Chapter 2

SCHOOL DAYS AND THE WAR YEARS

Right across the road from our house was the Elsternwick branch of the Methodist Ladies College so that was the logical place for me to start school in February 1939 when I was four and a half. Mum told the kindergarten teacher, Miss Brien, that I could already read but Miss Brien didn’t believe her. A couple of weeks after I started school, she said to Mum one day when she came to collect me `Do you know Mrs Bodycomb that Joan can read already?’ I think Mum refrained from saying `I told you so’. I have no memory of learning to read and certainly I was never taught, personally I think it’s just a skill like learning to talk that one picks up from the environment – plus being read to - and all our own children could read before they started school.

The kindergarten/grade 1 room was divided into four tables with six children at each. Students started at the red table then progressed to the fawn table, then to yellow, then to green. I was never at the red table so perhaps Miss Brien suspected that Mum was not making an idle boast – I started at the fawn table, was promoted a couple of months later to the yellow table and then the next year I was put straight into grade 2. This was probably not a very good thing as I was a young starter anyway and consequently had finished the Leaving Certificate when I was only 15.

For the first few weeks my mother would walk over and collect me at lunchtime and take me back to school after lunch, then after that I did it alone. If I had wanted to eat lunch at school, I would certainly have been allowed to do so but I preferred to go home and spend the time with a book because from an early age I was an insatiable bookworm. Because I always went home for lunch, I think I missed out on a lot of the social life of the school and I didn’t play sport at lunchtime which everyone else did. During compulsory sport periods when teams were chosen, I was nearly always picked last because I was hopeless at games. If we were playing softball or baseball I would be put in the outfield because I couldn’t catch and I would stand there praying that the ball would not come near me and that the game would soon end. My father wanted me to learn tennis after school because he played tennis every Saturday afternoon and loved it, but I refused. Most of my friends learned tennis and swimming and they also went to a riding school at the weekends but my mother wouldn’t let me ride horses because one of her cousins had been killed when her horse ran under a tree.

I wish now that I had made the most of my opportunities at school, my parents were paying a lot to send me there and I just never really engaged with school or took part in the activities offered. While my friends were vying for positions of authority – Form Captain, House Captain, team positions, I was living in my fantasy world of books but my parents were very tolerant people who let me be and I’m grateful for that as my childhood for the most part was a remarkably happy one. Although a duffer at sport I did well academically and never really needed to work hard, probably because I was such an avid reader. I would have spent my life with my head in a book if I could have done that. When I was about eight my father took me to the Myer library in the city and enrolled me, then he used to drop me there on a Saturday morning before he went to work and I would spend the morning in the library until lunchtime when I would walk round to his office in Collins Street and we would come home together on the train, me with my arms full of books. I was given a bike for my 12 ^th birthday and then was able to join a local library at the back of a shop in Glenhuntly Road (sixpence a book, no free libraries in those days) and I used to ride up there every time I had some pocket money to take out another book. There was also a library in Miss Boyle’s little mixed business at the end of our street and after a couple of years I had read every book there.

I would have liked to learn music but we didn’t have a piano and my parents couldn’t afford to buy one. They did buy a piano when I was about twelve and I started learning music from a woman who lived near us. She had a dancing school and knew a lot about dancing but not much about teaching the piano. I floundered along for a couple of years and then gave it up. I learned the flute for a year when we lived in Canada and wasn’t much good at that either but I always feel that if there is one thing I would have liked to do, it was to play an instrument in an orchestra. Maybe in my next life if there is reincarnation!

I still have a few friends who started school with me in that kindergarten room at MLC. What a wonderful thing it is to have had the blessing of such long friendships. At the end of that first year, 1939, I remember hearing my mother talking to my teacher at Speech Night, the prize-giving evening event that always marked the end of the school year – always held at St Kilda Town Hall. They looked serious and worried and one said `Perhaps there will be no school next year’. I asked my mother as we left `Why would there be no school?’ and she said `There is a war.’ I had no idea what she meant.

I suppose that the years 1939-1945 were a time of real concern to adults but I was barely aware of that. I didn’t even know as a child that Darwin and Broome had been bombed. We did see changes however; it was a rule to make blackout screens for all the windows and our double glass front door. Dad dug a trench in our back lawn and roofed it over with layers of galvanized iron. It was usually half-full of rainwater and mosquitoes but eventually after the war it became the bed for a very productive lemon tree. Everyone was advised to dig these trenches in case of air-raids, though probably the best plan recommended at air-raid lectures was our dining-table padded over by rugs and cushions. There were also trenches all along the side of the playground at MLC and we all had to carry a little bag with some cotton wool to stick in our ears in case of an air raid, a handkerchief (I suppose to bind up our wounds!) and an eraser to stick between our teeth during a raid. My mother was the nurse on call for my school if a sudden air-raid alarm should occur. Evacuation for schools was planned; by this time John was at Caulfield Grammar School and evacuation for their school was to be at Yarra Junction just outside Melbourne. I was never told where MLC would go and thankfully that day never came.

