There Was A Little Girl

‘There was a little girl
who didn’t have a curl,
but a fringe, in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
she was very, very good.
But when she was naughty,
she was really and truly horrid.’

This poem was taught to me in my fifth year in an attempt to improve my behaviour.
It is crucial to that time when I ceased from being the spoiled only child of parents whose first baby girl had died, and became simply a little girl with a baby brother. This third story continues to explore my nature and experiences within the family situation as I developed through childhood into adolescence. Throughout the trilogy the consciousness of childhood and youth has been subsumed into old-age memories. In these the child I once was lives on, a vital part of my life-story and me.

In 1918, towards the end of what was referred to sometimes, ironically, as ‘The Great War to end all Wars,’ Charles Pollington, a twenty-year-old signaler, suffered a shrapnel wound, shell shock and gas. From the muddy, verminous trenches in France he was sent home to a hospital in London. His bed was next to that of Tom Tilley, a dispatch rider in another regiment, who had been wounded by enemy fire. Father liked to tell us the story of how ‘a sweet-faced young girl (she was sixteen) came to visit her brother.’ Uncle Tom said to her, “Nellie, give some of those grapes to that young fellow with the bandage on his head, in the next bed, he hasn’t had any visitors.” That was how my parents met. Mother used to tell us children that ‘some of the nurses in the ward really fancied’ Father, but she stole him away from them.

Charles Ernest Pollington and Ellen May Tilley were married in Saint Bartholomew’s Church Hackney, London, on 20th September, 1920. She was in her eighteenth year and he in his twenty-first. Ellen, ‘Nellie’ to the family, with the few relatives and friends who were present at the wedding, went home to the ‘long lease’ terrace house in Ramsgate Street, where her sister Clara and husband were living. When I visited them in 1957 and 1958, with my husband Jim and our first two little girls Sherry and Rosemary, the opposite side of the street was bare, the houses having been bombed by Germany in World War II. The remaining terraced houses were demolished and the tenants, many reluctantly, re-housed in stark concrete blocks of units, in the 1960s.

Grandma had sailed to Australia earlier in 1920, with her three youngest sons, her oldest daughter Alice, Alice’ husband Bill Sykes and their children. Father kissed his bride goodbye on the steps of Saint Bartholomew’s and hurried to Australia House with the marriage certificate necessary for their assisted passage on the next ship. Mother used to say, with truth, “I was married and then left at the church door.”

My father was innately a good man. Mother once said that had he lived in Paris during the French Revolution he could not have told a lie to save himself from the guillotine. He consistently tried to instill in us children his own sense of honour, and could not understand why, as a child, I would not admit to wrongdoing. But I had worked out that I would be punished if found out, but perhaps could escape punishment by denying my guilt, even when asked to declare on my ‘honour.’

A handsome, well-spoken quiet man, Father had gray-green eyes, warm-brown wavy hair and a ready smile. He sang softly to himself in a fine baritone, well into old age. Now, it is unusual to hear people (other than small children) singing to themselves. Before radio sets and stations appeared, it was common for people to sing, hum or whistle at work, or just to ‘wile away the hours.’ If Father sang at meal times, Mother sometimes said, “Don’t sing at the table Charles, it brings bad luck to the house.”

‘Nelly Dean’ was an old song Father sang to Mother throughout their life together. Father was eighty-four when he died in 1983, and four years later Mother lay dying in hospital just before her eighty-fifth birthday in 1987. Whenever I visited her I would hold her hand and softly sing that old song. She would squeeze my hand and smile:

‘There’s an old mill by the stream,
Nellie Dean,
Where I oft time sit and dream,
Nellie Dean.
And the waters, as they flow,
Seem to murmur, soft and low,
‘You’re my heart’s desire, I love you,’
Nellie Dean.”

I have a still-vivid early memory picture of being in a bushland setting with a mixed smell of eucalyptus and goats in the air. I was standing in an enclosure that had rusting wrought-iron-railings, similar to those around children’s graves in often-neglected old cemeteries, and I was happily engrossed in feeding a black baby goat (kid) from a crescent-shaped nursing bottle. When the feeding bottle was empty, my father and another man struggled to pull me out. I was holding on tightly to the baby goat, iron railing, and bottle, while screaming at the top of my lungs. This scene took place in 1925, when I was a spoiled, and very strong-willed, two-years-old little girl.

I think that incident occurred when Father was a lighthouse-keeper on Sandy Cape. Mother and I went with him until I was in my third year. Father served on Double Island Point, Fraser Island, Bustard Head, Lady Elliot Island, South Molle and the Whitsundays. We children never tired of listening to his stories, and a few times we sat on the grass while he stood on the back landing and showed us how he used semaphore flags to ‘talk’ to ships. Once he and a friend sailed over to visit two American women who kept goats on Hamilton Island, which was otherwise deserted eighty years ago. Yachts, often from other countries, sometimes anchored in a nearby cove, and their crews would call on the lighthouse-keepers with many good yarns of their adventures at sea.

Father occasionally talked about his narrow escape from death. He and the other lighthouse-keeper were fishing with hand lines from a flat rock ledge, and had thrown some burley (blood and offal) in the water to attract the fish. The other man had gone
back to his cottage for a few minutes, and while he was away sharks came after the burley. Father had caught, and was almost caught by, a shark when his foot became entangled in the line. He was being dragged over slippery rocks into the sea, when the other lighthouse-keeper, hearing his cries for help, ran down and pulled him free.

Inserted in this trilogy among other old pictures are some taken on Double Island Point and also on Sandy Cape where mother had her first disappointing, and very embarrassing, experience of bread-making. The story was told so often that, although most distressed at the time, she was later able to accept the humour of the incident.

Having been given a ‘yeast starter’ bottle (or ‘yeast mother’) by the other lighthouse-keeper’s wife, Mother made up the bread dough, but it failed to rise. A young woman, still new to Australian ways and easily discomforted, she decided to hide her failure. Taking a shovel she dug a hole in the vegetable patch between the two cottages, and buried the unrisen dough. That afternoon there was a great deal of hilarity at Mother’s expense. She was called to come and look at ‘the biggest mushroom in the world.’ The hole had not been dug deeply enough, and the heat of the sun caused the bread dough to rise to the surface ‘like Lazarus from the grave.’

Another rather amusing anecdote of that time, again targeting my mother, concerns a rice pudding she cooked and placed to cool on the windowsill next to the verandah. When she went to get the pudding, goats had come up the three steps and taken it away. The empty enamel dish was found next day a few yards from our cottage. Those goats had a rare treat, as Mother’s rice puddings were delicious. Made with milk, they were sweetened with condensed milk, as well as with sugar and sultanas, and finished off with knobs of butter and freshly grated nutmeg on top.

When I was about ten months old my parents decided to go on a picnic. Mother carrying me, and Father toting an old rug, a picnic basket and thermos of tea, they walked a short distance from the settlement into nearby bushland. After I fell into a sound sleep on the rug, in the shade of a large ghost-gum tree, they strolled a few yards away to look around, while keeping me in view. A short time later they came closer to me check that I was still sleeping soundly. They were horrified to see two dingoes standing together, only a couple of yards from the far side of the rug, and almost hidden by the large trunk of the tree. They were staring at the picnic basket or the sleeping infant, or perhaps both. While the two dingoes turned tail and loped off into the bush, Father lost no time in gathering up the rug and supplies and, with Mother carrying the baby, they hurried back to the safety of their cottage near the lighthouse.

Towards the end of my second year, somehow eluding my parents I climbed out onto the balcony of the lighthouse and attracted the attention of people below by calling out and throwing down, from between the railings, my shoes, socks and sunbonnet. My poor father long maintained that the couple of minutes while he quietly crept out and seized me, were the worst of his life, including his service in the Great War.

That incident stayed with me in the form of nightmares until I was eight years old, when we were in Mount Isa. Often I dreamed of falling, and woke up crying. It was thought the nightmares were due to my parents being over-zealous in making me understand what would have happened to me, had I fallen from the top of the lighthouse. All my life I have felt dizzy when looking from the window or balcony of a tall building. However, with my love of travel, I am thankful never to feel uncomfortable in an airplane, except in very turbulent conditions.

In 1926 Father invested the payout he received for being invalided out of the British Army near the end of the Great War, as down payment on a small house in Cramb Street, East Ipswich. It was on the opposite side of Queen’s Park from Grandma’s house in Gordon Street, which was close to town. As a result of this, from my third year, until 1930 when Grandma and Uncle Tom went to Mount Isa, I was left at Grandma’s house with them for a couple of hours most Saturday mornings, while Mother did her shopping in town. The tales of my experiences and misadventures there are graphically told in ‘Nails Too Bent to Keep’ and ‘Maggots in Paradise,’ the two stories preceding this one.

Before World War II about eighty-five percent of Australia’s people came from Great Britain which often was referred to as ‘the old country.’ As children we marched into school from assembly to rousing songs such as ‘The British Grenadiers,’ ‘Rule Britannia,’ and ‘Do Ye Ken John Peel,’ and sang them, too. We were made to stand and sing the British national anthem. We also sang ‘Waltzing Matilda.’ It makes me smile now, to recall one of the verses of ‘Advance Australia Fair,’ which we used to sing then, without questioning any of the words:

‘When gallant Cook from Albion sailed,
To trace wide oceans o’er,
True British courage bore him on,
‘Til he landed on our shore.
And there he raised old England’s flag,
The emblem of the brave.
For all her faults we love her still,
Britannia rules the waves.’

My father gained work on the lighthouses having been a signaler, with Morse code and semaphore flags, in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in the Great War. He lost this position in 1928, due to the impact of the ‘Great Depression’ of 1919 to 1938, because he was an English returned soldier, and Australian returned soldiers were given work preference. Father worked for the railways for a year or so until he lost that job for the same reason. Then he did ‘subsistence’ work for Ipswich City Council, until in 1931 we went up to Mount Isa for him to work in the Mine. It was commonplace to see men ‘hump’ their ‘bluey’ or ‘swag’ and ‘billy-can’ walking long distances, sometimes with a dog companion, in the search for work. It was customary, at most houses where they asked, to give them a ‘feed’ to help them on their way.

In East Ipswich, each morning Mother went across the street with a quart jug, to get milk from the Rissons in exchange for vegetables. Mr. Ward, who kept the corner shop in the next street, bartered supplies for our vegetables such as beans, peas, cabbages, tomatoes and eggs if the hens were laying well, or an unlucky hen if they weren’t. The back door of most houses was left unlocked for the butcher and iceman to have access to the icebox. As Mother used to say, there wasn’t much to steal.

During the Depression years, most men rode bicycles while women and children used ‘shanks’ pony.’ Children were used to walking, often a mile or more, to and from school, carrying a ‘port.’ Father rode a bicycle to work, and Laurie, my brother, got a used one when he was eleven years old. By working at the hospital, Mother paid one off for me when I went to high-school. We mended punctures, pumped up tyres and patched leaky inner tubes. Married women were not allowed to work in professions or ‘white collar’ jobs, which were reserved strictly for men until World War II.

Shortly before my brother was born, in the middle of my fourth year, my parents took me out on our front verandah one bright, starry night. As he liked to do on such clear, dark-blue-sky nights when, as he would say, ‘the heavens seem so close to the earth,’ Father pointed out to me some of the great constellations such as Orion the Hunter and The Southern Cross. Then Mother said, “We have a big surprise for you. You are going to have a dear little baby brother or sister soon.” She went on to tell me how happy we all would be, and how good it would be for me to have someone with whom I could share my toys and play.

However, those were fatal words as far as their peace and hopes were concerned for a long time to come. I was very indulged, had not had to share anything with anyone in my four-and-a-half years, and was used to commanding the sole attention of my parents. I had a temper tantrum, shouted that they were not to get me a brother or sister, and altogether quite ruined their anticipated pleasant surprise.

When Mother went into hospital for the baby, I was sent to stay for ten days at a dairy, which was recommended by the Rissons, who lived across from us and kept a cow. Two girls aged seven and nine years lived at the dairy, and often took me to the barn to see the cows getting milked. One day we watched some kittens being born, and the girls told me that was how babies were born, out of their mother’s tummy. They laughed at me when I told them babies were found under cabbages early in the morning, after being put there by fairies, or else bought at a baby hospital.

After my visit at the dairy, I came home with nits in my long, golden curls and confused about how babies came into the world. I would have nothing to do with my baby brother and thought for a time that I had a new mother. This one wasn’t like the old one in some ways, not only looking different, but also seeming much more impatient with me. She was angry when she heard what the girls at the dairy had said about how babies were born, and made me cry when she used a nasty-smelling lotion and fine-tooth comb on my tangled hair, to get rid of the nits.

Thoughts about childbirth occupied my mind until I was satisfied, through careful self-examination, that the only way a baby could come out of its mother was through her navel. I felt sure that must be terribly painful, and could well explain Mother’s crossness. I told her what I thought about the way babies got born, and declared that I was never going to have any children. She only laughed, and said I might have to change my mind if ever I got a husband. Grandma sometimes declared she was sure I was born with ‘an extra-large bump of curiosity,’ because I asked a lot of questions and liked to listen to grownups’ conversations. My garbling of information gleaned from overhearing women talking about such things, probably was responsible for the conclusion I reached (which satisfied me for years), about childbirth.

