Madge and Frank, the early years

 

Mum’s family was  not particularly religious. I can recall no time when they crossed the threshold of a Presbyterian church, which seems to have been their nominal religion. Mum and dad’s marriage at Yass, being contracted between a Catholic  (dad)and a Protestant (mum), would have occurred in the sacristy of St. Augustine’s church, not in the main body of the church. It was known as getting married “behind the altar”. It’s a repellent concept today, but was the norm in the 1940’s. There’s not a lot of room in a sacristy (the smaller room where the priest robes for Mass), and I imagine the only witnesses to the marriage would have been the official witnesses, F.C. Cleary (cannot identify this person – I suspect it should read T.F. Cleary, dad’s father) and Vera McDermott.  Did they have a celebratory meal afterwards with family and friends? Did any of mum’s family travel to Yass for the occasion? And why marry in Yass, and not Newcastle?  I have never seen a wedding photo – was any photo taken? What wedding dress did mum wear? Did they then have a honeymoon before dad returned to barracks and sailed to further war in the Pacific? Why didn’t we ever think to ask our parents something of this big event in their, and our, lives? The only photos available around this time, show mum and grandma in one photo, and dad and grandma in another, standing in the front yard of what is clearly dad’s parents’ house in Murrumburrah. It’s the closest we come to “wedding photos”.

 

If the wedding was underwhelming as a religious spectacle, there is every reason to believe that it was joyously and full-heartedly entered into by its participants. The occasional tender statement is there on the back of the war photographs, and hint at what letters would have more fulsomely expressed. It would have been a very difficult time for mum when dad returned to his unit and was known to be in the pestilential jungles and swamps of New Guinea  and in who knew what sort of dangerous contact with a demonic enemy. But that war-life came to an end, the soldier returned – sick and damaged – and a new life was built.

 

I imagine that mum continued to live in Newcastle after her marriage, or at least, after dad sailed with his Unit to the Pacific theatre during the war, but after Dad’s discharge from the army, she got her first taste of living in the country.

 

Dad was discharged from the army as “medically unfit” on 21 August 1945.  The war had formally ended on 15 August with the formal surrender of Japan, but it would take months for most soldiers to be brought back to Australia and to be discharged. There is no doubt that the serious accident to his left knee and the malaria which now infected his body, brought about this earlier discharge. By June of 1945, he had already had 6 attacks of malaria, requiring hospitalisation in army hospitals in the field in New Guinea. Both these conditions led to a determination by early August that he would receive a 25% war pension from that time on. This remained for the rest of his life, increasing over time to 30%, in April 1967, and then to 40% in August of that same year.

Dad’s first job after his army discharge, was as an ‘Electrical Mechanic’ for the Shale Oil Company at Glen Davis. This is a village about 80km to the north of Lithgow, which is accessed by turning off at Capertee – a turn-off regularly passed  during the early 2000’s when we travelled to our farm “Indigo”, at Pyramul. Shale oil is a substitute for conventional crude oil, but is usually more expensive to mine, and the shale oil works at Glen Davis have long ceased to exist. Ernie McDermott, dad’s brother in law, Ernie’s wife Vera, and their daughter Lorraine were also living at Glen Davis at this time, and it is likely that Ernie told dad about a job being available there. There two were good mates before the war, taking the “bang out of Bango, and putting the gun into Gunning”, as dad once said. A photo-booth image of two obviously well-lubricated blokes, gives weight to this description!!

 

During 1946, dad and mum moved from Glen Davis to Newcastle, for dad to take up a job as a Motor Mechanic at Kloster and Company. I feel sure that the reason for this move was the failing health of mum’s younger sister, Dorothy. In fact, they had travelled to Newcastle for Dorothy’s wedding on 1 December 1945, not knowing that in 6 months time, on 23 June 1946, they would be back in time for her death.

 

A surprising fact is that the only address I have for us as a family at this time is 20 Dawson St, Cook’s Hill – surprising because that’s where mum’s sister Phyl, her 2^nd husband Jack Sandford and their  sons Barry and David were living when I came to know the house in later years, and it’s also the address given as where Dot lived with her husband. Did we all share the house? Possibly, but it’s a small house and would have been a squash. Possibly either mum and dad, or the Sandfords, rented somewhere else and just used this address to make sure their mail didn’t get lost.  Perhaps Nan, Dot and Eric rented this house, and we then became tenants before the Sandfords. Cooks Hill is an interesting address, regarded these days as a type of gentrified Newtown or Paddington (without the terraces), but in the 1950’s when I knew it, it was very much an inner city working class suburb. One of the factories I enjoyed visiting with my Sandford cousins on visits there in the late 1950’s, was the Ice Cream factory where “factory 2nds” of various icecreams could be bought at ridiculously low give-away prices.

 Mum and dad lived in Newcastle from 1946 until 1949, and the family became 3 when I was born on 16 February 1947, at the now defunct Royal Newcastle Hospital.  During these years, there is no evidence that dad’s two major war injuries, malaria and his damaged left knee, required further hospitalisations, although there is no doubt that his knee, in particular, continued to cause him considerable pain and loss of mobility. This particular story, of course, has a lot further to run.

 

 Hard to know where these 2  photos are taken. It could be in Newcastle, and perhaps at a holiday weekender at Lake Macquarie. Or maybe baby Ross is being shown off to Grandma and Pop - the boards on the house look very much like the photo taken just before dad sailed for the Middle East.