Chapter 2 – My dad, The Blacksmith

Before I was old enough to go to Sunday School and Mum and Dad only had the three boys, Dad built a side car onto his bike. He used to put the boys in the sidecar and then ride his bike and sidecar from our house at 12 Kenilworth Road, Parkside, to Halifax street in the city. I love this about my Dad that whatever was needed, if he didn’t have it, he would make it. Throughout my childhood he gave me a sense of safety and security, something I have never had in quite the same way since leaving my parent’s home.

As a little girl of maybe 4 – 5 years of age I used to have dreadful nightmares. I don’t know what caused them, or if they even need a cause, but they were, terrifying, fearful nightmares. I would wake up screaming and run into my parent’s room and climb sobbing into their bed. I dreamed I was being chased, or being shot at with arrows, and I would be running and something would be chasing me, and then I would become paper thin and fall flat on my face and not be able to escape. Sometimes I would be suspended up in the air in a sort of glutinous bubble and down below someone would be shooting arrows at me. My bedroom was adjacent to my parent’s room and I loved the comfort of knowing that Mum and Dad were sleeping so close by. I knew I could just run into their bedroom and climb into bed with them and they would comfort me. How wonderful it was to have parents who loved me and made me feel safe.

My mother helped me solve the problem of my nightmares too. She told me that when I went to bed I should start to dream my own pleasant dreams before the nightmares could grab me. I practiced dreaming about fairies and grottoes and in “Technicolor,” too. “If you do this,” Mum said, “it will stop the bad dreams from getting started.” It worked! Even today I do this. I don’t anymore dream about grottoes and fairies but I do make sure that I am thinking pleasant, happy thoughts prior to going to sleep.

As sometimes happens in families I began to experience some “inapproprite touching” from a male relative (not my father) but my dear mother discovered what was happening and put a very rapid stop to it. I was too young at the time to understand it all, but in later years I felt very grateful to My Mum for watching out for me and preventing me from any long-term damage. I told myself that I would do my best to protect my own daughters, if I ever had any, from experiencing the same thing.

My maternal Grandfather Williams, my mother’s father used to come and visit us at 12 Kenilworth Road. Grandpa was a white haired old man who used to wear a waistcoat and a silver watch on a chain which he kept in his fob pocket. Grandpa walked with a pronounced stoop because his spine had been severely damaged in an accident when he was working on the railroads “up north” before he married my grandmother. In those days he was given no proper medical attention and he was placed on a bed that dipped in the middle causing his back to set in a bent position. When he could finally walk again he was unable to straighten his back. I remember that when he walked he used to clasp his hands behind his back in order to give him balance as he walked. When he visited Mum he always gave us kids a white peppermint lolly to eat and sometimes he used to give us a shilling to spend. We used to like to listen to his stories of his days “up north.” I have only a few photographs of my Grandfather Williams. One is in a group photo taken on the veranda of Eudunda Farmers where he used to work, another is a portrait in a frame that Mum used to have on a cupboard at 12 Kenilworth road and one small snapshot of Grandpa and me taken in our backyard at 12 Kenilworth Road, Parkside.

Parkside was a poor district in those pre and post war years. Mum did not like our neighborhood very much. She was uncomfortable living so close to people who might not be suitable company for her children. Coming from a country town she was used to a different dynamic and didn’t like the “quality” of some of the people who lived in our street. We kids had no such scruples and soon knew a large number of the children, “suitable” and “unsuitable” who lived in the neighborhood. Our neighbors on the Robsart Street side of our house were the Osborne’s.They had two teenage sons who were definitely not to Mum’s liking. Mum did not like boys of any kind, for that matter, and certainly didn’t want the Osborne boys to be in contact with her precious only daughter. Interaction between our two families was firmly discouraged. One day, one of the boys climbed over the fence and into our yard, but  quickly vaulted back to where he came from with “a flea in his ear” from my Mum.