After the nits were gone, I went to stay at Grandma’s house for a few days and, probably at Mother’s request, she took me to a hairdresser. Ignoring my wailing, the woman cut off my hair to just below my ears and gave me a fringe. It was an awful shock, seeing myself in Grandma’s dressing-table mirror, with short straight brown hair instead of long golden curls. My face looked strange to me, I felt quite unlike myself, and was altogether unhappy. When he came home, Grandma told Uncle Tom that she was ‘completely done in’ by my ‘shenanigans,’ and he was to keep me away from her for the rest of the day, to save her sanity. That suited me well because, when she was in one of those moods, I preferred to be with him, anyway.

Another terrible thing happened to me on that visit. I had some little holes in my baby teeth. Ignoring all my protestations, Grandma took me to the dentist. He came out into the waiting room to take me into the surgery, because I wouldn’t go in, and held tightly to Grandma’s skirt. She disengaged my hands firmly and said to him, “Take no nonsense from this little madam, she’s been too used to getting all her own way. He put me in the chair, cranked it up with his foot, and told me to open my mouth. I wouldn’t, and he couldn’t make me, even with the nurse helping him. He picked me up, and thrust my head out of the window. “Look down there,” he said. “If you don’t do as you are told, I’ll throw you down into the street.” It was a long way down from the third floor, and I was petrified, so that three baby teeth were filled without me making a sound. It wasn’t painful that first time, but for many years afterwards teeth were filled without use of anaesthetic, or with a very small amount, so that it was in varying degrees a painful process.

My stay at Grandma’s house was not a happy one, even when Uncle Tom was there. She said such things as, “That child’s got her nose out of joint,” or, “That one’s turned into a little green-eyed monster” and “It’s about time that little madam got her come-uppance.” Uncle Tom was kind to me by letting me follow him about and help him with his collection, and I played games with Blackie. But despite knowing that there was now a baby boy at my house, for once I was glad to leave Grandma’s house.

When I was taken home Mother made a big fuss of me, telling me that I looked so much older and nicer with my hair cut short. But I didn’t want to be older and truly hated the way I looked, with my hair cut so short that it was halfway up to my ears. I was altogether very unhappy, and showed it. I disliked watching Mother breast-feeding the baby and singing lullabies to him, and objected to Father carrying him and singing to him instead of to me. It seemed as though they were too occupied with my brother to have patience with me or do things that amused me and, for the first time in my short life, my demands went unheeded.

Tired of my scowling face, one day Mother stood me in front of her dressing-table mirror and made me stare into it until, I laughed. She said, “There! You see! Always remember that when you make an angry face you look ugly, but when you laugh or smile you look quite pretty.” For years afterwards I smiled prettily into every mirror or shop window I passed, and at everybody I saw. My vanity must have been a source of amusement to mother, and the habit persisted into old age. I still find myself smiling at people, even strangers, who sometimes look a little bewildered.

When my baby brother Laurie was some seven months old, and I was into my fifth year, Uncle Ben and Aunt Hannah came to lunch. I resented the attention they gave to the baby, so after they left I gave him the bar of kitchen soap to suck, as he always put things into his mouth. When his mouth frothed and he cried I put the soap back on the sink in the kitchen, and was frightened when Mother thought Laurie was having a fit. Father went across to use the Risson’s telephone to call Doctor Trumpey, who came right away. I still can remember standing with hands pressed against the wall, looking up at three angry faces looking down at me, as the doctor examined the baby, bent down and smelled his mouth and asked, “Who put soap in this baby’s mouth?” Doctor Trumpey was quite cross, and exclaimed, “That child deserves a good hiding!” That was the first time I got Father’s razor-strop on my legs, but not the last.

A few months later my naughtiness again got me into trouble. Because there were only two cars in our street which was closed at one end, it was safe for children. When my brother Laurie was about nine months old, some afternoons Mother let me push him in his pram up the grassy footpath to the closed end, where lived three girls a little older than I was. Then I brought him back to where she was watching for us. I had collected six half-pennies (threepence), before she found out, from the mother of one of the girls, that I had been pulling aside my little brother’s napkin, to show the girls how a little boy was different from us. The money, which I had been keeping in one of Father’s old ‘Log Cabin’ pipe tobacco tins under my mattress, was given back to the girls. I was smacked by Mother, who couldn’t for the life of her understand why I did so many wicked things. But I was glad Father was away from home working for the Railways, so that I didn’t get his razor strop on my legs.

The poem with which this story opens entered into my life because Mother said that she was growing sick and tired of smacking me, because it didn’t seem to make my behaviour improve. I think the fact that I learned to read early in life could have been due to my natural curiosity, and Mother often got me a book along with hers when she went to the free School of Arts Library. When I was in my sixth year, saying that the words, altered to fit my appearance, really were meant for me, Mother printed the poem on a card that she put on my bedroom wall at my eye level. I was forced to learn it by heart and, whenever I got into trouble, for a time she made me repeat the words to her instead of a smack. That poem was the bane of my life until Mother stopped replacing it when it kept falling off the wall. She probably was as tired of it by then as I was, but I can understand why I still remember the words.

Before my brother’s birth Father made me a small wheelbarrow, which I used to help him in the garden, and he taught me the name of each plant that I put into my small plot, which was similar to his big one. Most suburban gardens in the 1920s were patterned on the ones people were familiar with in the ‘Old Country.’ Often there was a pretty English-style cottage garden in front of the house, and a vegetable patch and fowl-run at the back. Usually, a chicken-wire trellis concealed both the outdoor lavatory and fowl-run. On our trellis Father grew green or yellow runner beans and sweetpeas, in season, and in front of the lavatory was a ‘Nellie Kelly’ passionfruit vine. On the trellis at Grandma’s house were choko vines and passionfruit vines.

Father used to say that people always should have respect for bees and earthworms and never harm them, because they were the gardener’s friends and a source of life on earth. As a result of his words I got into the lifetime habit of covering up and patting down any earthworm I uncovered with my hand-trowel. Father also impressed on us that we should never call good soil or earth ‘dirt’ as that word was an insult. Dirt was something to be swept up and thrown away. To this day, out of respect to nature, I have given due respect to earthworms and bees and never called garden soil ‘dirt.’

In our street the clotheslines consisted of two lines attached to crossbar posts at each side of the backyard. They stretched across, half way between the lavatory and the house, and were lifted high up in their centre by tall, slender poles. At three-monthly intervals the clothesline-pole man came along in his cart, and called out to housewives to come buy the eight-foot long poles, which had a ‘V’ shape at their top end to hold the clothesline high in the air. Every Monday morning, along the street washing would appear on clotheslines, the earlier the better, unless rain was teeming down.

On washing day, which was always Monday, when the fire under the wood-burning washing copper was just right, I sometimes was allowed to place a potato to bake in the hot embers. I watched it cook until the skin was dark-brown, when Mother would rake it out with the poker. I loved doing this because for dinner we had only roasted, mashed or chipped potatoes. I still enjoy a baked potato, split and buttered, hot from the oven. But in memory those that came hot from under Mother’s copper some seventy years ago still taste the best.

A huge horse wearing ‘blinkers’ pulled the baker’s high old-fashioned coach. When the baker with his wicker basket delivered the bread at a house, he called out “Trit-Trot!” and the horse plodded to the next house and stopped. When the baker called “Whoa!” and the bill was paid, or he chatted with housewives on his run, the horse waited. At Easter time Mother bought fruity hot-cross buns and served them toasted and buttered for breakfast. She used to sing to us this old ditty from her own childhood in London, when the baker called out, “Come and get your hot-cross buns!”

“Hot-cross buns,
See the old woman runs.
One a penny, two a penny,
Hot-cross buns.
If you have no daughters,
Then give them to your sons.
One a penny, two a penny,
Hot-cross buns.”

In my fifth year 1929 the little girl who lived next-door, Violet Muntz, a playmate of mine and the same age, died of tetanus. Her parents had neglected to have their three children inoculated, and at the bottom of their yard they kept a horse and sulky, which was thought to be the source of the illness.

My parents had seen to it that we children were inoculated against tetanus and, looking back to that time, I am sure it was a good thing they did, because Father preferred using horse manure or blood-and-bone fertilizer to any others and used horse manure given to him by Mr. Muntz, on our garden. Also I sometimes fed carrots to the big, friendly horse, which would come out of its shed, look over the fence, and lick my hand with a very rough tongue if I didn’t get down quickly. It was like a farm horse at the dairy where I stayed while Mother was in hospital having my brother. In fact, it was similar to the Clydesdale which pulled the baker’s old-fashioned high-built coach, which looked like a stagecoach.

Because I fretted so much over the death of my little friend Violet, Mother started to let me have the three girls from the closed end of our street come and skip rope on our grassy footpath. We tied one end of a long piece of rope to the gatepost, and took turns at holding the other end or skipping slowly, fast or in pairs. As we skipped we chanted rhymes passed down through generations of girls. Some old rhymes had a double meaning, such as those about the ‘Grand old Duke of York,’ ‘The Farmer in the Dell.’ All unknowing, we sang about the Great Plague of London, which killed a third of the people in 1666, ‘Atishoo! Atishoo! We all fall down.’ The following rhyme was said to refer to King Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon:

‘I had a little nut tree,
And nothing would it bear,
But a silver nutmeg
And a golden pear.
The King of Spain’s daughter
Came to marry me,
And all on account
Of my little nut tree.

Years later in the United States, I found that my own daughters were chanting and skipping to quite different rhymes, some of them with a history going back to the early settlers. But that time when I was five, between skipping we talked about my friend Violet’s death and I said I was never going to die. The girls, who were older than I was, laughed and told me that I wouldn’t be able to keep from dying, because everyone had to die. I flared up in a temper, saying I would go inside and ask Mother.

I went upstairs into the front room where she was sitting in her rocking chair, near the window and working at making a nightgown for my brother, as baby clothes were usually hand-sewn in those days. I still can recall that scene with the afternoon sun slanting in on Mother, with her pretty, light-brown hair fluffed out in front and coiled into a bun on the nape of her neck with a tortoiseshell comb. She was looking down at her sewing, and had the white lace curtain drawn back so that she could keep an eye on me. She had heard us talking and, when I demanded that she tell me I would never have to die, she reminded me that her first little girl had died, and said everything living on earth, all the people, animals and plants had to die sometime.
The girls were calling for me to come out and play, but I was too embarrassed and distressed by what my mother had told me, to go back to them. I went into my bedroom, threw myself on my bed and cried. As a mother I wrote the following poem about that chastening childhood experience when I was made aware of my own mortality. As a grandmother, I wrote a similar poem which is at the end of this book, opposite a picture of me smiling in my post-graduation robes for teacher of religious education. I was eighty-one on October 2004, and have been teaching children aged between ten and twelve years, for twenty-three years.

It was told to me, when I was five,
that in this world each thing alive
first grows, then dies.

With chin well out and head erect,
I stood defiant to reject
my own demise.

Through many years I’ve come to see
God’s plan of life revealed to me.
So now I know,

when body, mind and spirit tire
and only ash remains of fire,
it is time to go.

Our neighbours on the other side, the Malones were immigrants from Ireland and had only boys whose ages ranged from nine to fourteen years. They said ‘me’ not ‘my,’ ‘yous’ not ‘you,’ and ‘aint,’ not ‘isn’t.’ I liked their ‘brogue,’ and tried to copy it. Then Father took me in hand and for years corrected my lapses from his version of ‘the King’s English,’ so that I grew up speaking a hybrid English-Australian tongue.

One time the younger boy had bandages on his arms and legs. “They’re for school sores” he explained to me, and added, “You mean you aint got any yet?” I cannot understand why, but I was quite envious of him. I got into Mother’s ‘home remedy box’, took some bandages and pins and bandaged one arm and leg, before trying to sneak out of the house to school without her seeing me. However, she caught me and wasted no time in undoing my work, and I got a spanking to go on with.

For my fifth birthday, at the end of 1928, Uncle Ben’s wife Aunt Hannah, came by bus from the next suburb, to visit for a few hours before they and their little boys left for Mount Isa, for my uncle to work as a miner. I must have been waiting anxiously for her, as I remember Mother letting go of me so that I could run down to the corner when we saw Aunt Hannah get off the bus. She bent down and kissed me, then put on my finger a lovely little gold ring with a ‘ruby’ in the centre of a gold heart.

I dearly loved that ring and Aunt Hannah who gave it to me. In ‘Maggots in Paradise,’ is the story of its loss and the dismal time I had going by train with Grandma, from Ipswich over the range to Toowoomba, to stay for a weekend with Uncle Alf and Aunt Lily. Uncle Tom took us to Ipswich Station in his ‘ute.’ Although Brisbane Central Station with its airy glass canopy under which pigeons flew, fascinated me, like other small children I was frightened to be on any railway platform when a roaring, steam-and-smoke-belching train rolled to a grinding stop. Uncle Tom gave me a bag of sweets, which had never happened to me before. Sometimes Father made Turkish delight, or went for an evening walk and brought back a chocolate bar which Mother shared with us. I still remember Grandma’s anger and my anguish when I was sick from the train’s winding track around the mountains, and from eating all the fondant sweets given to me, so that I lost my gold ring down the toilet of the train.

