The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Fay Berry 2013 – Chapter 13 – 1950

 

Dad had a little blacksmith shop on Glen Osmond Road, Frewville and his forge and the ringing of his hammer on the anvil was a well known and well-loved sound along Glen Osmond road. Then in 1950, Dad moved us to a new home at 118 Glen Osmond Road Parkside and built a new factory at the rear of the property.

 

 

For most of 1950 and 1951,my brother Maynard worked after school as a “maid” and a delivery boy for the local doctor. He cleaned the doctor’s house for the doctor’s wife and rode his bike to make deliveries for the doctor. With the money he earned, he purchased all his clothes to relieve Mum of the burden of clothing a fast growing boy. He told me that the Doctor’s wife used to leave money under one of the beds to test him to see if he was honest.

I feel very sorry for Maynard, looking back. Mum used to tell him all her troubles and he was a problem solver and took all Mum’s burdens on his own young shoulders. He carried the burdens of both Graham and myself as well. He didn’t try to carry Charlie’s burdens, because Charlie “knew it all” and liked to think he could manage for himself.

 

Charlie’s abrasive nature meant that on a very regular basis he used to get into scrapes at school. He would get into a verbal battle with one of his class mates and if at the end of the day he felt he had been got the better of by one of his class mates, he would find a way to “pay back” the offender.” A typical example is as follows. After school one day he sidled up to a boy who had annoyed him in class and punched him on the nose and then ran like the wind to the safety of home.

Charlie was a fast runner. After Charlie was safely inside his home, Graham came walking down the street unaware of what his brother had just done. At this stage in their development, Graham and Charlie were often mistaken for each other. They were so alike in appearance that they could have been twins. The indignant crowd of boys who had been pursuing Charlie saw Graham and thinking he was Charles, began to beat him up.

From the Glen Osmond Road end of Kenilworth Road, Maynard turned the corner on his way home from Adelaide Technical High School, and seeing his little brother in trouble, pelted down the street and flung himself into the melee.  Graham grabbed onto Maynard’s trouser belt and as Maynard swung to hit one boy and then turned to punch another, Graham gleefully helped him out by kicking and punching as many of the boys as he could reach with his feet and his free hand as he hung onto Maynard’s trouser belt. Maynard was like a mother bear protecting her cubs.

 

Maynard was very, very intelligent, in fact in my view, he was brilliant. He was Dux of Parkside Primary School and later of Adelaide Technical High School. If he put his mind to it, I believed he could do anything, accomplish anything. He was constantly inventing things to solve problems at home and later in his work. I was very proud of my brother Maynard. If I had a problem with homework at school and I took it to Maynard, he would consider the problem for a moment or two, then point his finger at it and say here is the crux of the matter, all you have to do is this…. and the problem would be solved, as clear as a bell for me.

If I went to my brother Charles, he would travel from the A to Zee of it, but by the end I was no wiser than at the beginning. Maynard should have been a teacher. He would have been a very good one. It was not to be, though, he did only two years of teacher’s college training before Dad begged for him to join him in the family business.

 

1951 was my Grade 7 year, and my last year, at Parkside Primary school. After completing Grade 7 at Parkside Primary School, in 1952 I commenced my first year at Unley High School. At this time the school was located on the Kyre Avenue corner of Unley road, Mitcham (now renamed Belair Road). Years later, after I had completed high school, Unley High school was moved to Fullarton road at the Kitchener Street corner, Netherby and the old Unley High School became the Mitcham Girls Technical High School.

It was not my original intention to attend Unley High School. I had sat for and passed the entrance examination into Adelaide Technical High School where my brother Maynard had attended. My brother Charlie wanted me to go to Unley High School, the school he was attending, and what Charles wanted he usually got. He persuaded me, very unfairly I discovered later, to go to Unley High by telling me that Unley High had more tennis courts than Adelaide Technical High School. They DID have more tennis courts, but as I later found out, and what Charlie had neglected to tell me, was that only four courts out of the 13 were available for use by girls at the school.

It soon became apparent to me that many other of the school facilities also seemed to be “just for the boys.” To make things worse from my point of view, the school was segregated and girls and boys were not supposed to mingle in lunch and recess breaks. Girls were encouraged to keep to one area of the schoolyard and boys to the other. How stupid was that!  It was a rule that was pretty well impossible to enforce, but the Head Mistress gave it her very best shot.

