As was the way in many large farm families, the older Gittens children were assigned to looking after younger ones. Blanche was fortunate to have not just one but two siblings of the right age to amuse her when she small. The twins Bert and John, then ten or eleven years old, made a box sledge for their little sister to ride in, and Blanche’s earliest memories were of the thrills and spills of being hauled around in her "cart" by her two "horses." Blanche loved her father and all her brothers and sisters, but Bert and John always had a special place in her heart.
Blanche’s childhood was generally happy, but it was not easy. The war years and the early twenties were difficult ones for the family. They never actually starved, but at times they had to make do with essentially the same food as the farm animals, such as boiled wheat and molasses. When the children complained of the monotony of their diet their father would tell them they weren’t hungry enough. "Hunger is the best sauce," he said.
It wasn’t just the food that was monotonous. Diversions, too, were rare in those times. The event of the year was the agricultural show at Tambellup. The children looked forward to the show for weeks in advance, and to miss it was the bitterest of misfortunes.
This happened to Blanche when she was ten. It was a punishment for leaving a gate open and letting the sheep get out--an oversight of a sort that could have had serious consequences, for instance if the rams and ewes had intermingled out of season. Her father gave her the choice between a spanking on the spot or staying home from the show, then two weeks away. She thought he would forget, so she said she would stay home from the show. He didn’t forget, and Blanche never forgot the pain--far worse than a spanking--of waving goodbye to her sisters Mae and Ethel as they set out with the family on their way to Tambellup.
Lacking the glamour of the show, but exciting nonetheless, were family picnic outings in a two-horse wagon with John in the driver’s seat. A happy-go-lucky youth with a passion for speed, John consistently won the battle with his brothers to take the reins, and he loved to send the wagon hurtling through the bush without regard for things--and occasionally, riders--falling off the back.
On one occasion the oldest girl, Ethel, then about nine years old, fell from the wagon and hurt her back. From about that time, her arms and legs stopped growing, and the family came to believe this must have been a result of her injury. Only much later did they realize that her condition was of genetic origin--achondroplastic dwarfism, characterized in adults by a normal trunk but shortened extremities and a large head. Happily, Ethel’s sunny disposition and physical hardiness won out over adversity, and she went on to a good life despite her disability.
Lacking a school in the neighborhood, the older Gittins children had only a sketchy education. But in 1919 a school was established a little over three miles from the house. (The school site is indicated with an historical marker.) Blanche attended the school for three of the seven or eight years before it closed for lack of the requisite six pupils.
Her younger brother, Ron, also attended the school. As a toddler, Ron suffered a head injury when he was kicked by a horse, but he recovered well enough to start school at age six, and had a full six year's schooling.
Both Blanche and Ron walked to school barefoot on a stony road. This was no fun on a frosty winter morning!
Even less fun, for Blanche, were the teacher’s fits of irrational rage. Apparently the teacher, later Mrs. George Hodby, had not been properly trained and was temperamentally unsuited to working with children. Her method of individual instruction consisted of screaming the lesson at the top of her voice while whacking the child’s desk with a cane. Frightened, Blanche failed to progress as she should have. She never forgave Mrs. Hodby and never spoke to her in the subsequent decades they continued to live in near proximity in Tambellup.
Despite Mrs. Hodby's shortcomings as a teacher, as an adult Blanche was able to set down her thoughts in vivid, spontaneous prose marred only by occasionally shaky spelling. She learned to read well enough to find imaginative escape from the loneliness and monotony of the farm in works of fiction such as those Zane Grey, Rider Haggard, P. J. Wodehouse, and especially Mary Grant Bruce, an entertaining but now-forgotten Australian writer of school stories. Unfortunately she later subscribed to the notion, popular in Blanche's milieu, that fiction was "a lot of silly rot" as she put it, compared to nonfiction, or "true" literary works, like biographies. "As far as my feet will carry me," by J. M. Bauer, a prison-escape thriller, and "Growing Up," by Russell Baker are examples of biographies that pleased her in later life.
