Living with an Angel

By Gary Whatman

In the early '70s, although he didn't realise it at the time, Gary was caught up in many episodes of bizarre coincidences. These incidents transformed ordinary daily events into magical encounters with his future soulmate, Pam. As a result of these coincidences, Gary and Pam, who also happened to be the kindest, most intelligent, bravest person Gary has ever met, were able to form a lifelong bond after just three short chance meetings and two weeks of travelling together.

Given Pam's angelic qualities, plus the uncanny coincidences that kept piling up, the story furthers the possibility of a mysterious force 'out there' shaping our destinies. The possibility that Pam is a true angel cannot be dismissed lightly.

Like true soulmates, their thoughts and actions were always in sync, which was the key to their successful, stunning adventures at home and overseas.

Then tragedy struck, as lymphoma, a blood cancer.

As important as it was to all concerned, the story is not about cancer and the fight to defeat it. It is a story about how one heroine uses her kindness as a potent weapon to try to make the world a better place, for current and future generations. It is hoped readers will understand this once they have read the story.

Because an angel cannot save the world by herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: May 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922628183

Gary Whatman

Gary Whatman is the author of 'Living with an Angel', which contains his memoirs and a biography of Pam, his wife. Pam is the kindest, bravest, most intelligent person Gary has ever met. She is the angel.Gary has 30 years’ experience in writing, largely government reports. His blunt, evidence-based approach was strongly influenced by Pam and her belief that ‘honesty is the best policy’.When Gary and Pam met in the New Zealand summer of 1974/75 they seemed to be playing out a modern-day fairy tale. As if under a magic spell, they became instant, lifelong soul mates. Over the next 45 years they travelled the world together, frequently to very unusual or remote locations. Some of their astonishing adventures are revealed in ‘Living with an Angel’.But then tragedy struck and changed their lives forever.Gary is retired now and lives in his home in Canberra, Australia. He spends a lot of time hiking the many tracks around the ‘bush capital’. He has a son and daughter who often go with him on bushwalks.

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Pam. 1985

GARY WHATMAN

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Copyright 2021 © Gary Whatman

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Introduction

On 2 November 2019, at 11.45 pm, the love of my life, Pamela Ann Fielding, was tragically and cruelly taken from us. This is a true story about Pam. Well, it started off about Pam but I’ve added bits about me, too. It is based on Pam’s early diaries, a large photo collection, and my memories. Mostly my memories.

I began writing this story of Pam’s life for two reasons:

Pam was such a special person, it didn’t seem right not to tell the world about her.

It forced me to remember all the good times we had together, which is supposed to help with the grieving process. That’s a long, hard process. It’s been just over a year since Pam passed away and it’s become clear to me that I will never get over her death. But that’s good in a way, because the last thing I want to do is forget her. My strategy, then, is to just ride out the difficult periods when I get all emotional; they don’t usually last too long.

As I got into writing Pam’s story, I realised it couldn’t be told without including aspects of my life too, because our lives were so interwoven. Thinking about all this, it dawned on me that the first 20 years of my life, before I met Pam, had some fascinating moments, so I’ve added them to this collection of stories.

So Pam’s biography starts out as an autobiography, from my early years, until I first met her.

Angel

In case you haven’t guessed, Pam is the angel in the title of this book. The reasons for this are explained in Part 2 of this story.

I found lots of definitions of ‘angel’ on the internet. I decided to go with this (from a poem by Paula Glynn, entitled ‘The Hierarchy Of Angels’ – https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-hierarchy-of-angels) because it’s simple:

A benevolent celestial being who acts to protect and guide human beings.

I don’t know about the celestial bit, but Pam did have some qualities that most mortals don’t possess. I marvelled at her inner strength many times during 2019 as she suffered so much but kept on going. Pam wasn’t just my soul mate; she was my superhero and angel, and always will be. And like all super­heroes, it took a hell of a lot to kill her off. Most mortals would have given up well before she did. I made a list of all the things that I could think of, in no particular order, that combined to cause Pam’s untimely and unfair death. It is horrifying. No-one should have to suffer the way Pam did. You’ll find the list in Appendix 1.

Part 1 of this book describes my home life in the 1950s and 1960s. I left home after the ‘60s and I’ve included a brief explanation of how the early ‘70s was a period of preparation for my eventual meeting and subsequent relationship with Pam. I didn’t know I was being prepared for anything at the time. To get through this section you might need, what Pam (and others, no doubt) would refer to as the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.

Part 2 describes the magical way in which Pam and I met and began a lifelong relationship, after knowing each other for only two weeks. This part of the book also describes and gives examples of Pam’s character. By this point you might agree with me that Pam was indeed an angel.

