Margaret Innes

New Worlds: Reading, Writing and the Imagination

Category Archives: Family history


by 1 Comment

Ian Hamish and Ukraine: A blog

This is a story about how unexpectedly one morning I opened my email to be asked if I would moderate a comment on my blog Stepping into Eternity: Stories of my Family where I wrote about my uncle, Ian Innes-Sim. A Terry Joyce in England had written Hello, I am doing some research into Ian Innes-Sim as he was recorded as being part of the 2nd Rayleigh Scouts. Can you help? I said I could, we exchanged emails and out of that exchange comes this blog.

Terry’s researches revealed that as a scout in May 1937, at almost fifteen, my uncle was part of a three man team that won the Local Junior Marathon. Later in July of that year he was a Patrol Leader who went to the World Jubilee in Holland where he would have seen Robert Baden-Powell give his farewell speech. Then in July of 1939 he joined the SS Test Bank as an apprentice marine engineer, following in his father’s profession, at the start perhaps of hopefully a good life. Barely two months later in September of that same year World War 2 was declared, and three and half years after that in January 1943 my uncle, as an apprentice in the Merchant Marine, died at the age of twenty when the ship he was on, the Oakbank on voyage in the south Atlantic, was torpedoed and sunk. He and the captain were rescued by the U-boat that sank them, but both died when that vessel was itself sunk by the Allied forces. I am very sure the shock of my uncle’s death began the slow unwinding leading to my grandmother’s own death five years later. I do know from my mother how very proud she was of her son’s scouting achievements. He has no known grave and I only have one photograph of him, possibly taken when he joined the Merchant Marine and which is attached.

I sent a copy of this picture to Terry, and he replied with an image of the logbook from the 2nd Rayleigh Scouts from 1924 -1944 recording the names of the scouts who fell in action during WW2. It was a simple typewritten list of nine names, six from the RAF, one from the Army, another from the Fleet Air Arm and my uncle from the Merchant navy. There is a note written on the bottom of the page in green ink: ‘They were strong & beautiful in their lives and are an everlasting example to us.’ Terry had also sent the link to a YouTube video of the jamboree in 1937 and considering what was to happen, it’s poignant to watch. Who knows what the fate was of so many of those young men in the film, my uncle among them? My uncle is commemorated on Tower Hill Memorial, which is maintained in perpetuity, as it says, by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. How many of his fellow scouts’ names ended up on memorials around the world as well?

While I write this story of loss and grief, I think of a news item I saw just a few days ago, young men in Ukraine manning checkpoints against the Russian invasion. They were university students, like my uncle just twenty or in their late teens, given three days training, and then sent with a gun to protect the capital, the nation. There was other reports of young Ukrainian men and women, also new soldiers, getting married in the midst of war in their uniforms, hugging each other before fighting. According to news reports, many of the soldiers in the Russian army are conscripts, young men also, some with only a few months training, who did not know where they were being sent or who they were expected to fight and kill. I think of a Ukrainian woman giving sunflower seeds to one of these young men so when he died the bright yellow flowers might grow from his body in the nation’s soil. I think also of the maternity hospital in Mariupol bombed, a pregnant woman rescued and taken to another hospital where both she and her child died. She had begged the doctors to save her child’s life.

William Blake wrote in one of his poems, “The strongest poison ever known came from Caesar’s laurel crown.” Everything that is happening in Ukraine now is proof of that line. When both the young Ukrainian or the Russians soldiers die in combat, it’s likely their names will end up on memorials in their countries just as my uncle’s and certainly numbers of his fellow scouts did after WW2. When the civilians die in the shelling, just as the soldiers have died fighting, it will again be for the delusions of power and egotism of leaders like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his inner circle. Again it will be everyone else who will suffer the ongoing grief. I am asking myself why the delusions of men like Putin have to cost so much in other people’s lives, not just once but over the generations. Who will be accountable for this and why is it still happening now, why it can’t be stopped? The best place to ask these questions would be in the criminal court in The Hague, should Putin and his inner circle ever end up there to answer for their war crimes.


by 1 Comment

9 True Heroes and on coming back to life.

The true heroes I have met during this whole progression from diagnosis to chemotherapy are many. There are the medical staff. Canberra has its issues and problems in the health sector, they’re often in papers with talk of dire consequences for both patients and staff. I can honestly say I have not met with any of those problems. From the ultrasound sonologist at the start who made her good pick of my tumour to the registered nurses in the chemotherapy suite who know how to insert a cannula without hurting you or leaving you in discomfort for hours, all these people have been professional, competent, careful, concerned, pleasant. A special shout out to the breast care nurses who have been uniformly brilliant. Then there are the volunteer ladies who take the trolleys around in the chemo suite, offering tea, coffee, fruit juice and as many biscuits as I could want to eat while stopping for a chat. In between are the administrative staff who book the appointments, make the phone calls, send you the referrals. The complexity of the whole process, the fitting together of medical procedures, tests, follow-ups, actions, and aftermath is like a kind of three-dimensional, time-based Lego building plan where everything has to fit together. What’s at stake is not a structure to admire for its intricacies and beauty but someone’s health and life. For me so far and for now, it’s worked and this is my thanks.

