Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Hong Kong but my parents were not Chinese. My father had also

been born in Hong Kong and my mother in England, and when I was one year old my mother took me back to England to visit her family, and stayed there for a year, returned to Hong Kong where my brother was born, and then we came to Australia, spent the war years in Australia, returned to England to be evacuated, and I was left at boarding school in England at the age of nine

but after three years I went back to Hong Kong on a flying boat. As a group of school children it was the first time the British government thought, “Perhaps some parents would pay for their children to go out to the Far East for the summer holidays.” So we went by flying boat and then my parents decided that they didn’t want me to go back to boarding school, so I stayed in school there in Hong Kong for two years, and then they packed me up, and sent me back to Australia.

I completed my education here and my parents joined me, and I did occupational therapy, and worked as a therapist, also in England for a short time, and returned to Australia. I did some voluntary work, as well as doing occupational therapy. I ran Women’s Hall at Sydney University, being a warden, as it was called then, for

students at Sydney University. Then I got married and since I’ve been married, I say I don’t work, and my husband says I work but I’m not paid for it. My last school was Abbotsleigh at Wahroonga and here I am at Pymble, so I haven’t gone very far in my life at all. I had just one son, who lives in Canberra and I suppose that’s the short answer to your question.

1972.

Well my father comes from quite an interesting family and my brother is

actually an historian, who is completing a book right now on Tubby Allen [Arthur Samuel ‘Tubby’ Allen], who was the commander of the Australian forces in the Kokoda Trail. That’ll be published by Oxford University Press next year, but he’s writing a story…the next book he is writing is about our family history because my ancestors went to the Far East where one of my forebears was named the

most odious man in the East. In 1702 he went from Portugal to be the Chief Justice of Macau and my father’s family stayed in Macau and Hong Kong right up until the end of the last century. My grandfather was a director of just about all the companies in Hong Kong including managing director of the Hong Kong Engineering

and Construction Company, and my father was a civil engineer employed by his father’s company, and he was involved in a lot of the construction in Hong Kong, both before and after the war. After the war he ran his own construction company and built housing developments in quite a lot of areas in Hong Kong. He married my mother when she went out to Hong Kong and he used to say that

he’d bought his wife, a good oriental custom, because she actually went out as a missionary. The Missionary Society was very disappointed that they’d paid for her training and to go out to Hong Kong, and to learn Chinese, and blow me down, just when she was getting useful, she go married. So he felt that it would be a good idea to make a substantial donation to the Missionary Society.

She was 26, no 25 when she went out.

Well he had quite a lot of highlights in his life and the sort of person he was, he spent most of his time either working for his own company after the war, and very busy with his

father’s company before the war but hugely busy with voluntary work. For instance after the war, all the infrastructure of Hong Kong had been bombed and he was the Honorary Consulting Engineer for the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, two orphanages, the Blind Society, all of that sort of thing. He was incredibly busy as a volunteer and similarly when he came to Australia.

He worked as a civil engineer but he was very involved in voluntary work and then at the age of 72, he was asked if he would be warden of a new Anglican Retirement Village, and he agreed if he could be the voluntary warden. He was so successful at this that almost all of the residents, 62 of the residents nominated him as Senior Citizen of the Year and he became the Senior Citizen of the Year.

So all his life was spent really in looking after people, helping people. That was his hobby and he actually was a champion sportsman in Hong Kong, and he won an award for that. He was a runner and a footballer, and all of those sorts of things. He also won the one and only scholarship at Hong Kong University as a young man, so he was one of these all time sort of people. He was

good academically. He was good with sport but he was also very involved in helping people. As a young man he was also a Scout leader and he won an award for rescuing life at the risk of his own life. The award he won was the first time it had been won in Hong Kong, so my brother being the one and only son, has the various awards he’s won.

He won lots of running and sporting cups, which the grandchildren all have.

He accomplished quite a lot in his life.

Yes, she went out as a missionary and she also was very involved in

all sorts of things, in the Red Cross and lots of voluntary organizations.

Well looking back on my father, I think he was a very accomplished person and so was my grandfather, who was a very important

individual in Hong Kong, but my parents weren’t at all pushy. When I think of other people whose parents desire their children to excel at things and I have to hand my parents credit for the fact that they didn’t push us to do anything at all. They were very accepting of everything that we did, very supportive.

It was the kind of life that very few people have these days because it was an era when Europeans had a staff of servants, so my parents lived in a very attractive house, which my father designed in an

area called Braga Circuit and my father’s name was Braga. It was the most salubrious sort of building site in Kowloon on the mainland and it had been two hills, and much of the hillside had been taken off to fill in a gully to make a housing development, and ours was the first

house built on that area. They had a cook and a ‘makee learn’ [youngster], so the cook didn’t peel potatoes or wash up. The makee learn did that and there was a cleaning amah who cleaned the house, and the silver and the brass, and there was a wash amah, who did the washing and ironing, and a gardener, that’s a fahwong, who had a wife who helped with watering the garden.

When I arrived we had a nanny and her father was English, and her mother was Portuguese. So it really was quite an elegant lifestyle. I still have things like the finger bowls because at the end of the meal there’d be fruit and I’ve still got the fruit knives and forks, and everyone would have their own little finger bowl, so they would dip their fingers in the finger bowl after eating the

fruit.

Well it was a two storey house, whitewashed I suppose and my father had a funny little Hillman car, and he would drive from the house down to the Star ferry, and parking was no problem back then, and he would get the ferry to his office. He worked really long hours

but there was no problem about meals either because my mother would just be able to say to the cook, “We’ll eat at eight o’clock at night,” and that’s the time it would be. My father would be able to ring from the office and say when he was leaving, so the cook would have the meal ready, and as he drive up the hill towards Braga Circuit, he would toot his car and one of the servants would come rushing

out and open the garage door, so he didn’t even have to open a garage door, very easy lifestyle.

My father designed it and nowadays looking back I think it really was a very modern house. It even had an en suite bathroom, which pre-war days was quite something, with a lovely tropical garden looked

after by a fulltime gardener. Our next door neighbour, the Favours, Eric and Gwen Favour, people said she was a very keen gardener, and she was. She had a lovely garden but of course she didn’t work in the garden. On the other side there was a couple called Mr and Mrs Woods, and they had two daughters, and their nanny was the sister of my nanny, so we girls spent quite a lot of time together. My parents

also had a beach house at Nineteen and a Half Mile Beach, so on Saturday afternoons we would drive out, and have beach parties.

I remember a lot of the

occasions when the two nannies would take us out together and I think life was quite cushy for them too because they would take us to a nearby…not a real park but a bit of a park, and there were a lot of parties, and children’s outings. I’ve got a photo here of my third birthday party and every child arrived with its own nanny, and its own amah.

It is a Chinese servant. So you want to see a couple of photos?

Oh they lived in the house. There were servants’ quarters. Oh yes it really meant that the

employers fed them and to the extent that an Egg Man would come to sell eggs. My mother would after a little while say, “I think we’re buying rather a lot of eggs. I don’t think we’ve really had 10 dozen eggs this month. Perhaps you need to speak to the Egg Man.” The cook and the Egg man were obviously doing a little dealing on the side.

There was an attachment at the back, whereas after the war we lived in a three-storey house and the servants had the downstairs. They had the whole of the downstairs to live.

Oh yes, we had a dog. A German shepherd called Jimmy and one of the servants

would take him walking. I think he was there a bit as a guard dog and he really was a very good guard dog because on one occasion a friend came to see my parents, and one of the servants let him in, and he sat down, and he waited and he waited, and he waited. Then he realised my parents weren’t coming back and he’d like to leave. He got up to leave and Jimmy the dog, who’d

been so friendly, growled furiously, so this poor man had to wait until my parents got home. But I was only there for one year and then I went to England for a year, and then I came back. I left Hong Kong just before my fourth birthday to come to Australia, not that we knew we were coming to Australia.

Well I was one year old and

my grandparents hadn’t seen me, and my mother was losing weight, and her sister had come out to Hong Kong for a holiday, and she’d had TB [Tuberculosis], and it flared up again in Hong Kong. So instead of going back to England, my aunt went to Italy and then went to a sanatorium in Switzerland but she’d been staying with us, and my mother was losing weight, and they were

afraid that she had TB. So my grandparents urged her to go to England, miss the summer, so I could be inspected, so we went to England for a year. My father was expecting to join us but the Munich crisis was on and he applied for home leave, and the company said, “Oh no, you better not go to England because

if you go, you’ll never get back again. They’ll keep you there,” and so he didn’t go to England. After a year we returned.

No my grandparents never did but my other grandparents were actually in Hong Kong.

On my father’s side, yes. He was one of 13 children and they were all in Hong Kong

at that stage. Grandparents can sometimes be quite distant.

No my grandfather used to come…one of his deals was every Saturday morning he would arrive with a great load of produce, apples and other fruit, and vegetables, and he’d go from son’s house to son’s house

depositing great loads of produce and play with his grandchildren. He didn’t like babies but he liked little children and he used to play with us, I must say in rather a remote way.

Two doors away lived my Uncle Noel and Aunty Marjorie, and they had a son Morris, how was two months older than I was, and so we played together a lot.

We’ve got some wonderful home movies of Morris and me, and things like racing up the lawn, and there was Morris with my doll in a dolls pram, and me wheeling a big pram with another cousin in it. He’d always win. We had chickens and we’ve got a wonderful movie of him

chasing one of these little day-old chickens around, and when we’d do that one of my parents would always say, “And the next day the chicken died.”

My father was taking the movies but lots of parties and lots of going out to the beach in big groups, family groups, and nice pictures of walking

down the steps of the beach house, and the children with little rubber rings round them, and no surf of course, just swimming in the water but always taking a couple of servants to do the work. My mother also was involved in…say on a Monday afternoon she went to a knitting group

run by a Mrs Faber and they would knit for impoverished children in England, then on Thursday she had a sewing group, and they’d sew things for an orphanage in Fan Ling, out in the new territories. Then once a fortnight we’d drive out to the new territories with the things that everyone had made for these little orphans.

Oh Hong Kong is an island and Britain was seeded Hong Kong after one of the opium wars, and then after another opium war they managed to acquire a peninsular on the China mainland, called Kowloon. It went as far as Boundary Street and then later the British Government managed to acquire what was known as the ‘new territories’, which went

from Boundary Street probably about 20 miles, to the border of China. That area was British Territory. In fact it was British Territory until 1997 because they got the new territories for 99 years, a lease, and that was up in 1997.

Oh yes.

There was a very large British community, lots of business people because Hong Kong was an entrepreneurial port and an entrepot, so that

companies that wanted to trade with China would have business firms in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a real hub, not only for business but for transport, things going to and from China, and Japan. Tea was brought from China to lots of places in the world.

Going into China, the Australians would be sending wool and they’d be bringing back tea, and teak, and things that Australia wanted.

I’m sure it has.

Well we’ve got a movie of it and I’ve got some stills of it but I do remember quite a few of the children who went. Of course they were children older than me, like Susan Woods who lived next door and various cousins, and there was a

woman called Zoe Williams, and her son whose name escapes me at the moment. We played not ‘Hunt the Thimble’ but hunting something and the mother…Lesley the little boy was. Zoe Williams couldn’t bear her son not to find the thing and so his mother kept on helping him, and pointing things out, and

I can still remember thinking how funny that it was really important for this mother that her son would keep on finding the missing item, the kind of Hunt the Thimble.

Very, very pretty little dresses with lots of smocking and

no worry about whether things needed ironing or not. Little girls really did wear things with skirts, no pants, no overall type of things at all. The boys of course wore little romper suits.

My father would have worn in the summer a white shirt and white

trousers, sometimes long but sometimes shorts with long socks, and a topee hat. In fact he brought a topee hat to Australia, which was one of those hats with a corked lining, so that the sun wouldn’t bother you. My mother would wear a cotton dress in the summer and silk in the afternoon, and actually the second time she came to Australia

even in the 1950s, she would change in the afternoon, always, so by the time my father came home from work she’d be wearing a silk dress.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’d have been Australia women in that era who would have done the same sort of thing. I think there would have been Australians who would have

changed to welcome their husbands home in the evening.

I think probably it was. The women servants before and after the war, the amahs would wear black trousers and a white top but the nannies…I don’t know that I ever heard nanny’s name,

she wore a white uniform, always called ‘nanny’, never called my her name.

I don’t remember the names of any of the amahs we had before the war but I do remember the names of the amahs we had after the war.

The black trousers and the white top.

Oh no,

it’s the kind of things that the Chinese in the country areas still wear today.

Very loose yes and not western-style buttons but one of those collars, the Chinese style collar with the little buttons made of fabric, little knotted fabric.

I don’t think I was ever told her name. I mean she was just nanny but they were all called nanny. They were never called Susan or…

Not as close

as some of them because my mother did things with me and then later with my brother. Of course when she was in England she didn’t have a servant. We stayed with my grandparents for a short time and then because she thought my father would be joining us, she rented a flat nearby, and she would have looked after me but she’d looked after me to some extent in Hong Kong as well.

Some of the other women had never changed a nappy, never fed their children, never done any of the usual mothering for child. I mean they’d have cuddled them and kissed them, and read books to them, done the nice things.

Oh yes. She was delighted to have children and it was a very close extended family with my father’s brothers and their wives, and their children. We’ve got photos of Christmases for instance, huge number because my father’s family, they lived in a very large house with two tennis courts.

With so many children you need a lot of tennis courts. There was lots of playing of tennis and things like that. Of course it was so easy to entertain. You didn’t have to cook or clean up afterwards, so you could entertain a huge number at times.

Yes, it’s just a different world. I’ve still got the fish knives and forks. For instance before the war, my parents would have always had a fish course as well as a meat course, so you’d always have the fish knives to have with your fish.

I can’t remember because I wouldn’t have been eating

with adults before the war, so I just have to say that after the war my parents always said, “Oh we live very simply now, very simply,” only a three or four course meal after the war. But the modus operandi would have been the same, so the cook would come first and he would come on your left side, and present you with a platter of meat, and you would help yourself to whatever meat you wanted. Then would come three other

servants carrying vegetables and you would serve yourself from the left, you’d help yourself to whatever vegetables you’d want. Then the servants would all disappear and then when my mother wanted them again, she would ring a little bell. I’ve got the little bell. It’s over on the table there, and I’ve even got the little bell that my aunt used every day for every meal until she died in 1998. She still had a servant. She only had one servant though.

Then when that course was ended, second helpings would be offered and then it was time to take the plates away, so the servants would come and take the dirty plates away, and bring the next course. One of my mother’s job everyday, after breakfast the Cook Boy would come and she would go through the menu for the day, what she wanted to have, and then he would arrange

for the food for that day to be delivered. So one of her big jobs of the day was to go through the menu. He was literate but the amahs weren’t.

I wouldn’t have eaten with the adults, so I really don’t know. What I said to you then was

what happened after the war but it would have been the same method of serving. My bedroom was called the nursery and I would have eaten with the nanny looking after me.

Oh no, not at all, no.

When I say I wouldn’t have eaten with the adults that would be dinner at night because that would have been after my bedtime. Meals would be eaten say between eight or nine maybe, quite late. My father wouldn’t come home from work until about eight o’clock at night, well past the bedtime of a three year old.

Oh very, very. They were both very demonstrative parents.

Very physically loving and caring, and say my father…I don’t remember this before the war but after the war, one of the servants would bring a tray with morning

tea things and leave it in the hallway outside the bedrooms and then he would always come in, and wake us up, and say, “Here’s a cup of tea for you.” He had little sayings, so he’d say, “Let us then be up and doing with a heart for any fate, still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labour and to wait.” Little uplifting poems from Longfellow and

sayings like that, so he was always, he himself personally was always striving to use up every available ounce of his energy, and every minute of his time, so I think he thought that starting the day with something positive like that was a good thing.

I don’t know that that was any question because they weren’t Chinese. My father could speak Chinese at a workman’s level because after the war for instance, he had something like 1,200 workmen working for him and not many were expatriates. He had an architect called Eddie Amamouden

but most of the workmen were Chinese, so he needed to be able to understand how he could communicate with them and what they were saying, so he could speak at workman level but I don’t think he could have held a theological level or a physiological discourse with anybody because all business dealings at a higher level were in English. If you got a

bus or a taxi the driver wouldn’t speak English but you could live very comfortably without speaking English. There was even a shop, there’s still a shop there now there called Lane Crawford and all the shop assistants there were English. They didn’t have a single Chinese shop assistant in Lane Crawford and the dairy farm was where you’d go to buy a milkshake or something like that, and the staff there could all speak English.

If you bought material all the material shops there were run by Indians but they could all speak English, so the shopkeepers that you mostly dealt with could. The baker was a Mr Chericov and he was a white Russian, so there were a lot of non-Chinese but not all English, but the non-English ex-pats communicated in English,

quite a lot of Americans of course.

She did have Chinese lessons. She could actually speak Chinese quite well and at one stage she could even read a Chinese newspaper. My father couldn’t read Chinese.

No, I could speak enough to be able to tell the…this was after the war.

