PARENTS ARE PEOPLE TOO!

My Mum and Dad, Percy and Doris Penford in one of their many gardens

Writing about a period in Christina Booth’s family’s experience the other day caused me to reflect on my own, and for most of us the stories which enrich our family history are so easily lost. It seems that only as we get older do we see our parents and grandparents and those even further back as individuals with their own dreams and passions and goals for their lives. Programs like Who do you think you are? where celebrities delve into their family trees to discover all manner of previously unknown details highlight just how little we know about our forebears.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, Mum and Dad were simply Mum and Dad. While I was busy getting on with what I wanted to do, and trying to work out who I was and where I fitted in the vast scheme of things, I probably gave little thought to what my parents might have wanted out of life and whether or not they felt they were on the right track to achieve that.

To discover late in my mother’s life that as a nursing volunteer in the early years of World War 2 she would hop on her pushbike as soon as the air raid sirens went off and pedal like fury to the local hospital to start work, made me see her in a whole new light and admire her for her courage. And the fact that pushing ninety she could still remember word for word great long poems she had learned as a girl in school, made me realise there was more to her than simply the person I knew. She was ‘somebody’ before I came along, but like many women of her generation her own needs were relegated to the back burner while the business of being a mother and caring for the home and family became her central role.

And what about Dad. A true Englishman, and conservative to boot, he was always particular about how he presented himself, never venturing out unless he was fully kitted out with pressed pants, shirt and tie, waistcoat and jacket, and dapper hat to top it all off. But being a garden lover he could get down and dirty too, and lovingly coaxed whatever patch of dirt he called home to produce a prolific array of colour. We were always working class, and I wonder if the brightness he liked to create was a way of compensating for the mundane everyday routines.

Because of their conservative nature, one of the things which amazed me most was their decision to leave England and migrate to Australia early in 1961. Of course, a lot of other Poms were doing it too, but here they were, almost fifty years old and with three kids, a time of life most of us wouldn’t contemplate such a huge move. Uprooting themselves, leaving everything familiar behind and heading half way round the world to forge a whole new life for the family at their age took some guts. For them, it was supposedly an opportunity for a brighter future for the whole family, but for me the trip itself was a right royal adventure.

Five weeks on an ocean liner, stopping off at foreign ports which felt exotic and exciting, spending the days exploring the ship with my brother, and finally landing in a new country to be housed temporarily in army huts until Dad could find work and we could find our own accommodation. Like living in a permanent caravan park, but with everybody eating together in a huge mess hall, there wasn’t exactly much privacy. More than a few interesting stories could come out of that period of my family’s life. Temporary became 18 months until we finally moved into a modest rented suburban house in Melbourne.

My parents are now gone, and sadly I wonder how well I really knew them. It’s one thing to reconstruct a family tree, to compile who married who and when and who their children were and work backwards to see just how many people are part of the fabric of who we have become. What’s missing though are the stories that family tree represents, the lives behind the names and dates, the rich inheritance waiting there to be uncovered. Old photo albums hold a wealth of information, but too often really only have significance to those who were there at the time.

So, it’s prompted me to begin an autobiography of sorts, not a boring tome to be shelved and never read, but the story of my life in little snippets, complete with photos, so my grandchildren, and even my children who know me but don’t know everything about me, can discover something of what makes this old girl tick. Could take a while.