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My Story, Rural Childhood

Patricia Burge – the carer who laughed

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CAREER CARER Patricia Crawford as a new trainee in 1956 at RPA Hospital, Sydney.

Patricia Burge (1937-1992).

WORDS cannot really describe the shock and grief that made its way into our family when we knew that our dear Mum, Pat, was going to die.

It was one of the very few times I have been moved to prayer… night seeping into our little home, Mum noticeably absent in hospital, and my sister, just a teenager, waiting for my return. I put my arms around Jen and prayed that we would be okay. I don’t have any firm religious beliefs, but that night, we needed to be heard by something.

Pat Burge was a nurse, an excellent old school carer who knew her stuff. Born at the tail end of the generation of Australian women who were encouraged into teaching, secretarial work, or nursing (and little else), Patricia Crawford (as she was born) did the unthinkable for a North Shore girl and got herself enrolled to train at Royal Prince Alfred (RPA) Hospital in Camperdown.

She described nursing school as the making of her since it gave her female leadership in the form of matrons and older nurses who taught well and cared deeply for their profession. It transformed Mum from a directionless girl into the practical, approachable woman that she was.

When she married, she thought it was high time. Most of her friends were already having kids and she was pushing 30. Like most women of her era, she gave up work completely when she had children in quick succession.

‘The Dream’ of pastoralists to marry city girls and create dynasties to work the land was at its peak, and Mum willingly bought into the myth, relocating to a farm outside Delungra in the Northern Tablelands of NSW and making it into a family home after years of standing derelict.

But ‘The Dream’ lasted only five years, until the death of my younger brother Nicholas.

For the next six years Mum struggled to ‘get on with her life’. She gave birth to Jen, and watched her like a hawk until turning one meant the new baby was past the risk period for SIDS.

Approaching 40, she tried her hand at academia, beginning distance education in English literature. But when her first results didn’t match her promise, she gave up. Being part of the group who needed her, I was unaware of the pain that surfaced, the hopes that were dashed, and the disappointment she brought to those around her as a result of not living ‘The Dream’ to its fullest.

Nobody who hadn’t promised to stick by her ‘for better or for worse’ was affected, but when Pat Burge tested ‘The Dream’, it blew up in her face.

The moment she decided to leave Inverell was one of the turning points of Mum’s short life. No longer was she towing the line for others. She became a self-actualised person, probably for the first time. She sat her kids down and asked us if we wanted to come. I said “yes” without hesitation. What we left that Spring of 1979 was an already broken home. Dad had left, and Inverell held nothing for mum anymore. ‘The Dream’ was over.

The night we drove away, Mum turned the radio up in shock at the news that Lord Mountbatten had been killed by an IRA bomb. Mum was very ‘old school’ North Shore – the Royal Family meant something to her – and his death was like a watershed. She entered a time when there were no more heroes, only herself.

OH, PAT! Sleeves rolled-up for a school working bee, but funny bone always ready!

For the next 13 years she created a world for her children. She surrounded herself with great friends. She returned to nursing and achieved in that field in ways that she never envisaged. She taught us to believe we could do, and be, anything, and encouraged us towards a much broader set of dreams. In doing all this, Pat Burge became a heroine.

It was a bright, brief time, and we all shone.

By the time her cancer was picked-up through exploratory surgery, treatments were all too late.

Mum told me that as she woke from the anaesthetic, she felt for the post-operative tubes and knew her prognosis by virtue of her training, thinking “oh, damn!” for a moment.

Then, true to this heroine, she stayed positive for all our sakes. There was simply no other choice, and she achieved a year of denial with a funny grace – laughing about being pushed around in wheelchairs, caring for the recovering ladies who shared her hospital room, and eschewing chemotherapy until she could almost count the days left to her.

A good friend of Mum’s who was on duty at the local hospital broke the news to me that her death was imminent. He and I told her together and she just accepted it, simply because she already knew. Entering new emotional territory, we decided in a matter of minutes that we would be bringing her home to die.

During those last weeks we talked about the moments in her life that had meant something to her. These talks enabled me to write all but the last paragraph of her obituary.

What happened after that was so profound that I could only describe it as “a powerful death, after a powerful life”.

Surrounded by her nursing friends, who held her, monitored her, and comforted her, Pat Burge died in her own bed after a series of exhilarated breaths, like she could see something great coming. She had farewelled everyone, made peace with her journey, showed no more than a hint of despair and an abundance of humour.

Without her, most of us who had relied on her heroism came to absolutely nothing, and we needed to rebuild from deep within.

But hers was an inspiring death, which in its own time saw my prayer answered. We have been okay, since she had to leave us. We’ve had to grow the seeds she planted, the germ of which is the emotional intelligence that was Mum’s key attribute. When taken care of, they proved to bear wonderful fruit, and still do.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

My Story, Rural Childhood

A Writer’s first obituary

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BROTHERLY LOVE (L-R) Nicholas, Michael & Andrew Burge in 1973.

Nicholas Burge (June 1973 – September 1973).

ONE of the earliest original pieces of writing I completed was an obituary, written for my younger brother Nicholas who had died seven years prior from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

I was in the final year of primary school, with an inspiring teacher, a sensitive Welshman, who set us a writing task to record the story of ‘something I’ll never forget’.

I don’t know why I chose Nicholas. Most probably it was because there had not been much talk about him since he died, even though I had experienced first-hand the devastating impact his loss had on my family.

The piece has long since been lost, but I know I wrote about the morning he died. Me (aged three) and my older brother (four) were the ones who discovered the baby, dead, in his cot, during our usual morning ritual of waking him and taking him into our parents’ room.

