This month is my book’s first birthday and I’m marking the occasion with some posts throughout May offering random glimpses of Katharine Susannah Prichard.
May Day brings to mind a passage in a letter Katharine wrote in 1956 to Mikhail Apletin, who worked for the Union of Soviet Writers in Russia:
‘To-day, I am sad, because I wanted to go to the celebrations of May Day in Fremantle, but friends who were to drive me could not go, and so I have spent the day alone in my wild hills. Writing to you and Oksana is a consolation. Our winter is beginning and torrents of rain have been falling.’
I find it a poignant image of old age. She is 72, and despite her fame she finds herself alone in her cabin in the rain. Greenmount was an isolated place to live for a woman without a car.
That same year, she published the pamphlet Why I Am A Communist, based on some newspaper columns she had written; Jeff Sparrow calls it ‘a gesture of loyalty to the Stalinist regime, at a time when the faith of many loyal Communist Party members was being shaken to the core’.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 
Thanks for sharing this, Nathan.
It’s also a reminder of how the concept of ‘old age’ has changed, and how in the mid 20th century and postwar era the car represented independence for men but not for women. Few people today regard 72 as old age but that is because of improvements in health care and opportunities to be out and about doing stuff.
Most of my friends are older than me, and all of them drive till well into their 80s. But when we were young things ourselves, few of us had mothers who drove, and those mothers that could drive, deferred to a husband for family trips (which meant that he got more experience, and she didn’t). My mother, who learned to drive in the ATS during the war, was a rarity. She always drove the family car, and she was most unwilling to admit in her late 80s that it was time to surrender the licence.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, thanks Lisa, so true! KSP was already about the average life expectancy at 72. It’s something to be thankful for, and I just hope life expectancy and health don’t keep going backwards with Covid. Your mother was a trailblazer, how wonderful that she was such a driver and kept it up into her 80s.
LikeLike
A much nicer May Day this year (weatherwise in Perth) than 1956. I’m 72 now and cycled across to E Perth today, not an option in Greenmount then or now probably. Mum, who got her licence at around age 40, is 91 now and at least considering giving it up, though it’s still her job to drive ‘old ladies’ to church.
LikeLike