Maggots in Paradise

My Grandma, when provoked into doing so, would say, “There are two sorts of people I simply can’t stand a bar of - those who interfere in other folks’ affairs, and chronic whingers.” Of the latter type she would declare, though never in their presence, “Mark my words, people like that would find maggots in Paradise.” I think that was the nearest to criticism of anybody that she ever came.

A quiet-spoken, pretty little woman who owned to being five feet tall (“if she stretches,” Uncle Tom would say), the only cosmetic she used was face powder. Born in 1870 to a ‘working class’ family, in some ways Grandma kept a Victorian outlook, believing cosmetics (except face powder), gaudy adornments, strong perfume and bright-coloured nail polish should not be used by respectable women. Fortunately, she had little need of cosmetics, with a fair skin, pink cheeks and bright blue eyes. However, her soft-gold hair retained its colour to the end of her life, due to regular visits to the hairdresser. When teased she never admitted to vanity, saying, “I simply like to keep up my standards.”

Early in the 1940s, Grandma started her monthly weekend visits to us. While she prepared the meat and dessert for Saturday lunch, I sat at the kitchen table, shelling peas, ‘frenching’ green beans, or squashing dates for apple and date pie. Grandma enjoyed having an audience, and in that way I learned about life in England, before she came to Australia with her three younger sons in 1920. She had some quaint sayings such as: ‘I learned early on, life’s too short to waste time complaining, what can’t be cured must be endured.’ ‘Hard times visit all of us, rich and poor alike, but you don’t have to invite them in and give them a chair to sit on. If you can’t avoid them, you have to work your way through them.’ ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.’ ‘Misery loves company, but nobody wants to be around a ‘misery guts’ for long.’ Sometimes, when asked, she would sing a little ditty about those ‘hard times:’

‘When you’re living down in Poverty Street,
Nobody knocks at your door.
For when you’re living down in Poverty Street,
The folks all know you’re poor.
But when your bits of silver turn into gold,
They drive away all care.
And everybody comes a’knocking at your door,
When you’re living in Golden Square.’

Grandma was baptised Emma Elizabeth Lesurf (a name anglicised from the French), in Hackney, London. Her mother, nee Elizabeth Levesque, was married in one of the Channel Islands, where her father was a policeman. Their ancestors were Huguenots from Brittany in France, which was predominantly a Catholic country. As Protestants, they found living and working conditions, difficult. The men of the family were artisans and the women cottage industry workers, doing needlework, knitting, spinning and weaving.

As with Clara, her next older sister, Grandma was among the first to attend the London County Council schools set up in the 1870s for working-class children. She used to say, but laughingly, that she sometimes thought one of the reasons they were sent to school was so that they could read to their widowed grandmother, ‘Granny Levesque,’ who had poor eyesight, partly due to cataracts, and also to long years spent at needlework, often in poor lighting. Apart from doing a little housework, or at meal times and family get-togethers, the old lady passed her hours in the upstairs bedroom she shared with the two girls in the terrace house in Hackney, London. In the afternoons she usually sat in her rocking chair downstairs in the parlour, wearing a hand-sewn, lace-trimmed mobcap, and a delicate, hand-made woollen shawl. There she would be read to for an hour most weekday afternoons, first by Clara, and later on by Emma (my grandmother), from two romance novels, which the girls borrowed from the free public library each Saturday.

The result of this, which amused me when I heard the story, was that Grandma became addicted to romance novels and, for the remainder of her life, would borrow two books of that genre each week, from the public library, in England and Australia. She often said, “I thank God I’ve kept my eyesight, so I don’t have to rely on someone to read to me.”

Once I asked her what she did to have fun when she was a young girl. She raised her eyebrows at me and said, “Lord love a duck, child, we didn’t use the word ‘fun’ then. If you were born into the working class you knew your place in life, and didn’t question it. Anyway, you were lucky if you were spared to grow up, so many died young. On top of that, you were lucky if you were allowed to go to school. A lot of poor children got very little or no education, because they had to help their parents to earn a living, especially country children.”

Grandma continued, “We soon learned to do as we were told and to keep our mouths shut around grownups. When I was a child it was strictly a case of ‘children should be seen and not heard,’ and ‘spare the rod and spoil the child.’ Believe me, none of us got spoiled, and we had little time for what you call ‘fun.’ We helped with the cooking and ate our tea early, then tidied up the kitchen. While young children played, mothers and older girls often sat on the whitewashed doorsteps in the twilight, and chatted together or with neighbours, until it grew dark. It was considered ‘slovenly’ not to have clean white lace curtains in the front window, and whitewashed front steps. Young ones often jumped over the two or three steps to keep them clean, because whitewashing them was another job for us girls.”

After thinking a little, she said, “Of course we played games when we could. We tried to get to school early, to have time to play before the bell rang. Girls skipped rope to such rhymes as ‘I Had a Little Nut Tree,’ ‘Bluebells and Cockleshells,’ ‘Georgy Porgy Pudding and Pie,’ and others. We’d bounce balls against the brick wall, play hopscotch or jacks. Boys would play ball games, marbles, bowl hoops, spin humming tops on the concrete or stand around eyeing us girls. Our games were played strictly according to the season. Every so often word was passed around of some family suffering a death.”

Grandma attended school for seven years until her twelfth year. After that she would get up at five each weekday morning, eat her bread and dripping with a cup of milky tea, and walk a few streets to two houses of the ‘well-to-do’. For sixpence a week she would light the downstairs fires and clean and polish shoes that were left out for her in the scullery. Afterwards she went to her work, where she was indentured to a cigar manufacturer. (Her indenture papers are still in the family). However, after her marriage in her eighteenth year she worked at Siemens’ Lighting Company, a block from her home in Hackney.