 

I made so many wrong decisions when choosing what subjects to take in my school studies. There were really only two main choices available, commercial subjects or Arts subjects. I had no idea what I wanted to do or be when I left school and neither the school nor my parents were much help to me in making that decision. My father and mother both favored the commercial course because Dad believed that a girl only needed enough education to be able to work in an office as a secretary.

It was inevitable, therefore, that I take up business studies. This was not a good choice for me, but the choice having been made, I quickly found out that I had no talent for Bookkeeping, Economics, Mathematics or Geography which comprised 95% of my course. The only subject I both liked and had a talent for was English. I very soon had a “defeated” attitude towards most of my subjects and rarely did any homework in any subject except English and in that subject I would spend hours writing essays and reading books.

It pains me now to think how different it could have been had I taken Arts subjects. I would have enjoyed my studies and not only that, I would have been in classes with a good quality of girls, instead of the rabble that were my classmates in the first two years of my commercial course at Unley High.

At Unley High School there was, however, a great concentration and encouragement for sporting activities. I excelled at sport and because of this all my energy went into my sporting activities and very little into my studies. Sport was rewarding, study was not! I played tennis, softball and hockey. I used to arrive early at school each day, either for team practices or games of “Keep the ball away” and “brandy” with a group of very active boys and girls who also arrived early at school each day.

Even though interaction of any kind between the sexes was strictly forbidden at school, most of the teachers didn’t arrive much before 9.00 am so most of our activities were over by that time. When we played ball games in the yard near the temporary classroom buildings along the northern side of the school, quite often our ball would go under one of the buildings. One of us would have to crawl under the building to retrieve the ball. This was definitely not good for our school uniforms and they used to get so dirty. I am sure we looked a scruffy lot, real St Trinians!

We had a school hat which was part of our uniform and we were supposed to wear it whenever we left the schoolyard. My battered school hat spent most of its time stuffed in my school bag or hanging from the back of my neck by its elastic. Rarely was it found actually on my head. Every year the school elected Prefects but I decided early on that I was not interested in being a prefect because prefects had to be “examples” to the other students and to me, being an“example” was a very restricting concept.

One day the Head Mistress drove her car into the school yard just as a group of boys and girls were in a scuffle on the bitumen near our classroom during a game of “brandy.” Someone yelled, “The Head’s coming!” We scattered in all directions and hid out until the Head gone. Only when we thought we were safe did we come out from our hiding places.

We went into our classroom and were getting ready for our first class when the headmistress came into our classroom. She asked for those girls who had been behaving in “such an unladylike and disgraceful manner” to stand up. No one moved. She looked around the classroom and then pointed at me,

“You! You were one of them, I recognize you because of your thick plaits.”

 

I knew she had not seen my face and yet she had recognized me by my plaits!  Well, that settled it for me! That night I asked Mum to cut my hair. Mum was very surprised because she knew how much I loved my long thick hair and how much I enjoyed piling it on top of my head or plaiting it in fantastical styles. I did love my hair and was only cutting it to maintain anonymity at school. I could not face, however, just throwing my pride and joy into the bin, so I took it to a wig maker and had it made into a switch that could be plaited and I still have that switch today. I think I must have been as vain as the Absalom of biblical days.

The games of “brandy” and “keep the ball away” continued. One day during one of our games I was pursuing one of the boys whose name was John Badman. He was a boy I had a “crush” on. I knocked the ball out of his hand but as I sped past him, he grabbed my wrist and swung me around so that I went flying onto the bitumen, landing on my back on the ground. Suddenly, towering above me appeared a pair of legs in grey trousers. I groaned, it was my brother Charles. He gave me a sound and humiliating “telling off” in front of all my friends for being a “tomboy” and for breaking the school rules. When he left, one of the girls, who was quite overawed by a 5^th year student giving me such a trouncing, said,

“Is that your brother?” and I replied,

“Yes, it is, unfortunately, but don’t hold it against me!”

 

We had a French teacher called Madam Wenzel. She was a real live, authentic French woman from France. She was short sighted and wore thick glasses and her grey hair she wore in a bun. She was a gentle soul, and did not deserve our class. At the commencement of each French lesson she would come in and we would stand up and chorus,

“Bonjour Madam.”