On the other side of the lane lived the Wilkes’ family a young couple with one small baby. Mum didn’t like them much either because we frequently heard sounds of conflict coming from inside their home. One day I was playing in the lane way between our two houses when I heard a piercing scream coming from inside the Wilkes’ house. I stood stunned for a second and then ran as fast as I could through the Wilkes’ gate and in through their back door, skidding to a halt at the entrance to their kitchen. There I stopped in my tracks. My uncomprehending eyes took in Mr Wilkes who was standing by the kitchen table with his trousers and underpants down around his ankles. Mrs Wilkes was kneeling on the floor in front of him and he had a handful of her thin hair in his hand, dragging her head back. Mrs Wilkes was crying and whimpering pitifully. I stood there frozen to the spot for what seemed like forever. Then, in an instant, I turned and fled from the room, out the back door, through the gate and across into my own yard, down to our chook yard. There I squatted down and began petting the chooks as I tried to process the visual images that were now indelibly imprinted on my brain. I knew that what Mr Wilkes had been doing wasn’t right, but didn’t know what to do about it, so I did nothing.

Just up from the Wilkes’ house was the “Comic” lady.” She was tall and thin and angular and had jet black hair which she wore in a short bob with a straight fringe. She must have been about 40 or 50 yrs of age but she was very childlike in her personality and demeanor. My brothers and I used to treat her as an equal, just as we would one of our friends from school and not as a “grown up.” We would sit in her lounge room and read “The Ghost who Walks” or a “Mary Marvel” or a “Superman” comic. The “Comic lady” would give us the latest comic books to read and sometimes even let us take a comic book home. We would often sit in her lounge for hours and she never seemed to mind.

Further up Kenilworth road, past Robsart street, was the Ash’s house. Mrs Ash had a daughter called Lorraine who was in my class at school. My brothers and I loved to visit her home to play in the tree house in their back garden. We would pretend to be pirates or riding an elephant or camel in the desert. To visit places further up the street we used our push bikes. Our push bikes were our “life-lines.” Without them our world would have been very small indeed and our bikes were our most precious possessions. I didn’t have a bike at all until I was eight years old, because a bike was pretty hard to come by. I longed for a really good one, a bright shiny new one, but it wasn’t until High School that I got a new bike. In the meantime I kept begging my father for a bicycle. My Dad, being the resourceful man that he was, soon solved the lack of a bike for his darling daughter by building one from parts he gleaned from the tip or from rubbish dumped on vacant allotments. With my own bike at last, it was necessary now for me to learn to ride it. One of my “unsuitable” friends from up the street, Yvonne Mates, soon taught me to ride my bike. She would run along behind me as I wobbled along and hold me and my bike in an upright position until finally she couldn’t keep up and she would have to let go. I would continue to wobble along for a few yards and then my bike and I would fall in an ungainly heap. Scratches and bruises were all “par for the course” for me. When I could finally “stay in the saddle,” I was free! I loved my bike and the freedom it gave me and I was grateful to Yvonne for her patience in teaching me to ride.

Yvonne was the only daughter of a single mother. She lived in a house just up from the corner of Macklin Lane and Robsart Street. Her house had a galvanized iron shed at the side and a swing was hung from one of the cross beams in the roof. When the door of the shed was opened you could swing right out almost to the footpath on Kenilworth road. My Mum didn’t like me playing with Yvonne because she didn’t think she was “a good influence” on me. I was never sure why Mum felt that way, but Mum was always vetting my friends for suitability. One day Mum gave me a birthday party and I was allowed to invite friends from my Sunday School and a couple of girls from school but she wouldn’t let me invite Yvonne. When Yvonne discovered that I’d had a birthday party and not invited her she was very hurt and I felt very guilty. I felt very indebted to Yvonne because she had spent such a lot of time teaching me to ride my push bike. I complained to Mum and said it wasn’t fair that she hadn’t let me invite Yvonne to my party. Mum must have felt a bit guilty too, because she decided to give me a second birthday party and invite just Yvonne to come. This seemed to satisfy Yvonne, but I don’t think it would have satisfied me if our positions had been reversed.

