Len and Dulcie’s Wedding, 10th July, 1954
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Copyright © 2021 Victoria Twead
Photographs kindly donated by Fran Globke and the Clarke family
Published by Ant Press
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-922476-48-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-922476-47-0
Paperback Large Print ISBN: 978-1-922476-49-4
Hardback Large Print ISBN: 978-1-922476-50-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-922476-41-8
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Each book purchased will help support Careflight, an Australian aero-medical charity that attends emergencies, however remote.
For Fran, who treasured and kept Dulcie’s letters safe for more than 60 years.
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For Terry and the Clarke family. Without their generosity this volume would never have existed.
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For Bungundarra, Queensland, a land of hills and hollows where these events took place.
And finally, dedicated to the memory of brave young Dulcie Clarke, who will live forever through her letters to Fran.
Contents
5th NOVEMBER 2020
Part I
1957 - 1962
Part II
1963 - 1968
Part III
1969 - 1973
Part IV
1974 - 1981
Epilogue
A request…
Acknowledgements
About Victoria Twead
The Old Fools series
Ant Press Books
Ant Press Online
5th NOVEMBER 2020
The following email appeared in my inbox, completely out of the blue, on 5th November 2020:
Dear Victoria,
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Having enjoyed reading about your various life experiences in the past, I was eager to read “Two Old Fools Down Under”. I was not disappointed. I enjoyed it thoroughly and see on Facebook you have also been traveling throughout Australia. This is one of the reasons I am writing to you now as Australia has played an important part of my life since the 1950s.
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Through a United Nations “People to People Program”, I began a penpal friendship with a young married girl in Queensland where she and her husband lived with their baby girl on a farm in the outback. I lived in Detroit, Michigan, a large city and was expecting my first child. And so our friendship started and we shared our lives by mail through the 1960s and ’70s until her untimely death in 1981.
[Len, Dulcie and baby Karen, 1956]
The diversity of our lives showed our entirely different ways of life in two vastly different locales and we wrote of our daily lives sharing not only good times but our adventures, problems, and tragedies and our innermost thoughts. Her life presented daily challenges more worthy of any stories or TV series my sons could watch. We looked forward to her letters and I kept the letters in a scrapbook.
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I wanted somehow to pay a tribute to her life and accomplishments by telling the story that chronicles her life from young girl to admirable Australian woman. But my husband and I began a new business and I kept putting it off. Periodically I would look at the scrapbook and think, Someday, when I have time…
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Now I am 85 years old, with Parkinson’s disease and my “someday” is, I’m afraid, coming too late. The desire to share Dulcie’s life is still there. I re-read the letters and find they are most interesting to read, just as she wrote them. It is her story, I can’t improve on that. But I don’t know how to do this, and so I am writing to ask you if you could give me any advice as to what options I might have.
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If you would like to read one of her letters—pick a month and year—and I will send you a copy of one close to that time. I cannot choose which one is more definitive of her, they are all most worthy of reading. Her life on the farm or ranch always was so different from mine. She faced many challenges, loved her land, and never gave up in the most trying of circumstances.
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Thank you for taking the time to read my email, and thank you for sharing your adventures with all of us readers. What’s next?
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Fran Globke
Coldwater
MI USA
“Joe!” I yelled from my office. “Listen to this!”
My husband joined me and listened quietly as I read Fran’s email aloud.
“Lovely email,” he said at last. “I would love to see a letter. Shall we ask Fran to send one?”
“I already have.”
“Excellent.”
The sample letter arrived and took our breath away. We told Fran we would be honoured to take over the project and publish the letters in book form. Fran agreed and provided us with all the letters. Joe set to work transcribing them.
But we wondered how Dulcie, an Australian girl, had been matched with Fran. I emailed Fran and received this reply:
Hello Vicky,
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In 1957 I heard about the People to People program, the brainchild of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He hoped it would encourage international friendships through a variety of activities including an exchange of letters.
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I was intrigued. At 21, I had just had my first child and had left my job to be a full time wife and mother. I loved my new “career” but missed the city life I had also had.
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I worked in the business hub of Detroit on the 21st floor of the National Bank Building as an Underwriter in an insurance firm. Our offices overlooked Windsor, Ontario, Canada across the Detroit River.
