A Simpler Time

INTRODUCTION

This is less a personal memoir than an attempt to capture, through my own experience and that of my family, the simplicity of a time long gone in Australia’s past.

The circumstances of one’s birth are a lottery, and yet while I have always felt that I was one of the winners of that particular lottery—being born to a loving family in a prosperous nation at a time of relative peace—the wonderful thing is that I was one of many such winners in my community and around the country. The immediate postwar decades in Australia really were a simpler time, and though I may be guilty of looking at it all through rose-coloured glasses—for those times were not without their serious problems—I wanted to try to write an account that would make me feel the same way I do when I look through our old photo albums. I wanted to relive the many good times and the very occasional bad times, gain a new perspective on old events, and get a better grasp of the kind of forces that shaped me, my family and the kind of country Australia is now.

For most of my adult life I have written biographies of people as diverse as Nick Farr-Jones, John Eales, Kim Beazley, Nancy Wake, Nene King, Steve Waugh, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and Les Darcy. In the course of writing them, I have spent months, spilling into years, turning into decades, trawling through diaries and letters and interviewing contemporaries of my subjects, trying to re-create scenes from their lives. Often the primary documents have been sketchy, as they either no longer exist or I have not been able to get full access to them. It has been an extraordinary thing, thus, to apply the same level of research to my own life and that of my family. For, not only have my family been hoarders, meaning we still have letters and diaries from well over a hundred years and three generations ago, but I have had an ‘Access All Areas’ pass to them.

I have found this process richly rewarding. I have always had a good idea of where I came from, what my background was, but it has been something fantastic to actually know what it was that first propelled the two branches of my family to Australian shores, how my grandparents met each other, how my father wooed my mother, what my father wrote in his diary when we were born, and so forth. It has been similarly rewarding to travel to Yorkshire to visit the very houses that my maternal family left in the mid-1800s to come here; to visit my 87- and 97-year-old aunts in Tamworth and Scotland respectively to get their perspective on events of long ago; to endlessly discuss with my brothers and sisters exactly what happened in various episodes, and why Mum and Dad did what they did; to make contact once more with long-lost workers from our farm, and with primary-school friends that I haven’t seen for nigh on 40 years and get their take on our common experiences of childhood and the things which formed who we are as adults.

I offer my warm thanks most particularly to my brothers and sisters, David, Andrew, Cathy, James and Trish, for their invaluable help in winkling out so much detail in this account, and I also cite many aunts, uncles and cousins, including Ida Wilkie, Ted and Mary Carter, Alec and Rod FitzSimons, Margaret Tink, Roger FitzSimons, Frederic Murray-Walker, Patricia Gregory, Alison Flanagan, John Carter, Alexander Wilkie, Mary Hardiman, and Hugh and Richard Lander, all of whom made valuable contributions.

For a particular episode that occurred in the 1950s—which will become obvious when you read it—I drew on the work of my cousin Angela Dobbie and her book Both Sides of the Fence. My sister Trish recorded oral histories with members of our family before they died and these were also an invaluable resource for me, as were the diaries and letters of my parents and grandfather.

Old neighbours Ian and Elaine Slade, Brian and Patty Watts, and Adrian and Margaret Russell, all of Peats Ridge, were very helpful and I warmly thank them, as I do other former Peats Ridgeans Evelyn McCarthy, Jim Raddatz, Jonathan Dyroff and Geoff Steer. Thanks, too, to my mother’s old friend, herself a professional writer, Sharon Rundle of Bucketty, New South Wales.

All the events described in this book occurred, with the only rider being that I used three pseudonyms—Bobby McTere, Emily Stone and Sally Dunbar—to prevent possible needless embarrassment. As to Frank O’Brien, I am positive that was his last name but have been unable to confirm his first name was Frank, as all those concerned are long gone and there is no written account of the event described herein. The records of one Frank O’Brien at the Australian War Memorial fit closely with my memory of what Dad told me. The name Harold Johnston, also, is recalled from dubious memory alone.

