The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Fay Berry 2013 © – Chapter 14

 

The farm consisted of a large farmhouse and some very large outbuildings and sheds. I never did find out how much land was contained within their landholding. The Wurfel’s had a champion Clydesdale horse called “Ballville Renown”  that they were very proud of and they used to show this horse at the Royal Show each year. They had five sons, Keith, Ian, Max, Ken, and Trevor. They were all big tall strapping young men and Rosalie and I were very impressed with them. I promptly “fell in love” with the four oldest boys, and this infatuation continued for some years after that. I have a photograph taken of us all sitting around a table in their kitchen. What a crowd we were.

I liked Ken the most.  Anyway it kept me interested and happy for all of my stay on the Wurfel farm at Pinnaroo. Every Adelaide September Royal Show, the Wurfels used to come to Adelaide to enter their Clydesdale horse in the “Heavy Horse” category at the show.

When when our holiday was drawing to a close, we arranged to meet them all again at the next September Royal Show. My holiday at Pinnaroo convinced me of one thing and that was that life on a farm, although it seemed a wonderful life to me, it could be quite unpredictable because there were always good years and bad years and the Wurfel’s had experienced a number of bad years because of severe droughts in the mallee region. At home again in Adelaide I could hardly wait for the next 3 months to pass before I saw the Wurfel boys again.

 

When each Royal Show came around in September 1952 and again in 1953 and 1954, Nancy King and I would go to the show as often as possible to visit with the Wurfel’s and so we had access to their “digs” near where their horse was stabled. There was usually someone there who could tell us where to find the boys at that particular time and we used to wander around the show with them watching some events and inspecting the various displays. In a couple of those years, Mr Wurfel allowed me to lead their precious Clydesdale horse in the Grand Parade and I felt so proud and regarded it as an honor.

Nancy and I spent as many days as we could at the show and we got to know so many of the country people who were showing their horses there. Of an evening all the boys used to kick a football around and there and one year their was a boy from Minnipa there and he was a great deal of fun and very athletic. We became very inventive in ways to get into the show without having to pay. If any one had a free pass, it would go back and forward through the fence into the showgrounds allowing us to get us in for free. The show would be over at last and I would look forward to my next visit to Pinnaroo or the next show, whichever it might be.

 

Soon the 1952 year was over and it was the last day of the school year at Unley High School. It was great fun. We each got our copy of the school magazine and then went around the school to find our favorite people and get their autographs. You could always tell who were the popular students at the school because you would see them standing surrounded by a crowd of adoring girls or boys and signing their name in the back of someone’s magazine. Boys such as John and Peter Lawrie were very popular. I notice that in the back pages of my copy of the School magazine, there were few girls’ autographs, but many boys’ names.

 

 

Over the Christmas period my brother Graham and I spent a lot of time at Nancy King’s place up at Eden Hills. The King’s house was in Eurilpa street and was not far from the Sturt Creek. We loved to go hiking along the creek bed where there were a number of deep pools where we could swim. There was one special spot that I loved. There was a small waterfall, and some distance below there was a shallow rock pool.

We would sit in this rock pool and have a cool shower under the waterfall. How good it felt on a hot summer’s day. I often wonder if that pool is still there today. Nancy’s younger sister, Marion, was a bright, giggly little girl and she used to love jumping from rock to rock along the creek bed. Sometimes she would  overbalance and almost fall into the river and then she would give this really engaging giggle and it always made me laugh.

Once we came across a snake and my brother Graham got a rock and dropped it on its head and killed it. After we had finished playing in the creek we would go back and have dinner at the King’s house. One day when Nancy and I went down to the Sturt River on our own we came across a troop of boy scouts. The Scout Leader was somewhat older than the boys in the troop and we thought he was very attractive.

Nancy and I played in the rock pools for some time and then when we were walking back up the hill towards Nancy’s home, we saw the boy scouts a little distance away sitting in a group on some rocks. Nancy looked around but couldn’t see the Scout leader and said to me, “I wonder where the Skipper is?” From behind us came a deep voice, “I’m right here, girls.” We both got a fright and Nancy was so embarrassed.

From then on, when we were ever in a nostalgic mood remembering “the good old days,” one of us would say, “I wonder where the Skipper is?” and the other would answer “Right here, Fay,” or “Right here, Nancy.” Year’s later Mary Ann Brinkerhoff and I went searching for the place where Nancy and I used to go and play among the rock pools but we couldn’t find it. I knew that we had commenced our walk from behind the old aboriginal girls’ home but that was no longer there and so much subdivision had taken place that we couldn’t find a way down to the Sturt Creek from that direction.