I mean before the war I only travelled by car or taxi but after the war I could tell the bus driver I needed to get off the bus and things like that.

My brother actually has the home movies because he wanted to put them on video and he is a professional historian, so he is the

one who has done those things. I said I could get the home movies from him and I was told they wouldn’t be wanting to use those but I actually think they could be quite interesting.

Well there is quite a bit of our family history in the National Library already because my eldest uncle, Uncle Jack collected everything that he

possibly could about the discoveries of the Far East from Europe and when he’d amassed his collection, a man called Professor Boxer and others said it was the largest collection of this sort of stuff in the whole world, and it’s now in the National Library in Canberra. We went to see it quite a few years ago and the head of the library

showed us around. She said a third of the rare books in the library come from Uncle Jack’s collection but my brother says he not only collected important stuff. He taught himself medieval Latin, so he could translate some of this stuff, things like maps where China is the centre of the map because it was definitely the centre of the world and these were drawn by Jesuit priests, very smartly put in China as the centre of the world. He had what my brother calls ‘ephemera’ as well.

Oh he’s three years younger than I am, so he hasn’t got the same memories but he does remember some quite interesting things like my family used to pack up food parcels from Australia to send to England during the war and my mother would buy say peanuts to put in the little corners. On one occasion there were quite a lot of peanuts that she couldn’t put in and my brother said, “I can remember very well because I

ate the rest of the peanuts and I was very sick.”

Well as far as Australia is concerned…

In fact my father did take movies of Chinese people and women with their feet bound and things like that, and then just ordinary life

in Hong Kong before the war. When I say ordinary, not ordinary from a Chinese perspective but showing the beach picnics and tennis parties, and other parties, and when I say parties, I think it was just the way they behaved, day after day after day, as one can when one has a staff of servants. You never have to clean the house or make sure that

you’ve got enough produce in, no cleaning up, no cooking.

Oh it doesn’t because say, I mentioned that my aunt, my last aunt in Hong Kong died in 1998 and she had one servant, and yet there are plenty of Australians there now, and they even share a servant, so they’ll have a servant just one day a week, whereas we had a staff of servants, and even a

chauffer called Balerious.

Yes, that’s a Portuguese name.

No, Portuguese.

Well people had little beach houses, not to sleep in but to use for a day at the beach with say a room for men to

have their clothes and for them to change, and a bathroom, and similarly for the women, and plenty of veranda space, and chairs, and tables, and places to prepare the food. We had one made of granite I suppose, because the main rock in Hong Kong is granite.

Lovely beaches and lots of beaches, and on the Kowloon side they were named according to how far they were from the GPO [General Post Office], so we had ours at Nineteen and a Half Mile Beach, and we were at one end of the beach. There were only two beach houses there, so ours was very inferior in comparison with the Kadouris’ wonderful house called Boulder Lodge. That was a real house and the Kadouris back then were the wealthiest people in the Far East.

There was Sir Eli Kadouri and his two sons. The elder son before he died was Lord Kadouri, so they had this marvellous house called Boulder Lodge and then on the other end of the beach was our little house that you couldn’t sleep in! Then there was Nineteen Mile Beach and Eighteen and a Half Mile, and Eighteen Mile Beach, and so on. Lots of people had beach houses, some of them were just a concrete slab with

some kind of matting roof. I’m not sure what it was but I think the veranda was the most important part because you wouldn’t go there if it was raining. You’d only go there if it was a nice day but there was a five and a half day working week, so people would only go…the husbands would only go in the afternoon. There was public transport but it would have been really just for the local people going to their villages and

ex-pats [expatriates] just went by car.

Everyone did, oh everyone swam, no sharks, no jellyfish, no surf. You didn’t have to worry.

Before the war people…I don’t know this from personal experience but the men used to wear

and the women too, the costumes were probably very revealing because they were sort of woolly stuff, so when they’re wet…[laughs]. I don’t think there was too much modesty when they were wet.

The Chinese didn’t swim. In fact I think a lot of the Chinese didn’t really like being out in the sun too much because it made them darker and they prefer to be as fair as they

could be. Even the women working in the fields would have very, very large platter like things on their heads with a hole in the middles that the top of their head would fit through, then something the size of a tray, circular with black fabric all around the edge, and we would have to drive out of town, which didn’t take very long, from Kowloon to the beach, and as you left the built up areas you’d get to the

paddy fields. Chinese are brilliant at terracing and growing all sorts of things in very little areas, and of course they use night soil to make the ground fertile. There’d be people with great long bamboo poles with a jerry can at each end with a spout and they’d lope along, and water the fields, so

on the way coming home from the beach there’d be a really pungent odour. As children we’d put handkerchiefs over our noses and breathe into the handkerchief. After the war it was another story going out there because this was at the time of the Communists and I mentioned earlier that my parents were interested in a particular orphanage. Once a fortnight we’d drive out

there on a Sunday afternoon to deposit things that had been made and my father would be advising about building and so on, the orphanage. To go there, 20 miles from Kowloon we would be stopped by the British Army and they would wait until there were about 10 cars, and then we’d go in a procession so that bandits wouldn’t apprehend us and stop us, maybe kidnap for ransom.

No Chinese wanted to be either the first car or the last car, so even if we were the fifth or the sixth car that had arrived at the barricade, we’d be ushered up to the front and a policeman would get in the car with us, and the same coming back.

It’s really amazing to go to Hong Kong now because Chinese who would have been working on the roads are now sitting behind computer screens. Back in the old days you’d see women and even quite young children, sitting at the side of the road

hitting stone to make it smaller, to go into road construction because Hong Kong is very rocky, and it’s not soft sandstone like Sydney. It’s granite and quite extraordinary to see the change in a fairly short space of time where women and children would be doing physical work. In the old days a lot of carrying done

by people, not only men but even women, with these long bamboo poles with a basket made probably of bamboo, carrying produce from their field to the market. You’d drive along the side of the road and they kind of lope as they do it, carrying very heavy loads with the bamboo bent

really low on each side, giving an indication of how very heavy the two loads were. The women of course and even quite small girls, carrying the baby on the back with a square of fabric, quite often even embroidered fabric and then two…no four bits of material, so that from the top and the bottom they’d cross over the front,

and the baby’s feet would be dangling out, and the head and arms at the top, and it always stunned me the way the baby’s head would be thrown right back, no support for the baby’s head at all. Of course little children running around, no nappies, nothing like that, so these little children would have a slit up the back of their pants, very convenient. It cuts down on the washing for these village families. That’s only

the poor class people, not wealthy or middle class Chinese.

There was a film of Chinese acting and we would think it was very overacted, with great gestures and facial expressions.

My father took that just in some street scene in Hong Kong. It was street theatre and it was really some Chinese showing how at the time of the Japanese invasion of China, how the Japanese would fight, and they would beat back the Japanese.

A lot is done on the streets, not so much in Hong Kong now but in

parts of China still, so people would have their haircut and the barber cutting their daily beard, and someone inspecting their teeth, no teeth being extracted on the streets but a lot of dealing done on the streets.

Clean, clean, wonderfully clean. Back then,

really dirty, a lot of spitting in the streets and not only in Hong Kong but in the East they would think that our habit of blowing our noses and putting this awful product into our pockets was absolutely revolting! Their system was much better. You need to blow your nose and you blow hard, and you use your fingers to squeeze the end of your nose, which isn’t very pleasant if you’re

walking along the street, especially if someone has done it out of a bus window [laughs].

I think quite a lot of things were strange and different. I don’t know how shocking but we really ate

Western style. We would have say curry and rice sometimes or a meal that pre-war Australians wouldn’t have eaten but on the whole it was very much roast beef, and chicken, just ordinary Western food, meat and three veg quite a lot but as I said, there was always fish. But we would have had sweet and sour meals

occasionally and then once a year the Chinese would go off for Chinese New Year, for say five days, and it was amazing the number of people who wouldn’t stay at home then. They’d go out to restaurants, even for five days. The woman of the house would feel that she couldn’t possibly cook. She’d do breakfast but apart from that just eat out in restaurants!

I think they still do.

Oh there was sewerage. Oh very much so, in fact my mother got the shock of her life coming to Beecroft and buying a house there, “Blow me down! There was no flush toilet!” In her whole life she’d never been in a house without a flush toilet. In Hong Kong there’d been a flush toilet. She’d lived in French Indochina in High Fong with a flush toilet [laughs].

This was in Hong Kong itself and in Kowloon. Certainly in the villages the village people wouldn’t have had flush toilets.

I don’t think so. People would have just assumed that village people, farmers lived differently.

I don’t think there was any concept of what it was like. There was no…even now on the Star ferry in Hong Kong, there’s an upstairs and a downstairs. I don’t know what it was before the war but after the war, it was 10 cents upstairs, no 20 cents upstairs and 10 cents downstairs but it wasn’t a White/Chinese

distinction, so anyone who wanted to pay 20 cents could be upstairs. If you wanted to you could go downstairs, in fact my husband likes going downstairs on the Star Ferry because he could see how the motor goes. Being an electrical engineer, he’s interested whereas I have never in my life gone downstairs on the Star Ferry. Whereas in other places it was illegal at some stage in the early 20th century for Chinese to live on the peak and it was my grandfather,

who was on the Executive Council, which was not a voted body, it was appointed by the governor, and it was my grandfather who pushed and pushed successfully, so that Chinese were allowed to build houses, and live on the peak.

Oh very smelly.

Cooking smells

because somehow Chinese cooking does permeate but it’s not an unpleasant smell I don’t think. I don’t think fish, if you have a fish meal is an unpleasant smell. I suppose it’s unpleasant if you’re not just about to eat the food but Chinese cooking really does permeate. It was the dirt. They didn’t seem to worry about dirt and even quite affluent people didn’t seem to worry about

having an unpleasant entrance to their home.

I suppose we’ve got some of the furniture around here that reminds me because

when I look at it I think, “I should clean that a lot more and I should polish that a lot more.” Whereas my mother had her wooden furniture and even the intricate carving, that was cleaned every day and I went to stay with my aunts almost every year for the last few years of her life, and her maid, not an amah anymore, it’s very expensive to have an amah, so she has a Sri Lankan maid, and she cleaned the brass everyday, even

the pedals on the piano, and the hinge on the piano, cleaned everyday. So every now and then I say, “Oh I need Wimila,” their Sri Lankan maid.

People didn’t have wall to wall carpet but they had rugs,

Chinese rugs, not Persian rugs. Some of them were made in Shenzhen. Some had a little bit of different colouring but many of the really good carpets would have just the same colour all through but a self-design in them, very closely woven, really beautiful and people did use silver a lot, and have silver ornaments but in

Hong Kong it is very humid in the summer, so things had to be aired at the end of summer. The enervating heat is really exhausting, even for people who aren’t doing physical work and so folk would find that their leather shoes and leather handbags would grow mouldy. Things would deteriorate. I mentioned that my mother had a sewing group every Thursday in her home for an orphanage and women would

wear skirts with even say six yards of fabric in the skirt, and the perspiration would rot the top of your dress, especially the back of it, so they would throw that away but the six yards of material in the skirt would make a lot of clothes for little children.

Before the war there wouldn’t have been air conditioning but

the buildings were solid with very high ceilings and ceiling fans, so that helped the people who were in those sort of office buildings and most of the women, the ex-pat women wouldn’t have been doing much physical work anyway.

Oh no. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the…no such thing as a siesta. Hong Kong has always been very, very busy, extremely busy and even those workmen working on the sides of the roads, and doing construction work wouldn’t have a siesta. One of the things that must have been good before the war was the way they used bamboo scaffolding because it is still used today. Instead of using steel scaffolding

to erect a building, if you go to Hong Kong today you’ll still see bamboo scaffolding used, so some of the old-style things have obviously been very efficient.

A lot of people used powdered milk and didn’t have fresh milk. Nowadays of course milk can be imported very easily but

some ex-pats felt that it was not suitable to have powdered milk, so they would buy fresh milk from the dairy farm but sadly the cows weren’t treated properly and quite a lot of children did get TB but there were epidemics of various kinds. This is after the war, I can remember somebody giving me a dog and saying, “This has just

been born on Hong Kong Island and you’ll get this little cocker spaniel.” But before the cocker spaniel arrived on the Kowloon side where we were living an epidemic of rabies appeared, so I never did get the dog but every now and then somebody would be bitten by a dog, and have to have those horrible injections into their abdomen. malaria was another thing. You had to take anti-malarial tablets and I gather that in

the British Army, if anybody did develop malaria it was an offence because you’ve got to be fighting fit, so they’ve got to remember to take their malaria tablets. My brother got malaria and had a temperature of 105. He was very ill. There was quite a large British Army presence before and after the war, and navy as well. They were both very big naval and army depots.

Oh no, just spray.

Oh I wouldn’t have a clue. It wouldn’t have been Mortein but one of these old-fashioned spray things. You’d fill it up with some gunk and spray it, and of course you’d sleep under a mosquito net, always sleep under a mosquito net. In the summer it was so hot, quite a lot of people would have a fan blowing on them all night and we had

rattan mats under our sheets, so you’d lie on your left side, and then when that got hot you’d roll over to your right side, so that the summer heat really was very enervating. Later after the war, when I was there and I did go to school in Hong Kong for two years, we wore white pleated uniforms, and the boys wore white uniforms, white shorts, and white shirts, in the summer. In the winter it

was grey, grey shorts and grey for the girls as well.

The navy was based in the harbour, oh yes. I should say that Hong Kong is not like Sydney where there

are lots of wharves where ships tie up. The norm is for a ship to tie up in the harbour and for lighters to come an offload the goods but passengers could arrive right at a wharf. One idea of just how busy it is, from my aunt’s apartment she looked out over the South China Sea

and I counted, daily I would count say 82 container ships, just at one point from her apartment. We may think Sydney is busy. Hong Kong is incredibly busy and before the war it was busy too, and lots of passenger ships as well.

Perhaps we don’t realise that the Japanese had been at war with China for quite a long time and they had put a puppet Emperor in Manchuria, there were things like the rape of Nanking, and they had been

steadily progressing in China but most of the Chinese thought that Japan wouldn’t dream of war against Britain, and Japan had been an ally of Britain in the First World War. Then Japan started to invade Indochina, what is now Vietnam and so then people did start wondering, and even so, the Chinese

thought that Hong Kong would be perfectly safe. No one in their wildest imagination thought that there would be any problems in Hong Kong itself so no Chinese person felt worried, but I’ve heard that since that time, they realised that some of the Japanese who were living in Hong Kong actually were plants. My father used to talk about the really good barber in the Peninsular Hotel,

which was the leading hotel. I think it probably still is one of the leading hotels and the barber was apparently a Japanese spy, but before the war only officers were allowed to go into the Peninsular Hotel. The other ranks weren’t allowed to, so the barber probably heard some interesting facts.

I don’t know about generally. I really don’t. I do know that we were not the first people to be evacuated, but the British women and children were told they had to leave Hong Kong and we were given five days notice, and told

that we should have warm clothes, so people assumed that it would be Australia because this was July. We were told on the 1st of July that we would be leaving on the 5th of July. I can’t imagine the organization that was required for this and women were allowed, adults were allowed two suitcases, and children were allowed one suitcase. My brother was 10 months old, so apparently…I don’t know this but my

mother told me his suitcase, she packed it full of nappies.

Well people had been living such a comfortable life, not everyone was wealthy, not all ex-pats were wealthy, but none of them did physical work. None of the married

women did any work of a paid kind at all. Even single young women would have done office work, rather sedentary work really and with a staff of servants to do what they wanted. Many of them had never changed a nappy or done any of the real caring for their children, just the things they chose to do. So they chose to read

a story to their child or chose to take their child to play with a neighbour’s or even to go across the harbour to the other side. It was what they chose to do. They didn’t have any demands. If they wanted to go shopping or visit friends and didn’t want to have their child, if they were having lunch with a friend, they wouldn’t have to make arrangements for what to do with their child. Taking children to or from school wasn’t a problem. All of that

could be looked after by servants. The trauma of saying goodbye, this was wartime. People were afraid of leaving their husbands behind, not knowing what would happen or when they would see their husbands again, not knowing where they were going and they had to go to a depot

to be registered with the ages of their children, and what other children they had because some of them had children in boarding school in England at that time. So not all families were together in Hong Kong. Many of the families had children say of 11 and over, in England, so it was bad enough having one or two children, or three children in England, and there they were with

their husband, and perhaps a younger child in Hong Kong but to have the family in three different places, and not knowing where the third place was really. Trying to also…“I’m allowed two suitcases. What do I take? How do I decide?”

Oh yes, they were. Well to begin with the husbands went back home, but after the invasion of course,

the husbands were rounded up and put in prison camp, and many of those families were never reunited.

Well, my mother does tell me that my brother’s clothes and other things had to join in my suitcase because I was only three at that time, and so I didn’t need too much space, and she needed

two suitcases, and it would be very hard to think, “Well I don’t know what I’ll need and where I’m going,” for someone to just pack two suitcases of things. We were allocated the Empress of Japan and mother always would say, “There I was on the Empress of Japan.” We were put in Palm Court, people on camp beds and it was either 100 or 200 camp stretchers in Palm Court.

