Dear Pammy

D   E   A   R

Drop Everything And Read

P   A   M   M   Y

Poems Articles Mysteries Memoirs Yarns

Y’-name-it

edited by Yuli Heled

A local pub in the remote Australian outback, The barman notices that we are travellers from NZ and says “I am a Kiwi too, I grew up in Cromwell.”

“Cromwell? So maybe you know Pamela, who lives there? She was an English teacher in this area for many years.”

“Of course, she was my teacher, my best teacher actually. I really loved her. It’s only thanks to her that I love reading.”

We feel the warmth of the connection, it makes our day.

Twenty years later, Pammy’s face lights up when she asks me “a cup of tea, or maybe a glass of wine?” The setting of her small retirement village apartment does not make any difference. I am her guest, she is my host, and she will cater for me in her utmost aristocratic manner.

It is easy to make Pammy shine. She loves stories, she is made of stories. When she tells her own story she is as engaged in the characters as if she was inside a Jane Austin novel.

The humble lounge where Pammy and I are sitting is transformed. It turns into a dance hall, and she is dancing, dancing, dancing in words. It is Friday night in St. John’s, and just like every other Friday night, after the shops close, delicate sixteen year old Pamela is there, flying in the arms of her friend. What was his name? She can’t remember, but he was the one who came straight across the room the other night and picked her up, making her his regular dancing partner from then on. No talking, No socialising. Definitely no romance between the simple working man and the young academic. Just dancing. Foxtrot, Quickstep..”We had nothing in common” she says, ”He just chose me, I was shy, you see, but evidently attractive. We were a dancing pair…Not once had I been degraded to be a wallpaper flower. The boys liked to watch me dancing. And I could dance, I could dance alright.”

A young girl dancing well is nothing to write home about. But Pamela is not an ordinary dancing girl. She is a dancing miracle, if you know the story.

If you hear that when she is thirteen the headmaster calls her parents in to tell them the school can’t keep such a severely disabled girl anymore. That’s how bad she was. That’s how hopeless she was considered. In her diary, she writes about herself “a skinny, stammering, deaf-in-one-ear child who has an unhealed scar on her lung that keeps her from normal life for months and years at a time, a child who is always the last to be picked for a team, a child who has never won a lolly in a lolly scramble, and someone who is perfectly willing to donate her meals to the starving in Africa.”

I look at slim, almost weightless Pammy, at an age we would all be blessed to get to. Her body is still skinny, so much that she could almost be snapped, but there is nothing thin about her presence. A learned, strong willed, proud woman who has lived a full life with impressive achievements.

“But I also see a child in a caring whanau, a child who is loved.” Her diary continues..

Indeed, love saves her. With all the frustration of having a stuttering daughter who refuses to eat at times of worldwide depression and whose throat closes even at the smell of food, her dedicated mother does not give up on her. She calls a doctor, who contacts a retired speech therapist from England.

For the next five years, the therapist Iva M. Cran would put Pamela in front of a full size mirror and teach her to breath, speak slowly, and say vowels correctly. The rule of thumb is: whenever blocked, wherever you are, just lie down until you can ‘come back’.

In 1943, ‘trauma’ was not as fashionable a concept as it is today, but it is hard not to think of the event preceding Pamela’s hardship in any other terms. At the age of twelve, while her father (Pop) is working in Invercargill not able to visit the family, and mother (Mama) struggling on her own with three children in the mini-farm

they moved to so they could provide a dryer, healthier home for fragile Pamela, a decision is made. Eldest daughter Pamela is to be sent to the newly opened Roxburgh Health Camp.

What could have been a nice adventure turns out to be a prison. Polio pandemic means no one is allowed to leave. A threat of war in the Pacific contributes to the tense environment. Except for occasional picnics in the hills, where the children pick rosehips – the wartime source of Vitamin C – Pamela is mostly secluded in her room, frightened and alone, with books as her only comfort. Her letters to her parents are not answered, her cry for help not heard. Only later, when finally rescued, it would be revealed that her letters were censored and never reached the family, until an odd letter to her grandmother that they somehow forgot to censor, which is the first time the alarmed family learns of her distress. After feeling abandoned for so long, a victim of cruelty that was considered standard

conduct in those days, Pamela is brought back home.

The ongoing speech therapy heals Pamela. She learns to speak, and gains confidence, but there is a small ‘side effect’ to the remedy – she acquires an English accent and sounds like a well mannered British girl.

That childhood breakthrough incubates the motto of Pammy’s life. SPEECH IS POWER. No wonder her only daughter is to become a Speech, Drama, Communication & Public Speaking Teacher.

The dance evenings stop, but.only because university starts. There is much more glamour to be found there.

After graduating from Southland Girls’ High School the three young besties, Claire, Shirley and Pamela, embark on their independent lives. Pamela is the vulnerable one, her friends worry about her. “She is so innocent,” they reckon, “she wouldn’t know how to protect herself”.

