14 Year Old Hector
When my dad Hector was 14 and just left school grandfather Harry (Henry Inglis) Williams) told my father that he was going to be a printer and that he would get him apprenticed in that trade. Dad said he wanted to be an electrician like his big brothers Linn, Happy, (Lawrence) and Harry. “ No” said grandpop “You are going to be a printer so get used to the idea.” Granpop took Hec on the steam train into Sydney and went to Anthony Horderns on Brickfield Hill, alighting first at Central station where it used to be halfway to Redfern station and getting the tram along George St towards the Quay.
“Why are we going all the way here, dad?” asked my father.
“Because Anthony Hordern’s is family, that’s why and I’m going to get you a new suit so you can look smart getting your first job in the printery.” Dad looked glum when he thought about a printery, but brightened thinking about the first new suit he had ever had with long pants. Up to then he had had hand-me-downs from his older brothers and when he grew too big for them they got handed down again to Gator (Alwyn) and finally put away in a drawer in the dark shellacked wood chest with ornate pull knobs that granpop had made himself. He was a pretty fair cabinet-maker. It had a big mirror the silver starting to flake off the back and there were little knick- nacks on its shelf, a china shephardess holding a broken-off crook and above the chest of drawers on the wall was hanging a fly-speckled lithograph in an oval dark carved frame of King George V and his queen looking stateley and severely into the parlour The long-used clothes with their rips and tears sewn up so expertly by granma’s nimble fingers were kept for Colwyn and Ralph as runabout clothes when they grew old enough. In another drawer wrapped lovingly in old sheets from the Sunday Sun and Guardian were baby clothes, the bonnets and the boottees and the ribboned little dresses, the white lace trim starting to go cream almost yellow with age. Several had come from her own family the Pikes when she and Harry had finally married after the second child was on the way at the time when the townspeople of the Southern NS.W where he collected his cattle out of the sale yards to drove them to the Darling Downs, Queensland nearly a thousand miles away had banded together refusing to let his cattle go. “Not until you marry Lucy Pike, Harry Williams and then you can take ‘em… . but leave her a few quid, because she’s too far gone to work in the Hotel as a maid. The publican sacked her and she has been helping out and sleeping in the back at Lee Hong’s hand laundry.”
So Lucy pike and Harry Williams got married in a church, on sufferance, disapproving sniffs from the townswomen and guffaws from the drovers around the pub. “Serves you right, Harry for playing around with an abo.” Lucy Pike had a touch of colour and that meant the white women ( mostly all descended from convicts) kept aloof from her. The second son was forming in her womb to be named Lawrence and who we would know as uncle Happy.
I loved my grandmother very much. I have never known a nicer lady. She always smiling and would give me hugs and great pieces of marble or rainbow cake and she cooked
potatoes baked in a pan of sizzling dripping with carrots and stringed up silverside of beef in the oven of the wood stove,chicory. She died in her fifties. As she was in her last hour of life breathing with rasps and heart beat fluttering then racing irregularly again, Grandfather Harry who had been less than gentle with her in earlier years leaned over her and begged tearfully “Will you forgive me Lucy?: She opened her eyes slowly looked at him stonily for an instant then died.
Grandpop lived on into his eighties, a gruff. lonely man taking a daily walk down to the tip behind Woronora cemetery (where he is buried) to collect old bread or anything to feed the chooks and ducks in the wire-netting enclosure next to the outdoor dunny. He had a walking stick with a gooseneck handle and a worn rubber tip on its end. He would turn over old tins or anything that might be useful. That was in depression times and even on after the second world war into the forties. The horse drawn rubbish cart would pass by three or four times a day driven by Scottie Taylor a man nearly as old as grandpa and the cart would tip end up over the rise of rubbish from householders around the Sutherland township and Scottie would scrape the last of it down into the gulley with his shovel, while the rats and currawongs waited patiently for the horse and cart to go away again for another load.
