When my son was small, he and my dad liked to read Mem Fox’s 1984 picture book Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge.
The book – which was illustrated by Julie Vivas and is competing in Guardian Australia’s reader poll of the best Australian children’s picture book of all time – is about a boy called Wilfrid climbing through the fence to visit the aged care home next door. He meets many interesting people there, including Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper, who had four names like Wilfrid, but who, according to Wilfrid’s parents, had “lost her memory”.
Wilfrid brings Nancy treasures and each helps her remember something fleeting but lovely from her life. An egg reminds her of a bird’s nest in her aunt’s garden, and a shell reminds her of going to the beach in a tram long ago, and how hot she had felt in her button-up boots.
Dad and my son liked the book because my son also has four names. Dad has five. My son used to wonder if he could add one more so they would be the same. Back then it was the number of names that was important. They also liked to talk about living so close to the beach you could get there by tram. The quest for memories was theoretical.
Now Dad calls several times a day, terrified. He thinks he’s in a hotel room, he’s not sure where, and he has no idea how he got there. Sometimes he just says he feels lost. He needs my help. It’s urgent.
Each time I talk him down gently. See the photos of us all on the window sill? It’s your room at the nursing home. You live there. It’s safe. You’re fine. My sister will be there tomorrow. I’ll be there on the weekend.
Dad is barely mobile and needs a lot of help with daily life. It’s a good nursing home. The care is kind and respectful and attentive. But his fear and confusion is heartbreaking.
So is the fact that wanting to leave is pretty much the only thing we talk about, except when I can divert him to his memories: the time he and his mates made canoes out of corrugated iron to have races on an outback dam, their camping trips to Carnarvon Gorge and the magnificent Indigenous art they saw there, how he met Mum at church fellowship group, the mean tricks he played on my auntie when they were kids, the trips he took with Mum, and all the ones he wishes they’d taken.
I often take photos to help these conversations, and one day we were looking at a picture of Mum, reading Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge to my son. It’s obviously bedtime, because my son is in his PJs and his cheeks are flushed the way they got when he was straight out of the bath. He’s pointing to a picture.
“Do you remember that book, Dad?” I ask. “You used to read it all the time.”
“Wasn’t it about a lady on a tram?” he replies after a long pause.
“Yes, Dad. Yes, it was.”
You can vote once a day in Guardian Australia’s poll to decide the best Australian children’s picture book. The winner will be announced at 6am on 6 February