Part 3 discusses the many adventures we had together, both here (as Pam was from New Zealand, which we visited 34 times, I’ve included that in the ‘here’) and overseas, to every continent except Antarctica, which was near the top of our list. Travelling is what we were doing when we first met and it seemed right and natural to continue travelling right up to the moment that Pam became ill.

This is a very personal story, but it’s also one that I would like many people to read. Pam was such a wonderful person. Knowing about her, and knowing that there must be others like her, can give people hope, or even a model for the future, especially in today’s world, which is all doom and gloom.

Part 1 –

My life before Pam

Brian and Tony (in judogis), and Gary. About 1961.

The tear in the photo is authentic

Chapter 1 –

Growing up in Canberra in the

’50s and ’60s

Introduction

Part 1 sets the scene for what comes later. It’s to give an idea of the type of person I was when I met Pam in 1974. I was an inquisitive person and liked to be active. I would have written a similar account of Pam’s early life, but to be honest I wouldn’t know what to write. That doesn’t sound very good, does it? After living together, very closely, for 45 years, I should have some knowledge of Pam’s early life. But I don’t. I guess that means that I talked more than Pam. Not on the phone, though. Or maybe I just didn’t listen as much as I could have. Seriously though, who talks about their lives from zero to 18 years?

Well, I’m going to. For the first time ever, read here about the sensational life I led while growing up in Reid, Canberra in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Pam and I had a lot in common, but one thing in particular that we shared was a mutual passion for nature. It was instrumental in maintaining our strong bond into perpetuity; it determined who we were and what we did; it kept us out of cities (relatively speaking) when we travelled. Our love of nature saw us live simple lives, even when we travelled. How my passion for nature developed is explained below. Where did Pam get her love of nature from? Well, her father was a nurseryman …

This chapter is like a photo album, except that it’s the opposite to a photo album. In a photo album, each photo or group of photos tells a story. Instead, what I have arranged are the stories with an occasional photo. Like photos, these stories are a snapshot in time.

The events described come from my memories, with small prompts from diaries and photos. Therefore, they are predominantly my interpretation, but some recollections may differ from what someone else remembers. That said, I should mention that I’ve always prided myself on my good memory, and I believe what I’ve written here is an accurate description of events, at least from my perspective.

Part 1 has the appearance of an autobiography to the near exclusion of others, that is, my four brothers and sister. Sorry about that. I’m not saying that the events described are not relevant to them. They were and possibly still are.

To my younger brothers, Glenn and Terry, and my younger sister, Jill, I’m sorry that a lot of this doesn’t apply to you. Or maybe it does. Maybe not the actual events described but the situations you’ve found yourselves in might have more in common with what I’ve written here than I realise. My next memoir will have to be about you three – there is lots to say; but I’ll need your input.

Exploration

To me, the ‘50s and ‘60s was a period of exploration. That is, exploring the nearby bush. We were lucky because there was so much bush around, up close. We were virtually living on the slopes of Mt Ainslie and the mountain was still a bit wild. There weren’t as many fire-affected areas as today and wildlife seemed to be more plentiful. For example, we rarely see goannas on the mountain these days. They used to be more common. There were even two squatters, living in separate hovels on the mountain. Once, my two older brothers and I came across one of them (Sox or Bert, I’m not sure which) while we were exploring. He told us to ‘piss off’. After that we stayed away from that part of the mountain. For a long time, or what felt like a long time to me, the family consisted of Mum (Nancy), Dad (Jock), my two older brothers, Brian and Tony, in that order, and me. Eventually Glenn came along, followed by Terry and finally the only girl, Jill. By the time that Glenn had made himself noticeable, when he was about 10 years old, I was in my mid-teens, Brian was married and gone, and Tony not far behind him. I think during this growing-up period, Glenn spent more time with his younger siblings than he did with me.

What this means is that the family was basically split into two. Sometimes I wondered which group I was in, but really that was a simple question to answer: the older group. Well, that’s the group from which most of my childhood memories came, and on which this account is based.

So, Brian, Tony and I, and a couple of neighbourhood friends, spent a lot of time exploring Mt Ainslie and, when we could convince Dad or Mum to drop us off, anywhere else that had native bush. We criss-crossed all the mountains around Canberra, and then later, went further afield, for example, to the Cotter Reserve, which like Mt Ainslie was a bit wild and didn’t have many of the facilities you see there today.

In those days (should I stick my neck out and call them the ‘golden years’?) children were largely unsupervised. That was the case for us, anyway, and I always assumed it was the case for other families, but maybe it wasn’t. We were responsible for our own entertainment. The older the child, the further from home he or she could roam. As Brian was the vastly mature age of about 10 years old at the beginning of this age of exploration, that is, when I was about six, our hikes were only limited by our imaginations and the problem of physically getting somewhere. That was when Dad or Mum became useful.

