Thanks, and my WIP

First of all, thank you all for your kind words about my Mum.

She says she has improved again today, and will go in to town to see her doctor tomorrow.

To say I am relieved is an understatement!

Changing subject I have managed to get to the end of another draft of my WIP.

As I said a while ago I have split my MS into two books which has meant developing some of my character’s stories more.

In celebration of another milestone here is another section from Petenka’s viewpoint. This is set a year after the scene I shared last time after my characters have been at war for almost a year.

Resignation: Russia - May 1942

Petenka Bykova

‘I hate to say it, but I don’t see how we can survive until the end.’

My words dropped into the well of light around a single precious candle that flickered on rough timber walls. The dugout was one we shared with Lena Kominskaya our regimental surgeon. Maybe five years older than us she had been a surgeon at the Moscow orthopaedic hospital before the war.

Svetlana froze, her spoon halfway between her mess-tin and her mouth. Incredulously she asked, ‘Have you really taken that long to think about it?’

‘No, of course not. We did get interrupted earlier.’

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.’ A click on the rim of the tin as she put down the spoon, ‘It’s an uncomfortable subject to discuss.’

I kept my voice light, ‘Why is it so difficult?’

Her brows knotted, ‘I don’t find it pleasant to contemplate my death.’

‘I don’t worry too much, but I do not believe death is the end.’

‘Because of faith?’

‘Exactly.’

I peered at her through the flickering light. Even with all we had faced she looked as relaxed and as sure of herself as the day we met. I shifted uncomfortably.

Svetlana smiled gently, a knowing smile.

I threw a crust of bread at her, ‘I know, you’re a Communist, you think I’m deluding myself. We don’t need to have that argument again.’

Retrieving the scrap of bread from her shoulder, she flicked it at my head. ‘It doesn’t serve any purpose does it?’

‘Children,’ interjected Lena from the shadow of her bunk, ‘play nicely!’

As Lena went back to the letter she was writing, I felt for the crust and tugged it from where it had caught in my hair. I thought about throwing it again but dropped it on the floor, someone had to feed the poor rats. ‘That argument is tired.’

Sveta frowned, serious again, ‘I asked the question, because I realised how much I was afraid. I thought you must be too.’

‘You’ve been afraid?’

‘How could I not be?’

‘You always seem so calm.’

She looked at me impassively, ‘That’s not how I feel.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘I am terrified of dying. More afraid of being wounded. But…’

‘But?’

‘I am frightened of losing you. Frightened of how I would be if something happened to my Petenka.’

‘Nothing will happen to me.’

‘You don’t really believe that.’

‘I’, suddenly unsure I paused to consider ‘no, I don’t see how we can survive. Yet, somehow I can’t really imagine…’

‘I can, but I don’t want to.’

Al Returns

Well I didn’t fall off the face of the Earth.

On Tuesday night my eldest brother Mike phoned me. He had heard from my Mother’s husband that Mum had been taken into hospital that day.

Despite being elderly Mum and her husband live on a farm in the sticks about 40 minutes from the nearest (small) town Dorrigo. Mum had woken to excruciating abdominal pain and after phoning their doctor called an ambulance. She was taken to Dorrigo hospital which has a small emergency department. I was told she would be transferred to the nearest base hospital in Coffs Harbour about 100km away on Wednesday morning.

Mike lives about 5 hours’ drive from Mum while I am about 15 hours’ away.

So I got on the first flight I could to Coffs the next day. From here in Melbourne it is an hour flight to Sydney, where I had to wait for another plane for the hour long flight to Coffs.

Fortunately, Mum responded to treatment and we were able to take her home on Friday. I got home late last night. She is well on the way to recovery.

Needing to relax after a harrowing week I went waterfall hunting this afternoon. The result: piccies of the Olinda Falls on the flanks of Mount Dandenong just outside Melbourne.

Home Safe

A quick one tonight.

I got home safe from Mum’s house late on Tuesday night.
I had a lovely time but all good things come to an end.

Mum lives 1300 km (800 miles) away so I don’t get to see her nearly as often as I would like. It was quite heart wrenching to come away. She is still fit and healthy but at 82 years of age I am painfully aware that she won’t be around forever.

Mind you having said that she comes from a long lived line on her mother’s side so I hope she will be around for a good while yet!

That’ll do me for tonight except I have as usual come home with a pile of piccies. I will share just two tonight.

A pair of fire-tail finches (Neochmia temporalis) also known as red-browed finches. These native finches are about the size of a sparrow. They form pair bonds and these two seemed very cozy so I guess they are mates.

A common or laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) these guys are common across eastern Oz. They are a giant kingfisher (about 45 cm long) their main prey is reptiles such as lizards and snakes. They swoop down from their perch and carry their prey back into a tree. They dispatch a snake by battering its head repeatedly against a branch before swallowing them whole!

In which Al enters the Picture.

A little while ago I did a post based on my early teen years in Mum’s patch of the country.