Across Glen Osmond road and in Main street, Eastwood lived the Viney family. The Viney’s had two daughters, Pauline and Joan. Pauline was a shy and retiring girl who always seemed to have a “hang-dog” look about her. She was in my class at school. Joan was her younger sister and she was a happy, outgoing girl. I was attracted to Joan more than to Pauline, but Pauline was very jealous of my friendship, so there was no way I could possibly be friends with Pauline and with Joan at the same time. Mrs Viney was an extraordinarily pretty lady and even her mother who lived with them was a very good looking woman for her age. Mr Viney was a big, burly, smiley kind of man with bushy eyebrows and a mustache. The Viney’s had a large double block with a shady fig tree in the garden. It grew the most beautiful, luscious figs. How I loved those figs!

There was another family called the Whitwell’s who lived just off Kenilworth road, south of what is now called the Howard Florey Reserve. They had a son called Colin and he was good friends with my brother Maynard. I really liked Colin and loved it when he came to our place to visit. I was very sad when somewhere in the next few years his family moved to Melbourne and I only saw him once after that when he came back to Adelaide for a visit. Colin’s father used to collect all sorts of interesting “nick nacks” from around the world. He had one little curiosity which fascinated me. It was a scene where a little man was kneeling down with his hands tied behind his back and behind him was a turbaned Persian slave holding a scimitar high above his head. If you pressed a button the scimitar came down and cut off the kneeling man’s head, but then it would all snap back into position and the head was still on the little man. I could never work out how this worked and it fascinated me.

Just up Kenilworth road and past Campbell road there were some Sycamore trees. We called them “itching powder trees.” The seeds of the tree were round balls covered in fine hairs that formed a fine powder when rubbed off into our hands. We would sit up in the tree and let the powder float down onto unsuspecting passers by who were walking along the footpath underneath us. The fine powder would get down inside the collar of their shirts or dresses and would make them itch. As kids we thought this was the funniest thing we had ever seen and we never tired of this pastime.

Just off of Fullarton Road, and a little back from the Glen Osmond road corner was what is now called the Howard Florey Reserve (I don’t know if that was its name back then). We often used to go there on a Saturday afternoon to play in the big playground on the western end of the street. Next to the playground were some rooms that contained tables and chairs and games and art materials. These were provided by the council to entertain the local children most Saturdays during summer. The play rooms were supervised and the board games and drawing and painting equipment were free and local children could draw and paint to their hearts content. I remember going there one Saturday with the song “April Showers” running around in my head. From the playground a large lawn extended right up to Fullarton Road. Sometimes local parents would arrange games of “Red Rover all Over” on the lawn area, or “What’s the time Mr Wolf?” I loved the lazy summer afternoons we spent there. At the Fullarton road end there was an elevated paved pergola area with a series of pillars along the outside edge. The pillars and pergola were hung with a beautiful purple Wisteria vine. I loved that Wisteria! I used to lie on one of the bench seats underneath the pergola and dream an hour or two away looking through half closed eyes at the beautiful wisteria flowers. That pergola and the wisteria are there to this day (2012).

One of my brother’s friends lived up Glen Osmond road past the Fullarton road corner. His father kept an old flat top truck in his back yard and my brother’s friend had set up a theatre with a stage and curtains on the truck’s tray top. We spent many an afternoon there with a crowd of kids from school, all of us taking turns to put on a skit or a play or recite a poem. The “audience” would sit and either boo or clap the entertainers, depending on whether they thought their act was good or bad and some of them were bad, very bad! I can remember standing on that stage bursting with pride when after I had done an imitation of one of my brothers’ acts, some of the children actually clapped me for my efforts. They were probably just being kind but it was a moment of glory for me.

Across the road from our house and a little further south lived Mr Price. Mr Price was a male nurse at the mental asylum on Fullarton Road at Glenside. He owned quite a large piece of land with a house near Glen Osmond road which had no access onto Glen Osmond Road. The entrance to his land was from Kenilworth road. Mr Price had separated some of his vacant land on Kenilworth Road and  made it into a night cricket pitch, surrounded by a 6’ high steel mesh fence. He leased the cricket pitch to the Night Cricket Association. We kids used to love to watch the cricketers play. The pitch was all lit up at night and so our house and that part of the street was often bathed in bright light even at 10 -11 o’clock at night. Sometimes before matches when the cricketers were just limbering up, they would let us play with them and we felt so proud and special at such times.

