General Chat

Hello everyone, hope the weekend was enjoyable for you all.

Tec, Linda and SueMaid, your reminiscences of your childhood are so interesting to read. My mother, who passed away over 10 years ago now, at the instigation of one of my nephews, wrote down her recollections of her childhood in the 1920s and also did an tape recording, interview-stlyle, with him, as he wanted to create a family record that he could pass onto his children when he finally had them. I have a written copy, which I read recently, but it brings a tear to my eye - well, a lot of tears actually.
My in-laws are Italian and next weekend they are making sausage - an annual event - and I will be going to help out. Otherwise we dont get a share! It's all day - cutting up the meat, mixing in the spices, and putting it in the sausage casings. Sounds like fun!

Have been to the gym this morning -go at least twice a week - so had better make a start to my day of h....work.

Bye for now, and have a good day,

Susan...

Good morning to you all. I hope you are all well?

I love reading this thread...Its lovely and I love the stories. I am not very good at telling stories and mine aren't very interesting any-way. Lol

Have a good Day/Night. xxxxx

Good morning and good evening:))

Posh I don't believe for one minute that you don't have some interesting stories to tell. Nice to see you:)

Susan - one of our grandsons other set of grandparents are Italian. We've had some wonderful meals - and wine - when visiting the family in Hobart. I wish I had asked my OH's parents and my father much more than I did while they were still alive. My father in law told some wonderful tales but it's only since he passed away that I found out that he was 16 when his grandfather passed away and I would love to know why he estranged from his family and died alone. I can well imagine that reading your mum's memories would make you feel sentimental and teary. Just as the song "You are my Sunshine" would bring back memories for Tec.

Carole - I love both your "doggy" stories. I don't know which one is funnier:))

Janet hope you are feeling better.

Sue xx

Hi Sue,
Well I do have one story to tell actually ......

I have only just realised that I can click on 'Last reply' lol It was taking me ages to find the end of the thread too Lolol

Good morning everyone.

Tec, "You are my Sunshine"

now I could leave it there, but it might look very strange and Mrs Tec might come gunning for me, so I had better add, that that song was my parents special song from their courting days.
Just after my dad died, nearly four years ago now, my sister saw a small plaque just a couple of inches across which stood on a little stand. It has a stylised yellow sun on the centre and the words "You are my Sunshine" around the edges. Mum has it on her mantelpiece and I get to dust it every week when I do her housework.

I off course being too young was not born in the war, Ok, I own up, I was 60 earlier this year,so am not that young.

Anyway my parents met during the war. Mum came from near Huddersfield from a very poor family. She had passed the scholarship exam to go to grammar school,but no way could her family afford to send her. That would have meant buying a uniform and paying for bus fares into the town and that simply was not an option,so her lot was to continue at the village school until she was old enough to go straight into the mills, where she would be destined to stay until she could marry.

The war intervened and she joined the ATS, being bright she made her way up the ranks a little bit and thoroughly enjoyed her taste of life away from the mills. During the war she met my father and eventually they married, so she moved up to the North East with him and never worked again, Her lot was to be a wife and mother. I feel so sorry for intelligent women like her,who simply had no chance of a decent education because of their birth status.

Posh, clever you!! I never knew what that meant, so didn't touch it. Just clicked on Last Reply and presto, there it was, the last reply. Should have been obvious... You can teach an old dog new tricks, but for some - me - it takes a bit more time! Thanks....

Susan...

Hi Susan,
I expect most members already knew that but I am a little slower than most. :-))))
I put it down to an age thing (not that I am old you understand) Lolol
Have a nice day xxx

Allan,

I have fond memories of the back to back houses, or at least one in particular.

I met my OH when we were students at Leeds. he had lived in the usual grotty rented accommodation for the first year, but then four of them decided to get together and buy a back to back terraced house between them. It was in an area designated for slum clearance, but it had a few years left before it was scheduled to be demolished. To buy it outright cost less than a years rent for the four of them. One of the fathers bought it in his name, but the boys had equal shares.

It had a large cellar, a large kitchen and second room on the ground floor, two bedrooms on the first floor and on the top floor was the bathroom and space for another bedroom, which at that time was open to the stairs. The toilet of course was out in the back yard.

They used the second downstairs room as a bedroom and OH shared one of the large bedrooms with one of the others. I of course had my own digs, but spent much time there , well it was the seventies you know.

As the two boys sharing the bedroom both wanted privacy, they decided to spruce up the space on the top floor and separate it off to form an extra bedroom. They needed to build a wall to do that, so they did,out of cereal boxes! They used to buy the large boxes of Kellogs cornflakes and seemed to exist on them, so every time they finished a box, they simply glued it to the one before and in no time at all they had a wall built. They then papered it using lots of flyers for bands which they had pinched from the student union, you know the sort of things you see plastered all over walls in towns, advertising forthcoming concerts.The door they salvaged from the slum clearance area nearby,

I don't think that it would have passed any building regulations, but I have fond memories of our little love nest.