I promised I would carry on with more of the story. Well I am starting that story again only… and it is a fairly big only… I am jumping about thirteen or fifteen years further into the past.

The early 1960s a man and a woman meet and fall in love.

He was from India. As an Anglo-Indian in a racist world, living in what was Redneck Australia he was (I think) tormented. She was desperately unhappy in a marriage to a man who would not let her return home to visit her ailing father in England.

They are both married to other people and have children. Yet despite that and despite the standards of the time they leave together. He never looks back, she regrets always leaving her son and daughter with the man she no longer loves.

About two years later I was born…

Meet my father, Rupert Russell. This is what he was like in my earliest memories (and amazingly I do remember these times). He was young and fit and a lover of wild places. But it is almost impossible to find a picture of him in this period. He was a thinker (some might argue a philosopher) and he had some funny thoughts. Like me he was and is a writer (find a small sample here). One of the thoughts he had in this period was that people should not have their photo taken. Hence no photos of him.

And... no photos of me as a baby. Which brings me to this piccie. Mum holds a gate somewhere in western NSW so Dad can drive through. Next to her a two year old Al.This is the oldest picture of me in existence. Don’t I look a serious little fellow?

As I said Dad was a lover of the wilds. He grew up in an India that was still even then largely jungle and learnt a passion for the wild from his father. So one of the things we did when they weren’t moving around looking for work was go out into the bush and camp.

Here is one of the few piccies of my Dad from then. Mum got up and snapped him as he slept. The tousled little head next to his is mine.

A detail I had never noticed before on the car are some packets of dri-tot nappies (diapers). I have always known that the mosquito net in the car window was there to protect my little brother Ian from the flies. He was a tiny newborn at the time of this trip. So he slept in a bassinet in the car.

This little photo of Mum was taken a few days later on the same camping trip.And now a discovery. I have always treasured this photo as one from my early days. I scanned it a few years ago so I could have a copy. But tonight I blew it up so I could look at it for this post and I saw something I had never noticed in the little 2” by 2” print.
Al enters the picture.

Out the Back

Well the votes were cast and the result is in. It surprises me that it was quite as firm as it is. Based on the count so far 100% of you want me to post about my Mum’s place. Although a few of you did have a “bet each way”.

I had a look through my piccies of my trip to Mum’s and they took me in a different direction to that I had originally intended when I thought about this post.

A couple of days into my visit Stan (Mum’s husband) and I set off “out the back”. I posted this piccie of Stan’s old Land Rover the other day because it was the vehicle we went out in. In case you wondered it’s a 1963 “series II” model (which means it’s around my vintage).

Mum and Stan’s holdings are divided in two: the front block where their house is; and about four miles away (and about 1000 feet higher) is the “back block”.

I took a piccie from inside the Land Rover.It’s not a great photo because I was bouncing around as the vehicle climbed the steep track. The scrub in this piccie is all regrowth from the past twenty years or so. Unlike most of Oz this north east corner of NSW is very wet and the forest begins reclaiming undisturbed country very quickly.

Out the back, we climbed into low clouds, so what is normally a beautiful view of mountain country all around was concealed.

Our destination was this little mill cottage (mill as in timber mill) that Stan relocated out the back in the 1970s. Deb, my three girls and I lived here for a few years when the kids were little. But in more ways than that this trip really was a trip into my memories.

Just beyond the wall of mist in this piccie lies a huge chunk of my childhood. As I mentioned once before Mum and Stan met because we were neighbours.

I say in my profile I am the child of Hippy parents, I’m not exaggerating. In the 1970s Mum, her then partner Johnny, my brother Ian and me moved onto the property next door to Stan’s.

Here I am at the age of about 14. These old photos were mostly taken by Ian and me on a very cheap Kodak 110 camera we had.

This is one of mine, from about 1976 or so. As you can see I am still taking photos with similar subject matter decades later, some things never change ;-)I like the above piccie of a huge tree fern because it hints at the view beyond. You might be able to see a track that comes out of the forest in the bottom left, in fact that is the track Stan and I followed to get out here on my recent trip.

It was a strange childhood I lived. At times incredibly poverty stricken, and lacking many of the comforts most of us take for granted.

Yet at the same time incredibly rich in experience. Here Johnny loads timber cut off our land.
Timber that was cut so we could build this shack. The old lady in the piccie is my Grandma, Mum’s Mum.

Here she is sitting on my lap in this family portrait. Grandma had come out from England to stay with us for a year or so. She came from a tidy neat little village in England.

I think she probably thought we were all mad, but she loved us and took it all in her stride. Like my mum, she was an amazing person.

In our shack we had no power, so no TV. Lighting was a 19th century mix of candles and lamps. Entertainment was playing cards or reading. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. I guess my already strong love of books was set in concrete in that period.

It’s late now and I have to hit the sack for an early start. But tell me shall I go on with my little slice of a personal history when I next post?