I’m not too sure about that and she’d say, “I went to Japan on my honeymoon on the Empress of Japan First Class.” Which gives some little indication of the great change that came upon people and I presume this was a P&O ship, which was requisitioned by the British government, and it wasn’t suitable for the thousands of people.

You think of the toilet facilities apart from anything else, so trying to feed a 10-month-old baby and look after a 10-month-old baby but luckily we didn’t come to Australia on that ship. To begin with that ship was sent to Manila and we got off there, and then it went back to Hong Kong to bring more people out but fortunately my mother

knew people who had gone on the earlier trip, just before us, and the British women and children were to go to Fort McKinley in Manila but my mother said to her friends who went earlier, “Can you book us into a hotel?” And so they did, so we didn’t have to go to Fort McKinley.

I had my fourth birthday in Manila.

I suppose I’d had a few changes in my life and I think at that age you’re very accepting. I didn’t find it traumatic at all. That sounds strange but I was with my mother and whatever tears she shed or whatever worry

she had, she didn’t share with her children, so as far as I was concerned I was going on a boat trip and it was going to be a bit of a holiday, and I had my fourth birthday party at the hotel with other evacuated mothers and children, so I still had a party.

He just went home, back to the family home and his brothers

had houses nearby, and for quite a few months he was in that family home but he had been denied home leave when my mother and I went to England in 1937, and so he…I’ve only got as far as Manila.

The following year he put in for home

leave to come to Australia and his father said no, and the company said, “No,” so he put in his notice. He resigned. I’ve actually got a letter that my grandfather wrote to one of his sons who was touring the world and he says, “Hugh has resigned. I have no idea why. He’s joining Nora and the children in Australia.” [laughs]

But in Manila, even on the ship, it was only a two-day trip but my mother would jump up early. She’d wake up at four o’clock in the morning and think, “I can go to the bathroom. There won’t be anyone in the bathroom at four o’clock.” So she would have a bath and of course saltwater baths even with ordinary P&O back then, and then you’d sort of rinse in fresh water,

and she’d use the bathroom, and then limit her fluid intake so she didn’t need to go again for a while because apparently the bathroom facilities were really pretty grim for those two days. But it must have been really hard for some of the people who were in Fort McKinley in an American army camp, having left really nice houses and servants, and suddenly having to change nappies,

and wash nappies and all of those things. We were there for…I’m not sure if it was five or six weeks. I think it was five weeks we were in Manila and my mother loathed Manila from then on.

There were quite a lot of clubs. There were a couple of

Portuguese clubs, the Club Lusitania and I’m not sure what the name of the other club was. There was the Hong Kong Club and only British people could belong to that, and it was in a prime location right by the ferry on the Hong Kong side looking out over the harbour, and the Hong Kong Club is still there but my husband and I were there a couple of years ago having lunch, and it was a bit of a shock to see

so many Chinese people there. There were hardly any ex-pats there at all, so different from the pre-war days. There was a cricket club with a cricket ground right in prime spot in the CBD [Central Business District] and that has moved now. That’s been sold and there were quite a number of very exclusive clubs. There was a racetrack on

the northern side of Hong Kong in the New Territories and men who enjoyed horse racing or even amateur jockeys back then but gambling has always been a real pastime of the Chinese, and so Happy Valley is the main race track. There were country ones where ex-pats could even ride horses and

have races themselves.

The major hotel was the Peninsula on the Kowloon side, then there was Gloucester House and others on the island, and I mentioned while we were having a cup of coffee that my grandfather’s children were even invited to the opening of the Peninsular Hotel, and

75 years later I really should have written to the organisers to say there is somebody alive who was at the opening, my last remaining aunt, because they might have enjoyed inviting her to the 75th Anniversary. One of the family jokes is that all 13…no 12, one had died, all the children of my grandparents were there and Uncle

John, the youngest son, saw all this wonderful party food going to waste and people weren’t eating it, so he ran all the way home, and got a suitcase, and filled it up with party food to take home.

Oh I think it was a very childish thing to do, the kind of thing that some little boy would feel, “This was terrible that the adults weren’t eating all this wonderful food,” and I don’t think there would have been

very many children invited to this function but my grandfather used to have, not a car but a rickshaw, and he had a rickshaw that came every morning at a certain time and would just sit there waiting for when he wanted to get down to the Star Ferry. Then the same rickshaw driver would take him home. When my father grew up, he and his family lived originally

in a great big house in Robinson Road, which is in what’s called Midlevel still, in Hong Kong with a lovely harbour view, and normally they would walk to St Joseph’s College where they went to school but if the weather wasn’t good, they would go by sedan chair.

Well, a box someone

could sit in or a couple of children, or say a mother and child, would get into this little box, and then a curtain would come down at the front, and there would be windows on the other three sides with poles protruding front and back, a man on flat ground running forward and aft, to carry the person in a sedan chair. I’ve been in a sedan chair before the war. We’ve got movies of my mother and me

in sedan chairs. My father said that when they were growing up, the house next door to them, the owner was rather an overweight Chinese woman and when the sedan chair drivers would see her coming, they’d leave their sedan chairs on the road and run away, so she always found it very difficult to get a sedan chair but sometimes

with her sons, they would come home with nits from the sedan chairs, so my grandmother really didn’t like them going by sedan.

Oh several times, oh yes.

A bit like taxis in the city. Hong Kong

wasn’t spread out and so sedan chair drivers would almost like in a taxi rank, and if you wanted a sedan chair to take you from A to B, you would go to where there was a sedan rank and get into a sedan chair.

Before the war I don’t know but I do know I had sedan chair rides,

not as a touristy thing but genuinely. After the war there weren’t any sedan chairs. I did get rickshaws sometimes.

I always actually felt very sorry for the poor rickshaw drivers pulling even a child, I felt it a bit awkward about that but even after the war my eldest uncle

always went to the Star Ferry by rickshaw and there again, he would have a rickshaw driver, the same driver. He obviously paid him a retainer and it’s not like a taxi where you think, “Oh, oh, I’m keeping the taxi driver waiting.” Uncle Jack would leave the house just when it suited him but it obviously was worth the while of the rickshaw driver. He wouldn’t have been willing to sit and wait

if money wasn’t coming in. Where Uncle Jack lived it was just a flat pull from his house to the Star Ferry.

I was 12 by then and I’d been at boarding school in England, and my mother thought it was really very funny when I came home from boarding school, she lined the servants up

to introduce me, and I shook hands with each of them. She thought that was…[laughs] she didn’t object or anything but she thought that was really funny for a child to shake hands with a row of servants.

The sites I mentioned, that was after the war. Before the war he was working as a civil engineer with the Hong Kong Building and Construction Company and they did have one very large building site, and my father would drive with his father around looking at suitable areas for various things, like they would drive to one area, and my father would say, “This is a perfect site for a go down,” which we call a warehouse in

Australia, but this would be a prime site for a go down or this would be a good spot for power generation to have substations and things like that because my grandfather was chairman of, directors of China Light and Power, the main energy authority. There was one particular spot and he said, “This is a beautiful place for

the best residential area on the Kowloon side.” So his father agreed that they would buy, his company would buy these two hills and a valley between them, and that was developed as a prime residential area. After the war he negotiated with the Hong Kong Government to get three particular building sites but then after the war he built

a women’s residential area for students at Hong Kong University. He had a lot of big projects in Hong Kong after the war.

Before the war they were thoroughly disapproved of and even after the war

things were not as comfortable as we would think of today, so a man who married a Chinese girl…I won’t say they were frowned on but people did look askance at folk who did that. There’s a lot of literature to say things like when a young Englishman went to any of the colonies, he didn’t get married for

his first term of duty because he wouldn’t be able to afford a wife, and the first term was seven years, and then he’d go back to England, and usually get married during that time, and some of the engagements would be for years and years. There were two methods of sending mail. They could either do it by ship and the mail ship was very prompt or it could go overland. So

from the railway station in Kowloon, it could go across the Trans-Siberian Railway through Russia, through Europe and then across the [English] Channel, so the only water that that letter would go through would be across that brief little bit of Channel. But the mail steamers were very prompt.

I should also say that over the GPO, there’s still the same proverb. The GPO before the war had a wooden plaque with a quote from Proverbs, which I’ll remember in a moment and when that old post office was demolished, and the new GPO was built on the Hong Kong side,

they demolished the whole lot but they retained this same wooden plaque, which they re-erected and I thought it was so important. It was the beginning of my Christmas letter in 1998, “As cool water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country,” which gives some little indication of how people would cry out for news from the home country.

I think a lot of people found it quite difficult but it must have been much, much worse years and years ago when Hong Kong was first founded because, like darkest Africa, so many people died. There was typhoid, typhus, cholera and of course malaria before there were any malaria epidemics. If you go to the old colonial

cemetery there are some very, very sad graves and year by year there would be not graves but memorials, like “fell from aloft”, not a house loft but a mast. “Fell from aloft” and a name, the “17th of January 1850” and then “fell from aloft,”

two days later, “fell from aloft,” fives days later, and you think of that poor 18 year old sent up the mast, and then the third one sent up the mast during a typhoon.

Not really, no, my mother wouldn’t have had too many Chinese friends. She had American friends, mostly neighbours.

I can’t

say that I remember the Americans before the war. After the war I did but not before the war.

Perhaps I should say we were very lucky to come on to Australia because not everyone did. The ship that brought us

did several journeys and they brought people not only from Hong Kong, but even from Japan and someone I was at school with in my later years in Australia had come from Japan. Her father was involved in an English newspaper in Japan. People came from Singapore and then to Perth, people even came from Burma and India but we were very lucky. There were others

who evacuated to Manila and they never got here. They were the ones who were shown in that film Tenku, which was on ABC television, a documentary series. Anyway, we were allocated to come on a Dutch ship called the Slamet, which was sunk later on in the war and we were lucky on this occasion because we were put in a cabin,

not in anywhere like Palm Court, not one of the lounges. I have no idea how many people were in our cabin and normally ships stop at Thursday Island to pick up a pilot. I’ve been told the piloting down the inside of the Barrier Reef is the longest piloting job in the world but we not only picked up a pilot, but we picked up some other people who interviewed every

woman independently and gave her the option of choosing Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne. My mother thought that Melbourne might be too cold and Brisbane might be too hot, so she would choose Sydney, a bit like Goldilocks and hard beds, and soft beds. She also said, “I’ve got two little children, so I’ve heard the Sydney beaches are lovely. I would like to be put near

a Sydney beach,” whereas other women said, “I need to be near a shopping centre,” or “I’d like to be near the Post Office.” People hadn’t a clue what Australia was like, so a few people did get off in Brisbane but the majority got off in Sydney and then others went on further. It was really wonderful when we got to Sydney, volunteers had been

allocated to come and pick the women up, some from the Red Cross, and some from the Australian Volunteer whatever, AV…I’ve forgotten what it was. So a lovely Australian volunteer came to the ship with her car and took my mother, brother and me to Manly. The women were told there are three levels of accommodation. It’s 30 shillings, two pounds

or two pounds 10 shillings and my mother thought, “Well my husband can afford two pounds 10!” So we were booked into a very nice hotel in Manly, children were half price, half the two pounds 10 and we were told that we could only stay until the beginning of the summer holidays because they had bookings throughout the holidays. We arrived in August and

the three of us were in the one room, and my brother at this stage was 11 months old. My mother was very frightened that she would cause the women or the people in the surrounding rooms to be disturbed by this crying baby, so when she woke up in the morning, she’d always tiptoe along to the bathroom, no ensuites in those days, tiptoe along to the bathroom

to warm his bottle and hope that she could shove it in his mouth before he woke up! But one day coming back along the corridor, she saw that somebody’s door was ajar and she could hear the BBC News, and her family were just on the outskirts of London, and she didn’t have a radio in her room, so she put her ear to the open door to listen to the BBC News, when suddenly the door

opened, and she had to explain why she had her ear to the door. She never did that again because she was just so embarrassed and it was really strange, the woman didn’t say, “Oh well you must come in and listen regularly.” My mother knew that she had to move by summer and she wondered what on earth she would do, and she actually had a friend Margaret Woods, the woman who lived next door to us. Margaret with her daughters,

Susan and Patsy, were living in a remote connection’s house at Cronulla, so she thought, “Oh, she’s in Cronulla and she’s enjoying it. I’d like to go to Cronulla.” So she got a taxi from Manly to Cronulla and it cost her 30 shillings, and Stuart was a big heavy lump to lug around, so she booked him into

a children’s hotel. There were children’s hotels in those days and she went to estate agents, and looked for somewhere but they were mostly fibro places with fuel stoves, real holiday homes. She felt she wouldn’t be happy there at all, so after three or four days there she went back to Manly. There were other evacuees living there, not only in our hotel but in Manly and in neighbouring places, and it was Stuart’s birthday on the

29th of August, so she booked a table in a restaurant in Manly and invited some other evacuees to Stuart’s first birthday, wheeled him there, and the owner of the restaurant said, “Prams not allowed in this place.” So Stuart had to sit in his pram on the pavement while the rest of us tucked into the cake, which sounds a bit funny except

that it must have been quite heartbreaking for her to know what his birthday would have been like in Hong Kong, with all the servants preparing a lovely party and every invited child with a nanny as well as an amah, so it must have been quite difficult.

She never did you see. She always made it funny and it’s only as a mature person that I’m thinking as a mature individual, and as a child, “Ha, ha! Wasn’t that funny?” Of course it wasn’t funny at all but she never complained about it and all these expressions of my

saying, “Wasn’t it tough,” is my summation. She used to say, “Wasn’t that funny?” But as I look at photos and as I look at the movie of my third birthday party, my last party in Hong Kong, I think it was tough. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with the other evacuees and on one occasion she’d arranged to meet another evacuee at the zoo, so

we went from Manly to the zoo, and on the way back she had to change…was it trams? I’m not sure…at Spit Junction and she bumped into a Miss Wise, who had been a teacher at St Stephen’s Girls College in Hong Kong. Miss Wise invited her to a picnic at Balmoral Beach and mother thought Balmoral was lovely, so she suggested to Miss Wise that she would

love to rent a house in Balmoral, and Miss Wise and her sister went round looking at accommodation, and then lined up that my mother would go, and look at some of the houses. House after house said, “No children. No children.” Then she got to a house, 15 Awaba Street, White Cottage, and the woman said, “Oh, I love children!” So

she took out a year’s lease on this house in Awaba Street and also she…while we were in Cronulla, in the hotel, we lived in a hotel, and then my mother booked Stuart into this children’s hotel, she was talking to a Mrs Wade, who said, “I’ve got a niece who lives in Wauchope,

Thelma and you need a mother’s help, and Thelma would love to come to Sydney. I’m sure she’d be glad to be a mother’s help to you.” So we not only got White Cottage, we got Thelma and I’ve got an interesting little story to tell about Thelma. Mother always talked glowingly about Thelma, “Thelma was just wonderful,” saved her life, “Thelma was fabulous.” Well, three years ago my

brother got a phone call in the middle of a dinner party and woman at the other end said, “My name is Mrs McPherson.” Stuart was thinking, “I’ve got to get back to my guests.” “You wouldn’t know me but I used to look after you in Balmoral.” Stuart said, “Thelma?” and it was. So we’ve linked up with Thelma again! We never knew what her surname was and what had happened to her but mother always

spoke so glowingly about Thelma, so Stuart was really excited to meet up with Thelma again.

Well she’s over 80 now and she was wanting to downsize, and she was going through her photo albums, and she had some photos, and she thought, “I better not throw these out. I’ll look up Braga in the phone book.” S. Braga, so she rang S. Braga, my brother and so I got the

photo of my first day at school, which I didn’t have before, and things like that from Thelma.

Yes.

Well she’d just finished school and she thought how lovely it would be to come to the big smoke, and her aunt wrote to her suggesting my mother, and she was paid…it sounds awful now,

a pound a week but if she’d been a shop assistant she’d probably have earned 25 shillings a week, and then had to pay board and lodging. She lived with us really as a member of the family and she looked after my brother, and she could take us to the beach because we were very close to the beach. I started school at Queenwood and I was within three or four minutes walk to Queenwood. I walked along with

the girl next door, who was two years older and her name was Kerry Doyle. She lived with her mother and her grandparents, Captain and Mrs Doyle. We walked to school, so I don’t think she had as much to do with me as she did with a pre-schooler and it meant that if my mother wanted to go out anywhere, she’d have Thelma. Thelma would help with getting meals ready and doing those sorts of things. She had one day off a week and after her day off, she’d

come back, and she’d say, “Oh it is good to be home!” So she really considered it home. We were very lucky because my father hadn’t been given home leave in 1937, so he wanted home leave to join his family, thinking it would only be for a short time and his father and the company said, “No,” so he resigned, and he came to Australia.

It sounds strange now but we had only been able to bring two suitcases for adults and one suitcase for children but by the time he came, things seemed to have quietened down, so he was able to bring furniture and all sorts of things with him. He didn’t choose to bring a lovely dolls house of mine or all sorts of things he didn’t choose to bring but he did bring a lot of things with him.