One Saturday morning, when I was sitting at our kitchen table while she was preparing the ‘joint’ for dinner and I was shelling peas, I asked, “What happened to children when they got into trouble in school, when you were young, Grandma?” “My goodness! That was something we tried to avoid,” she replied. “At home you got your ears boxed if you stepped out of line, but at school you got caned, and that was a lot worse. I’m glad to say that along with most girls I was spared the cane, but boys often had a harder time of it. Slow learners sometimes had to wear a tall ‘dunce cap’ with a big ‘D’ for dunce on it, for the day. Ah, that was cruel, I admit. But we were there to learn, and learn we did.”

Still remembering, Grandma went on, “We were taught reading, writing and arithmetic. Geography took in the main countries of the world with their capitals and products. In history we had to learn all the kings and queens of England. School prizes were always books, and I got a book as a prize for learning those by heart. We did mental arithmetic until we could add up pounds, shillings and pence in our heads, without ever stopping to think. In our last year girls did needlework and cookery, while boys did woodwork.”

“Another thing that comes to mind,” she said, “is that at first we used slate-boards and slate pencils. After a year or two of that, we used pencils for school and homework, doing ‘sums’ or a page of writing to old sayings such as, ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ The older girls and boys wrote with pens instead of pencils. We dipped our pen-nibs in inkwells, and the Good Lord help us, if ever we blotted our copybooks. Come to think of it, that’s where the expression, ‘to blot your copybook,’ meaning ‘to do something wrong,’ came from.” “In 1883, during my last year, Salvation Army Officers came to the school and got us children to sign the pledge against strong drink. Most of the boys had to be shamed into signing, but sad to say I think very few of them kept it.”

On another Saturday morning, when Grandma was cooking dinner, she told me, “We young ones, like my own children later on, went to Baptist Sunday School because it was closest to our home. We learned to say the names of the books of the Bible by rote, both the Old Testament and New Testament. I didn’t mind doing that because at the end of the year if we could say them all we were given a book, and I loved reading. Each summer we Sunday School children were taken on a free bus ride out into the countryside for a picnic, which made quite a nice change for us city children, you can be sure.”

“But you mustn’t get the idea that life was all that hard for us,” said Grandma. ‘You see, we knew no different then. Wireless sets were unheard of, and I was sixty-five before I got one. People made their own entertainment. Most families had an old piano or piano accordion or a gramophone, and everybody sang along. When we had a get-together with family or friends, everybody had to put in their ‘twopence-worth’ of entertainment. Nobody was excused, and we were all easily pleased in those days. London music halls were very popular, and cheap, too. When we were old enough, and working, we’d go in the cheap seats. The songs often got printed on penny sheets, and we’d soon learn the words and tune from one another. It was the usual thing for people to sing to themselves at their work, and mothers would sing their little ones to sleep with lullabies.”

I liked to hear Grandma talk about her life at home in Hackney, as a girl. She and her sister Clara slept in the same room as their grandmother, and used candles in tin candlestick holders to light their way to bed. These were snuffed out at eight-thirty, because everybody was up early in the morning. “Sometimes, if I wasn’t too sleepy,” she said, “I read for a while by candlelight, this being in the 1880s. Once I fell asleep over the book, and the candle guttered away to nothing. The next night we two girls couldn’t light our way to bed, as we had no candle. Our grandmother went to bed earlier than we did, and she snuffed out her candle. Of course it all came out,” said Grandma, “and although we bought our candles I was in trouble. You can be sure I didn’t try that trick again.”

All week long, Grandma and her older sister had to dress the younger children, tidy the bedrooms, empty the slops into the outside lavatory, and then wash themselves and the little ones in the back room behind the kitchen. This room held a concrete ‘set-in’ tub, a ‘copper’ and scrubbing board for washing clothes, an iron mangle and a tin hipbath. After doing all that, they made breakfast. They sliced bread, toasted it on a toasting fork on the red coals raked to the front of the kitchen stove, spread it with dripping from the weekend roast and seasoned it with salt and pepper. “And it was very tasty too, washed down with milky tea,” Grandma said. She always liked ‘good dripping’ toast.

When she was eighteen years old, in October 1889, Emma Elizabeth Le Surf, (a name anglicised from the French) who later became my Grandmother, married Benjamin Tilley, a cobbler by trade whose parents were farmers. It was thought that they helped him to get a lease on the terrace house in Ramsgate Street, Hackney, where he set up as a cobbler in the front room, afterwards the parlour.

After Grandma had Uncle Alf in 1890 and Uncle Tom a year later followed by a succession of births, she had to stop working for Siemens Lighting Company and do ironing at home. As Grandfather’s worsening health affected his income, she took in more ironing. She used two very heavy ‘flat’ irons, with one always heating on the stovetop. It was very hard and tiring work keeping the irons hot and wiped clean, while not scorching the clothes. With time her widowed mother came to help with the children and house, while Grandma went back to Siemens Lighting Factory to work full-time.

Grandfather’s main work grew to be for the policemen at Hackney Police Station. They were usually large men whose feet often ached from walking their beats on the streets around Hackney. Grandma told me that these ‘Bobbies’ (named after Sir Robert Peel) came to prefer the shoes he made for them because he had a way of stretching the uppers, which were wrapped around the soles so as not to rub against corns and bunions. As did most cobblers of that time, Grandfather held the tacks in his mouth, and spat them out onto the sole of the shoe as needed, which later was thought to be the cause of his health failing after a few years. He drank at the local pub, to relieve his chest pain, he said, until his death from ‘galloping consumption.’ This name was given to a form of tuberculosis, common in the yellow ‘smog’ of London with its coal and coke fires. When he died, Grandfather was forty-eight and Grandma was forty-four years old. She had six children at home, two of them working for a very low wage, and the Great War was looming.

