Chapter 7

OUR FIRST HOME AND SOME GOOD HOLIDAYS

Not only mowing lawns and teaching swimming at weekends, Reg was doing a part time Arts degree as well as teaching full time at Melbourne Teachers’ College, so life was very busy.

We lived as economically as we possibly could, always aware of the need to get our own home but one day I wondered `How on earth did we save enough money for a house?' and Reg said `Well we just didn't buy anything - don't you remember, I had one bottle of beer on a Saturday night and you bought the Women's Weekly - and those were the only two things apart from food that we ever bought.' I remembered then that Reg had an exercise book that he made into a little ledger, listing the months of the year across the top of the page and our expenses (insurance, food, petrol when we at last had a car, savings so that we would save a set amount each pay cheque, and a rough estimate of things like medical, dental, birthday presents etc) down the side so that every month we knew exactly how much we were up for in expenses. Then at the other end of the book he wrote down every penny he spent each week. I never got money from the bank, Reg would just give me my `housekeeping money' each time he was paid which was once a fortnight and I would make it last - or else we would eat mussels from the pier at the end of the fortnight.

I also had a little notebook in which I wrote down every penny I spent (mostly just food) and it's amazing what a difference it makes if you keep track of every penny. I know it sounds dull but it wasn't - we always felt that our lives were just great. After we had been married for about a year, we managed to put a deposit on a block of land in Mount Waverley which cost £500. The road was not made (and in fact never was while we were living there), there was no sewerage or phones in the area but it was a start. A couple of years later we had paid it off and got a loan from a building society, Home Finance, to have a house built on it. By then I was pregnant with our third child. We went out one Saturday morning to look at Show Homes and chose one that we could afford (below).

It cost £2500 and was a three-bedroom weatherboard house and we arranged to have it built on the block and one wonderful day we moved in. The cladding was vertical boards and we had them stained dark red, every room had large windows and the bedrooms all opened off what was called the sun gallery, aptly named as it faced north and was a lovely sunny area. When we woke up on our first morning in the house Reg and I looked out into the back yard from our bed and saw a beautiful red fox trotting across the yard which was as yet unfenced. That was the only time we saw him so I’m afraid we displaced him from his home.

There were no houses either side of us and across the road there was a gully with a creek running through it. That’s still there today, it’s part of the green belt area of Mount Waverley. We used to make all the children’s presents and one Christmas Reg made wooden billycarts for Marcus and Nick and they used to race them down the track to the creek and then drag them up to the road again – hours of fun. I don’t know why we didn’t worry more about snakes as there was so much long grass about. One day a few years after we had moved in, when we came home in the car Marcus said `There’s a belt on the road’ and I said as we drove up the driveway and he got out of the car `Go and get it then’ but as he ran down the driveway I thought `There couldn’t be a belt on the road’ and ran down after him, just in time to see a large black snake disappearing into the long grass. I got the shovel, thinking I could kill it but couldn’t find it.

When we moved into the house, we couldn’t afford to buy carpets so Reg rented a commercial sander and we sanded the floors ourselves and stained them. That sanding was the worst job I can ever remember doing. The noise was appalling and although we tied handkerchiefs round our faces we were blowing black stuff out of our noses for days afterwards. The floors still weren’t great so when we could afford it we bought seagrass matting to cover the floor in the living room and sun gallery, the bedrooms remained bare except for the bathroom kitchen and laundry where we laid linoleum. The seagrass matting was the cheapest kind, squares sewn together and the strings joining them broke every so often so that the whole thing would come apart. Once a week we would fold it all up and sweep up the sand and dirt that had fallen through. Still it looked good and so did the lightshades, those very cheap round Chinese paper ones that folded flat. Fortunately they were in vogue at the time so actually the house looked quite stylish. We thought it was marvelous.

We bought a washing machine soon after we moved in to the house but until then it was all hand washing - not easy with clothes, sheets, nappies etc. We decided on a Turner-Sapphire which had a rotating tub with a wringer attached - no rinse cycle - so you washed the clothes, put them through the wringer into the laundry sink, put them back into the tub for a rinse and then spun them dry. A bit tedious but so much easier than hand washing or the wood fire coppers that we had had at both our previous residences that I thought I was in heaven. A few years later we got a Hoover twin-tub machine - no wringer - even better but still not by any means automatic. Still after the fire coppers we thought we had arrived.

Reg collected discarded bluestone blocks from somewhere and made a patio outside the sun gallery which was handy for putting the pram on each time we had another baby. Because the driveway was quite steep, he built a retaining wall along one side from discarded bricks that he got somewhere. It was a beautiful straight wall but I know that Celene still has a crooked toe from having dropped a brick on it while carrying bricks with only sandals on. We planted a lot of trees which grew well and of course had a vegetable garden as we had at every house we ever lived in. Reg’s father came over and built a playhouse in the back yard and one Christmas the family present was a set of monkey bars which were a constant source of fun.

