ROOTS (part 2)

My mother had an entirely different childhood.  Born a year earlier than my father and one of two identical twin girls.

Living in a beautiful seaside town on the north coast of Cornwall, England her childhood was marked by happiness, family love and the added bonus of being one of 'the twinnies' as the townsfolk called them.  Her father was the head waiter at the poshest hotel in town and during the war he worked in the catering corps at the nearby RAF base.

They shared their school with evacuees so only went in the mornings.  The rest of the day was theirs to play in the fields or watch the fishing boats in the harbor or swim and play on the miles of golden sandy beaches their town was famous for.

Holidays were spent with her grandparents, Aunts, Uncles and cousins in our ancestral village in the south of the county.  The war was only an occasional reality.  Watching dog fights during the battle of Britain, the occasional of bombing from the Luftwaffe who would sometimes, when damaged, aim their planes for the RAF base, sometimes strafing gunfire along the way before they crashed, usually into the ocean.

Her father's family lived in Plymouth which was England's most heavily bombed city during the war.  On one single air raid 17 of her relatives were killed when the 'gerries' hit the gasworks setting off a series of explosions along the gas pipes for several miles.

She left school at 13 and held various shop jobs eventually working in a photographic shop.  It was here in the early 1950's that she met a handsome young man whose had been born and raised in India during the last days of the British Raj.

Their relationship lasted for over two years and she was madly in love with his charming, gentle and exotic manners.  One night he planned a special night out at an expensive restaurant.  Mum was sure he was going to ask her to marry him.  Instead he 'came out' to her and said he loved her dearly as a friend but had been using their relationship as a mask to hide his true nature from his family.  He was a homosexual and couldn't bear to keep pretending to her.  Heartbroken she took a taxi home while he got on his motorbike and drove at high speed into a tree, dying instantly.

Heartbroken my mother decided to emigrate to Australia where she had a cousin living who promised that he and his wife would take her in and look after her.

They lived outside of Cairns in Far North Queensland and ran a sugar cane plantation.  Her new life turned into a nightmare.  Her cousins, far from looking after her, treated her as unpaid labour  and the culture shock of arriving in 1950's rural Australia, where it was all beer drinking, swearing and constant reminders that she was 'another of those pommie bastards' was too much for her to take.

 
These two events would greatly affect her future views on both men and Australians.

She moved to Brisbane where one of her cabin friends from the ship she arrived on took her in and got her a job as a waitress.  It was here that she met my father who was on a two month transfer working as a chef.  His charming continental manners swept her off her feet and when he returned to Sydney and wrote to her asking her to marry him she jumped at the offer.

They had a simple wedding and honeymooned at the Berowra Waters Inn, an area which would later play a big part in our lives.  A year later my oldest sister was born and a year after that they returned to England where my other sister was born.  3 years later I was born.

Sadly as much as my mother loved living back in Cornwall with her family close by, my father hated it.  Not only did my grandparents resent him for being foreign , but even more so because he was Catholic and my mother had changed her religion to marry him.  He worked in my grandfathers restaurant under much resentment and isolation from the rest of the family, until 1965 when he demanded we return to Australia.  And that's really where my story begins.......