Harry would take a walk most days along First avenue Loftus on the south side of the cemetery and sometimes Bluey the cattle dog would go with him. He sometimes carried a hessian corn bag, the same kind he had used to build Betowynd with bush timber, tin roof and the sides of stretched corn bags dipped in wet cement slurry and nailed with clouts onto the green timber sapling frame. Then he would get through the railway fence and walk across the rails of the Illawarra line emerging near Taplan’s newsagency. This shop had lollies and big milk-shakes with banana, strawberry, chocolate or vanilla flavours for four pence. I usually didn’t have fourpence though I could sometimes scrape up a penny for a chocolate frog. These were two kinds, cream-coloured chocolate or dark. They were both delicious but I usually asked for the dark kind.
Harry never paused here, except occasionally to pay his bill for paper deliveries. I was never actually with him and just tagged along behind with the dogs and don’t recall grandfather ever buying me anything at Taplan’s. Maybe he never thought about it. I was just one of his grandkids who was tagging along for no reason. There was a reason. I was lonely and I sensed my grandfather was lonely, too. Grandma had died not long before. But he never talked to me much. He just let me hang around like a young stray dog, and sometimes there would be a gruff word or two.
I was still waiting for my young uncles and cousin Jackie to come back and play with me again as we used to do….. when we were a like a tribe clambering down the bush tracks, from ledge to ledge finally reaching our waterhole. The big kids would swing on a rope over a tree-branch, (Ralph Jackie, Billy Collins and sometimes Colin. Gator was a bit older,) and splash into the water.
They never did come back to play. Life, adolescence, jobs and I suppose, girls drew them into the adult world and the big city on the distant horizon. And of course the War Colin and Ralph up for service in the air force.
In those days daily papers were a penny each and the Sunday Sun and Guardian was threepence. It had a lot of comics in colour and there was Prince Valiant and Ginger Meggs my favourites. There were also the Gumnuts, little eucalyptus babies that lived in gum trees. I was too old for that comic, but I still looked at it. There was a cute illustration of them entwined in gum leaves and their heads in gumnut helmets. Thinking back now I would say the style was illustrative art nouveau.
Grandfather Harry would do the Sunday crossword. He was good at doing them and sometimes entered in the crossword competition for the “neatest and most correct entry.” He would post his entry with a penny stamp not sticking down the envelope because that would cost more. I don’t know if he ever won anything. He was like my dad when he bet on the races (every Saturday and Wednesday) never told anyone except my mum if he won or lost. I don’t know if Grandfather Harry bet on the horses. I know the rest of them bet every week. Gator was the most hooked (even worse than my dad, Hector.) He would lose most of his pay from his job as an unlicensed electrician. My dad was licensed, having done his apprenticeship from fourteen to twenty. I forgot to mention that my grandfather could do the cryptics too, which I cannot do.
At Taplans my grandfather would turn north across the street to Boyle’s Hotel on the corner, where he would take off his battered hat as if he were entering a church (which he never did) and I could see he was already beginning to relax .
Though I never went inside I knew the outside well. It has illustrations painted onto the glass of sporting scenes. Cricketers in white flannels, cap and bat, wickets and crouched players in the distance, were shown with smiles of anticipation , lifting schooners of amber. bubbly beer and the words “Tooth’s Fine Ale” prominent. Another panel depicted a beach scene which could have been Cronulla because I recognized the Norfolk Island Pine trees near South Cronulla beach. A lifesaver was hugging a pretty bronzed girl in a red one piece bathing suit and drinking a pint of K.B.Lager with froth running over the glass. I heard my dad say once, he is losing too much froth because the silly bugger didn’t tip his glass when he was pouring it. Aussie men in those tough times didn’t like to see good beer spilling over as froth even in an advertisement . Another good ad for beer was near the corner of Kingsway and Princes Highway, just near where my nana lived.. A big billboard had an illustration of an oldtimer with a mustache lifting a pint of beer saying “Here’s to E” the meaning of which used to mystify me, but it stayed in my mind and only now
Can I understand it was an ad for Toohey’s Beer, a rival to Tooth’s Beer. I liked these paintings and even as a curious ten-year-old puzzled how an artist could paint them. I think it was then that I resolved to be a painter someday and paint beautiful paintings, too.
