The Kitchen Tapes No. 19

Recorded on 9 June 2018

Other Craig House Stories

[ GM: This was one of the longest recordings at 1 hour and 6 minutes.  In it Trenna sounded less tired than she had in other recordings, especially in the ones that were to follow. To see why this one was a bit different I looked at Trenna’s diary for this date and was surprised to see that she was not at all well, and had not slept much the night before. Sometimes Trenna could just muster every bit of energy she had to get a task done!
Probably because she was tired and unwell some of the details in the stories are less clear than usual. So, like always, I welcome Comments clarifying matters. I am interested to know if anyone knows the “Wheels” tune Trenna is referring to?]

GM:  Today is Saturday the 9th of June, 2018. Trenna Mahney is talking in a moment. 

Tren,  we were about to go on to when you moved to Girls Friendly Society but realised there were still a number of incidents and stories about Craig House. Perhaps you can share some of those?

Callisthenics

THM:  OK.  I don’t recall talking about when we used to go to “Club” which was also known as callisthenics.  The girls would go on one night of the week and the boys would go on another night. 

I think we went on a Thursday night and the boys went on a Friday night.  Later on I think it became twice a week.  I’m not so sure if initially it was twice a week, but it was in the late 1960s that I went to callisthenics.  

It was held in what was the old Bishop’s house and grounds which was a large area of sloping grounds down from St Georges Terrace, down Spring Street to Riverside Drive.  On the opposite side of the road was the Emu Brewery which also took up a large parcel of land that went from Riverside Drive up to a small Street just before the Terrace. [Mount Street]

[GM: The Bishop’s House still exists in Perth. Earlier than the times described by Trenna it was the headquarters of Legacy. Information on it is in Wikipedia and elsewhere.]

These grounds were the grounds of the Bishop’s House.  The home was no longer being lived in by the bishop.  The actual house was so grand. 

I think it had been rented out to people who could afford expensive real estate because it was very grand.  I knew there was a dentist there because from time to time I had seen him before I went to go to the dental hospital.  

Maybe I stopped going to the Bishop’s House when it was later either left in ruin until it was decided how the church would break up the property to make the best capital investment but we walked there, as a group of girls. 

We were dressed in our Legacy gym clothes I think.  Either that or we changed into them when we got there.  It was a royal blue gym outfit and it had the Legacy badge on the corner of the chest.  

We would all leave from Craig House, I think at about 5 pm and we would walk over the Narrows Bridge and then over the very newly started construction of the Mitchell Freeway.  On the Mitchell Freeway site at that stage there were piles of sand which something like a tar had been put down on top of it to cover it so that the sand wouldn’t blow away. 

I loved callisthenics

But it cracked and broke and there were areas of sand that were well exposed.  We loved running across the sandhills and jumping on this tar, or whatever it was, because it would crack it up.  I did make a good crack and it didn’t hurt because we were jumping on sand. 

Of course it was breaking it up so it was no longer useful for the purpose that it was there for. I don’t think we actually took that into consideration.  We just enjoyed the fun of it, and we would run and jump and roll on the sand.  Do stuff like that. 

I loved callisthenics.  It was a really good night because we would go out as a bunch of girls and then we would rock up at callisthenics. 

The grounds were very beautiful but run down, so there weren’t well preserved gardens.  There were lots and lots of nasturtiums and weeds but at the bottom there were large weeping willows that we’re grand and fabulous to climb.  You could hide in them and they were terrific.  You could sort of swing on the arms of them, they were very grand trees.  

Then there was lots of lawn and just on the upper side of the hill to the left was a prefabricated building, which because it was on a slope some part of it was on legs to make it level .  You walked upstairs to get to the inside of it.  

There were quite a lot of girls because they were all Legacy girls and not just those from Craig House.  We got to know the girls, or I might say that those girls got to know us. 

I know in later years people would say they remembered me from Gym or Club, whatever.  I never knew who they were, and I think that was just due to my poor eyesight. 

From time to time I would take my glasses off so they wouldn’t break when I was doing a particular acrobat.  So I would be doing it quite blind.  

Callisthenics was one of those sorts of things because we would have cane hoops that were the size of a small tyres on a car in diameter,  but they were just cane and we had to do callisthenics with them where we would reel them around our arms and legs and our waist, and do things where we would go through them. 

