A Patchwork of Pink

By Bev Arnold

At the age of sixty-nine, author Bev Arnold realized a long-secreted childhood dream. She released her debut country music CD, Never too Late. Just months later, she found herself sitting in a doctor’s office receiving a breast cancer diagnosis. In A Patchwork of Pink, Arnold narrates her life story, focusing on her cancer journey.

At first, the diagnosis was a bothersome intrusion into her current excitingly fulfilling life. But throughout the ensuing months, this initial response was replaced by a deepening pernicious despondency, as she felt her life changing. She watched her evaporating dreams, hopes, and musical aspirations being replaced by visions of a desolate, obfuscate future. Arnold tells how it was an experience that intruded on and disrupted every aspect of the world she had taken for granted.

With her emotional response to cancer treatment infinitely more harmful than the physical, A Patchwork of Pink illustrates how her love for, and involvement with, the local wildlife provided her with often hilarious, sometimes tragic interactions, offering a stabilizing anchor to her emotional turmoil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Dec 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504310901

Bev Arnold

Bev Arnold was born in New Zealand and moved to Australia at age twenty-two. She is now retired and an advocate for animal rights. Arnold has five children and three granddaughters.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

T he doctor looked up from the report and asked, Do you prefer a female doctor?

Umm, no—not necessarily, I stammered. I don’t mind either way.

A specialist! I thought. Well, that’s unexpected. Surely a bit of an over-reaction. I was taken aback by the direction this consultation took.

Turning back to her computer, the doctor brought up a list of breast specialists in the Gold Coast area. She nominated one, then printed out and handed me the referral.

Although surprised by the test results, I was confident it would prove to be a hullaballoo over something trivial and felt uncomfortable with all the fuss. I was more irked at the intrusive timing than concerned with the findings. But the situation did feel odd—almost surreal. It was July, Friday the 13th. Not a good date to receive test results.

Up until that point, life had been great. The previous unbelievably exciting eighteen months had seen me record, and then at the age of sixty-nine, release my debut country music CD, Never Too Late. Not an album destined for great acclaim, but it was my first small step toward realising a long-abandoned youthful dream and I felt deep pride in knowing it was all mine.

But now this—the timing was woeful.

I wasn’t born into musically-involved family, so my childhood love of country music was to the resigned bewilderment of my parents. While a lack of encouragement and opportunity left that youthful leaning secreted away, overshadowed by the more pressing busyness of life, my love simmered over the years. Finally, at the age of sixty-six, with time running out to realise dreams, I bought a guitar determined to learn to play. But to my dismay, when lessons began, I found my guitar teacher enforced a strict policy that pupils must sing in accompaniment to their playing. My embarrassed refusal invited his impatient response, Everyone can sing—you sing.

So, the album evolved as the product of a series of circumstances, not as the result of any calculated intent.

I took the specialist’s referral and thanked the doctor. Picking up the pack of x-rays, I hoisted my bag up onto my shoulder and returned to reception.

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CHAPTER 2

I was born during World War Two. A time of worry, uncertainty, and strict food-rationing—but I was too young to understand. I was welcomed into a close, loving family, and before they moved to live in Auckland, my maternal grandparents lived just a few houses up the street from us; my gentle, poetry-loving grandfather holding the eminent position of mayor of our country town.

Childhood memories are strewn with roasting chestnuts over the kitchen fire, picking wild berries for my mother to make jam, helping my father make us home-made sweets, and walking to school on frosty mornings with fingers warmed by an oven-heated stone clutched between my gloves. I felt safe and never questioned that my world would always remain the same.

It was an era before the rueful take-over of plastic. A time when household lawns were hand-mown with a push-along rotary-blade mower, phone calls were connected manually by female switchboard operators at the local telephone exchange, a loaf of bread—unsliced—cost seven pence a full loaf or four and a half pence a half, and a ‘take-away’ meal, meant fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. It was a time when televisions, home computers, mobile phones and such, were still locked away in the imaginings of dreamers.