One Saturday Mother took me to have morning tea with the two Misses Ferrier, old ‘maiden ladies’ for whom she ironed. They lived in a very large house, which was crammed with heavy English furniture, ornaments and paintings, and, Mother said later, ‘it all came around the Cape in a sailing ship, years ago.’ They had two servants, a man and wife who ‘lived in,’ the man did yard work and drove the horse and sulky, his wife cooked and did housework. Mother and I were seated at the lacy, cloth-covered dining table, and tea was served from an elegant, English china teapot. There were plates of cucumber sandwiches and, to my mind and eyes, marvelous little animal-shaped biscuits with coloured icing, imported I was told, from London.

While the grownups chatted, I dutifully ate a triangular sandwich and sipped milky tea. Then, one at a time I placed biscuits under my saucer until I had room for no more. I was starting to put them in my pocket, when a Miss Ferrier said: “Excuse me Ellen, would your little girl like a paper bag for her biscuits?” I remember the awful silence, broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock, when Mother lifted the cup and saucer, disclosing five pretty little biscuits in a circle. It was fortunate for me that I had salvaged one in my pocket, as Mother would not allow me to have the others. As we walked home I was tearful, partly because I was denied such a treat and because Mother kept saying how very ashamed of me she was.

On my fifth birthday I received from Uncle Tom and Grandma a lovely, dressed-up doll with golden curls and bright blue eyes, in a porcelain face. I never again had such a doll. I named her ‘Gwendolyn,’ from Mother’s Kate Greenaway Names Book and she was the length of my arm. I wore a Kate Greenaway dress, with smocking on the chest and sleeves. One Friday I insisted on carrying my doll when we went to meet Father at East Ipswich Railway Station. It was a late summer afternoon, a lovely, blue-sky day, but a long and tiring walk. Mother was pushing my baby brother Laurie in his pram, along the well-mown footpaths, and kept slowing down to look at all the pretty gardens we passed. We were wearing hats, as the Australian sun was considered too strong for us to go out-of-doors bareheaded, whatever the season.

As we crossed the macadam road to the railway station, I dropped my porcelain doll. Poor Father, looking forward to coming home after working on the railroad for five days, was greeted by a cross wife, an inconsolable little daughter carrying a beautifully-dressed doll without a head, and baby son crying in sympathy, as babies often do when other children are crying. The remains of the doll disappeared, and for some years I received such gifts as a book, ball, pencil-case, or handkerchiefs as it was said that the loss of both my ring and doll was due to my carelessness.
There were no facial tissues when I was a little girl. The windows of haberdasheries and department stores often displayed artistic arrangements of handkerchief-boxes with pictures of lovely ladies on the covers. These were always a welcome gift, and many handkerchiefs appeared on the clothesline on washday, having been boiled up separately, with washing soda in the water. Most little girls had a pocket in each dress for their ‘hanky,’ and very young ones sometimes had one corner of the handkerchief
pinned with a gold safety pin to the shoulder of their dresses.

In early 1929, being five years old in October of 1928, I started attending Ipswich Central State School, which was on the town side of Queen’s Park. Mother walked with me that first year, pushing my brother Laurie in his pram. I walked home with the two girls who lived at the closed end of Cramb Street, and Mother waited for me on a seat at our end of the park. I was always happy to see her, partly because the two older girls who walked with me used to ask me to spell words, promising me sweets if I could. I didn’t receive any sweets, and when I spelled out ‘littel’ I was upset when they laughed. I think those incidents helped me to come ‘top’ in spelling, so as to win the cone of boiled ‘lollies’ each week, in my class at Mount Isa Convent School..

Each school year I carried a small ‘port.’ The first year it contained a sandwich, cake, fruit, slate-board, slate-pencils, and a damp sponge in a ‘Log Cabin’ tobacco tin, for wiping clean the slate-board. My white panama hat, which was cleaned weekly with ‘Blanco,’ was dark-blue under the brim and had an elastic band to go under my chin. When I got to school each morning the hat was placed, with my port, on a hook on the rack outside my classroom. Then I hurried downstairs and joined the other girls in my class, at sharpening our slate-pencils to a point on the concrete. Towards the end of the year, nearing four o’clock, Mother appeared in the doorway of the Headmaster’s office, where I was sitting on the linoleum-covered floor writing fifty times on a sheet of paper, ‘I must not talk in school.’ Mother scolded the Headmaster, and next week I was transferred to East Ipswich Convent School.

From the beginning of school life we learned our ‘times tables.’ Each year we said them over and over by rote, in a singsong fashion, until we knew them all by heart up to ‘twelve times’ tables. We learned them so well that still I can do them, randomly, without error. We practised progressive mental arithmetic until we left primary school, and learned many Latin and Greek ‘roots’ to help us ‘parse’ out the meaning of words and spell them correctly. We rarely misbehaved, for fear of the cane.

When I was fourteen years old, the boy behind me dipped the ends of my plaits in his inkwell, and when I flicked them, ink went everywhere. I cried, he got caned, and the ends of my plaits stayed a faded blue for a few weeks. That boy became a Spitfire Pilot and was killed in a ‘dog-fight’ over England. I heard later that thirteen boys from the two seventh-grade classes at Blair State School were killed in World War II.

Occasionally a few girls would ‘name call’ other girls who would answer back: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Sometimes boys would come to ‘fisticuffs, but I never heard swear words uttered by children during my schooldays apart from a simple ‘bloody’ or ‘damn.’ Different times bring different customs, but not many of them are improvements on the old ones.

The boys had a rhyme which we girls thought was rude: ‘Silly Willie Wagtail, sitting on the cow’s tail. Watch out, Willie Wagtail, you’ll get a cup of tea.’ A girl named Kareen, who lived at the closed end of Cramb Street, said to me, “Listen to that bird, it always calls my name.” I listened, and believed her. Still, when I hear the magpie-lark calling, I can recall how envious I felt, and how, when I told Mother about Kareen and the bird, she said, “Come downstairs, I’ll show you something especially yours.” Just outside our back fence grew a large tree covered in lovely lavender flowers. Mother said, “On the 27th October, you will be six years old. Never forget that the jacaranda tree blooms on your birthday.” And still, when the beautiful jacaranda tree is in its glory, I tell that story to my long-suffering relatives and friends.

About that time Charles Dickens made a lasting impression on me when I went with the school to see my first ‘movie,’ ‘The Old Curiosity Shop.’ I was left with the indelible memory of the obscene Mr. Quilp dancing on Little Nell’s fingers, as she was scrubbing the steps. Later I studied Dickens’ ‘social reform’ novels and the ‘Industrial Revolution,’ and realized the inequity of a social system that condoned the gross exploitation of a ‘lower-class’ by a mostly apathetic Victorian ‘upper-class.’

My sixth birthday was disappointing because my parents were very angry with me. The front and back stairs of our house each had a wooden railing, which needed painting. One Saturday morning Father sanded and painted the front railing a lovely, glossy dark-green. Mother called us up for lunch, so he put the lid on the tin of oil-based paint and the brush in turpentine in another tin, in the bathroom. This was under the house next to the laundry with its concrete ‘set-in’ tub and washing-copper. While we were eating, Mother said, “Charles, when you have time, these kitchen chairs could do with a coat of paint.” In our kitchen the sink surrounds, like the tabletop, were of bare pine and sand-stoned. As at Grandma’s house, the table and mantelpiece over the stove recess had oilcloth covers, hers with flowers and ours with blue-and-white checks. The chairs were painted white, to match the legs of the table.

After lunch Father went out, and Mother tidied up the kitchen. Then she took my baby brother into her bedroom for his afternoon nap. I remembered Mother saying that the kitchen chairs needed a coat of paint. I thought if I could do that for her it would save Father a job, and be a big surprise for them. I carried one of the chairs downstairs onto the back lawn, got out the paint can and brush and started. It was very hard and messy work, but I thought the chair looked lovely painted a glossy dark-green, so I went upstairs and got another one. I was almost halfway through painting it, when Mother appeared on the backstairs landing and started screaming at me.

I was smacked hard, stripped off, and put in the bathtub under the cold-water shower downstairs, which was used only by Father. After being scrubbed clean of the dark-green paint which had got on my skin and dress, I was put into my pyjamas, told not to come out of my room unless I needed to go to the lavatory, and Father would deal with me. When he came home Mother told him off for leaving the paint where I could get at it. Father said she should have been watching what I was doing. He was angry because he had a hard job scraping the green paint off the chairs so as to paint them white again. I kept quiet and stayed in my room out of the way. I was very cross with
Mother because she wouldn’t listen to me at all, when I was explaining that I had only wanted to help by painting the chairs as she had asked Father to do. I thought it was unfair that I had been punished when I was only trying to help and surprise them.

One Saturday morning Father and a friend were putting ‘sparrow-proof’ wire around under the eaves of our house, because we were getting sparrow lice. Also they had to spray insecticide to get rid of the sparrows and their lice. It made me cry because the baby sparrows were dead when they were thrown, with the nests, down on the lawn. Mother said perhaps I would like to bury them, and put little crosses on their graves. But she forgot to watch how I went about it, as she was busy preparing lunch.

It took me some time to collect the baby sparrows in my small wheelbarrow, and cart them to a bare plot in Father’s vegetable patch. I dug a hole for each baby sparrow, and buried them in wax-proof lunch paper bags that I had taken from the kitchen cupboard along with a box of matches. Then I put matchsticks on top of each tiny grave. When he saw what I had done Father was angry with Mother for giving me such an idea, and with me for burying the sparrows in his vegetable patch, because he couldn’t put his plants there until he had dug up the sparrows. I was upset, but his friend thought it all very funny, and said that maybe Father should consider that patch ‘consecrated ground.’ The next morning all the matchsticks were gone. Father had unearthed all the tiny corpses and disposed of them in a bag in the rubbish bin. Poor baby sparrows! When I asked Mother what that man meant by ‘constipated ground,’ she laughed and explained why real cemeteries are called ‘consecrated ground.’

From my earliest memories until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, when he entered the R.A.A.F., Father played a Hawaiian steel guitar made of rosewood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl decoration all around its edges. Father had taken guitar lessons from two Hawaiian teachers at a studio in Brisbane. Inside the guitar was a picture of a Hawaiian girl dancing the hula in a grass skirt. I liked to watch him using the ‘steel’ and finger-picks on the strings, making music. That guitar kept him company when he was away from us on the lighthouses or railway. One song he often played and sang was about ‘a little brown girl in a little grass skirt, in a little grass shack in Hawaii.’ After he played and sang that song the guitar would sound out a ‘twang’ and, if Mother happened to be nearby, Father would wink at me and smile at her. Sometimes she smiled back, but at other times she frowned and said an island life would suit him very well, with little brown girls to run and fetch to his every beck and call.

We enjoyed the age-old British custom of having ‘get-togethers,’ when we gathered around a gramophone or piano and sang songs and recited poetry My Uncle Tom played his harmonica with lots of trills, was much admired as a whistler, and imitated birdcalls. Uncle Alf played the piano-accordion. Sometimes Uncle Bert, his hand on Grandma’s shoulder, recited ‘Somebody’s Mother,’ and sang ‘My Mother’s Rosary:

‘Ten baby fingers, and ten baby toes,
She’d count them in the morning sun.
And when her daily work was done,
She’d count them over, every one.
That was my mother’s rosary.’

Each of the children present was given a role to sing, when we gleefully performed the lengthy ‘round’ song ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ The many verses start off with:

‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ ‘Who saw him die?’ ‘Who’ll toll the bell?’
‘I’ said the sparrow, ‘I’ said the fly, ‘I’ said the bull,
‘with my bow and arrow, ‘ with my little eye, ‘because I can pull,
I killed Cock Robin.’ I saw him die.’ I’ll toll the bell.’

Everybody sang the Chorus:

‘All the birds of the air were a-sighing and a-sobbing,
When they heard of the death of poor Cock Robin.
When they heard of the death of poor Cock Robin.’

Apart from humorous works as leavening, ballads and poetry of the first three decades of the twentieth century imitated the genre of serious sentimentality popular in all aspects of artistic expression, and life, in Victorian times. Mother’s brothers were tenors and sang along with a piano. Father had a fine baritone voice and sometimes accompanied himself on his guitar. He used to recite or sing dramatic or humourous monologues. Popular with his audience was an amusing piece which described what a suitor saw when ‘he ventured like bold Columbus, / other regions to explore, / and took a quiet picture, / through the keyhole in the door’ of the bedroom of a lady to whom he had proposed marriage. That man got an awful ‘eyeful’ when she put her glass eye in a jug of water then took off her wig, false bosom and a false leg.

Whenever, towards the end of the evening’s entertainment, Father recited with great feeling a melodrama, ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God,’ I was left fearful of the dark. At home, Mother waited for me on the backstairs, while I went down to the lavatory next to the fowl-run. I felt sure the ‘bogey man’ could be lurking to steal bad children. He was a real threat to an imaginative and often naughty child.

