CALYPSO THE DOG , WORLD WAR II , AND TRACING THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF A ONE-ARMED OLD SCOTCH COLLEGIAN
A REMARKABLE LIFE AFTER NARROWLY SURVIVING SERIOUS WAR WOUNDS
It may have started with idle curiosity about a dog called Calypso but it unravelled into an amazing story of a desert war , misfortune and chance survival at the hands of an enemy doctor .
First to the dog . Calypso was part-Dalmatian . In fact , her faded spots indicated she was at least a couple of generations distant from her pure-bred forebear . She was given to my father-in-law John Hamilton in March 1956 by a woman who worked at the US Consulate in Trinidad and Tobago .
Within three weeks , Calypso was dead , run over by a truck in the yard of Port of Spain ' s Colonial Hospital where Hamilton , a young Melbourne doctor , was working as part of a five-year overseas adventure in the United States , Caribbean , Asia and Europe . Calypso ' s ill-fated stint with Hamilton , documented in weekly letters dutifully sent by the then 24-year-old to his parents back in Dandenong helped me date a bunch of colour slides I ' d been poring over . I could see Calypso on a beach with some of Hamilton ' s glamorous friends , and there she was on the hospital lawn .
But on the same series of Kodachrome slides were pictures of a fishing trip and two blond boys holding the catch .
According to Hamilton ' s letters , about the same time Hamilton had acquired Calypso , he ' d gone to Monos Island which sits between Trinidad and Venezuela . His travelling companions were John Bevan Todd , his wife Enid and their two children .
‘( Todd ) is the Australian Trade Commissioner here who will shortly be leaving for Washington ,’ Hamilton wrote , before offering this crisp summary of the
ABOVE : CALYPSO THE PART DALMATIAN IN 1956 . BELOW : BEV TODD (’ 31 ) IN THE LIBYAN DESERT IN 1941
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