela was by now in her early 60s, and by her own admission, embittered. In her mind, one’s life ended at 60 -- or at least entered a phase about which she wanted to know nothing. (In her youth, she maintained that life ended at 30, and at 20 she determined to “drive a car off a cliff” when she reached 30!) One day, she folded her hands and called it quits. She concentrated on Imran Khan and Viv Richards, favorite old movies, the dogs, the pursuit of spiritual matters … and kept an enormous truth to herself. Just as she had hidden the early stages of her Crohn’s until the collapse came, she now hid the onset of deafness caused by audio nerve degeneration.
In fact, mentioning the deafness earlier would not have helped, because the condition could not be reversed or halted. Deafness continued to worsen throughout the next quarter century, and by the end of her life was so profound, the only thing she could make sense of was her daughter’s voice. All other “bands” of hearing were gone … a cruel tragedy, for one who had begun as a professional musician.
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| Angela's 65th birthday portrait, by Jen. |
In 1996-97, she watched Jen and Mike invest an enormous amount of work and cash in a multimedia project for CD-Rom, a medium which was tipped to be a big, busy marketplace (it wasn’t; but who could know this?), and in July 1997, Jen took off for America and Canada, intending to secure distribution. Angela and Mike heard the purr of a big V8 taxi on the drive at the Seacombe Gardens house at 4:30am, and they hugged farewell at the door. Angela was convinced Jennifer would not return; it was an emotional time, and she admitted that Jen -- by now close to 40 herself -- was long-past due, and owed, a crack at a life of her own. The business trip was planned as a seventeen-week odyssey from one side of North America to the other --
But a few weeks after Jen flew out, the family GP was visiting Bill when he noticed an odd lesion on Angela’s left temple. A swift biopsy revealed the truth: skin cancer, spreading rapidly. Angela was scheduled for surgery … Mike emailed his sister … Jen got herself back from Alaska in five days flat, through the skill and kindness of Flight Center staff in Vancouver. Angela was back in surgery to remove the cancer and perform a skin graft to close a five-centimeter wound, the scar from which she carried for life … a trophy of yet another survival.
She enjoyed the stories Jen brought back from Alaska and Canada … photos and mementos, accounts of places visited and friends made. Angela did not yet know it (neither did Jen and Mike), but in August 1997 they were poised on another of Destiny’s pivot points. Jen’s abortive business trip had been very well insured, and 90% of all costs were soon refunded. Four of the seven weeks she’d spent in Alaska had been her own vacation, spent with a great “internet friend,” Anna, who had in turn introduced Jen to her own friends, Ken and Gerry Downes. Friendship struck up among the four immediately. Jen remarked to Angela that it was “like going home” … and this would prove prophetic.
In the months following melanoma surgery, Angela recovered well. Her hearing was “off” in 1998, but not so badly that she was incapacitated. The Crohn’s was just grumbling away, as it always did. When Anna invited Jen back for the Alaskan summer in ‘98, she felt confident in booking tickets for Anchorage, and on into Seattle, Maryland, Toronto… it would have been three glorious months of traveling, but Fate had its own ideas … and as a consequence, Angela’s life was soon to change completely, permanently -- and for the better. In fact, Jen had already met her future husband, though neither she nor Dave Downes -- son of Ken and Gerry, state fencing champion, marathon cyclist, arctic trucker, sailor, cook extraordinaire, cat lover, and all-around good guy -- knew it at the time.
Very seldom does the airline booking system run amok, but when it does, it creates chaos. After a few idyllic weeks in Alaska, Jen hiked up to the Anchorage Airport to confirm her bookings for the rest of the trip … no such bookings were in the system. She had the printed itinerary from Flight Center in Adelaide, but the computer in Anchorage knew about nothing until the international flight -- Japan Airlines, ex Vancouver back to Australia. Consternation turned to panic, then to the decision to scrub the gallivanting across Canada and America, and stay on in Alaska for the 90 days allowed by the I-91 tourist visa. And how fortunate was this --
Because just as this computer glitch was happening, Jen and Dave had met, fallen in love, and were trying to figure out how to get their lives organized. With two more months ahead of them, to spend more or less together in the summer of ‘98, decisions were made. Jen spent a great deal of time in Fairbanks, and returned to Aus with the news, “I’ve met someone.”