She would reply,

“Bonjour mes enfants. Comment alles vous?”

We would respond,

“Nous allon bien, merci, et vous?” and only then could we all sit down.

She tried so hard to teach us French and we played so many tricks on her. One day in winter when we had a fire going in the grate in the classroom, my friend Jill Black brought some bullets into the classroom. That is, ammunition for a gun! She put one of the bullets into the fire during Miss Wenzel’s class. It exploded with a deafening bang. Thankfully, I was not involved, so that was one less trip to the Headmistress’ Office for me. I was not good at French and when at the end of 3rd year we had our French oral exam, my examiner asked me what musical instrument I played and I answered,

“I play softball and hockey.”

Needless to say, I failed oral French that year. I had never wanted to learn French in the first place, but this was another one of those times when Charlie’s will prevailed over mine.

Mum and Dad always took notice of what Charlie thought and never what I wanted when it came to schooling. Charlie was an expert at French and in his Fourth year at Unley High he won the Alliance Francais prize. He wanted me to learn French so that we could talk French together, but my French was never good enough for that.

When Charlie was in his matriculation year he had a Jewish girlfriend whose name was Illana Peisach. Illana came from Egypt and spoke a number of languages and was very fluent in French. I suspect that Charlie was friends with her mainly to improve his French. Charlie spent a lot of time teaching me the skills he thought were important. He taught me tennis, table tennis and how to speak deaf and dumb and chess. I learned these skills, but usually spent my learning time in tears. Everything I did was punctuated by Charlie yelling at me,

“Watch the ball!” or

“Do it right!” or

“Not that way” or

“Don’t be an idiot!”

It was not easy and not much fun being Charlie’s little sister. He probably meant well, but he had a harsh, dogmatic nature and I think I was meant to be just a feminine little girl who responded to kindness and not to harshness and punishment. With Charlie as my brother, that was not possible. Maynard was always kind to me but Charlie and sometimes Graham gave me grief.

 

Ron Hicks was one of the young people from the Adelaide ecclesia and a student at Unley High and he was in 5th year when I was in first year. My brothers told me that Ron liked me but I never found out whether he did or not because I was too shy to talk to him at that time because he was in his fifth year at school and I was only in first year. When I was about eight years of age I spent a day at the Hick’s house at Coromandel Valley.

My brothers decided to visit the Hicks’ family one day in the school holidays. We rode our bikes up to their property on Coromandel Parade. Their house was on about 4 acres of land that ran beside the Sturt River and it was a substantial dwelling hidden behind a tall green hedge. They had an orchard that extended right down to a very old stone bridge that had been built over the Sturt River more than one hundred years earlier.

When my brothers and I arrived on the doorstep of the Hicks’ home we were greeted very cordially by Ron and his parents, Mr and Mrs Hicks and they could not have been more hospitable to us. I doubt very much that they would have realised for one minute that we were there without our parents’ permission. We had come well prepared to avoid such a suspicion. We were all neatly dressed and we had brought with us everything we would need for a picnic. We had a billy can for boiling tea, some sausages for a barbecue and some buttered bread and a bottle of tomato sauce!

The Hicks family accepted our presence without question and Ron took us further along the river to a pretty spot near the stone bridge, ideal for a barbecue. Here we built a small fire and cooked our sausages and boiled some tea flavoring it with eucalyptus leaves and we spent a very pleasant afternoon together. I would have enjoyed the day a lot more if I hadn’t been worrying about the ride home! My bike had no brakes and I knew that we had to ride round some very steep and sharp curves such as the “Devil’s Elbow” to get home and I was terrified that I would have an accident! We made it home safely, but I incurred my brother’s wrath because I chose to walk my bike for a large portion of the trip home.

My class teacher in 1st year at Unley High was Mrs Schodde, a lovely lady, but completely unable to cope with her unruly class of girls. Our classroom was on the northern side of the school in a transportable near Unley Road. As wide-eyed first year students, we spent our first day at school  gathered in the central yard area watching all sorts of ‘initiation’ ceremonies going on.

