The Stanmore Years Part 2

Continuing on from my previous blog, across the road from my house in Stanmore was a block of flats, and to either side of the flats were two very old houses.  One we called the witch’s house.  This was because the old lady in that house only came out to check her mail and she wore long black robes and had very long, white hair.  She actually looked exactly like a witch and was very scary.  The house was very dark, overgrown and creepy.  Then one day the house got bulldozed and a block of units went up.

The other house was a massive 2-storey house similar to mine but I think it was older.  This house had a family in it from New Zealand.  There were the parents and 5 children.  They had their own yard in that house but it was very small and only at the back of the house.  So they always came to my yard to play too.  They were good fun but the other kids would make fun of their accent.

Then a block of units also replaced that house.  On either side of me were two federation houses; each had an older couple in them, with no children around.  They had dogs that always tried to attack the postman. They always asked my dad for help with their house maintenance, which he was always happy to do for them.  Another house 2 doors up had another older couple too and the lady would come over to get our cumquats to make the best marmalade I ever tasted, we went through jars of that stuff and to this day I still remember the amazing taste.  My mother always marvelled at how she made it as it wasn’t something my mother would be familiar with making in Portugal.

My mother never really spoke English very well so to go shopping either my dad or me had to go with her.  Shopping consisted of walking up to Enmore where there used to be a corner supermarket, a fruit man, a butcher and a fish shop.  That’s all we needed and so every couple of days I would help my mum do the shopping. On occasion my dad would drive us. My mum got her drivers licence when I was about 12 so until then we just walked everywhere. My father’s car was a Holden Ute from 1962 then when my mother got her licence we got a blue Ford Escort in 1978 and my father sold the ute.

The families in the street were from all different backgrounds and some were immigrants like my parents.  We had Greek, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and New Zealanders but mostly they were from Anglo Saxon backgrounds.  Everyone got along and there were never any neighbourhood disputes. It was a very good time back then, everyone helped each other and everyone knew each other in the street in the immediate area of our house.

Living at that location was very convenient as the train station was close to go to the city or we could bike ride to different places close by even to the city sometimes.  I remember roller-skating too for very long distances.  Our house was located at the top of the hill.  So to roller skate down the hill was tricky, and there was a telegraph pole on the corner at the bottom of the hill which I usually ended up hitting when skating down the hill and losing control!

We would know nearly every single house in the street and who lived there.  The book “To Kill a Mockingbird” was especially interesting to me because we had a “Boo Radley” house!  It was so creepy.  It was a block from our house, across the road, after the stop sign on the way to school.  We crossed the road to avoid that house.  It was a huge mansion, very dark and scary. The house was called Woerden and was built in the 1870’s, and has since been replaced by a park.  The original fence still stands.  So whenever we would walk past we would peer through the overgrowth to see if there was anyone there and we would get occasional glimpses of someone inside the window.  I found out later a reclusive person lived there.  But on some occasions stories would surface of ghosts in the house, something frightening peering through the windows at night.  It was the local haunted house.  We were terrified of it.  We even had dares of who would dare to run through the iron gate into the front yard and stay the longest… some boys went for it, I never did, I just ran away like the rest of the girls!

There were many mysterious houses and people around this area in those days. And many interesting people from all different backgrounds with stories to tell.  We had an orphanage for girls, which is now known as Stanmore Lodge.  The girls were always locked away, they were never allowed out and we only saw them when they had their annual fete on the grounds.  That’s when I got to see the inside of that amazing house too, thankfully today it’s been restored beautifully and is very well looked after.  We suspect it was actually a home for unwed teenaged girls as the girls there seemed a bit older.  It was at this fete that I’d buy my second hand Barbie dolls and their clothes for 5c and the cakes were awesome, the only time we ever got to eat Lamingtons as my mother was not into baking cakes.

