Category: Dear Letitia

Dear Letitia,

It was in October 2018, that you snuck into my life. On a last meander around London, a week before I was due to fly home to Australia, I took a notion to visit the Temple Church. Based on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, it was built by the Knights Templar and consecrated in 1185.

It took some time to find the tiny Elizabethan gateway to the Temple Gardens, dwarfed among the imposing buildings of Fleet Street. I had read some of the history including the fact that it had escaped the Great Fire of London only slightly singed, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so overshadowed by the more modern buildings.

 

I walked through the Temple Gardens, entered the ancient, round church and came face to face with your portrait.

My eyes often glaze over when reading excerpts of history on the walls of old buildings. The art and craft of the architectural details are what interest me most. Was it the mixture of wisdom and innocence that I saw in your face, young and fresh, despite the gravity of the uniform? Or was it the fact that you were born in Australia that drew my attention, and then drew something like indignation? Why had I never heard of you despite the description beneath your photograph outlining a dazzling career?

That evening, giving way to curiosity, I googled your name and was surprised about how little detail I could find, despite your brilliant contribution to medicine including being a champion of the poor and sick, despite serving with distinction in both world wars, despite being a profuse researcher and writer, despite rising to become the first female Chief Medical Officer for London, and despite then going on to distinguish yourself in the legal profession.

Those eyes of yours seemed to beckon me and I took my self back to London to visit the Medical Library known as the Wellcome Collection. Your family had deposited five boxes of your documents and writing in the archives. By the time I joined the library and by the time the large document I ordered was brought up to the reading room, I had only half a day left. None of the material was digitalised and nothing was allowed to be copied. I read the PhD dissertation by a medical student, Emily Garret, before catching the train home in the dark. Several days later, I was back in Australia with you by my side. Were you curious to see the country of your birth once again? Or were you there to prod me into not forgetting you, just as my Great-grandmother, Agnes had prodded me until I ended up telling her story in The White Apron?

                                    D

Dear Letitia

Your father, Charles Fairfield came from an Anglo-Irish family with aristocratic connections. He had been managing a silver mine in Colorado when his friends were killed in a stagecoach accident on a mountain road, leaving a teenage boy. It was the early 1880s, and Charles decided to deliver the boy to his mother’s family, who lived in St Kida in Melbourne, making a detour to England on the way. On the ship from England to Australia, he met Isabella MacKenzie who would later be your mother.  She had apparently been sent by her family to visit her brother, a musician, who was reputed to be ill. But that story does not completely add up. It was an unusual and very daring thing to do in those days for a woman of your mother’s class. Why was this beautiful, talented young woman sailing such a long-distance unaccompanied?

A steamer arriving in Melbourne from England in the 1880s

Do I need to go back that far? Instinct tells me I must. Both your parents must have been brave and adventurous so perhaps it is little wonder that they produced three talented and intelligent daughters. For a while, your mother joined her brother in his bizarre lifestyle in the goldfields. His illness proved to be more about the amount he drank and eventually she returned to St Kilda to a hotel recommended by Charles Fairfield.

The mother/daughter relationship is important. I believe to get to know the daughter, I must first learn about the mother. Unless the archives in London turn up some of your own memories of Isabella, your mother I will have to rely on the writings of your sister, Cicely, better known as Rebecca West. However, even her own biographer says Rebecca West was first and foremost a storyteller and infers that she did not let the truth get in the way. She describes the seaside hotel in great detail in her rambling memoir but frustratingly doesn’t give it a name. I am guessing it is the Esplanade Hotel, affectionately known as The Espy, which has been recently been refurbished.

The Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda

Charles who worked as a Journalist in a Melbourne newspaper married Isabella on 17^th December 1883. They moved a few doors from the hotel to an old and beautiful house and stayed in connection with the hotel’s proprietors, Mr and Mrs Mullins. I am telling you this because a man called Mullins is one of the people who refurbished the old Esplanade Hotel. Is it just a coincidence? I will keep digging. I have contacted the historical society in St Kilda and later this year I will make a visit on my way to Hobart. I want to get a feel for the place you were born in 1884. I know you lived most of your life in Scotland and England but I think I want to claim a bit of you for Australia.

Dear Leticia

I’m so excited. I’m coming to London and plan to burrow into your boxes in the Wellcome Collection. During the first week in January 2020 I will attempt to get my head around what you have bequeathed to the world. And then I’m off to the New York Writers’ Workshop in Sardinia for a week.

When I return from Sardinia, I will spend as much time with you as I can, also hoping to meet with your niece. In between all of that I am looking forward to catching up with my English grandchildren and their parents.

Sardinia

Although my enquiries have so far been unproductive, I still hope to visit the Melbourne seaside suburb of St Kilda before the London trip, to get a sense of the place that both your parents were thrown into. I can empathise with Charles Fairfield and Isabella MacKenzie who met on board the ship and later married and made their first home in St Kilda. In the late 1890s, they made, what must have been, a gruelling journey from England to Australia. I am able to imagine their displacement of self and culture on their arrival, from knowing the experience of my own parents when, with me in tow, they left their beloved Scotland after the ravages of the second world war, to make a new life in Australia, at that time still a colonial backwater in many ways.

When writing your biography, I had already planned to include details of my journey to find you.  And now, the reading I am undertaking in preparation for documenting your history supports this. The thinking seems to be that the reader of a historical story should be aware of the writer’s time and place, that the work can only ever be an interpretation of the past rather than an authoritarian truth. I just know that at every step in this journey, I will be hoping that you would have approved.

I almost said to you: ‘Don’t hold your breath, this could be a very long project – oops – wrong thing to say to a woman who physically stopped breathing in 1978. However, hopefully, I can breathe into your amazing story and help bring it to life for posterity,

The Wellcome Collection Building in London.

Dear Letitia Arrival in England in the middle of winter is both a shock and a respite after the inferno that is Australia right now. 

 

England–Hertfordshire

My country is on fire–literally and I almost feel guilty for leaving but I do what little I can from afar.

Australia—Lake Conjola, NSW.

I have to confess to losing confidence in my ability to record your life. Living so far away while all the research material lies in the archives of the Wellcome Collection in London, makes such a proposal seem like a fool’s errand. None of the material is digitalised, nothing may be photocopied or photographed. Tomorrow I go forth to London with notebook in hand. I have been delving into the archives, which are, thankfully, online and have ordered various documents from the five boxes where your life has been stored.

I plan to spend tomorrow reading and hopefully, by the end of the day, I will decide if I am biting off more than I can chew. After that, it’s off to Sardinia for a week of hobnobbing with successful writers, mostly from New York, hoping some of their brilliance wears off onto me. When I return to London, if I have decided to stay with you, I hope to meet up with your niece.  She sounds lovely, but contacting strangers has always daunted me. I can see you rolling your eyes and hear you saying, ‘What a mouse!’ And so I remind myself that this year I have no excuses. I will hopefully be able to return to London later in the year. And with you as a role-model, how can I remain a mouse?