Bluey the blue cattle dog, part dingo, would wait outside patiently curled up in the shade of the pub verandah, while Harry Williams had his beers, talked to his cronies about how he helped build the Warragamba Dam and the Hume reservoir. How he used to drive cattle a thousand miles to the Darling Downs from the Monaro and how he got a gold medal for diving off the gold dredge and saving a dying man. “I wouldn’t have bothered but he owed me five pounds.”
Then the important part of his daily visits to the pub. flirting with Dorrie Boyle, the daughter and later owner of the hotel. She was a full sized, big breasted female in her forties with a warm smile to her paying customers, sliding another beer in someone’s direction, taking the tip as her due.
Harry Williams had once taken a bunch of flowers from Grandma Lucy’s garden, without asking permission, while she watched , crying behind the lace curtains of her kitchen. .
I remember being woken one night, my mum sobbing and saying “Siddie, Grandma Lucy is dead.” I cried too, but I couldn’t believe grandma was really dead. It was only when they took me to the crematorium at Woronora cemetery and I saw grandma‘s coffin slowly moving along rollers to a small open door at the end, that I knew she was really gone and I would never get another piece of marble cake and a cup of hot, sweet coffee and chicory made with plenty of condensed milk from the Nestle’s tin with the Switzerland gold medal on it. I could see some fire and smoke and I could feel the heat from the gas jets that were going to burn Grandma’s body. I knew it would heat her up and before she burned the muscles of her body would contract and she would sit up and move wildly. That’s what the kids at school said.\, and I supposed it was right. Would she suddenly become aware what was happening and scream? I didn’t want to be there to hear her.
I knew I never wanted this to happen to me if I ever died which was unlikely because I was going to be like Peter pan and Wendy and never grow old. Also I was careful crossing Princes Highway and I was particularly wary of big red lorries coming up from Cronulla.. It might be the same murderer who killed my little bra. I didn’t want to get hit on the road. I didn’t want to die and burn up in a coffin. I didn’t want to be full of maggots either in the ground at Woronora Cemetery, where I used to play near Bobbies grave, hoping somehow he could call out to me.
There was a residual smell from previous cremations that made me want to leave. “Let’s go home, Mummy, I urged plaintively. My mum was crying. She had a blue maternity dress on and it was getting wet from tears. I wondered if my little brother or sister inside knew what was happening outside and that Grandma wouldn’t be there to give them marble cake either. That meant there would be only Nana O’Keefe left and her cake had little caraway seeds in it that were hard to spit out and they made the cake taste like medicine. To get a piece and a glass of milk you had to go and gather sticks for kindling before you got anything from her, except some mouldy chocolates from gold foil-covered boxes left over from Ida’s gifts from her boyfriends years before. They still tasted good, though.. The chocolate had started to go grey. Auntie Ida “Buntins” to her brothers (later she called herself Bonnie) had a lot of boyfriends even before she went to work for the American G.I.s in Kings Cross, or King’s bloody Cross is what my dad called it.” Why don’t you talk straight about what she’s doing Marge?” said my dad “I don’t want you to talk to her again.” “ But she’s my younger and only sister, Hec and anyway she’s only a hostess. She just does the catering…. “ mum;s voice was a bit unsure. She really did not approve of her glamourous sister.
“Jesus Bloody Christ, and what does she cater for?. Next she’ll be asking you to go and work for the yanks, too, the little bitch!”
“ She already did, and If you go on about it anymore, maybe I will.” Dad looked shocked. “Anyway I’m pregnant against, thanks to you never letting me alone. So going to work for anybody is out of the question.”.
“ That wouldn’t stop those fucking yanks. They go for anything in skirts, schoolgirls, school boys anyone.” My father subsided in grumbling. Mum added slyly “Schoolboys don’t have skirts these days. Maybe when you went to school they had, well grass skirts or lava-lavas anyway.” This was my mum’s ultimate insult to my father and his “boong” side of the family. Sometimes my mum went a bit too far.
“Watch your language, with the “F’ word. Do you want the boys to grow up like you? Siddie’s in the lounge room listening. (I was). Are you there Siddie?” mum called out. I said nothing. What are you doing Siddie?” She came in.” Just listening to my crystal set mum. I can get eight stations.”