By 1917 London was enduring six or more air raids in a week, and many nights were spent in shelters. Grandma worked ten hours a day on a factory assembly line, for half of a man’s wage to support her family. Four of the six children at home were under fifteen years old and two older sons were with the Army in the Middle East. There were acute shortages of basic foods - meat, vegetables, milk, rice, sugar, flour, tea, fats, fuel, etc., with long queues for supplies. It is a well-recorded fact that the life of the working class in Great Britain, well into the twentieth century, was commonly one of deprivation and endurance, which worsened sharply during the war years. When I was a little girl I often visited with Grandma and Uncle Tom at ‘Grandma’s house’ until, in my seventh year, they moved to Mount Isa for him to work in the Mine. I used to enjoy watching Uncle Tom use a ‘hobbin-foot’ (shoe last) to repair shoes and boots. It was he who told me that Grandfather, John Tilley, died of ‘galloping consumption.’ This was brought on by his habit, when he was resoling shoes, of holding the tacks in his mouth and spitting them on the soles of shoes as he repaired them. Later in life I learned that this disease was a type of tuberculosis. When I was older and repeated Uncle Tom’s story to Grandma she said, “I suppose it could have been that, as well as the drink, but as far as I was concerned it was an Act of God. I was married for twenty-five years, from the age of eighteen, and went out to work for most of them. I had fourteen children and raised eight of them, which was a very good record for those hard times.”

As a young woman, I once asked Grandma why she wanted to have fourteen children. She was amazed at my ignorance, that I didn’t know the difference between conditions of life for married women in her day and in my own. “I had no say in it,” she said. In those days women had very few rights. We had no right to the vote, and little say in how our money, if we had any, was spent. We certainly didn’t have any rights over our own bodies. It was a man’s world then, believe me.” She went on to say, forthrightly, “There was no contraception, which for some poor women meant death or damage from bungled abortions. In many cases women couldn’t afford to have a doctor in to deliver their children. There were good midwives of course, but there were those who didn’t have much training, and unrepaired damage caused suffering, miscarriages and even needless death for some poor souls.” That was the strongest speech I ever heard Grandma make.

Many years later when studying life in nineteenth century England, I learned that those were very harsh and difficult times for working-class women, and I realised that what Grandma told me was simply the ‘tip of the iceberg.’ I grew to respect her gallant attitude to life, her cherished independence and acceptance of ‘what life dished out’ to her, without complaining. I think that by nature I am one of those whingers Grandma couldn’t ‘stand a bar of.’ We rarely saw her weep, and sometimes I have wondered whether that stoical, calm acceptance of her ‘lot in life’ was typical of many women of her time and situation, or whether she was truly a ‘one off,’ like an oil painting.

Aunt Clara stayed in England with her husband and baby daughter, when Grandma and the rest of the family went to Australia in 1920. Thirty-eight years later Aunt Clara still lived in that terrace house in Ramsgate Street, Hackney, in which Grandma bore her fourteen children. In the 1960s those old terraced houses still intact after World War II were demolished, and most of the residents went to live in high blocks of concrete flats.

We were living at a U.S. Air Force Base in England in the late 1950s, and visited my Aunt Clara twice at that ‘three up and three down’ terrace house. In the small parlour were an old piano and a horsehair sofa. A three-tiered corner whatnot held pictures, and a stuffed bird on a leafy twig under glass. On another corner table was what could have been an aspidistra. In the kitchen were a table with chairs, and a cupboard above a small refrigerator. In place of the old-fashioned coal or coke-burning stove of Grandma’s time, there was a gas ‘cooker’ in the stove recess. A door opened out to the back room, which now contained a flush toilet and a shower recess. Next to the old concrete ‘set-in’ tub was the iron clothes mangle in which my mother had once caught her hand.

The three upstairs rooms were equally small. In the rear one was a single bed, a dressing table with drawers and mirror, a rocking chair and a cabin trunk. Aunt Clara told me the sad story of the late occupant, Emmy Murray, who had recently died. “She was what we used to call ‘a maiden lady’ or an old spinster, reserved, and quiet with it. She was like one of our family, and had only the one beau that we ever heard of, that was my oldest brother, Alf, and Emmy was betrothed to him as a girl.” Aunt Clara went on, “Alf couldn’t get a job to suit him in this country, so he went out to Australia in 1912 and worked as a drover on a sheep station. He was to send for Emmy, but in 1914 enlisted in the Australian Army Cavalry, and in 1918 at war’s end he returned to Australia and married someone else. Poor Emmy lost all interest in going out and about. She just stayed working in the same department store, and lived with her parents until they died. A lot of women were left old maids after that war… and others.”

Opening the cabin trunk, she said, “I’ll have to get rid of her things, but who on earth would have a use for them nowadays?” She took out the contents and placed them on the bed coverlet. Sadly, we stood looking at the hand-embroidered linens, old-fashioned, hand-made nightgowns, elastic-kneed drawers, laced bodices and stays, lisle stockings, old-fashioned dresses and handkerchiefs. In a biscuit tin with a pretty village scene on it, were some faded pictures, letters and postcards. Some, from my Uncle Alf, had been sent to Emmy before and during the First World War. A small box held an old gold watch and a gold ring with a tiny diamond, which he had given to her when they became engaged.

I said, “Aunt Clara I admire you for having Emmy to live in your home for so long a time.” Raising her eyebrows at me, she answered, “I would have been ashamed for her to live with strangers. She was like one of the family, and we always took care of our own, it was simply the thing to do.” Aunt Clara went on, “You take my mother, Emma Tilley, who was your grandmother. When she went to Australia in 1920 she lived first with my older brother Tom, and then after he got married she lived with my brother Robert, until she died in 1953.” Aunt Clara continued, “I remember when my own grandmother came to live with us after she was widowed. She took care of us little ones while my mother, your grandmother, went out to work. It’s always been the custom for old maids or widowed women to make themselves useful to the family in return for room and board.”

Speaking for myself as a little girl, the earliest recollections I have of my own Grandma, Emma Tilley, are of the time when she and my Uncle Tom lived in a cottage in Gordon Street, Ipswich. Mother and Father and I (and later my little brother, Laurie) lived in East Ipswich. It was a pleasant mile-long walk to Grandma’s house, through Queen’s Park, which had many attractions, such as a drinking fountain, swings, seesaws, an aviary with colourful birds, and enclosures for rabbits and guinea-pigs. Sometimes I carried cabbage or lettuce leaves from Father’s garden, to feed the animals.