There was a tune called Wheels.  I remember that tune and if I heard it today I would know it immediately, but I can’t bring it to mind.  It was called Wheels and it was at some point the tune we used to perform our Christmas event, which legatees and parents would come to to see how we had gone.  

We had learnt a callisthenic dance using these canes.  I found them pretty daggy, as did most of the girls.  We really just liked doing the Roman rings.  There were two types of rings, one we’re called Roman, and there were other sorts, but I don’t know what the difference was. 

Maybe they were just on straps that hang from the ceiling and you pulled yourself up like, you know, the people in Roman times.  The other Rings were … I think they might have been constructed so that they were solid and not bendable. 

There were the bars and the up and down bars. I called them the up and down bars.  They might have been the high and low bars or the uneven bars.  I think a lot of people called them that. 

They were two parallel, thicker lots of bamboo that were on uprights and you would perform, you know, standing on your arms and pointing your legs and swinging around and doing all sorts of things on the bars.  

The uneven bars had one bar at one height and the other bar at a higher height.  So, you would do those same exercises but with those you could swing a lot further and you would swing and jump between the bars.  This required real skill. 

I think they were mainly for boys, but I was very good at them.  I had a fun nickname, which I didn’t mind, of Spidermonkey, because I did love swinging on those bars and I could do the work up to a whizz, and a whizz, and a whizz and go from one lower bar, and jump up to the next, and then whizz, and whizz, and whizz and come down to the lower bar. 

I  didn’t like the Roman rings because you had to pull yourself up.  They were all about strength.  You had to pull yourself up and if you could do that, then you had to put your legs out in front of you.  

They were the sorts of moves that were in the Olympic Games.  You had to be able to stand upside down by holding yourself on the Roman rings. 

That was it, the Roman rings were a lot harder to steady because they only had leather straps.  They would move, and you would have to be able to stand up, and by your own strength, hold yourself upside down without the Rings going apart. 

Whereas the other rings were set at a certain rate so you could do those same exercises but you wouldn’t have that thing where they went apart and you could fall off and probably break your arm or something, but we always put down big plastic padded pads that we would fall on .

The thing I loved the most was the trampoline and the box.  It was either called the box or the horse.  There was also the beam, the parallel beam. 

I probably could have done a hell of a lot of damage to myself, surprisingly I didn’t

I wasn’t so good at that, and never really understood why.  I only understood much later in life why I wasn’t so good at that.  But the box, I was far and away the champion. 

You had to run up and jump on a spring board and you would jump up and over a cushion topped, padded topped, horse.  You would either land on the horse, or you would go right over the horse and there would be two padded mats on the floor, and you would do a circle in the air, roll in the air, and try to land on your feet. 

Often there was a bit of crying that went on there when people would fall flat on their faces.  

There would often be people on the other side, who would be on either side of the mat to catch you as you went down if you didn’t look like you were going to be able to do it.  Catch you, not in their arms, but that they would get your arms and guide you down. 

But I was very good at that and one of the main performing feats that I got to do, which made everyone ooh and aah much later on in life when the gym had moved to Legacy House, which was behind Craig House, was when we did the final presentation, there were two girls who were standing on top of the box, and I had to run up and jump and they would grab me by my arms and throw me up in the air, and I would be able to do a double somersault and land standing straight with my hands out. 

I would go really high in the air and you could hear, and I loved it, everyone gasp, and go Ohhhhhh! because I was so light. I weighed a feather.  I probably could have done a hell of a lot of damage to myself, surprisingly I didn’t.  

Even when I was doing those callisthenics when I was young over at the Bishop’s House on the trampoline.  I loved the “tramp” as we used to call it, and we would be able to do all sorts of tricks. 

One of the things we learnt first was to just jump high so that we could jump higher on one spot, because a novice will start to jump and they would not come down in the same position. 

So, coming down in the same position was the thing you had to learn first, and you didn’t want to jump forward.  

Then you would learn to jump or just lie down and do a roll on the tramp, and then get up.  But I would learn to jump and do a roll on the tramp as easy as pi. 

I had got to a stage where I could do jumps really high, do double flips, and not necessarily stand because that was hard.  I don’t know that I got to the point where I could end the jump with a stand. I usually ended a jump with a sit. 

