Book: Redemption - Part IV - Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Childhood - Part 1

1950 - 1959





According to family lore, I was born in the back of an ambulance as it raced towards the then named General Hospital. “Right under the railway bridge, in fact” John liked to add. Decades later, those words always got a chuckle out of me as I drove under that bridge on my way to Downey Park or Bretts, the hardware store in Newmarket Road. John’s birth may have inspired Dad to pen some of his best poetry, but I found him intolerably cruel. I used to think he resented me because he had our parents to himself until I came along, but by the time I was six, and the last of our siblings had arrived, I knew it wasn’t me. John simply had an insatiable curiosity.

 

My earliest memory concerns an incident that occurred when I was three. Dad was painting the house which had proven too small for his ever-increasing family, a problem he solved by adding an enclosed verandah divided into three rooms. John was about five at the time. If the house could be painted then so could I. My turpentine bath was nothing compared to the hiding he got, but it made no difference. A few weeks later he sat me on a chair to play a new game called Barber Shop. I cried when I saw my beautiful curls lying in the dirt, but he was crying louder.



Me and John early 1950s

Unfortunately, the passage of time only accelerated his need to experiment on me. What would happen if he put those grasshoppers down my dress…or push me into that prickly pear bush…or lock me in the laundry where the biggest spiders lived? To this day I am still petrified of grasshoppers and spiders. But by far the worst thing he ever did to me was when he told me Uncle Jack needed me out in the yard. When you’re a kid, being chased around by headless chooks is hardly conductive to a good night’s sleep. Dad knew it was pointless to continue chastising his son unless he could find an acceptable diversion so he bought John a chemistry set for his next birthday. It was brilliant idea, too…..until the first explosion.

Dad’s mother spent the first six months of the year with us and the last six with her daughter’s family on a farm at Nanango. Granny was a strange, secretive woman, poles apart from my maternal grandfather who was always such fun. Grandad never failed to have just the right number of chocolate frogs in his old Gladstone bag whenever he came to visit and Christmas was the best day of the year! A beautifully trimmed tree, surrounded by gifts for his twenty-six grandchildren, held pride of place in the living room of his Newmarket home. After our Christmas lunch, more a feast than a lunch, he’d oversee games in the back yard. Nothing was ever too much trouble for Grandad. Granny, on the other hand, was always snarling about something and often had blazing rows with Mum over some real or imagined slight. We were strictly forbidden to enter her room under any circumstances, but when I was eight she invited me in.

Grandad (Tom) Casey with all his grandchildren on Christmas Day 1961

My memories of that time are vague but I do recall she insisted I sit on her bed while she lowered herself into a rocking chair beside it. Her thin straight white hair, parted on one side, hung limply from her head like a rag mop. Her bed was high with a brass head and base. It’s funny the things we remember. The bed seemed to squeal when I sat down. I felt awkward, sick, scared and I wanted so badly to be allowed to go. But then I spied it, a battered old trunk on the far side of the room. Three weeks! That’s how long she made me wait before she opened it. But when she did I felt like Howard Carter must have felt the day he entered Tutankhamen’s tomb. When I cast my mind back to that time all I can remember seeing were crocheted doilies and shawls, embroidered smocks, yellowed newspaper cuttings and sepia-toned photographs. I clearly remember, though, looking forward to my visits with Granny after that and to the stories she’d tell about days long past.

Remarkably, though, considering the time I spent with her, I can only remember one story, probably because it concerned Ben Hall, the infamous bushranger. According to Granny, the outlaw was on the run from the troopers when my great grandparents gave him refuge. During the time he spent time with the family, she said he nursed my grandfather, then a baby, while singing songs and telling tales. When I started writing this book I researched Ben Hall’s life only to be oddly disappointed to learn the child Granny claimed he had nursed could not possibly have been my grandfather. Hall died in 1865, twelve years before John Archibald (Jack) Warman was born! Yet, when I finally received a copy of the newspaper article John promised me back in 1996, I realised the story was basically true. Granny, or someone before her, had simply taken a little poetic licence and substituted Jack for his brother, Rennie.

In the article, an interview published in The Sydney Daily Mail on July 19^th 1922, Mary Ann Warman, then aged eighty-two, told about her youth in Sydney and her life on the male-dominated cattle stations of the New South Wales northwest. When asked about Aborigines, she said hundreds of them lived around the homestead, but that they were good tempered and friendly. Only once did she fear them. “…That was when over nine hundred natives gathered at a huge corroboree in the neighbourhood and the weird and noisy ceremonies were kept up for several days.”

My great grandmother, Mary Ann Warman

English-born Mary Ann Jones grew up in Circular Quay. I couldn’t help but smile when I read that. When we were children John told me Dad’s family once owned land at Circular Quay but I never believed him. I didn’t believe much of what John told me back then because of his tendency to exaggerate. But there it was, in black and white. Mary Ann saw the first steamers arrive in the Harbour and said they “caused a great sensation”. Her father had a timber yard near the Federal Wharf, and as a child she said she delighted in their fine band, then the only one in the Colony. She also witnessed the building of the Victoria Barracks and Governor Fitzroy’s new stables, which later became the Conservatorium. On a more sombre note, she said the water supply was cut off on the first Friday of the month and it was “…a terrible nuisance. Carters would do it for a penny, but pennies were not very plentiful so the task fell to the children. For years I carried the water from a pump near Bathurst Street, quite a long journey, and the thought of it, even now, makes me feel my shoulders sore. We carried our precious burden in buckets on yokes, cross our shoulders, and it was very hard work, but we didn’t mind it. Everyone worked hard in the old days, but everyone was happy.”