Mother used to leave me at Grandma’s house quite often on a Saturday morning, while she did her shopping in the town. When she came back we sat at the kitchen table which, like the mantelpiece above the stove recess, was covered with a pretty, flowered oilcloth. We would have a lunch of some German sausage, called either ‘black pudding’ or ‘white pudding,’ and a ‘cottage loaf’ of which Grandma would first butter, then cut off each slice against her apron. Mother told me that was an old-fashioned and very dangerous way of buttering and slicing bread, and the reason why she always used a breadboard.
There would be cheddar cheese cut from the big, muslin-wrapped wheel at the grocer’s, fresh lettuce, tomatoes and other vegetables from Father’s garden, and sometimes a pickled pig’s trotter for Grandma, which I thought was disgusting. Mother threatened me with a ‘good hiding’ if ever I said anything about it. But Uncle Tom cleaned the pig knuckles and added them to his collection under the house. He taught me to play jacks with them but usually he won because his hands were bigger than mine.

I was Grandma’s ‘little helper’ until, at the end of my third year, I ruined her Christmas puddings and made her terribly angry. I thought I was being helpful when I stirred into the fruit mixture a bowl of eggs, shells and all, while Grandma went downstairs to the lavatory, which was situated next to the fowl-run and behind the trellis for the choko and passionfruit vines. After that disaster I was told to ‘stay clear of her,’ and became Uncle Tom’s ‘little maid.’ I helped him add to his collection of things worth saving, which he kept in tins and bottles attached to the rafters under the house.

Into the 1930s there were no wireless sets and few cars or telephones. Messages were sent through the post office, with telegrams delivered by boys on bicycles. There was little ‘outside’ amusement, apart from an evening walk to a movie theatre. Films were captioned and silent, as we were just starting to come into the ‘talkies’ era. They were accompanied by piano music, soft and slow for sentimental scenes and loud and fast for action ones, the piano being in a ‘pit’ below the stage. Most families had an old piano or a gramophone, which provided music for ‘sing-alongs’. Some people played the piano by ear’ but shortcomings went unremarked. Uncle Alf brought his piano-accordion when he and Aunt Lily came from Toowoomba, Father played and sang to his guitar, Uncle Tom played the harmonica, whistled and did birdcalls.

We children sometimes accompanied the music by blowing on combs wrapped in tissue paper. Grandma and Mother had sweet, soft singing voices and sang many old music-hall songs. Grandma usually said ‘I’m pleased to oblige, I’m sure,’ when called on to sing or recite one of her ‘pieces,’ and I loved and still remember many verses of sentimental old ballads she entertained us with, such as:

‘IF THOSE LIPS COULD ONLY SPEAK’

He stood in a beautiful mansion, surrounded by riches untold,
And gazed on a beautiful picture that hung in a frame of gold.
‘Twas a picture of a lady, so beautiful, young and fair.
To those beloved life-like features, he murmured in sad despair:

“If those lips could only speak, and those eyes could only see.
And those beautiful golden tresses were here in reality.
Could I only take your hand, as I did when you took my name,
But you’re only a beautiful picture, in a beautiful golden frame.”

He sat there and gazed at the painting, then slumbered, forgetting the pain.
And there in that mansion, so gladly, he stood by her side again.
Then his lips moved and softly murmured the name of his once sweet bride.
And with his eyes fixed on the picture, he woke from his dream and cried:

“If those lips could only speak, and those eyes could only see,
And those beautiful golden tresses were here in reality.
Could I only take your hand, as I did when you took my name,
But you’re only a beautiful picture, in a beautiful golden frame.”

When Grandma sang it, with Victorian-style expression and gestures of course, that song always gave me ‘goose bumps.’ As I had remembered only the chorus, it gave me great pleasure when a friend was able to come up with the verses.

I have been unable to trace the following ditty, which Grandma, who was born in 1870, used to say was ‘as old as the hills. Although I cannot remember all the lines, I feel that ‘Mary and John’ should be included in this story, as it was one of her old favourites. She never needed much begging when I asked her to sing this very old song:

‘MARY AND JOHN’

‘Mary and John
Lived in an old country village.
Sweethearts of old,
They were engaged to be wed.
Then one sad day,
Up went the nose of sweet Mary,
And at poor John,
She threw her engagement ring.
“I’ll not be your wife,” said Mary.
“I don’t give a dash,” said John.
“Although you’re the fairest fairy,
That ever the sun shone on.”
“I’m going back to the dairy.”
“Well then, go along,” said he,
“But on your way, dear Mary,
Send Molly Malone to me.”’

A great favourite of mine was ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage,’ (lyrics by Arthur J. Lamb in 1899, music by Harry von Tilzer), which is included at the end of this story. Perhaps it was because Grandma had a sweet, tuneful voice, so well-suited to performing such ‘old-fashioned’ ballads as this one, that it was sung only by her, at our family gatherings.

Although it was meant to portray a sad life-situation, and she sang it in a very serious manner, with much expression, Grandma occasionally made a derisory remark at the end of her performance of the song. It is a good thing that she knew only the first verse and the chorus, as she surely would not have made such a ‘slighting’ criticism of ‘one who had been Fashion’s Queen’ had she known how the song ended.

When I found the complete song, the last verse revealed that the beautiful lady who had been ‘a bird in a gilded cage’ had died before reaching her ‘fullness of years.’ I think it is ironic that, unaware of the sad nature of the final verse, after Grandma sang the first verse and chorus she often said, “I used to wish that I could change places with that one. In my opinion she didn’t know when she was well off. But there, as I’ve always said about whingeing people, some of them would even find maggots in paradise to complain about.

I had forgotten a favourite song of Grandma’s, ‘Long, Long Ago,’ written by Thomas Haynes Bayly in 1883. I was pleased when I found it on the internet. Then I realised that my memory had confused the song with the tales I heard or read as a little girl, which began: ‘Once upon a time, long, long ago.’ I recalled how, when Grandma sang this song, after each verse everyone joined in singing the chorus, ‘Long, long ago, long ago’ twice, and Mother put her hand over my mouth to silence me when I shouted the words.

