Ian and Blanche maintained close ties with the Gittins family. Throughout the 1930s and early 40s they attended a family get-together at the Gittins house almost every Sunday.
 |
| John, Maud and Charlie, early 1940s. |
At the beginning of that period Mabel, Charlie, John and Arthur were still living there, and Ethel and Mick also came regularly. John married Maud and she took over running the household in 1940.
Ethel in particular enjoyed these weekly gab-fests, and occasionally said she looked forward to them all week. She seemed always in a good humor, despite her physical limitations. She even claimed advantages in her short stature, for example attributing the success of her game at the Tambellup Ladies' Croquet Club to her necessarily compact mallet stroke.
The 1940s brought sharp reversals of fortune for the Gittins family, especially to Mae, Mabel, Ron and Ethel.
Mae: Unlike Ethel and Blanche, their older sister Mae never found any joy in farm life. She'd longed since childhood to escape to a place where people lived in a nice house with a nice lawn in front, wore nice clothes and worried about things that don't get much worry-time on a farm--body odor, for example. Mae made her move in that direction in 1928 when she married Arthur Horsenell, a man of like mind who owned a nifty runabout--two seats up front and a rumble behind--and had never in his entire life so much as set hand on a pitchfork. Mae and Arthur H. settled in Melbourne, but returned to the West from time to time on family visits. These occasions were unfortunately strained. Arthur Horsenell's attitude to his in-laws was one of indifference bordering on disdain, and the feeling was mutual. For example, when Arthur H. tried to make himself useful by chopping wood for the stove, he brushed aside Charlie's suggestions how to go about the job safely. And when he soon after stumbled into the house with a gash on his forehead from a flying wood chip, he received first aid but little in the way of tender loving care. The disparity in family background revealed in that incident was likely a factor in the eventual failure of Mae's marriage, which ended in divorce in 1939. In 1942 Mae married Clenneth Williams--a far more congenial partner. Clen was not a farmer--he was an aircraft mechanic--but he certainly knew how to chop wood.
Mae and Clen
Mabel: After forty-some years as the manager of the Gittins household, Mabel had become increasingly tired and querulous. Her self-pity and unceasing complaints were making life difficult for everyone. This state of affairs ended with John's marriage in 1940 to twenty-six years old Maud Williams. Maud was a lean, kindly, energetic woman with a voice like a steam whistle, though not as euphonious, and she used it to say exactly what she thought regardless of the circumstances and audible to everyone within a quarter of a mile or so. Examples: "You have really big feet, don't you," and "Tennis? You can't play tennis. You're too fat."
Mabel could not possibly live under the same roof as Maud, and it wasn't long before she was persuaded to leave the farm to live out her days in in a small house in Tambellup town. Blanche had her doubts about the move. She said to Ian, "I do worry about Mum. Is she going to be happy there in that little place they gave her?" to which Ian replied "She wouldn't be happy if they gave her Buckingham Palace." But he was wrong, as it turned out. Shocked out of her melancholy, Mabel went off to Perth for a course in healthful living featuring veggies with no seasoning but celery salt, raw calves's liver, and sunbathing--lots of sunbathing. She came back in a far better frame of mind, picked up with an old friend, Mrs. Hulland, and found a kindly helper in the everyday business of the elderly living alone in the person of Kathleen Byrne, a young woman who herself had also just left a farm to live in the town. So Mabel generally fared better in town than on the farm. She kept on complaining, no longer put her whole heart and soul into it.
Ron: Like his older brothers Bert and Frank, Ron early left the farm to strike out on his own, but unlike them he never stuck long to one line of work, instead jumping from one job to another--from itinerant farm work to mechanic to working on a fishing boat off the South Coast near Albany. He was not the model of a steady worker, for example on a hot summer day when he should have been at work in in Andy Bessen's garage in Tambellup, he sometimes joined the local kids in their after-school dip in the river. Despite the serious head injury he'd sustained as a small child, Ron was "a fine figure of a man," as lonely shut-in Betty Fairweather once said. He became a powerful swimmer, winning all the swim events at the Tambellup New Year's Day ragatta, and later competing in the State Championships in Perth. In his work as a salt-water fisherman, Ron's strength as a swimmer often came in handy when nets got snagged in underwater obstructions--he would jump off the boat, swim to the trouble spot and fix the problem at close range. But one day a momentary brush with some large and swift sea creature, perhaps a shark, persuaded him to go back to the old fashioned way of clearing nets from within the boat.
Ron's life changed about 1940, with his marriage to Ruby Gibbings, a barmaid at the Tambellup pub. Ruby was suffering from tuberculosis, at that time a fatal illness. She told Ron she had at most only a few years to live, but they went ahead with the union anyway. Ron was employed on Miniter's farm, and the newly weds made their home in the two-room cottage--a mere hut really--that Mick provided on his property for the use of farm workers. Why weren't they accommodated in the homestead? One possibility is that Mick, a Catholic and deeply religious in a quiet way, thought their relationship improper.