Our main shopping street was Newtown shops or Parramatta Road shops in Annandale.  There were some larger stores like Coles (which was like a Target store back then, not a supermarket like it is now) and a department store like Gowings in Newtown although it was called something else.  Supermarkets were just corner stores there were no large Woolworth’s or Coles like there is now.  A corner supermarket was all we needed back then anyway.  I would only get toys and stuff when it was Christmas and my birthday and my mother made all my clothes so we didn’t need shopping malls!  But now and then we would visit the only shopping mall we knew which was Centrepoint.

Since my dad worked for the railways in Sydney we could go anywhere for free by train.  So we would go to the city and checkout Centrepoint.  That was our luxury shopping mall, which is now Westfield Sydney. Even back then it was so beautiful with its carpeted mall area (when it was first built) and fabulous shops that my mother would love to check out.  If we had to buy a new suit for my dad or a new dress or shoes for my mum we’d go there. When I was older I made my mother buy me some clothes, as I didn’t want to wear the clothes she made for me anymore.  Centrepoint was always a big treat but my father would just have a nap on the velvet couches while we shopped.  My mother would just go and get him to pay for stuff of course! 

Newtown and Annandale had some nice clothing shops back then too but then it went downhill really quick and became very run down.  Today, Newtown is a great place to visit and to go shopping and it had a great recovery from the down time.  The different types of stores that you find there are varied in price and style.  You get modern designers and then you get the op shops and Salvos.  There are artsy stores along with the run of the mill clothing shops.  It’s now become a mecca of restaurants, bars, café’s, all kinds of variety shops and every kind of eating/drinking place you can think of.  It’s come a long way from the old times when I was a kid and it’s great to see that. 

Sadly some parts of Parramatta Road, Annandale where we would find upmarket boutiques and shoe stores, are still very run down or abandoned.  I guess that area didn’t make the transition to the modern day tastes as easily as Newtown did.  So now and then, I like to visit Newtown, remember the good times of the past with my mum and dad and enjoy the new experiences it offers to my now teenaged daughter who is the same age as I was back then when I still lived in Stanmore.

The Stanmore Years - Part 1

A recent day spent roaming around the inner city suburb of Newtown in Sydney, Australia brought back some memories of my younger years.  Until the age of 16 I grew up in Stanmore, which is a neighbouring suburb to Newtown and Enmore.

My preschool was in Newtown and I went to have a look if it was still there and the building still exists (an old church) but the preschool is no longer there.  I remember walking there with my mother from my home in Cambridge Street to the preschool in Newtown.  The walk involved going the back way under the railway bridge on Liberty Street  then behind King Street and walking along a road that had a park along the way.  We always encountered the bearded lady.  She was this very tall, scary looking woman with a dark beard.  Yes we thought it was very strange and my mother would always wonder why she didn’t just shave!  The woman would be walking back towards Stanmore in the opposite direction to us and we’d always walk past her as we got to the park and walked along Lennox Street in the mornings.

For some reason I still remember that even though I was probably not even 5 years old yet and realise now that was a bit of a walk to do every day to and from preschool and my mother walked me there and home every day.  It would have been a relief once I started school at Stanmore Public School, which was only two blocks away from home.  Another thing I remember about preschool is being locked in the attic by myself when I misbehaved.  It was a very surreal place, the attic of an old church building… weird stuff and I still remember sitting in there for hours in the dark with only a very small window for light and nothing to sit on - only the floor.

In Stanmore, the house we lived in was a huge two-storey Victorian house that was originally someone’s mansion but then it became a private hotel, and when we lived there my father converted the house into 4 flats, 2 upstairs and 2 downstairs.  Originally we lived in the downstairs flat at the back of the house but then move to the front flat which was a bit more spacious and more convenient.  The house was enormous and there was always a lot of work to be done on the house.  Just to re-paint the house took my dad weeks and weeks and he had to climb up this very long ladder to paint the top part of the house.  He did it all himself with occasional help from a cousin who was a painter.  His favourite colour was green so the house was always different shades of light green and he painted the different parts of the house like the window outlines etc. in different shades to contrast. 