Grandma remained essentially a Victorian woman, and I have included the lyrics of a few of the ballads she and the family enjoyed because, like many others, they were written when Victoria was Empress of India and Queen of the British Empire. They were sung at our family gatherings well into the fourth decade of the twentieth century. The popularity of the ‘wireless,’ a novelty brightening the lives of its listeners, plus the gloom cast on them by World War II, caused people to sing much less than formerly was the case.

At the end of this story are colourful copies of the original versions of ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage,’ ‘Long, Long Ago,’ and Grandma’s special favourite, ‘A Perfect Day.’ I believe the style in which they are presented is much more empathic to them and their time than if I had merely typed them. Seen thus, they bring the ambience and sentimentality of the nineteenth century to live again in the twenty-first, and afford a brief escape from the pressures of life today when many people do not sing to themselves or to their children.

It was a joy to me when Father played his Hawaiian steel guitar and sang, in his fine baritone, ‘island songs,’ especially the one about ‘a little brown girl in a little grass skirt, in a little grass shack in Hawaii,’ with which he used to tease Mother. Often at the end of the evening he would recite a humorous or dramatic monologue. When he performed ‘The Green Eye of the Yellow God,’ it left me terrified of the dark. After we reached home Mother would have to wait on the backstairs, while I went down to the lavatory.

The ‘bogey man’ lurked in the dark to catch bad children. I was often told I was one, and Grandma sometimes called me ‘a holy terror.’ A pretty child, until my brother’s birth I was over-indulged and grew ever more wilful. I believe that despite my naughtiness the ‘saving grace’ for me, of what otherwise could have been a bleak life in the long years of the ‘Great Depression,’ was that always I felt wrapped in and protected by family love.

We had no wireless set until I was twelve years old, and visits to the movies were rare. But books for children, with many of their illustrations graphically, even frighteningly, supportive of the text, could be borrowed from the free library for a week. We children read books from an early age and, as both Mother and Father were avid readers when they had time, we were usually in the School of Arts library every week.

I still can recall the anticipation I felt, and sigh of pleasure I gave, whenever I read what were to me those ‘magical’ words, ‘Once upon a time, long, long ago,’ with which most fairy and folk tales began. I always put my nose into opened books, especially new ones, before reading them, and Mother would smile and shake her head at me if she saw me sniffing the pages of a book. All my life I have enjoyed that special smell of a new book.

Death figured very largely in most of the tales we heard or read when I was a little girl. Hansel and Gretel either died of exposure and hunger, or survived by cooking the wicked witch, and in some stories the wolf ate Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. In the story ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ the pigs boiled up the big bad wolf. Wicked stepmothers abounded, many getting the end they deserved, and Grimm’s and many other ‘fairytales’ often were very grim indeed. In British countries many more children died through childhood diseases than happens nowadays. Most families suffered such losses: my older sister died in infancy, and six of my Grandma’s fourteen children died young.

Towards the end of my fifth year, I was allowed to go with Grandma by train one Saturday morning to Toowoomba, to visit for the weekend with Uncle Alf and Aunt Lily. Uncle Tom drove us to Ipswich station in his ‘ute’ and gave me a bag of sugary fondant sweets. It was a very exciting occasion for me, as I had never been on such an excursion as this before, nor had I been so indulged as to receive a whole bag of sweets. After the train started, Grandma settled herself in a corner seat with a book, with me opposite her. I had not been told not to eat the sweets, so that after Grandma said she did not want any, I ate all of them. When the train was climbing up and around the twists and turns of the Blue Mountain ranges to Toowoomba, I grew very sick indeed. Grandma lowered the carriage window, holding my head out, while I was sick.

Although I got rid of the sweets in this way, I got cinders in my eyes and a sooty face. Grandma had to take me to the lavatory to wash my messy face and tearful eyes. All the time she was doing this, she grumbled about me being a dreadful child, and not knowing what she had done to be ‘saddled’ with me. To make matters even worse I was very upset because I lost, down the train toilet, the gold heart-shaped ring with a red ‘ruby’ in the centre, which Aunt Hannah my Uncle Ben’s wife, had given me for my fifth birthday.

Upon our arrival at Toowoomba Uncle Alf and Aunt Lily got the full story of my gluttony, and its awful result. As my best dress was messed up, it had to be washed. Although I was feeling better when I got off the train, I was put on a very plain diet for our visit and had to sit at the table watching grownups eat the rich, creamy desserts and other special treats I didn’t get at home. I was upset about this, and grieving over the loss of my ring, so that during my stay I was unusually quiet. Uncle Alf remarked upon this, but Grandma shook her head and replied, “Just be thankful to God for small mercies.”

In 1931, when I was seven years old, my family, which now included my little brother, moved to Mount Isa for Father to work in the Mine smelters. In the Great War he had been a signaler, so was able to be a Lighthouse Keeper on the Queensland coast in my early years. Mother and I were with him for some of that time. As the Great Depression from 1919 to 1938 worsened, Australians replaced English returned soldiers in the work force. These years are explored in my third story, ‘There was a Little Girl.’ Father and Mother had a hard time ‘making ends meet’ for the few years until war broke out again, and Father enlisted in the R.A.A.F., in 1939. (I enlisted in January 1942). Then from l943 until his retirement at age sixty-five, he served with the Australian Federal Police.

When I was a child we were British Subjects, England was referred to as the ‘Mother Country,’ and grownups sometimes talked wistfully of ‘going home.’ So no one was very surprised when Grandma, then well into her sixties, decided to ‘go home to England’ to live out the rest of her life with her daughter Clara, who was still living in the same ‘long lease’ terrace house with her husband and their little girl, Joan.

Soon after Grandma left Uncle Tom sold Grandma’s house, stored her things and took the rest up to Cardwell in North Queensland. There, in his middle forties (he was eight years older than my Father), he married a ‘maiden lady’ of thirty-eight years, who was the sister of a long-time mate of Uncle Tom. I heard that all of the relatives were shocked by Uncle Tom’s actions, both in ‘selling Grandma’s house behind her back’ and the fact that he ‘didn’t let on to a soul what he was going to do.’ Mother was quite annoyed with him, but Father said, “Nellie, there’s more to this than meets the eye, you shouldn’t be so hard on poor Tom, when you don’t know the whole truth of the matter.”

