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.