The book is chronological in structure, with the exception of the story about Geoffrey Abrook which, though it actually happened after the events described in the rest of the book, I have included for structural reasons and, interestingly enough, because it is locked in my memory as having occurred at that time.

In terms of the overall book itself, I offer my warm thanks to my publisher Shona Martyn for her support of this project from first to last; my editor Mary Rennie for her indefatigable and highly skilled work; to Henry Barrkman, Harriet Veitch and Sonja Goernitz for their own expert advice and contributions to the structure and tone of the manuscript; and to my wife, Lisa Wilkinson, for doing what she always does—using her editing skills to make my books far better than they otherwise would be.

I hope you enjoy reading it.

Peter FitzSimons

Neutral Bay, April 2010

CHAPTER ONE

BEFORE THE BEGINNING…

I can remember things from well before I was born…

Lying snugly beside my real memories of riding a bike for the first time, getting a pet kangaroo and kissing Jenny Jarvis that shining afternoon on the veranda of our farmhouse, I can equally remember Mum making mud pies as a little girl in the expansive gardens of her family’s Wahroonga home, and cherish such memories as Dad firing his enormous artillery gun at the Germans in the battle of El Alamein. I still thrill to recall Mum and Dad sending away their first crop of tomatoes and am saddened when I remember my brother Martin disappearing behind the hospital’s Emergency room doors a couple of years before I was born.

Of course, I know that while most of my memories are genuine, the others are collective family memories that have seeped into my soul, but they feel the same as my own. And they give me reference points that guide me through life and tell me where I’m from.

There, secure in my mind, is the vision splendid of Grandpa Fred Booth, a strapping young Australian Light Horseman of nineteen years of age, proudly heading off to put down the uppity Boers who had had the temerity to try and shake off English rule. As he wrote to his beloved mother from the front lines on 16 May 1900, his unit had became known to ‘the English Tommies as the Devil’s Own because we get into the hottest fire and come out with the least loss’. And yet there really was loss alright. Within two months of that hopeful letter, 300 of the original 500 Australians Grandpa was riding with were casualties. Still he didn’t falter…

‘They opened a terrific fire on us and all explosive bullets,’ he wrote of an ambush by the Boers at Pienarspoort. ‘The four men nearest the Boers were cut off and taken prisoners but Wally Clarke who was next to me was shot through the thigh and fell on his horse. He was then shot through the head which killed him instantly. The rest of us had great luck to get away…’

It was ‘great luck’ that would ride with Grandpa for most of his long life. Had the bullet that felled the unfortunate Wally Clarke been just three feet to the right, then of course not a word of this book would have been written. Grandpa would not have returned to Australia in 1901, would not have correctly decided that the way to make his fortune was to become first a wool classer like his father and then a wool broker and, most importantly from my point of view, would not have married his sweetheart, Pollie, and father six children, of whom one was my mother…

So successful was Grandpa’s wool-broking business that Mum’s was a privileged existence from the beginning. She was the second-youngest of five daughters and one son, born and raised in a stately Wahroonga home called ‘Oakfield’, at 63 Coonanbarra Road, high on Sydney’s North Shore. Grandpa was bringing home such bountiful bursts of money that they could afford to have a housekeeper-cum-cook live in and a gardener come regularly. And every April, a woman called Dorothy would come to Oakfield and sit for a fortnight in a chair on the corner of the veranda sewing the dresses, ball gowns and bloomers for the social season. The housekeeper would bring Dorothy cups of tea to keep her going, and stop for chats on her way back and forth to the laundry, where one of the earliest washing machines in Australia—a big wooden barrel which turned one way, then the other, and was the talk of the neighbourhood—awaited her.

But really, didn’t everyone live like that? Mum and her sisters, mixing almost exclusively with people of similar affluence, going to the best private schools, had little reason to think otherwise. On one occasion I remember, Grandpa took daughters Linda, Ida, Jean, Mum and Mary out in his brand-new 1927 Cadillac—one of the first imported into Australia—to the famous Head of the River rowing regatta on the Parramatta River. It was an occasion when the boys of Sydney’s most prestigious Great Public Schools were going up against each other, meaning that the young ladies of the most prestigious girls’ schools turned out in droves to cheer them on. But here is a funny thing…

Even as they are driving out there, in the company of so many other of their schoolmates, neighbours and friends, they can’t help but notice there are actually cars coming the other way, seeming to be going about their business just as if this was a normal day.

