Chapter 6
MARRIAGE AND EARLY FAMILY LIFE
When I left Melbourne Teachers College I was appointed to the School for the Deaf in St Kilda Road Melbourne and my best friend from Teachers College days, Val Cowan, was invited to join the itinerant physical education staff so we were both able to stay in Melbourne and often met to talk about our lives in the world of teaching. Val phoned me at work one Friday afternoon to say that some of her fellow staff members were going to the pub for drinks and would I like to meet them there? She wanted me to meet the man she was working with as she thought I would like him. I did – he was six years older than me and a champion athlete, very popular with both men and women but had never had a girlfriend. We got on so well that after the group at the pub broke up, he asked me to go out with him. Yes, I said, I’d love to. Not being used to taking women out, the most exciting venue he could think of was the boxing stadium so I hopped on the back of his big Norton motorbike and off we went to the stadium but to my considerable relief, not being a fan of boxing, the tickets were all sold out. Instead we went to a coffee shop and talked … and talked … and by the end of the evening I had decided that I would either marry him or I would never marry. I still think that is true as in our almost 60 years years together I never met another person who could compare with him.
His name was Reg Carr and we did marry but not until two years later. My family was fiercely opposed to our relationship as he was a Catholic and my family were great old Catholic-haters. You might remember that my mother’s family had ostracized Mum’s brother for that very reason – he had married a Catholic. Mum went to some rather extreme measures to end our relationship – she sent me to a cousin of hers who was a doctor and he regaled me with half an hour of horror stories about Catholic women in labour who were allowed to die in order to save the baby. When that didn’t work, she arranged for the principal of Vancouver School for the Deaf to offer me a job there but that didn’t work either. The situation was complicated by the fact that his religion was very important to Reg and he said he could never marry me unless I became a Catholic also. I read books and we argued over many points of doctrine and dogma and my mother and Reg’s mother both gave us a hard time for the next two years, until in the end I decided that I could become a Catholic (albeit a slightly tongue-in-cheek one) and we were married on May 20 th 1957. Reg was the eldest of four sons and was adored by his mother. An amusing (in retrospect) incident took place a day or two before our wedding. Reg’s mother said to me `You know Joan I’ve cried myself to sleep every night for the last two years.’ `That’s a coincidence’ I smartly replied, `because my mother has too!’
Reg made all the church arrangements – booked the church, paid someone to do the flowers and play the organ – but because of the religion problem our wedding arrangements were slightly complicated. Although we were being married in St Augustine’s Catholic Church we didn’t have a Nuptial Mass because we knew that there would be groans from my side of the guests so we just had the simple wedding service but we decided that we would go to Mass at our local church early in the morning. So on our wedding day Reg picked me up and we went to the Catholic Church in Orrong Road Elsternwick, not far from where I lived. Imagine my horror when we entered the church and found everything draped in black – it was a Mass for the Dead – not a good omen I thought. Then as I knelt to receive communion I misjudged the height of the kneeler and cracked my shin on the edge of the marble kneeler causing some agony and a large lump on my leg. Halfway through the morning the rain poured down – added to which I had a very sore throat, the forerunner to a streaming cold.
However, nothing could dim our joy in the occasion. Our wedding took place in the beautiful little St Augustine’s Church at the top of Bourke Street in Melbourne and the reception was a lunch for about sixty guests at the Nurses’ Club in St Kilda Road which Mum had kindly arranged even though she was not happy about the marriage. We were married on a Monday morning as it was the first day of the May school holidays and we went away afterwards for a driving honeymoon to northern Victoria and the ACT. We had been offered a job as house parents at the new Glendonald Oral Deaf School in Kew so we hadn’t looked for anywhere to live. When we got home from our honeymoon, we found that the job had been given instead to one of the principal’s friends, so we had to look for a flat. We found a very small one in East St Kilda, just a bed-sitting room with a breakfast room and shared use of the kitchen, bathroom and laundry. Our landlady with whom we shared was single and kind but a chain smoker so the whole house reeked perpetually of smoke.