I could do the twist sits.  There would be a competition to see who could do the most twists and you had to jump really hard and high to be able to do the most twist.  So you’d jump and jump and jump and then you would sit, and swivel, face the other way, sitting, swivel, sit, face the other way, and keep doing it until you ran out of power to keep the bounce going. 

So all that time you were sitting and swivelling and sitting and swivelling and sitting and swivelling and I could do that, I don’t know how many times, but more times than anyone else.  

The only time I had trouble was when I was showing off.  I loved it because there was also another one that was very hard to do. 

That was the stand and lay.  You would jump very high and then you would jump and fall to a lying position with your arms out like that [GM: Trenna demonstrates] and then just stand up but if you got really good at it you could jump, jump, jump, jump, lay, swivel, lay, swivel. 

Now you would never be able to do that as much as when sitting because you were lying, and you had to always lay in a perfectly posed position.  I would jump, lay, swivel and you had to try and do it as quickly as possible before you lost the strength to turn your legs around without bending them.  They had to be in a straight position.  

So the only time I got into trouble is when I did try to do a very high jump, and then try to jump forward so I could do a backwards somersault. 

I had done that before but I had done that by doing a backward somersault and coming back to a lying position which helped you.  I wanted to show that I could do a backwards somersault and come down standing. 

Well, I jumped and jumped and jumped and I went to do a forward somersault and as I jumped so high I did this forward somersault but there was no stopping it I just kept going forward and the trampoline was sort of in the middle at the back of the the hall, and at the side were the parallel bars. 

I went jump, jump, jump, and I kept on going and I ended up sprawled, face down in between the parallel bars. My head hitting the top bar and my legs spreading between the lower bars, and then falling to the ground, which did not have any padding because it wasn’t in use at the time. 

There was a terrible uproar about what I had done and I got into trouble.  I was not allowed to go on the trampoline again, and surprise of surprises apart from probably having bruises, I didn’t break anything. 

Going back to the “Wheels” performance. The performance was held not at the new gym, but back at Bishop’s House. 

After gym we would all walk down, there would be a hatch that would be lifted in the old building, so you walk down the stairs to the old main grand building.  There would be someone inside, someone who was rostered on. 

I don’t know who they were, but they would hand you a salad roll and a cool drink which we all looked forward to.  The salad rolls had obviously been donated and hung around all day.  They were really, really, soggy but something about the sogginess I liked.

I couldn’t bear that today, but I quite liked that sogginess and they were always some sort of salad roll, which had ham and cheese and stuff in it, which was yummy.  Not like the sort of sandwiches we got for school lunches.  

Back to the House 

We would eat them, then all of us girls, there were obviously legatees or parents who would come and collect the other Legacy kids, but there wasn’t any bus or anything so we just all walked back to Craig House in the dark, or probably semi-dark because Gym took about 2 hours, so it was around the 7 pm mark that we would walk back over the Mitchell Freeway, again, still jumping on the tar and get home and we would have to eat our dinner. 

I can’t sort of picture what happened with homework.  We always sat on the smallest table for dinner so I’m assuming that homework had started for the others, because that would start at 7 pm. 

On club night, maybe the girls went over and joined the boys for homework because we would interrupt them by getting the meals out and talking and stuff like that.  So I don’t know where they were, but I sort of don’t think they were in the main dining room with us.  

We would have our dinner which was always dried out by then.  Dinner on those nights was better because we were not supervised, so if there was food that someone didn’t like they could ditch it as long as it looked like it had been eaten. 

It couldn’t be put in the bin where Matron could discover it.  So we would have that, which was usually pretty dried out.  A lot of the girls didn’t want dinner because we’d already had salad rolls. 

I always wanted mine, and then we would also eat dessert.  I don’t know if we had to do homework after that but as we were so young we just seem to have endless amounts of vitality so I presume we just went on with homework after that. 

A Flawed Character

The other thing about Matron is that she was definitely a flawed character. 

She came from a wealthy family.  Her surname was Templar.  She never married.  She did have a man in her life during the war who was killed, or went off to war and never came back, and afterwards she never married. 

As I said, the family name was Templar.  She had a sister named Faith who was older than her, but slimmer and better looking, and had got the man, who was a doctor, a well-regarded and respected doctor down at Busselton. 

