A frightening medical emergency leads David Astle to salute his “first teacher” - his 90-year-old mother Heather Astle.
As firstborn, I presented a novelty to Mum, a mystery. In many ways the diary reads like anthropology, where Margaret Mead’s Samoa was Heather Astle’s Balgowlah, each page a series of field reports. She predicted my gaze belonged to a future judge. I took seven months to utter a word – “Mum” – and nine months to walk.
“Mrs Cuck-uck got big fire. David go look please Mummy.” Hardly auspicious, but that was my first complex set of sentences, this nappied columnist keen to see Mrs Cudmore’s incinerator next-door. Since then, I’ve built a million paragraphs, drawing on the words that Heather and Pippi Longstocking fed me, Seuss and Milne, then Frenchs Forest Primary, and beyond. The learning is relentless, but you never forget your first teacher.
The diary sputters around the time Apollo 13 missed the moon. By then I could whistle, and kick a footy. I made cartoons too, that evolved into puzzles, an obsession destined to become a profession. Even as an adult, tramping the Andes, I relied on Mum as midwife, delivering Wordwit puzzles from aerogramme toHence my smile into the receiver, every time those curly questions come. Coronate, I explain, is rare, but valid.
Heather survived. That’s what she does full-time now. She left hospital in early May, and today turns 90, six years shy of the Queen. This column is for you, Lee Starheath – thank you. I love you, and I promise to investigate that fruit-plate conundrum next week.