There was one exception to this unlimited exploration. We were not to go near the swampy part of the Molonglo River, between St Johns Church and the river, because there was quicksand there. This was before Lake Burley Griffin was built. Funny thing, usually when we were told not to do something, or not to go somewhere, we did it or went there as soon as we could. I don’t know why, but in this case, we didn’t look for the quicksand, even though we were intrigued.

As a matter of interest, in 2004, the program MythBusters, on SBS as I recall, busted the myth of the existence of killer quicksand. I think they used a mixture of cornflour and water to simulate the supposed properties of quicksand. They found that quicksand is denser than water; the greater the density, the greater the buoyancy of objects that fall in it. So you won’t get sucked down if you fall in, but you could die of something else if you can’t get out, like exposure or hunger.

After thinking about it years later – well, not that many years – I concluded that Dad and Mum had their own agenda. Rather than seeing it as giving us unbridled freedom to go wherever we wanted, maybe they just saw it as an opportunity for some peace and quiet. They would often drop us off somewhere and not expect to see us again until dot on five o’clock, when tea (dinner) was served up. Usually, because we had initiated the plan, we knew where we were going and so knew how to get home – just walk all day in that direction. But sometimes Dad would get us out of bed and tell us to make some sandwiches because we were going on a hike. Mum went along with this and sometimes made our lunch. It didn’t matter to us that they would spring it on us like that; it was part of the mystery that we loved. It did create a few minor problems, though, with the other members of our gang who lived close by. Sometimes we had to drag them out of bed, too. But their parents didn’t really interfere. I think the key here was that they trusted our parents’ good judgement. We upheld our end of the (unspoken) bargain by not getting injured, or in trouble, and getting home on time, usually for tea.

Sometimes we’d be dropped off at a place we hadn’t been to before. But Brian the wise, and our leader, always had an answer. ‘We’ll go that way’, he would say with great confidence. If we had to alter course, after, say, we had recognised a landmark that shouldn’t be there, usually we hadn’t gone too far. But Brian, and later Tony, when Brian had developed other interests, always had an answer to smart questions like, why were we changing direction? ‘We’ve been walking in circles. It must be these new shoes, one sole is thicker than the other.’ Sounded plausible.

Dad had this thing about snakes. If we saw one, we should kill it. And don’t forget to take the razor blade and Condies Crystals. This was to cut open the bite and apply the crystals. And while we’re at it, suck out the venom from the bite. I’m not sure what the crystals were supposed to do, but it was proven a long time ago that they don’t work. The crystals are banned today as a treatment for snake bites. And the tourniquet has been superseded by the compression bandage. Luckily, or maybe due to good management, I don’t know, the Condies Crystals, razor blade and tourniquet were never needed. And even in those days, sucking out the venom seemed a bit dubious to us. But we did have encounters with snakes, which I’ll get to later.

It seemed that Dad only feared two things in life: quicksand and snakes. He obviously didn’t subscribe to the theory that most people bitten by a snake are trying to kill it. Either that or he didn’t care. That snake must be killed. He even made a very elaborate ‘snake killer’, a long piece of wire wrapped around itself. It was flexible, strong and very light. We were supposed to take it with us into the bush, but I don’t think we ever did.

In all my years in the bush, where I’ve seen many snakes, I have to admit I’m guilty of never killing, or even trying to kill a snake. But I suspect that Dad never did either. There’s scant evidence that he had. I remember once, when he used to ride a bicycle a long way (by the standards of the day) for exercise – like all the way from Reid to Hall – he came home excitedly claiming that he had killed a brown snake. He drove us back there to see it. Sure enough, it was a dead snake, but who killed it? I have my doubts it was Dad. And another thing, it was too big and had a pattern. I think someone killed a non-venomous python. I knew about pythons at the time because at that tender age I had a great yearning to learn all I could about animals and other living things.

Dad would have been the last to admit it. I’m not sure why, some macho reason I suppose, but he loved nature and animals. I mean, we (the kids) must have got it from somewhere and Mum wasn’t a likely candidate. Dad wouldn’t have killed a kitten. Well he would actually, a whole bagful of them. Or would he? That man is and will always be a mystery to me. He always said how much he hated all the stray cats and dogs that came our way, some staying a few years, but he was the one who fed and cared for them.

And when I came home with a blue-tongued lizard and a bearded dragon, and a young magpie that couldn’t fly, it was Dad who helped me build an elaborate home for them. And he said that he threw the bag of kittens in the river, but I don’t think he was tough (or cruel) enough to do that. Just more killer feral cats out there due to one act of kindness. I don’t think Mum had the same liking for nature but she understood that it could mean a lot to others. Possibly her indifference towards nature was due to her big fear in life: water. She couldn’t swim.

