Tag Archives: history

AWOL but now returned


I’ve been away from this blog for several weeks now, after all the entries relating to my new book (Spit & Polish). Partly, I wanted to give you lovely people who subscribe to this blog a bit of a breather. Partly, I was recovering from many week away from home base – I was looking after my kids’ cat and had to relocate for weeks. Coming back, I had all of those appointments and other foolishnesses to catch up on. Sucks the brain away.

And finally partly because, when I returned, I decided I couldn’t live without a cat of my own. I adopted one that (of course) required a five hour driving session to his shelter (Furry Tales Rescue) and back (He is big and orange and polydactyl, so I had to have him), followed by the usual buying frenzy and the somewhat more unusual trying to figure out what was wrong with his leg. But we’re getting along and I’m trying to keep him loving me while also helping him learn the rules of the house. He seems to be settling in well. I’ve named him Archy, after the Archy in Archy and Mehitabel, a book I’ve loved for years. (Archy is a cockroach/ beat poet, but with all those extra toes and my Archy’s singing voice, I think it works)

Look at those toes!

So work has taken a bit of a backseat of late. I am just starting the research for the sequel to Spit & Polish, hoping to get it tied up in draft by the end of the year. In-between I have a few editing projects lined up (by all means contact me if you need a developmental editor as I still have some spaces available), plus my usual onslaught of volunteer activities. This feeling like I have to make a contribution is exhausting sometimes, but to be honest most of my commitments are great fun and grist for the writing mill.

I’m now seeking input for the next book – in it, my nursing student, Ruth Maclean, is sent for her rotation to the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, once known as the Rockwood Asylum. It’s 1947, and treatments for the mentally ill are still pretty basic. The concept of treating mental illness, as versus just hiding its sufferers away, is still new, but the building here was designed by William Coverdale with all the best of intentions, with lots of light and privacy. (It’s not the building’s fault it now is vacant, falling apart, and perhaps haunted.)

Rockwood Asylum

I mean, just look at all those windows! Very unusual at the time for psychiatric hospitals, even more so for asylums for the criminally insane like Rockwood. It’s going to be fun to research more about this building and its inhabitants.

During the time my fictional Ruth is on placement there, there was an existing nursing education program running on site, for Registered Psychiatric Nurses. I can only imagine the tensions between all of the nursing programs in Kingston at the time – the Kingston General Hospital School, the Hotel Dieu School, Queen’s University, and this one. Competition for the best jobs, various comments about discrepancies in programs – this is all familiar to me from my time at Queen’s, where there was still great tension between regular nurses who trained for their RNs, and those that opted for the university program to get their BNSc. Could lead to some interesting interpersonal interludes.

So I’m looking for any information about psychiatric nursing schools, inter school competition, psychiatric care in 1947, and life in Canada in the post-war period. I’d be most grateful if you have any tidbits to share that I could insert into Ruth’s life.

It’s going to be a bit of a challenging time for Ruth again, I’m afraid. Money remains tight, doctors are flirtatious, supervisors are demanding, patients are difficult. Someone may even have an unfortunate “accident.”

I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

You can get a Quick Look at the Museum of Health Care here:

A rabbit in every pot and a saint on every corner- or why Malta was so confusing


99AEDA4F-9342-4307-A0D5-B85E0B056E3BI’ve just been lucky enough to take a trip to Malta, land of my grandfather’s birth and burying place of other in-law relatives. It’s not an easy place to get to, but my heart has wanted to go there for years. It’s the fabulous history. Millenia of history. Footprints of travellers from centuries back. The sense of struggle and growth and religious wars. Cool stuff.

Kind son and his lovely partner arranged to take me and led me through hundreds of streets and pathways. I can’t thank them enough. It was a fabulous experience.

It’s an interesting spot. There ARE saints on every building corner. No one seems to notice them. The buildings in Valletta and Birgu are astonishingly attractive, their golden limestone sides glowing in the sun. They are also largely vacant.

Apparently Valletta has been on the downturn for some time- the buildings were wrecks until it was declared a UNESCO international treasure in 2018- lifting the tourism industry and helping with renovations. Some of the four-story buildings have coffee shops and unbelievably tiny shops in them. There are virtually no grocery stores. There ARE pharmacies. And balconies.

And tourists, even in this dead mid-winter time.D0C10A16-99A1-43D3-B532-292AF2EDC7E2

Culturally, it’s an odd place, too- people seem to come and be swept away. Prehistoric temples abound- but the people from that time mysteriously died out. The Phoenicians arrived and created art…but left. Muslims conquered through (and have been wiped off the history), and then the Knights of St John essentially built the Valletta seen today, and as far as I can tell, nothing much has happened since then. It’s all been about maintenance.

The knights were very ornamental – to the right you can see the interior of St. John’s co-cathedral, decorated on every flat surface. Even the floor is ornate, covered with decorative memorial slabs. It’s spectacular.

6C17B68D-72CF-4A2D-86C7-0D2C8007F6F2Earthquakes have shaken the place- half of the former capital of Mdina was shaken to the ground- original buildings are medieval style, rebuilding is Baroque. To the right, you can see the line along a wall where the medieval crumbled away, the right side rebuilt in the Baroque era. (They rebuilt it almost exactly the same, but with Baroque fancies.) Much of Malta seems to be repairing things to be exactly as they were.