At this time, Bill was somehow hanging on. He was in Flinders Medical Center more often, and for longer, than he was at home. Angela knew his passing was only a matter of time. Bill lived long enough to see the engagement ring on Jen’s hand, and see the photos, when she took an album to the hospital. Angela was too unwell to visit much, so the brunt of hospital visiting was borne by Jen and Mike. Bill was delighted by the photos: “You can see the love,” he said of them.
These were frantic months, as Jen and Dave worked long hours to fund the immigration process … getting Dave to Australia. It’s an expensive business. Dave took all the hours he could get, “tossing freight around” in arctic conditions, and Jen worked endless hours, saving every dollar. Angela was sidelined with steadily worsening illness -- 70 years old now, increasingly deaf, growing gradually weaker through the lifelong malnutrition of her condition.
Bill was hospitalized for the last time late in 1998. After five weeks in FMC, he was moved to Halcyon Nursing Home in Glenelg, not far from the first home he and Angela shared upon arrival in Australia. Jen and Mike worked together, taking many of his personal things to the home, to make him as comfortable as possible, but medical reality was about to be faced. After the removal of a lung, a person can live a maximum of around eighteen years before the heart fails, because one lung just won’t do the job forever. Bill lived the eighteen years, and passed away in his sleep, just nine days after being admitted to Halcyon. He was less even than a shadow of his former self. The young dancer who’d wanted to be a soccer player but was “put on the stage” by his stage-struck mother was as lost as the young soldier who rode superbikes and drove tank-transporters across Germany while still in his teens -- and the man who braved the horrors of Dorman Long’s Middlesbrough steel works and drove ballast over the mountains in sleet and ice, on mountain roads, for the stake to float his own business.
For Angela, Bill’s passing was a release and relief. His illness had been so long, hard, debilitating, it was akin to watching her father fail. As with her father’s passing, she felt only relief; at the end there were no tears. Bill was cremated and his ashes returned to England, where they were scattered in the garden of remembrance in Middlesbrough, where the ashes of his parents had also been scattered. All contact with the Adamson side of the family was lost at this time. Angela had a handful of in-laws, but the Adamsons had never made or accepted overtures of friendship. By 1999, Angela had been gone from the UK for almost three decades.
The family in Australia now numbered three, plus two beloved dogs. But Sandy and Patch were eleven years old, and after Sandy died at home with a heart attack, within weeks Patch was diagnosed with a massive abdominal cancer. She was euthanized gently after exploratory surgery, without ever regaining consciousness. Now, Angela, Jen and Mike were alone in Australia, with Angela growing increasingly delicate. Things looked bleak, yet the horizon held a bright spot, and as she turned 70, Angela focused on this.
On March 20th, 1999, in a log cabin church in Fairbanks, Alaska, her daughter married Dave Downes, who was to become her “other son.” The work began in earnest to bring him to Australia. Angela knew how immigration is a long, slow, infuriating business. All she could do to help was be supportive while it took twenty months to get Dave down under. But in October, 2000, Angela met Dave at last, at the house Jen had found, and fitted out for them, only half a mile from Angela’s own home.
Angela and Dave immediately accepted one another as family … and by this time Dave and his Alaskan family were awaiting their own tragedy. His mother, Gerry, had been diagnosed many months earlier with the lung cancer which would take her life just a few weeks after Dave arrived in Australia. Like Angela, Gerry suffered a lifetime of recurring illness, though she also enjoyed long remissions, periods of robust good health in which she rode motorbikes, drove trucks, sailed boats and wrangled the Downes family finances into seven figures. The sad news arrived when Dave’s father called long-distance, and while Dave could not fly home at once for his mother’s funeral or memorial (the costs, right on top of immigration, were prohibitive), he and Jen did fly north in the Alaskan summer of 2001 to pay their last respects. The FV Aurora took family and friends down Resurrection Bay to Bulldog Cove, where Dave and his elder brother, Doug, scattered Gerry’s ashes into the sea where the Downes family had so loved sailing.
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| L-R: Ken, Jen, Dave, Gerry, Doug ... a wedding day. |
Back in Australia, Angela was very frail indeed -- given to frequent falls now, and hospitalized several times with injuries. Mike lived with her, caring for her as he could while working his way through the early stages of his PhD. Jen hiked between the two houses to help, while Dave worked, and cycled, and cooked. Angela and Mike would come down for dinner and movies a couple of times a week -- and to play with the family’s newest member, a “blackberry kitten” named Bagheera, who would be with them until July 29th, 2014, when Nature took her course, as she always does.