Claire, the brightest of the lot, moves to Christchurch, where she excels.

She moves quickly so well (or, as Pammy likes to say it, she dux), that she manages to swap out the wife of her German lecturer, who practically ‘divorces for her’.

Shirley goes to Otago for a French competition, meets John – a half Pacific young man – follows him to Cambridge where he had been granted a scholarship to become a minister, and marries him in spite of the racial havoc. And who is the man who gives Shirley away at the wedding in England? No other than Pamela’s father, there at the right time. Shirley is to become a world famous hymn writer, awarded in England for her publications, among them “Earth Mother”.

Pamela does not lag behind. She is a true scholar. Thanks to two Muriels, mother Muriel Doreen, the reader of the family, and her beloved highschool teacher Muriel May, whose love of literature is contagious and who invites great NZ poets like Fairburn, Baxter and Glover to visit their school in person, Pamela becomes hooked on the written word. 

The first from her extended family to attend university, she studies hard at Otago Uni with its Scottish flavour that resonates with her heritage from Mama’s roots. She is granted a Masters in History with Honours and, following a teacher training in Christchurch, becomes a teacher herself, taking her profession very seriously. During her education she endures many attempts by others to fail her and lower her self esteem, discourage her from delivering papers in her Honours class, or convince her to never fulfil her passion to stand in front of a class of students. When she takes a position at the not-so-prestigious Columbo College just so she can have a job, she faces insults and is put down by colleagues, like a fellow teacher saying to her ‘you are just too stultified’. 

Pamela writes in her diary: “when the stammer reared its ugly head – adults could always do this to me – I had to dig in my toes and refuse to be tossed out.” If this is not a symbol of persistence against all odds, an exemplary model of stamina, courage and dignity, what is?

At the age of twenty five her brother sets her up on a date, where she meets Erik, and soon after they get married. She believes her salary as a trained teacher is pretty good, only to find out that men get much more for doing exactly the same job. Moreover, after marriage her pay is added to Erik’s, so he could be taxed at a higher rate.

From then on Pamela is known as Pammy, a name used by all, even by her future grandchildren who would never call her ‘nana’.

Erik takes educated Pamela to live in the countryside, and to get bored. Baby Jacqué, who is born there, does not help the boredom. Pammy would sit at the doorstep of “Niagara”, a place across the school where children would spend their time catching whitebaits. ‘I’ve got 71! Says one boy’. This is not the right life for academic, trained Pammy.

She gets relief from the boredom when the small family spends a year in England. Erik’s  good salary allows them to buy a small car, a luxury at that time, and they can travel and camp around the country.

London, of course, offers all the culture that Pammy craves, especially a plethora of her beloved Shakespeare’s plays. Little Jacqué with her English accent “loves going for a wolk in the pork”.

Eventually, Erik gives up and quits his position so they can move back to Invercargill to teach history. Pammy’s former high school gives her a job as a history teacher, while Jacqué at intermediate school is a ‘key child’ with both parents working. Pammy needs to pave her way, and things don’t come easy. She has to do a lot of catching up to keep up with the way things are being taught now. What makes her what she is, though, is her ability to tell stories. She believes this is the way to teach any subject. She calls this way “a love letter’. Many of the girls she teaches in those years go on to graduate with a university degree in history purely because of Pammy. One of her former students, who qualifies as a history teacher but moves to teach maths and science, admits that even those subjects she is teaching in that same ‘Pammy’s way’.

The school’s management, however, fails to believe in the “love letters” method, and history is degraded from being on a top spot. Pammy expresses her fury that the subject is taken off her hands, but (and there is a but in it, she says), she starts teaching English. She takes her 3rd form students down the creek, where the gorse is, to look at cracks and write poetry. She establishes a Shakespeare Day with special foods and costumes. She finds her feet again. Soon they will discover her special talent and make her Head of English in the James Hargart School in Invercargill. That is a major moment.

Pammy teaches at James Hargart for twelve years. Once a year she also goes to Christchurch Summer, a week-long programme for the deft, to write their national curriculum.

One winter, when she enters the staff room, she is handed a telegram: “You are awarded a Woolf Fisher Fellowship’s Australian Tour”.

The year is 1987. With her sister in Melbourne and Jacqué and her husband Graham in Sydney, she couldn’t have been given a better gift. The ‘cost’ is easy-peasy: she is to write an essay about her journey. The only detail she would omit from the report is the Stubby’s party her sister throws for her, inviting only three boys – and Pammy. Even Erik does not know.

A rare species indeed, the curious, introspective, and opinionated woman is always part of the scene. Even at old age, she does not stop. Upon retirement, the former timid Southland girl takes on ordination, a distinguished role in the community that involves performing prominent public speaking. Only after the challenge is met, and the speech is over, she would allow herself to react to the immense effort.

When she is down from the stage, and only then, she shakes.

***