Although seeming incongruous and distant now, I remember a simpler, and in many aspects, happier way of life when compared to today’s more cosmopolitan, over-commercialised, technology-dominated existence. But archives of memory can be biased, and it could be debatable as to whether life was in fact less complicated, or whether it appeared so because I was experiencing it from the innocent perspective of a child.

Certainly, before the introduction of safe, reliable birth-control, for a mother relegated the responsibility of rearing a large family on a meagre income, her burden must often have felt intolerably heavy. Disposable nappies were unheard of. Three dozen fabric nappies—despite a repeated barrage of washing and boiling—survived to serve two or three babies, and even then, fought on to the death as household cleaning cloths. With none of the appliances that we now consider to be basic necessities, none of the health benefits that massive advancements in medical technology has since gifted us, nor access to the superfluity of medicines, medical sundries and commercially-marketed foodstuffs that fill modern pharmacies and overflow the shelves of today’s supermarkets, the role of a mother then, would have been infinitely more challenging.

But to a child with a penny to spend, life was good. One could buy half-sized penny ice-creams—and lollies were sold individually. Probably not too much fun for the poor shopkeeper, but to a child standing at the sweets counter with pennies clutched in hand, trying to decide between the veritable rainbow of delights on display was just the next step down from heaven.

Please may I have three of those black bulls-eyes, …and umm, two of them, (pointing) …umm, one of the blue ones over there—no, I think I’ll have two blue ones please, …umm, three raspberry drops, …and a twopence liquorice strap. Umm, no, …I think I’d rather have a toffee bar instead, please.

I was about eight years old when my father got his first car—a 1936 Ford V8, and around that same time my mother got her first electric washing machine—a Hoover. Prior to that, household washing was done in a large copper-vat set in concrete block housing, with the water heated by a fire lit in a purpose-built cavity underneath. After boiling, items were lifted from the scalding water with a wooden rod, dropped into the first of the concrete twin-tubs, squeezed through a hand-operated mangle into the second tub of rinsing water, fed back through the mangle, then dumped into a basket to be carried out to the clothes-line. Until 1945, when South Australian inventor, Lance Hill, began manufacturing what came to represent the ultimate in luxury to every mother—and, initially, a status symbol in the yards of the wealthy—his rotary Hills Hoist, the standard clothes-line consisted of a length of purposeful wire stretched across the back yard between two posts. The forked end of a tall, sturdy timber pole was used to hoist the heavily laden line up from the ground and allowed the washing to catch the breeze.

What happened to the old copper? My father used that to try his hand at brewing beer—successfully. Until stored bottles began exploding one by one, then he gave up.

Coal to fuel our coal-range stove was delivered by the sackful slung across the back of the local coalman and dumped with a resounding crash into the wooden coal bin outside the kitchen window. I tried eating it once, as all kids must—until I was caught. I remember it was crunchy, but otherwise tasteless. Until we, children, reached what was hoped to be a sensible age, when cutting the firewood kindling—using the smaller axe—became our weekend job, on many bitterly cold winter-mornings, the ground white with frost and the household water frozen solid in the pipes, daybreak would see my mother outside at the woodpile next to our out-house toilet. Dressed in my father’s brown-checked woollen dressing-gown, her nightie peeping from below the hemline danced around her ankles while she split logs into kindling to light the coal-range. Once the fire roared to life, the water heated, the water-pipes thawed, and our school stones warmed in the oven. While our breakfast porridge cooked, the billy-can of milk was collected from inside the front gate where it had been placed the night before.

As a child, snuggled down in my warm bed, some nights I was awoken in the small hours of the morning by the oddly-comforting sound of the milkman’s truck getting closer and closer, stopping at each house as it edged up the street. Eventually, it pulled up at our gate. Soon would follow the rattle of coins as the money and the scribbled milk-order note were removed from the billy, then a moment later, the dull clunk of the metal scoop as it knocked against the side of the milk can while the ordered measure of milk was ladled into the billy.