So she returned to her bedroom and the argument. “He’s listening to his radio. He’s got the earphones on.” She resumed the argument “ You’re just jealous because she gets three times the pay you get”
My dad growled. “ I have to work twenty hours overtime a week rewiring Dutch ships to get the dough for all the black market food you pay through the nose for.” “ Well we can’t live on the ration coupons. The boys need meat and milk. Just lucky for you that beer’s not rationed…” Mum paused for breath and then she was on again. Dad never got the better of these many arguments I heard throughout my young life. This is, incidentally one of the sources of my knowledge about scandals of our family history.
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You asked me about our family’s connection with the Horderns. I have never understood the connection, But Grandfather Harry was sure of it. My dad said that grandfather Harry would always buy the kids clothes from Anthony Hordern’s because it was “family.” How this came about I don’t know. I’ve looked at the family connections on Our Williams family and also the Nash one and I can’t see anything.
From my memory, not looking at the websites, I know there was an aunt Anne who I think was Harry;s eldest sister. I think she stayed in Braidwood because Dad, Hector ran away when he was fourteen and went back to Braidwood. But it might have been an auntie Alice. There was an aunt who was sent up to Sydney as a maid in service. I forget who she was but I think she was younger. When I was in my teens and dad was taking me (the only time because I found them boring) to Randwick races, we got off a trram somewhere near the Bat and Ball Hotel in Centennial Park. She lived according to dad in a bit better than slum terrace house on a road to the west side of the park facing the Park. Anyway she either had died, no longer lived there or was out. So I don’t think it was this sister You know there was a family bible. What happened to it? I wouldn’t be surprised if Harrie got it as he was always family history oriented, and in 1938 he was a “marine” depicting and commemorating the landing of the fleet…but there was another one about Kurnell. Maybe it was that he was in…or both. Anyway I’m sure he is dead and gone now and I don’t know any of the addresses of his children. I just know they used to live in the old post office at Caringbah and the eldest son was named Arthur and the next was Bryce. Their mother was named Floss. Mum said she had a social disease when she married Harrie Williams. She left him when the kids were stilll small. Same thing with happy, Dorrie left him and grandma brought up Jackie, Same thing with Ralph. His wife(?) left him with at least two children, Coral in the guestbook and an older boy who my mum said was sired by someone except Ralph, because of his hair colour. But he could easily taken after Esther Kilpatrick Harry Williams sold the house I think because of road widening, which was an old grey weatherboard facing north,and I think they left the shire. Uncle Harry would have known about the Anthony Hordern connection. And Arthur his eldest son would have been told, I’m sure. Maybe that relation still living down at Nimmitabel on part of the old property who is in the guestbook would know. Was his name Peter Williams? I saw his name yesterday but I have forgotten. Strange I can remember things of 65 years ago and forget a name from yesterday. Jackie, Laurence( John?) my cousin was Happy’s only child that I know. Happy eventually married again, a fat hottentot-like woman from South Africa, who obviously was part native from there. She was like a parody of Granma Lucy, but though I only saw her several times when I was about twelve she seemed a nice enough person. Lin had a thin, proper would be respectable wife called Dulcie. My mum did not take to Dulcie. I don’t know why. They never visited us or vice versa and they might have lived in a middle class suburb of the western suburbs. Something like Ashgrove or Lidcombe. I seem to remember a couple of young kids, about my age. Colin married the Buntings girl across the road from us. Her father was a petty officer in the navy stationed down past Woolongong and the second son was Norm. the older boy got rheumatic fever and told he could not do sport but he did and died. He was a nice boy. Colin and my dad fell out because of the oath you have to take entering the police force that you will tell on your mother is she commits a crime. After that there was the cheating over the five acres that had been my dad’s, from which your mother profited also and my dad got nothing except a very small cheque only a small fraction of the value of his rightful share. He told them to stick it up their ar .es. What a miserable lot they were. I don’t blame your mother because she never had much Ruthie and your dad only made a small amount as a messenger for the water board…..But it meant I could not finish high school or go to university. ( Brian send this email 16th Aug 2004 five sites.).
