Needless to say my father was extremely proud of this invention.
Unfortunately for him, we girls quite often found it easier to iron on a towel on the floor or on the kitchen table, annoying him no end, particularly as one of us (no-one ever owned up) left a large imprint of the iron on the carpet, which had to be covered by a mat for years until it was finally replaced.
Somehow the confines of the narrow hallway in Ijong Street didn’t do the ancestors within their gilded frames quite the justice that the wide corridors of Drominagh and Clonmoylan had. On occasions, when my father was feeling particularly merry, he would give a long sermon on each and every one of the ancestors, sometimes accompanied by a rendition of The Wearing of the Green, embarrassing us no end, but amusing our boyfriends, who actually found this most interesting. They’d no idea they were taking out such noble stock.
For hours my father foraged in Haigh Park for seedling Roman pencil pines and planted these as a screen around the barren block. Eventually it grew into a solid clipped hedge eight feet high. He also planted the land with potatoes. It was a well-known fact in Ireland that you never planted a garden until you’d prepared the soil with a crop of potatoes. This was not as widely known in Australia as one would have expected.
My classmates at school exclaimed in great glee: ‘She lives in a potato patch. Ha, ha!’ Children can be so cruel.
But the potatoes worked. My father turned this desolate piece of land into one of the most picturesque gardens in Canberra, later building a pergola over the rear patio where he planted the grapevine under which we took many of our meals in the hot summer months. The Virginia creeper thrived and he grew a rosemary hedge in the front, spending hours and hours trimming it to perfection, together with the pencil pines out the back – usually in the scorching heat (which never seemed to worry him), with a handkerchief tied over his face to protect him from flying branches and pollen. His array of seasonal flowers was a joy to all who walked past, and he took great delight when people stopped to exclaim and pass the time of day with him. Luckily he didn’t live to see the day when the house was knocked down and a development of townhouses was callously erected upon his hard earned work, although the pencil pine hedge has survived.
Although an expert in the garden, my father was typical of his era. The cooking was left to the women. My mother managed on a meagre budget to keep us all fed, her speciality being a mean Irish stew in the pressure cooker. An Irish friend, Pat Gallagher, a long tall streak-of-fun with a mop of unruly russet hair, arrived one day on his pushbike with a couple of chickens hanging over the handlebars, handing them to my mother with much pride. I remember helping her to clean and pluck them in the laundry tub, after which she stuffed them with herbs out of my father’s garden, grabbed a handful of potatoes from the front lawn, some tomatoes from the vegie patch out the back and popped them all in the oven to produce a grand meal for Pat and all of us sitting at the cedar table.
Another day Pat arrived with a grin, hastily whipping two rabbits out of a hessian bag. This time it was a tasty rabbit stew. Not bad for someone who hadn’t had to cook much at all until we came to Australia. Her only stipulation was that cooking, washing up and house chores were done with a Craven A cigarette firmly placed in her mouth to get her through the task. Many a day we hid a few out of the packet to surprise her when she ran out.
Mulwala Hostel was home to many newly arrived Irish men and women. Our home became a haven for many, including the gregarious Tom Cahill and the beautiful Rose Donnelly who became a life-long friend, together with her husband Harry, an innovative engineer, who was at the forefront of Canberra’s rapid progress. Rose had met Harry at Mulwala where he too was boarding when he first came to Australia.
In 1957 my father’s mother Eily sadly passed away in the nursing home in Dublin. Needless to say this caused my father great grief. I’d like to say I was overcome with immense sadness also, but I’d known my grandmother for such a short time that after three years in Australia she’d sadly become a distant memory. In the back of his mind I’m sure my father had held onto the faint hope that he’d somehow get back to Ireland before she left this world. For months he was guilt ridden, going into a slight decline. However, one consolation was that the small amount of money she left him in her will helped us pay some outstanding bills, although it took forever to get to Australia.
Everything we needed was always explained by: ‘When the money comes from Ireland.’ Yet when it did eventually get here it was well and truly spent.
