Write on...

Today I’ve had a very interesting day.

Unusually I’ve been out without The Man, even if he had been able come with me he’d have been bored out of his tree.

I’ve been to the society of Genealogists rooms to part one of three day long sessions about writing family history. The next was in a couple of weeks and the third about four weeks after that. We’re not a big class and the 30  odd of us were divided up into groups of four.

I’ve been on writing courses before and enjoyed them, but this one is specifically aimed at turning all our dry dusty genealogy information into a readable and hopefully entertaining thing.

Apart from talking about structure and showing not telling we had a couple of exercises to write then read out to the others at our table and have them critique it.

The first one to was write a small piece introducing one of our ancestors.

He was my mother’s father Herbert Henry Hall.  He was my moustachioed grandfather who never refused my request to be read to. He was also the only grandfather I knew. But he was other things too.

He was a merchant seaman. I still find it hard to associate the much younger image of him wearing a flat cap and standing on the steps of New Zealand’s Nelson Cathedral with his crew mates from the ship Port Kembla.

He was a stoker, a noisy dirty sweaty job that was part of the power that drove the ship.

In September 1917, the date written across the bottom of the postcard the Port Kembla hit a German laid mine and sank. Importantly there was no loss of life.

After lunch we had another writing session, this time the tutor asked us to write about the ‘prompt’ that we had been asked to bring with us.

The sepia tinted photograph is a postcard. Iron framed beds, corners neatly mitred run down either side of this ward in the Edmonton Military Hospital. The patients are all casualties of what became known as The Great War, WWII, though there is nothing great about war.  It dates to about 1915 -16 the time that my paternal grandfather was wounded and probably invalided out of the army.

Just three of the beds are occupied by what look like pyjama clad men. The remainder of the inmates wear the hospital ‘uniform’, trousers and jackets in what looks like a fits all size as some of the trouser and jacket cuffs are turned up. The men are also neatly attired in shirts and ties.

Only the three capped and long aproned nurses are smiling.

From the right of the postcard the long thin face of George Arthur Harvey, my paternal grandfather, looks solemnly at the camera. Behind him against the wall is a pair of crutches Are they his I wonder.  I remember Mum telling me that his wounded ankle never healed properly leaving him with what sounded like ulcers that needed to be dressed daily.