Humphrey McQueen remembers Manning Clark
Dear Manning,
I’m writing you this letter for want of better ways of continuing the conversation we’ve been having for the past eight years, sustained by weekly letters while I was in Japan. We began to walk and talk in 1983 as you were preparing for heart surgery and I wasn’t coping with a broken heart. You wanted someone to walk with, and I needed company.
When you died at 4pm on a Thursday, I couldn’t stop myself thinking that that hour on that day of the week was when I most often called around for tea with you and Dymphna before we set out for a stroll through Forrest, some days going for more than a kilometre, others barely making three hundred metres before your breath gave out.
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