Ron and Ruby, about 1940.
It seems that Ron and Ruby's relationship and even their location came as a surprise to other family members. Blanche heard about it one evening when she happened to be at Ethel's place, and she right away walked over to the workmen's cottage to see Ruby. By the light of the wavering amber flame of a kerosene lamp, the place's only illumination, Ruby poured out to Blanche' sympathetic ear her innermost fears and hopes. She was strong and sincere person striving to find a meaning in life and death, yet with few inner resources beyond a passing acquaintance with the New Testament.
Ruby's disease progressed rapidly. She delivered a healthy baby, Geoffrey, but died soon afterwards. Distraught, Ron found himself unable to care for the baby and placed him in an institution. A few weeks later, on returning to check on his son, Ron was shocked to see that the standard of care was very poor, so he took him away and asked John and Maud to care for him. They were reluctant to take on that responsibility--they may well have had hopes of having a baby of their own--but they did so, and eventually they formally adopted Geoffrey as well as another child, a new-born girl they named Pam.
John and Maud with Geoffrey, about 1949
Ethel suffered her own tragedy when in 1943 Mick Miniter died suddenly of a heart attack. He was 53. His death left Ethel with financial difficulties. Mick had willed his entire estate to her, but when she returned to the house after the funeral she found it had been broken into and the will had been stolen. Consequently, according to law, Ethel had to share the estate with Mick's estranged sisters. She purchased a house near Nurse Turner's in the outskirts of the town of Tambellup (M on the Tambellup town map) and lived there, very modestly, for the next several years.
Things looked up for Ethel near the end of the decade. By this time she had regained her high spirits and was a popular habitue of the Tambellup pub. At this time the pub was flourishing under capable management (Mr and Mrs Colin Smith) and with a congenial clientele. It even attracted tourists--two tourists to be exact. Mr and Mrs Diamond were traveling to vacation in Albany when the train happened to break down in Tambellup. The couple strolled over to the pub to wait out the delay, and had such a pleasant time they ended up vacationing in Tambellup instead of Albany, and made Tambellup their holiday destination of choice on subsequent occasions as well. It is a happy thought that Ethel's presence contributed to this outcome in a place that was nobody's idea of a tourist mecca.
So it was fitting that Ethel found love in the the pub's dimly lit lounge, when she met a rugged stranger named Harold Parsons and they took an instant liking to each other. There was one hiccup in the budding romance--when they stood up to leave the pub at closing time, Harold was shocked to find the Ethel was a dwarf. "I like your style," he said, "but I didn't know you were so short!" Ethel laughed heartily, and they were married soon after and had twelve good years together before Ethel died in 1962.
Ethel and Harold, about 1950
Back now to Ian and Blanche: On those Sunday get-togethers at the Gittins place, Ian and his brothers-in-law often indulged their shared interests in fishing and hunting, for example going after perch in the stretch of the Gordon River near the Schleuter farm or taking shotguns after the wild duck that flocked to the salt lakes near the Gittins house. Only Mick Miniter declined field sports, preferring a quiet read of "The Bulletin," then Australia’s leading political and literary publication.In the late 30s, Ian and Blanche and John, Maud and Charlie Gittins started taking joint annual vacations, renting the cottages belonging to Bert Box in Emu Point, near Albany. The cottages were located at a high point with a view from above Oyster Harbour. For Ian and the Gittins brothers the big attractions were fishing for sand whiting in Oyster Harbour and for bream in the clear waters of the King and Kalgan rivers flowing into it.
At first the fishermen’s pleasure in the river was spoilt by an annoying problem: their hooks often got caught between the rocks of the shallow riverbed, and they wasted a lot of time trying to retrieve their tackle. But Ian found a neat solution. Instead of simply throwing back any undersized fish, he corralled them in a holding pool. Then, when a hook happened to get stuck, he threaded the other end of the line through the gills of one of the little fish and tossed the fish into the river, where it was constrained to swim to the fouled end to release the hook.
Although Ian and Blanche spent much of their leisure time with Blanche's family, they--especially Ian--gradually came to spend more and more time in Tambellup's social center, that is to say the pub, and there they got to know people with backgrounds different from their own. One contact led to a lifelong friendship between Ian and Blanche and Tom and Joan Alford.
 |
| Blanche, Joan, Tom and Ian, early 1940s, at the entrance to "Happy Days" tea garden near Albany. |
Continue reading: 3.1.6 The War Years
Previous Topics
3. Ian and Blanche (1929-1975) Blanche (-1988)
3.1 Weathering the Depression (1929-1945)
3.1.4 Chronicals of the 30s
This Topic3.1.5 Relations and Friends
Next Topic3.1.6 The War Years
No comments:
Post a Comment