Pam McAlpine, wife, mother, and poet
Genius, as they say, can be found in the unlikeliest of settings and one never knows when they could be entertaining angels unawares.
Pam McAlpine was born in Ipswich, England on November 22, 1935, an only child.
Pam joined the Women’s Air Force in Britain in the 1950s, a devoted wife and mother who travelled halfway around the world with her husband, David and two young children.
Pam was also a gifted writer.
Like so many in the United Kingdom after World War II, Pam and David emigrated to Australia as “Ten Pound Poms” seeking the opportunity for a new life. David worked for years as an airline mechanic at Hazelton Airlines at Cudal while Pam raised their four children.
On a rural property without a car or driver’s licence, she experienced the unique isolation and loneliness of a young wife raising a young family.
But it was here that she also discovered a love for poetry and story-telling.
At home, she would hone and rework her quirky, whimsical observations of love, life, and the foibles of human experience before sending them off for publication in the readers interest pages of the popular and candid magazines of the time.
Topics included her fear of snakes, romance, wit and comedy, and her homesickness. One of these missives — Sweet Dream; a beautiful work about a lost life — was read out at her recent farewell.
Other works in her eclectic compilation ranged in subject from the Venus Flytrap, envy, penguins, aliens, frogs, and 1980s American President Ronald Reagan’s love of jellybeans!
Pam believed that her distinctive, heart-felt poems were worthy of a wider audience; but was determined that she was not going to waste her works on “vanity publishers” that promise the world to unpublished writers, for a price, of course!
As with the eventual fate of us all; the millionaire and pauper alike; the knighted business titan and the lonely office assistant, we all come back to where we started.
Pam McAlpine — wife, mother, and poet, has returned home.
Pamela Joyce McAlpine,
22 November 1935–2 March 2020
“SWEET DREAMS
I only have to close my eyes
And I’m back home with you
Recalling scenes from bygone days
And things we used to do.
Those dear, familiar faces
Etched so clearly on my mind,
I watch them shed their silent tears
As I leave them behind
Although it’s more than twenty years,
It seems like yesterday
I’ll need no special photographs,
They’re in my heart to stay.
One day I’ll see them all again,
My homeland’s streets I’ll roam;
Such are the dreams a migrant dreams
When he is far from home.”