‘Casey Jones,’ a rollicking song placed at the end of this story, was a favourite with us children. Father learned it from American Army Corp soldiers in France, whom the K.O.S.Bs fought beside in the trenches in 1917 and 1918. The way he sang the song, one could imagine the train rolling along the railway sleepers. It was about ‘a brave engineer,’ who, ‘on a fast express won a glorious fame.’ Casey’s last wish was to be a driver on the M.K.T. Line. When I went to Texas in 1947 I found that my father-in-law was a Conductor on the ‘Katy’ or the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Line.

Long after World War I, and until post-World War II, Great Britain had her Empire, and Australia’s population was mainly, and proudly, British. All of my male relatives had good singing voices, and often sang in harmony ‘gung-ho’ patriotic-type tunes with robust, stirring words as, ‘The Road to Mandalay,’ which I have put between the first two stories, ‘Nails Too Bent to Keep’ and ‘Maggots in Paradise.’ Whenever Aunt Hannah’s brothers came and played Irish ballads on their fiddles, everybody sang along, and still I remember some of the lyrics. Sometimes we children were allowed to join in the general singing by blowing hard on combs wrapped in tissue paper. At times Grandma would scold us because of the ‘din’ we made, and say that we were “never backward in coming forward.”
Mother taught me to recite the next poem, with gestures, when I was four years old:

“When I was at a party,”
Said Betsy, aged just four,
“A little girl fell off her chair,
Right down upon the floor.

And all the other little girls
Began to laugh, except for me.
I didn’t laugh a little bit,”
Said Betsy, grave and wee.

“And why didn’t you laugh, darling?”
“Or don’t you care to tell?”
“I didn’t laugh,” said Betsy,
“Because I was the girl who fell.”

Mother sometimes sang an old ballad with Grandma, who would say “pleased to oblige, I’m sure,” when asked to recite or sing her special ‘pieces.’ As she had been taught to do as a child, gestures and facial expressions accompanied her recitations and songs. I am sure that many of these would be received with amusement by the audience of today. Grandma would be bewildered by such a reaction to her performances, as she was used to having them received with respect and appreciation. The next poem is one she learned in 1875, aged five, and which she taught to me when I was that age. However, I refused to recite it because recently I had lost my own beautiful, well-loved, porcelain doll ‘Gwendolyn,’ given to me on my fifth birthday. Ignoring my woe, Grandma recited the ‘piece,’ complete with gestures, to an appreciative audience all of whom had heard it many times before:

‘I once had a beautiful doll, dears,
The most beautiful doll in the world.
Her face was so pink, and so white, dears,
And her hair was so beautifully curled.

But I lost my beautiful doll, dears,
When out by the haystacks, at play.
And I never could find where she lay, dears,
Though I searched for many a day.

Then they found my beautiful doll, dears,
When the mowers were scything the hay.
But oh! she was terribly changed, dears,
For her paint was all washed away

.And her arm trodden off by the cows, dears,
And her hair not the least bit curled.
But for old time’s sake, she is still, dears,
The most beautiful doll in the world.’

I cherish the memories of those gatherings and especially of Father singing English and Scottish ballads and those he learned from American Army troops that his Regiment fought alongside in World War I. A few that he sang to himself were featured in the Musical, ‘O! What a Lovely War.’

When I went to America as a bride in 1947, nobody recalled those songs about States such as Michigan, Georgia and Texas, which Father used to sing to us. Most of them expressed the heart-felt yearning for home felt by young soldiers living, sometimes dying, in the muddy, often repeatedly fought-over, trenches of war-ravaged Europe in 1917 and 1918. I remember one song which went like this:

‘I want to go home, I want to go home.
I don’t want to fight in the trenches no more,
Where the ‘Jack Johnsons’ and ‘Whiz-Bangs’ do roar.
Take me over the sea, where the Aleman can’t get at me.
Oh! My! I’m too young to die, I want to go home.’

Another I remember yet, was:

‘I want to go back,
I want to go back to the farm,
Far away from harm,
With a milk-pail on my arm.
I miss the rooster,
The one that useter
Wake me up at five a.m.
I guess this great big city
May be very pretty.
But nevertheless, I want to be there,
I want to see there
A certain someone full of charm,
That’s why I wish again
That I were in Michigan,
Down on the farm.’

Studying Victorian History in my fifties, I found that, in spite of the great differences in social and living standards existing through ‘upper,’ ‘middle,’ and ‘lower’ classes, there was a strong common link in the preoccupation with and acceptance of death both in literature and real life. Eschatological rituals were observed strictly by, and cut across, all strata of society. I realized that the following song I learned in the 1920s was representative of sentimental verse at a time in history when the mortality rate, especially among children, was so very much higher than it is nowadays.

Although as a little girl I liked to hear Grandma and Mother reciting or singing dear old ballads, the exception was ‘Little Boy Blue,’ by Eugene Field, about his small son, circa 1885. This song always left me with the fear that I too would die in my sleep. It was sung in a semi-monotone and of course, with appropriate gestures.

LITTLE BOY BLUE

‘The little toy dog is covered with dust,
Yet steady and staunch he stands.
The little toy soldiers are red with rust,
And their muskets mould in their hands.
Time was when that little toy dog was new,
And the soldiers were marching fair.
That was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Took them, and put them there.
“Now don’t you move, until I come,” he said,
“And don’t you make any noise.”
Then toddling off to his trundle bed,
He dreamed of his pretty toys.
But while he was dreaming, an angel’s song
Awakened our Little Boy Blue.
Ah! The years are many, the years are long,
But those little toy friends are true.
Faithful to Little Boy Blue, they stand,
Each in the self-same place.
Awaiting the touch of a vanished hand,
The smile on a little boy’s face.
And they wonder, while waiting the long years through,
In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue
Since he kissed them, and put them there.’

Edna, my parents’ first child, died, and Mother was very ill, in the plague-type epidemic which took so many lives, starting in Europe, after World War I, and lasting into the early 1920s. Old cemeteries bear witness to the dreadful toll taken by the disease, particularly on young children.

When I studied the history of World War II and its aftermath, I found that some sources considered this terrible illness, loosely called ‘influenza,’ could have resulted from ‘ the hasty mass interment of bodies on the battlefields of Europe. One report I read, stated that: ‘It is believed that insufficient precautions were taken to inhibit the spread of disease, particularly by rats.’

As a result of my parents’ tragic loss, I was spoiled, and being a pretty child made it easier for me to get my way. I only had to point at Father for him to be my willing slave. When I was given a meccano set, together we built a bridge over a galvanised tub filled with water. I used to place tiny celluloid dolls in toy matchbox boats, with paper sails on matchsticks, in the water under the bridge. I would puff at the sails to move the tiny boats to a landing place. Later my brother and I often played that game in Mount Isa. Sometimes we landed the occupants of the matchbox boats safely at a dock, and at other times we created storms and great waves, gleefully drowning each other’s little people. Often that meccano bridge was ‘a bridge over troubled waters’ and, for some years, one of our favourite games.
Father also made wooden toys for me: a doll cradle, a table and chair and an ironing board, which I used with a pretend iron to press clothes for my doll. Once he made a puppet theatre with painted puppets dressed by Mother, and a scene painted on a backdrop draped over a kitchen chair. These had to be left behind in late 1931, when we went up to Mount Isa for three years, for Father to work in the Mine. In those twenty years of the ‘Great Depression’ men went about the country in search of work, often hitching rides on freight trains when the guards ‘looked the other way.’

In the grassy field behind our house in East Ipswich, from 1934 until 1936 when our house was sold, we flew kites Father made, just like those his father had made for him and his brothers, with butcher’s paper, thin wooden slats, string and glue. Each of Father’s kites had a painted face and a long rag tail with paper bows along it. I held up the tail as we walked to the field. When the breeze was ‘just right’ and the kite was flying well, we sent messages (paper ‘wishes’ with holes in them) all the way up the long string to ‘heaven.’ Our kite always flew high with its long tail floating behind, and the messages would go all the way up the string to the body of the kite. Often Father held the string for Laurie and me, so we didn’t lose our kite. It is very sad, seeing your lovely kite drifting far away, high in the sky, tail floating out behind.

When he spent some months in hospital in 1918, the last year of the Great War, Father learned to paint with oils, garden scenes or pictures of flowers, mainly pansies and violets with their leaves, on velvet or wood, for use as a decoration of a table or dresser. Once in a while he let me use a small, hard paintbrush and scrap of material, and I tried to copy what he did. Mother learned to draw in school and I remember well, her pictures of beautiful ladies she called ‘Gibson Girls,’ with small waists, lovely hair piled atop their heads, and big, puffy ‘leg-o’-mutton’ sleeves.

In 1935 our neighbour, Mrs. Malone, gave us an old go-cart, but it had no brake, and Mother said it was to stay in our street. But when she sent us to Ward’s shop in the next street, we sneaked out with the go-cart. On our way home it went out of control on a downward slope and we were tossed onto the footpath, sore and shocked but uninjured. We managed to scrape most of the dirt off the butter, but we couldn’t get the sugar, which was dirty, back into its broken bag. I had no way to avoid being punished for that incident, and the go-cart was given back to its former owners.

As I grew, I stayed disinclined to admit to guilt. I had been baptized an Anglican, and at my ‘Confirmation’ at age twelve, we sang the hymn ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is.’ Father nudged me and pointed to the words ‘perverse and foolish oft I strayed.’ When I hear the dear old hymn I recall that scene with a tinge of sadness. Despite the discontinuity between childhood and old age, I have kept some of that contrary child’s curiosity. I love to wander along a beach, collecting shells, driftwood and ‘treasure trove’ cast up by the tide. I have had too many ‘collections’ to count, and all have gone by the way, but still, in old age I am happy just to be by the sea.

Father’s flower garden and vegetable patch were like those of his father who had grown tuberous begonias for competition showing in his greenhouse in Walthamstow, London. In 1956 my husband was stationed for three years at Sculthorpe Air Force Base, Tactical Air Command, north of London. With our first two small daughters we visited a few times with my Uncle Laurie, Father’s youngest brother, who lived with his wife and son in the same house in which he and his brothers had been born.

Father, the third of four sons, sometimes told us stories of his youth. His mother, Annie (nee Rendell) who died, aged forty-one years, when he was thirteen years old, was of Scottish descent, which was why he enlisted in a Scottish regiment in World War I. She was a friend of a Romany named Rose Lee, Queen of a Gypsy tribe, who visited my Grandmother and told her fortune each year when the caravans came to London. Father told me that after her last visit, when he came home from school his mother was sitting crying at the kitchen table with her apron thrown over her head. She said the gypsy had foretold her death. That scene remained with him all his life.

Grandfather, who was the son and grandson of bookbinders, married his housekeeper who had two daughters, one of whom, Grace, in 1917 married father’s oldest brother Fred, who was found unfit for service. During the war poor Fred twice received white feathers, a cruel practice indicating cowardice. Father found on his return from France that his small savings allotment which was sent home monthly, was given to Fred and Grace on their marriage. My mother went there a few times for Saturday dinner. She told us that she was overawed by the white damask tablecloth, the silver serviette rings, cutlery and cruet set, and the fine china service and dining room furniture.

We enjoyed hearing tales about our great-uncle’s service with the Army in the ‘Zulu War’ in 1879, when Britain was colonising Southern Africa, and of the ferocious fighting qualities of the Zulus under Chief Cetewayo. There was a great loss of life on both sides, and we children heard stories of how many British soldiers died gallantly at their posts. Father used to condemn what he called ‘the futility’ of the Boer War. As a boy he was told the reason Zulu warriors were so recklessly fearsome in battle was because they were not allowed to take a wife until their spear had tasted human blood. When he left England in 1920 there were two crossed assegais, souvenirs of that war, above the dining-room fireplace in his home, and also a replica in a glass case of Nelson’s Flagship ‘Victory,’ which our grandfather had made. Those artefacts still were there in 1957 when we visited Uncle Laurie and his wife, Lily.

Uncle Laurie who was our father’s youngest brother, trained as a pharmacist and served as a Medical Orderly in the British Army, throughout the Burma Campaign, in World War II. Father said that because of the nature of his work, Uncle Laurie had a ‘rotten war.’ We exchanged letters a few times while I was serving in the Australian Air Force, W.A.A.F. After meeting him I became very fond of him, as he was a lovely man, pleasant in appearance and unassuming in manner. I have always wished we could have seen each other more often while I was in England in the late 1950s.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, Grandma was thirty years old, and for the rest of her life kept her Victorian outlook and standard of morality. In twenty-six years of marriage she had borne fourteen children and was proud of having reared eight of them. Grandfather’s death at age forty-eight in 1914, was sometimes referred to by Grandma as ‘an Act of God.’ Usually it was attributed to ‘galloping consumption,’ a deadly disease which struck indiscriminately in nineteenth century England.

This was a type of tuberculosis common in London for many years, when there were coal or coke fires in all the houses and at night street gas-lights were yellowish blurs in the foul, eye-stinging ‘pea-souper’ fogs which often lasted for days. In Victorian times the eschatological concept was accepted with sad resignation. They envisaged for the dead ‘a better land’ which was the subject of many songs of that era.