They kept the house for a couple of years after they graduated and let it out to other students, but then it was compulsory purchased and demolished. They did get some money back, so made money from it over all, it was certainly cheaper than renting. Of course they had to live in a slum, but it wasn't any worse than your average student digs.

Posh - how funny are you:))

I'm really enjoying these stories - keep them coming.

My parents made the decision to come to Australia not long after they married. My father found it difficult to leave his father - his beloved mother had died when he was a child and he was very close to his father. Grandad encouraged my parents to come to Australia and told them that if he was younger he would've come with them. So when I was three years old we boarded the ship "Otranto" and sailed to Australia. My mother was 23 years old - my father 30. We never saw either of my grandfathers again.

My parents' first taste of Australia was a stop over in Port Adelaide where they saw small tin huts in dusty streets. This worried my mother as she thought this was how all Australian lived.

We settled on a migrant hostel for 3 years and saved every penny they could to scrape together the deposit for what you would call a council house - we call them housing commission houses. They arrived in Australia with one child and moved into our new house with 3 children. My brother and sister were born while we were living on the hostel.

My mother is still living in the same house. My parents brought up 4 children in the house. I left the house when I married and my father left the house to go into the nursing home where he died 3 months later. My parents didn't return to England until 1979 - 23 years after we left. Both my grandfathers were gone by this time - I well remember my father breaking his heart when he received the telegram telling him that his father was gone. I remember dad holding me too tight and telling me how much my grandad loved me but I guess by that time I had forgotten him - I was nine. I was a married woman with a child when my mother's father passed away. My mum saw her mum a number of times before she passed away. We had planned our first trip back to the UK and I was so excited at the thought of seeing my grandmother. Six months before we went to England gran died. I was so disappointed but more so for her because I know how much she was looking forward to seeing me again. Now I have grandchildren of my own I realise now that it must have broken my grandparents' hearts when we left to come to Australia. And we were on our own as no other family ever followed us over. Hence the need to do my family history - to discover my roots.


When we went back to England my parents came with us. We walked from my uncle's house to my gran's house where another uncle now lives. My mother took one hand and my father took my other hand. When I asked why my mother said that the last time they had walked with me to my gran's I was 3 and they had held my hands then.

I've brought back such memories:))

Sue xx

Oh Sue that is so sad, but I understand why your grandparents would have wanted your parents to be able to start a new life. I feel bad enough that my children are down in London!

It must take courage to go off to the other side of the world on your own. OH was head hunted and offered a new job in Canada, in a way we were tempted, but I didn't want to leave my parents. The main over riding factor though was that I was within days of giving birth to our second child and they were insisting that we both went down to London for some sort of briefing. They couldn't understand that I thought it wasn't a good idea to be so far away from home when I could go into labour at any time,so we told them to forget it and Canada was no more

Hello Posh - Hope you're having a good day!

Thanks Linda........"You Are My Sunshine " too - lol

Sue......That was such a touching account of your families move to Australia - an exciting new life - so brave, but at a cost.
When I used to bring emigrants over to Australia on the ships, I got to know many of the families quite well during the voyage.
They didn't know quite what they were going to, and some had very little money. I have often wondered what became of some of them, I hope everything worked out, and that they made a success of their new life.
I visited some of them at an immigrants hostel in Melbourne at one time.
They had all got jobs, and were struggling to save to get their own place.
We also used to carry parties of orphan boys - I did really feel sorry for them, and have since heard some very strange stories about that..

Having spent 16 years to and fro Australia, I got to know many parts, and made friends with many Aussies, still in contact with some.

Tec.

Hi, good morning and good evening. Some wonderful reminiscences here. "You Are My Sunshine" by the Carter family was one of my mother's favourites.
Linda, we appear to be of an age. I don't have any war stories of my own. My parents met after the war and I was born late 1948. My father went to New Guinea in 1942 and did not get back from until May 1946.
My mother was living in Sydney when in 1942 three Japanese midget submarines penetrated Sydney Harbour and fired torpedos, missing a US warship but sinking a naval training ship (HMAS Kuttabul). We had newspaper censorship and she said that there was nothing in the papers. Same when Darwin and the North West coast were repeatedly bombed by the Japanese.
Britain, most European countries and even the enemy combatants suffered immeasurably much, much more as Tec and others have said.
Thank God we probably won't have to go through that, but I remember as a child the paranoia of the imminent nuclear war was frightening to an 8 year old boy.

Posh,
I'm not vying for any position here but I think that I am slow in responding, certainly in typing> lol

So many stories and so many reminiscence's. We came out to Australia in 1982 but as a child I remember the cold war and the threat of nuclear war.

I used to think of a big bomb perched on a cliff and if it fell..well that was it!

I'm grateful that all my relations, including my father, came home from the war safely.