May 1943 was a sad year for us. I knew that my parents were worried about the war and Dad was called up for military service and rejected as medically unfit. We were on holiday at the time at a guest house in Upper Beaconsfield called Runnymede and Dad had to go to Melbourne for his medical exam. I remember Mum being immensely relieved when Dad came back at the end of the day and said that he had been rejected on medical grounds because he had chronic nephritis as a result of injuries to his kidneys in a train accident in Belgium when he was serving there during World War One. Although Dad had no happy memories of his days in the war and never reminisced about those years, he was disappointed I think to be rejected as he felt that it was his duty to serve again.

The war worsened, Singapore fell to the enemy, the warship 'Prince of Wales' was sunk, also the Red Cross ship 'Centaur' when many wounded men as well as all the Australian nursing staff were bombed off the coast of Australia and everyone died. Some of those nurses were my mother’s friends and had trained with her at the Children’s Hospital in Melbourne so that was another cause of sadness but worse was to come.

During that year Mum told me that she was expecting another baby. I was wildly excited as I loved babies and immediately began to knit baby clothes. I had all sorts of things planned for the time when the baby would arrive. On May 17th 1943 Mum drove herself to Hopetoun Private Hospital in Elsternwick and gave birth to a tiny premature son, Robert, weighing 2¾ lbs. Because he came so quickly, he was delivered on a stretcher in the matron’s office. Although so tiny he was perfect but needed extra care and was taken to a thermostat bed, the forerunner to the humidicrib, in the Children's Hospital in Carlton. Little Robert died when he was ten days old. Our parents were told later that he probably had congenital heart failure and that he had developed pneumonia – no antibiotics in those days of course - but I think the saddest thing was that they were not with him and in fact hardly saw him – only once I think right after he was born – and John and I never saw him at all. Perhaps my father who worked in the city used to visit the hospital in his lunch break, I don’t know because he never mentioned it and I never asked. I don’t even know whether there was a funeral service for Robert when he died. I just remember that I was sleeping in my parents’ bed with my Dad and I woke up one morning to find Dad crying beside me and he told me that Robert had died.

My parents would never speak about him after that and I felt instinctively that the whole subject was somehow taboo. John and I still remembered Robert on his birthday every year and worked out how old he would be and wondered what he would have been like and how his life would have turned out had he survived. We went to Swan Hill soon after that to stay with Dad’s brother Uncle Ivor and his family while Mum recuperated. She never talked about the baby so I didn’t either as I didn’t want to upset her. I did once ask whether she might have another baby one day and she just said `No’. End of conversation. After a couple of weeks, we went home to Melbourne and life returned to normal.

Mum was a kind and caring person, always eager to help anyone in trouble and we often had other children to stay when their parents were away or ill. Our second cousins Susan and Ross Lilley were frequent visitors and so was Lynette (the daughter of Dad’s brother Ivor) and sometimes there would be children of our parents’ friends in times of adversity. Mum told us this story about Ross Lilley when he was staying with us once – she said that he used to get lonely when John and I were at school (he was just a toddler) and one morning she was washing the breakfast dishes and he was playing in the garden. He came inside and took her hand while he kept repeating 'They are all the same, Auntie' so she was taken by Ross to see that he had opened all the fat buds on her lovely row of Christmas lilies below the sitting-room windows and indeed they were all the same – ruined - and no blooms for that Christmas. Mum wasn’t cross, she just said `What a dear little fellow – and what an enquiring mind!’

In the Christmas holidays of my last two years at school I had part time jobs. First in a milk bar and then in a small department store. I liked working and I liked the bit of money that I earned, I can’t now remember what I spent it on but my guess would be on books. My first holiday job was in a milk bar serving behind the counter, making milk shakes and washing up in the kitchen behind. While doing that the rather sleazy owner would always find an excuse to come to the kitchen and put his arms round me. The shop next door was a china shop and the woman who owned it knew what was going on I think because she offered me a job which I took, a much nicer place to work!

The following year I worked in a department store that sold a bit of everything and I served on the so-called Beauty Counter which was mainly hair pins and face powder but it was fine and once again the money was appreciated. I had my first little romance there, a boy who worked on the hardware counter. Our affair never advanced past riding our bikes part of the way home together and I can’t even remember his name so it wasn’t very significant – just a very minor milepost in my teenage years.