When asked if she had met any of the old time bushrangers, she said she had met practically all the famous ones of the 1850s and ‘60s. “In the early sixties, I lived with my husband at Cox’s station – ‘Nomby’, Liverpool Plains – and I met Ben Hall and all his gang: Gilbert, Dunn, O’Mally and Lowry, but I didn’t know they were bushrangers till afterwards. We had just finished dinner one evening when four horsemen rode up. Two of them came into the room and asked for a light for their pipes.

“One of the men, Tom Lowry, had grown up with my husband and Mr. Cox on the station. We asked them to have something to eat but they thanked us and said that they had had dinner. As they rode off, Lowry said to Mr. Cox, ‘We may only want a bit of beef and flour and we’ll look you up again and give you a hand with the cattle if you like. We’re camping at Mitchell Springs and you can tell the Blues if you like.’ I didn’t understand what he meant at the time and my husband never enlightened me.

“The men came frequently for a month and insisted on yarding and branding the cattle. A nicer lot of fellows you never met! They only had meat, flour, tea and sugar from the station and they all behaved so gentlemanly that I had no suspicion they were bushrangers. Tom Lowry was a fine type of young fellow and I don’t know how he went wrong. He was afterwards shot at Jerilderie. They used to chop wood for me and come into the kitchen and sing songs besides play the Jew harp and concertina, giving us quite enjoyable evenings.

“Ben Hall was a charming man, kindness itself to everyone about, and used to delight in rocking the cradle and nursing my baby. It appears that the police thought the outlaws were in another part of the country altogether, and as they never interfered with anybody on the station, no one betrayed them to the authorities.”

Mary Ann said she was astonished to learn they were the famous bushrangers and that she felt sorry when she learned of their tragic fate, so shortly afterwards. “Whatever led them to their desperate course of life I don’t know, but from what I heard in later years, Ben Hall had suffered a great unmerited injustice. I can only speak of them as I found them, well-behaved, clean tongued, good-hearted fellows.”

The house I grew up in was situated on a large corner block facing Kedron Brook Road, the long stretch of bitumen linking Newmarket Road, Windsor, with Days Road, Grange – or The Grange as we used to say.

The house in Kedron Brook Road Wilston, early 1950s (with extension on right side)

On certain August nights we could see the “Ekka” fireworks from our front verandah, but on “cracker night” (Guy Fawkes Night), we had our own fireworks. They may not have been as spectacular, but they were ours, paid for with our own pocket money. Mum posted a schedule of chores to be done each week on the kitchen wall and if it was fully adhered to we earned sixpence each, which was mighty good money in the 1950s. Foodstuffs like flour and sugar were bought in bulk and stored in large bins; whereas chicken was deemed so expensive it was reserved for special occasions like Christmases and birthdays. Birthdays were memorable for another reason. To the tune Teddy Bear’s Picnic, a radio presenter announced the names of children celebrating birthdays each day and told them where to look for their presents. I can still see the beautiful three-foot doll I found under my bed when I was seven. Mum had made an entire wardrobe to go with it!

By my eighth year it was paper dolls that held my interest. I not only spent most of my pocket money on them, they inspired my life-long interest in art and fashion. These dolls were printed on the covers of books and their clothes were cut from the pages within. When I grew bored with them I started drawing my own. Being a fashion designer was not my first career choice, though. Originally, I wanted to be an archaeologist because the ancient past enthralled me. In fact, my life-long interest in crime fiction came about because Agatha Christie had married an archaeologist and frequently accompanied him to digs in old Mesopotamia.

But she wasn’t the first author to entice me into a world of intrigue. Mark Twain was. I would have been about six or seven when I first read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the mid 1980s, my second child was amazed at the information I was able to provide when she had to do a school assignment on the celebrated humourist. What I didn’t tell her was that my knowledge of the great man got me into serious trouble when I was about her age. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was required reading when I was in the seventh grade. Despite being the only girl in the class to know the answer to every question, Sister Teresita consistently ignored me. Perhaps she wanted to give someone else the chance to shine, or perhaps, as I suspected, she just didn’t like me. One day I threw caution to the wind by standing up and shouting: “Samuel Clemens” to her question: “Who wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?” She always brought out the worst in me. Spinning around on her heels, she waltzed towards me, savouring every step until she was level with my desk. “Mary Warman, you are WRONG!” she screeched at the top of her voice like an enraged harpy.

Despite being scared to death, I heard myself screech back: “I am NOT!” An eerie sound echoed throughout the classroom as every girl gasped and collectively put down whatever she was holding to cover her mouth with her hands.