Well from my point of view, I

didn’t really know anything else, so for me things were just lovely. We were at, to begin with, at Manly right by the beach and went and played at the beach every day, and then summer came. When I say we went every day, it wasn’t exactly every day but life was just a picnic for me. I’m sure it wasn’t for my mother. I mentioned that she had her family in

London and she must have been very concerned about that and concerned about her husband but she was in a very pleasant accommodation. There was no worry about money or anything like that. The only worry for her was separation from her husband and not knowing when she’d see him, and separation from her parents, and her brother who was in the air force, so that would have been from an adult perspective,

absolute agony. From a child’s perspective things were fine for me. There were lots of gatherings with other ex-pats. During the war years we even had strange things done just for evacuees. I can remember going to parties. It might have only been once a year but the Archbishop of Sydney had parties in Bishop’s Court for evacuees’ children, not

fathers, just the mothers and children. There would be egg and spoon races, and sack races, and things like that. The community was very kind to evacuees, even things that were available to ordinary Australians. There was no child endowment for the first child but there was two and sixpence a week given for the second, and subsequent children.

That was provided for the evacuees and I do know that a few of the evacuees thought that this was a terrible mistake and that the government would eventually realise it was a terrible mistake, and ask for the money back, so some of them never touched that two and sixpence a week! Of course it was the British government that eventually was paying to begin with, until the

Japanese took over Hong Kong and captured it. Money was taken from the husband’s pay and sent down, and so the husbands themselves decided how much they wanted to send to Australia to support their wives, so some were generous and others weren’t so generous. It was surprising the number who had even remote relations or business contact, if their husband worked for

a multinational company that had a branch in Australia, a large bank or something like that, those Australian branches of British companies would be very kind to these evacuees, and even second cousins, this sort of thing. The word would get through that you have some remote relation and some people were really kind to relations that were not close to them. Some of the

evacuees clubbed together and there were three or four houses in Roseville, quite larges houses, and groups of evacuee women would rent the houses together. My mother in renting White Cottage, the owner of the cottage lived at the back. She had a little…I don’t know if you’d call it a granny flat these days, but she had her own independent accommodation at the back, so we only

used the front of the garden, we never used the back garden.

Oh no, never. She never mentioned any difficulties. She never mentioned any problems. I’m only aware of it as

an adult. As a little child every week my grandmother in England, every Sunday afternoon she would write to my mother and she would write to me but I used to think, “What lovely cards!” Many of them were Mabel Lucy Atwell cards and it’s only as an adult I’m aware of how painful it must have been. These are little Mabel Lucy Atwell…much of the writing is really faded and I find it really

sad now, “Mummy tells me that you’re able to knit now and you’ve started to knit something for Stuart. Constantly we wish we could see you and give you lots and lots of love and kisses, from Grandma Bromley. My darling little Sheila, we are pleased with the snap [photo] we saw of you.” As I read these as an adult, I have an adult perspective but I didn’t think that

poor grandmother. She’d never seen Stuart. She may have wondered if she’d ever see us again. “I love the time when I do my knit and sit and think of my dears a bit.” There was never any hint that there was any anguish at all but as an adult, I think it must have been extremely difficult and I think it must have been very hard for those who had not much dealing with their children except the happy times, not

the work times with their children but I was never aware of it.

I have no idea but

I must say it’s amazing how the Cockneys managed with all the bombing and things like that, and the deprivations that they had in England because I went to England after the war, and I was at boarding school there and things were pretty tough. Even in 1947 and after ‘48 when Britain had won the war, bread rationing and

10 pence worth of meat a week, and then it was cut down to eight pence worth of meat a week but they’d even make a joke about that. You had to take the paper to wrap the meat in and the story went that someone had forgotten to take the paper to wrap his eight pence worth of meat, “Ah,” but he remembered. He had a bus ticket! He handed the bus ticket over and the butcher wrapped his meat in the bus ticket but it fell through the hole the conductor had punched in the ticket!

So they did make a joke out of things and my mother gave us a very happy time. I just remember being very happy although I do remember little things, like when my father did join us, mother had always said, “Kiss Daddy goodnight,” and we’d gone, and kissed his photo goodnight. The very first night he was with us, she said to us, “Kiss Daddy goodnight,” and I went, and kissed my Daddy goodnight,

and Stuart went and kissed the photo.

Well straight away when my mother was thinking of somewhere to live and she’d been invited to a picnic with other evacuees at Balmoral, she did ask what the schooling was like, and she was told there was this nice little girl’s school called Queenwood, so that was another plus about Balmoral. There was the

beach and a school.

It was all very happy! Miss Maidway was the headmistress and I can’t remember the name of my class teacher but I do remember that I was introduced by one of the big girls. She took me to my class and she showed me my hook, where I had to hang my hat, and it had a little Christmas tree, and my desk,

and my chair also had a little Christmas tree, so before I could read or write everything with a Christmas tree was mine, my book, my everything had a Christmas tree on it. I would walk to school and then walk home again, and we had play-lunch, and we had to take our lunch with us, and practically all the children were Australian but there were a few Japanese children, and I thought they looked like little dolls with their

dark hair, and their fringes, the sort that you really needed to have a little key at the back to do them up. I can remember we’d sing patriotic songs like, There’ll Always be an England and Rule Britannia, and things like that, and we even sang them at the prize giving. In 1941 the Japanese children were waving their Union Jacks and Australian

flags just as enthusiastically as the Australian ones, and they knew all the words because we’d learnt them. My mother used to get very agitated afterwards because she’d say, “And Pearl Harbour was just a few days after the prize giving!”

None at all. I presume that their fathers were businessmen here but I have no idea.

I wasn’t conscious of being different in an unpleasant way, not at Queenwood and I then went to a school called Braemar, and then I went to Arden but when I was at Arden the headmistress I think, used to

encourage my mother to speak about wartime things in England because she was very patriotic, and she wanted the children to be aware of things that were going on beyond the school. She’d have old girls coming back and speaking to us, who were nurses or in the VAD [Voluntary Aid Detachment]. She never had any boys coming back but she used to have girls coming back and talking

about what they were up to.

Do you want to go further on about that because I can talk about that now?

Well say going to the dentist, this wasn’t from Balmoral. This was going from Beecroft where we lived. My parents bought a house there.

We’d go by train and then we’d walk up to Macquarie Street, and afterwards on the way home we’d always go to the newsreel just near Wynyard Station, and they were continuous, so you’d go to the newsreel, and after…I don’t know, was it an hour, an hour and a half? However long the newsreel lasted, you’d get to the point where you had come and sometimes we’d leave just then or else my mother would say, “Just wait until we can see such and such a section

again for the second time.” Then we’d get up and leave. The newsreels were just like full the whole time, people coming in and leaving all during the news time. I do remember my mother, even in Balmoral times, would have the radio on, not all the time but a lot of the time, so first thing in the morning she’d turn it on, only the ABC never anything else and she’d listen to the news, and then it would end, and about 15 minutes later the new could come on the other

ABC station, so she’d switch the station, and listen to that news as well, and then it would go back to the original one. She was very keen on listening to the news.

I think it was just something I’d grown up with. There was a war on and things were happening but I can’t say I was at all worried. There was no

worry about it. This was what life was like and weren’t we lucky that we were so far from the unpleasant things that were happening. This was like a refuge for us, so although there was a war and I had relations, who were prisoners of war, and so on, there was no personal sense of insecurity at all.

Oh they really were the enemy. When we had eggs for breakfast my father would draw a picture over Tojo [Hideki Tojo] on one egg and Hitler [Adolf Hitler] on the other egg, and they would be decapitated before we ate the egg! [laughs]

They were just the enemy. I mean, there were goodies

and baddies, and they were baddies, like we’d play in the bush with neighbouring children, and there were goodies and baddies. These were adult baddies.

There were certainly what one saw on the newsreels and

then there were letters that arrived from England. For instance, a Doodle Bug [V-1 flying missile] dropped in the garden right opposite where my grandparents lived and all their windows were shattered, and all the ceilings came down, and my mother’s brother was an navigator, so he was flying off day by day, night by night I should say. So I suppose that wasn’t all good news.

With my father’s family, they were in Hong Kong and when Hong Kong fell some were in the prison camp, the prisoner of war camp in Stanley, others managed to get away, and were in Macau during the war. They just didn’t hear from 1941 until ‘45, they just didn’t hear. My grandfather did die in Macau and my father got a telegram

from the War Office in London. I actually have the telegram but that was only because he was quite an important person, so from Macau they notified London and London sent a cable to say his father had died. Another brother escaped through China to Chun King and free China, then he, his wife and three children got across to India, the family by air

in an unpressurised plane, my uncle overland with all sorts of exciting things happening. One day during the war the phone rang and it was a sailor from a ship. He said, “Your brother is on a ship in port and he’d like clothes.” So my father packed a suitcase, mainly with children’s clothes, went down to the docks and said, “I’d like to take this suitcase onboard.”

They said, “There’s no ship here,” because of course it was all ‘hush hush’, so my Uncle Paul and his family went from Macau overland through Japanese occupied China and got to America during the war.

I knew my cousin Frances needed my clothes, didn’t I!

Because the Japanese had taken her clothes and she needed some more clothes, so I was very happy to give her my clothes.

Oh I could only wear one dress at a time.

Daddy was putting them in a suitcase. I saw him put them in a suitcase to take to my cousin Frances. [laughs]

My mother actually bought my clothes using rations and then she passed them on to somebody else, who had a daughter just a bit younger than me, who had a son just a bit older than my brother,

so my brother got the second-hand clothes, and I got the new clothes, so I was lucky but my brother used to wear my shoes. Then one day he came home from school and he said to my mother, “These are girls’ shoes!” So then she knew she’d have to buy boys’ shoes for him and use some coupons.

No, not at

all. No I mean that was just funny. My mother did those sort of…I’ll tell you when I was conscious of rationing, that was when we got to England. We got to England in 1945. Things were really tough then and they got tougher and tougher. I was never hungry but I’m sure teenage boys and men would have been hungry.

Just everything really that we wanted but it was really funny. The Australian government were wonderful, because we’d come from the Far East, we were actually allowed rice, so whenever my parents entertained they always serve rice as well as everything else because it was such a treat for people to have rice.

Because they expected that because we’d come from the Far

East we were used to rice, so as well as everything we were allowed, we were allowed rice.

It was her decision, you know life has got to be simpler after the war. Things had really been so tough and so we’ll eliminate a fish course

unless we have fish as a main course. In Australia we lived in Balmoral until the lease was up after one year. By that time my father had arrived and he needed a job, and he was finding it quite difficult to get a job because there was some system, even in 1941 that people from the First World War should get precedence

but he’d been a member of Rotary in Hong Kong, so he went to a Rotary Club function in Sydney. He met someone there who asked what he was doing and he was looking for a job, and this man said, “I’m a friend of a Mr Peak and he’s the Managing Director of Timbrels at Rhodes.” So my father got a job as a civil engineer with Timbrels at Rhodes. Now from Balmoral

to Rhodes was impossible but they had some friends, also evacuees who had been renting a house at Top Ryde, who were just leaving, so my parents moved into this rental accommodation at North Ryde and I went to a school called Braemar. From there they were looking for somewhere to buy not too far from Rhodes and so they bought in Beecroft, 9 Oakland Avenue Beecroft.

Very different. The house was owned by a Mr and Mrs Nicholson, who lived opposite in a lovely, lovely mansion called The Hermitage that had been built by Blaxland and they owned the house opposite that was surrounded by field, and something grew, corn, wheat? I don’t know but there were a couple of haystacks and we used to play

in the haystacks, which was great fun. I went to this school Braemar, which was also a Boarding School and when my parents bought at Beecroft they put me in as a boarder for the rest of the term at Braemar. So I stayed there until those holidays and then I moved with the family to Beecroft.

Nothing affected me. I can honestly say I was not affected.

They didn’t affect me one little bit. I can’t remember any blackout curtains or anything like that. I can’t remember air raid sirens

until we got to Beecroft. At Beecroft I was aware of these things but I can’t say that my parents were really worried, to the extent that I do remember my father saying that he wished he’d got enough money to buy properties that were on the market on the peninsular and places like that. The people were putting places on the market, so he was feeling that things

were pretty secure around Sydney but he didn’t have any spare cash.

Well and considering that yes…totally cut off from members of his family in Macau and from prisoners of war in Stanley Camp.

What he did actually, he brought with him lots of photos, things like pictures of the reservoirs and the retaining walls of the reservoirs, and bridges, and roads, and all sorts of infrastructure things. He handed them over to some authority and then before the war ended the Colonial

Office in London got hold of him, and said would he be willing to return with the army to help with the reconstruction of Hong Kong.

Yes. He went back to Hong Kong in 1945 when the war ended.

No I started as a day girl

and then my parents bought a house at Beecroft, and they thought, “Oh it would be very unsettling for her to start at a new school in the middle of term.” So they put me into Braemar as a boarder.

I was! My mother would ring up every evening to have a chat and asked how things had happened

during the day, and that was fine. Then on one occasion, maybe it happened more than once but on one occasion the headmistress spoke to my mother afterwards and she said, “Sheila is very happy here. There’s no need to ring her up in the evening like this.” So my mother stopped ringing and she didn’t say to me, “Oh I better speak to her and say ‘well I won’t be

ringing from now on,’” and the headmistress didn’t tell me, so I thought, “This is it! I’ve been abandoned!” That actually is the only traumatic experience I had in my time in Australia. All the big events that were happening in the big wide world weren’t traumatic at all, all the important things but the thought that I had been put into this place and this was it, for ever and ever! So at the end of term when my mother came and picked me up,

I got a very big surprise.

Well that story that I’ve just told you has coloured my impressions of Braemar, so I don’t like Braemar at all. Strangely enough I really can’t remember Braemar. I think it is because that, in my funny little brain was so traumatic. I don’t remember the names of any of the teachers or any of the girls. I do

remember the house we rented and I remember happy times with the Nicholsons, who used to invite us for afternoon tea on a Sunday, and it was a great big spread. I can remember the lovely window seats in the drawing room and I can remember lots of happy times. They had five children. The youngest was a bit older than me and the others were adults but I can remember that family.

I can remember the happy things but Braemar I can’t remember.

I can’t remember her name. I can’t remember what she looked like, don’t remember her, don’t remember any of the teachers, don’t remember what the school looked like or anything.

Not worth remembering!

No, they may have thought so and they may have thought I spoke with a funny accent but I was not conscious of any unpleasant feelings or I really cannot remember. I can’t remember anything unpleasant said about those Japanese children either.

Back then I may have had more of an English accent because when I get back to England my rellies [relatives] over there think I have a great Australian drawl.

But

then I was at boarding school in England from the age of nine.

I have no idea.

I think it was because at school we sang God Save the King at school and there was a real consciousness of the fact that

we were British, and we were fighting, and we were fighting an enemy, and it was a worthy thing to do. We’d go down into the bush and play but you’d be bushrangers or you’d be baddies, but you wouldn’t dream of anyone taking the place of a Japanese. You wouldn’t be so unpleasant as to say, “We’re going to be the Australians or we’re going to be the British and

you can be the Japanese or you can be the Germans.” You wouldn’t do a thing like to your friend.

From Beecroft, we lived in Oakland Avenue and there were lots of little girls around, and I was really friendly with many of them. I have to say there was only one whose father was in the war. The girl opposite was Anne Hanson and she lived with her mother, and her grandparents. They weren’t Hanson. I

can’t remember their surname but her father was in the war. In the whole of Oakland Avenue there wasn’t one other father who was in the war. Oh we did skipping and lots of imagination, you’re sort of mother and father games, and some little girl would be given a nurse’s uniform for Christmas, so we’d play doctors and nurses, lots of imagination games. We didn’t have

too many things to play with, dolls and doll’s tea sets, and things like that were in pretty short supply. In fact one Christmas my mother would have liked to have given me a doll’s tea set but she didn’t have one, so she gave me a coffee set, fine, fine bone china, not one piece is chipped. This coffee set is immaculate and my sister in-law and brother have it now, not one scratch, not

nothing because people didn’t have much, and so they looked after what they had. In the back garden my father built us a swing and he also built us a seesaw, just three logs, and then a plank on the top, and hopscotch. You could have a lot of fun without actually having to buy a toy. There just weren’t those sort of toys available but

if you had a sort of snakes and ladders thing, the counters were made of cardboard. I can remember one…I’m not sure if it was birthday or Christmas, “What do you want?” “I want some counters.” That’s what I wanted and I’m not sure if they’d have been wood or plastic but before the war I think there was plastic but it was very expensive. Some people had plastic door handles and they really were special but we were special in Oakland Avenue,

in fact we were special in I don’t know how big an area, we had a fridge! Other people had ice chests but we had this American fridge that my father had brought back with him and we had to have a transformer to get it going.

