The Bexley North home was a brick semi-detached house with two bedrooms upstairs and a living room, kitchen/dining room and laundry downstairs. There was a small foyer on the side up a path to the front door, and the stairs ran up the side of the living room to a small landing from which there were three doors, directly to the bathroom or to the main bedroom or the slightly smaller second bedroom facing the back yard. When we moved into this home, there were only my sister and I. For a few years the toilet was in a small outhouse in the backyard. There was a generous back yard.
The house was situated in a Housing Commission estate of similar houses, some semi-detached and some free standing bungalows. Unfortunately for us, we were surrounded by bigots of the worst kind - people who looked and sounded okay, but were underneath unkind and prejudiced. We quickly went from being a small family to a large one, and the neighbours on both sides avoided my family for that reason. It is a theme that repeated itself constantly throughout my childhood - people avoiding us because of the size of our family. There appears to be a perception that the large family would suck one in, and the hapless victim would find herself minding hordes of children, lending hundreds of dollars worth of sugar etc when the supposedly disorganised mother (and mothers of large families were considered disorganised - otherwise why didn't she prevent the pregnancies from occurring?) ran out of food. The reputation of large families was not good. I was not invited to play with the other children on the estate or with classmates. Invitations to classmates to come to my place to play were refused. We rarely attended other children's birthday parties or functions. We never asked other children to our birthday parties - they were considered family affairs and besides, we didn't have that sort of money to spare.
The woman who lived to the right of us was particularly venomous towards us. One incident stands out in my mind - the day my mother broke her arm. I was nearly 5 years old and about to start kindergarten at school. My mother was heavily pregnant with my 2nd brother, Barney. It was a week day and my mother was doing the washing. Suddenly she slipped, fell and broke her arm, badly: a compound fracture, obvious even without an x-ray. She lay on the ground outside the back door, unable to get up. There was only myself, my sister, 4 years old, and my brother Robert, 2 years old, at home. My father was at work. We did not have a telephone. In 1958, very few people had telephones in their homes, especially in a Housing Commission estate.
My mother asked me to go next door and ask Mrs Bartimore to come in to help her. I ran next door and explained to our neighbour what had happened. Mrs Bartimore shook her head, said she was sorry and closed the door on me. I was flabbergasted. I ran back home and told my mother. She swore - the first time I had heard her do so. She must have been in a lot of pain.
Luckily for us, I had recently been trained by my parents to use the public telephone about a block from our house. This was no mean feat - the telephone required the use of button A to put in the money for the call and button B to start the conversation. It was not an easy task for a 4 year old to learn. I had been given a lesson on this phone a few weeks prior to my mother's accident. Now my mother asked me to take some money from her purse, go around to the phone and ring my father and ask him to come home. Luckily I was able to talk to my father without any trouble and he arrived home about an hour later. My mother stayed on the floor while we sat around her, crying in sympathy. My father called the doctor and he set the bone and put plaster on it. Looking back I think it must have been difficult for my mother to manage with three small children and a badly broken arm. But worst of all was the realisation that our neighbour hated us so much that she would not come to the aid of a pregnant women with a broken arm.
A broken bone was the lever for us to move to a larger house when we had become too large a family for the two bedroom house. By the time my brother Gunther was born, there were 6 children born in 7 1/2 years, and we were very crowded. My parents slept in the living room with the youngest child in a cot near their beds. The 5 other children shared the two upstairs bedrooms. At one time I recall sleeping in the main bedroom with my sister and at least one brother. We had of course put in a request to the Housing Commission to be moved to a larger house, however houses large enough to fit us were rare, and we had to wait until 1963 to get a suitable place.
The lever to get the new house was a broken bone. My third brother, Angelo, broke one of the bones in his lower leg - I don't remember which one - while he was still crawling. Whilst I am not sure if he actually broke it falling down the stairs, my parents used this as the reason for the broken bone, and demanded that they be moved as the stairs were too dangerous for small children. In reality, the first thing a crawling child was taught was to come down the stairs backwards, and considering how often we went up and down the stairs, it is a wonder that there were not more accidents.
The Housing Commission reacted fairly quickly after that and we were offered a house in Sutherland. My mother took me with her, and we went by train to Sutherland with my three youngest brothers, Gunther in the pram. We looked over the house from the outside and decided that it would suit us -without seeing the inside at all. We were so crowded that anything reasonable would have been satisfactory. We had the right to refuse the house if we did not like it or where it was situated, however my parents and I were thrilled. A four bedroom bungalow on a corner block. Whilst overgrown and dirty, the place was large and had plenty of room for a large family.