‘Where are they going?!’ Jean asks, completely mystified. After all, everyone she knows, and everyone they know, is going to the Head of the River, just as her family does on this Saturday every year, so where on earth could the people coming the other way be heading off to? Absolutely mystifying.

At roughly the same time, not more than a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies, my father, Peter McCloy FitzSimons, was growing up in the middle of a family of five children, the elder of twins—him and Jim—coming after his older brother, Mac, and sister, Peg, and before the youngest of all, Alec.

The FitzSimonses lived at 11 Bareena Avenue, Wahroonga, in a modest brick house called ‘Pitlochry’, with a lovely small grove of citrus trees out the back, together with a yard boasting 40 chooks—both of which helped greatly in providing for the family’s food needs.

My father’s father, James, was a good God-fearing man, with an Irish accent so thick and heavy you could bang in nails with it, t’ be sure, t’ be sure. And I remember with love the story of how the Fitzes first came to Australia.

For, just after James had turned 26 his father died, and as the newly installed head of the family he decided that the best thing would be for him and his nine surviving brothers and sisters to go with their mother, 52-year-old Isabella, and leave their northern Irish town of Moville to begin a new life in Australia. James had heard it was a land of colossal opportunity, where other Irish people had arrived en masse, with nothing in their pockets and were now doing very well indeed.

Not all the family was convinced, however. One of the brothers, Charles, decided to stay and the family had tearfully separated from him, surely aware that they would never see him again.

So it was that in late 1889 with his family tight behind him, his younger brothers riding shotgun around their mother and sisters, my grandfather strode down the gangplank onto the docks of Sydney with a curious bulge in his pocket. He was glad to see Australia, but that really was a pistol he had in his pocket, and he had his right fist wrapped around it, while in his left hand he held a sword disguised as a cane. He wasn’t sure what Australia was going to throw at them, but, by God, he was ready.

Grandfather James—as a man with a strong sense of duty—waited till all his siblings were married and settled before getting married himself, at the age of 48 to a 31-year-old woman from Manly by the name of Edith Mary McHarg. Edith had begun her working life as a typesetter at the Sydney Morning Herald, shifting hot metal around at lightning speed as the printing presses roared all around, before moving to a job as a nurse at Sydney Hospital. She was a can-do no-nonsense kind of woman, as little intimidated by emptying twenty bedpans and dressing badly infected wounds as she had been by working in the heavily male culture at the Herald.

Not long after James arrived in Australia, he had gravitated to Scots Presbyterian Church at the Sydney Harbour end of York Street, where he had taught the fifteen-year-old Edith in Sunday school. And yet they had only started to look upon each other as man and woman when, about fifteen years later, at the Scots Church fete held at Centennial Park in 1909, they had been the respective winners of the men’s and women’s 50-yard dash, may the Lord be praised. She called him ‘Boggs’. He called her ‘Dolly’. They adored each other.

In terms of his work, as an accountant in O’Connell Street for the household drug company Elliotts, Boggs was not an ambitious man. After a few years getting himself established, he had no sooner received a promotion than he asked for his old job back, on the grounds that he felt more comfortable in that position. No, his ambitions were focused only on the success of his children, while his great passions could be counted on two fingers. Firstly, there were his chooks, which he raised from chicklets onwards—and which from four-thirty every morning for at least an hour before getting ready for work he would primp, pamper and care for. And coming a very close second was Christianity.

So devoted was he to going to worship at Scots Church, and so highly regarded was he by that church community, that in 1903 the congregation bestowed on him its highest honour, of being Session Clerk—broadly, the chairman of the board that ran Scots—a post he held for the next 35 years.