In 1958 we also exchanged the Holden for a highly unreliable pale-green Armstrong Siddeley with a wide stepping-board, one of the first automatic drives and governed by a fluid clutch. My father adored it, no doubt thinking back to the fancy cars of his youth, so overlooked the odd problem he had with her.
My mother was not quite so forgiving, as time after time she and the rest of us were left stranded somewhere when the car refused to go. Yet, sitting proudly in the driveway, it added a bit of glamour to the street, until a Volkswagen Beetle eventually replaced it, lowering the tone somewhat.
Chapter 15
The Reluctant Student, Rose Bay
In 1959, Viv, like Dibs, went to boarding school at Rose Bay Sacré Coeur Convent. For the first time in our lives I was on my own, so to speak. I left our primary school in Braddon and started as one of the first intake of students at the new Braddon Catholic Girls High School (now Merici College) adjoining our local church in Braddon. Here, amongst other things, I played hockey for the first time. Much to my amazement, I became quite good and made the first team in the initial few months of being there. Pulling up a good four inches shorter than most on the team, this was of great surprise to everyone, most of all to me. I’d eventually found something at which I excelled. Sadly this was not to last long. For in 1959 I was sent to Rose Bay, where hockey was frowned upon as being unladylike, meaning I had to give up my short career.
Viv was a great success at Rose Bay; I not quite so.
I was desperately homesick, spending most of my first term in tears, demanding to be sent home, much to Viv’s utter humiliation. I never really overcame this homesickness, hence my memories of my four years there are not as happy as they might have been.
Rose Bay Convent, now known as Kincoppel Rose Bay, is a stately stone building set on acres of prime real estate in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney. Sitting proudly on the hill, before the road branches down to Vaucluse, it boasts wide uninterrupted views of the harbour on three sides. Why I didn’t just enjoy the view, I don’t know. Set around a central courtyard to the front, it boasts a glorious chapel with an ornate marble altar and dark wooden pews, where the nuns (dressed in black habits with ruffled frills surrounding their demure faces), and we girls, seemed to spend a great deal of each day praying. Or so it seemed at the time, although we did have many picnics in the extensive grounds rambling down to the water, or if we were lucky, on Shark Island in the middle of the harbour. Most of the students of these days were from large farming families from around New South Wales where I spent a number of school holidays. My most memorable one was in Orange when I stayed with my best friend of the time, another Rosemary, on her parents’ extensive sheep station where we rode horses, swam in the dam and played tennis on the grass court down by the river.
This was the time when a pound of wool was worth a pound and sheep stations were literally rolling in it, so perhaps in hindsight my father should have hocked everything to the bank (or at the very least us children) and bought a farm at Reidsdale to stock up with sheep.
Viv became a ‘blue ribbon’– the equivalent of a prefect, allowing her to walk around elegantly with a satin blue ribbon draped over her shoulder. I didn’t get this honour, but was more than proud when Viv did.
We were somewhat short of male company, not being allowed to fraternise with any, not even with Riverview, the school across the harbour, which was our ‘brother’ school so to speak. In fact if a boy happened to come to Mass in the side
chapel adjoining our main chapel, it was a great occasion. His parents hauled one poor fellow, the brother of a classmate of mine, there each morning where he’d endeavour to position himself out of sight of all of us desperate girls. Fortunately for us this was extremely difficult to do. I don’t think he was particularly good looking, but at least he was a male. Kambala Girls College adjoined our convent on the bottom side, but as it was not a Catholic school we weren’t allowed to mix with them either. We swam in a small seawater pool cut into the rocks where a couple of the students excelled to such an extent that they were regarded much like pop stars of the day.
One evening after supper, with all the students gathered in the long study as usual, Viv and I were highly embarrassed, yet somewhat proud, when a chapter of Channel Dash, a book just released about Eugene Esmonde VC was read to the entire school.