None of Grandma’s five surviving sons ‘touched the drink.’ She had forbidden them to do so as, towards the end of his life my grandfather drank a lot at the ‘pub.’ Mother used to say, “None of us dared disobey our mother. Her word was law in our family.” Although barely five feet tall and soft-speaking unless very angry when she would get red in the face and seem to swell up, to the end of her life in 1953, none of the family would risk Grandma’s displeasure. Once I saw her rise up from her chair at a large family dinner, and ‘clip the ear’ of a married son who had made a remark which she considered to be ‘in bad taste.’ The chastisement was accepted in silence.

Grandma wore her ‘widow’s weeds’ for years after Grandfather died, mainly because she could not afford to buy new clothes. Because her oldest sons, Alf and Tom, were living in Australia, she too emigrated in 1920 with her three youngest sons. She still was wearing semi-mourning attire, as evidenced by her passport photograph. I liked to hear her talk about funerary rites and strict rules of behaviour and dress at times of bereavement and for the prescribed period afterwards. When she allowed me to, I would pore over her black-edged condolence cards and the black drawstring jet-encrusted handbag, gloves and black-edged handkerchiefs. What fascinated me most was a curl of Grandfather’s hair in a glass-covered mourning brooch, which was among the ‘remembrances’ kept in a hatbox on top of her wardrobe.

After Aunt Alice died in 1929, and Uncle Ben was killed in 1930 in a cave-in of silver-lead in Mount Isa Mine, Grandma wore black clothes for a year for each one, and the men of the family wore black armbands. When a funeral procession passed in the street, people who were on the footpaths stood quietly without moving, to show respect for the dead, and every man took off his hat and held it to his chest. A man always ‘doffed’ his hat to a woman he knew, walked on the street side of a woman, and took her arm when crossing a street. Such general observance of good manners was taken for granted through the ‘Great Depression’ years and World War II.

I own a collection of Victorian and Edwardian novels and ‘school-prize’ books. Many of them evince a resignation to death, which is often depicted as a blessed release from earthly woes, to Heaven, which was ‘up there beyond the clouds.’ Most of these books are morally ‘uplifting’ in nature, yielding insight into, and pictures of, events and social customs of those times. Many of them are dramatically illustrated

I always tried to listen to grownups talking among themselves, because by so doing I collected information which, I have to admit, sometimes became garbled in my mind.
Grandma always noticed my presence at such times, and would say, “Nellie, tell that child to leave the room while her elders are talking,” or “Nellie, little pitchers have big ears,” and to me, “Remember child, that curiosity killed the cat.” Only once, when I was about fourteen, I daringly answered her back, saying, “And information brought it back to life. Anyway, that’s why cats have nine lives, Grandma.” I soon regretted my pert rejoinder, because she slapped my cheek and said, “That will teach you not to be cheeky to me, my girl.”

When I had been attending Ipswich Girls Grammar School on a scholarship bursary for a few weeks, Grandma was brought from Brisbane to our house by Uncle Robert in his ute, one Saturday morning for a couple of hours, after writing to tell Mother she was coming. After the usual greetings and morning tea, she sent me out of the room. Filled with curiosity as usual, I sat on the steps near the kitchen window and eavesdropped. I was horrified to hear Grandma say, “Nellie, you must take that big lump of a girl out of school, and put her to work. Times are hard, with this terrible Depression. I grant you she’s clever, but when all’s said and done she’s only a girl. It’s plain foolishness for you to be working at the hospital to keep her in school, when she’ll up and marry and you’ll get nothing back for all your hard work.”

Mother later told me she was determined, when I won the gold medal, that I should continue going to school over Grandma’s opposition and Father’s apathy, because she won a silver medal but left school at fourteen years of age. I was glad she ignored Grandma’s advice in this matter, despite reaping her displeasure for a few months, and that was something which all members of the family tried hard to avoid. In my story, ‘Nails Too Bent to Keep,’ I related how at a large family gathering, when I was fifteen years old and attending Ipswich Girls Grammar School, Uncle Tom told me, “I’m proud of you, Marcie, I always knew you would go a long way, because of your insatiable curiosity.” Later, when I was talking to Mother about that incident we recalled Rudyard Kipling’s story of how the ‘Elephant’s Child’ got his trunk through his ‘’satiable curtiosity.’ We laughed and agreed that Uncle Tom had been having a joke with me, and it didn’t do to under-estimate him or his sense of humour.

In 1929 my Aunt Alice, who was some years older than Mother, died of illness soon after her husband, Bill Sykes, a pianist and songwriter, was killed by a car in Melbourne, where he had gone for an interview to get music published. His music was stolen. Grandma gave a home to Ivy, the oldest girl, until she married a couple of years later, and the other children went to foster homes, paying family visits for holidays. Next year my Uncle Ben died under a fall of silver-lead ore in Mount Isa Mine, leaving Aunt Hannah a widow with three young sons. Those were very sad years for the family, especially Grandma. Late in 1930 she went up to Mount Isa with my Uncles Tom and Robert and my Cousin Ivy, for the men to work in the mine.

One Sunday morning, shortly before my seventh birthday, two of my older orphaned girl cousins who were staying with Grandma in the school holidays, walked over to our house to visit for the morning. After lunch Mother said I could return with them to Grandma’s house, taking her collie dog, Sandy, with us. She was going to come there in the afternoon to get Sandy and me, pushing my brother Laurie in his pram.We had just come out of Queen’s Park and were nearing Grandma’s street, when a motorcar ran over Sandy. One of my girl cousins ran to get Uncle Tom while the other stayed with Sandy who was then lying on the footpath, and I was sent home to fetch Mother. I have never lost any details of that experience. I was running, sobbing bitterly, through the park when, as I tried to tell Mother, ‘a beautiful lady in a pale blue dress and carrying a blue and white frilly umbrella (I later learned it was called a parasol), stopped me, and asked why I was crying.’ I told the lady what had happened, while she wiped my wet, hot face with a lovely lace-trimmed, scented handkerchief. She took out of her white handbag a Nestle’s honey and almond chocolate bar, put a piece of it in my mouth and, placing the rest of the chocolate in my pocket, wrapped up in her handkerchief, sent me on my way.

Sandy was Mother‘s pet. When I threw myself on her and sobbed out the sad story, she was dreadfully upset and slapped me, crying that I should have been minding him better. She said she couldn’t get over how wicked I was, eating chocolate, which was all around my mouth, when Sandy was dying. Mother put Laurie, who was crying out of sympathy with me, into his pram and with me running beside her hurried to the place where Sandy lay. On the way I tried to give her the rest of the chocolate bar, but she threw it, wrapped in the lace-trimmed handkerchief, into the gutter.

When we arrived at the dismal scene my Uncle Tom was there with his ‘ute’ and my cousins, who were very upset. Mother was able to cuddle Sandy before he died. Uncle Tom told her I was not to blame, as I was much younger than my cousins, and the dog should have been on a lead. He said he was sure the blame lay with the careless driver, who would have been able to avoid hitting the dog, as there were very few motorcars on the road. Uncle Tom sent us home, saying he would take care of everything.

Poor Mother and I cried all the way home. Later, when she had recovered somewhat, she told me that she was sorry she had been so hard on me. The accident wasn’t my fault, it was just the terrible shock, and seeing the chocolate smeared around my mouth, which had caused her to lash out at me. I later figured out that I had walked and run about five miles that afternoon. It was a good thing I was wearing my hat, and it was no wonder my legs were aching all night, and next day, although I was well used to walking. In those days, when children’s legs ached the condition often was referred to as ‘growing pains.’

On our way home I found the handkerchief, without the chocolate bar, where Mother had thrown it by the roadside, and put it in my pocket. It was placed with the washing, as it was much too good to be thrown away. That episode in my young life left me with a deep conviction that the beautiful lady was no human being, but an angel sent from God to comfort me, and give me chocolate to ease my hurting. The fact that I have always been a ‘chocoholic,’ especially using it for solace in stressful times, I attribute to that encounter with a lovely angelic being in Queen’s Park, Ipswich.

In Mount Isa in October 1931, for my eighth birthday I received another gold ring, with ‘M’ on it, from Uncle Robert, and from my parents a celluloid baby doll. I got her head caught in a door, and Father mended the crack with Tarzan’s Grip, which was silver-coloured, so that my baby doll had a silver streak around her head, and always wore a bonnet. A neighbour gave me pretty remnants of cloth, and Mother showed me how to put a slit in the back of the neck of the garments, with a button, for the dresses to go over the head of Elizabeth, Josephine, Jacqueline Pollington. Father made her a wooden cradle for Christmas and, Mother helping, I sewed the covers for it.
We lived in the ‘Mines Camp,’ and the ‘tents’ were three-room rectangular houses with unpainted hardwood floors, on galvanised-iron-capped, two-feet-high wooden stumps. The roof and sides were corrugated galvanised iron. The roof was covered by a canvas ‘fly,’ on a centre beam. The upper half of the canvas sides rolled up, and were let down to clip onto the metal sides when the ‘wet’ season came, or at night, when it was cool. There were three steps on both back and front. There was neither electricity nor running water, and Mother cooked out the back in the open.

One late afternoon, soon after my eighth birthday, I was sitting on the front steps, reading ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ a well-loved book given to me by Uncle Tom. I always loved the smell of new books. Mother once told me it amused her to see me sniff a book before reading it. I was so engrossed in my book that I didn’t hear Mother call me to come in for dinner. I had reached the episode where Alice was in the White Rabbit’s house. She couldn’t stop growing, and her arms were sticking out of the windows, while one leg went up the chimney. When Alice became small again and able to get out of the White Rabbit’s house, I closed my book and went indoors. Mother was washing up the dinner dishes and I started to cry, thinking I had missed out on my main meal. But after scolding me she produced my dinner and dessert.

There were no real roads in the camp, only straight lanes between sets of tents. The dusty red earth was covered in ‘gibber’ stones and gravel. The vegetation consisted of spinifex bushes, tussocky grass, and straggly eucalyptus and acacia-type brush. We had no gardens, as the sulphur-smelling water came frothing from a bore. Drinking water was scarce. I recall how much we missed the rain during the long dry season.

Because I used to get bronchitis when we lived in Ipswich, my tonsils were taken out in Mount Isa, where I didn’t have bronchitis, probably due to the dry climate. The hospital was built like the tents, with the same bare unfinished hardwood walls and floors, but it was much larger. I was very scared as I watched the doctor scrub up with strong-smelling red carbolic soap. The patients were all in together, and after my operation there was only tap water to sip. I was feeling horrible as my throat was so sore, and I had been given ether as an anaesthetic, which made it painful to vomit.

There were very few electric lights in the Camp. Kerosene or hurricane lamps were used in the tents. Sometimes the harsh light of a miner’s carbide lamp would flare out whitely into a night lighted only by the star-studded sky. Torches were used for night trips to the lighted communal lavatories. Covered tin buckets were kept in most tents for children to use at night and, in the early morning, were taken to be emptied and washed. I think the bore water was laced with alum, to soften it for general cleaning and washing clothes. It came foaming from taps, and smelled and tasted unpleasant.

Drinking water was collected in a kerosene tin each day, from two ‘good’ water taps. Mother used dried fruit a lot in ‘English’ curries and desserts. Vegetables and fruits such as potatoes, onions, pumpkin, oranges and apples were available, and dear, in the town shops, as were other basic foodstuffs and housekeeping needs. Our ‘Chinese cook stove,’ like those used by Chinese cooks on the ‘diggings,’ was made of sawn-up anthill between flattened kerosene tins. Mother managed to cook good meals in that contraption, although it was difficult to regulate the oven temperature, and she had to wear a hat to cook under a blazing hot sun and blue sky, on most days.

Our living conditions in the 1930s Mount Isa Mines Camp were primitive. Electricity and bore water were in the communal lavatories-latrines, which had tubs with ‘Condy’s Crystals’ in the water, for people to soak their feet to prevent them catching tinea, but many still caught it. At school the girls wore ‘panama’ hats, and boys wore ‘fishermen’s’ hats. At all other times we had straw hats with corks bobbing from the brim, to keep flies away and so stave off ‘sandy blight.’ This nasty scourge was caused by the red dust and flies, which struck down many a child and adult.
Leaving Laurie with Father some Saturday mornings, Mother and I, wearing hats and carrying shopping bags, would walk into town to buy flour, meat, basic vegetables and fruit, and tins of dried or condensed milk, peas and beans. We loved puddings with golden syrup or treacle and sultanas. Sometimes we got books from the library, and Mother used to say that reading kept her going. In Mount Isa a favorite game for us children on hot days was to float tiny celluloid ‘people’ in matchboxes with paper sails, in a large tin tub of smelly bore water. We made wild waves, trying to drown each others ‘people’ by sinking their ‘boats,’ and a lot of water was splashed on the hardwood floor. It was a spirited, time-consuming game, which cooled us off nicely.