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. Well she’s just part of the war effort too. She works hard too… Working lying down more likely. Shut up Hector I don’t know why I married you. You married me because ……………wouldn’t and you had to have somebody. You beat him up on Sutherland railway station that is why he stayed away. You said tyou would kill him if he saw me again. I didn’t know you were pregnant already. But it was yours, Hec, yours Siddie is yours. Don’t you remember when it happened? It was when we went to the old picture theatre where Unwins junk yard is now. It was the time we went out during half time and got over the back fence into the orchard. Don’t you remember the guavas. Yes we ate them in the dark and when we went back to the picture theatre and the lights came on they were full of worms and we had been eating them. Well anyway Hec that was when Siddie was started. Yeah five months after that we got married in the Presbyterian church and remember the look of the minister. He didn’t want to perform the marriage. It was only because your dad was presbyterian and his mother Esther Mickilpatrick that he did it. Yeah and I could only give him two quid because I was on the dole at the time. Anyway. Siddie is yours. You said he was, I know what I said. Well if you say anything else I’m going to leave you. What and you pregnant I’ll go back to my mother. Mum started crying and I was crying inside me like I always did when my mum and dad were arguing which seemed all the time. Mum always said her grandmother O’Keefe was crazy and sat around the house in Beaconsfield crying and moaning and not doing the housework. She said she was “silly as a rabbit.” There was one of her aunts Auntie Eilleen, a sister of Richard O’Keefe my grandfather who according to mum was “a pain in the neck.
This auntie Eileen came over and visited us during the war and the thing I remember was she did some baking making puff pastry and she used up a month’s supply of our butter ration. Mum was very angry with her and we kids had to eat bread and dripping for the month. Believe me bread and dripping and strawberry jam on your sandwiches for school is no prize. Little things stay in your mind over the years, like for instance what happened to that alsation puppy we gave Ollie and Wally’s family when they lived in Gymea. I got the impression from Dad that uncle Wally had “disposed of it and though I was only ten I wanted to dispose of uncle Wally and hit his head with a hammer and throw him in a hole in the vacant lot next door and cover him with leaves and say to everyone “Wally was always eating and shitting around the place and whining too, so I “disposed” of him. I got so angry then that I wanted the nazis to send a lot of planes over the east end of London and bomb all Wally’s relations, there..
Those were the days when animals had fewer rights even than now and you could dispose of your pet by hanging it till it choked to death frothing frantically at the mouth or you could take a litter of kittens and drown them one by one in a tub of water, as they mewed and gurgled for air. Some more gentile persons could not stand the drowning, chopping their heads off with an axe on the chopping block was too messy and the dog would come along afterwards and lick the blood, so they would dig a hole in the backyard. throw in the kittens and as they milled around in their last desperate moments and hurriedly cover them with soil with a spade and go back inside for a bottle of beer to calm the nerves while mother would casll out to the children you can go and play outside again kids. Dad's’done what he had to do. But where have the kittens gone mummy says the youngest child, a little girl who had seen the kittens come out one by one from the mother cat’s “tummy” and was very worried indeed what daddy might have done. He took them to the R.S.P.C.A. dear where they will be given to good homes and they will grow up and have kittens too. What’s dad buried down the backyard mum. Just some rubbish, dear that the rubbish man wouldn’t take. She’ll have to kick out her live-in, Eric He’s only a boarder. Well he sleeps in her bed most of the time and comes back drunk every night. O.K I’m sorry I brought it up. My dad gave in as usual before my mother would screech and cry.
The heavy, sonorous organ music made my head hurt, like when I had to do sums in Miss Reilly’s 3A class at Sutherland Primary.
All my relations were crying, even Gator who used to be so happy with the world. except for once before. He was so strong he would carry great logs up the hill on his shoulder, to be cut up for firewood at the old house “Betawynd” which I always thought was a stupid name and meant there was better wind there. It was never very windy on the hill above Brown’s Creek and Prince Edward Park. Gator , uncle Alwyn ( hence alligator hence Gator} had red eyes swollen with grief, just like he had been when he swept up my brother Bobbie’s brains from Princes Highway after the police and the ambulance had gone. What shocked me after I realized my brother was dead and I was only four and a half, was that they let this man go home. Dad and Gator and Ralph and Colin and uncle Pat O’Keefe and Den and Ern, they should have all turned on this man and killed him dead. That is what I wanted. Why didn’t the big people of my family do this? The man told the police “I didn’t see the kids’ They just rushed out onto the road and I couldn’t help it.!” This was not true, because he did not slow down and when he stopped it was along way along the road because he was going real fast. I went to the court with others of my family , I wanted to tell the court what happened but they wouldn’t let me speak.