A couple of 2nd year boys were forcing a 1st year boy’s head into the drinking fountain and giving him a good soak. There were a few children from Parkside Primary that I knew. One was Peter Robertson who lived at the Southern end of Kenilworth Road. Over the previous year we had developed a rather strange sort of relationship. It had become a ritual between us that whenever we met on the street we would wrestle with each other. I was very strong and physically fit for a girl and always won our wrestling contests, but on this, our first day at Unley High School, things changed.

Peter immediately began to wrestle with me as before but this time it was different. Peter had grown during the summer holidays and was now too strong for me. It was my pride that kept me wrestling. I waited until I could legitimately break off our struggle and retreat with some sort of dignity, but never again did we conduct our wrestling matches. I have often looked at Peter’s face in my Grade 6 school photo and wondered what happened to him after he left Unley High School.

He had such a sweet face and was such a nice boy. One of the unfair things about being a female in this world is that when we marry our names are changed to our husband’s surname and so it is well nigh impossible to find old girl friends from our school days in a phone book.

(Years later after I left Unley High School, I accidentally met our old school teacher, Mrs Schodde’s son Peter.  I was driving down North Terrace when I saw him and recognised him, standing by the kerb about to cross the road. I stopped and said , “Hello, Peter.” He looked and me and then said, “I remember you, you’re Fay O’Connor.” We chatted for a short while. That was the last time I ever saw or heard of him until I saw this obituary reporting his death. So many people touch our lives and then are gone and we never see them again. I find that so sad).

One of the girls from my Grade 7 class was Winsome Walladge (she did not like her name). She was tall and wore her hair in two long, thick plaits. I didn’t like her that much and even less as time went on. She queened it over our group of girls and delighted in playing one against another. Why do girls do this? This day your friend, the next day not. Fay Younger was from my old school too, but she was a lovely girl and I really liked her. She had beautiful wavy blond hair and was such a gentle, kind and pretty girl.

 

I was in the commercial class in first year high school, mainly because I didn’t know what I “wanted to be” and so that is where girls got put if they had no direction or counseling as to where they “should be” because of their natural talents. I should have been studying English and the Arts, not commercial. I am sure this applied to a lot of the other girls in my class as well, and so it seemed that a large percentage of the girls in our 1st year class were directionless and therefore, particularly unruly. They all professed that they “hated school and would leave as soon as it was humanly possible.”

One of our school mates arrived at school one day with two trays of chocolates which she openly admitted to having shoplifted from a local store. She handed them around to her friends during class time. I avoided this group as much as possible, but I still managed to incur their displeasure. They took an instinctive dislike to me and often gave me a hard time. They swore like troopers and I think the fact that I did not swear made me even more vulnerable and a target for their abuse. They would follow me as I walked across the yard and call me rude names and swear their heads off at me. I just used to ignore them as much as possible and get on with my life.

One day just before class, and just outside of our classroom, one of the girls attacked me physically. I think that because I had never responded to her verbal abuse she thought I would be a pushover in any physical confrontation. She thought wrong!  She came at me kicking and punching and landed one kick which really hurt, but the second time she swung her leg at me I simply grabbed her leg pulling it upward and forcing her backwards and down onto the bitumen. She landed on her back with a thump, banging her head hard on the ground.

Consequently, we both were required to pay a visit the Headmistress’s office and both spent an half hour after school in detention.The good thing for me after that was that this group of girls didn’t bother me again. I was grateful to my brothers for the experience I had gained during our many wrestling matches on the front lawn at 12 Kenilworth Road.

I used to feel so sorry for our class teacher, Mrs Schodde, (Peter Schodde’s Mum). She must have despaired over our class for those two years when the delinquents in our class made her life such a misery. On one occasion poor sweet Mrs Schodde really “lost it” when one of the girls was being difficult.

“You, my girl, will be pregnant and a single mother by the time you are 16!”

Wow. I think she would be in trouble if she said that to a student today!

One of the girls in this group was a girl called Wendy Swain and in first and second year she was really foul-mouthed, she didn’t like me and let me know how she felt at every opportunity, and I could not stand her. In third year, however, like magic, it seemed, the troublemakers in our class all left school to try to get jobs in the “real” world. Wendy was the only girl remaining from the old group.