Now, going from Wahroonga into the city was no small journey, as it took a little under an hour on the train to Milsons Point and then there was the ferry from there to Circular Quay and the walk up to Scots. And it was no matter to James that—dressed as always in his bowler hat and crisp white shirt with heavily starched collar—he already did that trip back and forth every day of the working week. For when Sunday came around James was delighted to make that journey back and forth, twice, so he could attend both the morning and the evening services at Scots.

In between times—well, goodness gracious, apart from preening his chooks and being a keen member of his local chess club, what else was a man to do? He delighted in sitting on his front porch making rude remarks to whichever local Catholics were making their way to Mass. Such was his antipathy to the Papists, it is said that his family was stunned when, on his deathbed, he announced that before he expired he wanted to convert to Catholicism. When asked why on earth, he reportedly replied: ‘So that when I die there will be one less of the bastards!’

I remember, too, how, at one point when my dad and his twin brother Jimmy were eight years old, they were sent away for a year to live on their Auntie Gert’s sheep farm in Inverell, because their mother had had a nervous breakdown and she needed time to recover. Before departure, both parents told Dad that it was his duty to ‘look after’ the smaller, weaker, Jimmy, and that admonition was one that stayed with him for life.

On one occasion after their return to Wahroonga the young twins were racing along the street to get to their father as he made his weary way home from work. My dad got there first by a fair margin and, after my grandfather had lovingly tousled his hair, he kept walking so that he had advanced a matter of ten yards by the time Jim got to him. No matter, Jimmy insisted that his father turn round and go back to the exact spot of pavement that my father had first met him, so he would not be disadvantaged even though he just happened to be slower. And so my grandfather did.

Quite what my mother was doing on that day I cannot remember, but it was likely something to do with her immediate family, as she was singularly close to all her sisters, while adoring her much older brother from afar. All the sisters addressed each other with nicknames taken predominantly from A.A. Milne’s book Winnie the Pooh. Linda was ‘Kang’, Ida was ‘Pooh’, Jean was ‘Tige’, Mum was ‘Rin’ and Mary was ‘Piglet’. Yet a clue to what she might have been doing on that day is provided by a particular stanza of poetry she wrote about that time:

We three, enjoyed our lives enormously,

Playing cards and playing shops,

With broken biscuits, making swaps,

A minimum of household chores,

Long days playing out of doors…

Hot days underneath the hose,

There were no finer times than those.

What is certain is that even though my mother’s and father’s childhood homes were only about 500 yards one from t’other, and both on the east side of the railway line, from where Mum lived in her lovely home with its expansive gardens, Dad really might as well have been from ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’. While Mum’s family’s finances never suffered particularly during the Depression years, it was not like that in Dad’s home. There, things tightened to the point that he and Jimmy had to leave Knox Grammar School before their final year there was completed so they could get jobs and help support the family. Both boys had received a partial scholarship to the prestigious school for their sporting ability and Dad, particularly, had gone on to emerge as a star of the Firsts rugby, cricket and athletic teams, as well as winning the Oration Prize in his final year there.

And then suddenly, with the Depression, it was all over. From being one of the stars of the school he was now employee No. 14 at Gillespie Bros Flour Mills, working as an office boy, collecting and posting mail, and running errands all over town at the behest of the firm’s venerable white-haired patriarch Robert Gillespie, who was also the Chairman of the Bank of New South Wales and a benefactor of Knox Grammar School to boot. It wasn’t thrilling work, and Dad missed his school life, but it made the money that he and the family needed, and at least he was able to continue studying for his Leaving Certificate at night, after completing a full day’s work.

That certificate gained, he began to study in the evenings for a degree in Economics, moving among the glorious stone spires of the University of Sydney, somehow managing to hold down his Gillespie Bros job, do his studies and play lower grades for the Northern Districts cricket team and for the University of Sydney First XV rugby team. He was good enough at the latter to win a University Blue and nurture ambitions to one day play rugby for Australia, to be a Wallaby. Academically, he shone enough and felt confident enough to plan on perhaps doing a stint at Oxford or Cambridge to further his studies. And, oh so quietly, in an ambition that he then kept purely to himself for seeming immodest, he dreamed—often while walking the streets of Wahroonga at midnight reciting poetry to wind down at the end of his madly long schedule—that one day, one day, he would be a conservative prime minister.