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| Bagheera ... 31.10.2000 - 29.07.2014. The Black Prince. |
For Angela these were difficult months, with her health gone, her hearing going, her kids working so hard. She spent too much time alone, of sheer necessity, until The Solution presented itself. Rather than Angela and Mike being in one small house here, and Jen and Dave being in another small house there, both paying silly rents, why not combine the households into one big house in a much nicer suburb?
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| Two homes became one with the move to Coromandel Valley. |
Angela was in hospital yet again, recovering from a nasty fall plus an acute allergic reaction to a prescription drug. The kids visited with a set of photos of the house to which she would be going home this time, when she was released from FMC. The houses were combined into one at Coromandel Valley, almost in the countryside. The loudest sound was the low of cattle on the hill behind the house, and the chuckle of kookaburras in the area’s many trees. Angela would sit in the back garden and watch possums in the twilight, in the summer of 2004/05, and now she had three people to keep an eagle eye on her, make sure her diet was right -- she had the high-level home help she’d needed for years.
A lovely house in a lovely place, tons of help, big screen TVs, a “black panther” roaming around, the kids able to work from home, Mike working toward his doctorate …? After years of hardship, life was suddenly pretty good. She had the huge master bedroom, with her own bathroom, her own tea-making area, her TV, movies, books, glorious views from the windows, the ability to go out in the car occasionally, and her hearing was still good enough. From August 2004, Angela was set. Her life stabilized, and according to some measures, improved. (Left: Mike, finished the PhD., and lecturing.)
The only real downside to living in rentals is that owners have a nasty habit of selling them, compelling residents to move. And move. And move again. The big Coromandel Valley house was not actually ideal … the agents leasing it swore it didn’t get too hot in summer (it turned out to be a sweatbox), and the insulation and ceiling fans were adequate (a bare-faced lie). So when the owners sold it only seven months after Angela and family moved in, no one was too concerned to be looking for a better home. Yet again, Jen and Dave went house hunting, and Angela --
Lady Luck had to play her trump card just as the house hunting began. Angela suffered shingles, had not recovered from this when she came down with the “killer flu” of the season, and was still suffering that when she fell again and fractured her ankle. She was bed-bound (though never hospitalized) for five months in all, while the kids moved the household to an enormous place at Aberfoyle Park. She settled in to an even better home in a lovely suburb; but much damage had been done by this run of bad luck. The strength had gone from her spine; she never stood up straight again, and as years passed, her posture became ever more stooped. The snazzy walking sticks were put away; she maneuvered around the house with a walking frame, went out in a wheelchair -- and this worked well enough to keep her mobile while the family were forced to move not once but twice more. (Property owners have no compassion for tenants. They trade in houses as investments; tenants are just a necessary evil, to keep the houses earning before they’re “flipped” for big cash bonuses when the price is right. Angela had been renting since 1984, but for twenty years had enjoyed the security of the state’s Housing Trust, which protected vulnerable people.)
She enjoyed the two Aberfoyle Park years, but the five years at Sturt were not so good. Her hearing was failing rapidly now; mobility was difficult. It was time for her teeth to go, and be replaced by dentures which, though they fit perfectly and looked wonderful, seemed to help aggravate the Crohn’s Disease. (Long-term sufferers know this also affects the mouth. It’s not merely a condition of the gut.) She developed cataracts, which were removed and “Rolls Royce” lenses fitted into both eyes. But the big problem was glaucoma, which galloped and stole 90% of her vision before it could be halted.
In 2011, Dave’s father, Ken, passed away unexpectedly of a massive heart attack. In 2012 Dave flew to the States to be with the family when Ken’s ashes were interred at Arlington … back in Australia, Angela, Jen and Mike were just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and wondering what it would be. Angela’s health was so precarious, she was clearly on borrowed time, and the lease on the rental home in Sturt was almost up.
The inevitable happened: another move. As the family moved for the last time -- to another big house in Old Reynella -- Angela’s condition became very serious. She was in her 80s now. Of the vast old family of her youth, only two aged cousins remained. The rest had dwindled away gradually, while the younger members and in-laws drifted out of contact, as families will. Her years at Old Reynella were as comfortable as possible: a big-screen TV, hundreds of movies with subtitles … a new little “tigress” on the prowl, after Bagheera left us in 2014. Angela farewelled Bagheera on his last day with the Irish blessing, “May the road rise up to meet you … goodbye, son.” And she greeted Zolie, the white-booted silver tabby, two weeks later.