You can see some photos of what it looks like now when I went to visit a few years back at my photo stream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marg_t97/sets/72157626072930008/

Once the flats were converted we had various tenants throughout the years but we had the same tenant in Flat 4, which was the upstairs rear flat.  Her name was Edith Young but initially she lived there with her partner Mr John Loan so we called her Mrs Loan even though they weren’t actually married.  Then when Mr Loan passed away she told us to call her Edith.  She was probably already in her 70’s when she moved in there at the beginning.  I don’t ever remember anyone else being in that flat but her and Mr Loan although later she had another friend move into her flat, which had two bedrooms – his and hers.  She was a war widow who also had lost 3 sons in the war.  She was the one who maintained the gardens; she grew the most amazing roses.  My father let her have free reign of the garden and she planted and pottered around there until the very day she left that house when we sold it.  She would have been well into her 80’s by then.  She was always there as she was retired and didn’t drive, but she went and did her own shopping every day, did her hair once a week at the hairdresser in Enmore and went to Newtown RSL every Saturday night by taxi with her girlfriend Betty who lived in Enmore.  She had grandchildren and great-grandchildren who sometimes visited but their visits were few and far between.  I think they lived far away.  To this day whenever I smell Deep Heat cream or Dencorub, I think of her. She used that stuff on occasion for body aches and pains especially after she’d been on her knees in the garden all day and the smell carried down the stairs and wafted through the whole house for hours sometimes days.

Mrs Loan was a woman who grew up in another time and she got along so well with my mum and dad.  My dad and her would chat for hours in the garden.  We only had one telephone in the whole house, and the tenants had to use our telephone to make any phone calls and leave a 10c coin in the little glass ash tray when they were done.  Also if someone called a tenant I had to go get them to take their call.  The phone was an old black Bakelite dial phone with a very loud ring.  So when someone was on the phone we overheard everything because the phone was in our lounge room.  But we knew that Mrs Loan made most of her calls while we were out, as my father would find coins in the tray when we returned.

This lady was also my babysitter on occasions when my parents went out to the Portuguese Club at night without me.  She would make sure I was OK in bed and come down the stairs to check on me at night until my parents got home.

The bedroom I slept in was the same room my parents slept in until my dad made me a room adjacent to the kitchen, but that wasn’t until I was about 11 or 12.  My room was originally a large communal dining room and it had a large marble fireplace and two doors in and out.  We closed off one door, which faced the corridor and the stairs.  The stairs were very old and creaky wooden stairs so I would be in bed and hear Mrs Loan come down the stairs as she would sigh and take very slow steps and the stairs would creak.  Then she would open the bedroom door to check on me.  There was light in my room because the old doors had a glass window above them and when the stair light was on it would shine through that window and light up the room.

I went to have a look at the house again a few years ago and the current tenant was nice enough to let me go inside when I told him I grew up there.  I marvelled at how it didn’t seem so big anymore.  When I was a kid that place was massive and cavernous! There were so many little rooms, under the stairs there was a room, under the verandah, at the back under the rear verandah, under the kitchen etc.  It was awesome for hide & seek!  My father of course named every little room after some reptile in Portuguese just for the fun of it and because there were so many of them we had to name them to know which ones we were talking about!  We used them for storage and some of them were just a crawl space for doing electrical or plumbing repairs.

My dad built his toolshed/workshop in the back yard, and yes that also had a name.  He spent most of his time in there doing stuff and making things. My mother spent most of her time inside cleaning, cooking and making/mending clothes.  I spent most of my time in the back yard.

In Stanmore at this time (60’s and 70’s) it was a very quiet family-oriented suburb with a lot of older, retired people living there as well.  Every house had one family living in it and the flats across the road were all families as well. Now it’s all just students and the large family houses have been divided up into rooms for rent including my old house.

So all the kids in my street who lived in units had no back yard and they would come to mine.  My house occupied 2 lots, so it went from 77-79 Cambridge St because the next house was 81 on one side and 75 on the other.  The empty lot next to my house was my back yard basically!  So there was lots of room for kids to hang out and play games.