Not understanding the concept of death, of course we did not see the impact that was coming, when we went to tell mum and dad that the baby wouldn’t wake up.

At the time of writing about the day, I had no more than a mental picture of my mother, flying out of the bed with a great sweep of the pink sheets, and my father trying to wind the old party-line telephone into action. Mum, keening like a seagull, held the dead baby in her arms.

I learned much later that we’d all driven from our farmhouse into town, the dead baby in a carry-basket between my brother and I. We were left with our grandparents while Nicholas’ body was taken to the hospital.

Later again, when I retrieved his death certificate, I discovered Nicholas was buried the very next day in the family plot. Apparently my father was incapable, in his grief, of driving away from the cemetery. Mum took over.

We didn’t last much longer on the farm after that. Despite being encouraged to have another baby, the grief worked its way between my parents, and we left the land for a brief life in town, before they separated and divorced. Not long after, we moved with mum closer to the city where she’d grown up.

There were psychological reasons for everyone’s behaviour in the wake of Nicholas’ death, but this is not the place to explore them. When I wrote his obituary, I was too young to understand them anyway, I was only responding to being asked about something ‘I would never forget’.

Perhaps this was also my first lesson in how powerful words can be? I know it bonded me closer to my mother, to have her son recall with great importance something that was a life-changing moment for her family. When I packed up our house after her death, I found Nicholas’ clothes in a little bundle wrapped inside her wedding veil in a bottom drawer in the garden shed. A photograph of the baby boy confirmed they were his.

When I wrote to my father about the same events many years later, he expressed that he always believed it was better to get on with the care of the living, as opposed to thinking about the dead. At the time, I said nothing, because I didn’t know if I agreed, or not.

But writing about my memories gave Nicholas a place in my life, even though his own had been so very short. Like most of my writing, this little obituary involved looking back, and I have since learnt how controversial that can be. In this case, I believe it was more than worth it.

Obituaries are biographies, often written at acutely painful times. I recall my obituary for my brother Nicholas was very short, like his life. It was an affirmation that he existed, that we knew him, and that we loved him. Sometimes writing is really that simple.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Performers, Write regardless!

M*A*S*H forever

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SERVING OF M*A*S*H The cast of the long-running TV sitcom during its 8th season.

A Writer’s first lesson in comic timing.

WHILST participating in a television interview, Cate Blanchett apologised for answering a question about acting using an American accent, explaining that to her, ‘American English’ is the language of comedy, after years of watching M*A*S*H.

Being of exactly the same generation, I can only agree with her.

This long running sitcom, set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War of the 1950s, was my very first ‘adult’ experience of television.

As the child of a nurse, it was considered appropriate viewing for my first years of staying up late.

“It’s a well-known maxim that all great comedy springs from the worst situations of human deprivation.”

The fun-filled yet desperate world the characters inhabited worked its way into the very fabric of my writer’s brain, just as it was in the process of forming.

When I am writing comedy, all the classic scenarios of M*A*S*H spring to mind, because between 1972 and 1983 the writers explored every comic angle they could think of. Thanks to syndication, the series has been playing across the world’s television screens for four times longer than it aired originally, and counting.

The secret of the comedy lay not in what was overtly funny, but rather in what was deadly serious about life for Americans stuck in Korea patching-up the wounded.

It’s a well-known maxim that all great comedy springs from the worst situations of human deprivation. Pathos tempers farce. Sadness frames wit. Laughing in the face of death is always more three-dimensional than laughing or crying alone. The two states are very close in the human experience.

M*A*S*H capitalised on those extremes, from the original book MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by ‘Richard Hooker’ (a pseudonym for Dr. H. Richard Hornberger and W.C. Heinz), where the basics of the show’s characters were created, to Robert Altman’s 1970 satirical black comedy feature film M*A*S*H and the series it inspired.

But the TV series had the time and the following to explore the dynamic to its extremes, and evolved from slapstick (think ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan and Frank Burns cavorting, as though no-one knew they were having an affair), to a kind of black comedy that was borderline drama by the time the show took its final curtain call in the feature-length series finale Goodbye, Farewell and Amen (1983).

For me, the array of three-dimensional male characters who joked, sported, laughed, cried, cross-dressed and generally expressed themselves in ways that it was rare to see men behave in the ‘real world’, were beautifully countepointed by one of my all-time acting heroes – Loretta Swit.

MAJOR HERO Loretta Swit, who played Major Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan for the entire run of M*A*S*H.

Stunning, prickly, sympathetic, quick-witted, great at her nursing job, devoted to the army and her country, yet willing to take emotional risks at the drop of a hat, how could you not love Margaret Houlihan, the winning smile that lit up the khaki cloud of Korea?

Swit’s work as Major Houlihan ranks amongst the best-drawn television performances ever, but she had her work cut out for her. Alan Alda (who is the only actor to perform in more M*A*S*H episodes than Swit, as Captain ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce), paid tribute to her achievement in transforming the ‘sex bomb’ tag that the role was originally drawn with, by turning ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan of 1972 into simply, ‘Margaret’, by the show’s end in 1983.

Interestingly, this change coincided with the women’s liberation movement, and remains one of Pop Culture’s best examples of the metamorphosis of a stereotype.

Apart from being the best education in comic timing I can think of, the series is also a great example of time economy in a script. Next time you watch an episode, notice how the half-hour format restricts the use of too much foreshadowing and requires simple, fast set-ups to every laugh.

If you’re re-writing a script and you need to touch-base with how it should be done, whether it’s a comedy or a drama, watch an episode of M*A*S*H.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.