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It was an hour’s bus ride into the city from my home and an hour return in the evening. Downtown Detroit was at that time a thriving city with major shopping, theatres, museums, hotels, and led the automobile industry in the world.
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When I heard of People to People it seemed like a wonderful way to contribute something to further understanding and peace, and I thought it’d be great to learn about places I probably would never see.
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I sent in my information and I was given Dulcie’s name in Australia. I also received information on another young woman in Tokyo, Japan. I excitedly answered both letters.
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Unfortunately, my Japanese friend, who was a university student, lasted only two to three years because, after she graduated and began work in Tokyo, Asako found she couldn’t keep up her English and so we decided to end our letters.
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Her letters about her life, customs, and her experiences during the war were so different and I learned so much about Japanese culture. I treasure her letters also.
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In Dulcie’s letters I found another way of life which was so completely different from mine, and our friendship grew as we learned not only about our differences in lifestyle but also how much the same were our mutual fundamental beliefs on which we based our lives.
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I am so glad I sent that first letter.
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Fran
Other than a few tiny corrections and minor grammatical changes, the letters are all as we received them from Fran.
Occasionally Joe and I thought an explanation was necessary to clear possible ambiguities. These are few and appear within square brackets [thus]. For international readers we provided the approximate equivalent metric values for imperial weights and m
easures. We also converted Fahrenheit temperatures to degrees Celsius.
I believe Dulcie’s letters are Australian historical treasures and I am eternally grateful to Fran and the Clarke family for allowing me to share them with the world.
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Victoria Twead, 2021
Part I
1957 - 1962
3rd November 1957
Dear Fran,
Well, I was pleased to hear from you again and thank you very much for the photo. I have enclosed one of myself and Karen. As you can see she is not in a good mood. However she does have some sweet moments among the sour ones.
Well, the hot weather is with us now and the temperature goes to 115 degrees [46°C] almost every day. My garden has long since withered up and died, but it was beautiful while it lasted. Thad balsams, petunias, zinnias, nasturtiums and a few other kinds.
Have you any household pets? We have three cats. Two tortoiseshell females and one black and white tomcat. Their names are Snuffy, Dotty, and Scotty. Karen loves them and is always carrying one around everywhere she goes. Of course we have numerous other animals on the farm, such as dogs, horses, cattle and pigs.
Well, now I had better answer some of the questions in your letter. I have already told you it can be very hot here, but no, it doesn’t get very cold in winter. We don’t have snow in Queensland and the temperature only drops to between 20 and 30 degrees [C].
Our cars are both S.M. 1500s [Singer 1500] and are made in England. Cars are very expensive in Australia and there are lots and lots of people who cannot afford them. Also our roads are terrible things, just rough dirt tracks that are impossible to travel at much more than 30 miles per hour [50 kph]. In the cities they are made of bitumen. I shall be driving back to our farm shortly and although it is only a distance of approximately 500 miles [805 km], the roads are so bad, the journey usually takes two days.
Well, Fran, as news is short, I will close now and hope to hear from you again soon.
Yours sincerely,
Dulcie
29th November 1957 Mt. Ossa
Dear Fran,
I received your letter yesterday, so I am answering straight away, as we are leaving for home tomorrow. I will be really pleased to get back again and get the house and garden ready for Christmas.
Yes, I suppose you are excited about Ricky’s first Christmas. This is Karen’s second one, but as she was only 2 and ½ months old for the first one, this one we will really enjoy with her. Yes, she is walking, running too. She first walked at 12 months, but can’t talk very much yet.
Well, yes, I have two brothers, Brian, 21, and Tom, 23, both single yet, no sisters. Len has two sisters, Violet 30, married with 3 children and Margaret, 20, single. No brothers. Both my people and Len’s are farmers and are “next door neighbours”, (the two farms join one another). Len’s mother and father live apart and Margaret is on the farm with her mother, while his father works away. We very rarely see him.
My cat had 6 kittens last week. I killed four and kept two grey tomcats as my two other cats died from the heat a while back. Karen loves the kittens and when the mother cat gets out of the box, Karen gets in with the kits. They haven’t got their eyes open yet, but when they have and are able to walk a bit she will have lots of fun with them.