My dad, of course, being from a farm in Portugal, had to plant every kind of fruit tree and vegetable known to man.  I could list them all and it would be a very long list but basically we had lemons, oranges, olives, peaches, plums, nectarines, mandarins, cumquats, tomatoes, chocos, passionfruit, carrots, strawberries, spinach, lettuce, cucumber and naturally, a grapevine which he grew to make a car port to shade the car!  All this was grown in our yard, and plenty more!  But there was still some grass lawn that the kids could run around on and kids from all around would come to my yard.  Yes I was used for my yard as sometimes they’d come to play in my yard but didn’t let me play with them!! If I told my father he’d chase them all away but I didn’t do that often as I pretended they were my friends!  Mostly they were and it was good fun, because of course those were the days where you would be outside all day until your mother came to get you for dinner.  In summer we’d still go outside and play after dinner until it was night-time.

Part 2 to follow.

Wow it's been a while!

I can’t believe how long it’s been since I wrote in here! I guess I probably forgot about it for a while!

Since I wrote last time I’ve had a milestone birthday which I celebrated with some girlfriends in the city and had a wonderful time. I also obtained my first tattoo that I have been meaning to get for more than 10 years.  It’s the name of my daughter with a purple rose underneath as her name is Cassandra Rose.  It wasn’t as painful as I expected and I’m happy with it!  OK so what is a woman of my age doing getting a tattoo?  No idea, just thought it was cool and fun and besides I’m pretty much the only one of my friends that doesn’t have one and yes you can still succumb to peer pressure in middle age!  And no it wasn’t a tramp stamp, as it’s located on my back on the right shoulder blade, so it can be covered up when necessary!  They say it’s an addiction and that once you have one you always want more.  I am thinking of getting more but not for the time being…I’ve been using an app called Momento to write in lately but I still like this kind of format in a general blog with articles that are written once in a while.  When I returned to blogging I meant to keep up the momentum but somehow that didn’t happen.  That’s OK onwards and upwards here we are again and I’ll try and keep it a bit more regular.

Coming to this age brings a lot of thoughts and dilemmas.  Sometimes I try to remember back what it was I wanted to be or where I wanted to be at this age and I seriously don't remember.  I know I wanted to be a journalist in my career but since I never got into university to do that course I never got the opportunity.  However a career is not even a consideration for me anymore, a job that is OK to be in, that's somewhat interesting and challenging, keeps my brain working and pays an acceptable wage is all I require from a career at this point in my life.  Mainly I wonder what else there is beyond work and trying to pay bills these days.  I know that it's all a matter of choice and that we can make choices that change our lives but for now, for the sake of my child's security and my current financial status, this is life for this point in time.  Not for always that's for sure.  When Miss C finishes school there is travelling to be done and possibly moving to a location that is not as expensive to live in and then things might become a little more relaxed and there will be less stress.  But all that is a few years away yet and in the meantime we make the most of life as it is currently.

Of course I remember that I imagined being rich and successful.  Although at what I'm not sure...  I even remember writing short story scenarios of my life and how it would be when I reached 35 or something... How wrong it all turned out to be!  We never know what we are going to get or what is going to happen in life, but I guess I've just rolled with the punches and got back up again!

Getting older has its good points and bad points. The good points are things like not getting stressed over little things, being a bit more experienced in life with men, dating, life and other general aspects of life simply because you've been around for a while and things are now a bit clearer.  The bad parts are looking older, age health issues, more maintenance is required such as hair coloring, trying every kind of anti-ageing facial cream, more make up is needed, medications etc.  I can't believe how long it takes to get ready to go out these days!  And of course how tired you get now, going out is great but the recovery is a much longer process!  I remember the days I would not sleep all weekend and still work on a Monday feeling just fine.  Now if I go out more than one night in a row it takes me days to recover!

All I can do is make the most of life and take it all in and enjoy it as much as possible and not let the little things get to me. After all, I'm too old for that shit!

Call Me a Grammar Freak… but really, isn’t it just Common Sense?