I hated Latin, ancient history and needlework, but loved English literature, public speaking, drama and geography. I also adored the library where I spent many happy hours, particularly if we weren’t going out to visit the Duncans (he went to school with my father at Downside) at their delightful waterfront home in Camp Cove at Watson Bay. Music practice was held in tiny cells down in the school’s dungeons, which were so dark and eerie that I soon decided the piano was not for me. The rec room was down there too, where one of the more talented girls reproduced the latest hit songs on the piano and we’d dress up and dance with each other on the odd Saturday night. We had The Art of Gracious Living classes given by Mary Rossi, one of the better-known Sydney identities of the time, where we’d learn how to walk in high heels, talk with the right pronunciation, eat with good table manners, and generally behave like a lady.
On the whole the nuns were kind and gentle, some stricter than others, some more patient teachers, but it seemed as though they all had our well-being utmost in their minds. One was so beautiful that even the workmen’s eyes would pop out of their heads when they saw her. She sang like an angel, unbelievably passing up a career in Hollywood to become a nun.
Arriving to pick us up one afternoon at the front door of the convent for a week of school holidays at Whale Beach in the Armstrong Siddeley, my father could hardly contain his admiration when he met her for the first time, and Viv and I had to hurriedly move him on.
I have to say that my days at Rose Bay on the whole were spent in counting the moments until school holidays arrived so that I could be back in Canberra and riding at Mrs Lew’s, or cuddling the new addition to our family, Trudy, a satiny black Dachshund (who Porky only just tolerated), rather than putting my head down and getting on with my studies. To this day I can recall that sick feeling in my stomach when holidays came to an end and we had to return to school for another long term.
Having completed her Leaving Certificate, followed by a stint at nursing and being an air hostess with Ansett, Viv eventually returned to Canberra to work at a number of jobs in order to save up for ‘overseas’, which was the aim of all young girls in the 1960s. She left in 1967 with a friend from her Ansett days, and after a time in the Greek Islands, with work on enchanting Mykonos, she toured Europe, ending up getting a holiday job in a small café in Spain. With her black hair, nutbrown eyes, and her skin now tanned by the hot sun, she was frequently mistaken for a Spaniard. Eventually she ended up in Ireland, working in Dublin where she modelled, subsidising that with waitressing and secretarial work.
Married to Tim Cresswell, a dashing Welshman she met in London, she now runs a great tourist operation at their farm, Cilwych, which has been in the Cresswell family for generations, on the banks of the picturesque River Usk in South Wales. Here their two lovely daughters, Laragh and Dominie, were born, and I often visit. Only recently I took two of my grandsons now living in France, Hubie and Ru, to stay with Viv and Tim on Cilwych where the boys rode horses amongst the green rolling hills, fed the pheasants and played on the grassy banks of the River Usk. The lovely and talented Laragh was home from the far north of Scotland where she was working as a production manager on the television series, Monarch of the Glen, so with her tantalising tales of what it was like working on a TV show she was a great hit with the boys, as she let them help her muck out the stalls and watch her exercise the horses in the field adjoining the stables.
Unfortunately for all of her siblings in Australia, Viv is a long way away. Sadly it is close to fifty years since we’ve all been together in the one room. Each of us has been with her separately at Cilwych or in Ireland, but we’ve never been together all at once. And as Viv hates flying she has never made the long trip back to Australia.
Chapter 16
A Fortunate Meeting
Eugene was accepted into Duntroon Royal Military College in 1962. I remember vividly taking him out there on his first day and leaving him with the other cadets in the grounds of the College. He was understandably nervous and looked very alone. He won a boxing competition in his first term, which gave him a good start in his new life. What I didn’t realise then was that in a different weight section was my future husband, Rob, a delicious tall blond fellow with startling blue eyes. He won his section also.
‘Due mainly,’ he told me, ‘to the times I had to protect myself as a surfer on Manly beach, once for chatting up someone else’s girlfriend.’
Well, a bloke has to learn somewhere.
