Like soft light stealing the dark of night, awareness came of a terrible struggle. Peggy opened her little brown eyes. She wondered why he sat there, hunched, beside her bed.
Sorely moving her parched lips, she made a whispered request from a mouth dry and swollen. “Daddy, I want a drink of water.”
George's head jerked up from his chest. He stared, open-mouthed. Peggy rasped out her plaintive plea more impatiently, “Daddy...may I please have a drink of water?”
He found his voice, “Nurse!! Nurse!!”
Life began anew.
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This is the picture I have built up in my mind over many years, from early childhood perhaps, as my mother related the true facts of the beginning of her life. As I grew up we often whiled away the lonely hours on the farm together, as she talked about her childhood, and I came to know how deeply affected she was by the accident which altered her facial features forever. As she is still alive I have altered the names of family members and places for her privacy.
--00--
The year was 1917. Peggy, four and a half years old, was the youngest of a family of five girls and one boy, her siblings ranging in age from 11 to 18. Another baby boy, born a few years before Peggy, died soon after birth. The family lived on an idyllic farm in the rich rolling hills of the Darling Downs of Queensland, Australia, where they share-farmed a small dairy herd.
The day was bright and sunny and Peggy's mother was hanging washing in the backyard on long wire lines held up by wooden props. Alice, the eldest daughter, was some miles away working as a housemaid on a horse-breeding property, and Ruby, 11, was at school. During the previous few days, Bill, nearly 17, had been working on a merry-go-round cum see saw for the younger girls. He had bolted a large log across a similarly large stump. Using an adze, (which is an old-fashioned axe with an arched blade at right angles to the handle, and used for cutting away the surface of the wood,) and also using a file, he had flattened the log at the ends and attached a little backrest. Unfortunately, he didn't have a nut to secure the bolt to the support which he had erected on the stump, and the girls had been warned to stay away. Their mother had made a point of warning the older girls not to allow Peggy anywhere near the new play toy, at least until Bill had a chance to finish the job.
Lulu, a tomboy by nature and 10 years older than Peggy, couldn’t resist trying the seesaw, and she lifted her little sister Peggy on to the other end.
Molly, a year younger, was incensed. "No Lulu" she pleaded, "Mum will go mad!"
But Louise continued, and soon they were spinning round and round. Peggy became dizzy. Then Louise lowered her end of the log to the ground, putting Peggy high up in the air.
“I was scared, and I overbalanced.,” she told me.”I remember being on the ground, looking up at the log high in the air.”
Now in panic for fear of the reprimand she knew she was in for, the older sister jumped off her end of the seesaw to run to Peggy’s aid.
The bolt in the middle of the support had gradually loosened, allowing the log, now released from its weight, to rumble slowly towards the edge of the stump, down onto the little girl's face.
Louise screamed, "Peggy!!" as she raced to help her little sister.
Struggling to lift the heavy log, she was not prepared for the sight that greeted her. Peggy had turned her head slightly to the right in a last desperate effort to avoid the falling log, but her face had suffered terribly under the force of that heavy weight. Her nose was crushed flat, and the whole of her face was a bloodied mess. Lulu screamed in shock, dropping the awkward burden straight back on the damaged face.
By this time Molly was hysterical, and the girls’ screams quickly brought their mother, Annie, running. She must have been able to hear the desperation in their voices, and her heart would have been cold with fear. Louise lifted her unconscious little sister into her mother's arms.
Annie, screaming orders to the girls, carried her baby into the house and laid her on a bed. She sent Molly, always the thin one, running across the paddocks to find her husband George and son Bill, who were working for their neighbour, an auctioneer.
The auctioneer had the luxury of a telephone and his wife rushed to call the Warwick ambulance, and father and son returned home, agitated and distraught, in the horse and buggy.
Peggy lay in hospital for two days while the doctors and hospital staff waited for her to die, and her parents prayed.
But Peggy did not die, and in answering her parents prayers, God outfitted her with the positive attitude and fighting spirit that would be her sustenance through many challenging years ahead.
In the days following her return to consciousness, she was given sips of water from a metal cup with a long thin spout, and when the doctors finally risked examining her injuries more thoroughly, they found that her jaw was broken in two places, the bridge of her nose was crushed flat, and bone was protruding through the roof of her mouth, while her little tongue was lacerated in several places where sharp baby teeth had clamped down under that heavy weight.
As the days went by, Peggy was able to accept sloppy food from a white china feed cup with a spout. To assist that delicate process, Annie took to bringing in a piece of rubber tube which she put on the end of the spout. That way she could get the food further in to Peggy's mouth.
During the long recovery period Peggy frequently suffered painful abscesses on her jaws, and she was nearly 11 before she could drink fluid through a straw.
Today, in 2012, she is 99 and still bears the splits in the sides of her tongue and a hole in the roof of her mouth, the bane of dentists when she is having a false plate made.
After some weeks, she was allowed to sit out on the wide, wooden verandahs of the hospital with other patients. They sat in large canvas covered deck chairs, typical on country hospital verandahs during the greater part of the nineteen hundreds. Peggy got to know a young girl about 14 years of age, who had stepped on a rusty nail, and had a poisoned foot. In an era before antibiotics came into common use, she no doubt required many weeks in hospital.
As long as I can remember, Peggy has been an intensely private person. On the first day that she was allowed to sit out in one of the big chairs, she wet her pyjama pants. Horrified to discover she had disgraced herself, she let out a loud scream. The nurse came running and asked the women sitting around what happened.
One replied, "Oh, the poor little thing wet herself and got a fright."
The nurse reacted angrily and hit Peggy across the back, jarring her jaw. She then dragged her off to the toilet block, which Peggy had not seen or been into previously.
Over the years, Peggy often remarked, “Children know things. They're not silly.” As she sat there on the toilet that day, she thought, ‘What’s the use of taking me to the toilet now? I've already done it!’
At her father’s next visit, she lost no time in reporting the incident. George was most indignant, and the nurse got into a terrible row over her behaviour.
Peggy still feels guilty over the incident, musing, “That poor nurse, I wasn't really hurt."
Then she adds, “But for a long time after I went home from hospital, I had nightmares about those toilets. I used to wake with a smothering feeling--like I was being crushed into a dark corner. The toilet cubicles were high and dark, with no doors, and the room was gloomy. I was so embarrassed, having to sit there, helpless, exposed. Any women strangers who came into the toilet could see me. I felt like I was in prison because the walls were so high and dark.”
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