The older I become the more I notice stuff.  I notice how badly some young girls dress, I notice how inappropriate some stuff is on TV and I notice bad grammar, spelling, punctuation and the chronic misuse of words.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know with the advent of computers, spell check and the relentless desire for immediate news and information to be published in the moment will cause things to be overlooked.  Things to be written incorrectly with no time to proof read.  Things that are just published as fast as possible in real time, without any concern for the actual accuracy of language use or basic spelling.  I understand all that and I accept it.

I accept it when you are chatting in a chat room or a messenger, obviously you want to type your message using the least amount of keystrokes as possible so you type things like “i will c u l8r lol”  and I do this in all chats, on text messages and when commenting or writing statements on social networking sites.  I do not have a problem with abbreviated typing, acronyms, shortening of words, leaving out commas, apostrophes and always using lower case.  This is normal for this type of situation.  I’ve been on chat groups since 1995 and at first I was horrified at the terrible spelling when I realised, that is what you do.  It’s the way it should be… again in those forums/situations it’s perfectly acceptable.

Then there’s normal posting on websites and forums, commenting, status updates, tweets, blogs things like that.  In these cases of course there is room for error.  It is no big deal if there are some mistakes or misspellings although why people don’t just run a spell check when writing a large piece of text like a blog is beyond me.  Spell check doesn’t fix everything but it can correct the most obvious mistakes.  But you still need to proof read.  More on that later.  So in my case, when I post on social networking sites or Twitter for instance, sometimes I abbreviate words or leave out commas, but I try to keep my spelling and word use accurate.  After all you want your message to be understood and not confusing.  So in this situation it’s acceptable to be a little slack and bend the rules a bit, I don’t have a problem with that at all. 

What I can understand is when someone will shorten a word like phone to fone.  Or tomorrow to 2moro.  That doesn’t bother me.  What I can’t accept is when people use the wrong words or actually can’t spell words that should have been learned in primary school.  Sure, not all of us listened in school, or even went to school that much but people, please.  Give me a break.  You have to know the difference between There, Their and They’re.  This is common sense.  So is the use of Your and You’re.  Come on … everybody has to know the correct spelling and use of these words!!!

I cannot tell you how much it irks me to constantly go online and see words like these and many more such as Where, we’re and were… and my pet hate the misuse of It’s and Its.  So annoying.  I’m not here to give you a grammar lesson.  There are many sites on the internet that will help you with that, but seriously, I think everyone needs to wake up and realise that it’s not a good look!

Again as I stated before, none of this stuff matters when you are texting or chatting etc.  But I tell you, it does matter on websites such as news.com.au and other official news sites, information sites, educational sites, and official government sites.

I am sorry but I do not accept that a site like news.com.au can possibly find it acceptable to publish stories with incorrectly spelt headlines, and content with bad grammar, wrong word use, and obvious spelling mistakes.  This is totally unacceptable.  These are sites that are used for research, information and education.  They are not setting a good example.  What does it say about their company when they cannot spare two minutes to proof read an article before it’s published? Is it really that urgent that proof reading is just not an option anymore? I find that hard to believe.  I worked as a proof reader for a newspaper company in the 80’s.  My job was to read what the editor had already approved and check for any obvious spelling or grammatical errors.  After all, the writer’s job was to write the article, not worry about all that little stuff, that was my job.  If a newspaper article was published with mistakes in the body, let alone the headline, somebody would be out of a job, seriously fast.

Of course I am not forgetting that those were the days of manual typewriters, and no computers.  We started to get computers in the late 80’s and electronic typewriters and word processors were starting to be used more often.  But originally, if you typed something wrong, you had to type the whole page or article again, manually.  And newspapers were printed from plates of type face, not from a computer and a printer!  So what I am getting at is that because we had to be careful in those days, because it was such a hard job to have to re-do things over and over again, it seems that naturally more care was taken.  More proof reading was done, more checking and consequently you would barely, if ever, see a spelling mistake or error of any kind in the final publication.

Now of course with computers and the immediate need for news, we find stuff being published with mistakes all over the place, all the care and caution is gone.  And I’m not just talking about the online newspapers, but the print newspapers.  The mistakes in the printed newspapers today make me cringe and make me wonder, do they need a proof reader? Hello, I’m here!