These were years before the invention of milk pasteurisation—soon to be followed by that of milk homogenisation—and an increasing number of cases of bovine-transmitted tuberculosis being diagnosed around that time, encouraged most families to follow newly-issued government health recommendations that all milk be boiled before use.

I recall the great excitement when we got our first fridge—a Leonard. Our old wooden house wasn’t built to accommodate such undreamed-of modernistic wonders, so the fridge was plonked in prime position against a wall in the small kitchen. It intruded awkwardly into the kitchen walkway, but nobody cared—it meant that now our mother could make us home-made ice-cream. I was seven.

Prior to welcoming that most wondrous of inventions, sitting on the floor in the coolest part of our pantry food-larder, a small, wooden, wire-mesh-screened meat-safe served to keep perishables cool. Inside, a plate with Sunday’s left-over corned-beef sat alongside a dish of butter, a jug of milk, a chunk of cheese, and—an essential in every home—an old enamelled metal bowl cradling its precious content of fat-dripping.

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CHAPTER 3

F rom the age of around nine or ten years, I loved to sing, regaling anyone who had the misfortune to be within earshot, with my ‘cowboy’ songs. My grand repertoire of around five songs just got shuffled and then repeated—mostly Roy Rogers. Influenced by pre-pubescent hormonal stirrings, I was besotted with both him and his horse, Trigger, in equal measure.

But my developing hormones were fickle. It wasn’t long before that obsession was supplanted by infatuation for another—a local teenager who played in the local Scottish brass-band which practised during most weekends, in the town’s sport and recreation grounds. Invariably, before dozing off to sleep each night, I would fantasise different exciting scenarios of me meeting him in person. These secret imaginings always ended the same, where unfailingly, our meeting left the object of my passion entranced by my loveliness. These innocently sensuous fantasies never went further. At that plain and gangly age, it was enough for me just to be found attractive.

Mostly though, I was immersed in my fanciful world of cowboys, horses and all things country. Notions of becoming a vet—to atone for the fact that I was unable to have a horse of my very own—were abandoned when my parents explained that, as a girl, my veterinary skills would necessarily be restricted to treating smaller animals such as dogs and cats, not larger animals such as horses. Also, with no veterinary colleges in New Zealand at the time, undergoing training would have meant me moving to Australia. With that idea quashed, I substituted animals with people and focused on a career in nursing instead.

My older sister, Jennifer, and I both suffered severe car sickness. It was our field of expertise and we were masters at it. The mere anticipation of getting into our father’s new, pastel-green Zephyr-Six for a family outing, surfaced feelings of nausea. With car air-conditioning as yet an implausible fantasy, car journeys were comforted by the more environmentally-friendly ‘four-by-forty’ air-conditioning—four windows open, doing forty miles an hour—allowing the intermittent waft of petrol fumes and road dust add to our misery. Within just a few miles of leaving home, we took turns to vomit into a baby’s potty. This pale-yellow family treasure—a cast-off from my young brother’s potty-training days—along with a large container of water to rinse it out after each use, became an integral prerequisite to every car journey. A penis shield attached to the front served us nicely as a handle. Before setting off on a trip, this indispensable travel-companion was strategically placed by our feet on the floor in front of the back seat, and the container of water packed into an easily-accessed fore position in the car boot. Each time my sister or I vomited—at almost every bend of the unsealed, winding roads then endemic to New Zealand—everyone fell respectfully silent while our father patiently pulled the car over to the side of the dirt road. After he’d emptied, rinsed out and returned to us the wet receptacle, our journey resumed. Poor Dad. Despite his esteemed position as barrister and town coroner, he was the one entrusted with that unenviable job. But I guess it served to keep him grounded.