But besides everyone listed above, there are other true heroes who are closer to me: generous and good-hearted friends who were there when I needed them; people who read this blog and were themselves generous enough to write messages of support and affection; and my partner, for whom no amount of thanks will be enough.

There were times in my first few days after chemo when I wondered if recovery was possible. That passed and before the end of the first week I’d gotten my mind back. I still found chemo doesn’t leave the body that easily. It has a taste and a smell, especially in the first two weeks after infusion. That taste was the first thing I noticed in the morning and there was hint of its smell in my clothes. I thought it was a curious taste and smell, a mix of the chemical and the human, a mirror to the purpose of the therapy itself, to kill the active cancer cells in my body. Those cells may be dangerous, even deadly, but they are still something my body makes, they are a part of me. That is what chemo has to do, remove the toxic part of me with its own toxicity. This is what every cancer patient having chemotherapy has to deal with. So I’ll always say, people don’t ever lose their battle with cancer; it’s the treatment that loses that battle.

During the second week after my first infusion, when doing something so ordinary as putting the washing on, I realised I was walking and moving with a sense of some energy. By the beginning of the third week I found I had my sense of optimism back, the pleasure in just being here. My walks into the nature park were getting longer and longer. Sitting at the computer now, writing this blog, glancing out at the autumn colours in the garden and seeing small groups of magpies foraging for insects, is to feel very alive.

I still have two chemo sessions to go, the next today once I have posted this blog. What I’ve taken from this whole experience is something I would say to anyone who is about to go through it for themselves: never forget who you are, what you like to do. A mind can take you anywhere and you need to indulge it. For me, next it will be walks in the autumn sunshine and Jane Gardam Old Filth novels as soon as the ACT Library service delivers to me all of her books I have on reservation. In the meantime my cycle of chemo and recovery goes on for another four weeks. Not too long now. The end is in sight. My next blog probably won’t be for a fortnight or more while I try to think out in greater depth what this all means.


by 1 Comment

7 On waking up in No Man’s Land.

The day after my first chemotherapy infusion, a Saturday, I was still high on the steroids I had to take to prevent nausea and it buttressed me from the chemotherapy drugs’ full effects. Sunday morning, the high was gone and I woke to be face to face with the unvarnished effects of their search and destroy mission against the existence of any cancer cells I might have in my body. Like all other chemotherapy patients, my body and me were the collateral damage in the fight and in a tussle between chemo and my cancerous doppelganger, it was no holds barred.

For the next two days my head seemed filled with a thick yellow miasma, impenetrable and unbreathable like the bushfire smoke that had blanketed Canberra and the southern regions after the black summer bushfires. It felt that every life force had stopped in the wake of a catastrophe. It hollowed me out, leaving behind an emotional fragility where I was teetering very finely on the edge of slipping into a very dark place indeed. I couldn’t concentrate enough to read and felt too ill to do anything much, even listen to music. I retreated into my head, repeating well known excerpts from loved pieces of writing or running scenes from my favourite movies through my mind to keep me balanced.

Then on Tuesday morning I woke up in a bath of sweat. It was the last of the drugs exiting my body. I remember thinking in a very practical way, I’ll need to change the sheets and then realising for the first time in a number of days I had a clear mind. I had woken up in no man’s land where my recovery from the last four and a half days might really begin. I started by sleeping on and off for 18 of the next 24 hours. After that, it was navigating the side effects.

Before I had left to go home after the infusion, a hospital pharmacist came to give me 50 anti-nausea tablets and as well, five injection ampoules together with a 24-hour emergency number for the community nurses should the nausea be uncontrollable. I did not need to use any of these things but it did give me the insight into just what chemo can do to someone physically. The aftereffects I was experiencing were in many ways mild: nose bleeds, a searching and lasting fatigue, muscular ache eased by Panadol, limited concentration. All things able to be dealt with until, as the nurse had told me I would, I began to lose my hair.

I remember I looked in the mirror and thought my hair was thinning. Extra strands began building up in the hairbrush during that first week on to be combed into the bin. Fine shining threads of hair littered the bathroom floor and were visible on the hall runners. Towards the end of the second week, my hair was coming out in handfuls in the shower. Me and my partner took to standing in the back garden where I picked the hairs out of my turban and he brushed away whole clumps to be scattered around the garden. ‘Oh, my, oh, my,’ we both said and to our credit, we both laughed. Even now after my second infusion, we can still come across those clumps of fine grey hair in the garden, covered with frost and dew and shining in the cold, late autumn sun like finely spun filigree. And for the very first time, my partner, who had first started losing his hair before he was thirty, had more hair than I did.

I went back to the mirror and started studying what I could now see now I had only the thinnest brush of a few pale hairs to cover my scalp. I said to myself, this is me. That’s the shape of my head, what my ears look like, the set of my features. For four sessions lasting into late June, chemo has stripped me to the essential features where nothing is concealed. I’m stuck in that fight between my cancerous doppelganger and the drugs and for the next two months I have to learn to navigate no man’s land.