Now of course as discussed, there is a big difference between abbreviating words in chats and texting, to outright misspellings and incorrect word use.  We also have the phenomenon of typos.  The good old typo has caught us out many a time.  If you are a touch typist like me you will know the true meaning of a typo.  A typo is not a spelling mistake.  A typo is when you accidentally type two letters inversed such as “hte” he instead of “the” or “lauhg” instead of laugh as the letters are close to each other on the keyboard and being a touch typist, you don’t look at the keyboard and all it takes is for your fingers to start on the wrong letters and typos are the result.  This is also perfectly acceptable in chats, online forums and social networking as anyone can see that it’s not a spelling mistake or a wrong word being used.  Typos are usually auto corrected in programs such as Word so they are not an issue for publications. They do tend to appear in forums and Twitter and of course chats and texting but that’s not an issue.  I am guilty of typo errors and it comes with the territory!

Now we come to the fun issue of the wonderful “auto correct” feature now found on most smart phones like the iPhone.  This is a great feature, make no mistake, it’s awesome.  I love how it auto completes really long words so that I don’t have to type them myself.  The only problem is that it tends to come up with some innovative and sometimes rather embarrassing words that you certainly never meant to write.  Just Google sites such as autocorrectfail.com and damnyouautocorrect.com to see what I’m talking about!  The rule here is this, PROOF READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not once but twice and three times!!!!!!!  The only way to escape embarrassing auto corrections is to check what you’ve written BEFORE you press SEND!  This works very well.  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve typed a message thinking it’s perfectly fine, but being the proof reading psycho freak that I am, I go back and check it, and find a word or words that really did not look good and would’ve been rather embarrassing to say the least and I thank my obsessive nature each time for taking the time to check it before pressing SEND!

So if you’ve read this far and are still here I commend your perseverance!  And what is the lesson of my rather long post today?  Learn proper English people, learn when to use proper words, know when abbreviated text and acronyms are appropriate and when they’re not, and most of all, before publishing, sending or posting anything: PROOF READ your work and give people like me some respite from the constant bombardment of silly mistakes and bad English!

The Importance of Me Time

In this day and age it seems we are all too busy, running around, doing stuff, keeping up with everything and we barely have time to eat and sleep.  I find coming from growing up an only child, with too much time on my own, that I sometimes miss that time where I could just sit, think about nothing much and just recharge my mental batteries.

I can’t think of the last time I had time to be alone and reflect on life, meditate or just be on my own without anyone around and things to get done. It just doesn’t happen an awful lot for most people I would imagine.

I think it’s very important to make the time for this.  We all need time alone; we need time with our thoughts.  In my case, unfortunately that time usually comes when I go to bed at night exhausted but then can’t sleep because I have a million things going through my mind that I never get time to address or deal with during the day.  So then comes the annoyance of insomnia that haunts me more than usual lately.  I do have things on my mind but it’s not like they are major or huge significant things… just stuff that I’ve forgotten to think about or take care of during the day, it all comes flooding into my mind as soon as I lay down my head to sleep at night!  This is the worst possible time for this stuff to come into my mind, when all I want to do is sleep!

I think that one way to solve all this is to find the time, even if it’s not every day, but at some point during the week, to sit down and let all the stuff go through your mind.  Then address each issue as it comes, make plans, organise things, write things down (this does help for me, if I put stuff down in writing it makes more sense and is a lot more structured than random thoughts going nowhere in my mind).  I have done this a few times but the problem remains, where do we find the time?  We all have busy lifestyles, work, kids, social lives, maintaining a household, maintaining relationships with family and friends, keeping up with everything that needs to get done and the list goes on.  For me, sometimes I find a window of opportunity for this rare thing called “me time”.  When I know I have a free weekend coming up where I will be on my own, with no commitments or nothing planned that I need to do without fail, I make sure I slot this time in for me, and me only.