 

One day during the holidays, Dad took us for a drive to Cape Jervis and we went up in the lighthouse there and were able to see right out to Kangaroo Island. We then drove to Rapid Bay and had a look around there as well and it is a pretty place. Another day over the holidays I met Rosalie Martin at the Railway Station and traveled up to Eden Hills with her. When we got to the station we decided to play a trick on Nancy King who was going to be waiting for us at the station. We hid from her to make her think that we had missed the train and then jumped out and gave her such a fright. We went to her place and spent the evening playing Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. They were such lazy idyllic days.

Throughout all my early years, my push bike was my “escape machine” and sometimes, on a Saturday, I used to ride my bike for quite long distances away from my home. Once I rode all the way from Parkside to Hallett Cove. I left my bike at the top of the cliff there, then climbed down the cliff face to the rocks at the base of the cliff. I put my clothes and belongings on a rock and then went for a swim off the rocks. That turned out not to be a good idea because I got washed onto the rocks and received some cuts and bruises in the process.

I decided not to swim any more at that location and found a place where I was hidden from anyone on top of the cliffs and stripped off so that I could sunbathe. That also turned out not to be a good idea! I was happily soaking up the sun when I looked up and saw below me a troop of boy scouts climbing up the rocks and coming towards me. I hurriedly grabbed my beach jacket and put it on. Luckily for me the scouts had been too busy climbing the rocks to look up and see my previous lack of adequate covering. One of the boy scouts asked me where the train station was. I pointed the way and after they had passed out of sight I quickly scrambled back into my clothes.

 

Life for my brother Graham in our family was a very different story from mine. Mum had never bonded with Graham from when he was born and as the years went on relationships were always strained and difficult between Graham and Mum. My mother was not a very happy or stable woman during our family’s early years. She had difficult births and a great deal of ill health which meant that for a considerable period of time she was unable to look after our family much at all.

Graham was the one most affected by these times of enforced separation. Mum’s mother, my grandmother, died of tuberculosis when Mum was about 18 years old and she never got around to telling Mum the things Mum felt she should have known about the “facts of life.” Mum felt that she grew up very naive and ignorant as a result and ill-equipped to cope with the vicissitudes of life, or of bringing up young children.

She was determined that I should be better equipped for life than she was and this resulted in her telling me much, much more than I needed, or wanted to know about the dangers of being a girl in this world. She used to read me all the gory, horrible stories of rape and murder that occurred in the newspapers, warning me of “stranger danger” before that term had even been invented. I can remember putting my hands to my ears and saying “I don’t want to hear this, Mum!” Still, I am grateful to her because I certainly didn’t go into child birth expecting to produce a baby out of my navel as she did!

Mum didn’t like boys and certainly didn’t want to produce boys, she only ever wanted to have daughters. When Maynard came along, she rationalized that it was okay because he was “a boy for her husband.” When Charlie came along, again she rationalized that he was “a brother for Maynard.” When Graham came along, it was too much for Mum, there was no way she could rationalize having another boy to bring up. She told the nurses at the hospital they had made a mistake, that the baby was not hers, it couldn’t be because it had red skin and must surely be a red-Indian’s baby, certainly not her baby.

Poor Graham, Mum never really loved him. My Aunty Connie, Mum’s sister, told me in later years that often when she visited Mum she would find Graham in the back yard all by himself, crying and hiccuping his little heart out. Aunty Connie would pick him up and hug him and put him in his pusher and take him for a walk until Mum had calmed down. She would talk to him and croon to him and say “Come on you little bugger, I know how it is, no-one loved me either.”

 

Everything was different when I was born, I was the daughter my Mother had always wanted. By that time Graham was three years old, and if he had felt rejected before I was born, his rejection was complete when I was born. Mum loved me, there was never a question of that. I wish I had known then what I know now, maybe I could have been kinder to Graham, maybe I could have helped him more than I did. I don’t really think it would have made much of a difference, though, his path and mine were already set and we were traveling in very different directions.

 

 

Graham was a good looking boy. I have a portrait of him and photograph of the two of us taken at Kingston Park Beach on one of our very rare family holidays. It shows two handsome, happy, carefree kids. We should have been and could have been so close, but we never really were very close.