Well I’ve got a photo here. My parents went looking for a house while they were renting at Top Ryde and the first house

they saw was this one, 9 Oakland Avenue. They thought we could really be happy here, just a three-bedroom house and a wonderful back garden but it also had one of those lovely old fashioned verandas, which we used as a playroom. The house was just a nice brick house, very solid construction but my mother got this shock of her life after having bought it

and moved in to find there was no flush lavatory in the bathroom. It wasn’t a little shed down the back. It was a tiny, tiny room just outside the back door. You had to go out there and some poor man had to empty it every week. In the back garden we had WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and fruit trees, and my father grew lettuces and tomatoes. We didn’t seem to have any shortage at all.

We just used it and once a week some poor man would have to come and empty it. He would have done that at night time when no one was aware of what was happening. The iceman would come, not every day…I suppose every second day and he delivered to all the other houses except ours, and he had some metal to pick up the ice with,

and at the end of our road, about four houses towards the bottom were a Mr and Mrs Brindley, and their daughters Ruth and Barbara. Ruth was my age and then there was a track leading to a house that was really in the bush, and after a while the ice man said he would deliver ice to this poor man who lived down at the bottom of the track, so my mother used to make little blocks of ice in our fridge,

and she’d take them down to this poor man who lived in the shack in the bush. People had choko vines growing up. We had water on but the Brindleys even had a water tank, so they had chokos growing over their water tank and once a week my mother would go down, and play tennis with the local women at the Brindleys’ court, which my grandmother in England thought was a very frivolous expenditure of

time, “We’re at war!”

Oh it was a suburb. It was definitely a suburb. It was just that Oakland Avenue would have been one of those fingers of roads where the bush comes right up to Oakland Avenue but everyone had very neat gardens in the front with a

wide driveway, but nobody had a car. You only got two gallons of petrol a month, so what was the point of having a car? And so people walked. I was too little to have a bike. We had a tricycle and a scooter.

I walked to school to Arden, which was one of those little one teacher schools that I think proliferated very much in that era. The headmistress was a Miss Windrich and occasionally she’d have someone who must have just left school and hadn’t decided what to do, and this former pupil would help her a bit but she just ran the entire

school. My brother went there for a little while and then my parents thought there aren’t enough boys in the school, so he was sent to the Beecroft Public School but I stayed at Arden the whole time. I only had one boy in my class. His name was Nigel Butterley, who then became a composer and there was Jill O’Sullivan, and Mary Thompson. She used to be very proud because Thompson’s Corner had something to do with her family. I think I played with the neighbours. There was a Muriel

Lackman, who lived a couple of doors away, so I mostly played with the little girls in the area. I went to Sunday School on Sunday afternoon and you’d get all dressed up, really, really dressed up to go to Sunday School, and all the children in the neighbourhood would walk up to three o’clock Sunday School.

St John’s Beecroft. It would have been a good mile I guess for little legs to walk but

everybody seemed to go.

I don’t how much regularly there would have been because we would have gone sometimes to have barbeques in the bush. There probably was steak but I only ever had sausages with bread. I can remember going to the fruit shop and buying a pennies worth of grapes.

Then we would still go and visit the Nicholsons and the Nicholsons would come, and pick us up from Ryde Station in their car, and use the petrol to go up the hill but to come down the hill, they’d just run the car down without turning the engine on to save petrol. So we did go and visit friends, but I won’t say it was ever a regular thing.

Although I said my mother didn’t have any contacts here, my father’s mother was Australian. She’d been born in Tasmania and he did have an aunt here, so the aunt would regularly come, and have lunch with us. Once in a blue moon we’d come and visit her in Killara but she lived to the ripe old age of 101 in the era when people didn’t live to 101!

Oh yes because I think life had been very full and very social in Hong Kong, and lots of relations, and masses of friends but there still were links with other evacuees.

Very little because I think even my father’s job here in Sydney must have been quite different, so I can’t say there’d have been too much that…oh men were in very short supply in say the church, so although he wasn’t an Anglican, he became a warden up at the church and he taught Sunday School up there, and so did my mother.

I can remember some of the fathers including my father, digging the air raid shelter and planting metal over it, and then putting earth on top of it but before they put the roof on it flooded. I can’t think there would have been too many things that were the same from Hong Kong days.

Oh my mother still dressed. I told you she did that when we returned to Australia in the 1950s. She always dressed in the afternoon.

She wouldn’t have done gardening. My father would have done the gardening. I don’t think it would have

dawned on her that outdoor jobs like that were hers but say she’d always had her hair done, so she always went to the hairdresser and had her hair done. She wouldn’t have thought of washing her own hair. I mean she would never have thought of having a shower. She still had a bath.

No Thelma didn’t, which was just as well really I suppose because the house we moved into, the rental house

in Ryde and then the Beecroft house, they only had three bedrooms, so there wouldn’t have really been room for Thelma. She was with us and then soon after my father came to White Cottage, someone in her family wasn’t well, and she needed to go back to Wauchope.

Only the one at the school.

In the front of the school. I think it was a recognised design. I think they’d have given dimensions and so on. I’m sure you’ve heard all the stories of air raid shelters because it was just two benches on either side of the wall. The wall ended and then was dug down deeper, and two benches put facing each other against either

wall. We used to have practice for that and we used to have practice of what we’d do in an air raid, how we’d have to evacuate the classroom, go down to the air raid shelter.

Miss Windrich had…every morning we’d have to sing the National Anthem

and I think public schools had a big flagpole but this was a pretty humble little school, so there was just a little flag on her desk. We’d all stand to attention and sing the National Anthem. Every now and then we used to have a singing time, and we would sing other patriotic songs as well, and I have a feeling that we were notified because I don’t…this sounds stupid but

we were aware that there was going to be this evacuation procedure because a bell would be rung, not by Miss Windrich. Someone would ring a bell and I think we thought it was very funny and exciting. I can’t remember there being any fear whatsoever. Some teachers may have instilled fear but for us it really was a fun

thing to do, a bit of shoving and pushing, and this kind of thing. There wasn’t any frighten about it.

I don’t know of any others. Other people may have had them but I’m not aware of them but I do know that some people had areas of their house, like this great aunt in Killara, she had

a garage and then there was space between her sort of subterranean garage, then there were steps up to her backdoor, and she had someone excavate the area there to build a room. So she had, I suppose you’d call it an air raid shelter but quite a lot of people had an area as a kind of basement area in their homes, but I don’t know of anyone who actually dug

an air raid shelter.

No, no we never had anything like that. There used to be air raid sirens on the telegraph poles and they would ring out on a Sunday. I’m only aware of them doing it on a Sunday. That may be my faulty memory. Maybe it happened more often but I’m only aware of it on a Sunday, just to see that the

machines really were working.

She was the most amazing person. She wasn’t young but she was full of energy and full of enthusiasm. She loved all her girls. She never played favourites. She had time for every single person and being a one teacher school, she was the teacher right the way up to sixth class

but she hated it when anyone left, so my brother left because there weren’t any other boys in his class, and it was traumatic for her. My mother found it really difficult to say that Stuart was leaving the school and with me, as I got older she wanted me to go to Abbotsleigh, and she wanted to tell Miss Windrich but she didn’t dare to tell her. Other children left and that was really hard for her.

She was a stickler for doing things properly. Everyone had to do everything to the best of their ability and she would have people learning to read as well as people who had already learnt to read. You can imagine, first class right up to sixth grade but no one felt left out or neglected and I can remember even when we wanted to blow our noses, we’d

have to go outside the door to blow our noses. She taught us lots of patriotic songs and the school premises were actually owned by the local church, so once a month we had to go on an outing while there was some function, some women’s group at the church. So she’d take us to the museum or the zoo, or the art gallery, some outing, once a month, rain, hail or shine we had to go on an outing but

it was always a great pleasure because Miss Windrich would have prepared so well and she was so patriotic that she’d encourage us to bring items to school. It might have only been once a term. I can’t remember. All the things would be collected to be sent off to somebody in England and of course similarly, because my mother had relations in England, her parents, her sister, her brother, and others,

we ourselves would send food parcels to England. They weren’t wrapped in cardboard and paper. They’d be collected to make a parcel and my mother would go to the post office, and see if she was near the limit because if you got over the limit, then you’d have to pay excess, so she’d want to get things spot on to get her money’s worth with the postage.

Having collected the right amount, things would be packaged and then wrapped in very strong fabric, and then she would sew the parcel in the fabric. Then my father had a little bottle of India ink with a special nib with a round end on it and he would very neatly write the name and address, mostly to our grandparents to send items of food. My mother would have little

extras to put in the corners, so that everything would be packaged as neatly as possible. I never saw Miss Windrich wrap or post the things but we would take items to school to be sent and I have some indication of the type of things that were sent because even when I went to England after the war, I was the recipient of some of these parcels. Is it worth reading the type of things because it is almost unbelievable?

Now these were the things that Miss Windrich sent to an 11-year-old-school girl at boarding school in England, “Here I am writing June the 25th. I had a parcel from Miss Windrich yesterday,” as I write to my parents in Hong Kong. “It had one tin of dripping, a tin of nutmeat, three jellies, one tin of condensed milk and a tin of sweets.” For an 11 year old, I

obviously approved and I have other letters from that boarding school saying that I’d had a parcel from Miss Windrich or a letter from her, and I obviously wrote and send thank you otherwise she wouldn’t have kept on sending to me. She was very conscious of all her pupils being ‘her’ girls. She was a single woman who just lived for her school and she kept up with a lot of the ex-pupils.

People in Australia were very kind to the evacuees and to the children. I think perhaps it was most unusual for Australians to travel overseas

and here were a group of people who’d had to travel twice. They’d had to travel from England to Hong Kong and here they were evacuated, and perhaps there were some people who thought now this is part of my war effort. I don’t know why but they were particularly kind and welcoming. There’s something that I need to say perhaps that I haven’t said before as far as the evacuation was

concerned. On our ship the Slamet as it arrived in Sydney, there was quite a to do because there were possibly a half dozen to a dozen Chinese people on the ship and my impression was that they really weren’t going to let the Chinese onshore, and, “What would happen to them? Would it go back to Manila with these Chinese people?” There was a lot of consternation amongst the women

about these Chinese people and they were asking the women where they’d been born. I can remember my mother saying, “I was born in outer-Mongolia,” and the people were saying really weird things. My mother was born on the outskirts of London, not anywhere unusual at all but I think that the women were so anxious that all them, including these Chinese women, would be able to get off the ship.

I had no idea who these Chinese people might have been until last year and I came across a Chinese man, who told me that his mother had been evacuated. I asked how that was possible knowing about the White Australia Policy and he said his mother had been employed by the British Consulate in what was then Canton, so all the employees of all the British embassies and consulates in that neck of the woods were evacuated.

I suggested that his mother’s story should be recorded and he said his mother had such a traumatic time that she wouldn’t talk to her children about it, certainly not to the public, and yet this woman, although she had a difficult time during the war as an evacuee, she never returned to China, so Australia was obviously good for her. One of the things that really

amazes and impresses me is that despite their anguish, their worry, being separated from their husbands, so many of these evacuated women had such happy, happy wartime memories that instead, after the war when they returned to Hong Kong, they said to their husbands, “We never want to retire to England. Hong Kong is lovely but Australia is the place to retire to.”

I know lots who persuaded their husbands unseen to make Australia home.

It is because the wartime for many people was very traumatic and I understand for the women the separation, and the worry of being away from their birth families, and away from their husbands in prison camps, must have been ghastly but the

rest of it in Australia was just a wonderful place.

I remember it as being

an extremely happy time. I’m sure for adults there were all sorts of problems. I can’t say I had a single problem as a child. I related very well to the little girls in the road where we lived. I can remember we only had one annual holiday. We’d go to a beach house at Avoca, right on the beach at Avoca. The back garden

ran onto the beach and for two weeks, the first two weeks in January we had a blissful time at the beach. Apart from that we stayed at home but we had great holidays. We’d go down to the bush and there were very simple things like a long piece of rope with a big knot at the bottom. We’d climb up on a rock and swing from this rope, and come back to the rock or let go, and drop down into…not a gully but just a little dip.

It was the kind of era when parents didn’t have to worry about their children meeting with any danger at all. So you didn’t need to go away for holidays to have a really happy time. There were occasional ferry trips and things like that but I can remember so many happy experiences at the weekends, and school holidays without any highlights needed to make

life happy. Things really were very simple. I can remember there were a few funny board games that you wouldn’t have now. There were Snakes and Ladders and those sorts of things but there were some board games in which there would be battleships, and you’d throw the dice, and you’d move the counter, and you’d win battles and lose battles, so no wonder we won the war! All these children playing their board

games!

I don’t know if it was required but my parents did buy material and it might have been to line curtains to make them as blackout stuff but my mother was no sewer, so we had the material but we never made blackout curtains. We

didn’t do any of those wartime things and I know in some families they worked out that a spot under the stairs would be the safest or under a heavy table or something like that but I have to say my parents never did anything like that. It may have been their own personal experience that they had been close to danger. I’ve got a letter that my Uncle Paul wrote from China in which he talks

about the fall of Hong Kong, a very moving letter about the last Christmas in Hong Kong when Hong Kong fell and it really was very dangerous, about how not only the Japanese but the workmen class of Chinese coming to loot, and they got walking sticks and put them over the balcony so that the end of a walking stick might look like a pistol, with

say 80 workmen all coming to break into the house. They had experiences there of personal very immediate danger with their families, so Australia did seem like a wonderful haven and I can’t say that my parents ever felt that there was any shortage of tea or sugar or any food stuffs. I know for some

people it was difficult, but my parents didn’t have great urges for 20 cups of strong tea, so the tea ration was fine, butter ration was fine, everything. There was never any shortage.

Yes I would have been, no five.

I always think, “Isn’t it extraordinary the fact that Hong Kong fell doesn’t hit the headlines?” Because for Australians it was Singapore and the people imprisoned in Singapore, but personally, I’ve only passed through Singapore just on a few occasions, and

Allan my husband has two cousins who were in Changi during the war, and both died prematurely because of their wartime experiences but growing up I knew people who were killed in Hong Kong. So for me the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day is more significant. I think it’s possibly ones

personal story, so it’s the fall of Hong Kong that I remember and one of my aunts, who is still alive in London, she cried when the Union Jack came down in 1997 when Hong Kong reverted to China. She cried particularly then because she was in Hong Kong at the time that the Japanese took Hong Kong and they forced

all the British people in Hong Kong to watch as the Union Jack went down and the Rising Sun went up. Actually she was evacuated with my mother, brother and me. There was my aunt with her son, two months older than me, and her daughter, 10 months older than my brother, but in the hotel in Manila a man broke into her bedroom, and stole her passport, and

all her money. She was so traumatised that she cabled back to her husband, who got special government permission for her to go back to Hong Kong and that’s why she was caught. My mother pleaded with my father, she cabled and said, “Please let me go back with Marjorie!” But my father said, “No, you have to do what the government tells you to do.”

Some of it was sent. My father chose funny things. My mother would have chosen differently. I had some lovely nursery furniture including a little lounge suite and it fitted in very nicely into by bedroom in Beecroft but he didn’t bring a dining room suite, and he didn’t bring

the proper lounge furniture. He brought amazingly his little daughter’s sitting room furniture but nothing for his own setting. Maybe he thought that his wife would choose something different in Australia and it’s true because in Hong Kong one had much more Manila cane furniture rather than properly upholstered stuff. So my parents went to Baird Watson’s and bought a dining room suite, and lounge furniture but they were able to bring some lovely

ornaments. Then at the end of the war, the Colonial Office in London, no before the war ended the Colonial Office asked my father if he’d go back to help with the reconstruction, which he did, but well, my mother wasn’t Australian. She didn’t really have roots here, so he said he would only go back to Hong Kong if his wife could be returned home to England.

So we were repatriated and at the end of the war the government wouldn’t let people sell homes or furniture or anything like that on the open market. There was a fixed price and the fixed price was 80 percent of the pre-war price, so you can imagine with returning soldiers. There were so many people who wanted houses and quite a lot of women

and children during the war, not just the evacuees but other people, had gone to live with their mothers and fathers or groups of women shared houses. We know several. There’s a Dr Babbage who went off to fight and a Dr Hercus. Their two wives with the families shared a shared together. At the end of the war when they came back, the two doctors wanted their own homes again and so there was a great dearth of houses.

My parents had oodles and oodles of people ringing up, “Can we buy your house?” Not wanting to look at the house, just wanting to buy our house. A friend of theirs, Dorothy Bates, had rung and said, “We’re friendly with a Dr Paul White and he’d love your house.” So they let him buy the house at the government regulated price and he took the furniture, and 80 percent of the Baird Watson’s pre-war price was what he paid.

Other people if there was no contact like that, would go to see a house at the recognised price and say, “I will give you 10 pound for that lemon tree and 15 pounds for that rose bush.” So people could wangle a bit more money if they wanted to.