Many years later when I was troubled in the direction I would going in life, and had taken one or two steps across the dividing line, I became owner of a Belgian 9 m.m. automatic. I went into the bush and tried it out at a stump and missed both times because I had had no experience with handguns, though I was the best shot in the family with a .22. or a 303 Lee Enfield, and beat my dad and brother Pat in a contest at Waterfall. I did not have many rounds of ammo for the automatic,, and wasted not more bullets. It took two shots to kill an old tom cat that mum wanted me to shoot under the house which was diseased and she thought the disease might spread to the chooks or the three horses they had at the time Let me tell you about these horses. One of them found a way to get out of the yard. There were sliprail that had to be pushed along and the rail would fall down and the horses could get out . They would move to mum’s garden and what they didn’t eat, they would trample on. This horse would hold the rail with his teeth and move his head sideways , doing it again and again until the rail would fall down. Horses are not supposed to be very smart, but this one was. I remember when I was about nine or ten I had this poney. I called him Tommy, but I don’t know what his real name was. Anyway he never came when I called Tommt. He would ignore me and move away from me when I came near. He liked my mum, though and when she went into the little outhouse down the yard he would come along to the dolor and try to poke his head in, He was a gelding twelve jhands high and a reddish brown color. He really was a nice horse. I started riding him when I was seven and I had him until I was fourteen. That’s when dad sold him and we used the money to send me on the Skymaster airplane to Tasmania for a trip
Yes,they let the man go who had smashed into Bobbie and spattered his brains on the highway, that my uncle Gator crying age about seventeen was sweeping up with the millet broom mum usually mused to sweep the kitchen. What happened to the broom afterwards? Bobbie’s brains when into the garbage. Did the broom go there too, or was it washed afterwards and used again to sweep the kitchen. The man with his big red lorry killed Bobbie aged three with his that did not slow down. But all my life I remembered what he looked like.
He was a man about five foot seven or eight and he had sandy hair and some freckles and about thirty five years of age. I was only four and a half. I dreamed of growing up and killing him, because I had loved my little brother.
Well in the later years I examined that automatic thinking , “What can I do with this? What use is it to me”. That night I dreamed again about what happened to my brother. It was like a revelation from God, though I did not believe in that stuff.
The Sydney Morning Herald is available on microfilm and stories of thirty years before even a small item about a child being hit by a car on the Princes Highway, Kirawee can be accessed. I found the old address and went there. There were people of the same name living there. A little boy was at the gate. He was about seven years old and had sandy hair and freckles. “No, he’s not here now. He died. He was my grandfather.”. I went away and soon afterwards found someone who would give me a good price for the weapon. I did not need it any more, but the conflict in my mind has never completely gone away.
I remember thinking when I was young when I still used to go over to the old house made of bags dipped wet in cement and stretched over the sapling frame, with a galvanised iron roof and floors made of split sandstone, that grandfather Harry could have done it. He could have killed that man. Because I knew grandfather was like me.
.and words said I loved my grandma and yet I also loved my grandfather. But I never got to tell him that because the males of our family never talked about such things. I always heard bad tales about what he did when he was young, but in his old age he was gruff but always good to me. Somehow I felt close to him. I think he wa s athrowback to William Nash and I know I became like my grandfather Harry in many ways.
She was very heavy, 19 stone towards the end and probable had a bad heart. The Williams diet was short in green vegetables and fruit and heavy in fatty meat and potatoee carrots and onions.. Not good for the health.. Anyway most of that generation had bad hearts and the sons diesd from bad hearts except my father. But though my heart has never given trouble touch wood, my sister Chris has a problem.
She would never use them herself again after the last little one died a few days after birth, but she would give them to Ollie when she married. Nothing was wasted in the Williams house in Gray st. Sutherland just up the road from the abbatoir on Savilles Creek.
