Brains and Miracles

According to my understanding of the current teaching about one’s brain, as I learn to do new things – like this blog on the computer – I’m actually creating whole new thought patterns in the part of my brain less used until recently.

I’ve always thought of myself as the creative, articulate type but who knows, there may be a whole new personality waiting to be accessed.

Do I want that?

Not really. I mean, for better or for worse, I’m me. But I think it’s good to develop our brains. Especially as we get older! I reckon I need all the thought patterns I can create up and running.

I used to know a man whose brain was radically damaged in a car accident. In fact, at the request of Openbook Publishers, I wrote a book where he was one of the main characters, so I got to know him quite well.

Craig was a highly talented musician – a composer, conductor and piano and double-bass player. His music had been selected to be played during a function with the Duke of Edinburgh visiting and the Duke had complimented Craig on the music. Craig had travelled to various countries as a musician.

When he was twenty-five and at the height of his musical career, he was in a car accident. It was 1977. Rear seat belts were not compulsory for back seat passengers then, as far as I know. Craig was a passenger in the back seat and his head took the full impact of the car roof hitting the road as they rolled over and over again. After many days in a coma in hospital with concussion and a cerebral oedema, he awoke completely unable to think or communicate normally.

When he was finally released from hospital, the doctors said he would be watching television sixteen hours a day for life – if he were lucky.

It was a long, hard haul but with the help of many specialists including the brilliant Dr Wood, an eminent neuropsychologist, he actually ‘learnt to think again’, using a different part of his brain. He never regained his ability to compose music but after some time he was back playing instruments, recording in an elaborate studio he had built himself, running a business – and doing various other things such as conducting a band in a local school.

When I interviewed him, I saw no evidence of a brain-damaged man. Only a highly gifted one. And when I interviewed his neuropsychologist in Adelaide, I asked him if he considered Craig ‘normal’ now.

He looked at me in horror.

I looked back apprehensively.

“Craig’s not normal,” he said. “He’s way above normal. Gifted.”

He is, that’s for sure, a walking miracle. A miracle produced by his own perseverance, the talented doctors, and God. There were, needless to say, many people praying for him throughout his trauma.

Our brains are amazing creations!

Lantern Light

Currently I’m awaiting a publisher’s verdict on my latest book – another novel inspired by real life places and people. Real situations.

It’s set in beautiful New Ireland (part of Papua New Guinea) where I taught in 1973. And where I met several of my friends including Glen (now in Cambodia) and Peter, both of whom some of you know.

Peter and I both taught at Madina Girls High School, an astonishingly English-looking place. To get there, we drove down the narrow winding Boluminski Highway, an unsealed road that snaked its way scarily around blind bends in the jungle and coconut palm plantations.

We turned off and wound down narrow car tracks and suddenly entered another world.

A school with neatly but artistically laid out gardens, flowering hedges and cottages - all with the backdrop of the vast green sprawl of the jungle. Immaculately dressed girls worked in the gardens after school, and the happy sound of their singing and giggling filled the air. Madina nestled at the foot of the mountains and only a short walk from the brilliant aqua sea. The heat was stifling in most of the area but Madina enjoyed a lovely breeze from the sea.

The headmistress, Miss Marchment – who has given me permission to set my novel in Madina (which I’ve called Barrington Place) – was an awe-inspiring lady who intimidated many who encountered her. A strong woman with a pioneering spirit, she ruled her school with a rod of iron, the heart of a mother and the soul of an artist. I was very shy with her at first but once I knew her, found her a delightful person who befriended most of her staff.

Clad in what she called ‘my red dress’, Miss Marchment would ‘go to war’ against any red tape or regulations threatening the well-being of her pupils. (Another teacher: Shhh! Miss Marchment’s coming. She’s wearing the red dress!) She tended to get whatever she felt she needed for her charges! Many of these girls have gone on to be high-level professionals in various countries and are still in touch with her.

I’ve called my novel Lantern Light because of the wonderful evenings we spent huddling around hurricane lanterns, talking until all hours, long after the generator had gone off at nine o’clock. There was a peculiar atmosphere of intimacy and security in that capsule of golden light with the dark, whispering jungle brooding around us.

It was an atmosphere that inspired the telling of many secrets. We told one another all sorts of things we would have been slow to tell our friends back in ‘civilisation’. Sometimes the outcome of our confidences was surprising!

The descriptions of Madina and its surroundings are not exact, but I’ve tried to do what Louis de Bernieres (author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) says he does – to capture the flavour rather than the exact details, to give it ‘literary truth’. (He says that in his Afterword to Notwithstanding, a book inspired by the English village where he grew up.)

Incidentally, my characters and the main story are completely fictitious, although I’ve included a few events inspired by things that really happened to people I knew on New Ireland and have acknowledged this in the Foreword.

Here’s a hint about the plot:

Teaching in the jungle of New Ireland, Ali longs for a greater challenge. Dave loves risks and danger.

 What will this cost them?

And the theme:

Surrounded by brooding but alluring equatorial jungle, Ali and her friends are safe in a capsule of beauty and order.

What will happen if they break the capsule?

So . . . we’ll see what the publisher says.