The sad thing was that Graham couldn’t rely on Dad for love either because Mum tended to influence Dad against him. He could never win. He became a defensive and boastful boy with a vivid imagination which Mum called “lying” and that didn’t help much either. He used to tell outrageous stories and it is clear to me now that it was all to bolster his damaged self-esteem from receiving so very little loving from anyone. Maynard was always kind to Graham, but Charlie was not. Yet my brother Graham told me in later life that he actually adored my father but somehow always seemed to be in conflict with him. My mother turned out to be a better grandmother than she ever was a mother.

Graham had been to Sydney during the holidays and had met a girl from Hurstville whose name was Barbara Etherington. Barbara was about 14 years of age and for a time she was Graham’s girlfriend. She was a very pretty girl and she came to stay with us during the summer holidays. Graham was about 16 years of age and very volatile and wilful and Mum, quite unfairly, I thought, was very anxious and suspicious of the two of them, that they were “behaving themselves.”

One day Graham and Barbara had an accident in the car and Dad had to drive all the way to where they were to get the car started again and this made Dad angry. Barbara eventually went home and Mum and Dad could relax again. Barbara eventually came to Adelaide to live and ended up marrying George Hawkins and went to live in Perth.

 

A lot of the conflict between Graham and Mum was not Graham’s fault. One day Graham drove Mum and I to the Uraidla show. On the way the car broke down and Dad had to come and get it started. Graham was upset because Dad only did a temporary fix of the car and Graham felt sure that when it was time for us to go home after the show that once again the car probably would not start.

When it was time to go I sat in the front seat next to Graham and Mum sat in the back seat. When the car wouldn’t start, Graham asked Mum to get out of the car so he could pull the seat out to get the tools that were kept under the back seat. Mum was tired and refused to move and Graham yelled at her. Mum got out of the car, making me come with her and we got a lift home with another family who had attended the show.

In the meantime, Graham eventually got the car started and on the way home he visited some friends of his called Rainsfords and they invited him to stay to dinner and this meant that he was late home. When he finally did get home it was late and when he opened the door into the lounge Mum was there in the dark waiting for him. She started hitting Graham with her fists.

Graham held her wrists to stop her hitting him, but when Dad came in and saw Graham holding Mum’s wrists, he got really angry and yelled, “Don’t you touch your mother.” It was a really nasty scene and as far as I am concerned it was really Mum’s fault from start to finish. Graham was barely 16 years old and yet both Dad and Mum expected him to be able to fix the car, drive Mum and me around and do everything without adequate help from Dad.

 

That was really the beginning of the end for Graham. Not long after that Dad and Graham had another serious conflict that almost came to a fist fight and that night Graham left home. He left home with no money and no job, nothing! I was too young to know what it was all about, but I feel so sad now, thinking about it. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for Graham leaving home at just 16 years of age and having to fend for himself. My heart bleeds for him. Everything in his life has seemed to conspire to turn him into a lonely lost outcast.

Today, I look at the photo of our family taken in the front yard at 12 Kenilworth Road before we moved into 118 Glen Osmond Road Parkside and we all looked such a fine upstanding bunch. I shake my head and wonder, ‘What happened?’ A year or so later I spoke to Dad and persuaded him to at least let Graham visit our home. I said “You will talk to a stranger and invite him into your home, but not your own son.” So Dad finally agreed that Graham could come home to visit, which he began to do quite often after that.

There was another set of circumstances that changed the course of Graham’s life. He came to visit the family at a time when my brother Charlie’s sister-in-law, Jan Joseph and her friend Joyce Rosser were staying with us from Sydney. Graham so badly wanted to get on with Dad and be accepted back into the family that when he saw that Joyce was staying with us, he thought that she must be someone Dad approved of and soon started up a friendship with her and she became his girlfriend.

They began to go together and eventually decided to marry. Graham was baptised as a Christadelphian because there was no way he could marry Joyce if he was not baptised, certainly as far as Dad was concerned at any rate. I wonder whether his baptism was for real or was it just an effort on his part to please Dad? I don’t know, but they married. Graham went to Sydney to live with Joyce in a small house, owned by her parents and adjoining her parent’s home in Sproule street Lakemba.

As time went on it was evident that it was not a “marriage made in heaven.” They had a bunch of children and a difficult marriage. Still they did have a certain security together because living as they did next door to Joyce’s parents in the house that they owned, they received good support and the children the loving care of their grandparents. I  eventually got many insights into Graham’s life when he pointed me to a web site on which he had posted his “writings” of poems and stories. My brother wrote so well and some of his stories wrenched at my heart and I cried over them. I don’t really have too many “what if’s” in my life, but I do wish I could have changed my brother’s history in some way to set him on a different pathway than the one that he chose.