Grandma returned to Brisbane a few months later, in late 1935. She was ‘very glad to be back where the sunshine is taken for granted,’ and said to Mother, “You wouldn’t believe how your sister Clara has changed, she’s impossible to get on with, and there’s just no telling her anything. She took not a blind bit of notice of me, nor of anything I told her for her own good.” Grandma declared that she intended to indulge herself for the rest of her life, now that she had an English old age pension as well as an Australian one.

To the surprise of those who had thought so ill of Uncle Tom, it was revealed later that he had been the owner of what the family had known as ‘Grandma’s house.’ Apparently, he bought it with money saved from his years of service, and pension from the Great War, and maintained it, with Grandma helping with household expenses. Father related to me a few years later, the story of how Uncle Tom had joined a Light Horse Regiment in England in 1914, about the same time that Uncle Alf had joined the Australian 3rd Brigade, 9th Division of Light Horse in Australia. This might have been the famous Brigade in which ‘Breaker’ Morant served in the Boer War. Uncle Tom and Uncle Alf met up by chance in Egypt. Their regiments went on to serve in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Palestine and France. In 1918 Uncle Tom, then a motorcycle dispatch-rider in France, was wounded and ended up in a London hospital bed next to Father.

In late 1930 Grandma and Uncle Tom went up to Mount Isa, for him to work in the Mine. Her beloved son Ben had been killed in a ‘cave-in’ in 1929, leaving Aunt Hannah a widow with three young sons. Aunt Alice, Mother’s oldest sister, who came to Australia in 1920, died soon after her husband was accidentally killed in 1928, and six of their children went to foster homes. Those were sad years for Grandma, who took the oldest girl, Ivy, to live with her until Ivy married a Welsh miner and they went to Melbourne. In late 1933, Grandma and Uncle Tom also left Mount Isa, and returned to Ipswich to live.

At age sixty-five Grandma received an Australian ‘old age’ pension and was granted an English pension when she ‘went home’ in 1935. On Saturday mornings she visited her hairdresser and the library, had a light lunch out and sometimes took herself to the ‘pictures.’ Each year she travelled up to Cardwell by train with a ‘sleeper,’ to visit Uncle Tom, Aunt Gladys and their little boy, and also went by airplane to Melbourne to see Ivy and her family. Once a month Grandma used to spend a weekend with my family, and she would laugh and say that having two pensions was like winning the ‘Golden Casket.’

Grandma lived in Brisbane with her youngest son, Robert, his wife Ruby and their two boys for seventeen years until her death in 1953, aged eighty-two. Aunt Ruby was very sweet-natured and got along very well with her. Mother used to say that was because they allowed Grandma to ‘rule the roost.’

In those days most people we knew went to bed after the nine o’clock news programme and a light supper, because of having to get up early in the morning. In the evening women would read, knit, sew or do mending. Although she always had done ‘fancy-work’ on aprons and tablecloths, Grandma took up knitting late in life, and knitted until her bedtime. She was proud of her work, especially the jumpers for my uncle Robert, her grandson Bryan, and Ross who was born in 1946. She never found out that, after she went to bed, Aunt Ruby unpicked Grandma’s knitting to correct the mistakes and re-knitted it for her. I knew about it because of the few times I stayed with them overnight.

In 1936, when I was twelve years old, I had a dreadful experience, the details of which I still can recall vividly. I had been put on the train at East Ipswich one Saturday morning by Mother, who was going shopping afterwards at Cribb and Foote, the big grocery shop in town. I was met at Brisbane Central Station by Uncle Robert in his ute, and was to spend the weekend with him, Aunt Ruby, my cousin Bryan and my Grandma. I had a perfectly lovely day, as I was a great favourite with the family and it was a rare outing for me. I was to sleep on a camp bed in Grandma’s bedroom. Most houses had outdoor lavatories then. On the far side of her bed was a ‘night-stand’ with a cupboard for her china chamber pot (for use at night) with a pretty design of pansies on it. Between Grandma’s bed and mine there stood a ‘low-boy’ chest of drawers, on top of which sat a large, round ‘Baby Ben’ metal clock. The clock had a tin bell on top like a bicycle bell, and it clanged loudly every quarter-hour, half-hour, three-quarter hour and hour.

I couldn’t get to sleep with that loud, tinny bell ringing out the time every fifteen minutes, next to my bed. To make matters worse, Grandma was snoring and snuffling in her sleep. After the clock rang out eleven o’clock, I was tearful and felt I couldn’t bear it any longer. I got up very quietly, opened one of the drawers and put the clock inside. As it still kept me awake, I wrapped it up in some clothing, put it back and closed the drawer. This muffled the sound, so that at last I dropped off to sleep.

In the morning we were shocked awake by a loud banging on the door. As we sat up in our beds, the door opened and Uncle Robert, Aunt Ruby and my cousin Bryan came into the room. My usually quiet-spoken Grandma was furious. “How dare you come in my bedroom when I’m not dressed!” she cried out. “You know better than to do that! Get out of here at once, the lot of you!” As she talked, her voice was spluttering with anger. I was leaning forward from my camp bed, looking at her. She wore a silky, pink hairnet over some foam-rollers on her head, was red-faced with anger, and she had no teeth. I said to her, “I didn’t know that you were like Uncle Tom, and didn’t have any teeth, Grandma.” She reached over, took two lots of teeth out of the small ‘pansy-flower’ jug on her night table and put them in her mouth.

Uncle Robert told her, “Mum, it’s eight o’clock, and we were worried something had happened to you. You’re never in bed this late in the day.” Grandma said, “Where’s my clock? Somebody’s taken my clock.” I got up and took the clock out of the drawer and gave it to her, while trying to explain why I had put it away. When she saw the clock wrapped up in a pair of her long pink cotton bloomers, she was terribly angry with me.