We had very little money and we had only been married for a couple of months when I realized that I was pregnant. That was not in the plan as I had intended working for at least three or four more years while we saved for a house. I taught until the end of that year – fortunately I always wore a smock to teach in, as many of the women did, to keep our clothes clean so my growing condition was not too obvious. This was an important consideration as women were supposed to resign as soon as they became aware that they were pregnant, and women with children could not be employed by the Education Department but we needed the money and I loved the job so I stuck it out until the end of the school year by which time I was 7 months pregnant.
We had no car as we had been buying a Holden on terms but couldn’t keep up the payments so had to let it go back to the seller and Reg rode his bike every day to work at Caulfield Technical School. I remember one day when I was sick with the flu and had stayed home in bed, Reg rode his bike home from Caulfield Technical School at lunchtime, he just had time to make lunch and a cool drink for me and then rode his bike back to work. I thought that was such a kind thing to do and I was lying there thinking What could I do for him in return? Then I remembered that I had knitted a navy jumper for him but he didn’t wear it because the sleeves were too long. I got up from my bed, unpicked the sleeves from the cuffs upwards and reknitted them the right length. What I think I learned that day was that if you love someone you care more about them than you do about yourself. I felt I had discovered a great important truth and perhaps I had because we were still together after 59 years of wonderfully happy marriage when Reg died at the end of 2016.
Our first child, a beautiful little daughter, Belinda Jane, was born on February 21 st – exactly nine months and one day after our wedding and she was one day late. She was not named after anyone, we just liked the name and had it ready for her and it suited her from the start. She was born at St Vincent’s Maternity Hospital in Melbourne and I shared a room with a lady whose baby had died. They should have given her a room by herself as she was very upset and so was her poor husband and they had to put up with me in the other corner with a beautiful baby and lots of visitors. I can see in my mind’s eye now her husband coming in the door to visit her – he was trying to smile for her but he was crying. I didn’t like St Vincent’s – there was a huge room opposite ours where some society person had just had a baby and the nuns were popping in and out all day carrying huge bunches of flowers but they never came near me and my poor sad room-mate; supposedly Sisters of Charity but not really very charitable I didn’t think. One shouldn’t generalize of course and years later I worked for the Sisters of Charity at St. Vincent’s College and liked and respected them very much.
I had mastitis so didn’t have an easy time of it and we all went home to Mum’s for a few days where I quickly recovered and then we went back to our little flat. We divided our bed-sitting room down the middle with a yellow curtain and managed to have a very good life there – we even had friends to dinner sometimes. Belinda slept peacefully in the corner in her bassinet and if we had visitors, we would move her to the other room. She was a happy and sweet-natured baby and I still remember teaching her to say `Mama’ while drying her after her bath, when she was five months old. The next day I taught her to say `Dada’ and the next day she said `Baba’ but that was the limit of her repertoire for a while.
We bought a chess board and a book called Teach yourself Chess and we played chess every night after dinner and went for long walks at weekends, all free entertainment. I did all the shopping on foot with the pram and once a week I walked over to Mum’s for lunch which took about 40 minutes and she would drive us home at the end of the day, putting the pram in the boot of her car. She loved Belinda of course and all the pre-marriage misery was forgiven and forgotten by us both.
When Belinda was about six months old, we were lucky enough to get a much larger flat in a big old house in Brighton as friends lived there and were moving out. This time we had our own kitchen but still had to share the bathroom with the residents in the flat next door. The tenant was a young woman whose husband was not there – in fact I don’t know whether she had one but she had three children, boys aged about five and three and a little girl of about eighteen months. Her brother lived there too – he was a motor mechanic and used to have a bath every night after work and always left a heavy ring of grease with black hairs stuck in it all around the bath. Because we had to use the same bathroom I would clean up after him every night. We also shared the hallway and I used to hang my overcoat on a hook there until I caught him going through my pockets one day and after that I kept it in the bedroom. At least we had our own kitchen there and we painted it in bright colours which I still remember - blueberry (a purplish blue) ceiling, citrine (lime green) walls – and I made red and white checked curtains and altogether we couldn’t have been happier.
