Bloody Pommies!

“After lunch, the farmer’s wife told us to get the washing in and then pack our things.  We didn’t really have a lot to pack, as the books were already in the chest, so we collected our still-unwashed clothes from the laundry and packed them into our cases.  Mum stripped the beds and put the sheets in the laundry and the farmer came and put all our possessions in the back of the estate car, and told us to get in.  Once we were in the car, he told Mum that it was General Election Day in Australia and that he had registered her as a voter, which he actually had been obliged to do as voting in a General Election in Australia was mandatory in those days – he was taking us in to Corowa so that Mum could vote.  This sounded perfectly reasonable to us, especially as he added that there was a big fine if you didn’t vote.  When we got into Corowa he parked outside the hall with a big sign outside saying ‘Polling Station’, pointed to the hall and told Mum to go inside to vote – he even told her who to vote for, as she had no knowledge of Australian politics.  She got out of the car taking her handbag with her and as soon as she disappeared out of sight, he told me to get out of the car, too.  He quickly unloaded the boot of our belongings, turned to me and said “Tell your Mother she’s not suitable” – and then he drove off at full speed.  I was stunned, and watched his car disappearing in a cloud of dust.  Mum came out of the hall, saw the luggage on the verge and asked me what had happened.  I told her that the farmer had told me to get out of the car and what he had said, and I am thankful to this day that I had no idea at that moment of the enormity of our desperate situation – we had been in Australia a little less than a week, 12,500 miles away from the place we knew as home, we had no money, Mum had no job, we knew no-one, we had nowhere to go, and Peter was over 50 miles away and apart from writing a letter, impossible to contact.

Chapter  13 – Abandoned

            Mum slumped down onto the chest and the silent tears started again.  Being Mum, she of indomitable spirit, she did not allow her self-pity to last for long, so she decided to go to the Post Office to see if there was any accommodation available nearby.  We balanced the two cases on the chest and carried it between us to Sanger Street, only to find that the Post Office was closed, it being a Saturday; and all the other offices and shops were closed because of the General Election.  There was nothing else for it but to ask in a pub if they had any accommodation, which Mum found wholly distasteful.  Mum’s Lancashire accent was very pronounced and in the first pub we went into she barely had time to get out the fact that she wanted accommodation before the landlord said “Not so likely, you’re a bloody pommy, and we don’t want those in here!”.  Shocked, Mum now understood the implications of being a ‘bloody pommy’.  We trudged down Sanger Street, struggling to manage the chest and the cases between us, so Mum told me to wait under one of the trees in the shade with the luggage, whilst she proceeded to call at the other pubs that offered accommodation – the Australia, the Corowa, the Newmarket, the Globe, the Star and most of the others.  Astonishingly, she got the same reaction in all of them.  She came back up the street to where I was, and said “Come on, there is one more pub left, let’s try that one”.  We made our way down to the Terminus Hotel, right down at the bottom end of the street, and went in.  The landlord’s wife came out from a back room, and Mum asked if they had a room vacant.  The lady told us there wasn’t, not for ‘pommies’.  Mum, by this time at the end of her tether, burst into tears and explained what had happened to us, carefully avoiding saying which farm we had come from.  The landlady took pity on us and said we could sleep in the back lounge on the settee, but that we had to be out before 6am the next morning as, if her customers found out that she was giving us shelter, she would lose them to other pubs.  We gratefully followed her through to the lounge with our luggage, she told us where the toilet was and told us to stay in the room and be quiet.  We were by this time so worn out and emotionally drained that we made ourselves comfortable and I fell asleep in Mum’s arms.  Poor Mum – here she was at 51 with a child of ten, in a strange country and not knowing what on earth would happen to us in the coming days.  It must have been dreadful for her, but her fighting spirit was to stand her in good stead over the next few weeks and, despite not being suitable as a domestic help, she possessed other qualities that would enable her to prove that she was not yet beaten.”