They were landed gentry type people.  They owned property and ran sheep and horses.  The property was on two sides of the road, that was nothing new to me.

I had seen that elsewhere with farmers when I stayed with people who lived in Vasse, they owned property on two sides of the road, so that didn’t seem to be flash, it just seemed to be that these people had property that was on two sides of the road.   Horses on one side and the sheep on the other side.  

Matron loved going down to the farm.  She loved her nephews, who were all well to do and intelligent people.  Later on I would learn that my ophthalmologist who had in fact been my ophthalmologist from when I was first operated on when I was six or eight I think,  Michael Walsh, the ophthalmologist, was also a landed gentry type of person who loved horses.  

Matron said that his family had tried to do a deal with the Hemsleys because they had been granted property.  His family were one of the people who were encouraged to come to Australia but were given property for a pound, or whatever. 

They got, I don’t know, they got a 99 year lease, or whatever.  As far as I knew it was just their property provided they came out.  His family had got property in Northam which they soon learnt was property they didn’t really want, because it was not as fertile, they didn’t get as much rain, and they certainly didn’t get any relief from the stinking hot summers as compared to a farm that was down at Busselton, that had beautiful beaches and would grow to be a much more colonised and elite area. 

They had tried to do a deal to swap land, but it never came off.  Matron would often say “they thought they could get away with that, but the Hemsleys were too smart for that”. 

I say that Matron was a flawed character in that when she did come to Australia she worked at one stage as a nurse.  But she was brought up in the Raj so had lived a life with maids and refinement. 

When she came to Australia she was offered a position as nanny to the state governor’s children.  Nanny in those days had a wider connotation to today.  I think the nanny did look after the children, including their education. 

So when Craig House was bequeathed by the Craigs to Legacy, and the then governor was probably moving on from his position, he had suggested Matron would be the perfect matron to run such a place. 

She, after all, had a nurse’s qualification and she was well regarded by the establishment and the freemasons.  So she got the job after the first Matron became too elderly and left. 

I think Matron arrived in the early 1960s and from all accounts from the neighbours, the Bonnerups, she was a very different Matron to the Matron who had previously been there. 

Later on we would learn from the Bonnerups that she could be quite a “common” woman in that she would quite often offer to go to the races with them. 

She loved the races.  She put money on the races and quite often “her horses” as she would say, would be running.  They were the horses from the farm, and she’d always say she had a sure fired bet.  

One day the Bonnerups went with her and she yelled and yelled and called out “you damn ruddy thing” and of course the Bonnerups were very refined people from Sweden, and I think they were very wealthy people. 

But they still liked Matron, they found her humorous, her wit very bawdy, she liked bawdy jokes which they found quite hard at first to comprehend someone like her, running a place full of children.  But we rarely saw that side of her.  

We saw the sometimes cruel side of Matron, but there was also a humorous side she had which could be deemed as bizarre, and not acceptable in someone who worked as a matron looking after fragile children.  

We would learn later that Matron’s father had committed suicide. I don’t know if that was known about her, but maybe it was.  Maybe that would make them think that she would have an understanding of some of the dilemmas that young children would be under.  But anyway, I don’t know. 

It’s a Joke

Matron liked practical jokes.  In one of these, there was a boy, and his name was John, and I think he was the head boy.  She decided that they would conspire in a practical joke, not so much against the kids, but against the house master and house mistress. 

I’m not sure which house master and house mistress were there then.  I probably do know but I can’t think at the moment.  It might have been the Partingtons or the Barnes.  It probably wasn’t as late as when the Gibsons were there. 

The Partingtons or the Barnes?  It was the Partingtons I think, who were a slightly weak and a little insipid couple, who might have annoyed her.  

Matron decided that they were going to set it up so the telephone would ring while we were sitting and having dinner and make sure you would have to go off and answer the telephone. 

This boy and Matron used to argue a lot, and we did know that.  That did happen a bit.  He had conspired with her with the blessing of her, that he was going to get her back. 

She came back in from the telephone call and she commented on him and said something like, you know, telling him off.  I don’t remember what it was, but she told him off.  We hated it when she would tell people off because she would always thump on the table and all the glasses would jump up and there would be a noise. 

And in this instance she thumped the table and she said “how dare you do this” or something like that.  And he got up, and he said “I’ve had a  gut full of this” and he pulled out a gun and he shot her, and she fell to the ground and there was this uproar. 