However, emerging from all this misery I discovered a beneficial upshot of my cowboy songs obsession. Singing helped allay travel sickness. As a result, our parents were forced to choose between suffering the sounds of us repeatedly throwing-up and dry-retching behind them—punctuated by frequent car stops to rinse-out—or tolerate me singing away in full bloom with Jen joining in the parts she knew. Obviously, they opted for the latter because I was never stopped. Anyway, privately I felt my singing was much preferable to our mother’s intermittent invitations, with a forced cheerfulness, to get everyone to join in singing nursery-rhymes. Her ill-disguised attempt to interrupt the blast of vocal abuse coming from the back seat, never worked. Driving along feeling totally green, whilst being lurched mercilessly for one side of the car to the other at every twist and bend of the dusty road, was bad enough, but simultaneously to be made feel obligated to join in singing ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ or ‘Humpty Dumpty’, really tested the parental relationship.

During one such family day-trip to Lake Taupo, my mother was nursing our baby sister, Shelley, on her lap, with our young brother, Greg, jammed in between her and my father on the front seat. Forced to endure the incessant, repetitive assault of ‘A Four-Legged Friend’ and ‘A Home on The Range’, coming from the back seat, my mother finally turned to our father in despair.

Lloyd—I think we’ll just have to marry her off to a farmer.

I was happy—that arrangement sounded good to me. My mother was teasing, but she was probably spot-on correct. At that age I would have been in my element on a farm. I could have a horse.

Aside from car sickness, a chronic ear problem had me repeatedly admitted for lengthy stays in the Palmerston North Hospital; a prospect always highlighted by my father first taking me into the town’s largest bookstore. There I could choose whichever book I fancied to take with me. Unfailingly, I chose one of Enid Blyton’s latest. I strongly identified with Georgina from the Famous Five series. In Georgina, I found the perfect role-model for the tomboy within me. The fictitious tomboy wore her hair cropped in a short, boyish style and would insist on being called George. Now, although my mother voiced no objections to the short haircut, there was no way I would be permitted to change my name. There was no point in asking.

However, the perfect opportunity presented itself when, prior to turning twelve, the ‘edification of Beverley’ began with me being packed off to boarding school. On the first day of that school year, with my hair cut as short as the barber would dare and my mother would allow, while we first-term new pupils milled around awkwardly introducing ourselves, ignoring my sister’s heated objections, I lied to my future classmates. I claimed that although my first name was Beverley, my second name was ‘Noelene’, and, …everyone just calls me Noel. From thereon, throughout the whole of my secondary schooling, the name Noel was accepted without question by the entire school—the teachers and headmistress included.

My father was away in the intelligence division of the New Zealand Air Force at the time I was born, and so had the deciding vote in tagging me ‘Beverley’—a name popular at the time. I never liked the name much anyway, but after somewhere reading that the meaning of the name was ‘from the beaver meadow’, I profoundly disliked it. Hell, I reasoned, there aren’t even any beavers in New Zealand. So how stupid was that?

As to be expected, by the age of thirteen I was awakening to an appreciation of my more feminine attributes. This new awareness undoubtedly was influenced by the more feminine girls in the dormitory, but in the main, of course credit must be handed to developing hormones. With these hormones also influencing my taste in music, my beloved time-weary cowboy songs were superseded by the prevailing popular songs.

This newly discovered femininity also saw me rejecting the self-imposed boyish title, in favour of Beverley. Although still not to my liking, at least it was a girl’s name. Unfortunately, by then it was too late. For the remainder of my school years, the name Noel remained as steadfast as bird droppings on raw wood.

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CHAPTER 4

A t the age of twenty-two, I departed New Zealand for Australia. A girlfriend and I were on the first leg of a poorly planned working holiday en route to Britain and the continent.

Jan and I met when we both enlisted for a modelling course at The Academy of Elegance—a finishing school for young ladies in Auckland. At the time, blinded by visions of greatness, I was starving myself with anorexic determination into a professional modelling career. But youthful dreams are easily overshadowed by the lure of even brighter horizons, and one day over a cup of coffee, Jan and I decided to seek fame and adventure in foreign lands. We just needed money. Jan was working as a private secretary while living at home with her family and therefore in a good position to save. But for me, while modelling certainly provided the glamour, it was an unreliable source of income. So, to save money, I returned to nursing and worked for eight months at Raventhorpe, a psychiatric hospital south of Auckland.

