THM:<\/strong> Alright. It is a blurr. That time in my life was lost to me a little. I was well… I thought I only went to grade 1 when I was aged six at East Victoria Park Primary School, but apparently not. I was also there in grade 2 and part of grade 3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My sisters and brother had all left Mofflyn Homes for Craig House, a Legacy hostel. I had no idea what a Legacy hostel was but they had to move, to my knowledge, because they were too old to stay at the Mofflyn homes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of my memory of this time is just not there. I think I only remember being there, and my sister Barb leaving me, going over to have a trial run at Craig House, and then coming back and going to live at Craig House. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I now realise that I did go and have a bit of a trial run. There was a time when I stayed over after a recent fire had happened. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The fire had been in Matron\u2019s sitting room fire – the wall that divided her sitting room and the main girls\u2019 bedroom called the Blue Room, which held 5 girls\u2019 beds. It was only a single layer brick, rather than a double layer and the fire burnt through to the girls\u2019 cupboards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Blue Room had been fairly damaged by fire and when I arrived the girls who had slept in the Blue Room were sleeping in the lounge room, and that’s where I slept when I came to stay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Initially it’s where I thought I slept when I came to stay permanently, but I now think that it was when I came as a bit of a trial to see how I would fit in at Craig House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Craig House was for older children. As a rule, they only took high school students. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I also went there after an ANZAC Day March which I didn’t understand. We walked behind the Wreath of Laurel flag which was the symbol of Legacy, a blue and yellow flag. We marched along the [St Georges] Terrace and then down onto The Esplanade, and there was a flyover and speeches by the Governor and various military dignitaries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We went and Colin wore our Dad’s medals from World War II. I know that at one stage the medals were put on me to wear. I don’t know if it was that time, as a special thing for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We marched, and I do remember I liked that because I was with my sisters and brother. There were people who lined the streets watching the parade and they clapped us and I didn’t really know what it was for. But, I was happy to be there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It may have been another time, but I think it all coincided with ANZAC Day and a sleepover. ANZAC Day is a holiday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t actually remember any official thing being done for my leaving Mofflyn Home to live at Craig House. All the children I knew just moved. There was no party or anything like that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I moved to Craig House and I shared a bedroom in the annexe with my sister Barb, and Nance had a room at the end of the annexe. There were also Barb or Nancy’s friends who were in another one or two rooms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Near there was where the storeroom was, which is where all the food was stored. It was quite often that there would be raids on the storeroom to get food. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The annexe used to be the boys\u2019 quarters and at some point when I moved there, which was in July 1965, a new, boys quarters was built at the back of the block of land. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Prior to that the boys slept at the house next door, a grand old house that was owned by the Bonnerups. The Bonnerups also had a house in Mount Lawley and they lived in that house. They allowed their house in South Perth to be used by the boys until the boys quarters were built. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The new building was quite modern for those times. There were boys\u2019 bedrooms, and at the end, a self contained flat attached which was for the housemaster and housemistress, who were employees who looked after everybody. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Initially they just looked after the boys but later, the girls too when Matron had breaks, and she would go away. She would go down to Busselton [in the South West of the state, about 200km away] where her sister Faith and her family, the Hemsleys lived on a property down there. Dr Hemsley was a GP in the Busselton Region and they were a well-known family who had a horse property, and they also had sheep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, I don’t really recall much of when I moved to Craig House from Mofflyn. My sister knows more than I do in regards to me moving there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At first I shared a room with Barb. I was always in trouble with her because in 1965 she was 14, and right at that age of being very much into pop stars, and loving pop stars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She was a fanatic about putting up posters, and placing stuff around the room which I wasn’t allowed to touch. She recalls forever screaming at me to leave her stuff alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t remember any of that. I was just really happy to be there, because I was sharing a room with my sister, and she was very pretty, and all the boys liked her, whereas I was quite an ugly duckling of the family, the skinny girl with thick glasses and very bad teeth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I wore a plate to separate my teeth because they crossed over each other and were quite rotten and overcrowded. [GM: This was due to Marfan syndrome.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once I was at Craig House I started to go to Forest Street Primary School in South Perth. My siblings had already moved to high school. They went to Kent Street High School which is where I went later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At Craig House most of the girls were friendly, but all older than me, except for a little while there was a girl called Bettine Byron. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn’t know what this place was. It was called a hostel. It wasn’t a home, and it wasn’t run by the church, or child welfare. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a place that was run by Legacy, which was an organisation, which was a patriarchal organisation that looked after the wives and children of the men who didn’t come back from, primarily, World War 2 and World War 1. They dealt with the families from other conflicts as well, but in my time it was primarily World War 2. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When new children would come to Craig House I would ask if they were a double, or a single orphan, feeling that it was just an ordinary question<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n My understanding of how it worked was that people, men, from Legacy acted as if they were your father, or at least as a father figure. This was especially the case for widowed women in the country areas who were running rural properties without their husbands to assist them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The children had to come to the city to get a high school education anyway. So Craig House was basically a hostel, like a boarding school, except Legacy was a charity so these people were nominated to come and stay, and Legacy looked after the children and paid for their accommodation and some of their schooling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I guess it depended on how much the wife or mother of the children could contribute to their upbringing. If they were sending their children to a private school the mother may have had money. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Those things never came to me as being of any consequence. It was just another place we went to because we were orphans, and I didn’t understand that, except that it meant that I didn’t have a mum and I didn’t have a dad. So therefore, I was a double orphan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When new children would come to Craig House I would ask if they were a double, or a single orphan, feeling that it was just an ordinary question. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I had no idea of whether they would be suffering any pain, because up to that stage of my life, really, from 2 years old or being able to have any memory, the majority of people I knew were people who had either no parents, or no mother or no father. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was just a fact. There were people who had parents, and there were people who didn’t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It didn’t make us worse off, but we were grateful to people who would take us in off the streets so we wouldn’t starve to death. And Craig House was very much a place of \u201cbeing grateful\u201d to all those people who looked after us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The men who were assigned to each family were called Legartees. It worked in the same way as a Masonic Lodge might work. A person had to be nominated by another person who thought they were of good character and good civic mindedness, and quite often have potentially enough money to contribute money to Legacy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Because apart from charity tin collections, from people in the streets, I don’t really know how they got their money. Some money was bequeathed to them by ex-military people, but I don’t know how the place was run. It wasn’t run by the church. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I was a \u201cward of the state\u201d which meant that I came under the banner of Child Welfare. A lot of the kids who went there came under the banner of Veterans Affairs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Each of those government departments gave various money, for various reasons. Some people got more money than others and were sent to better schooling, or better accommodation than others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t know how that worked. I just knew that I lived at Craig House. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As an adult my sister Nancy initially couldn’t remember that I was there, or when I moved there, but later on did realise that she lived at the same place as me for a time. I think part of that, is that once we went to Mofflyn Homes our family relationship, by and large, disintegrated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Even at Craig House Colin was separated because he lived in the boys\u2019 quarters. He was a shy child. He wasn’t intellectually clever, and he seemed to be a strange child and didn’t make a lot of male friends at Craig House. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a housemaster there at the time called Mr Tognolini who did take a shine to Colin when Colin didn’t make it into high school because his results weren\u2019t good enough. Mr Tognolini was a very good swimmer. I think he was a teacher. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t know if it was the case that the house masters had to be teachers, but as a rule they were. And so were their wives, who really only in the late 1960s played any role at all other than being there for when Matron went away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, Mr Tognolini helped Colin very much with learning mathematics, which he couldn’t do at all, and Colin, later in life, became a civil engineer, which he did it with a lot of study and also that grounding from Mr Tognolini. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She taught me how to do sign language, and I loved talking to her. She was always very sunny and happy to me.<\/em><\/strong> <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n That meant that Colin was the first in our family to go to university and get a degree. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, I was with Nancy for a very little time, a matter of months. I think it was only until the end of that first year when Nancy moved out of Craig House. I moved out of sharing a room with Barb, I think because we squabbled too much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Betine Byron came along she was about my age but wasn’t really going to stay at Craig House for very long. There was something different about her. She was either the child of a Legatee you needed to have some accommodation while her parents were overseas, or she was only going to be in Perth for a short amount of time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I think it was only a period of months that we were there together, but she was more my age and I did have fun with her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By 1967 I did get some younger people coming to Craig House but up to that point I was with all the older girls, who were the same age as my sisters Barb and Nancy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I would go to the lolly shop near Mill Point Road, at least I called it the lolly shop, to buy her a packet of Peter Stuyvesant. Matron smoked them like a chimney.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Their friends were all friendly to me. One of the girls in particular, Lynn, who was deaf, we got along very well. She taught me how to do sign language, and I loved talking to her. She was always very sunny and happy to me. Some of the other girls were nice to me but not necessarily friendly to me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So, in 1967 Helen, who would become my best friend, came to live at Craig House. She was 10 and so was I, and I was so excited that her birthday was the 11th of August, exactly 1 month before mine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The day she arrived Matron gave us a little job to do where we had to walk up to the local Mends Street shops. In those days they were just a strip of shops with a petrol station on the corner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I would go to the lolly shop near Mill Point Road, at least I called it the lolly shop, to buy her a packet of Peter Stuyvesant. Matron smoked them like a chimney. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Helen and I walked up there, and we were so excited because Helen had a threepence which she showed me. We had decided that we would try and find threepences because we would make a lot of money because the previous year Australian currency changed from pounds, shillings and pence to dollars and cents. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So the threepence, which would be the equivalent of 3 cents was not around any more. There was a 5 cent piece that looked a bit like it. I was very impressed that Helen had threepence and we went and bought Matron her packet of cigarettes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I think we had a little bit of money and we bought some lollies, and I think we talked all the way there and all the way back. I think I did most of the talking because I was so excited to have a new friend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Helen was quite quiet. She did have a mum, but her Mum couldn’t look after her. So she was just a single orphan, not a double orphan. We moved in together into what had now become the Pink Room. It had changed from the Blue Room after the fire. There were also three other girls who shared the room. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Helen and I went to Forrest Street Primary [in South Perth] together, and she came to grade 5 with me. We were in the same class because there was only one grade 5 class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We walked to school. It was quite a walk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We had to walk up past the zoo, so we would hear all the animals who were quite loud, and in those days you did hear the monkeys, and the elephants and the lions. In later years those noises seemed to disappear to a certain degree. I don’t really know why, but it was much louder in those days. Probably because they were in smaller cement cages and weren’t treated as well as they were in later years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We would love terrorising all the younger kids at school<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n But, all along the road, on the verge there were large plane trees, up and down the street, so there was lots of leaf litter everywhere. And there were squirrels everywhere<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We loved the squirrels, but of course they were not considered to be animals that were wanted. They were a pest. They weren’t something that the zoo wanted. <\/p>\n\n\n\nTrying Trenna Out<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a><\/a>To Craig House<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Legacy<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>A New Friend<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>An Adventure Every Morning<\/h3>\n\n\n\n