Review: 'Thursday’s Child’ By Maralyn Rittenour

For sure, Irish-born Maralyn Rittenour’s memoir “Thursday’s Child” amply realizes the nursery rhyme prophecy (which is the epigraph to the book) that “Thursday’s Child has far to go.” Over the eight decades and seven continents covered here, the author, who is a Springs resident, shows how with passion and purpose, sometimes because of necessity, but mostly out of energetic curiosity and organized determination, she journeyed to places both off and on the beaten path all over the world, in more recent years fulfilling a “bucket list.”

The “chronicle,” as she refers to it, also celebrates with incredible detail and often self-deprecating humor how her travels and sojourns tended to yield an “unexpected adventure or encounter.” But what stands out the most is Rittenour’s sense of thanksgiving for having such a wonderful extended family and so many loyal friends, hundreds invoked here with anecdotes that at times she concedes may be apocryphal (or “imperfect memories”). It’s the spirit that counts.

Although she writes in her introduction that one of her possible motives in writing this book was, as a “somewhat religious person,” to express gratitude for “luck” (“survivor’s guilt”?) when accidents of war or the lack of quick attention to medical illness could easily have done her in. It seems clear, however, from the detailed genealogical tracings and mini histories of the times surrounding particular individuals — some going back several centuries — that “Thursday’s Child” is more memoir than tell-all autobiography. One learns that her father disinherited her at 16 under the influence of her “wicked step-mother,” which may account for a focus on social success (her aunt Bridget Christie-Miller had her presented to the Queen), but the implicit theme of the book is the author’s pride in placing herself firmly on a stately family tree, some of whose innumerable branches trace back to many notable ancestors, including royals.

In a way, the book is a natural for our time, when the pandemic has cloistered many individuals, especially those who live alone. Turning within and exploring one’s ancestral life, as fans of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Finding Your Roots” series on PBS well know, have become entertainment. Rittenour is fiercely defensive of those whose life might have been even more successful, such as the brother of a Swedish cousin who served in WWII and M15, and whose long distinguished career “probably” would have led to his becoming Lord Chancellor under Harold Wilson — were his second wife not falsely accused of being a Russian spy.

Especially after the tragic loss of her first husband Ian, a restless, adventure-seeking dentist serving a backwater indigenous community in Yellowknife in The Northwest Territories, whose outback zeal led to his accidental drowning, she digs in, finding her own way alongside taking comfort from keeping up with his family as well as her own. So, too, decades later when cardiac failure claimed the life of her long-term husband Charles. Though she knows that “Thursday’s Child” is largely a family album for extended family (her beloved mother, Moira had 32 first cousins!) — most living abroad — close friends on the East End where she’s been living since the early 1970s, when not at times in the city, will likely be surprised to learn about some of her numerous professional lives, both as a paid worker and volunteer at significant civic and cultural institutions. Of course, on a camel safari through the Thar [Great Indian] Desert, she was “given the leader of the pack, Lanu.”

A distinguishing feature of “Thursday’s Child” is its writing. Despite an overwhelming number of names and places, the author’s savvy enough to keep inserting casual identification, as characters re-emerge, along with parenthetical reminders that she has already introduced events or will get back to them later on. Many characters seem peripheral, but not to the theme of a well lived, often well connected, courageous life where risk and fortitude matter.

No doubt, Rittenour received much material from relatives abroad, particularly in the form of letters, but the mainstays of her recollections were her own diaries, especially those she kept on late-life trips. Other trek accounts affirm her prose as lean and direct. She is an excellent observer, and though diaries tend to look within, hers look out and reflect, more in the nature of journals: “…I believe we [she and her companions] enjoyed what is mostly lost in twenty-first century first world life, a respect for the power and vastness of nature, a rediscovery of our planet’s grandeur, and for ourselves a sense of achievement when even the mundane act of breathing required effort at high altitudes.”

One only wishes publication could have accommodated photos and maps.