SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE

Australia was one of the worst hit countries in the depression and my father found himself in a grim place. We had to leave our Deepdene home and live in rooms with other families. The £2 per month that my father received in rent from the mortgaged property disqualified him from any government assistance, but that £2 was simply used to service that mortgage. The family helped a little, but everyone was struggling. My father often said that without the Salvation Army we may well have starved. Dad tried to get odd jobs, like gardening and he had a short burst with the Atlantic Oil Company loading 44-gallon drums. Result, a hernia and that was the end of that. In a strange way that may well have saved my father’s life, as a later story will suggest. I was one of those hyperactive babies and that did not help the situation. I have seen photographs of me standing up in my pram and throwing out the pillows, or anything else I could get hold of. I have an image of being carried around the kitchen in Sylvia Scott’s home in Beaconsfield Parade, an unshaded electric light globe dangling over the table, my father frantically trying to get me to sleep. The house was only a couple of doors away from the home where my father had grown up and in the next street (Clive Road) to my mother’s parent’s home. This was a blessing for we escaped there every day and I have the fondest memories of my toddler years with my grandmother. There were little laneways leading to Camberwell Junction and I am sure we made daily visits there. My mother was very fussy and whenever there was an unpleasant smell in the lane, I was encouraged to spit to avoid infection. She (the cat’s mother as I was often told) had a fear of dogs and whenever one appeared, we crossed the road to avoid the certain danger. In those days, stray dogs were a common sight. As I write this an English dove is cooing loudly outside and that was a very common sound in my grandparent’s garden. How strange it has now stopped. Not my imagination, there it goes again. I have a very clear memory of my very early years and it is probably related to regular change of setting. Variety prompts recall. Sylvia had a little daughter, somewhat older than me, and she had beautiful golden hair. Her name was Aivlys and I well remember being in love with her, if such is possible. I was much older when I realized the origin of her name. I am sure it was in those years that I had a rag bunny with silk-lined ears. I used to rub the silk between my first finger and thumb, a habit we called “pimming”. One day to the great alarm of my mother and grandmother here was I “pimming” on the back of a lady’s silk dress during our regular visit to the Camberwell Market. Of course, there was much to see on those trips to Camberwell Junction. In Riversdale Road, just before “Sixways” there was the blacksmith’s shop, opposite the wheelwright, both servicing the milkman and baker’s carts, as well as those belonging to the rabbit-oh! and the bottle-oh! The blue city drays pulled by beautiful draught horsed also needed such services. Mechanically we had the steam roller led by a man holding a red flag, until sometime later, a flagman tripped and fell. The practice was immediately abandoned. The fire-engines, housed just south of the junction up Burke Road hill, had solid rubber tyres. They were obviously old and a relic of an earlier day of motoring. For a reason that I am not aware of we had to move from the room in Sylvia’s home to a house in South Camberwell, where we stayed until I was five years old and we returned to our Deepdene home. Two spinsters owned the house, one a teacher and the other a librarian. This meant we had a free run of the house in the daytime and that was a real advantage. I have a few vivid memories of the years in this house, not all to my credit. There was a glass cabinet in the sitting room and how I loved to hold the cowrie shells to my ear and listen to the sound of the sea. Good for the imagination. One stormy day I was sat in this room on the “potty”. Probably not a great idea. The storm was fierce. Thunder and lightning came closer and closer. Suddenly a glowing fireball flew in through the window and burst in front of me. The memory is vivid. I don’t know where my mother was, probably somewhere with her head in a cupboard, the place she escaped to in terror, whenever there was a thunderstorm. At night we were confined to our bedroom and I often found it hard to get to sleep because of an eerie wailing noise. One night it was worse than usual, and I asked my mother what the sad moaning noise was. Her answer: “Oh, another little dog has been run over at Camberwell Junction”. I went to sleep imagining an ever-growing pile of the dogs that had met their fate at this notorious junction. Years later my mother told me that the librarian spinster suffered from melancholia. Lucky dogs!