Day 16 - Modern things

Mrs Pearson was our landlady and I think she must have been nearly a hundred years old. She lived downstairs with her stout little dachshund who was the only dog I wasn't terrified of.

She liked modern things but really, it was a long time ago when they were modern.

Mrs Pearson fascinated me and even though I knew I wasn't supposed to disturb her, I loved to go down to visit her sometimes. She didn't actually mind being disturbed, and she would show me her treasures which were very colourful costume jewellery pieces that smelt strongly of stale perfume.

On a pedestal in the hallway, stood a black bakelite telephone with an old silver dial that still had letters as well as numbers on it. A few times, my parents asked if they could use it and Mrs Pearson said they could.

In the laundry out the back of the house, there was a washing copper with a gas boiler underneath to heat the water. Not quite a modern washing machine but I didn't mind because I loved the smell of the soapy boiling water and best of all, I loved it when my mother let me turn the handle to squeeze the clothes through the wringer.

Day off

Dear Readers, thank you for visiting my blog :-)

I am having a day off today, so I hope you come and visit again tomorrow. I'll have a new story and linoprint for you then.

x

Day 15 - Sad moon

One night I couldn't sleep so I got out of bed and went to the bathroom.

There was bright light streaming through the frosted glass of the bathroom window and it didn't seem to be from a street light. I wondered what it was, so I climbed onto the toilet seat and stood on my tippy toes to open the old window to investigate.

I pushed the window open and saw a beautiful big full moon. But the moon looked sad and I thought maybe the moon had a sad face because he knew I should be asleep in bed.

"Please don't be sad, moon. I'll go straight back to bed, I promise." And I did.

But the full moon still always looks sad.

Day 14 - The baby

Then my sister was born and she was a real Aussie. Now our family had a solid connection to this new country, because no matter where else we might go, my sister's place of birth would always be Australia.

She was just beginning to learn to talk when I started school. Each day when I got home, I proudly showed off the English I had learnt, although I often mixed up the two languages. I was working through my 'David, Sue and Wendy' book at school, and sometimes I cried because Wendy was such a difficult word that I thought I would never in my whole life learn to spell it.

But my baby sister was immersed in two languages from the start and she just absorbed them both with an impish smile.

Day 13 - Fish in the pan

Our next home was closer to the sea again. Although this neighbourhood lacked all the little 'continental' shops of the inner city, it more than made up for it with beaches and headlands and bushland. It was a lovely suburb for going for walks and we often went to the beach to make sand castles and to play in the waves.

I think we had very little money during that time, so sometimes when my father came home in the afternoon, he would go rock fishing for our dinner. All four of us went on these afternoon fishing excursions. While my father fished, my mother watched my brother and me as we played with toy boats in rock pools or climbed on rocks.

Some days my father caught a big fish, but mostly they were pretty small.

My parents didn't want relatives in the old country to know that things were a struggle for us. To reassure the relatives that life in Australia was simply perfect, my mother and father asked me for my dolls' cooking set. My father had caught three little fish that day. He and my mother artistically arranged one of the fish in the dolls' frying pan, with a few mini tomatoes alongside to give a sense of scale (they were supposed to look like big tomatoes).

When our relatives received the photo in the next letter, they marvelled that my dad caught fish that were too big to even fit in the frying pan!

Day 12 - The old quarry

Berlin and Melbourne are flat cities, but Sydney has lots of steep hills. Each day, my mother took my brother and me on a walk up and down the hilly narrow inner-city streets near our house.

We walked to the post office to buy aerogrammes and to post letters back to family and friends far away.

We walked to the little deli that sold 'continental' groceries which you couldn't buy in 'normal' grocery stores back then: things such as dark rye bread and olives and gherkins and liverwurst and cheeses that weren't cheddar.

We also often walked to the little park with the swing. The little park was at the high end of a street and it had a sort of rock cliff that dropped down to the streets below. I wonder if the area down there may have once been a quarry. My mother didn't like us going close to the edge, but I loved it because from there, the houses down below looked like they were a sort of toyland.

Once my brother rolled a big glass marble over the cliff edge. I hoped that it would bounce all the way down to the miniature-looking houses at the bottom, and knock them all down. But instead the marble just disappeared.

My brother was very sad that he had lost his precious marble. I was sad that I had missed out on seeing the demolition of toyland.

Day 11 - No noise please

The first place where we lived in Sydney was

an inner-city terrace house on a narrow street.

It was quite a change after having lived close

to the sea in Melbourne.

My family shared the house with a man who

was a student. Although we almost never saw

him, we knew he had a lot of important work

to do because the sign on his door said that

we must be very quiet.

I had a feeling the sign really meant that the

man didn't like children very much. Maybe my

parents had that feeling too because we found

a better place to live before too long.

Day off

Dear readers,
I have decided that if I am going to do this for 60 days, I need to have one day off each week.
I will have a new story and a new linoprint for you tomorrow.
I hope you understand :-)

Day 10 - Easter Egg

After a couple of years in Melbourne, we moved to Sydney. Something to do with my father's work but I didn't understand what.

Our old black car had recently been replaced by a new green VW beetle which was very nice even though it was a bit of a squeeze with all our luggage. We headed out on the long road north on Easter Saturday.

The adventure of moving to a new place was so exciting that I almost forgot about Easter. Anyway our usual Easter tradition was to paint hard-boiled eggs, and there wasn't much opportunity for that on the road. We camped in our tent on Saturday night, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

It turned out not to be so bad to be in the middle of nowhere because apparently that is where the Easter bunny lives.

On Sunday morning, my brother and I just could not believe it when we crawled out of the tent and each found a big Easter egg. Beautiful, shiny,colourful and made of chocolate!