My father, I can remember very clearly that the letter came from the Colonial Office in London and the great excitement. War hadn’t ended and he’d already said, “Yes I will go back to Hong Kong.” So when there was the end of the European war he was quite sure that the Japanese war wouldn’t last too much longer after that,

so already they were putting feelers down for what they would do, and how they would split the family up, and we were aware that we would be going back to England long before the war ended really. I can remember what happened with the end of the European war and my uncle, who’d been in the European front, he was brought

out to Burma, and he was flying over the hump with planes there. My parents were already in touch with quite a lot of the evacuee people and of course the women whose husbands had been killed, they still didn’t know their husbands were dead but the general…excitement is too strong a word but an anticipation that there would be great reunions,

and things would happen, but a kind of dampener, “Will it include me? Will my husband be one of them?” My father didn’t know. He knew his father had died but he didn’t know about any of his other relations, whether they were alive or dead. I think people were ambivalent, evacuees and my parents were ambivalent because they didn’t really know. Then my mother had another thing that happened to

her. A sister of hers had come out to Hong Kong I’ve mentioned already, who had TB and on the way back to England before the war, she diverted so she could go to a sanatorium in Switzerland at Davoss. She was there for a year and then she thought, “I could be cut off. England and Germany are at war. I could be marooned in Switzerland without any money.” So she made arrangements to

fly to England and she hadn’t spoken a word for a year. She just wrote on a slate to communicate and of course wrote letters to her parents, and they arranged to meet her at the airport. They were late, so she rang them and she said, “I’ve arrived.” Those were the first words she’d spoken for a year. But when the bomb dropped opposite my grandparents’ house, my aunt…they’d built a chalet, a Swiss

chalet for her in the garden so it could revolve and catch the sun all day, so she walked from the garden chalet up to the house to see if her parents were still alive, and that was really that last time she was able to walk. So my mother had that but my aunt, having been in a Switzerland sanatorium, at the time that her TB was quiescent, she joined the WAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] and she became King Farouk’s [King Farouk I of Egypt] driver

for a while. Too bad she didn’t give him TB! Then her TB flared up again so she then went to a sanatorium in the Isle of Wight. So my mother had worries about her very ill sister and her mother used to write, and say, “Edna’s just craving a hot water bottle.” In England you couldn’t buy anything rubber because it was all used for tyres,

so my mother in amongst the food parcels would wrap things including a hot water bottle for her sister. There were lots of family things going on in England, not all of them happy. Things like her sister died in 1945 on the 6th of January and so she did have some sad things, and trying to do things to help her sister remotely like that. Towards the end of the war she

knew she was going back to England, to a mother who had been traumatised in a lot of ways, having a daughter die and having a son in the air force now in Burma, and wondering if…he’d been terribly lucky to survive till now, and would he survive the Burma thing. So although the war in Europe had ended, it wasn’t unadulterated joy for people but they knew that they would

be moving and they had to decide what to leave behind in Australia, and what to take, and what my father could take back to Hong Kong, and what my mother would be taking to England. Although there was rationing and so they wanted to take things to England, my mother knew that she had to send stuff to Hong Kong, and so my father

started collecting things to take to Hong Kong. Then when Japan fell, then things really got speeded up and my father would contact say a chemist, and say, “What are good things to take?” So a chemist would say, “I can let you have A, B, C and D,” vitamins and things like that

for people who hadn’t been eating properly. So even before Japan ended they were doing preparations like that, not the preparation you’d always think about, but, “How can I start collecting vitamin pills?” And then when Japan did fall, it was a school day. I can remember being at school. I didn’t know that Japan had fallen until I got to school and then we were told we could have

a holiday, and go home. I didn’t go home. I walked across the road with a lot of the other children and we swang on the swings, and played around in the park. My father was at work and was told he could have the day off, so he walked back through the park and picked me up. We went home and that really was very exciting. My family didn’t do what lots of families did. We didn’t go into the city. We already on that very day,

started our plans and our preparations. The next thing I remember was a family, the ones who lived next to us before the war, Margaret Woods and Susan and Patsy, they had spent the war years in Armidale. They were the first ones to be returned that we knew, to England and so they came and stayed with us for about a week. The next exciting thing to happen to us

was an uncle came down from Hong Kong. He had been in the Royal Navy and his arm had been blown off in the fall of Hong Kong, and he’d been a prisoner of war. The people who were really sick, those prisoners were not sent straight back to England. It was feared that they just couldn’t survive the first English winter without being built up in Australia, with some

good food and good weather. So Ernest Morris came down to Australia and was first of all put in hospital so he could have treatment for his arm, which had been blown off right at the shoulder. After having treatment in hospital he got permission to come and live with us, and so he stayed with us. By this time he had a naval uniform back again and had the empty sleeve in a

pocket in his jacket. I can remember he was given free transport. He didn’t have to pay to go on any transport at all and people were just amazingly kind. Here again I think he was one of the very first ex-prisoners that the average person in Beecroft had seen and people were just so pleased to have the opportunity of showing kindness one to one.

Then the letter came that we were to be repatriated back to England and once again five days notice. Boy was there ever scurrying around. We had to go into the city and have passports renewed. Stuart and I had to have our photos taken and we travelled on out mother’s passport then, as we had earlier, and inoculations and vaccinations. Uncle Ernest came with us and I can remember

we had left something behind at home, and so he said, “I’ll go back and collect this bit of paper because I can travel free!” So he didn’t have to pay the ticket to go and get whatever the item was. Then my mother started packing things and she was taking a camphor wood box back for her parents. She filled it totally with food, tins of peaches and all sorts of things that

could only be bought with points in England. You only had a point system. You had a tea ration, a sugar ration, a meat ration, a butter ration but then there were other things, tins of meat and sardines, and all sorts of things where there was a point system. So she filled this camphor wood box with food and she had to get clothes for us but she also wanted to send clothes back with my father. But before he went back to Hong Kong

we knew a Captain Wilkinson, who was captain on a plane. I’m not sure if he was Qantas or who he was but he was flying back and he took quite a lot back with him for my relations who had been caught by the Japanese in Hong Kong. We had quite an interesting time in our repatriation because we were repatriated on the Dominion

Monarch and that had been a very high class passenger ship just built before the war, and it was so big that it didn’t go through the Suez Canal. It always went via the Cape but of course it had been requisitioned by the army and it had been turned into a troop ship. On our ship there were also women and children but many, many

ex-prisoners of the Japanese, including Ernest Morris, so it must have been quite difficult for a captain who was used to working on a troop ship to suddenly be confronted with a whole lot of women and children, and men who I don’t think he realised were desperately ill, and really needing a lot of tender loving care. We were driven down to the

Dominion Monarch by a family friend, Cliff Piper and my brother was stunned at the size of this ship. He’d never seen anything as big as this ship, as he walked the through one of those dock areas. You walked through the darkness of the dock and there was this great big boat, painted grey of course. We’d been allocated

a cabin, which we shared with 32 other people and the women and children were permitted on deck at certain times. Very occasionally these poor prisoners of war were allowed on deck and we were given…oh the school-aged children had school on the ship in the dining room and our teachers were a few of the mothers who were

trained teachers, and even some of the prisoners of war because they had been teachers before the war, and they’d been caught by the enemy. So they were willing to act as our teachers in the dining room, which was probably a way of keeping us out of mischief. We were given fruit at recess but it’s unbelievable, the men weren’t given fruit, so my mother made us give our

fruit to her and she gave the fruit to Ernest Morris. We were given tomato juice for breakfast. You paid extra if you were given tomato juice, so she was allowed to buy extra tomato juice and she’d give that to Ernest for himself and to distribute. It’s unbelievable to think the callousness of the people on the Dominion Monarch in comparison with the lavish care that was given to those prisoners in Australia.

I mean there was no rationing or anything for prisoners. They were given all the cream and milk and meat, the very best of everything while they were here. I’m sure they experienced quite a difference in comparison with the English captain of this ship. In fact things were so bad that quite a number of the women on the ship wrote to all the VIPs they

knew and posted those letters in Perth, and by the time the ship got to portside, commissioners arrived to inspect, and the captain I think must have been reprimanded because things changed after that. There was the chief justice of Hong Kong on the ship. They weren’t people who deserved bad treatment. They weren’t Japanese prisoners. These were people who had been prisoners of war. When we arrived in England,

even then some of the women didn’t know whether their menfolk were alive or what their condition was.

No, tiny! Not big at all. The bunks were three tier bunks and there was no room for your luggage, so

you’d put in things not wanted on voyage down in the hold, and then there was a baggage room for things that you did want onboard. The mothers would go to the baggage room and get what they needed for a couple of days, and just store things on the end of their children’s bunks. There was just enough room to go sideways from one bunk to another.

The captain was behaving as he had on a troop ship I think and he would come and inspect the cabins to see that they were fairly neat. One day my mother was feeling terribly seasick, so she stayed in her cabin and the captain reprimanded her, and told her she had to get up and go on deck. She refused and he wasn’t used to that! But doing washing, going to the laundry and doing washing, all of that was really difficult because

it was really geared, it had been geared for some years as a troop ship, not geared for women and children. I think most of the women and children were very concerned about the men, the ones who had been former prisoners. I don’t think they were

at all concerned about their own comfort or lack of comfort. They had had great years in Australia. As I tell you, my mother was a very loving mother. She wasn’t a callous indifferent mother but she knew that we could manage without fruit for a month and so our fruit was confiscated, which was right and proper! When we arrived in London, we arrived in Tilbury Dock.

I have to say also, the ship normally went via South Africa but because of the state of the prisoners, for the first time ever the Dominion Monarch went straight through the Suez Canal to get the ship back quickly.

I know because

the church gave a farewell and the farewell was October the 14th 1945, so we left…that would have been just before, two or three days before we left, so really the middle of October ‘45.

A month.

Birthdays were not important in comparison with the birthdays of today but at the time they seemed to be terrific because we didn’t hire clowns and have all the fabulous things of today but every birthday and every Christmas was really celebrated with

friends and neighbours, and looking back on it I realise how difficult it must have been for relations in England to think of sending anything to Australia. I mean what could they send from war-torn England to the land of plenty and grandchildren in Australia? Absolutely nothing! Ah but I do happen to have one present that my grandmother sent me in 1941 for my fifth birthday and it’s

a tiny little book about the two little princesses at home. It was published a few months earlier in October the month before and I noticed it was reprinted the very next month, so it must have been terribly popular. I think back then they didn’t have an open slather with printing books, paper and manpower, so I somehow think they just produced things that boosted morale,

and that would have been one of them. It was obviously very popular and I must have like it too to have kept it all these years.

I mentioned that my parents, my mother had to give me an adult coffee set because that was something. She wanted to give me a doll’s tea set and back then dolls had china heads, so when you played with a doll you really looked after

it because you knew that if that doll got broken, it would have to go to the doll’s hospital. There was a doll’s hospital and that doll would be repaired rather than you getting a new doll, so we really repaired things a lot. I can remember things like a swing, so at Christmas time there was no swing on Christmas eve and you’d wake up on Christmas morning, and there’s the swing hanging between two trees, so from this

perspective it does seem pretty humble but back then it was an exciting present, whatever it was, and it brought pleasure not only to the individual but to all the neighbours. Everyone else enjoyed whatever the excitement was.

We’d go down to the bush and we’d get a tree, and decorate it mostly with decorations that we made ourselves. We’d make

chains and I can remember whoever had a birthday, there was some little weed that had a daisy-like flower. You’d pick these daisies and with your nail you’d make a hole in the end of the stem, and then you could strong the daisy flowers together, so a lot of it was just make yourself fun.

We had Bonfire Day but I don’t know which day that would have been but we would have a bonfire. We didn’t have crackers but we’d have a great big fire and run around, and get terribly excited just over the fire. You didn’t need to have fireworks to do that. I have no idea what day that bonfire was, Bonfire Night.

Well my father used to make us…no I shouldn’t say “make us”…We would go with our father just to the local war memorial. We didn’t go into the city. It would just be a ceremony at the local Beecroft war memorial and that was something he was very strong about.

It was just one of the things that was on his agenda,

that one should honour people that had done anything sacrificial like that.

I have no recollection of what it looked like but I just remember there being a little column and these names on it, and we would go. Someone would…whether it was a bugle I really don’t remember but someone would trumpet a

bugle or something. Someone would play some rousing song and I think we all sang, I presume we all sang God Save the King. We sang another couple of things and someone made a speech, and that was really important.

I think they really were very important and I mentioned that we’d go to the newsreels. There’d often be something about the royal family. There wouldn’t only be Churchill [Winston Churchill] with his cigar and his V [Churchill was known for making a ‘V’ with his index and middle fingers, between which rested a cigar], and his bomber suit. There’d invariably be something about the king and the queen, and what they’d been up to. Something else, this is after the war when

I got back to stay with my grandparents, framed in my uncle’s bedroom were the various commissions he’d got when he was flight lieutenant squadron leader and so on. Any commission he got was hand signed by the king. It wasn’t rubber stamped, so I don’t know how many people joined up but he signed every single commission.

Of course that was a no go area, no communication whatsoever between the women and the men, even though some of them had been friends before the war. The times on deck were much more generous for the women

and children than for the men. I’m not sure how often the men were allowed on deck but there was really not meant to be any link at all, which was a bit odd. Things were very tough for those men. I can remember there being a constant…not just conversation, complaining. I can’t remember the women complaining about their

own accommodation or how difficult it was for them and I think it was very difficult having children in such cramped accommodation, and safety issues, but I can’t remember any one of the women being worried about themselves. It was all very concerned about these former prisoners.

I’m sure that there would have been crewmen who would have been willing for a little something to do that. I remember when we got onboard the boat Mr Piper handing five pounds to a couple of the crew and I don’t remember what their positions were but he obviously thought, “Now I’ll grease their palm and they’ll

be friends of my friend.”

Just a business friend of my father’s and actually he owned the house at Avoca. My father met Mr Piper at Timbrels at Rhodes and he and his wife didn’t have any children. They lived at Epping and he got home from work one day, and he said to his wife, “I’ve invited this new fellow from work to come and have a holiday at Avoca with us

the next long weekend.” I don’t know which long weekend. It might have been Anzac Day, I don’t know. His wife was horrified, “Total strangers you’ve invited! Why didn’t you just invite them for afternoon tea here? You’ve never met the wife. You’ve never met the children. We probably won’t get on. You’ve invited them for a holiday at Avoca with us! How ghastly!” But this was an indication of how people were really kind to evacuees. Anyway, the Pipers were quite a bit older than my parents but we all hit it off very

well. We’ve got some lovely movies of my father with Stuart on his back and me riding Mr Piper’s back, and these two races going up and down the beach, really nice things like that. We had a couple of holidays with Mr and Mrs Piper, and after that we’d have their house at Avoca for a couple of…and not their nephews and nieces the first two weeks in January. These people who weren’t relations

getting prime time!

I think it was easier then because on the way down Stuart was 10 months old and by the time the war ended, it wasn’t quite so desperate, and also

by then we were at school classes. You imagine a 10-month-old child on a great big ship without any facilities for ensuring a baby would be safe and 100 people on camp stretchers, a 10-month-old baby on a camp stretcher? I think things like that really were quite anxious

making. Whereas going to England the war was over, she knew she was going to her parents. Previously leaving Hong Kong in 1940, where were they going? What was going to happen to them? What would happen to the menfolk? The Japanese were approaching. There was a different attitude after the war and I think sometimes when you can feel even sorrier for somebody else, then any discomfort of your own

is minimised.

I doubt it! [laughs]

He was six. He would have gone to the same school in the dining room on the Dominion Monarch. I think he was okay.

Oh yes! We both wrote to our father. I’ve got

two or three of those letters and he’s printed his letter in very big printing to our father, who got to Hong Kong. He stayed with Mr and Mrs Piper for just a few days before he too flew off to Hong Kong.

Oh yes.

Oh yes,

back then, even probably today when cruise ships pass through the Suez Canal, there are these ‘gully-gully’ men [magicians/entertainers], who perform tricks. They clamber up on the ship up ropes to perform tricks and the ship’s captain and officers shoo them off because they don’t want them on the ship but little

boats, not even boats, tiny, tiny rowing boats tie up against the ship, and they sell you things, and you bargain over the side of the ship until you come to an agreed price, so they were buying and selling like that but the gully-gully men are the ones who do a trick. They say, “Put a pound note in that hand and hold it very, very tightly. Look! I’ve got it in my hand!”

And you have no idea how they got the pound note from your hand to their hand, and they always do! [laughs]

Then of course they’ll sell you a camera and you think you’ve got a very good deal, and you open the camera up, and there’s nothing inside it!

No, I don’t know that people would have

bothered to take cameras on that ship. I don’t know of anyone who took a camera. I also do remember that one girl, a girl called Cassane Hannington, her mother had taken a spare pair of slacks for her and so she gave me a pair of slacks. When I got to England, lovely warm pants, my grandmother was horrified! A little girl with trousers! So my mother very

rarely let me wear them even though it was a pretty chilly winter!

I do remember we got off the ship and then we got a train to whatever the main station was in London, where our grandfather was meeting us. From the ship into London there were so many bombed cities.