The Maltese people have lived through invasions, the Inquisition (which apparently involved the ‘overstretching of muscles’ only and was MUCH gentler than the Spanish Inquisition), the blockades of the world wars and starvation thereof. They perch on an island made of limestone, with a thin coating of soil. Somehow they farm.

So, they’ve had a challenging time.

Now, they are having a harder one. Hidden behind the fronts of the tall houses are the Uber-rich, the 0.001%. Apartments are over 2,000,000 euros for a tiny cold space. The only real offices downtown are wealth management and investment companies. The rich hide in the tax haven, rarely seen. Do they contribute? Every museum collection and painting is labelled with the name of its sponsor, going right back to the dawn of history. Do the Uber-rich willingly pay for sewer and electrical systems when their names cannot be attached?

The rest of the island seems to rely on tourism only for support, and tourism is a fickle thing…and it doesn’t pay enough for people to live in the places they show to tourists.

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Church seems scandalized

 

Music isn’t as present as I would have thought. We wandered over a large part of the main island and heard only top of the charts from the 1980s – except for in one very funky coffee bar down near the waterfront. In one extremely posh restaurant, we ate our dinner to a selection of bad covers of North American 80s tunes. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard YMCA sung as a ballad. Or “Killing me Softly” as an upbeat tune. It

100B945A-DECE-43BB-B39A-68EED03D0E66broke my heart a bit, local music being one of the things I like best about travel.

Instead I listened to the language, a marvellous river of Maltese, English, Arabic, Italian, all swirling around, mingling even in the same sentence. It was fascinating, and loud.

Art in Valletta seems focused on the past, even in the new art gallery, Muza. As with

6E1CCC79-0DA8-4ECD-9147-1514D85291F1

Antonio Sciortino’s flowing sculptures

much of Valletta, the new museum was built within the framework of a baroque building. This is charming, and makes every museum visit interesting on many levels, but it means little conveniences like elevators, accessible washrooms, etc. are missing.

Of course, there is so much art – temples inscribed in the many years BC, decorated pots and crypts and walls and floors and sculptures on every corner by city by-law. Saints are hung by every house door.

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sculptor unknown

The new artists seem to choose ancient subjects – religious paintings are prevalent. Sculptures, though new, reflect ancient events. The most recent images seem to be of the terror of WW2 (well, except the mandatory prime ministerial statues. One wonders what they will do with the latest PM, escorted in shame from the country).

Of course, they know what sells. It is a tourist destination, after all, and people come to see the saints on every corner, enjoy the buttery sun on the beaches and the buildings, taste the rabbit that is on every menu. (It’s good!) But it has the air of a country frozen solidly in time. It’s beautiful, but, like the women climbing through the cobblestone streets in stiletto heels, Malta seems to be teetering on the edge.

CD29E7E9-BB67-4B20-8871-AA543380F2A8

 

Live Tweeting the apocalypse


I’m baffled. Lately my adopted city, Halifax, has taken to a bizarre habit of “live-tweeting” historical events. I participated in the first one – the live tweeting of the Halifax explosion.
It was strange. Every few moments around the anniversary of the event, there’d be a tweet purporting to be from people involved in the explosion. I half expected to see one tweet reading, “I hear something – aaaaaugh!”

Now they plan to “live” tweet the sinking of the Titanic.

I’ve had enough. Not only do I live in a town ringed by graves of Titanic dead, but apparently we are to spend the next year hearing nothing but tales of the Titanic and how it sank and how many people drowned and how the helper ships couldn’t make it there in time and such. They’ve come out with Titanic: the movie in 3-D, just so we can see the victims drown that much more realistically.

There’s even a huge exhibit about it all at the Maritime Museum, surely the most disheartening museum ever, filled as it is with souvenirs of death at sea. It includes a tiny shoe from the youngest child on the Titanic. Dead, of course. I hear it ‘s a chosen destination for the tourists on the huge cruise ships that come to town every year.

So what’s next? Displays of famous air crashes in airports? Maybe Halifax should move the site for remembering the Peggy’s Cove crash to the airport. It would be more… topical… there, somehow.

And what’s with this “live tweeting” disasters? Shall we, as my friend Tim suggested, “live” tweet the bomb at Nagasaki? Maybe the camps in WWII? “Arriving by train at camp. How nice to be offered a shower after our dusty travels…”

We could do Dieppe, Gallipoli, maybe Vimy. Or earthquakes. Of course, many of the tweets would be truncated in mid-post. With screaming. “Hear whistling…Smith hit.”

It’s not that I don’t find maritime and other disasters worth remembering. I do find blow by blow historical accounts needlessly heartless.

And the idea of using the deaths of thousands at sea to promote a seafaring community is truly gruesome. I dunno about you, but after viewing the display, I might think twice before re-boarding my ship. I might take the train, unless there was an exhibit of famous train crashes at the station. Followed by live tweeting of a spectacular derailment just to add verisimilitude.

Maybe I’ll just stay home.