In 1963 I left Rose Bay, returning to Canberra to work at the jewellers, Angus and Coote, where Viv had worked for a short time. I also commenced a business course at the Metropolitan Business College. In my spare time I joined a Repertory Society, starring in some rather obscure productions. I played the wife in The Importance of Being Earnest and had a short romance with Earnest. I also did a spot of modelling; mainly in fashion parades, where I wore Angus and Coote jewellery. One outfit I modelled I was allowed to keep. I remember it well: a grey linen suit with a silk polka dotted blouse. An invaluable outfit as I mixed and matched it a hundred different ways, for wages were not what they are today, my salary at Angus and Coote being a mere fourteen pounds a week.
During this time I dated a few fellows, including the genial Peter with tight curly blond hair and a wicked sense of humour, whose friend Richard took Viv out. Richard owned a small white Triumph sports car, in which he transported us everywhere, including to Manly Beach in Sydney one weekend where Viv and I shared a room overlooking the Corso. After swimming on the beach and sunbaking for hours on the scorching sand we then went to Bondi Surf Club where we stomped to Col Joye and Little Pattie. Other times we’d drive down the long winding road to Bateman’s Bay on the south coast of New South Wales to brave the surf, before undertaking the long trip back up the Clyde Mountain where we’d stop every hour or so to fill the radiator up to stop it overheating. Other times we’d go up to Perisher and toboggan in the snow or ride through the pine forests out near Mrs Lew’s new riding school.
My father’s half-sister, my godmother, Aunt Rosemary, joined us in Canberra from Ireland. At this stage she was well into her 70s and was having her first trip to Australia. Peter and Richard adored her, rushing her from one tourist spot to the other, quite often carrying her tiny frame on their burly shoulders or in the back of Richard’s sports car; her long grey spider web hair billowing in the wind, a radiant smile from ear to ear. She said it was the best holiday she’d ever had, particularly as Dibs had arranged an interview with the Canberra Times. Gracing Saturday’s front page, she was described as this ‘distinguished visitor from Dublin’, which tickled her fancy no end. She went off with Dibs to board her P& O liner in Sydney, clutching the article under her arm to show everyone back in Ireland. I’m not sure what her reaction was to her brother’s new life, a life so different from at Drominagh, where she’d spent much of her youth. For although our house at Ijong Street was now a rich oasis of tall firs, colourful flowers, shrubs and green lawns, it certainly was far removed, not just in distance, from Drominagh or Clonmoylan, where she’d last visited us.
Canberra now had a number of coffee lounges we patro
nised regularly. After work on a Friday night we’d head to Lumleys to linger over cappuccinos and raisin toast. It was a smoky atmosphere, underground, with no ventilation, adding enormously to the feel of the place. In the corner, a pianist or a lone trumpeter played soulfully until the wee hours. We wore twin sets and pearls, before mini-skirts became fashionable and I remember fondly a pair of shiny pink pedal pushers that I almost wore out. We tied our hair back in high ponytails and painted our lips luscious pink. However, each Sunday we still dressed demurely for Mass, after having been to the mandatory confession the day before, despite the fact I was having more and more doubts about the wisdom of a priest hiding behind a dark screen listening intently to a young girl’s bad thoughts, which I’m sure would arouse even the holiest of men.
With one of those ‘mother me’ faces and cocker spaniel brown eyes, my next serious boyfriend, Phillip, had a Peugeot car, which could only be started by using a heavy handle to crank the shaft. This was particularly embarrassing after a night at the drive-in theatre when we’d be the last car left in the lot. Yet, despite this, and his penchant for being at least an hour late for dates, we went out off and on for over a year until I received an invitation I couldn’t refuse.
‘Do you think it’d be okay if I asked Ro to come with me?’ Rob Peterswald probed Eugene, after Rob’s date for the Queen’s Birthday Ball at Duntroon couldn’t go at the last minute. I remember Eugene asking me if I’d mind Rob ringing. I gather there were certain formalities that needed to be adhered to, one of them being to get the brother’s permission.
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 13