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My Mother’s Memories

I was talking to my mother when I was writing the previous blog, 12 Things I Like About Being Older, and she was relating those things to the events and changes in her life. It was so interesting I asked her to write down some of the events we were discussing. She did despite recovering from a broken wrist. These are her thoughts, memories and comments on her life. I  will encourage her to expand on her later years which were full of farm work, community engagement, church and family plus continuing contact with her pen pals and friends all over the world.

My father, Reg, my sister Marty, myself and my mother, Mick.

A DIFFICULT BEGINNING

I was christened in the hospital where I was born as I was dying. I have been told it was lung failure. My sister told me years later that I was born prematurely and that was the problem. However, I survived. It must have been because the only clergy available was the Anglican Bishop!

NEXT ERA

My sister, who was three years older than me, started school. I was very unhappy! Our dog became my new “playmate”. I wouldn’t leave him alone. The two of us would lie on the drive, at the gate and wait for Marty, my sister, to arrive home from school.

THEN IT BECAME MY TURN

I left the dog and went to school. We were called “the bubs” and our room was very basic, with wooden walls to window height and canvas “windows”. No heating or cooling. The room had a cement deck outside where we sometimes had our lessons in fine weather. Children from Grade 1 to Grade 3 were altogether. The wooden main school house had Grades 4, 5, 6, and 7 all together. The headmaster taught the children up to 12 years of age  We walked along bush tracks from our house overlooking the river to school and picked wildflowers in the spring. There were very few roads and they were made of limestone.

I joined the Brownies. I am on the left, middle row.

Then the war came and with the war, flying boats on the river. Australia was cut off by the Japanese advance and the only fast link was by a 26 hour non stop Catalina flying boat flight to Colombo in Sri Lanka. We could no longer swim in the river off the jetty but we did anyway.  The girls school in the city was requisitioned and my only sister went by bus to the newly built Kent High School in Victoria Park. School for her was only half a day due to overcrowding. By the time I got there, more buildings had gone up so there were more classrooms. There was food, clothing and petrol rationing and a blackout at night. No lights at all anywhere. There was an air raid shelter at school and we dug one at home.

POST WAR AND ANOTHER ERA, STUDYING FOR THE LEAVING AND MY PARENTS SEPARATION

Our house in Duncraig Road, Applecross

By now I was studying for the Leaving, the final school exam, and my parents separated, causing quite a change in our lives. We had to move from our home in Applecross overlooking the Swan River to a two bedroom flat with my mother’s friend who ” took us in”. We stayed there for some time. I finished my schooling, passed the Pharmaceutical Apprentice’s entrance exam and went to work at the Adelphi Pharmacy on St. George’s Terrace in Perth. When I was old enough (you had to be 18 as it was a four year apprenticeship and not allowed to practice until you were 21 years old) my father signed the indenture papers and I began my four year apprenticeship.

In the city.

The apprentices did all their studying at night at the Technical School in St. George’s Terrace, very convenient for me as it was nearby, but not good for many. We finished work at 5.30 and began lessons at 6pm. We were paid one pound, about $2.oo a week for first year, two pounds for second year and so on. After I left, the lessons were held in the daytime and the pay increased. Not long after, apprenticeships ended and university degrees came in instead.

At the Women Pharmacists’ Association dinner 1950. I am on the right.

Morgan and me, 1949, Rottnest Island.

I finished my time but had married and had a young son and found it difficult to manage childcare. My husband, Morgan, was studying law at the University of Western Australia on an ex-serviceman’s grant. We had decided on a block of land in Doubleview and were working on house plans, but that was not to be. Morgan’s father had a timber milling business and was building another mill and running a farm, so he wanted his only surviving son to come down to the farm. We went.

I was about to have our second child and, having had some medical problems having the first, I stayed near my doctor in Perth and the hospital. Morgan’s mother looked after our first son at the farm. This was 1954. Two years later our daughter was born.

My Mother In law holding Twinkle the Shetland Pony with the three children, my Father-In-Law on Greyboy and Morgan on Bill

At “Parkfield”, the farm with my sons and daughter.

We left the farm 54 years later and Morgan died of leukemia three weeks later. What has followed in my life in the 64 years since I left Applecross and became a farmers wife has had many “ups’  and perhaps some “downs” but it would take many, many pages to chronicle them.

  St. Nicholas, our family church with my husband, Morgan.

I can only say I am happy, I have been loved and still am. With reasonable health I trust I shall have time to record some of those memories in the future.

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