A rare outing for us was to an open-air night-time cinema with canvas ‘deck-chair’ seats. In a ‘pit’ under the raised screen a pianist accompanied the black and white pictures with music - soft and slow or rollicking and loud, depending on the scene. Captions were at the foot of the screen when the film was a ‘silent’ one. Two ‘pictures’ were shown, ending towards eleven p.m. In the intermission, boys with trays shouted: “Peanuts, lollies, chocolates, soft-drinks! Charlie Chaplin films were popular, and Mother put her hand over my mouth to stop my screams in scary ones.

Once I lost my sandshoes, and they were found outside a day or two later, with stones and reddish grit embedded in the partly-melted rubber soles, which made the shoes unwearable. I got into trouble for my carelessness, as the workers were then on strike and money was scarce. By the time we left Mount Isa after three years, at the end of 1934, we were all thin and Mother in particular was ‘worn-out.’ I remember how we longed to go south to a better climate and living conditions, and to our old home in Ipswich with Father’s garden - all those good things of life we had missed so much.

Grandma, Uncle Tom, and Uncle Robert who was engaged to Ruby Pollard, left Mount Isa during the long ‘strike.’ My cousin Ivy married and went to Melbourne to live. Those were sad, hard years for Grandma, with the deaths of Aunt Alice and Uncle Ben. My brother and I spent many evenings collecting buckets of white quartz pebbles for his grave. We took them to Uncle Tom, and got threepence for each bucketful. We missed Grandma and the uncles, and were lonely when they left.

The Pollard family, also from England, went to Mount Isa at the same time as Grandma and my uncles. Mrs. Pollard, a long-time friend of Grandma, was a very nice woman. Mr. Pollard, a strict member of the Salvation Army, forbade dancing, cinemas and other amusements for their three daughters. Mother said it was a shame that Mr. Pollard took most of the money the girls earned. Ruby, the youngest, was beautiful in looks, as well as by nature. She and my Uncle Robert fell in love when they met again, when she was eighteen years old and Uncle Robert was twenty. Mr. Pollard would not allow them to marry until Ruby was twenty-one years old.

In February of 2001, it was the anniversary of Uncle Robert’s death, and I telephoned Aunt Ruby who was now eighty-six years old. She was pleased that I contacted her and said she would like to see me again. My friend Phoebe very kindly took me in her car to Holland Park to visit Aunt Ruby, who gave me a couple of old family photographs, and we enjoyed reminiscing about times gone by when she was a young woman and I was a little girl. She had many old family tales to tell, which I enjoyed hearing, but sadly have insufficient space to include in this story.

One story she was surprised that I had forgotten concerned the time when my little brother, Laurie, was lost. I was nine years old, and my brother would have been in his fourth year. Because he had a bad habit of running off, I was always admonished by Mother to ‘keep an eye on him.’ One evening after dinner, enjoying the coolness, we were playing with a few other children between the tents. When Mother called us to come inside, it was discovered that my brother was missing.

Aunt Ruby said, “Marcie, I have never forgotten how sorry I felt for you. You got such a hiding! All the men from nearby tents went looking in different directions for Laurie, but he couldn’t be found. Nellie put the kettle on the primus stove to make tea for everyone. When she opened the kitchen cupboard (which had wire mesh on both sides) there was Laurie fast asleep, holding an empty tin of condensed milk. He had jam and treacle all over him and the cupboard.” I told Aunt Ruby I was glad she had jogged my memory about Mother finding Laurie in the cupboard and how everybody laughed with relief. But I was glad that I blocked out the punishment I received.

In 1933, Father made bottled beer from a recipe given to him by a neighbour. At a very late hour one night we were woken up by a series of loud bangs on the corrugated iron roof, as the corks popped out. All the men who lived nearby, and were not at work, came and drank the beer because, so they said, it wouldn’t keep. Father suffered from a bad headache next morning, and Mother was very angry indeed about the whole affair. She said it was a disgrace, because Father was not used to beer or any strong drink for that matter, and it was a good lesson for him but hard work for her to clean the place up and get rid of the smell.

Poor Father never tried to brew beer again. I rarely saw him drink anything alcoholic, he didn’t seem to have a taste for it. But he liked ginger beer and enjoyed a ‘shandy’ at family reunions, as did many adults then, excepting perhaps those very few who, as the oldest children in primary school were shamed into signing the Salvation Army ‘pledge’ against the dangers associated with strong drink and kept it. In 1938, when I was fourteen years old and in my last year of primary school in Ipswich, the Salvation Army Officers were still going into schools to give a lecture on the dangers associated with alcohol. We were given certificates to sign and keep, pledging that we would not indulge in any alcoholic drink. My Grandma once told me (see ‘Maggots in Paradise’) that this was the custom when she was in her last school year in the early 1880s. She thought that not many kept the pledge. I think that would have applied to my classmates who were coerced into signing ‘the pledge’ in 1938.

The only time I got caned was in 1933 at the Catholic Convent in Mount Isa, when I was nine years old. (I turned ten years old in late October). We were taught by nuns who, in those harsh living conditions and hot climate, must have suffered dreadfully from the heat. They were garbed from head-to-foot in black serge, which also went over the starched white wimple covering forehead and chin, and they wore thick black lisle stockings and heavy lace-up shoes.

Some of the boys called the nuns ‘old magpies’ especially when they had been caned. Looking back, I am sure the call of those nuns to their vocation must have been extremely strong, and they often would have wished for wings, like a bird, to fly south for the summer months. The Mother Superior was stout, red-faced and strict. She kept the polished brass container of bamboo canes in her office, for use on naughty children.

There were two important rules we had to obey, under threat of the cane. The first was that when children went into the grounds at recess they must never go back onto the verandah where, on rows of brass hooks, hung the ‘ports’ and hats. The other rule was that we were never to leave the building without a hat. One day I was so busy talking to a friend that I forgot to put on my hat. I knew the risk I was taking when I went upstairs for it, as I had to admit to the Mother Superior, whose office faced onto the verandah.

As was often the case with grownups, in my experience as a child, she refused to listen to my reason for being on the verandah. She took me into her room, made me extend my arms out, palm up, and administered three ‘cuts’ on each palm. It was a most hurtful experience, both physically and to my pride. I went downstairs and, with my ‘port,’ and wearing my hat, ran all the way home, although it was lunchtime with two-and-a-half more hours of school left.

When Mother saw my red, blistered hands, she was very angry. Next day both my parents (it was during the strike) had an interview with Mother Superior, while I waited on the verandah. I could not hear anything as the door to her office was shut. Afterwards, Mother told me that Father did the talking. In time I came to feel sorry for that poor woman, unsuitably dressed as she was for the climate, and knowing the quality of a ‘dressing-down’ from my father, a quiet, well-spoken Englishman. I attended that school without further incident, and won the paper screw of animal-shaped boiled ‘lollies’ most Fridays for the class spelling bee. In time I was given rosary beads as a prize and soon became adept at saying the rosary and other prayers with my classmates, during religious education periods.

In Mount Isa’s Catholic Convent a routine observed by both students and nuns on many Friday afternoons after school became imprinted on my mind. I was an impressionable child and for the year I was involved in it I found it a frightening experience. We were marched to the nearby church, the interior of which was dimly lit, as no lights were turned on during the day.
In the gloom beyond the entrance was a man-sized statue of Jesus on the cross with the crown of thorns dripping blood down his body, and blood on the nail holes in his hands and feet. In turn, each child had to kneel and kiss those waxen, seemingly bloodstained feet. Then very subdued, we hurried home. After the first year, at my parents’ request, I was excused from participating in that ritual.

At the end of each year a concert was held at the Convent School hall, involving all the students. In 1932, I was nine years old and happy to perform. As Grandma used to say of me, “That one is never backward in coming forward.” I was paired with a reluctant little boy. We each sang a song with two verses each. I have never forgotten the glory of my first performance on a stage. After the boy sang, bashfully,

“I’ll buy you a little watering-can,
To water your garden when the sun goes down,
If you’ll marry, marry, marry, marry,
If you’ll marry me.”

I sang the reply with much shaking of head, stamping of foot and wagging of finger. His last proposal was:

“I’ll buy you a little motorcar,
To carry you near and to carry you far,
If you’ll marry, marry, marry, marry,
If you’ll marry me.”

Knowing that my parents, brother, Grandma and Uncle Tom were in the audience, I answered this proposal even more vehemently, and gleefully, with the following words:

“I don’t want your little motor car,
To carry me near and to carry me far.
I’ll not marry, marry, marry, marry,
I’ll not marry you.”

At Mount Isa Convent School concert at the end of 1933, I had just had my tenth birthday. Three of us little girls were dressed up in kimonos, black wool wigs and ‘oriental’ eye makeup. We waved chrysanthemum-flower-painted paper fans in front of our faces, as we giggled our way through Three little maids from school are we’ from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Opera, ‘The Mikado.’


I knew the words by heart, as my parents had a recording of all the songs, which they played on our ‘wind-up’ gramophone in East Ipswich. Father sometimes used to sing them as he worked around the garden, before and after our years in mount Isa, so that I grew up singing them too. Father’s favourite was, ‘A wandering minstrel I, a thing of threads and patches,’ and mine was, ‘The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la,/
have nothing to do with the case./ I have to take under my wing, tra la,/ a most unattractive old thing, tra la,/ with a caricature of a face.’

In 1937, Mother scraped up the money to take me to a matinee performance of the Borovansky Ballet Company’s ‘The Nutcracker Suite,’ at the Regent Theatre in Brisbane. In 1939 she took me to the Regent Theatre to see ‘The Mikado’ by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. Those were the two most enthralling musical experiences of my life until, in 1958, I had the good fortune to see Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway perform in ‘My Fair Lady,’ at Drury Lane Theatre in London, followed by dinner at that famous restaurant, Simpsons on the Strand.

In Mount Isa in 1933, my parents decided that I should attend the Baptist Church Sunday school with my nine-year-old neighbour, a girl in my Catholic Convent class. Father had been baptised in the Church of England and Mother had attended Baptist Sunday school in England. I was asking to become a Catholic, but only because I wanted to get the pictures of Mary and Jesus, the silver-coated statues of saints, and other rewards for scripture studies which Catholic students were receiving. But I still earned a ‘holy family’ picture and rosary beads for good school work, despite having been baptised in the Church of England as an infant.

The Baptist Sunday school was about a mile away on the ‘town side,’ and we had to cross the dry bed of the Leichhardt River in which water flowed only during the wet season, towards the end of the year. Each of us brought from home a penny for the collection box, which was passed around while a teacher played the piano and we children sang:

“Dropping, dropping,
Dropping, dropping,
Hear the pennies fall.
Every one for Jesus,
He shall have them all.”

However, before we reached the Baptist Sunday school we had to pass a Newsagent-General-Grocery shop. We two naughty little girls stopped at the shop and each bought four aniseed-flavoured-jelly black cats for a halfpenny. We stuck two, well licked, on the front of our collars, and ate two before Sunday school. Then we each dropped our remaining halfpenny in the collection box and ate our other two black cats on the way home.

Of course, after a few Sundays our mothers caught on to what we were doing. Mother was ‘flabbergasted,’ to think that I could do such a dreadful thing. “All those pennies go to buy a little Christmas gift for children who have no toys,” she said. “Just think about the poor aboriginal people in their humpies.” Those were earthen-floor huts made of scraps of wood and pieces of tin, about a half-mile out of town, and the aborigines were but poorly subsidized by Government and charities. Mother added, “Now I will have to give you an extra sixpence to make up for your wickedness.”

When Mother finished speaking I did indeed feel guilty. I felt even worse when we two red-faced little girls stood up at collection time and each handed our Sunday School teacher a sixpence, and I gave her the explanatory letter from Mother. When I think of the hardship of those years I realise that, along with the majority of the inhabitants of the ‘Camp,’ we also were poor, especially in the year-long ‘strike’ for better conditions, relieved only by subsistence Union funds. Still, we were not as poor as the Aborigines were. Harsh living conditions were accepted as the ‘common lot’ of the workers during the twenty years of the worldwide ‘Great Depression.’

In the latter half of 1933 a new concrete bridge was erected over the Leichhardt River, which cut off the ‘Camp’ from the ‘town’ side of Mount Isa in ‘the Wet’ or rainy season. The new bridge was built near the Catholic Convent and Church. They were on the town side of the river, which had a dry bed for most of the year. The old wooden bridge had been washed away during the last rainy season, and construction of a concrete bridge was a welcome topic of conversation for some time. A costly project, it was the subject of much interest, conjecture (and betting) as to whether it would or would not withstand the annual flooding of the river, and be high enough for the water to flow underneath instead of over it. The rains came and, as the water rose higher each day, people gathered on either bank of the usually dry river until there was a large crowd watching with eager anticipation. After a few days the long-awaited, costly bridge that had been opened with much political fanfare was washed away. It was replaced some months later, at a much higher level and cost.

Towards Christmas there was a nativity play at the Baptist Sunday school, and I was one of three winged angels, standing on hay bales, looking down on the manger and the ‘baby Jesus.’ When I think of that scene, I am sure my parents must have been amused at what was certainly a case of miscasting. I had begged of Father, until he made me a wand, telling him that all three angels would have them. He saw no need of a wand, saying I had the role of an angel mixed up with that of a fairy. On the night of the play I was the only ‘angel’ waving over the ‘baby Jesus’ in the manger, a silver-painted stick with a silver star on its end.