The house master and house mistress ran down to Matron and grabbed hold of John, and of course they both burst into laughter.  And we did too.  We thought it was the funniest thing we’d ever seen. 

But I don’t think it would be considered appropriate to get someone to go along with, who was probably under 17 years of age.  If he was the head boy that would be how old he was.  Maybe he could be as old as 18, because some did stay a little bit longer if they were doing apprenticeships or going into the Navy or something like that . 

We all think that was one of the funniest things that happened at Craig House, but we also think “oh my God, how many people could have been traumatised by that”.  And the poor house master and the house mistress must have been absolutely in horror about what had happened. 

It may well have been the Partingtons because I think it was Mr Partington, or Mr Barnes who said they had an allergic reaction to eggs.  

In fact what that meant was that they were allergic to something that was in eggs. So Matron, being a nurse, would know full well that that was a fact and she just did not believe he was allergic to eggs. 

And he was. 

She decided one day that she would serve up a dish with eggs in it just to see if he was telling the truth.  I don’t remember the dish. I think it was something like tripe, which did get served with a white sauce. 

She made sure that the eggs were beaten up so that you couldn’t see the eggs.  It was served to him and the poor man went into a terrible shock and he went into a fit, and I think she got her answer, because the ambulance had to come and take him off. 

He was close to death when they took him away.  So she did have those sort of quirks. 

While the Cats Away the Mice will Invade the Kitchen

The other things that we got up to that were mischievous, which I will and should have talked about, was Matron’s love to go down to the farm for the weekend.  She would get away from us and the responsibilities.  The house master and house mistress would get to be in charge.  

We hated it because the house mistresses never seemed to have strong personalities.  It was the 1960s so they were very under the thumb of their husbands. 

They were meant to look after the girls, and the men were to look after the boys.  On one occasion Mr Gibson came down to the girls’ quarters and Sue Crossing knew he was coming, so she hung tampons from the top of the door so that when he opened the door he would walk into a whole lot of tampons.

It was her way of saying  “how dare he walk into a girl’s room”, which we did think was brilliant and hilarious, which she got reported for.  He said he was allowed down there and she said “no you’re not, only women are allowed in the women’s quarters.” 

We didn’t know if that was true or not but it sent him packing, and his wife was sent to check on us.  

When they went back to their apartment we would often have midnight feasts. 

Now, to get to the kitchen you had to go either via the dining room.  If you had any lights on they would be seen through the French doors that face directly towards their apartment. 

Or if you went the back way you had to go across the back porch, that was inside, that they could see from their back apartment very easily where the fruit cupboard was, and they would see if there was any light, so we had to do everything in the dark, and it was pretty dark. 

When you got to the kitchen you needed to light matches, and on the kitchen windows there were no curtains or anything so you were always going to be seen.  

So we had to do everything in the dark and it was always barrels of fun because we had to try and get things out of the fridge. It was a huge double door fridge, and it had a double door freezer at the bottom. 

So we would try and get things out, sometimes getting totally inappropriate things out because they weren’t the things we were looking for. 

We were also paranoid about mice because you would hear the mice in the kitchen at night-time and we’d be very scared that we would tread on a mouse and that would start us screaming and alert the obviously very well gifted hearing Partingtons or Gibsons. 

They were probably in their rooms with the windows and door shut, and I’m sure they would never have heard a thing.  We liked to get to the fruit cupboard which was very clearly in the line of sight from their back room.  

The cupboard was kept locked  and we had to get the key, and the key was always hard to find because it dangled from the same hook as where the menus were. 

Everything had to be done in deathly silence because sometimes we reckoned that boys were sent out to spy on us to see if we were up or not.  We caught them once doing just that, and they wanted to come in to where we were. 

They said they were going to go and tell the house master if we didn’t let them in.  I don’t remember if we let them in.  

Anyway, we would get anything.  There would be leftover desserts, bits of rotten cheese, bits of cold meat of any sort, usually polony or something like that, sometimes there were biscuits, or just toast that we would put jam and marmalade and stuff like that on.  

Then we’d go somewhere and sit and tell stories.  We decided the best place to go was Matron’s sitting room because it was at the front of Craig House, and we thought that they wouldn’t go to the front of the house. 