Meanwhile, back in Bareena Avenue, after my grandfather James died, it was obvious that Dad’s youngest brother Alec was also going to have to leave Knox, as the family’s finances continued to tighten to the point of strangulation. But wait! It so happened that my paternal grandmother Edith was, together with her sons and daughter, a worshipper at the much closer St John’s Church, Wahroonga—not for them the long trek back and forth to Scots—situated right next to Oakfield, where she had come to know Pollie Booth. Pollie no sooner heard of the newly widowed Edith’s dire financial straits than she told her husband, Fred, who did the right thing. ‘Tell Edith to send the Knox accounts to me,’ he said, ‘and I will pay them.’

I like that. One set of my grandparents helping out my other set of grandparents on an important matter, long before they knew that the lower branches of their two family trees would splice…

Adolf Hitler helped to bring Mum and Dad together.

Like many young men of his day, Dad—now with his University of Sydney degree in Economics and starting to rise in the ranks at Gillespie Bros—decided to join up only shortly after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. To hell with the ambitions and dreams he had nurtured to this point; they would just have to wait. Not only was it his duty to join up, but he also felt that it might help get him to England, which he had long wanted to visit. His three brothers felt the same way, and put their entire peacetime lives on hold and also quickly joined.

As Dad recorded in his diary, his twin brother Jim had a word of advice in the months leading up to their departure overseas:

Jim says Mac and I should get married now, as after the war the girls will be rushed by the returned men.

The problem was Dad hadn’t met anyone he wanted to marry yet, even though he was 24 when the war broke out. Dad confided in his diary:

I regret nothing in my friendships, as no girl I have met I could really ‘go for in a big way’. My only disturbing thought is that it would be a pity if I married someone unworthy—after all the nice girls I have known.

So he ignored Jimmy’s advice, not for the first or last time, and concentrated on getting ready for war.

On 19 May 1940, Dad was on the eve of leaving Pitlochry for the boot camp at Ingleburn as part of the 2/1st Ack Ack Regiment. By happenstance, his great and long-time friend Frank O’Brien was about to go to his own training camp, and the two of them had a meal together in Wahroonga to say their farewells. They had been through the first part of their school years together, had played rugby and cricket in the same teams and attended church together. And now they were parting, going in different directions within the Australian Imperial Force. There was, of course, the real possibility that they would never see each other again. So—sort of for fun, sort of for real—late that evening they let themselves into a side room at St John’s Church and collected a hammer and nail they knew to be there. Then, taking a bright, shiny new 1939 penny, they punched a hole in it and nailed it into the back of a heavy cupboard they had moved out from the wall, before moving it back in again. Their agreement was that neither would tell anyone it was there, and if they both came back alive they would use that penny as the first deposit on a big drink they would have together to celebrate their survival. And if only one of them returned, then that survivor would keep it to remember the other by, ever after. A handshake outside the church in the moonlight, half a hug, and they went their separate ways. Goodbye, Frank. Goodbye, Peter.

Only shortly afterwards, Dad was off to Egypt and, more precisely, Libya where, as now part of the 2/4th Ack Ack Regiment of the 9th Division he fought in the Battle of El Alamein, in charge of one of the massive Bofors guns. His unit performed well and shot down much of Rommel’s crucial air support.

After two long years there, Dad was only briefly back in Sydney on leave before heading with his regiment up to the Atherton Tablelands in Queensland to train in jungle fighting. Then they were off to fight in New Guinea, where he landed at Milne Bay and then took part in the landing at Lae as one of the soldiers swarming off the boats and up the beaches who subdued the Japanese defenders over eleven terrible days. Later, he saw heavy action in the clearing out of the Japanese from Finschhafen and Dumpu. To his fellow soldiers, Dad—who rose to the rank of lieutenant—was known as ‘Plumbob’ because of his habit of wearing his slouch hat straight, dead level, rather than with the customary tilt.