After leaving Mount Isa in late 1934, for five years we lived in Ipswich, except for those few months when our house was sold and we went to Auckland in a vain attempt at a ‘new start’ for Father. The Great Depression lasted until World War II, when the Armed Forces absorbed many of the unemployed. During those five years, about three times each year on a Saturday, Mother and Father took us on a cheap outing, anticipated with delight by us children. We walked to Ipswich Station and caught a train to Central Station, Brisbane. There we walked down to the Botanic Gardens and sat on seats facing the yachts, some from foreign lands, moored there in a bend of the river. We wondered aloud about them and their home ports, as we had lunch - tea from a thermos flask, sandwiches, cake and boiled eggs.

We followed a set route. First we visited the monkey house, where they entertained us with squealing noises and fingers curling up, as they scrambled over each other begging for peanuts. Next we sat on seats beside the ornamental, reed-surrounded pond with its water lilies, and fed the ducks some old bread we had brought from home. We wandered around the gardens and into the greenhouse where Father talked about the giant ferns and other plants. We finished the tour with meat pies and ice creams from the kiosk, and rested awhile before embarking on what was, for us children, an exciting ferryboat trip up or down the river. At the end of our excursion we walked back to Central Station and returned to Ipswich, tired but happy children.

In October of 2001, while his thirteen-year-old brother Giancarlo, and their father Carlo, were in Italy, my ten-year-old grandson Alessandro was staying with relatives in Brisbane. His mother, my daughter Leslie, also was in Italy, touring with her sister, Sherry. My friend Phoebe and I took Alessandro for a ferryboat ride on the Brisbane River, for six stops. We passed under three bridges and the new Goodwill Walkway. There were power walkers and all ages and kinds of people on walking paths. Some lazed on lawns under native trees, gold-blossomed silky-oaks and jacaranda trees in full lavender blossom. There were groups of people enjoying the calm blue-sky day in parks, abseilers and climbers on cliffs, interesting old well-kept houses and stylish new ones, hotels and restaurant, some with out-door seating. Many kinds and sizes of boats were moored in marinas or making their way along the river.

Alessandro seemed unable to sit still. He was either on the top deck, or leaning over the bottom railing and amusing us with comments and questions, as he took in the sights on both sides of the river, enjoying every minute of the trip. For me, watching the scenes and activity on either side of the river, and the engrossed face of my grandson, it was a nostalgic re-enactment of my own childhood experience.

In our years in Ipswich, Mother walked a mile-and-a-half to and from the Hospital three mornings a week to be a ‘tea lady,’ and did ironing two other mornings. At Ipswich Girls Grammar School, a senior once asked me, “Isn’t your mother our ironing woman?” Girls attended private schools if they were from a moneyed family or won a bursary. I said, “I got here because I was Dux of my school.” She told me to learn the first four verses of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam,’ and recite them to her on Friday at lunch time. ‘Seniors’ had the right to give ‘juniors’ such ‘impositions’ as punishment, and I learned several pieces of poetry in this way. I had no idea that all the poetry I was made to learn then, would be valued by me in years to come.

I gave little thought in those years to the sacrifices Mother made to give me a high school education, a bicycle, a school blazer and take me to Brisbane to see those wonderful performances at the Regent Theatre. On each gala occasion we shared a small box of Mackintosh Toffees, and drank water from our bottles kept in Mother’s wicker basket. When I realised that she was the most unselfish woman I have ever known, it was too late to say the words that my heart wished her to hear.

People now have greater expectations regarding living and working conditions, than were dreamed of in the 1920s. Only through many years of endurance and solidarity of purpose of working men and women, were equality of the sexes and the present conditions of employment gained. Fresh-faced, pink-cheeked Londoners, my parents emigrated from England on assisted passage. In mid-summer heat they were sent west to work on a sheep station, under drought conditions. Immigrants, even the British, were resented during the Great Depression. The aboriginal women giggled, seeing a young white woman, who got splinters in her hands and knees, scrubbing the unsealed ‘wrap-around’ verandahs of the homestead. One evening Father was left out in a far paddock where dead sheep were being burned. Unconscious when he was found, he was taken by ambulance to spend two weeks in Brisbane hospital. Mother left with him, and they were excused from further ‘duty’ out west, to find work in the city.

Following the death in March 2001 of Sir Donald Bradman, generally recognised as Australia’s greatest cricketer, the following letter submitted by a reader appeared in Brisbane’s Sunday Mail newspaper in April 2001, in response to an editorial tribute to the great man. The reader’s letter refers to the socio-economic conditions prevailing in Australia during the 1920s and 1930s. I include it here as doing more justice to those people who suffered the prolonged hardships of life in this country during the twenty years of the world-wide ‘Great Depression,’ than any words of mine can do:

“Thank you for your inclusion in The Courier Mail on March 4th 2001, of the front page of The Telegraph dated August 20, 1934, about Don Bradman being supreme at The Oval. This was in the depths of the Great Depression and a small article on the same page demonstrates the despair of those so-called ‘good old days.’ It said:

‘Among the more than 400 returned soldiers who have applied for the job as caretaker of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne at four pounds ten shillings a week, are four winners of the VC, A Lieutenant-Colonel with the CMG and DSO with bar, two DSO winners, six Military Cross winners as well as nine holders of the Military Medal. About 90% of the applicants are unemployed.’

These forgotten heroes were desperate for any kind of work, and it demonstrates the magic of the ‘Don’ that he was able to help revitalise a nation that was in such deep distress and dejection. It had a profound effect at the time and I, for one, will always remember his contribution. He was a shining beacon in some of our country’s darkest years.”

Train travel between Brisbane and Mount Isa seventy-five years ago was very different from what it is now. I see it as emblematic of the sayings that Australia was the land of ‘plenty of time and wait a while,’ and ‘not to worry, she’ll be right, mate.’ It was commonplace for trains to arrive in ‘The Isa’ several hours later than scheduled. The three days sitting on hard seats, and enduring of sooty smuts and gritty eyes from smoke belched out from the engine, made the journey seem never-ending.

There were stops for the delivery and pick up of goods at all the towns. I remember seeing newspapers, ‘smokes’ and other comforts being tossed down to maintenance gangs working on the rails. Each gang had a canvas ‘fly’ erected nearby, and always a ‘billy-can’ for a ‘cuppa’ was suspended over a makeshift fire between rocks. When there were refueling stops for coal and water, men dashed across the line to the nearest ‘pub’ for a drink, while other passengers descended to ‘stretch their legs.’ Then when the whistle blew the passengers would scurry to climb on board the train.

Both going to and coming from Mount Isa, as with most people in the 1930s, our family didn’t have ‘sleepers.’ We all carried pillows for our heads and old rugs to wrap ourselves in, and lolled on our seats with pillowed heads, or tried to sleep on the floor between the seats. If any seats became vacant there would be a swift scramble for them so that we could stretch out, unless someone else ‘collared’ them first.
While we were in Mount Isa our house had been tenanted. In late 1934, when we returned to East Ipswich, we found the garden choked by weeds and the house in need of painting. There was no work for Father, who went on ‘relief work’ for Ipswich City Council, while Mother worked three mornings a week at the General Hospital.

In the space between the ceiling and roof of the house was a cabin trunk Father and Mother brought out from England in 1920. It was packed with articles of personal and sentimental value. When Father retrieved the trunk it was empty. Mother and I shed bitter tears over that theft. Taking out and examining each article had been one of my happiest pastimes, and I had been nagging Father to get the trunk down, so that I could recapture that experience. Among the contents was a collection of shells and ‘cats eyes’ hand-polished by Father when he was a lighthouse-keeper off the coast, and a rolled-up carpet-snake skin. There were mementos from England and Father’s war service: personal tin tags, Morse-code key and semaphore signal flags, and baby things. Father used to say: “I can’t understand the sort of mentality that could stoop so low, nothing was of any monetary value.” Australians were British Subjects until the late 1940s, and during the twenty years of the Great Depression thought of themselves as loyal, honest, and always ready to ‘lend a hand’ wherever it was needed.

In 1935, in my eleventh year, in common with other girls I kept silkworms in three shoeboxes. Father taught me to feed them with lettuce or beetroot leaves, and also mulberry leaves from the tree next-door. The different leaves caused the cocoons to vary in colour from pale yellow to a deep yellow and orange in colour. Father made ingenious little winders out of wire and cotton reels, upon which I wound the coloured silks from the cocoons. I delighted in this hobby and my spools of silk thread, until a friend of Father’s accidentally sat on and quite squashed the boxes of silkworms, which I had stowed on a ‘spare’ chair in a corner of the dining room. That poor man’s horror was matched by my tears. I had no desire ever again to keep silkworms after that miserable incident, which was attributed by my parents to my carelessness.

In early 1936, after a year of ‘subsistence’ work with no prospect of employment, my parents sold our house and we went to New Zealand for a ‘new start.’ We were in Auckland for two months, and thought New Zealand was a beautiful country. “It reminds me a lot of England,” said Mother. “It’s much more like England than Australia is,” said Father. We would have liked to stay in the scenic Maori-named ‘Aotearoa’ (Land of the Long White Cloud), but unemployment seemed to Father to be worse in Auckland than it was in Australia, with New-Zealanders given work-preference. The Employment Agency advised Father to return to Queensland. We had sailed to New Zealand on the ‘Niagara,’ of 19,000 tons, which was sunk in World War II by a German submarine. We returned to Australia on the ‘Aorangi.’

In Auckland we boarded at a very reasonably priced private hotel. We enjoyed the evening dinners and we children often ordered second helping of dessert. Father took us to the quay where the big liners docked, and gave us hand lines and bait. One day Laurie, then seven years old, caught a fish. It was just small enough to fit inside his shirt and, taking it back to the hotel, he hid it under his mattress. After a few days Mother complained to the proprietor, asking that we be given another room, as with the dreadful smell in ours she was very afraid we would get ill. Inevitably, that fishy
source of the smell was revealed and the proprietor was annoyed. Father gave up the search for work and we returned to Australia. After living in Brisbane for a short time we went back to Ipswich where Father again got ‘relief’ work for the City Council.

Before leaving Auckland we visited the new War Memorial Museum. A long path led from the street up sweeping green lawns to an impressive, wide, white building. I believe my interest in museums and art galleries dates from that time. The Egyptian exhibits held a morbid fascination for me. I had never seen a mummy nor a sarcophagus before. There were funerary objects, body ornaments and unwrapped preserved heads and feet. Having lost all notion of time, I did not know that my parents and brother had finished viewing other exhibits and gone towards the exit.

The lights dimmed, and a bell rang to let people know the museum was about to close. I panicked and started running, but found to my horror that I was back among the Egyptian relics. When I grew tearful and called for help, an assistant came to my aid and led me to the exit and my parents, who were waiting for me. They were unaware of the state of panic I was in, due to my being so engrossed in the ancient Egyptian display, which was exacerbated by the dimming of the lights.

When we returned to Australia in 1936, I had missed over two months of school and Mother said, because it was illegal, I was not to say that I had been away from school for that time. After a few weeks a letter was sent to my parents asking for an interview. The headmaster said I would have to be put back a grade, as I was found to be mentally deficient. I was enrolled in Blair State School, Ipswich, where I studied hard and, becoming Dux in 1938, won a bursary to Ipswich Girls Grammar School.

We moved to Sandgate in 1941, as Father was stationed at the R.A.A.F. Base there. I took the train to Brisbane and a tram to South Brisbane, where I had worked at Imperial Canned Foods as a junior stenographer since the end of 1940. I loved being close to the sea. We lived a short walk from the railway station, and I could make the distance in one minute if I ran fast. One Saturday before lunch, Mother came home from shopping in Brisbane. I was downstairs in the laundry, and she came to the top of the backstairs and cried out to me: “Hurry! Run down and tell the stationmaster that I’ve left my liver on the train. It will be on a seat in the second-last carriage.”

I just stood there laughing at Mother’s words until she ran down and slapped me. We heard the train whistle, signifying that the train had left Shorncliffe on its way to Sandgate and Brisbane. I reached the station as the train pulled in. Still laughing, I gasped out to the stationmaster: “Mother said to tell you she left her liver on the train, in the second-last carriage.” He too was laughing, as we found Mother’s liver.

When I turned eighteen on 27th October 1941, I enlisted in the W.A.A.F., without informing my parents. I was called up in January 1942, and did my basic training (which included a course in unarmed defence), at I.T.S. Sandgate, where Father was then stationed. After working as a stenographer in the Commanding Officer’s section for a few weeks, I answered a call for volunteers to do a ten-week course in teleprinting at the AMP Building in Brisbane, (General Macarthur’s headquarters), and go to Townsville in order to relieve men for ‘forward positions.’ Some of the residents apart from business people had been evacuated, on a voluntary basis, because of fear of invasion by the Japanese who were then in New Guinea. After three days of sitting up in the train, we girls were very tired. When we arrived at our quarters, ‘The Little Flower Academy’ on the Strand, we were shown a huge pile of hay and given large burlap sacks to fill and ‘cobble’ at one end, as mattresses for our bedsprings. A tin ‘dixie’ for our meals, with a canteen for water, gas mask, tin helmet and overalls, were all kept in a locker beside our beds, and worn during practice ‘alerts’ and two unsuccessful Japanese air raids which occurred in my tour of duty.

