For IWD — The women who made me

Two resilient, independent and confident women had significant impact on my life both as a child and a young man. One was my mother, Beth, the other was her mother, my nan, Hazel. Strangely they had almost parallel lives in terms of loss and challenges.

My nan was born in 1898. She was a teenager through World War 1 and married in 1924. Her husband was a boiler maker engineer by trade. She had two children, a son Peter (my namesake) in 1927 and a daughter Beth in 1930. The family survived the depression living on the South Coast of NSW by making rainwater tanks out of corrugated iron by hand.

They moved to Rosebury during the Second World War as boiler making was a high demand protected skill. As life returned to some sort of normal at the end of the war Peter joined the Maroubra Surf Life Saving club and became a keen competitor.

The club participated in a surf carnival at Newcastle in 1947. The surf boat was taken to Newcastle on the back of a truck. Returning home some of the team rode on the back of the truck. On the drive they passed under a low railway bridge. Peter was struck in the back of the head by a bridge beam and died shortly after in Newcastle hospital. This was an enormous shock to his father who seemed to “give up the ghost” and died in 1949.

Hazel was left with no husband, no son and no income and a teenage daughter. I don’t have a lot of detail but some legal correspondence I have seen indicated she’d been denied access to her husband’s share of his business by a business partner. She did secretarial work to survive. Beth had lost a brother and father. She went out to work to help keep them afloat instead of pursuing further study.

Arthur (my father) had been assistant secretary of the surf club and had been the family’s liaison after the death of Peter and during his funeral service — Peter’s ashes had been scattered at sea from the club’s surf boat. He started courting my mother and in 1952 they married. He was a returned serviceman but like many others returned home mentally damaged by his war service. Arthur was a closet alcoholic and struggled to hold down a permanent job.

Initially Beth and Arthur lived with Hazel. I was born in 1953 and spent my first couple of years in that house. In 1955 my parents became eligible for a War Service Housing loan — I’m guessing my father had a job at the time — and Hazel sold up in Rosebury. Together with her brother and a friend she bought a holiday rental business in Forster. It had two two bedroom semis for rent, a converted garage as a honeymoon suite, a two bedroom cottage for the three of them and a boatshed with rental boats on the lake.

Hazel established a photo-processing business doing overnight development and printing of black and white film. It was one of the few processing labs outside of major cities in those days. She also took many local photographs which were used for postcards.

One morning in 1959 Hazel woke to discover the friend had absconded with the contents of the business’s bank account. She and her brother were forced to sell the boatshed, cottage, and honeymoon flat to manage their debts. They moved into one of the semis as their new home.

Some time in 1959 Beth and Arthur were evicted from their home because of mortgage arears. A contributing factor was that Beth had two more children and had been unable to work for almost two years.

Despite the domestic violence Beth campaigned long and hard to get the Department of Repatriation recognise Arthur’s problems and grant him a TPI Pension (Totally and Permanently Incapacitated). They finally did so in 1965.

Beth and Arthur moved to Forster, sharing the semi with Hazel and her brother. Over the next couple of years Arthur drank more and started beating Beth. By 1964 she’d had enough and after one particularly bad evening she grabbed her handbag and ran out the door. I was pretty upset by this and an hour or so later I snuck out and walked off into the dark to look for my mother. A 10-year-old has no idea of life’s reality. My mother had nowhere to stay, no money and needed comforting herself. Luckily for her the local nuns helped get me into a local boarding school.

Meanwhile Hazel now had to deal with Arthur and try to keep my brother and sister fed and cared for. It took Beth about 8 months to regain custody of the children. Once that had been achieved Arthur left town and was rarely heard from.

Beth got a job working in the kitchen at the local bowling club. Through her organisation skills and innovations she soon took on running the kitchen and all catering for the club. Life settled into a routine. Hazel and her brother gave Beth the second semi to live in and they comfortably adopted a retirement lifestyle.

By 1968 Beth had finally found some time for herself and established a relationship with a local man. In August 1968 another brother joined the clan.

Working hand in hand with the secretary manager of the club Beth noticed some oddities in the accounts. The secretary manager confided in her that he had defrauded the club, covered it up and was working to repay the funds. Of course when he got sacked she also lost her job because she was associated with him.

Beth’s car, an old Hillman Minx, died. The diagnosis was a crank shaft failure. So Beth organised a replacement short motor and by herself stripped the old and rebuilt on the replacement engine block. The only help she needed was to get one of the local men to help with lifting the motors in and out of the car — using a block and tackle on the tree in front of the house. Once completed the car started straight away and served her well for a few more years.

The pair of semis that Hazel, Beth and family lived in were very old. Late one night in 1976 the wiring in the ceiling of Beth’s side finally failed and the semi burst into flames. My sister was cut off from escape and had to be dragged out through a louvre window as her nightie caught fire. Beth escaped but was unable to catch her dog which hid under her bed and perished in the fire. To get the place rebuilt Hazel and Beth had to do a title transfer as there was no way Hazel would get funds to rebuild.

As a hobby Beth knitted. My sister was pregnant at the time of the fire and all the baby things that Beth had knitted were lost in the flames. Yet by the time the baby was born Beth had knitted an even larger trousseau of baby clothes, quilts etc. We used to say that Beth could knit in her sleep.

Nan was never a great cook. She was stuck in the old days of meat cooked till leather like, peas boiled to mush and pepper was the only spice she’d use. Beth on the other hand could cook just about anything and usually without reference to a recipe. She seemed to have an innate feeling for ingredients and quantities.

In November 1977 Hazel’s brother died aged 85. A good innings for someone who landed at Gallipoli and fought at the Somme. Not long after Hazel started to show signs of dementia. Beth committed to caring for her at home in part to repay all the love, care and support Nan had given her. The disease got worse and worse until Hazel passed away in 1981, peacefully asleep in her bed at home.

Beth went on to run the practice for a local GP. She had a lot of involvement in swimming becoming an accredited coach and nationally accredited timekeeper. She was one of the drivers of a campaign for an Olympic sized pool at Forster. Significant funds were raised but despite this the local council instead built a pool in Stroud (a small rural village with about 1,000 inhabitants). She was highly critical of the deep politics in amateur sport and in the end that drove her out of the sport.

By the nineties she was retired. She had done a little travel with friends to Singapore and New Zealand. To keep her brain active she helped many of her friends with their strata committees doing much of the paperwork. Equipped with a laptop and a modem she was even exploring the then new thing called the Internet and email.

But decades of smoking and poor health finally caught up with her and she collapsed suddenly in January 1998. And passed away after three days in intensive care at MRRD in Taree. As she always tried to avoid being a burden she donated her body to science in the hope of avoiding a big funeral.

We held a memorial service anyway.

Both of these women lived their lives with a joie de vivre that was contagious to all around them.

These women taught me that anything is possible if you put your mind to it, life is to be enjoyed no matter how much shit it throws in your face and real fulfillment comes from being of service to others.