By the time Blanche had finished school, Arthur was back from the war and the farm was prospering after a succession of good years. All five of the older boys continued to work on the farm.
Frank Gittins, about 1940
The brothers had a blacksmith shop for making repairs to farm machinery and, on one occasion, for first aid. John choked on a fish bone and was having trouble breathing. Some sort of implement was needed clear the blockage, and Frank was the man up to the job. He lit the forge and smithed a forceps from a length of number 8--thick-- fencing wire. The bone came out without much trouble. For years the improvised forceps remained on display on the kitchen mantlepiece both as a momento of the occasion and as a reminder to chew carefully before swallowing.Blanche’s older sister, Ethel, married and went to live with her husband, Mick Miniter, on a farm only two or three miles from the Gittins homestead.
In the twenties it became clear that the farm was too small to support all five brothers, and Frank and later Bert got outside jobs for extra money with the idea of branching out on their own, while Arthur, Charlie and John remained on the farm and later increased their holding by the purchase of a 2000 acre tract known as Parker's located a few miles to the east of the main farm.
Frank become a good shearer and traveled with a team. Subsequently he invested much of his energy into owning and training race horses, but he eventually took over the McDonald farm in Tambellup.
Bert had a dam-sinking business and settled on a farm at Rocky Gully, about 40 miles north-east of Albany.
Ron, the youngest of the brothers, found work at various jobs--farmworker on Mick Miniter's place, mechanic, shearer, and fisherman working in a boat off the South Coast around Albany.
Enough of the "boys" of the family, back to Blanche. She recalled her astonishment at learning of her brothers’ savings. She and Mae had sneaked into the boys’ rooms and were surreptitiously rummaging in Frank’s locker when they came across the fruits of his labor on the shearing team—a roll of bank notes "big enough to choke a horse." For Blanche this discovery might have been a first inkling of the end of childhood.
Her first taste of life off the farm came in 1926 with a two-week vacation in Albany at the home of her aunt Eva Hill née Murray. This visit coincided with the post-war good-will call by the American naval flotilla called the Great White Fleet. The sight of the ships steaming into Princess Royal Harbour was for Blanche an unforgettable sign of the wealth and power of the United States.
Blanche inherited her mother’s round face and stocky figure, and her stance seemed to illustrate of one of her guiding principles, "You’ve got to stand on your own two feet." Yet she had the freshness and sparkle of youth, prompting an elderly friend of Eva to proclaim that at 16 Blanche was "the prettiest girl in Albany." She didn’t feel very pretty at the time, however, because she had just taken to wearing long stockings and, as she recalled with remembered embarrassment, "the blessed things kept sliding down." She stood 5’4" and weighted about 130 pounds until late in life, when she put on a certain amount of what she habitually termed "condition."
Blanche met Ian at a neighborhood picnic and sports day held near Tingerup (which was by this time called Wansborough).
The occasion itself was embarrassing. Ian came prepared to compete in organized athletic contests like those held regularly on the hard, level surface of the Tambellup show grounds, but at Wansborough he found himself expected to take part in impromptu races on a rough farm field softened by recent rains. His natty white athletic outfit was soon spattered, his spiked running shoes sank in the mud, and he ended up losing ignominiously to a local farmer who’d had the good sense to wear working boots. (Recollections, accompanied by guffaws, of Charlie Gittins).
Though she saw the funny side of the incident, Blanche did not join in her brothers’ laughter at handsome newcomer’s discomfiture. She had fallen for "the bloke with the eyebrows."
Continue reading: 3. Ian and Blanche (1929-1975) Blanche (-1988)
Previous Topics
2. Blanche Gittins (1910-1987) Background and Youth (-1929)
2.2 Tambellup
2.2.1 Charles and Mabel (1896-1926) Mabel (-1950)
This Topic2.2.2 Blanche’s Youth "Hunger is the best sauce."
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3. Ian and Blanche (1929-1975) Blanche (-1988)
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