There was a vacant block behind the house and we kept chooks and grew a big vegetable garden. We were within an easy walk of the beach and I used to take Belinda down there nearly every day. I had friends in the area too and we spent many happy days chatting while our children played together. We still didn’t have a car and one night on some special occasion we decided to get a babysitter and go to the movies in Hampton. Our babysitter arrived in a new car and we went off on Reg’s bike – me doubling on the luggage rack – which seemed a bit ironical but we enjoyed the outing and as usual had fun. We had very little money and sometimes by the end of the week I would have no housekeeping money left and no food so Reg would take a gunny sack down to Brighton Beach baths and dive for mussels on the piles, then bring them home and I would cook them and serve them with rice; my mouth still waters as I write about those mussels – they were delicious and of course so fresh.
To make a bit of extra money Reg taught swimming to private pupils, both adults and children during the Christmas holidays and also at the weekends during the summer. One day when teaching swimming at Brighton Beach baths, he saw a truck accidentally back over the edge of the pier into deep water. He dived in and tried to open the door of the truck but couldn’t because of the water pressure so pulled the driver out through the window of the truck and gave him artificial respiration until an ambulance arrived. There was an article in the paper about it the next day and a photo but sadly I forgot to cut it out; the driver was taken to hospital but survived with no after effects except a bad fright. Reg also bought a lawn mowing round and mowed lawns after school and at weekends. The first thing he did was reduce the charges for all his customers as he thought they were paying too much.
Our second child, another beautiful daughter, Celene Frances, was born on July 29 th 1960 – Reg chose the name this time and the spelling as well, the usual spelling being Celine. I chose the second name, Francis is my own second name after my mother whose maiden name was Francis – but people always questioned the spelling so we spelled Celene’s name Frances. This time I went to the Mercy Maternity Hospital which was a very different experience – wonderful caring staff, both religious and lay, excellent food and our subsequent four children were all born there. It was like a week’s holiday when I had a baby, we would go to the expense of a private room and I would make sure I had a good fat book to take with me. Once it was G K Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, I can still remember lying in bed reading those 52 stories in the utmost luxury. The only drawback about being in hospital was missing the other children at home. Every day I would write a separate letter to each of them and Reg would call in for a quick visit after work and collect the letters to take home.
In those days there was no such thing as rooming-in, the babies were cared for by the staff in the nursery and only brought in for feeds. We would feed them at 10pm and they would not be brought back until 6am – always preceded by a cup of tea and biscuits. We were not expected to do anything except have a nice rest and eat beautiful meals. It was thought that we needed the rest and I always went home feeling fine after a lovely holiday, well and truly ready to take up the reins again. The staff would always try to make me stay there for ten days, knowing that there were other children at home but I would beg to leave after a week and as I was always well, I would be allowed to do so – I just couldn’t wait to see the other children and of course they were not allowed to visit in case of bringing germs in to that very sterile environment! No paternity leave in those days of course, Reg would get an hour off from the Teachers’ College to pick me and the new baby up at the Mercy and drive us home, then he would go straight back to work and everything would be back to normal.
While I was in hospital we would usually get a council housekeeper to look after the children during the day, then Reg would take over when he got home from work. On his way home he would race in to see me and collect the letters for the other children, often he didn’t even have time to go down to the nursery to see the baby through the glass – no handling them by anyone other than the mother in those days of course – before he rushed home to take up his domestic duties. The older children were always wildly excited to see the new baby and I never remember any jealousy by younger ones. While I breastfed the current baby the other children would bring me favourite books to be read aloud so that they were getting plenty of attention, not the baby. When our fourth child, Nick, was born Marcus was only 16 months old and missed me terribly, he hid behind an armchair every day but when I came home he made up for lost time by eating about a dozen peanut butter sandwiches.