I was lucky enough to have my mum stay with me this week for Mothers Day for the first time in a few years from down South and decided to put her on HOL. You may recognise her from my last post with her sister in law.
I asked Mum a little about her life before she met my Dad who was Lismore born and raised till 19. He died at the age of 42.
Alice (81) – “My mum was a country lady and did it tough on the farm, 7 children and even though we never had much we were always happy. We always had music, it was important that we had music and each other. I remember Mum took us all to the pictures one time and we’re sitting there in the cinema and she still had her apron on with 2 left shoes, different shoes! We’d gone in the bus and that’s just how she was, getting 6 out of the 7 kids organised.
We sang around the piano every night at home. Mum always played at all the dances and Dad played the drums.
Mum had an accident in the sulky, a bad one on VP day (Victory in the Pacific) when the war ended. She was driving the sulky with old Jack the horse and he bolted and threw her out. She was bruised and battered but was playing piano that night at a celebration dance for the end of war and her first song was ‘Two lovely Black Eyes’ which was actually a real song.
When Len my brother was born my Dad who had no money on the farm couldn’t pay the bill so they wouldn’t let Mum take the baby home from hospital. The bank said they would lend the money on their cow but not on his wife. That’s the way it was then.
I remember when Mum was 82 she went into hospital to have her gall bladder removed and when she came out of anaesthetic, she said ‘What did I have?’ The only time she had ever been in a hospital was to have a baby. Very amusing!
“Dad was a chef in the war and when he came home on leave we’d have to walk through the bush and wait up the line because we had no transport to Dora Creek station. The troop train would come through and he would throw out biscuits or something like that. It was the saddest time. All the soldiers would be hanging out of the windows and we’d see Dad going past. Mum would be crying, we would all be crying, it was horrible. Even though he wasn’t going off to fight, he was the cook and had to go wherever they went. We’d know when he was coming home on leave, we’d see him coming down the hill in his uniform with his dilly bag and we’d be so excited, he would bring us a lucky bean from a tree or a shell (laughs).”
“When I was little in the early 40’s we would be at school and the alarm would go off which meant the enemy would be somewhere up there. All the beaches around Newcastle were barb wired for protection from submarines coming in and all our homes would be blacked out at night. We had newspaper all over our windows to black them out and would turn off our hurricane lamps so we would all sit in the dark. At school we were told if we were bombed that we had to get under our desks and hold a rubber between our teeth and if we were in the playground when the sirens went off we had to lie beside tree logs so we weren’t seen running. Can’t really see now how that would have done a thing had we been bombed but that was what we were told to do.”