A life

I was born in the last year of the Second World War in England. My father away in France, fighting the enemy as my mother gave birth to me at home on the floor alone, waiting for the midwife who turned up a few minutes too late. I weighed over ten pounds. Dad came home to stay when I was eighteen months old so I don’t remember the time he was missing in action, so to speak.
Being the youngest of three children, my two older brothers were my heroes growing up. We lived in the house where we were all born until I was seven, moving twice more in my childhood.


My mother thought herself an entrepreneur, always on the lookout for business opportunities. She fancied herself as a pig farmer and we bought a small holding and raised pigs and chickens. Unfortunately, this venture failed, as did many of our mother's grand schemes.
Her next great idea was to purchase a delicatessen. My brothers and I were still young but Mum expected us to work there afterward school.
When I turned sixteen, Mother had a massive heart attack, she became bedridden leaving
the running of the shop to myself and my seventeen-year-old brother.
Father had nothing to do with this business as he still worked for the family printing business my grandfather established years before.
Grandfather was a huge figure in my life. A man before his time, a compatriot of George Bernard Shaw, they exchanged many letters over the years sharing many of the same views on life.
Unfortunately Grandfather took his own life at age ninety-nine by walking into the North Sea in the middle of winter.

Meeting my future husband when I was sixteen was the next milestone. We fell in love and have been inseparable ever since. We married when we were both just twenty-one.
On our wedding day it rained heavily, but to me the sun was shining. We were in love and nothing else mattered. Even the disapproval of my parents couldn’t dampen the day.
They disapproved because he was from the other side of the tracks. Not good enough for their daughter.
However, we bought our first house together, a rundown, ramshackle place which we spent all our time and money turning it into a home.
Within seven years we had built a brand new house and opened two businesses, a bookshop and a women’s fashion store. I think my parents were beginning to reconsider their opinion of my darling husband.


1973 was the biggest change in my life when we emigrated to Australia. Leaving my family behind in England was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. We took with us our three-year-old daughter, leaving two sets of inconsolable grandparents. Life in Australia was a shock to the system, different customs and culture, plus the fact of not knowing anyone at all made settling in difficult.
We landed after a horrendous flight of nearly forty hours in the middle of a rainstorm at three a.m.
Fortunately, things soon appeared rosier and within a year we had two more children, real Aussies, our beautiful pigeon pair.
Life continued, bringing up children, working and getting on with life. With the occasional visit ‘home’ to visit family.
My parents retired and came to live nearby us in Australia. It was a huge move for them leaving my two brothers and their families to come so far at their ages. Dad loved the heat, lawn bowls and everything Australian. My mum never settled down, although she loved being near the grandchildren. Unfortunately, Dad only lived a few short years and Mum went back to England where she died a year later.


The decision to leave the country where one is born needs careful consideration. The ramifications can be far-reaching, affecting so many people. Our children, although having a better life than they would have done if we’d stayed in England, grew up without an extended family. We missed weddings, funerals and daily contact with our loved ones.
On the whole though our decision to leave our birth country and make a new life in a new one has been a good one.
Soon we will celebrate our fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. We arrived in Perth with one three-year-old child and now have six grandchildren and four great grandchildren having done our bit to add to the population of Australia.

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