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| Zolie. The Princess. |
A lovely house, a lovely garden, family around her, favorite movies, teeth and eyes fixed, her GP happy to come out and see her routinely every three weeks. She was set. What could possibly go wrong? In fact, a fifty year old timebomb was ticking away, waiting for its moment. During the 1960 surgeries, tubes placed into Angela’s throat damaged the structures there, and in winter, 2016 she began to suffer choking episodes which led to aspiration pneumonia. She was hospitalized briefly at Noarlunga, but responded well to antibiotics, came home and soldiered on.
In the Australian autumn of 2017, she was less fortunate … and mistakes were made at hospital level, which led to her being kept off her feet for two weeks by young physiotherapists who didn’t understand (nor did they ever ask) about the back problem that meant she hadn’t stood up straight for years. Again, she responded to antibiotics for the aspirant pneumonia, but after two weeks in a hospital bed, she came home almost unable to stand at all.
Always a battler, Angela tried hard to get back on her feet. The work of standing and walking induced a heart attack after one week at home … back to Flinders MC for a week of bed-rest … home again, this time so close to bed-bound, the level of care she needed was so high, Jen, Dave and Mike were driven beyond the end of their abilities. Angela could see what was happening, and volunteered to accept a nursing home. Official wheels were set in motion, but in this economy, nursing home places are difficult to get. People who should be in care must struggle at home. The kids discovered many a painful truth in these weeks -- Angela never knew.
She was home for four weeks before the next bout of pneumonia. Back to hospital for the last time; and her luck had run out. The infection escaped the lungs and the strongest antibiotics were ineffective. Treatment was discontinued. She came home with full palliative care facilities, to spend her last days with her family, with the maximum comfort that could be provided. Her favorite movie now was The Phantom, which starred one of her lifelong favorites, Irish actor Patrick McGoohan. In this, McGoohan had grown old, and almost certainly Angela perceived a soul mate as she watched The Phantom over and over in her last days.
Sleep began to take over as the medications were increased little by little. Morphine provided the cushion for her last days, and at around noon on June 20th, 2017, she took her last breath.
Jen, Dave and Mike paid their final respects at the Alfred James funeral home in Morphett Vale, where Jen spoke the old Irish blessing of farewell -- with one profound difference … Angela’s spirituality had returned to source in her last fifteen years. “May the road rise up to meet you, / May the wind be always at your back, / May the sun shine warm on your face / And the rain fall softly upon your fields. / And until we meet again, may the Goddess / Hold you in the palm of Her hand.” Angela always said that at its core, the Irish Catholic Church was as pagan as that land had ever been. She had returned to the the ancient, the primal, the essential spirit or soul of Nature. The Elementals spoke to her as other religions she had studied never did.
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| Angela and Bagheera,among rafts of flowers. |
Angela Cecilia Mary (Joan) Adamson nee Callander was cremated, and her ashes returned to the family. She and Bagheera sit together among rafts of flowers in the living room. The family have a plan, and she had agreed to it. She is survived by Jen, Dave and Mike … no grandchildren. She was an only child whose parents, husband and cousins have all gone on ahead. She always chuckled with a sense of knowing when Jen would say, “Death just means you’ll be there ahead of us. It won’t be long -- and I expect you to have the lights on and the tea made!” The family is playing “last man standing.” It will be cremation for us all, including the dogs and cats (we have the ashes of all of them, back to that first cat, from Glenelg, 1971). Angela agreed: when the last of us passes, all our ashes will be combined, and a long-lived tree plated on top of them, to assimilate us all into one new life form which should live a hundred years, and carry Angela -- and us all -- a century into the future with it.
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| Pixabay |
A lovely house in a lovely place, tons of help, big screen TVs, a “black panther” roaming around, the kids able to work from home, Mike working toward his doctorate …? After years of hardship, life was suddenly pretty good. She had the huge master bedroom, with her own bathroom, her own tea-making area, her TV, movies, books, glorious views from the windows, the ability to go out in the car occasionally, and her hearing was still good enough. From August 2004, Angela was set. Her life stabilized, and according to some measures, improved. (Left: Mike, finished the PhD., and lecturing.)