Grandma Lucy was always busy darning socks and the backsides of pants, even patching the rear with pieces of almost-matching cloth. Now it was different. When a boy went off to get a job, Granma would get down the Arnott Biscuit tin with the Rosella parrot on the lid and take out her little hoard of coins and a pound note or two. The pennies were big and heavy the florins halfpennies and even a farthing with a wren on the back. British pennies were bigger than ours the ones from the early 18hundred turned up sometimes they were very heavy and had Victoria as a young monarch and Brittania on the back with shield and trident. They could buy you a chocolate frog, but when they were minted they would be the pay for a labourer of half a day’s work. Corn laws price of bread utter poverty. Killing a child for stealing food. Children 8 works 12 hours a day in mills and mines. This was merry England our home that we were bloody lucky to get away from even if it meant stealing a sheep or robbing a shop of six shillings and eight pence halfpenny. You had to make sure you did not steal more than one pound and a shilling that was a guinea and for that they would hang you no matter what age you were.
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UNFINISHED FIRST DRAFT-
The sight of calves in the railtrucks. Gator outside the pictures bad heart died. Killing birds with a catapult. Killing a blue tongued lizard shooting bell-birds we were like savages. Talking to my brother.
The flies and insects everywhere matching red bulljoes with blue. Ant lions in the sand black snakes and brown snakes death adders sharks trapping and killing rabbits, caught a bandicoot. Makes “a man of you” Insensitive people but it comes back to you. The last hours of my dog Peter. They called me crazy because I talked to me brother. The dankers girl our cubby down the back Pat told on me stealing peaches from the orchard they are shooting flying foxes. Hair caught in a mangle. Bobby and a little gir/*-78/**lf/--+
riend in the cemetery. Things we shouldn’t do, Jackie betting on the races s.p with my friend from the castholic school. Whatleys shop being caught late by the headmaster biting the whatley girls finger. My great uncl first ww wootton trenches lunatic asylunm fat nana went to see him.. Pat and I attack dad in mum’s bedroom. Another time when I was about 11 I ewent in when I heard moaning and dad was on top of mum in a funny way. Are you having a wrestle I asked.
Esther Kilpatrick my grandfather’s mother told him that the family name had been Mckilpatrick but because the first part sounded like “muck” and the colonial Australians were ignorant of the meaning of “
Mc, the son of or descendant of” the first part of the name was dropped. She said she came from Londonderry. a name now frowned on in Ireland even the North because of the London connection. It is now called Derry. Esther died early and my grandfather was brought up by his older sister and an uncle George.
When uncle George and his wife already past middle age visited my grandfather Harry when he was a grown man with a family he kissed his “little brother Harry” on the mouth. That was the custom and nothing homosexual about it. A custom that now seems quaint and out-of-date.
Grandfather Harry was half Irish, maybe more Irish than English or Welsh. So I am a quarter Irish on my dad’s side and my mum’s great-grandfather Michael O’Keeffe came from Ireland so she said she was Irish but she had Nashes and Woottons and others in her family tree all from England, so I am mostly English through my mum, though we were taught to feel we are Australian Irish. I was taught to hate the English for what they did in Ireland centuries ago.
I think it is about time we forgot this regional rivalry about where we came from, because a family name is halved in importance genetically every generation. For example, though William Nash was my great great great grandfather how much of the genes of William Nash could be in me? John Williams (2) was one quarter William Nash, one quarter Maria Haynes and one half John Williams (1). So my grandfather Henry Inglis was one eighth William Nash, my father was one sixteenth William Nash and I am one thirty second William Nash. My son Brian is one sixty fourth William Nash and my grandson is one hundred and twenty eighth William Nash, about the same amount of genetic material as he has from some full aboriginal person waving an ineffectual spear at the oncoming Williams- Nashes encroaching on his tribal hunting grounds in the Eden-Monaro district.
I think this looking into the past for ancestors is really a nebulous vanity that would be defeated when the ugly truth emerges that these ancestors were just as common as ourselves with all our faults and weaknesses. Thank you Ric Williams.