On the remainder of Mr Price’s property there were stables for his horses and also a huge mulberry tree with wide spreading branches which used to bear the plumpest, purplest, most luscious mulberries that ever existed.  We and all the local kids from miles around used to frequent this famous tree in its season to eat the luscious berries that the tree produced in abundance. It was a magic place, and like Enid Blyton’s “Faraway Tree,” when we climbed into its branches we never knew who we would meet there! All the neighborhood children used to perch high up in its branches and eat its purple berries. Because we had such easy access to mulberry leaves from the tree, my brothers used to keep silk worms. We would line a shoe box with mulberry leaves and keep the silk worms in that habitat and watch the whole cycle of silk worm life until we finally wound the silk produced onto Mum’s old cotton reels.

At one time the Night Cricket pitch was used during the day by a man named Rod who came to live in Kenilworth Road for a time. He was a horse breaker and he would break in horses for Mr Price.  My dad being a blacksmith and farrier used to always be around horses and so my brother Graham became friendly with many of the horse owners and their horses. When Rod came to our street, Graham was very taken with him and so was I. We used to watch him as he trained the horses and he used to talk to us and tell us what he was doing and why. He had a great bull whip and he gave both of us lessons on how to crack a whip. I never did properly accomplish a good crack, but Graham did. Rod had brought a beautiful horse with him from the country when he came down to live in Adelaide and he kept it in Mr Price’s stables. He told us it was a stock horse, a famous “camp drafter.” Mr Price had a grey horse, a trotter, called Bubbles but its real name was “Pacing Perfection”and he said it was a “square gaiter.” The ones that trot are square gaiters and the  ones that use the cobbles are called pacers so a pacer moves both its left legs and  its right legs, where as a trotter used each leg in turn. One day Rod invited Graham and I to his “digs” further up Kenilworth Road. We sat in his lounge room and simply stared all around us. On the walls were whips and guns and archery sets and all sorts of horse paraphernalia. There were framed photos of famous horses and cattle and other memorabilia. One day Rod bought a car and began to take Yvonne M out for dates. Then one day Rod left in rather a hurry. There was some sort of scandal involving Yvonne M and when next we knocked on Rod’s door we found he no longer lived there. He had left the house and taken all his things with him and “gone back to the bush” and we never saw him again. Graham and I were very sad about it.

My father’s brother, my Uncle Doug and his wife Betty worked on a farm at Willaston owned by a Mr Twartz. My brothers and I went to stay on the Twartz’ farm together one time and I stayed there by myself on another occasion. Mr Twartz was an old German man and he was very skilled with the use of a stock whip. He not only could use a stock whip, but he could make them. He taught my brothers how to plait the leather to make a whip. We all practiced using odd bits of leather that Mr Twartz gave us with differing success. My Uncle had two or three children. There was a boy called Michael and I don’t remember the girl’s name and the other boy was Tim. I loved staying on this farm. I remember the house was a big old villa with a verandah on three sides. In the garden there was a big bush with razor sharp leaves and under the base of this bush a cat had gone in to give birth to its kittens. I remember climbing in under this bush to get to the kittens but when I came out I was covered in fleas and Aunty Betty had to bath me to get rid

Uncle Doug and Aunty Betty had a pet lamb called Jimmy that used to follow me around when I walked around the farm. I loved that lamb. There was a small shed that was full of wheat and sometimes uncle John would give Jimmy a few handfuls of wheat from that store. One day I went into this room to get Jimmy a handful of wheat for a treat but then I forgot to close the door again after me when I went out. Jimmy later found the door open and went inside and ate and ate and ate the wheat. Later on I found him standing at the tap wanting me to give him a drink, so I turned the tap on and filled up a bucket and gave it to Jimmy to drink. Jimmy drank the water and then his stomach swelled up. Uncle Doug guessed what had happened and then poor Jimmy’s life was on the line. Uncle Doug had to stick a knife into Jimmy’s tummy to release some of the gas that was bloating his stomach. It didn’t work well enough and so poor Jimmy died. I felt so guilty as if I had killed Jimmy myself. I spent most of that day crying for my lost pet lamb.