The road was unmade and we had no sewerage – just a dunny up the backyard with a drum under the seat that the `nightman’ used to come and exchange for a clean one early every Monday morning. We were all careful not to be using it when he arrived. I can’t smell Lysol to this day without remembering that dunny. There were always huntsman spiders in the corners and I used to hate going up there at night – but what joy when the sewerage came through our area a couple of years later and we were able to connect! We had no phone and of course in those days there were no cell phones so if I needed to ring anyone I had to walk about three blocks up the unmade road to the nearest public phone but that too came through after a year or two. Despite these minor inconveniences we thought our little house was a palace and I often wonder whether young people these days could possibly get as much joy out of a house as we did out of 35 Park Road Mount Waverley.

The year before Marcus was born, we began our annual camping trips to Wilson’s Promontory campground in the Christmas holidays. Reg’s father would lend us an old car, a utility trailer with a canvas cover and an old canvas tent without a floor. Reg and I would sleep in the trailer and the children in the tent. The weather was always fairly unreliable and the year that Marcus was six months old I was just getting ready to feed him his bowl of Farex for tea when a furious dust storm raged through the campground leaving a layer of black grit on top of Marcus’s Farex. I just scraped it off and fed him the rest.

Nick was only one month old on his first camping trip. He slept in his baby basket in the back of the car, Reg and I in the trailer and the other three in the tent. Nick was still having four-hourly feeds all night – I would wake to the sound of his hungry cries, get out of the trailer, stumble across to the car, get in the back seat, change Nick, feed him, settle him back in his basket and then stumble back to the trailer. That year it rained every day as well as most nights and the only laundry facilities were a wood fire copper and a trough. We would go up to the laundry every morning, boil up the nappies (no disposables in those days of course) and string them round inside the tent to dry. We had friends from the Teachers’ College who also camped at the Prom and they would come round to visit and we would all sit round playing cards and telling jokes. Did we ever think of going home early because of bad weather? Never. Did we all have fun? Always.

The year Nick was two our friends Ann and Ken Reynolds stayed at the Prom in a caravan – a great luxury to our way of thinking and we were round there one morning visiting while Nick and Andrew Reynolds played chasey round the caravan. Suddenly there was a bump and a scream – Nick had tripped and cut his head on the gas tank. He was bleeding profusely and looked as though he would need stitches. We rushed him up to the store where fortunately there was a first aid person who put him back together with butterfly band aids, the first I had ever seen and they worked perfectly. Above is a beach day at the Prom, Marcus and Nick in front, Belinda, Celene and Andrew Reynolds behind them behind them and Fiona and Ann Reynolds on the left. Happy days!

Another year we had walked round to Squeaky Bay and all were playing on the beach as the water was rough that day. Reg saw a girl in the water caught in a rip and giving the distress signal with her arm straight up. Her aunt and uncle were on the beach, frantic but neither of them could swim. Reg ran into the water and swam to where the girl was but then as we watched they got carried further and further out until they disappeared around the headland of the bay. By this time the aunt and uncle were not the only ones who were frantic as I contemplated life with four young children and no Reg. However, after about ten minutes they reappeared walking over the hill at the end of the bay and Reg explained that the only way to escape the rip was to go with it. What a relief for all of us.

Camping was always one of our favourite occupations and the Prom was a marvelous place to do it, very unspoiled and natural. Some nights a wombat would lumber through our campsite and every now and then someone would see a snake but nobody worried unduly about them. The tent had no floor so everything got sandy and ants were frequent visitors but we all learned to cope with a little inconvenience and had so much fun doing it.

Our daily treat was an orange or lime splice from the store at night - that was dessert - and something that we continued to do each day on our long camping trips. It was the only treat for the day so was relished by everyone. At night after everyone was in their sleeping bags I would read aloud. I can't remember what I read in the old Wilson's Prom days but I know that on our long Canadian camping trips I read the whole of the Narnia series and then the whole of the Lord of the Rings series - except that I used to skip out the battle scenes in both because I didn't like them - and the next day in the car we would recount what had happened the previous night for those who had fallen asleep before the end. The great thing about camping was that the children all learned to amuse themselves with found objects from nature and that continued in later years when we did so much camping in North America. I remember Belinda and Celene, on our first camping trip, getting two sticks each of unequal lengths and going round pretending they were a violin and a bow – chanting `Tune tune violin’ endlessly. Altogether such happy times and great forerunners to all the camping we were to do in later years.