Winston Churchill said that Japan would not fight, but in China the Japanese had been committing atrocities since 1935. In late 1941 our Cruiser ‘Sydney’ was sunk with 695 men lost. In February 1942, Singapore fell with 15,000 men captured and the Light Cruiser ‘Perth’ was sunk with some 400 men aboard. The Japanese invaded all the islands to our north. The A.I.F. ‘Desert Rats’ were recalled from victory in North Africa, to reinforce our troops in Papua New Guinea. In ‘W.T. Sigs’ we dreaded receiving ‘MOST IMMEDIATE’ messages from outposts at the top of Cape York, warning of Japanese warships in Torres Strait. We worked five-day shifts, eight hours on and twelve hours off. Sometimes at the end of a shift we would see our planes leaving in ‘V’ formation to intercept enemy ships or planes, or straggling back, after suffering losses. In March 1942 General Macarthur, in retreat from the Philippines, headed an estimated million American servicemen to pass through Australia.

The Japanese bombed ships along our north-west coast, with eight ships sunk, Darwin was almost destroyed, with much loss of life. They tried to bomb the fuel tanks at Townsville in 1942, but the only casualty I heard of was a cow. There was ‘official’ talk from Canberra of defending Australia ‘up to the Brisbane line.’ Our air-raid trenches, behind barbed-wire entanglements near the beach, were home to vermin that squealed or crackled horribly under our boots. At first guards pushed us shrieking girls back into the trenches, with the flat of their bayonets. Finally they let us sit on the sides. As an eighteen-year-old I was scared and excited, watching searchlights criss-crossing in the night sky above the ‘blacked-out’ town, trying to pinpoint enemy planes. We worked long shifts, and when we fell asleep over our machines in the late night hours we were prodded awake. In mid 1943 I became very ill with dengue fever which was rife, and being under twenty-one was granted a compassionate discharge.

I had been corresponding with a pilot, Doug Macarthur, from a sheep Station, ‘Coonaroo,’ near Mudgee, in New South Wales, whom I dated when we were both stationed at I.T.S. Sandgate. After pilot training he went on active duty, but was discharged when he caught meningitis. After recovering he trained and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Mascot Airport, in Sydney. We got engaged in 1943 when I was twenty years old and, although travel was restricted between States, we managed to meet. I went to Sydney and stayed with a married couple who were his friends, and he came up to Brisbane twice. He gave me a diamond ring; Barney Googles, my well-loved red and white ‘barb’ sheep dog; a string of crystal beads, and an Anglican Prayer Book with ivory cover, the last of which I still own. In 1945 he broke off our engagement and married a girl from another sheep station. I felt sure then that my heart was broken. However, as time passed I came to realise that he had made the right decision, and it would have been a much more suitable life-match for him.

I was working as a stenographer for the U.S. Army in Brisbane, and in 1946 was one of thirty men and girls chosen from volunteers to work in the Philippines. Some of us went on to Okinawa, where tails of ‘kamikaze’ Japanese planes were sticking up in the sea near the shore. Wreckage of tanks and planes (some American) was scattered amidst hidden land mines all over the war-ravaged island. Land mines caused some horrible deaths while I was there. Japanese prisoners - short men in grayish fatigues and forage caps - were still being lined up at the dispensary for physical examinations. A huge cemetery with some twenty-thousand U.S. Army, Air Force and Marine Division white crosses was between Naha in the south and Kadena in the north. The U.S Army built a fine macadam road from Naha to Kadena, where the U.S. Hospital was situated. I worked at the Medical Dispensary at Naha, and fell in love with a young Lieutenant from Texas. We were married in Manila in 1947, and honeymooned at Baguio, the summer capital of the Presidents of the Philippines. Later we sailed to the United States, and I fell in love again, this time with my husband’s country.

A friend recently returned from a trip to Mount Isa. When I said I was there as a child, she asked about life in ‘The Isa’ in the early 1930s. I recalled the heat; the red dust; sticky flies which caused sore eyes; prickly heat; tinea, and boils. Living conditions worsened when the roar of the Mine ceased in our last year because of the long ‘strike’ for better working and living conditions. Grandma and my uncles went south then. Those who stayed on helped each other to ‘pull together,’ ‘keep their peckers up,’ and ‘wait things out.’ I hated the ‘willie-willies’- red-dust-filled, high-swirling cones, scattering papers, tumbling weeds, and everything light enough which got into their orbit, high into the sky. Music was scarce, as gramophone records were inclined to warp and melt in the heat. Many of those big old black records were shaped into fluted, gilded or painted receptacles for fruit and other small articles.

I told her how in the evening, when the air was cool, adults in the Camp took deckchairs outside to visit, while children played. We had a few family gatherings at Grandma’s tent where she ‘kept house’ for Uncle Tom and Uncle Robert, but they were not as enjoyable as those we had at her house in Ipswich. The only music was from Uncle Tom’s harmonica and a neighbour’s piano accordion. Aunt Alice and Uncle Ben had died, and Grandma still grieved for them. She didn’t say her ‘pieces’ often and talked about ‘going home’ to England, which she did in 1935. Grownups were not inclined to sing, and Mother thought it was because they had ‘lost heart.’

When I was talking about those years to one of my grandchildren, she remarked, “Granny, life must have been totally boring, how could you have stood it?” Although our existence in Mount Isa seventy years ago was very primitive compared with life in South Queensland in 2001, we were not familiar with the word ‘boring.’ We simply accepted, albeit at times wistfully, what we were told was ‘the common lot.’ My friend said I wouldn’t know Mount Isa now, as it is a modern city, and very different from when I was there, with working and living conditions for mine employees and their families vastly improved. She cited such conveniences in the houses of Mine employees as a fresh-water supply, electricity, air-conditioning, television and computerization. “And,” she added, “there are sealed, lighted roads, modern hospitals and schools, and all recreational facilities enjoyed in the south of the State.”

It seems Mount Isa is beyond recognition from what it was like seventy years ago. There are gardens and trees around houses for the mineworkers and sealed roads, There are parks and landscaped government and commercial buildings - all the amenities enjoyed in southern cities. Most amazing to me is that now there is a lake in that desert wilderness, with swimming, boating facilities and a lot of bird life. Sometime, in midwinter, I would like to see that!

Until he died in 1983 aged eighty-four, Father still liked to take what he was accustomed to call his ‘afternoon amble.’ On the rare occasions when I strolled along with him, he would deplore the lack of pretty ‘old-world’ cottage gardens which had brightened up the humblest of homes well into the first three decades of the 1900s. He often used to say, “I believe I was born with a love of gardens and gardening.” Although he excelled at flower-growing, he loved growing vegetables, and was very proud of his cauliflowers when we lived in East Ipswich before and after our time in Mount Isa. He sometimes talked about the time when he enlisted in the Kings Own Scottish Borderers, and would say, “As a lad I route-marched from Plymouth in the south of England to Northallerton in the north. It was late springtime, and I walked through the most beautiful, native-flower-filled countryside I have ever laid eyes on.”

Father attended school until he was sixteen, and learned calligraphy and engraving because he was to be apprenticed to his uncle, a seller and repairer of jewellery, watches and clocks. Father said, “But I was foolish and young, and couldn’t wait to get away from home.” Also, he ‘fell out’ with his father because he didn’t get along with his stepmother who wanted Fred (the oldest who married her daughter Grace) to stay at home, and for Wally (next oldest) and Father to leave. My Uncle Laurie had to stay at home, as he was still very young. So, before he was seventeen, Father served in the ‘Territorials’ for a year, before he enlisted in the K.O.S.Bs. There was a song about the ‘Territorials’ which we children would coax him to sing for us:

‘Before poor Father joined the Territorials,
Ours was a happy little home.
Now he wakes us up in the middle of the night,
To tell us that we should all prepare to fight.
And he shoves poor Mother in the dustbin,
Just to keep on sentry-guard.
And there’s me and my brother John,
With our little nightshirts on,
Marching round the whole backyard. Gorblimy!’

Although he lived in Australia for many years, and served in the R.A.A.F. in World War II from 1939 to 1943, Father remained at heart an Englishman. He loved England dearly and deeply, not only as the land of his own birth but also as that of his ancestors, being convinced that his ancestors had always been English-born. He liked to say that woman’s natural role in life was to be the ‘helpmeet’ of man. This attitude towards ‘the weaker sex’ annoyed me as I grew up. When challenged about such old-fashioned ideas, he would laugh and sing, ‘Fickle is womankind,/ Like feather in the wind,/ Varying ever,/ Yet constant never,’ from an operatic aria.

At one stage of World War I he served in Italy (in that war Italy was on the side of the Allies), in the River Po Valley and the Plain of Lombardy. He thought Italian Peasant women, in their regional dress at that time, were graceful and lovely. For two years, just before World War II, he went to Brisbane twice a week at night to study Italian. In 1943 when Father joined the Commonwealth Police he was sent to guard male Italian internees and report on any subversive talk. He felt sorry for those Italians and, although he could speak a little with them on simple terms and subjects, he couldn’t understand their different dialects and rapid way of speaking; so he learned nothing of
consequence, to report.

He admired Grandma’s ‘grin and bear it’ attitude to life, and would say it was no use complaining about the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ He would orate speeches from Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ which he learned in school, and got us to learn. He admired Kipling’s ‘If,” and considered it, in regard to ethics, ‘second only to the Bible.’ But I now think that poem expresses an unrealistic view of life. Father imparted to us his appreciation and value of our natural world, if not in my own case, especially when I was young, his integrity.

Mother’s life revolved around husband and children. She gave herself unstintingly to us. During the years when I was away from Australia she wrote to me regularly, and I still have some of those letters and cards. When I was a girl she worked at Ipswich Hospital as a ‘tea lady’ three mornings a week then walked home and cooked dinner. Mother had won a silver medal in her last school year. She was adamant that I would go to high school if I won a bursary, despite Grandma’s opposition and Father’s apathy because of my sex, and she denied herself many things, to keep me there. After
I left Australia she worked at Saint Margaret’s Hospital in Brisbane, again as a ‘tea lady,’ and saved the money to visit me overseas three times. It is my only consolation, for all the years I neglected her, that she used to say she had a wonderful time visiting me and my family, both in America and in England. She went back to Australia a little reluctantly, plumper than when she came, and with a new wardrobe.

Now that Father and Mother are dead and I am unable to communicate with them physically, I have written the following passage to let them know, spiritually, that I love them and keep them in memory. I am grateful to them for all the intangible gifts I received from them, expressed in caring, sharing, giving, trying to teach me right from wrong and, despite my headstrong ways, for selflessly loving me.

If there is, as I hope, an immortal life after this earthly one, I wish that sometimes my Father and Mother may be as I remember them when I was a little girl. Father will have thick, wavy, warm-brown hair, grey-green eyes and a fine English skin. He will be smiling and softly singing to himself.

Wearing work clothes, with an old felt hat on his head and work gloves
on his fine, clean-nailed hands, a vanity with him, he will be kneeling on his folded hessian sack, and contentedly pinching out seedlings grown from seeds saved from previous plantings.

Perhaps he will be dead-heading the old-fashioned roses, and telling another little child why it is that we must try to avoid harming the bees and earthworms. He will explain that bees and earthworms are the friends of the gardener, and very important to the life-cycle of Nature.

When Mother calls to Father to come upstairs for morning tea, he will go into the kitchen and scrub his hands at the sink with his nail-brush. Then he will hand her a rose or small bouquet he has picked for her. Smiling, she will take his offering and put it in the blue glass vase kept on the oil-cloth-covered mantelpiece over the stove recess. Then they will sit down at the matching blue-and-white oilcloth-covered table, and drink well-brewed tea from a brown earthenware teapot encased in a tea-cosy, and eat hot buttered griddle-scones with honey.

In this scene Mother will be as she was when I was young, with her pretty, light-brown hair fluffed around her face. Her tortoiseshell comb will be holding her hair coiled into a bun on the nape of her neck, which Father sometimes kissed. Her blue eyes will be bright, and her complexion clear like his, with a natural pinkish bloom in her cheeks.

Quietly they will be enjoying the peacefulness of ‘A Perfect Day,’ freed from all worldly care. My little brother will be asleep in his cot, which had been mine, and I will be nearby, pleasantly and innocently occupied, so that they may be spared any concern about that little girl

‘Who didn’t have a curl, but a fringe
in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good,
she was very, very good.
But when she was naughty,
she was really and truly horrid.’

THE END

Reliving these memories has proven to me
that remembrances of one’s childhood often may be
from time’s distance, the fairest of God-given flowers;
and often showing, like a sundial, only the sunny hours.
So long ago planted, mine endured both sun and showers,
and the dark brooding skies of the Great Depression years
between two World Wars. Mixed with laughter and tears,
careful nurturing and love have preserved its perfume,
so my garden of memories is forever in bloom.