Chapter 1

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

I was born on August 31 ^st 1934 at my parents’ home at 60 Parkside Street Elsternwick. Back then it seemed to be the custom for babies to be born at home as my brother John had also been born there three years previously. A nurse came to stay in the house a week or so before I was due and stayed for a couple of weeks afterwards. She called the doctor when she thought the time of my arrival was getting close.

I don’t know what I weighed when I was born, but at the time my mother’s father was very ill with a disease called purpura; it causes bleeding under the skin that results in purplish patches and he was ill for several months. Because my mother had been a nurse, she walked about 3 kilometers to my grandparents’ house in Brighton almost every day to help care for him, pushing me in the pram with little Johnny sitting on a seat in front. I was told that I was a quiet and uncomplaining baby (or perhaps too weak to cry) and because Mum was preoccupied with her father’s illness, nobody realized for several months that I had gained almost no weight since I was born. I was then put on a very nourishing diet which soon had me up to normal weight.

John had had pneumonia when he was two and had almost died – no antibiotics in those days of course - but Mum had nursed him and he survived. He often suffered from bronchitis in the cold wet windy Melbourne winters so our mother always took extra care of him, fussing over him if he had the slightest sniffle and if I did anything to annoy him she would say `Don’t upset Johnny’ because he would then begin to wheeze and cough. I was a thin wiry child who never got sick. I used to wish I did as I would go off to school on cold wet winter mornings leaving John tucked up in bed with his meals on a tray, the radio in his room and Dad bringing home a fresh supply of library books for him every few days.

My father was an accountant and worked in Collins House, a building in Collins Street in the city of Melbourne. He and Mum had met at the Children’s Hospital when he was the payroll accountant there and she was a trainee nurse. They fell in love and when he went to Europe to revisit France and Belgium where he had been when a soldier during World War I they wrote to each other every day and announced their engagement when Dad came home. By then my mother had qualified as a nurse and she did some private nursing while they saved for their house which they bought with the help of a loan from Dad’s father.

The house was a California bungalow opposite the high green back fence of MLC Cato Branch where I went to school from kindergarten to Leaving. The house had three bedrooms, a living room and a separate dining room with a pass-through window to the kitchen and verandas at front and back. Half of the back veranda had been closed in to make what was called a `sleep-out’. My parents always slept there during the summer when we were young but later it became my brother’s bedroom. My parents had bought their furniture very carefully and they had their lounge suite made to order. It stood the test of time because our second daughter Celene continued to use it for many years when they lived in Australia, the US and Canada and it was still in excellent shape although it had been reupholstered several times. They had only essential pieces of furniture and in their first year of marriage two bedrooms and the sleep-out were empty and their dining-room setting only came as they could afford to buy the pieces. The dining chairs had drop-in padded seats of cow-hide and the large square table was fitted with two additional leaves making a long dinner table for a crowd. The big winding handle was linked to a mechanism below the centre of the oak table and like all good furniture in those days was made to last a life-time. There was a matching buffet, similarly treasured and carefully looked after.

Dad’s parents lived in Ballarat and we visited them about once a month, generally for Sunday dinner. I was nearly always carsick on the way. At Christmas they always came to stay with us. I enjoyed that but there was often tension in the house when they were there – looking back on it I don’t know why – did Dad’s parents dislike my mother? Or did she not like them? They usually stayed for a week and often took John back to Ballarat with them for a holiday. They never invited me, or perhaps they did and Mum wouldn’t let me go. She got on well with my grandfather but often had disagreements with my grandmother. My grandfather grew beautiful dahlias in their tiny backyard and used to set paper bag traps every night to catch the earwigs which loved to eat the flowers. Dad had one brother, a bank manager with one daughter, Lynette, about my age. We didn’t see them very often as Uncle Ivor was usually posted to banks in the Mallee. For the last part of his working life, they were in Swan Hill and we occasionally visited them there.