We’d seen it on the newsreels but never really seen it and here they were. Somebody started a children’s nursery rhyme, London’s burning, London’s burning, pour water, pour water, in the gloaming, in the gloaming, come sing and be merry. Someone started singing it so the children who knew it were all singing it and the adults got very angry, and I had never seen adults angry before. For the first time in my life

I had adults shouting at me and telling me, “Be quiet! Shut up!” All these things in very angry voices. I had never heard anyone angry like that before. One of the things as children in Australia we did then that I don’t think they do very much, we’d play ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and those, singing sort of things, and ‘Ring a ring a rosy, a pocket full of posies.’ That’s a song we’d sing

in Hong Kong when we were swimming and then you’re dunked under the water. ‘Drop the Hankie’, all those sort of games, children’s games that people used to play that didn’t require equipment but we sang a lot of nursery rhymes and ones that had actions. I can remember also that we’d sing nursery rhymes and doing knitting, including French knitting on the

ship. Arriving in England how many people would know a nursery rhyme, ‘London’s burning, London’s burning’? But a lot of us did. A lot of us were criticised for singing it.

That was only for a few minutes. We were very excited because we knew we were going to see our grandparents and obviously our mother had been

telling us about what was happening. We did know our grandparents because every week our grandmother had written. I’m not saying we got a card every week but it’s quite possible if two arrived in one week, maybe our mother kept one for when a card didn’t arrive but she wrote to us every single week. So we knew her very well and we were really looking forward to going there but my brother thinks we

killed the poor darling because here were two exuberant Australian children, who were used to running around outdoors, and we arrived in England in November. We’d have had to be indoors and be much more subdued, and of course no television to plonk us in front of the television, so it must have been a bit of a shock for us but worse for our grandmother.

I can remember things like, they lived in Surrey in a little village called Send between two larger towns called Guildford and Woking, and when we got to the house it was quite a small cottage because our grandparents had downsized thinking they had retired, and there wouldn’t be anybody at home. My mother and I shared

a double bed, and it was a feather bed with a feather mattress. Every morning I’d get one side of the bed and my mother would get the other, and we’d have to give it a big shake to even out the feathers. I can also remember there was no rubber hot water bottle. There was a stone hot water bottle and it really was a bottle made of stone. You’d put hot water in it and that would

warm this earthenware, and keep it warm for quite a while. Of course it meant the sheets were warm when we got into bed and I can remember other things like a hall cupboard where the sheets and towels would go in the hall cupboard, and you’d open the door in the bathroom, and you could get a nice hot towel out to dry yourself after a bath.

My brother had never been to England. It’s just we were outdoorsy sort of people who had been used to running out in a garden and letting off steam, and we’d moved into a household where there were grandparents, who had been looking after a really sick daughter who had died, and who had really had it tough.

My grandfather subsequently said he thought that his wife might have died before his daughter did because things weren’t easy during the war. In fact my grandfather had retired before the war. He was working with a company called Hays Wharf, right in the docks of London, and he had to go back to work. He was called up by…whether it was the government or the company, but he had to go back to work, no choice. Having worked during the day then he would be on

warden duty at night to be an air raid warden and for an old man to do that, that was pretty tough, and to have had the bomb in the garden and quite a bit of anxiety. There were other rellies who were in the army and so on. None of the close ones were killed actually.

Well it was a Doodle Bug and it dropped

in the garden opposite, and that house was destroyed, and their house was badly damaged. Subsequently I can remember my grandfather saying that the neighbours said to them, “Don’t do so much clearing up!” All the ceilings were down and the place in a mess, quite a bit of damage, and say his grandfather clock had been knocked down to the ground. He did as much clearing up as he could, whereas neighbours said, “No, no! The insurance will give you more money if the pace looks a

mess!” But he did all the clearing up he could before the insurance people came.

None, everything had been fixed up by then and we just went to the local, my brother and I went to the local village school, and the headmistress there was a Miss Peren. We used to just walk down to the little village school and there was just one shop there.

If I was down at the village shop and I saw a queue outside the shop, I’d come running home, and I’d say, “There’s a queue! There’s a queue!” So I’d collect all the ration books and join the queue because you knew there was something good that had arrived, and it might be bananas! So you’d get your ration of bananas and they’d chop that little bit…a coupon out. You’d go home with the bananas or they might look at the ration book and say, “Oh

you’ve had your bananas for the year.” So you’d get up to the top of the queue and have to go home empty handed.

I still don’t belong anywhere! [laughs]

Oh with a good psychiatrist! Can you recommend one? [laughs]

I didn’t know anything about the place at all. I’d left when I was one, except I sort of knew my grandparents. I just assumed that relations all love each other. I just assumed that I was their granddaughter and they would love me, and they did. Oh yes they did. In fact my mother and I, when I say we were in this double bed, my grandparents moved out of

that room so that my mother and I shared their room because they thought that was nicer than the room they had.

Well that’s why I think we suddenly had to become indoor children and I think we then read a lot more books and did things like that. I can remember there being a certain number of outings. I can remember my grandfather taking me to see

Pinocchio. In Australia my mother wouldn’t take me to the cinema because things like Anne Hanson, the girl opposite, her mother had taken her to see Bambi and it’s so sad. Anne took about a week to recover and she had nightmares and was crying and carrying on, and quite a lot of children’s films are really very sad, so I didn’t go to see those children’s films but I can remember going to see Pinocchio with my grandfather. So they took us out and they were very

kind to us. But I’m just thinking, there again as an adult that must have been hard for them. I’m sure they made a great effort but I wouldn’t have known they were making an effort.

But things like rationing and so on, I think children are very

accepting. I can’t remember being upset except on one occasion. There was one traumatic occasion. My brother and I can still remember when my mother, our mother cooked us an egg, a boiled egg, and she didn’t cook it enough, and the white wasn’t white. It was all runny and opaque. Now in Australia she would have thrown those eggs out and done two more eggs,

and we weren’t used to being forced to eat an egg that was too runny. She made us and an egg is a good egg, and we obviously needed the nourishment but she couldn’t have done that with her parents. We’d have had to wait for another month for an egg and imagine what her parents would have thought if she chucked a couple of eggs away! So that is the only occasion when I can

say that rationing affected me. Another thing where rationing affected me was I had a birthday while I was staying with my grandparents and it made my mother cry because she put out an ordinary Australian birthday party, and the little girls in my class from the send school were invited. We played a few games

because it was summer and then came in for the birthday party. It was all set out in the dining room and the children had never seen a party like it! There was fruit in jelly and hundred and thousands on bread and butter. Just a children’s party and a lovely cake with icing and candles, even candles on a cake! The children, the little girls were

absolutely gob smacked and it made my mother cry to think that these nine-year-old children had just never seen a party. They’d never had a birthday like that before and even the presents were rather sad when you look back on it, a hair ribbon, one hair ribbon. My mother made me return a few of the things and then afterwards she realised she’d made a mistake. Some of the little girls, their mothers would have thought, “Here’s someone

from Australia. What do we give a child from Australia? Nothing! Not a thing! I’ll give her two and sixpence” which was one coin, a half crown. So in a tiny screw of tissue paper they’d given me half a crown and my mother made me give it back. Then she realised afterwards how terribly insulting that was and it was only subsequently that she felt really guilty about that, so I learned things like that. I wasn’t angry with her for

giving the two and sixpence back but I learned things like that, that you can sometimes think you’re doing the right thing, and you’re actually doing something very hurtful.

No, well I don’t think so. I mean this is just the way the cookie crumbles, feeling, “Isn’t this wonderful to think that I’d been so fortunate, so

blessed,” and I do know as far as my father was concerned, he really felt that he was the preserved one to be able to help his family when he got back, and he did. He did! They sold the house at Beecroft and they used all the money to help his family. I have to hand my mother some credit too. She didn’t say, “Oh think of your own immediate family! We need something!” There was no thought about that. I think

both my parents thought, “Aren’t we blessed. We’ve really had it easy. We now have to do all we can to help in capital letters, the family.”

I didn’t come across any or maybe I was so clueless I didn’t appreciate it. I mean those little girls

at that birthday party, I didn’t sense anything the next day or the next week. I think they felt they’d been terribly lucky to be invited to such excitement. There were things like…I can remember…it might have been the local school or the local church. It was some local community where they hired a bus and we were taken to one of the seaside resorts to one of those fun fairs they have in England.

My mother gave us money and it sounds funny but we didn’t buy the return, and my grandfather said to my mother, “I’ll go and meet the bus when it comes back.” She said, “Oh they’re big enough to come home.” “No I think I’ll go and meet them.” We didn’t have the money for the return trip. The bus driver let us on and our

grandfather was smart enough to guess that we would have spent all the money at the fun fair, and the bus driver would have let us on the bus expecting someone to meet the bus, and to pay the fare. It was our grandfather. Our grandparents were really quite smart!

Except one of my uncles. My grandfather and his brother were both in the First World War and my grandfather had to go to a recruiting place, and he had a hammertoe. They said, “Can’t march with those feet! Through that door!” He thought that meant the door was into the street and it wasn’t at all. It was into another room where they chopped his hammertoe off! But my grandfather smoked a pipe

and I realised that telling jokes when you smoke a pipe is wonderful because the timing is everything, so he’d tell these stories, and he’d say, “Oh the war was terrific for me! Cured my hammertoe!” Then puff, puff, puff on the pipe! But his brother didn’t have a hammertoe and his brother didn’t have a very good war experience and was gassed, so Uncle Fred was allowed…I think it was three eggs a week but there again, no one said,

“Tut, tut! He shouldn’t be allowed three eggs a week!” I think people seemed to be very accepting and there were some families where there’d been two or three sons killed. How can anyone complain about anything? I can’t remember anybody complaining.

I can’t remember the details. I

do remember that apart from the very basic things that were specifically rationed, anything that wasn’t basic you would have to pay in points. I don’t even remember how many points you’d have a week but say you were allowed 30 points a week, then a tin of condensed milk would be x points or a tin of fruit, or a tin of sardines. Anything that came in a tin and any luxuries…we wouldn’t even consider them luxuries

today. Anything except the very basics were points and so you’d be juggling your points. You could save them up for a birthday, say sultanas or something like that and then if you wanted to make a cake, you’d really have to save up. Here in Australia now, I never crave sugar but in England you really craved sugar and so there was even a sugar ration. You’d think to yourself, you’d be mulling over, “Now marshmallows are

very light, so I can get an awful lot of marshmallows with my sweet ration.” Of course once you put a marshmallow in your mouth it doesn’t last very long, “So am I really better off to have a toffee, probably equal to four marshmallows but it will last much longer.” People would really think about things like this.

If you lived in the country you were better off because you could grow things.

My grandparents had quite a large garden and so my grandfather grew apples and things like that and had other fruit trees. In the summer he would grow things.

Not that I know of. I think it was possible that if your next door neighbour had a couple of hens but if you had quite a few hens they had to be registered. If you had half a dozen hens,

the government would know you had half a dozen hens. You might have a seventh hen on the quiet! [laughs] There was a lot of organization and you’d go to parks, and previously they might have had wrought iron fencing, well there was no wrought iron fencing because that had all been taken down to be made into armaments. People would have given their saucepans and things like that, so my grandmother only had a couple of saucepans. She’d given all the other saucepans

to the government!

It was just a little village school with a local village. It was called Send Church of England Grammar School. I was left-handed and in Australia Miss Windrich didn’t care two hoots whether I wrote with my left hand or my right hand but Miss Peren said, “Whenever you right with your right hand, you’ll get a gold

star no matter how bad the writing is but if you right with your left hand, you’ll have to write really carefully.” But I refused to write with my right hand and I still wrote with my left hand, whether I got a gold star or not, and blow me down! At the end of the year I got a prize for handwriting! About 10 years ago my husband was throwing out books and he was throwing out my handwriting prize! I said, “No! No! Throw out any book

of your own. You mustn’t throw out that handwriting book!” So I think I was rather a strong-willed child on certain things.

England was home. I’ve been told that people who are third culture children are like orchids; they’re easily transplanted. I’ve got

friends who find it terribly difficult to move home. One friend was moving from Northwood to Killara and she took years to cope with that move, whereas we moved here. My husband went to work from the old house and came home at the end of the day to this house. By the time he came home the pictures were on the walls, the furniture was in its position and no problems at all!

I know one has to work hard at making friends and I’m happy to do that, so being uprooted and being moved from A to B isn’t traumatic. There have been traumas, like when I went to Braemar and I thought I’d been abandoned. Another one, after a year with my grandparents, my grandmother

died while we were there. She died in April and my grandfather said, “Oh I’d feel cheated if I died in April having survived the winter and missed the spring and the summer! If I die, I want to die in Autumn!” But my mother and brother left England to go to Hong Kong because by then a primary school had opened and British women were allowed back

because before that, there was just no accommodation, and the infrastructure was ruined. It wasn’t only that the Japanese had done dastardly things but there’d been looting. Thousands of Chinese died of starvation and houses were looted for all the wood to cook the rice and things like that, so there had been a lot of damage. Anything that could be sold was sold, so pipes had been ripped out,

all the fixtures in houses had been ripped out. Anyway, after one year my mother and brother were able to return to Hong Kong and so they did. They went back…I wouldn’t have known. They went on the Empress of Australia and I’ve got some of the letters I wrote to my mother then, and I was left in boarding school. I went with my mother to have a look at the boarding school in Malvern and then she took me to the school

train, which left from Paddington or one of the big stations. I’ve forgotten which. I still remember getting on the train and seeing my mother walk down the platform. I was nine and I didn’t expect to see her again until I left school. When you’re nine, 17 seems a long time away, so that was traumatic but it wasn’t that it was England. It was just thinking, “I’m on my own.

I’m going to a boarding school. I don’t know anybody and in holidays I’ll be palmed off to various relations that I don’t know, so that’s going to be difficult.”

My brother and I were protected from it. I think probably this is the wrong thing to do. We didn’t go to her funeral. We didn’t do anything. She wasn’t well. She had pneumonia

and she died, and we weren’t sent off to stay with an aunt and uncle. I think that was the right thing from that perspective because I think our grandfather didn’t need to have grandchildren living in the house. Perhaps it would have been good if we could have gone to the funeral but I think it was very important for our grandfather to be in his home with our mother and it was lovely that our mother was

there to help him, to be with him so he wasn’t in the house all on his own after his wife died. She was able to cook and do things like that. Then he had a char [charwoman] who went everyday and she cooked for him, and she bossed him around. In England quite a lot of people have summer curtains and winter curtains. She’d say to him, “Oh it’s now time to put your summer curtains up and now I’ll take your summer curtains down

and wash them.” She’d do those sorts of things. A charwoman in England of that era is different from just the kind of cleaner I have today. Our grandparents were really very kind to us but it must have been quite an effort for them. I mentioned that my grandmother wrote every Sunday afternoon and

when my mother went to Hong Kong and left me in boarding school, her father said, “I never wrote. It was always your mother but now I’ll write,” and he did. He wrote every Sunday afternoon just as his wife had done and even the Sunday just before he died. He wrote half a letter. He wasn’t well enough to complete it, so he was very faithful over that. He did have one trip to Australia though.

I went to a school called Clarendon and there were a lot of children there whose parents were overseas. The Ethiopian princesses went there. The Emperor Haile Selassie grandchildren were there and children whose fathers were working in sugar plantations in Jamaica, children from all over the world. Not while I was there but

there had been some girls from Sydney there, before me and after me. Some children didn’t have anywhere to go for the holidays, so two or three teachers would take them sometimes on an overseas trip and sometimes just to a local place for the holidays but I would stay with various relations, mostly with my father’s brother and sister in-law,

the Auntie Marjorie who had been evacuated with her two children, and had gone back to Hong Kong. They were my guardians and that worked out well because Morris was only two months older than I was. He’s still two months older than I am and we email regularly! We write from time to time but we email regularly and I’m still closely in touch with that family. Sometimes they couldn’t have me, so I would

stay with another relation or two, including this Uncle Fred, the great uncle who was gassed during the war and his much younger wife. They didn’t have any children and so they really enjoyed me staying. I’d stay there for Easter and looking back on it, I must have lead them on a merry dance because I’d organise…I’d hide little things for them, little things that my mother had sent me from Hong Kong.

There’d be a treasure hunt and they’d have to search for the treasures I’d hidden for them, and they always cooperated. Another thing I’d do while I was there, The Times had children’s competitions, so I’d fill in the competitions and if I won the winning might be two and six or five shillings, and that was always terribly exciting. Twice my name and address was printed in The Times and

someone from my mother’s past would write to the address, so I’d be able to link my mother up with this long lost friend, which was rather nice.

When I was with Uncle Fred and Auntie Rose there was a little boy who lived three or four doors away, and they’d organise for us to do things together, so it was very thoughtful of them. As far as Morris was concerned, Morris and Janice, Oh I was really

involved in whatever their activities were, and my husband and I had a trip to Europe on our honeymoon. When we arrived at our hotel in London there was this wonderful lot of flowers and something about from the ‘Green Feather Bandits’. I didn’t know what it meant and later on when I saw Morris, he said, “What did you think of the flowers I sent from the ‘Green Feather Bandits’? I didn’t have a clue. He said, “Oh but remember we had…” and it was something with the Green…

we were part of a little group called the Green Feather Bandits and I was up to my ears in that but I’ve done a lot of living since then, and Morris had just stayed in Eastbourne, so he’d remembered the Green Feather Bandits and I hadn’t.