Mum, meantime, had also matriculated from school and earned a diploma in Physiotherapy from Sydney University—among her friends and family she had always stood out as being ‘bookish’, so it was not surprising that she was one of the very few of them to pursue a tertiary education—before joining the Australian army. As Lieutenant Beatrice Helen Booth, she wore the small, elegant cap of a physio for the Australian Women’s Army Medical Service and devoted herself to rehabilitating soldiers, including many who had fought in Dad’s campaigns. Though many men had died in those actions, a lot more had been wounded, and she spent much of her time in hospitals in Alice Springs, Darwin, Lae and Bougainville.

They were two young people from Wahroonga, Sydney, right in the thick of the war to Australia’s north, and though Mum never had to do anything as romantic as nurse Dad back to health, the time they spent in the war gave them a lot in common beyond the home suburb they shared. Before the war, Helen had known Peter only by sight as one of the four FitzSimons boys, whose heads she would notice separately and together bobbing along above Oakfield’s front fence—there were two heads with straight red hair, and two with dark curly hair—but by war’s end she knew him as the tallest, dark-haired one who, she heard, had been in thick fighting in North Africa and New Guinea.

Once the ‘Last Post’ had sounded mercifully for the last time in that war, and all of his dead comrades had been buried, Dad came home and resumed work as a clerk at Gillespie Bros…

But something was wrong. Having known what it was like to be in the wide desert at Libya and see the Panzers of the Afrika Korps coming at him full pelt, and live to talk about it, he found that when it came to the quotidian chores of office life, he had changed. Could he really live a life like his father before him, and like his brothers, of facing Banjo Paterson’s famous ‘round eternal, of the cash-book and the journal’? He decided he could not. And nor could he resume pursuing his previous ambitions of playing rugby for Australia, or going to Oxford or Cambridge to study. They were the dreams of a young man, and after six years of war, that he no longer was.

All he knew was that he had to take leave of ‘the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city’, and forge a new path. Thus, ignoring his Economics degree and the expectation that he would take up where he had left off, he moved north to the New South Wales Central Coast, just outside of Gosford, to try his luck at the art of running a citrus orchard. Taking advantage of a government program which assisted returned servicemen and women retrain for civilian life, he took a simple job as a trainee orchardist with one Gordon Leask, a local farmer who also happened to be a distant cousin.

Though his real desire was to have a sheep station—just like the sheep station in Inverell he and Jimmy had stayed on for a year when they were eight years old—his lack of capital meant that that was out of the question. And at least with an orchard he could draw on the small bit of experience he had nurturing the citrus grove at the back of Pitlochry when he was growing up. One way or another, though, he felt he simply had to pursue an open-air life, as he could no longer bear to be contained within four walls.

Mum, meantime, had also returned to Australia, and moved back into her old life at Oakfield, while also resuming work as a physio for returned veterans at a place in Sydney’s inner city, called ‘Broughton Hall’.

One night when she was at home, the phone rang in the kitchen of Oakfield. Her older sister Linda and Linda’s husband Cecil Lander—himself the scion of a famous farming family from the Riverina of New South Wales—happened to be visiting from their country property, and it was Cecil who picked up the phone.

He heard a polite masculine voice announcing himself as Peter FitzSimons, and saying: ‘Is Mary there? We’re looking for another girl for squash tonight…’

‘No, Peter, this is Cecil Lander and Mary is out.’

And then came the magic words.

‘What about Helen? She’ll do…’

Dad, remarkably light on his feet for a big man, had instantly improvised and asked Mum instead.

Mum accepted. And so it began. It was not one of those instant, passionate romances that flare up from out of nowhere like a bushfire, so much as a slower, gradually heating-up type affair. (Though, I swear, ‘affair’ is most definitely not the right word, if used in the modern sense of the word.)

Mum did not consider herself a particularly attractive woman, and would not have been surprised if she had not married at all. Growing up, she felt and looked different from her more conventionally attractive sisters, and in the silent watch of the night, as a very little girl, used to wonder if she was a ‘changeling’—the mythological creatures she would read about in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, who were the offspring of fairies and trolls, secretly exchanged for human children. Later, as a young woman at the dances often held in people’s drawing rooms, as an orchestra played in the corner, she feared being a wallflower, yet would get panicky wondering what on earth she could talk to boys about if she were asked to dance.