My mother had two brothers – the younger one, Geoff, lived in Brighton and had three sons and an adopted daughter and we visited them quite often. My mother’s elder brother we never saw at all. He was a doctor and they lived in a large house in Camberwell but he had married a Catholic so he was ostracized by the rest of the family after that. Ironically, years later I did the same thing and my family certainly were not pleased but didn’t take such drastic action against me.

My earliest memory is that of the day that John tried to take me for a walk in the pram which was parked on the front veranda. When he pushed the pram down the front step I was tipped into the hood of the pram. Fortunately Mum was at her sewing machine on the broad window ledge of her bedroom and she saw what was happening and ran out the front door and rescued me before I could roll out onto the gravel path. That was before I could walk – perhaps I was 9 or 10 months old – strange that I have a memory of it happening, but I do.

My next memories relate to the wedding at which I was a train-bearer. This was the wedding of my mother’s young brother Geoff (Francis Geoffrey Francis) and Marjorie Markby. There were five attendants – a matron of honour, two flower-girls and two trainbearers, myself and my four-year old cousin Helen Francis. I remember being taken to a dressmaker in Glenhuntly Road Elsternwick to be measured for my dress which was white with a fitted satin bodice and very full floor-length skirt of tulle over satin. On our heads we wore Juliet caps made from strips of satin criss-crossed into the shape of a cap with pearls sewn on where the strips crossed. Both bride and groom were tall and exceptionally good-looking people, my aunt wore white satin with a long train (hence the trainbearers) and all the attendants were dressed alike in long white dresses so it was a very beautiful wedding. I still remember it well – being carefully instructed as to how to hold the rosettes of which there were 3 – Helen and I held one each and together we held the middle one – to keep the train up off the floor. I also remember being bitterly envious of the flower-girls because they each got to keep their baskets of flowers which were made of silver woven cane, filled with beautiful flowers, and each had a tiny pink Cecil Brunner rose fastened on the outside – I can see them in my mind’s eye today.

I loved my dolls, dressed and undressed them and played endless games around them – two dolls with china heads and soft bodies called Betty and Marigold – the latter called that because she had brown eyes. I once tried to give Betty a drink of raspberry cordial and her body was forever stained pink. I also had a rag doll that I made myself and of which I was very fond. When I was about seven my mother taught me to knit and to use her sewing machine which was quite safe as it was a Singer hand machine and I spent hours sewing or knitting clothes for my dolls. I still have that sewing machine and it still works perfectly. Mum traded it in on an electric Singer but I was horrified and bought it back from the salesman.

For my fourth birthday I was given a dog, a little smooth-haired Australian terrier and he became my closest companion and my best friend. His name was Puppy. My parents suggested that I give him a more appropriate name and I did try but somehow names never seemed right and he remained Puppy throughout his life. He was a very clever little dog and I taught him to play Hide the Ball – I would hide a tennis ball and he would find it, and then he would take it away and hide it somewhere and I would look for it while he stood there grinning his doggy grin. Sometimes he and I would walk down to Elsternwick Station to meet my Dad coming home from work. When Puppy caught sight of Dad he would take off running so fast that all four stumpy little legs would be off the ground at once and he would become airborne.

Our parents took us away for holidays once a year, always in the May holidays, to guest houses at Marysville or Healesville. During the war most of the guesthouses were closed and then we used to rent a holiday house at Belgrave or Olinda. We did a lot of bushwalking with our parents and the guesthouses in particular were great fun because there would be lots of other children there to play with. I loved those holidays away but the only bad part was that Puppy had to be put into kennels when we went away. Dad and I would take him and leave him there, both feeling very sad as he would howl pitifully as we left. One time that we did that, Puppy was home before us – he had climbed the 6-foot high fence as soon as we left. When we collected him after the holiday he was always filthy and smelly so Dad and I would walk him home while Mum and my brother John went in the car and as soon as we got home we would bath him. Puppy was run over and killed not long after Dad died and I was heartbroken, he was just such a great little friend.