“Why you insolent little…” the nun raged while slapping her wooden ruler on my desk with terrifying force, missing my fingers by a whisper.

“Mark Twain was just his pen name” I spat out as fast as the words could leave my mouth. “His real name was Samuel Clemens. You did ask who wrote the book.”

I knew I had gone too far. Sister Teresita had a reputation to maintain after all. And unfortunately for me, she was my teacher again the following year.

In the 1950s, my brothers and I kept ourselves occupied by pretending to be gunslingers, pirates and other vagabonds whose nefarious activities we learned about at the picture theatre on Saturday afternoons. Behind the swinging saloon doors Dad built for us under the house, we drank sarsaparilla “whiskey” at the “bar” before striding out into the yard to see who had the fastest draw. At other times we explored nearby Eildon Hill, an old volcanic crater used as a water reservoir. We faithfully promised Mum we would only go so far up before eating the lunch she lovingly packed for us, but we always managed to go higher. When our farm-based cousins visited, we became even more daring by straddling the water pipes spanning its ancient crater in search of pirate gold. Once, Peter even rode his bicycle across them! Two years my junior, he caused Mum and Dad more headaches than John and I ever could have.

One of his favourite pastimes was to race his fruit-box billy cart down steep York Street and dash cross Kedron Brook Road to see how far he could make it up the equally steep Jeffery Street on the other side. Amazingly, these adventures were usually incident-free, but on one occasion, a hapless Vauxhall driver was forced to take evasive action when Peter darted out in front of him. The poor man wasn’t quick enough and his little car overturned. No one was injured, but that wasn’t Peter’s best day because, despite having fled the scene to take refuge behind the sofa, he had omitted to retrieve the evidence.

John and I might have had our moments, but Peter and I could not be in the same room for five minutes without squabbling about something. When Dad had had enough he came home from work one day with two pairs of boxing gloves. After tying them on our hands, he told us if we are going to fight we should at least do it correctly. We slogged it out for two whole rounds before laughter got the better of us and we agreed to a truce. To this day, Pete and I are still best buddies.

Of my sisters, Frances was born when I was four and Anne when I was six. My memories of their infancy and early childhood are unusually vague. I do know John and I were staying with Aunty Glady when Anne was born so Peter and Frances must have been placed with Mum’s siblings. She wasn’t living at Nanango then but at nearby Murgon. We had to return home via Kingaroy airport when Anne became ill. The hostess made the flight memorable by taking us to the cockpit where the pilot sat John on his lap and let him pretend to fly the plane. We must have been staying there for a while because I remember attending a school run by the Sisters of Mercy. I cannot comment on other nuns of the Order, but from my perspective, mercy was the one quality they lacked.

I can’t remember much about their house at Murgon or their earlier home at Wondai. The Nanango farmhouse was huge, a rambling rabbit warren of a place. Basically, it was two dwellings joined together. The seven people in my family were able to sleep comfortably in one section while the nine members of the Walsh clan, plus Granny and the maid, Ailsa, were comfortably housed in the other. By 2004, when I visited Glady at Greenslopes hospital, I knew there was no such thing as ‘coincidence’ so when she told me the story of how that farmhouse came to be built I just smiled.

According to Glady, James Fairlie Brett, co-founder of Brett & Co, later known as Bretts, the timber and hardware store on Newmarket Road where Kristen worked, was smitten with a certain young lady. During the war years timber was a rare and precious commodity, but that didn’t prevent J. F. Brett from procuring enough to ensure the construction of that sprawling edifice for her family. I wasn’t privy to when or why it was sold to the Walsh family.

Granny (seated centre) with Ernest (Dad) and Gladys at Nanango with offspring. (I'm behind Gladys)

Dad drove an old black Oldsmobile so our trips to Nanango, via the Blackbutt Range, always courted danger because the radiator either boiled over at the most inopportune time or Dad got too close to the edge. My heart still skips a beat when I travel that range despite having traversed worse, most notably the Gillies Range near Cairns. 

We took turns going to the farm during the Christmas school holidays, but in August we holidayed at Redcliffe as a family. We stayed in the same house each year, and for five of those years, the same people rented the neighbouring houses and flats. Good friendships were forged with the kids who stayed in them and every morning we’d stroll along Suttons Beach collecting shells and counting jellyfish. The cold August westerlies never failed to penetrate our windcheaters, causing us to pester Dad with the obvious question, while Mum wandered ahead, lost in her own world. She liked to gather interesting pieces of driftwood for her floral decorations.

Regimented is the word which best describes my father. Ritual and structure were essential to his way of thinking. We loved him dearly, but by the same token, we were also afraid of him. John and Peter called him “Daddywhacker” because of the many spankings they received. He was a strict disciplinarian who demanded total obedience and would not tolerate deliberate infractions. He could also be the kindest, gentlest man. He was a Gemini so perhaps that was it. One twin acted as the enforcer while the other was content to be the loving protector. He told us marvellous stories before we went to sleep and he never let a day go by without showing us how much he loved us. Mum was the typical Virgo, a homemaker who cherished her role in every possible way.