With no serious strategy, insufficient money, and even less knowledge of the countries we proposed to visit—or even if it was possible to visit them without visas, Jan and I charged ahead regardless. I borrowed a heavyweight green woollen blanket from my darling grandmother—who cried when I said goodbye and would die before I returned home to see her again. We organised passports, booked our flight to Sydney and a hotel on the beach at Bondi for the first couple of weeks. Beyond that was the adventure part. It wasn’t just that our plan details were a bit hazy—there was no plan at all. Nonetheless, spurred on by the fervid optimism of youth while lugging the airline’s permissible one large, heavy suitcase each, we kissed our concerned parents’ goodbye and embarked on a journey into the unknown. Neither of us had ever flown before, so even boarding a plane for the first time, inflamed our expectations and felt to be unlocking an exciting new world of promise.

Our initial vague intention was to work in Australia just long enough to save sufficient money to travel on to England. Then after (hopefully) working in Britain and (hopefully) saving money, the next even vaguer strategy was to (hopefully) work our way piecemeal fashion around various places on the continent—with neither of us speaking any language other than English—before returning home ‘somewhere down the track’.

However, fate had other ideas. After less than a year in Australia, I met my husband-to-be and that was the end of our working holiday.

Leaving behind the cold of New South Wales’ Snowy Mountains region, where we had worked until the end of the ski season, Jan and I headed for the beaches of Queensland’s sunny Gold Coast. Here I found myself pursued by a tall, impeccably-mannered, handsome, fair-haired guy in his mid-thirties who bore an uncanny resemblance to actor, Robert Mitchum—even to the deeply cleft chin, spoke with a gentle Canadian accent and behind the wheel of a big, swanky, ostentatious car. I couldn’t resist. When he arrived to collect me for a date, I overheard girls from other units murmuring things like, Wow! Who’s he? and Wow—who’s he come for? Swayed by these materialistic attributes, I allowed myself to be swept off my feet. I fell madly in love, became pregnant, gave birth to our first beautiful baby daughter, and got married—in that order. Meanwhile, overcome with homesickness after breaking up with a boyfriend, Jan returned home to her family in Auckland.

Our wedding day, when it did eventuate, possibly could be described as a romantic farce. By the time I’d been forgiven for serving up my first attempt at roasting chicken—with its plastic bag of ‘bits’ still stuffed inside, and my husband decided I was worth holding onto—and then waited for his birth certificate to arrive from Britain, our baby daughter was six weeks old. Obviously, a white wedding was out. Because he was a divorcee after an impulsive, very brief first marriage, neither was it permissible for us to marry in the church. A registry office was as good as it was going to get.

It was Melbourne Cup Day. After entrusting our precious baby and her bottles of painfully-expressed breast milk to close friends, we drove up to the Brisbane registry office. By the time we reached the city, and then navigated through the heavy traffic to find somewhere to park, it was our daughter’s normal feeding time and my breasts grew tight with anticipation. As a new mother, I hadn’t thought to make allowances for this.

Upon arrival at the office, my husband discovered we needed two witnesses—a tiny detail he had overlooked. Not knowing anyone in Brisbane who could be dragged in for the occasion, he paused deep in thought for a moment or two, then turned, patted my arm, muttered, Be back in a minute, Cher, and dashed out the door.

Less than ten minutes later, he returned sporting a broad, smug grin, followed closely by two men hurrying in the door after him—total strangers who’d been lured to witness our matrimony. As was eventually revealed, this pair, appearing excited and puffed with importance at their role, had somehow been enticed away from their employment in a George Street men’s tailor where my husband previously had suits made.

By this point, I was starting to feel disgruntled. What should have been our private, very personal, romantic occasion, seemed to be rapidly evolving into some sort of public comedic travesty. Trying to conceal my irritation, I was at the same time growing embarrassedly aware that my over-engorged breasts were slowly surrendering their bounty. A fact revealed to all—despite wearing maternity bra-liners—by two glaringly obvious,