It might sound very unsocial or very selfish or maybe it’s just not considered nice to be a hermit, turn off the phone and not return calls.  However, I need it.  If I don’t get that time (it can be from a couple of hours to a day maximum, I don’t think I’ve managed 2 whole days to date though!) I really start to get a bit stressed.  Once I get that time in, got the stuff dealt with or organised or at least addressed things that have been on my mind for ages I feel a whole lot better.  And sometimes I just need to zone out and watch trash TV or read a book or just meditate for an hour and all is good.  It’s amazing what some peace, solitude and stillness can do for our minds and our general well-being.

The problem is that I plan this time quite often, but sadly it rarely happens.  I’ve had times where I’ve planned out my whole “me time” weekend only to have things that come up where I have to go out or have people over or drive somewhere or do chores that need to be done and so on.  But it’s worth the effort in my opinion because I can safely say that it keeps me sane and gives me back some energy and the power to get on with life and all its challenges.

Why They Don’t Get It

I find as I get older I seem to always think back to things of the past, like when I was a kid growing up in the 60’s and 70’s.  I guess it’s because I get reminded of things when I hear certain music or see things on TV or movies that remind me of those times. 

Just the other night I was watching a movie set in 1973.  My daughter, the wonderful Miss C, was also watching.  Certain times during the movie she would exclaim “Oh My God that looks like you!” I must say the girl in the movie was the same age I was at that time and looked like me, and funnily enough, she wore flared corduroy pants like a pair that I had and Miss C had seen my old photos.  At times she would say things like: “Why don’t they use the mobile?”  I had to remind her this is 1973.  There were no mobiles.  She covered herself by stating that of course she knew that. 

Then there was a post on Facebook by a friend who lives in my mother’s home town in Southern Portugal.  This page is about the town and its traditions.  The photo he uploaded was of the milkman probably from the 1950’s or earlier.  The milkman would go door to door with his dairy cow and his milk containers.  He would knock on the door and ask how much milk you needed that day, and proceed to milk the cow into the measured containers that you then took inside and poured into your own milk bottle.  I showed Miss C this photo with the large dairy cow, cowbell and all and the milkman at the door of a little house in the town and told her what he was doing.  She laughed incredulously and exclaimed that there’s no way that could be for real.

Then there was the time Miss C complained of no food in the house.  Of course the pantry was full but to her, there was nothing.  I explained that I never actually said such a thing when I was her age.  I ate what I got, and that was it.  She looked at me strangely.  I told her about my father and how he grew up in the country living off the farmland and eating whatever was available at the time, and that it was nothing to eat bread that was six months old and hard as a rock.  They killed the pig once a year at Christmas and that pig’s meat was cured and made into everything from smoked bacon to chorizo which lasted 12 months until the next pig killing.  Of course, she didn’t believe me.  Come to think of it, when my father told me these stories, I didn’t believe him either and used to just say sure, as if.

What I’m getting at is that when we live in a world so far removed from a way of life long gone, it’s very difficult to understand that people actually did live that way.  When I was 12 which is Miss C’s age now, of course we had no computers or mobile phones, let alone internet or anything like it.  We had the old black bakelite telephone that rang with the “old phone” ring tone which funnily enough, is my iPhone ring tone, and you had to use the manual number dial to call someone.  I showed Miss C one of these phones once at a market, she was amazed at how you had to dial the numbers one by one.  She obviously thought it was a toy or something.

I suppose I do appreciate her inability to understand certain things as I was the same when my mother and father used to tell me stuff about their childhood.  Like my mother, when she was that age she would crochet and embroider doilies by the window during the day, then when it was dark they had little oil lamps that would serve as their light.  They ate the fish her father caught during the night fishing the night before and they would have their own version of social networking which consisted of the girls sitting by their ground floor windows and chatting to whomever passed by (and they knew everyone) and met most of their husbands this way.  Imagine that, well I couldn’t then and I can’t now!