Thinking about it now I think they might have, but anyway, we would sit in Matron’s sitting room.  The other reason we would do that is if any of us had cigarettes we figured no one would notice that because Matron was a smoker and if they smelt the smoke in Matron’s sitting room they wouldn’t think it was us.  

It was also where she kept the booze.  That was just on corner shelves.  We learnt pretty quickly that she would start marking the bottles of booze so we would look where the mark was and then we would fill it up with water or tea or something to make sure that it was at the same level. 

There was always someone like Sally or someone who would say “come on, let’s wee in it”.  I don’t think we ever did, but we always thought it was a really good idea to give it a go. 

They were great times.  

Murder!

Also the other things that were permitted and they were … Matron had times when she liked to play murder games which I loved, loving Agatha Christie as I did. 

But, they were really, really, scary.  They also included other games which were hide and seek, but it wasn’t that straight forward.  

The murder game was usually kept to the main house, inside.  I don’t think it ever was held outside.  What it would be is that you would pick a card from a deck of cards. 

It would all start in the lounge room, and if you got, I don’t remember the cards now, but it was something like if you got the ace of spades you were the detectives.  If you got the joker you were the murderer. 

I think there were three cards you could get that determined what role you played.  You didn’t know who the victim was.  

So there were three things, and they were the detectives, maybe the policeman or whatever, but I don’t remember now.  Anyway, you would all get cards, and it was easy to walk around Craig House in a circular fashion because you could leave the lounge room, head through the front foyer into the first passage of the girl’s room. I think that was the only time the boys were allowed there. 

All the lights were out, no lights were on.  So you would all walk through the foyer and then you would go down the first passage and turn at the intersection to the left towards the back passage, which either went up to the girls bathrooms or down past the cupboard inside the back patio where the vegetable cupboard and fruit cupboard was stored, through to the kitchen, around the kitchen, into the dining room, around the main table of the dining room, in through the French doors, and then back to the lounge room. 

You would then repeat that circuit all over again.  You didn’t know how many times that this would be done, but I think Matron did set a limit of 3 circles so that the game didn’t go too long.

I would walk around, as did most of the people in terror, sort of like this [GM: Trenna shows me a terrorised look on her face with her arms crossed against her chest and protecting her throat] because the murderer would come up and choke the person. 

The victim had to allow 10 seconds before they screamed.  I don’t know if it totally worked like that, but you had to hold off 10 seconds before you screamed and then you were allowed to scream….

Oh no, no, I recall.  You were allowed to scream and at that point everybody had to stay perfectly still except for the murderer who had 10 seconds to make their getaway before the police arrived.  

So then you would all go back and look at the position of the body, who it was, and then they would get up and that would be the end of their role in the game. 

We would all go back into the lounge room and the policeman or detective or whoever it was would have to ask the questions of everybody, and they would take note of who was around the body at the time. 

People were only allowed to answer questions in a “yes”, “no” fashion. They could not describe anything. 

So the detectives said things like “did you see the murderer” and they would say “yes”, and so he would say or she would say “do you know if it was a boy”, and they would say “yes”, and the detective would say “was it a boy?” and the person might say “no” and then so on. 

They had to tell the truth, they weren’t allowed to lie.  However, the murderer was allowed to lie all the time.  They didn’t have to tell the truth.  

So some people, older cleverer ones, thought it best if they were the murderer to not run too far.  Just to murder and then stand by the murdered victim so the police thought maybe it wasn’t them, because they were right there when they had had 10 seconds to get away. 

As the murderer was allowed to say anything they could answer yes or no to “do you know who the murderer was?”  “Yes”.  And “was it a man?”  They could say “no”.  “Were they wearing a dress?”  “Yes”.  So they gave all the wrong leads, and we used to love it, especially if the murderer was caught. 

Matron would let those go on until quite late at night. 

In later years I learnt that some people hated playing that game.  I loved it, but I still in later life found it horrible for someone to put there hands around my neck, or if I thought something terrible was going to happen in a movie I would always do this to myself [GM: Trenna emulates the earlier movement with her hands – which I saw many times when we watched TV together] to stop me feeling someone strangling me. 

GM: So you’ve got your arms crossed across your chest and holding onto your throat.

THM:  Yes, holding my throat.

