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:
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.
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