I have no idea. It was just some little club we had and we used to do things together. Their house was quite near the downs and being typically English, downs are hills, and we’d explore the downs and do things like that.

I imagine it was like bushrangers in Australia. I assume it was something like that but it was obviously not a girls’ group, boys and girls.

At boarding school we had to write every Sunday whether you wanted to or not. You had to write and my parents wrote very regularly. I haven’t kept any of their letters but my mother kept

most of mine, typical mother!

Three years.

Oh yes! I flew out to Hong Kong when I was 12.

Straight away after the war in England there were, no British women and children were permitted.

Things were pretty basic. My father was there with the British administration. He was given the title of captain and he had an army uniform. He was just involved with the reconstruction of Hong Kong and as time went on the infrastructure improved, and they didn’t start a secondary school but they did start a primary school, so my mother was on a ship with two of her sisters in-law,

went back at that time, one of them with three children, and so it was obviously possible for primary children to go back but not secondary children. So my father initially suggested that my brother should stay as a boarder but he was only just six, had just turned six but there were other six year olds at the boarding school I was in. There was a little girl called Audrey who was a boarder there at age six and in some of my letters I say,

“Audrey is sick. She’s still sick and can I give Audrey my doll?” I think she was psychologically sick probably, age six with her parents in China, really hard for a six year old. Her older sister was in my class. Looking back some of the teachers were wonderful. There was a Miss Drury, and Miss Singen was the matron. They were lovely but not everybody was. There was a Miss Henman, who was a bit

of a dragon and I can remember her, we weren’t allowed to put things on a dressing table, and I was making my bed one day so I’d put my nightie and things on a dressing table, and she brushed everything off including my doll, and my doll with its china head got broken. I thought that was a bit unkind, so some of them were a bit tough.

Until I finished school.

Yes. In 1948 the government decided that it was possible that some people in the Far East would actually pay for their children to go out for the summer holidays and so they organised a flying boat, a Sunderland Flying Boat to take children out…24 of us… it was either

24 or 26 of us who went out by flying boat. We flew from South Hampton. My Auntie Marjorie went with me to South Hampton and we got on the flying boat, and we flew to Marseille, and we stayed the night in a lovely hotel in Marseille. It was the first time I’d ever seen a bidet, never seen one before! We always stayed in the top hotel wherever we were. The next

day we flew and landed on the Nile. We stayed in Cairo in Shepherd’s Hotel, which has since burnt down. Then we flew and landed on the Persian Gulf, and then to India where we stayed in Bombay. Auntie Marjorie’s brother Sid, who was the captain of a ship, his ship happened to be in port, so I didn’t do what the other children did because we were taken on sight-seeing trip when we arrived but I didn’t

go on the sight-seeing trip. I went with my Uncle Sid back to his ship. Then we flew to Bangkok, landed there and the next day we flew to Hong Kong but at every spot one or two children got off. By the time I got off there was only one boy left on and he flew as far as Tokyo but I didn’t go back with the other children. My parents decided I could stay in Hong Kong,

so I went to school there for two years to King George V School, which was an English school but there again, there were children from all nationalities there. It was very easy to make friends because there were always new children, lots and lots of children coming all the time. There were Americans and white Russians, and Dutch. There was a girl called Birget Varning whose father was the head of the Royal Dutch…

I’ve forgotten what it is, anyway the Dutch shipping company and a French girl, Danielle de Santerre. There were some Aussies. There was a Danish boy called Oleg Johnson. There was Richard Guravitch and Svetlana Andreov. Richard Guravitch has come to Australia, a white Russian, and so has Paul Atrishenko. Paul has become an artist, quite a well known artist. There are quite a few who left Hong Kong

to come to Australia but some were only there for a year. Others would go on further and come back again.

Well we didn’t live in Hillview any more. My father started his own construction company and he built quite a lot of large buildings in Hong Kong but his main thing was three different

housing developments, and he would work really hard. As far as I’m aware he never took a holiday but he’d say, “Oh, a change is as good as a holiday!” So he’d always have some new project on but he never seemed to be stressed at the fact that he never had a holiday. I mentioned before he was really busy with all sorts of voluntary work, which he seemed to get a kick out of. He was involved in the Rotary Club where he was a kind of

chairman of their projects to help deprived people. They got an island and they would take street boys for holidays on the island and did all sorts of really quite worthwhile things there. Then of course the Salvation Army and the Girl Guides, and the Boy Scouts, and all the other things he was involved in.

We lived in Boundary Street in Hong Kong and we rented a house from the gas company. It was a three-storey house and I think he couldn’t afford to buy a house there because he was ploughing all his money into his company. I know after the war he was lucky, he was still in his 30s, so he could start again because he had to start again. So he had to borrow from the bank and he had absolutely no collateral but he had no problems because his name was so well

known, and so he was able to borrow enough money to buy all the equipment, you know the trucks and bulldozers. A construction company needs a lot of equipment and he obviously had no trouble getting all the equipment. He had 1,200 workers, so it was quite a big company. But then the Korean War put a dampener on things and also the Communists were coming closer and closer to Hong Kong

taking over China and the building game became a bit more difficult. More than that, having had the experience of so many of the family and friends being divided by war, he thought it was very important to leave Hong Kong, and the war years having been so happy in Australia, they thought Australia was the place to come to. So I was sent on ahead and

came to Abbotsleigh, and my family followed one term later. They built a house at Wahroonga and while the house was being built they bought a house at Gordon, and they lived in Gordon while the house in Wahroonga was being built. So my father didn’t sell his company in Hong Kong. He kept that going and so he maintained an office there, and he’d go to Hong Kong for a couple of weeks a year, and drum up enough business in those two

weeks to keep the company going for the next 52 weeks. One of his jobs while he was in Hong Kong was to be the consulting engineer of the British government in Borneo, so regularly from Sydney he’s fly up to Borneo and the British government at that time thought that the Communists would overrun Hong Kong but they didn’t think they would leave the Far East, and they thought they would develop Borneo. So he was instrumental in

flying over the area and deciding where it would be good to have ports and wharves, and highways, and reservoirs, all the infrastructure like that, so he regularly flew to Borneo.

When I got back to Hong Kong at the age of 12 things on the surface were pretty good. My parents still had…they rented a house. They didn’t own it but it was a three-storey house and the servants lived downstairs, so we had the cook and the makee learn, and we had a kway, who was the cleaning amah, and

we had Eyso, who was the wash amah, and we had the gardener and his wife still. We still had a staff of servants, so it still was not a difficult life for housewives, if you can call them housewives. My mother was also really involved with doing all sorts of things outside in various charitable things.

One of the first things they did, there was some great big monument in praise of the emperor right up high on the peak and I didn’t even see that. That had already come down. By the time I got there much of the infrastructure had already been built and building in Hong Kong was just going apace.

The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was the tallest building, so then the Bank of China built a building next door that was even taller. The British Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank had two English-looking lions outside, lovely bronze lions. So blow me down, the Chinese had two dragons just outside their bank. Nathan Road was still there with the Indian

shops and the banks with their Sikhs, with their great big turbans, one on either side of the entrance to the bank, and as you walked up Nathan Road all the Indian shopkeepers, “Come on! Come and buy! My silk much better than the silk next door and I can give you a better price!”

Oh no!

In fact people were very pro-British. Say the man who was the Chinese owner of the Kowloon Bus Company, he actually said to my father…One of my uncle, an Uncle Paul was involved in cars. He had the distribution rights for Leyland and various British motor vehicles

and after the war when Mercedes Benz was very successful, this man from the bus company said to my father, “I know Mercedes Benz buses are better buses but I would only buy British buses and I would only deal with your brother Paul!” So amongst the Chinese there was an intense hatred of the Japanese and I think even today every now and then you read in the papers or hear in the

media that China is furious about Japan not acknowledging the suffering of the Japanese people, and this business about comfort women, and the Chinese comfort women are trying to get compensation. The Chinese government is very annoyed about how they were treated, shamefully treated. More Chinese died as prisoners of various kinds than

Australians and British. Well, just like in Thailand on the Thai-Burma railway, it was the Thai people who died in greater numbers.

It’s still a very large community but until 1997

when Britain handed back Hong Kong, there were thousands of British people there. There was a British garrison there and with the Korean War, the Argyle and Southern Highlanders, and people like that were sent off to Korea. But I can remember being at school and they imagined that the Korean War was just a police action, and it would be over in the summer,

and it wasn’t, and so we were given wool, and even in class we would be knitting. We’d be sitting in our maths class knitting away, knitting balaclava helmets and even socks, but I could only knit the legs of socks and my mother would have to turn the heel of socks to send off to the Allied Forces. You weren’t sending it specifically to British or whoever,

it was just to the Allies. I mean there were even Turks on the Allied side but they said the Turks were okay. They didn’t need winter rations or food rations. Whatever they’d need they’d get from a killed North Korean! [laughs] Apparently they were very tough.

I knew which I preferred doing!

I’d rather knit than listen to the maths teacher,

who was Mrs Hill. She and I didn’t get on very well. I don’t think people on the whole worked very hard at that school in Hong Kong. The teachers didn’t seem terribly dedicated, most of them.

Yes.

Oh this was life wasn’t it? I mean is there any other life? Yes I just accepted it but it is strange looking back because I was speaking to someone a few years ago who said, “My husband had to go to boarding school and as an adult, for several years he wouldn’t speak to his parents or his sister because they didn’t send his sister to boarding school.”

I thought, “Isn’t that amazing. My brother never had to go to boarding school.” But I’ve never really thought of being angry or bitter, or annoyed. This was just my life, so at the age of five or six I went to boarding school for the first time and then nine, and then I was the one sent to Australia but my brother aged 11 waited in Hong Kong, and came down by ship with our parents, whereas I was sent off

prematurely by air. That’s the way it went but for some people obviously it’s something they find so traumatic that they’re angry with their family over that. Things are just different for different people.

Well actually I found them terribly immature. This is going on tape!

I hope no one from my school era ever hears this! I found them terribly childish because there was one other girl who had come from England. I think her parents came straight from England, Diana Parrot but the others…no, no there was one other girl who had been evacuated from Tokyo at the outset of war but all the others had just grown up in Australia, most up on the North Shore.

There were boarders of course but most had lived very sheltered sort of lives and I thought they were really playing very childish games, and the kind of imagination games that I hadn’t played for a long time. You know pretend games? I was used to playing Canasta and card games like that, and doing what I thought were more adult things. So to begin with it was a bit of an effort for me to

rush around the bush in what was known as the ‘Glen’, pretending that I really enjoyed playing imagination games but I did!

I don’t know if it was the war. I think people in Hong Kong maybe they grew up too soon. I don’t know. Maybe in Australia it was better but

Hong Kong was a very sophisticated place and you learnt from all the different ethnic groups. Say the white Russians, they must have lived a terribly difficult time because their grandparents and parents had been kicked out from Russia and travelled through Siberia to Manchuria, then they’d taken refuge in China, then there’d been the Japanese occupation, and they’d had to come to Hong Kong. So they had to learn language after language and then to come

to a European place like Hong Kong, they must have had some extraordinary things happen to them. Some of them, say Ingrid, who had spent the war years in Holland where they just about starved to death. They’d had terrible experiences. I don’t remember any Germans or Japanese in my class. There were two Chinese in the

class in Hong Kong, so in comparison with other people I’d had a pretty easy life really. I don’t think anyone in my year at Abbotsleigh would have known that I was playacting when I was doing these pretend games.

I don’t think they were interested. I really don’t think they were interested. Some of them are amongst my best friends now.

I had dinner with one of them last Friday. I was at school with her and did occupational therapy with her, and the husbands, we all get together. I was bridesmaid for some and they were bridesmaid…one of them was bridesmaid for me. I’m very good friends with a lot of them. In fact I’m organising the 50th reunion with another committee and next month we’re

having one of our reunion. Four times a year we have a reunion our class and so I was on the phone with three of them yesterday about going up to Copacabana. So I made an effort.

Margaret Mundy is the only one I was at school with in Hong Kong that I’ve kept up with from Hong Kong days. Patsy, Patsy Wood

my closest friend from pre-war days. I’m still in touch with her and my son was in England two or three years ago, and he stayed with Patsy in London. Two of her children have been…three of her children have been out here. Two have stayed here with us and I’m expecting Patsy and her husband to come and stay later, on their way to New Zealand.

My mother didn’t keep up with the evacuees because the evacuees then, they all dispersed. Like I’m saying that I’m in touch with Margaret, she became a friend of mine when we were both

in the same class at King George V in Hong Kong and we’ve kept it up ever since. My mother was in touch with evacuees like Mrs Woods, who returned to England. She didn’t maintain contact with any of the evacuees that returned to Australia.

They seemed to have no trouble fitting in at all. They got really busy and involved in all sorts of things. My father was terribly busy with work and then he stopped the travel overseas, and he was asked to go back to Timbrels, which by then was sold to an American company called Union Carbide. So he took over the job he’d had before as Union Carbide,

which was a much smaller outfit than he had been involved in, in Hong Kong because he was a real wheeler and dealer. When he left Hong Kong it was front page news. He really was something in Hong Kong but as I said, he ended up being Senior Citizen of the Year because of all sorts of community things he did. He just couldn’t help himself helping people and the head of the Anglican Retirement Village for instance,

said to my father, “Oh do you have any troubles in this village?” My father said, “No. No we don’t have any troubles,” because he was really good at solving disputes. There might be someone in the village who would get up and have a shower at midnight and upset the person in the unit underneath, and in some villages that would escalate, whereas my father could somehow solve things so either the man having midnight showers stopped having them or…

I don’t know how he did it but he was one of these wonderful conciliators.

I suppose I did but I don’t know that really

would have worried one way or the other. When I was here, Patsy had left school because she was actually a year older than me and she and her sister spent a year travelling around Australia, and her parents came here, and then we had a trip overseas, and their parents had our cars and our house while we were away. Patsy knew that I was about to start occupational therapy and her grandfather had said,

“You should do A.You should do B.” The one and only thing he hadn’t suggested was occupational therapy, so she decided she’d do that. She thought she’d do it in Sydney and she went to speak to the head therapist, who said, “No, do it in England.” Well I’d have been quite happy to have gone to England and have done it with her but I didn’t, and having finished I then went to England for 18 months, and I wouldn’t have minded staying in England. It wouldn’t have bothered me.

It sounds funny if you’ve got deep roots somewhere but perhaps I don’t have deep roots anywhere and yet I’m very happy here, and I am an Australian citizen! I’ve got a piece of paper to prove it!

No,

I came back when I was 15, just before I was 15 sorry.

I think Beecroft was one little community but my

parents moved from Wahroonga to Palm Beach, so they moved around. I think wherever they lived there was a sense of community. When they were at Palm Beach the sense of community occurred when the holiday crowd left, so there was the invasion for December, January and they breathed a sigh of relief when the end of January came, and they could be back in their community. They lived at Castlecrag and that was a wonderful sense of

community. Subsequently we moved into their house when they moved into a retirement village and that was a terrific sense of community. So I think there are still parts of community life in Sydney and Castlecrag is one of them. A little peninsular with a preschool kindergarten and if you’re involved, and I was president or something of the kindergarten, you get really involved in all the

activities there. You go to the shops and it takes ages because you know 10 of the people at the shops while you’re there. There was a regular fete at the community and you’d get involved in that. At the local church there was an art show every year and Alan would be on duty sleeping overnight to help guard all the expensive paintings owned by Mr

Crebbin, who had a terrific art collection. There really was a great sense of community at Castlecrag and I think there probably still is now.

I’m delighted to feel that my parents were some of the very few privileged for whom the war was an asset, in that it brought them to a country like Australia. If there had been no war, they would never have come to Australia. It would have just been Hong Kong and then England, and Australia gives a much better way of life for my

son and future generations, if there are any. So for me the war…isn’t this awful but the war has introduced my section of the family to Australia and my father’s mother actually came from Australia, and her family had a very interesting history in Australia beforehand, and to think that that side of the family would have not come to Australia at all.

I feel that my parents were right in saying that if it hadn’t been for my parents coming here and having the assets that they had to help re-establish my father’s family, they really would have been in a very sad state after the war. So personally it’s been helpful to me but also it enabled my parents to really do really important things for his

family, so the timing was right!

I’m sure there are masses of things that have been left out but I can’t remember them. I think I’ve done far too much talking. I’m not used to this!

I like the thought that Australia was a very welcoming country. It was at a time when Australia had so much to think about themselves, sending sons overseas and going through lots of traumas themselves, I’m stunned that they would put the welcome mat to people they owed absolutely nothing to. They didn’t need to say,

“Yes you can come.” Or they could have been very unpleasant and been reluctant to accept the evacuees. I’m stunned that a country like Australia would be more than welcoming and go the extra mile, and be such a wonderful place that oodles of people have come back. In an era when

the average wife would not take the leadership role but would go where her husband wanted her to go, these women had had such a terrific time in Australia that they were able to, not arm twist their husbands but put Australia in such a positive light that many, many of these men chose Australia as their home. Actions speak louder than words and that really tells

us something.

Thank you.