GM:  And that’s how you would walk around before the murder happened?

THM:  I would do that a little bit, you weren’t meant to. You were just meant to be walking along casually.  But it was in pitch darkness, and it was horrible because you knew that at any moment someone could put their hands around your throat.

People were told that they weren’t allowed to choke people.  They were only meant to do it lightly, but I’m sure there were some boys who deliberately did it, you know, a little bit firmer than they should have.  

I guess the final thing that we did…. well,  there was also another game, where you hid, you wouldn’t just hide but you would hide somewhere, there was a name to it,  and when you found the person you just stood with them.  This game was held outside so it could be quite terrifying.

This is in the dark at night time, so that’s what made it so spooky, because it was in the dark, and we had things like at the back corner was the woodpile. 

And then there was the bike shed, and then there was all down the side of Craig House which was just weeds and rubble and who knows what.  It was scary, and there were lots of trees and bushes and you know the back of the boys’ quarters. 

You weren’t allowed to go inside.  I think you could go into the boiler room or the laundry, but they were both outside anyway.  

So what would happen is everybody would go looking for the person missing, and as you found them you would just stand with them and hide with them and of course that got funnier and funnier because there would be less and less room to stay covered and hidden. 

Of course sometimes people would try and sit on someone or get on someone’s back to fit in and not be seen.  I actually think that’s how it was decided who the next person to hide would be.   It was the last person to find everybody else.

They then had to hide, or the game was over.  So it would be the last person to find the missing person who would have to be the next one to go and hide. 

There was a name to it, it wasn’t just hide and seek, in that you would go off and find them and that would be it.   So that was scary.

But the activity that was really scary, and Sue was the initiator of this, because I think she got a ouija board, or it was Matron’s board. 

But it was a séance board and we always did it in Matron’s sitting room.  I suppose because it was easy to sit around a table, and the room could be darkened. 

We would shut the French doors to Matron’s sitting room and shut the French doors to Matron’s bedroom and to the front foyer.  We were pretty well internal in the front portion of the house.  

We would do the séance and it would be really scary.  I was always scared and conned by this. 

I was terrified always, but I loved the terror

You would move a glass and Sue would always be the one to say “is there a spirit in the room?” and by that stage I was scared. 

“Is there a spirit here?  If there’s a spirit please show us a sign.  Is there a spirit?”

Sometimes what would happen is, we would have our fingers which were meant to rest lightly on a glass in the middle of the board, and around the board was the alphabet.  The glass would move to the alphabet. 

There was meant to be barely any touch, so it didn’t seem like someone was pushing the glass.  In all my time that I did it, I never felt anyone push the glass.  It just seemed to move of its own volition.  

It would move and spell out usually a word or just a letter.  So, she would say “please show us a sign.  Is there a spirit in the room?”  Then, by the glass moving to either where –  there were numbers as well as letters – either a number or a letter. 

We would say “thank you spirit.  Who do you want to talk to?” and then they would spell out a name, and that would give you the creeps.  If it spelt someone’s name. I was terrified always, but I loved the terror.  

We would get questions answered.  So, there would be things that were asked. 

There were things like “is my mother there?”  “Yes”.  Sue said, and we believed her, that she thought she could feel the spirits, and when the spirits were there she would know that they were there. 

She would say “there’s someone who’s asking “is there a John?””  And Sue would say “is there a John?”  And Helen would go “that’s what my Dad’s name was”.  Things like that. 

We would all get a little bit scared, it was good fun but terrifying, and we loved terrifying ourselves.  

But there was one time that terrified us the most.  That was when we were looking for a sign, and the glass was going all over the place, and it was getting faster, and it was getting scarier, but it wasn’t going anywhere. 

It was just going a little bit scary, and we’re all getting a bit worried about what was happening.  And then the telephone rang!   I can’t tell you the sheer amount of screaming that went on then. 

And we had to clear up the table as quickly as we could and put everything away because we knew that our screams would be heard from the back.  And they were. 

And we had to get everything put away back in place before the house master and house mistress arrived and it’s the last time I remember playing it. 

It’s the one that sticks in my head the most.  We may have played it again, but I don’t think we did.

So, I guess they were those things that if they weren’t told before, they are now.  

GM: Thanks very much.

THM:  Good God, how long…[?]..[recorder turned off]

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