My reading covers almost everything. I read anything I can get my hands on. But Pearl Buck is really one of my favourites. But Len and I both like war stories of the air-force or army. We have a large collection of books and have a library built in the new house. A few of my favourite war stories are “Down in the Drink”, “The First and the Last” and we also have some written by German pilots in the last war, giving their side of the war. It is really interesting to read about both sides of the war. Two of these stories were “I Flew for the Führer” and “Stuka Pilot”.
I am going to see about sending you a few Australian magazines. I won’t be able to send them airmail, I don’t think, but sent by ship they will probably take 2 or 3 months to reach you, however it won’t matter if they are a bit old when you get them. You might still find them interesting. Do you have any weekly magazines for women over there?
Well, Fran, I had better close now and start on a bit of work. So hoping to hear from you soon.
Yours truly,
Dulcie
10th January 1958
Dear Fran,
Well, I was pleased to hear from you again, although I didn’t really realise it had been so long since I last heard from you.
Time has seemed to take ages to go past this week and I’ve had no thoughts for anything other than Karen. She got out in the cow paddock a week or so ago and ate some poisonous berries and has been in a critical condition in the hospital since.
I can’t get in to see her very often as the hospital is too far away. I did go in yesterday but she is unconscious and does not know me. When she had eaten them she started to take convulsions and choked. I took her with me in the car and raced for the doctor and although I travelled at 60 miles per hour [96 kph] nearly all the way, it seemed to take ages to get there.
Sometimes I wish we lived in the city, where we could have good roads and be close to all the amenities.
Yes, we have Christmas trees here, in fact I think Christmas is spent the same in nearly all parts of the world. Thank you very much for the greeting card you sent.
Yes, our family’s birthdays all start to come now. First of all my brother Brian’s is in February, mine is 21st of April and Tom’s is in October.
I am having a 21st party this year. Mum and Dad say no one in our family has missed out on one yet and they don’t see why I should either. But I’m not really looking forward to it.
My two little kittens are getting around now and are into all the mischief going.
Well, Fran, I had better close now and do some work.
So hoping to hear from you soon,
Dulcie
January 1958 Bungundarra, Yeppoon
Dear Fran,
Thank you very much for the snap of yourself, and Len with Ricky.
Ricky is a nice little chap. To look at the snap of him makes me wish Karen was a baby again. I would have another babe but the thought of going through all what I went through before puts me off it.
I was reading in an English magazine where in England and America there are pain-killing drugs for childbirth, but here we just lie and wait till the babe is born and chew chewing-gum. I think I’ll save up and go overseas to have my next one if the doctors are so good as I am led to believe.
It is very hot today. The temp is 110 [43ºC] and we are only half-way through the day, so it will probably get hotter in the evening.
I am rounding up some more magazines to send to you. I haven’t received yours yet.
The pineapple harvest is drawing to a close at last. We got approximately a hundred and fifty thousand from ours with just a few hundred more to come. It wasn’t a bad season but we hope to do better next time. The next crop comes off in September.
Well, Fran, I must close now and get lunch ready.
So till next time,
Dulcie
10th February 1958
Dear Fran,
Well, yes, I do have good news about Karen this time.
She has had a few skin grafts on her feet but for the time being she is home with us. Her feet are the worst and the rest of her body looks just as if she was never hurt. I would have hated her to be disfigured. However, even her feet look good now. Thanks to the doctors and God, I am sure.
You must have been really excited when Ricky had his birthday. It was bad, your mother not being able to be there to celebrate too.
We have had some rain here at long last. We are right in the middle of summer here, so I expect you will be having winter over there.
I’m glad you liked the magazines. Would you like me to send you some more? Any particular ones? I am eagerly awaiting yours.
We are in full swing with the pineapple harvesting now. We sen
d most of ours to the cannery to be canned and exported to England and other countries. They are very prickly things but really taste nice.
I am enclosing a few photos for you and I hope you can decipher what they are as they aren’t very good. Do let me have some of your family as soon as you get some, won’t you.
Well, I had better close now as its 4:30 and I haven’t prepared tea [the evening meal] yet. So hoping to hear from you soon.
Yours truly,
Dear Fran, Love Dulcie Page 1