I tried very hard to explain how the loud tinny ringing every quarter of an hour of the bell on top of the clock, kept me awake, and that after the clock was wrapped up inside the drawer I was able to go to sleep. But Grandma just kept on scolding me. I also told her that the room was too dark for me to see that the cloth was her underwear, and that her snoring didn’t keep me awake after the awful clock noise was shut away.

However, Grandma seemed to get ever more furious with me, the more I tried to make her understand. Finally she said, “If I’ve told Nellie once, I’ve told her a dozen times, you’ll be the death of someone with your wicked ways, and I’m sorely afraid it could be me.” She ordered Uncle Robert to put me on the next train to Ipswich, as she wanted me out of her sight as soon as possible. I was tearful all through breakfast, and Grandma wouldn’t speak to me before I left. But while we were waiting for the train on Brisbane Central Station under the great glass canopy, which fascinated me, Uncle Robert gave me two shillings. That was a lot of money, when an ironing woman got paid three shillings for an hour’s work. I bought a threepenny Nestle’s chocolate bar at the vending machine on the platform, and still had a shilling and ninepence left when I arrived home.

When I got off the train at East Ipswich Station I had a mile to walk, but it was a fine blue-sky day and not too hot, and having the money helped me a lot. I was wondering what my parents would say when I told them why I had to get an early train home, but they found my story amusing and laughed about it. They seemed to understand that I had not meant to upset Grandma. However, Mother said that although I wasn’t to know Grandma did not like to be seen until she was dressed and had her teeth in, I should have known that ladies did not like to have their underwear displayed. She reminded me that all such things were hung behind the sheets on the clothesline on washing day.

At the end of 1938 I became ‘Dux’ of Blair State School. The Premier of Queensland presented me with a gold medal, and I was awarded a bursary to Ipswich Girls Grammar School. However, only Mother and my brother were present at the ceremony. At that time it was commonly believed that girls did not need educating after they reached fourteen years and, because of the Great Depression and high unemployment rate, married women were denied access to most professions. Father had just gained work as a guard for the City Council, and Mother worked three days a week as a ‘tea-lady’ at the hospital, to help ‘make ends meet.’ She walked over a mile-and-a-half each way, and paid off a Malvern Star bicycle for me to ride the three miles to the Grammar School.

I was well aware of being privileged in attending Ipswich Girls Grammar, as three-quarters of all children finishing primary-school went to work at age fourteen and few girls went on to high school unless their parents were ‘well-to-do.’ I was then engrossed in the ‘Anne of Green Gables’ series of books and sentimentally related to her, perhaps because as she grew up she also often got into trouble. But unlike Anne I had to leave school when I was seventeen, and was employed as a junior stenographer, attending two evening College classes a week until I enlisted in the W.A.A.F. at the age of eighteen.

One Saturday morning early in 1939, Uncle Robert drove with Grandma, Aunt Ruby and their little boy Brian, from Brisbane to Ipswich in his ‘ute.’ After a short visit with us, he took his family to visit friends for an hour, leaving Grandma behind for her to have the ‘serious talk’ she had mentioned in a letter Mother had received during the week.
After a cup of tea, Grandma told me to go outside, which I did, but I sat on the top step under the kitchen window. What followed proved the truth of the old saying that ‘eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves.’ Grandma said, “I’ll get right down to brass tacks, Nellie. You must take that big lump of a girl out of school and put her to work. After all, she’s only a girl when all’s said and done, and you’ll get no benefit from your sacrifice because she’ll just up and marry.” She said a lot more, but I was too distressed to stay and listen. I was almost as upset at being thought of as a ‘big lump of a girl,’ when I was slim and four inches taller than Grandma, as I was at the thought of leaving Ipswich Girls Grammar School so soon after earning my place there.

Feeling utterly wretched, I crept downstairs and climbed into the huge mango tree in the backyard of our rented house. Since I had ‘reached maturity’ as Mother expressed it, I had been told not to climb that tree or play boys’ games, and that I would get Father’s razor strop on my legs if I disobeyed. High up in the branches of the densely-leafed tree, Laurie, then eleven-years-old, and I had put two boards for us to sit on and see all around the neighbouring backyards without being seen. The mangoes were at the ‘green pebble’ stage, and my brother’s ‘shanghai’ (a catapult or slingshot) was hanging within reach, so I started shooting the small, unripe mangoes into the bushland behind our back fence.

While I was thus occupied our neighbour, Mr. Watkins, came down to his vegetable patch and proceeded to fill a pan with green peas. He had a very large bottom, and was bent over with his back to me. I have always been sorry for yielding to temptation and for having such good aim that I hit Mr. Watkins on his bottom. I was glad however, that Grandma had left with Uncle Robert before I disgraced myself. I was laughing so much that the top of the tree was shaking. Thinking it was my brother who was up in the tree, Mr. Watkins shouted, “I know you’re up there, you wretched boy, I’m going right now to tell your father to tan your hide.” My parents had heard all the commotion, and by the time I reached the ground they were waiting for me. That was the last time I climbed a tree or felt Father’s razor strop on my legs.

I was made to apologise to Mr. Watkins, whom we children didn’t like, as he ignored us. Once, when I complained about that to Mother, she said perhaps it was because he had no children to teach him patience. I liked Mrs. Watkins, who was very kind to me. She taught me to knit so well that I won the needlework prize at the end of my first year, and a book for being among the top ten students for the year. In my second year at Ipswich Girls Grammar we went to live in Brisbane, as Father was in the R.A.A.F., at Sandgate.

Grandma continued her monthly weekend visits with our family until her last illness, in 1953. As Australia’s population was about eighty-five percent British, most cookery was similar to that of the ‘old country,’ and Grandma was an excellent cook. Mother said some of her dishes were far too rich for Queensland’s climate in summer, but whatever the season, we relished everything Grandma cooked, and her pastry was of the ‘melt in your mouth’ variety. I liked sitting at our kitchen table doing small tasks for her while she, in one of her white cotton ‘wrap-around’ hand-embroidered aprons, was preparing our Saturday dinner and answering my questions or talking about her life-experiences.