Impact of personal experiences and emotions

Although World War II ended in 1945, it had a major impact on our family in the ‘50s, ‘60s and onwards, due to its effect on Dad. I tried to find out more about Dad’s wartime experience from Cyril, Mum’s brother and the last of their generation to pass away. Dad and Cyril were in the army together in the Royal Australian Engineers, a corps of the Australian army. They met by chance because both had surnames beginning with ‘W’ and therefore their tents were close together. Cyril said that they weren’t good friends. In fact, I got the impression that Cyril didn’t like Dad very much. After the war, Dad married Cyril’s sister, our mum, and Cyril married Dad’s sister, Joyce. I have heard that this ‘arrangement’ was plotted by Cyril and Dad while they were away fighting, but I think that’s just a family myth. It’s more complicated than that.

Cyril said that Dad was a man for the times. He was tough, reliable and a natural leader, despite him never being promoted during his time in the army. He was respected, was always there when needed and was a mate who never let anyone down. But Cyril also said that he didn’t like authority. For example, Dad had an argument about his name and was so angry he went and smashed an army truck. Oddly, that very authority that Dad supposedly didn’t like seemed to be used as a model for homelife, which meant we were always on our guard. It was a very strict household. Rules like not putting our elbows on the table while eating were unreasonably enforced. Any punishment dished out seemed to be random, depending on Dad’s mood at the time. And often the punishment far exceeded the crime. We kids rejected the rules whenever we thought we’d get away with it, like when Dad wasn’t there. But he must have had a network of spies (or rather, Mum) – he usually found out when we broke or bent the rules.

One of Dad’s jobs in the army was to explode Japanese mines; there were a lot left hidden. Cyril seemed to think Dad liked that job. But something there affected him in a big way. The general gruesomeness of war perhaps! I can’t say for sure whether there was any one incident that affected Dad for the rest of his life. But the death of his cousin might have had a big, though delayed impact on him. Apparently, there were Japanese snipers giving the Aussie troops a hard time, some hidden high up in the trees. I think it was there that Dad saw his cousin, Billy Brown, shot in the head by a sniper while they were talking. Dad mentioned this late in his life, but I suspect it was something he never came to terms with.

For most of his life, Dad didn’t talk about things he saw during the war. It was only towards the end – he lived for 91 years – that he opened up a bit. He took part in the Battle of Labuan, a key battle against the Japanese army, on an island off Borneo. Cyril said that all the landing barges were being used in Europe, so they used cargo ships for the invasion. Troops jumped into nets and then climbed into lifeboats. They got out into the mangrove swamps and the Japanese resisted. Cyril was complimentary of the Japanese soldiers. He said they were well disciplined.

After the Japanese surrendered, every Australian soldier was keen to get home. Dad was among the first to leave because he was officially employed by the Department of Customs and they were able to pull strings and arranged for his early return, ‘being required for employment in an essential occupation’. As much as he wanted to get away, Dad was not happy about this preferential treatment – he wanted to return with his mates. He felt that others were better qualified to return to Australia immediately, e.g. married men, some with families, and property owners.

When Cyril got back about six months later, he found Dad listless and aimless. He hadn’t returned to Customs. He had a casual job driving a truck, carting bricks from Cootamundra. It was during this time that he started drinking heavily and this eventually affected every facet of his life. He was prone to getting into vicious fights. But to be fair, according to Cyril, it wasn’t happy times for anyone; the whole world was upset during the aftermath of the war.

There is also a mystery, to me anyway, surrounding Dad’s activities during his time in the army. Although he hardly ever mentioned the war during his lifetime, I distinctly remember him saying that he served in New Guinea and Borneo. He even talked about conditions in Lae. But this is not reflected in his war record: when you add up the time he was at various places while in the army, there is a shortfall of a couple of months, that is, his whereabouts for some months are not recorded. Secondly, according to his war record, Dad never went to New Guinea.

In 1943, Dad left his unit to do a wireless communication course in Sydney. He later re-joined his unit in Queensland. Cyril said that Dad did not go with them to Morotai, the place from where Australian troops launched the invasion of Labuan. He came a bit later. This is rather strange. Cyril also said that Dad was performing escort duties of civilian VIPs at Morotai. This was a dangerous task that nobody volunteered for. It was not performed by members of the Royal Australian Engineers, so what the hell was he up to? I’m afraid that mystery died with him.

The only person I have spoken with who knew Dad both before and after the war, was his mother. She said that he was a changed man. He was no longer a person with a