The house was situated in a Housing Commission estate of similar houses, some semi-detached and some free standing bungalows. Unfortunately for us, we were surrounded by bigots of the worst kind - people who looked and sounded okay, but were underneath unkind and prejudiced. We quickly went from being a small family to a large one, and the neighbours on both sides avoided my family for that reason. It is a theme that repeated itself constantly throughout my childhood - people avoiding us because of the size of our family. There appears to be a perception that the large family would suck one in, and the hapless victim would find herself minding hordes of children, lending hundreds of dollars worth of sugar etc when the supposedly disorganised mother (and mothers of large families were considered disorganised - otherwise why didn't she prevent the pregnancies from occurring?) ran out of food. The reputation of large families was not good. I was not invited to play with the other children on the estate or with classmates. Invitations to classmates to come to my place to play were refused. We rarely attended other children's birthday parties or functions. We never asked other children to our birthday parties - they were considered family affairs and besides, we didn't have that sort of money to spare.
The woman who lived to the right of us was particularly venomous towards us. One incident stands out in my mind - the day my mother broke her arm. I was nearly 5 years old and about to start kindergarten at school. My mother was heavily pregnant with my 2nd brother, Barney. It was a week day and my mother was doing the washing. Suddenly she slipped, fell and broke her arm, badly: a compound fracture, obvious even without an x-ray. She lay on the ground outside the back door, unable to get up. There was only myself, my sister, 4 years old, and my brother Robert, 2 years old, at home. My father was at work. We did not have a telephone. In 1958, very few people had telephones in their homes, especially in a Housing Commission estate.
My mother asked me to go next door and ask Mrs Bartimore to come in to help her. I ran next door and explained to our neighbour what had happened. Mrs Bartimore shook her head, said she was sorry and closed the door on me. I was flabbergasted. I ran back home and told my mother. She swore - the first time I had heard her do so. She must have been in a lot of pain.
Luckily for us, I had recently been trained by my parents to use the public telephone about a block from our house. This was no mean feat - the telephone required the use of button A to put in the money for the call and button B to start the conversation. It was not an easy task for a 4 year old to learn. I had been given a lesson on this phone a few weeks prior to my mother's accident. Now my mother asked me to take some money from her purse, go around to the phone and ring my father and ask him to come home. Luckily I was able to talk to my father without any trouble and he arrived home about an hour later. My mother stayed on the floor while we sat around her, crying in sympathy. My father called the doctor and he set the bone and put plaster on it. Looking back I think it must have been difficult for my mother to manage with three small children and a badly broken arm. But worst of all was the realisation that our neighbour hated us so much that she would not come to the aid of a pregnant women with a broken arm.
A broken bone was the lever for us to move to a larger house when we had become too large a family for the two bedroom house. By the time my brother Gunther was born, there were 6 children born in 7 1/2 years, and we were very crowded. My parents slept in the living room with the youngest child in a cot near their beds. The 5 other children shared the two upstairs bedrooms. At one time I recall sleeping in the main bedroom with my sister and at least one brother. We had of course put in a request to the Housing Commission to be moved to a larger house, however houses large enough to fit us were rare, and we had to wait until 1963 to get a suitable place.
The lever to get the new house was a broken bone. My third brother, Angelo, broke one of the bones in his lower leg - I don't remember which one - while he was still crawling. Whilst I am not sure if he actually broke it falling down the stairs, my parents used this as the reason for the broken bone, and demanded that they be moved as the stairs were too dangerous for small children. In reality, the first thing a crawling child was taught was to come down the stairs backwards, and considering how often we went up and down the stairs, it is a wonder that there were not more accidents.
The Housing Commission reacted fairly quickly after that and we were offered a house in Sutherland. My mother took me with her, and we went by train to Sutherland with my three youngest brothers, Gunther in the pram. We looked over the house from the outside and decided that it would suit us -without seeing the inside at all. We were so crowded that anything reasonable would have been satisfactory. We had the right to refuse the house if we did not like it or where it was situated, however my parents and I were thrilled. A four bedroom bungalow on a corner block. Whilst overgrown and dirty, the place was large and had plenty of room for a large family.
The first photo shows me with my brother Robert: I am about 5 and Robert is 2 years old. We are in front of the Bexley North house and are about to go to church. The second photo shows my mother with me, aged 4, my sister aged 3, and my brother Robert aged 1 year old. My mother was pregnant with Barney and this was taken a few months prior to the fall and the broken arm.
No comments:
Post a Comment