Not that it’s bad to have today’s advancement in technology and the greater standard of living that education, stable economies (well in some places!), and advanced societies have created for us to live in these days.  I just think that sometimes it’s good to think back and realise that our families managed to accomplish quite a lot with the limitations they had.  I managed to do all my homework without the aid of Google!  Shocker!  I got together in the street with my friends on weekends without the aid of texting or Facebook!  Everyone managed somehow, and it makes me happy to know that Miss C will have it easier, much easier than I and certainly my parents ever did.  It’s just that sometimes - and I now realise where my father was coming from - it pays to realise how lucky we are and that life is good and we really have nothing to complain about, even if dialling an old telephone is just too weird to contemplate!

Past Connections

Lately I’ve found some contacts on Facebook that are people I haven’t seen probably since 1983 when I lived in Portugal and went to school there for three years.

I have maintained contact with many people I met and became good friends with and also family of course that I met when I moved to Portugal in 1980 when I was 16.  I was born in Sydney and lived here until my parents decided to move to Portugal when my father retired as that’s where both of my parents were born.

So when I arrived there I didn’t know anyone, not a single person.  I had not met any family that lived there apart from some family of my father’s that had lived in Sydney and moved back there before we arrived.  It was a culture shock on arrival I can tell you that much!  Portugal just came out of a Dictatorship and had a peaceful revolution in 1975 to establish a Democratic Republic, and by 1980 things were getting settled but the country was still way behind compared to Spain and other Western European countries when it came to technology, communications, construction, industry, government and education.  The stunted growth of the country during those 50 odd years of a Dictatorship would take at least 20 years to overcome so in 1980 things were far from good.

I moved to a fishing village called Albufeira in the southern province of the Algarve which is now a major tourist destination because of the wonderful weather and stunning beaches.  Back then we had running water for 3 hours a day and electricity sometimes didn’t work.  TV was only working for 8 hours a day and there was only one channel and the same for the radio.  Needless to say I was rather bored.  But the beach was good and through my cousin, the daughter of my uncle (mother’s brother) who was the same age as me I got to hang out and make new friends.  Once summer was over though we had to start school.

This town had no high school.  The only high schools were located out of town in other cities such as Portimão and Silves.  I was to go to the Silves Technical High School in the city of Silves which was inland, out in the country.

To get to school we had to catch a bus at 7am, if you missed the bus, you had no other way to get there unless someone’s parents drove you as there was no other bus to catch that would arrive at Silves on time for school.  We had to walk from home through the main town of Albufeira then go up the church steps and up the hill to the bus stop every morning.  On the bus is where we met others from Albufeira who were also going to Silves. 

So we would get on the bus for this one and a half hour trip to school every day.  The bus went from Albufeira through various small country towns to arrive at Silves by about 8:30 or 9:00 am if it didn’t break down!  At each stop the country kids would get on, kids from Guia, Algoz, Tunes, Messines and other towns.

Some of these friends I would see only during the school year as they never came to Albufeira in summer and we never went to the country.  Others I would see all year around because they lived close by in Albufeira or would holiday there for the summer.  Then when I left Portugal to return to Sydney in 1984, I lost contact with most of them except those closest to me and my family.  I had actually finished school in 1983 so some school friends I haven’t seen since then. 

Facebook is good for this kind of thing.  I had some friends on there that I had been in touch with all these years and from those, they then had other friends etc. etc. and recently I added a few that just appeared out of the blue and I marvel that we can now speak, look at photos, write to each other, chat online and catch up with each other about the last 27 odd years!  I know it seems strange but I marvel at these things!

We had some good times, the bus rides were a riot, there were some funny characters on there, and adventures getting home were even funnier.  The return bus didn’t leave Silves until 5pm and sometimes our classes finished at 1pm.  We didn’t want to hang around this boring country city; we wanted to get back to Albufeira to the cafés and the beach - where the action is - so naturally, we hitchhiked home.  None of our parents knew of course, we would hang out in cafés and bars till it was normal home time as if we’d caught the bus and then went home, our parents clueless.  But those were good times, and these new connections brought back some great memories for me.

I’m sad that I don’t have any photos at all from those school times, only some family shots but none of all my school friends from that period.  But the memories are still there and I’m thankful to be in touch again with some great people that I never thought I would hear from again who remind me of a great time in my life.