Grandma’s cooking was some of the best I have ever eaten. As well as pies such as the one with mixed herbs, onion and diced ham wrapped around a pork roast at the ‘half-cooked’ stage, she made ‘melt-in-the mouth’ sweet ones. We loved her rhubarb and apple pie with cream. But I disliked the taste of rabbit pie. I tried, as an excuse, to explain to her about Beatrix Potter and The Tale of Peter Rabbit whose father was ‘put into a pie’ by Mrs. McGregor, saying it put me off eating rabbit pie. But she raised her eyebrows and said, “Marcie, you’re too stuffed with nonsense for your own good!” But she stopped making rabbit pies for us after Laurie, my brother, said he didn’t like the taste either.

Cooking occupied a great deal of a ‘housewife’s’ time when I was young, and we always looked forward to, and enjoyed our meals. Through all those long, bleak years of the Great Depression most families ate well because women worked hard in the kitchen, often with the kind of meat, such as offal, which is not classed as a culinary treat today. One great favourite, steak and kidney pie or pudding, sometimes jokingly referred to as ‘snake and piggy pie.’ Another favourite was flank steak rolled with onion and herb bread stuffing, browned, and then braised slowly in the oven with potatoes and pumpkin. Mother made delicious pea soup and a great Cornish pasty, with ham, herbs, carrots and onion, from a fine, fleshy ham bone bought from the grocer. Sometimes on weekends we had fried sheep kidneys, bacon, onion, and brown gravy, with toast, for breakfast.

On Fridays Mother bought fresh fish (usually whiting) from the fish-monger, cut off the fillets, boiled up the frames and strained the liquid, after removing the flesh. Then she added onion, potato cubes, milk thickened with cornflour, and lastly some butter and parsley, ending up with a wonderful chowder, served with croutons which had been made from old bread and baked slowly in the oven. Fish fillets were crumbed and served with chipped potatoes, green peas and salad. Father also liked crumbed, fried mullet roes.

Those old recipes had in common the time consumed in their preparation, which is ill-suited to most home cooking nowadays. I cherish my memories of watching food being prepared then cooked, while listening to stories of family history. I learned how to fillet fish and I learned to cook while grating suet for pies or dumplings, ‘readying’ vegetables, or squashing dates and cutting up green apples for date and apple pie. It seems a shame to me that most children now miss out on those experiences of mine, and all of the delicious meals for which ‘fast food’ outlets and modern culinary advantages are poor substitutes. Most of my ancestors lived to a ‘ripe old age,’ despite living at times a frugal life-style, and the cholesterol-laden meals they heartily consumed regularly.

When I think of Grandma, I see her clearly in my mind as she was in 1946, when I was twenty-two years old, shortly before I left Australia to work as a secretary for the U.S. Materiel Air Command in the Philippines and on Okinawa. My family was living at Sandgate, a short walk from the railway station. I met her train when Grandma arrived, at 9.30 on a cool but sunny Saturday morning, for her usual monthly weekend visit with us. I greeted her with a hug and kiss, and she pretended, as usual, that I was squashing her and said, “Now, now, watch yourself you big lummox, or there won’t be anything left of me to cook your dinner.” I carried her small suitcase and a string bag containing the joint of lamb, pork or beef, and a book she would have been reading on the train.

Grandma always had shoes, bag and gloves of matching colour leather and, as this was a cool winter day, was wearing her beaver coat which reached almost to her ankles, and her close-fitting beaver hat allowed a little soft golden hair to show around her face. She was never without her ‘lover’s knot’’ ‘Welsh gold’ ring with a small diamond in its centre, and matching earrings, which Grandfather had given to her on their wedding day.

I once told Mother I thought that Grandma, wearing her fur coat and hat in winter, looked exactly as mother bear would look if she stepped out of the book, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’ Mother laughed and agreed, but said I had best not say that in Grandma’s hearing, as she would not appreciate being likened to a bear and could box my ears.

On our way home I ‘chattered’ to Grandma, who seemed as usual, companionably silent. However, after she was settled with a cup of tea, she said to Mother, “Nellie, I do believe that girl could talk the leg off a wooden clothes horse.” Grandma always kept family members, and particularly young people, in their place, and none could openly oppose her and get away with it, soft-spoken and pleasant as she seemed. It was accepted in the family that one listened to what she had to say, without interrupting or contradicting her. According to Mother, this way of dealing with Grandma developed over the many years when she was the ‘backbone’ of the family, and her word was law to them.

Apart from those recorded in ‘Maggots in Paradise,’ I have other memories of Grandma, some of which are brought to life in my final story, ‘There Was a Little Girl. In the first story of the trilogy, ‘Nails Too Bent to Keep,’ I described how life was when Grandma and Uncle Tom lived together for some years in the ‘worker’s cottage’ in Gordon Street, Ipswich. When I was eighteen years old in the R.A.A.F. in Townsville and homesick, I wrote the poem, ‘Grandma’s House.’ It was about some of my experiences there as a small child, and it has been given what I feel is its rightful place, between my stories Nails Too Bent to Keep’ and ‘Maggots in Paradise.’

My grandmother was a very good woman, by nature unselfish, honest in word and deed, and unsparing of herself. She had a rare resignation to, and acceptance of, what life dealt out to her and, although she was a loving mother, was strict with her children. Despite my misadventures with her, I never doubted her love for me. She sometimes said she was proud of the fact that none of her sons ‘took to the drink’ or used ‘bad language.’ Although, after emigrating to Australia, she continued to work hard, ironing for a living until well into her sixties, she was never known to complain about the many hardships life had dealt her; and she always succeeded in keeping up her standards.

I am sure, that is as sure as anyone can be of anything in this earthly life, that when she entered into her purely spiritual state, Grandma would have been among those blessed for life-long good behaviour in this world. Certainly she deserved to have eternal rest, and from her there would have been no complaints of finding maggots in paradise.



THE END