To my surprise and pleasure, over the Christmas break Wendy seemed to have completely changed. In less than a month into the 1954 new school year and she had become my best friend! The “new” Wendy bore no resemblance to the “old” Wendy of the previous year. Through my new friendship with Wendy, I also became very good friends with Jeannette, her older sister who was in fourth year.

On a couple of occasions I slept over night at Wendy’s place. Wendy’s father was a soldier and fought in the Second World War and when the war was over he came home to Adelaide by train. When his train pulled into the station he was so excited to see his wife and children waiting for him on the platform that he jumped off the train before it had stopped. His family watched in horror as he slipped and fell down between the train and the platform and was killed. How sad that must have been! To come safely home from the war and then die in an accident at the railway station.

Some years later, Mrs Swain married Ralph Barrett, brother to Don and JC Barrett of Barrett and Barrett, real estate agents and by coincidence in later years I worked as a real estate salesperson for the Barrett family. When I began visiting Wendy’s  home, her Mum and her new husband Ralph Barrett had a little baby girl, about 6 months old, Wendy’s and Jeanette’s little half-sister.

Ralph Barrett already had a daughter from his first marriage and her name was Pam and she was the same age as Jeanette.  I had a sleep-over at the Barrett’s home one night and shared a room with the three girls and we had a great time. What really amazed me about Wendy’s Mum was that she was a real disciplinarian with her baby. When she wanted the baby to stay in the lounge room she drew a chalk line on the floor and trained the baby not to go over the line. “How do you train a baby to do that?” I wondered.

 

Wendy was a very pretty girl. She was not very tall, maybe about 5’2” with a pixie-face and laughing brown eyes and a cap of shiny black wavy hair. She had an infectious laugh which went up and down the scale in the most engaging way. On the 12th May 1956 I was invited by Wendy to have lunch with her family and later go to the football with her. I once again saw Wendy’s baby sister and noticed how proud Paul Barrett was of his little girl.

After lunch Wendy and I caught a bus to the football where Glenelg and Norwood were playing a match. Glenelg beat Norwood. Wendy and I knew that one of our friends from school, John Bevan, was playing for Glenelg Colts (they lost) and so we tracked him down and chatted to him for ages after the game. I found Wendy so amusing to watch during the game because she got terribly worked up about it all as she barracked for her team. As far as I was concerned it was more fun watching Wendy than it was watching the football game.

As time went on it became pretty clear that Wendy didn’t get on very well with her step-father, Paul Barrett. She left school at the end of fourth year and she had a boyfriend called Robert Byrne who was a devout Catholic and Wendy’s step-father hated Catholics so he opposed Wendy going with Bob. There were lots of rows between Wendy and Ralph and when she refused to give Bob up, Wendy was forced to move out of home. She converted to Catholicism and married Bob.

On one of my trips to Melbourne Wendy and Bob were staying in the country at the time and they came to the railway station to catch up with me. They stood on the platform and waved at me and I waved back through the window as my train passed them by. The next time I saw Wendy was when I visited her in her small flat after her marriage. By this time she was expecting a baby and was three months pregnant. She cooked me dinner and entertained me very graciously.

Our easy friendship had somehow changed though, not that Wendy was unfriendly, she was very friendly to me, but I felt much younger and more immature than she. I knew nothing about babies. As far as I was concerned they were “little creatures from outer space.” I found I had little to add to her conversation about home-making and babies. I watched her meticulously washing up the dishes and marveled at how long it was taking her to wash the dishes. I thought about how my brothers and I used to wash the dishes at home and how quickly we managed to get the job done. I do remember, however, that we often broke plates which I am sure in Wendy’s home would have been unthinkable.

 

 

 

That day was the last time I ever saw Wendy. Six months later and she was dead! The hospital Wendy went to have her baby was Calvary, a Catholic hospital in North Adelaide. The birth was a long one and Wendy was very weak having lost a lot of blood. The doctors came to her husband and said that he had to choose between his wife or his baby because they could only save one of them.

Apparently, Bob chose the baby and Wendy died of septicemia. I wrote to Wendy’s sister Jeanette and she told me how it all happened. She was very angry and upset at Bob for choosing his daughter over Wendy. Wendy’s little girl was called Kaye and she grew up, so Jeanette told me years later, to be a very talented musician. I never ever got to meet Kaye and have always wished I could contact her and see if she looks at all like my friend Wendy, but I have no idea how to find her.