I was born in 1948 when memories were still vivid

Allan

You're right Colin. Britain and Europe saw so much more than Australia. Still Australia did suffer. I remember my brother in law telling me the story of his uncle who was a Japanese prisoner of war. He went off to war a boy but certainly came back a man - albeit a damaged one. My BIL told me that not long after he returned home he was sat at the dinner table and was chastised by his mother for his lack of table manners. She apparently said to him - without thinking - that anyone would think he didn't know where his next meal was coming from. During his years in the prison camp that would've been a daily concern although not the only one. Two years after coming home he died in a motorcycle accident and put an end to a tormented life - he was only 24 y.o. His diary still survives and shows an eager young soldier deteriorate into a bitter prisoner.

The nuclear bomb was certainly the fear of the baby boomer generation. However I think growing up in Australia in the 60's was a wonderful experience. Most people who were employed lived a good life with plenty of food and the "Great Australian Dream" - their own home. We went on camping holidays and spent most of summer at the beach. We roamed everywhere with friends and only came home when we were hungry. We didn't have a television set until I was 8 or 9 and a car when I was about the same age. We were never bored although we had no computers or any of the electronic games that are around these days. My parents were far from wealthy but then neither were my friend's parents so we didn't know any different.

Sue xx

Tec, I meant to say that my parents came over to Australia through BHP steelworks so my father had a job waiting for him.

Good morning/evening everyone:))

Tuesday morning here and already shaping up to be a lovely day. A shame I'll be indoors most of the day. Yet another meeting. I know it seems like I go to constant meetings but it isn't usually like this. Unfortunately our organisation is in danger of being taken over - with the area health service's appoval. There is a very large group called the Cancer Council who are funded by business, government grants and public donations who wait until small organisations get services up and running and then come in and take over. There is another group like ours who are fighting this takeover. We have worked hard for a long time to build up a library with an extensive range of reading material and dvd's etc. for the patients and their carers to use. We also have a group of drivers who take patients to and from appointments. The Cancer Council have decided in their wisdom that they would now like to take over both services and run it under their name with all our volunteers becoming their volunteers. The hurtful thing is that we have raised an incredible amount of money for hospital equipment and we are now getting a slap in the face for our troubles. Beware of becoming too high profile:))

Enough of my troubles. I hope my Aussie friends have a great day today and my Pommie friends enjoy the rest of your evening.

Sue xx

Good evening/morning all

SueMaid the same thing happened to a group of us here in the South West in the late eighties when AIDS was becoming more prominent in peoples minds.

The Health Dept of WA set up a "Sexual Health Working Party" consisting of local community health nurses, local government staff and other relevant representatives.

Although the main focus was on Aids education and we would give presentations at parent/teacher nights etc and manned an after hours phone line we were not allowed to use Aids in the title of the group: when we asked the Health Dept for additional resources we were told" you are not a health dept group, it was only a suggestion that you set yourselves up"

Two years later when it was realised how succesful we had become, the AIDs Council took us over and started dictating how we should be organised. Needless to say we all jumped ship and left them to it

Allan

Good morning, Allan. I think our stories are depressingly common. We've raised nearly 1.5 million for the hospital and they want us to continue as a fundraising group but take away what we started with - patient care. The sad thing is the heart will go out of our 250+ members and we will lose most of them. The paid job I do will almost certainly go but as it's not a real issue with me it won't worry me too much. However the principle of it will. Most of their staff is paid a weekly wage. We are all volunteer and run by a committee of which I'm president. I don't get a wage for training new volunteers - I am paid a fee. The Cancer Council intend putting their own trainers in. I would happily hand it over to the right people but we've done this for so many years and I am loathe to give away the reason this group started 17 years ago.

Sue xx

Ahh! the minds of Bureaucrats: it is impossible for them to conceive that 'non-professionals' can be successful in what they do. There has to be a 'Central' organisation making decisions thereby removing local involvement.

Having worked in local government for over 40 years I know how the bureaucratic mind, and system, works.

It was only three years ago when I left full time employment and set up my own consutancy business, that the whole stupidity of the system of which I had been a part really hit home!

Good on you SueMaid for putting up a fight against the changes...I wish you, and your group, every success

Allan

Good Morning SueMaid
GoodMorning Allan,

Sue...........It must be the same all over the world. I have seen this kind of thing happen again and again. It seems to me you can become a victim of your own success. In my experience, and I speak from experience, having been president of one charitable organisation, chairman for ten years of another, and secretary of another, that as soon as the bigger, and all powerful bodies interfere and take over, nothing ever runs so smoothly again. As soon as they start throwing their weight about, and dictating how the job should be done, then you quickly lose the goodwill of the body of volunteers you have built up. Ultimately of course the very people you are trying to help, are the ones who lose out in the end.
I hope you are successful in fighting this takeover. Maybe if enough of you voice your opposition loud enough, then they may back off.

If it 'aint broken - why mend it.

Tec.

Good evening Tec

On a lighter note, I was out with my OH yesterday and I was driving. All the time it was nag, nag, nag: you know, slow down, the lights are going to change, change gear

I really don't know why she can't be like me, because when she drives I offer nothing but constructive critiscism

Allan