Still, she liked Dad a lot, recognised him as a decent man and particularly liked his BSA motorbike, which he had bought with some of his army backpay. She adored the fact that he loved poetry and, even as they went rowing on Sydney Harbour and on excursions to Luna Park, he could recite dozens of the poems he had learnt off by heart to keep his mind active during long nights by an anti-aircraft gun in Africa and New Guinea.

Mum couldn’t match him in terms of the poems she could recite, but he was impressed by her own love of verse, and her knowledge of Keats in particular. At Abbotsleigh, the private girls’ school she had attended, she had won the highly coveted Faith Brodziak Memorial Prize for excellence in all of academics, citizenship, leadership and sport—the same areas of endeavour which Dad valued most highly. He further sensed in her a great generosity of spirit, and natural ladylike-ness that he was very attracted to.

She admired that he was practical and frugal enough to have brought with him plenty of peanut butter and jam sandwiches for them to eat for lunch and supper. He couldn’t believe how down-to-earth she was, for one who had been raised amid such privilege. She valued how neat he always looked…

After knocking off at the Leask orchard at midday, he would ride on his motorbike the two hours down to Wahroonga, get washed up at Pitlochry, and appear mid-afternoon, bright as a new pin on the front step of Oakfield, always in a white shirt with detachable collar, and never without a tie and coat. A gentleman and gentle man in one, he treated her as a lady, as they went out with friends to play golf, bridge and tennis. On weekends, they became a regular sight on the Upper North Shore, Dad roaring along on his BSA, with Mum clinging on behind and golf bags lashed along each side. They liked to go to the Gordon and Lindfield cinemas and sit there, holding hands.

Ah, but hasten, Dad, hasten!

For by mid-1947 Mum is about to go on ‘the grand tour’, with Grandpa and Auntie Mary, travelling all through the United States and Canada. Before the war, their mother had taken the big girls, Linda, Ida and Jean on an eight-month tour of Europe—each sister had been given £1000 by their father to spend in any manner they saw fit—and in Scotland Ida had met her future husband, who was himself sole heir to a family fortune. Now it was to be their turn, as Grandpa mixed meetings to sell Australian wool with showing his two youngest daughters the world as he knew it.

Before Mum left, Dad asked her one day at a picnic by Sydney Harbour to marry him. She did not faint with pleasure. In fact, Mum simply said she’d ‘think about it…’

Which at least wasn’t a ‘no’!

Supremely encouraged, Dad sent her many letters while she was abroad, to which she replied. Shining through is my father’s persistence, and his passionate belief that Mum is the one for him. No matter that Mum was staying in the best hotels, going to swish cocktail parties and travelling first class throughout North America, while Dad was picking oranges for a living west of Gosford, enjoying a beer only now and then, and sleeping rough in a leaky tin shack as he earned just enough to rub two beans together.

The letters of two of them gradually warmed up as they went along. Mum was not as sure that Dad was the one for her, but she was nothing if not impressed by his ardour—and maybe even a little stunned by it.

20 July 1947

Miss Helen Booth

c/- William Whitman & Co Inc.

78 Chauncey St

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

My dear Helen,

Very many thanks for your letter dated 10 July. That was the one in which you again said NO, or rather persisted in refusing to say YES. To say that I was not disappointed would be both untrue and uncomplimentary. To say that I am disappointed is what is known as a ‘masterly understatement’.

21 July 1947

My Dear Helen,

Now for a few reflections on the Marriage Problem. I quote ‘Maybe it’ll take an earthquake to make me say YES.’ Well I knew America was famous for strange phenomena but proposing earthquakes is new to me…

Secondly, I have been an orphan for 7 years. Relations and friends are wonderful ties and I am sure few people are blessed with better sets than I am, but I yearn for someone closer. Frankly if I should peg out there would be no