Recorded on the 20th April 2018
Mainly About Meals
[GM: Before we start. Also see the post “Floor 7 1/2” as it contains a player to hear “Tape 8 from the Kitchen” spoken in Trenna’s own words.]
GM: OK, today it is Friday the 20th of April, 2018. Tren, yesterday we were talking about Craig House and meals. Tell us a bit more about Craig House.
THM: Having talked about meals, there was something I haven’t mentioned, and that is that on occasions, I think monthly, one of the Legatees of one of the children would come to dinner.
A Legatee to Dinner
He [the Legatee] would sit at the opposite end of the main table, facing Matron. He ate the same meal as us, although I think he was given a choice of having something or not.
An example of that was tripe night. If he didn’t like tripe and white sauce with egg in it I think he would be allowed to have something else. Either that or Matron would ask ahead what he liked and he would be given his choice of meals so it wouldn’t be too embarrassing.
He supposedly was meant to eat all of his meal. Sometimes we had Legatees who didn’t have dessert, but that was OK.
Matron would greet the Legatee when he would arrive and I think they had pre-dinner sherries in the sitting room. When the meal was over, usually what would happen is that his ward, the child he looked after, would sit at the table beside him, so that person would be allowed to change places on that particular day.
One of the jobs that the girls had to do was that after dinner Matron would take coffee in her sitting room. I don’t recall whether that was every night, or only when she had guests, or felt particularly keen to talk to the house master or house mistress about something.
But coffee would be served by the older girls. Eventually I did get to do that job and I thought it was quite fancy because we learnt how to do percolated coffee.
[At this point Trenna’s voice becomes slightly and briefly “posher” as she talks]. It was a proper, silver, percolator which was not allowed to boil because it would make the coffee bitter. It was just allowed to chug along, and we would know when it was ready.
It would be put onto a silver tray with the little coffee cups which were tiny and were also silver. A little jug of cream was put on the table and crystallized brown sugar was also put on the table.
And there would be good quality biscuits or sometimes, smelly cheese and biscuits taken into the sitting room as well. So that was another job of the girls.
I went through what the layout of the dining room was, which was pretty much the central room of the house, on the right side. To the left side were the girls’ sleeping area and Matron’s bedroom.
She had a grand bedroom at the front of the house with a full size window that overlooked the Swan River and the city. Certainly prime real estate.
Jobs
We had a not overdone garden. It was quite a traditional garden of the period, where you had roses along the fence line.
We had a little brick fence with a painted white rendered top to the red bricks, and down the side a line of hibiscus. And to the side of her room there were shoulder height hedges of bushes that I didn’t know the name of at the time. They were well pruned, and they would have been pruned by the boys who did the gardening as their job.
I’m not sure that in the gardening job our lawn mowing was included. I think that that must have been done by a professional lawn mower. To this day I don’t remember that being something boys did.
I guess now that I have touched on jobs I ought to talk a bit more about jobs because jobs were allocated by Matron and we would do them for a fortnight.
It was unseemly to cut toast across in rectangles!
The girls would do jobs primarily related to their age or their capabilities.
There were jobs that were, as I have said, making the toast. The toast was made in a very large toaster, a 12 slice toaster and we would cut the toast into triangles.
It was unseemly to cut toast across in rectangles! They fitted into silver toast racks which were placed on the table. The same girl who had the toasting job laid out the jam bowls and marmalade bowls and butter for breakfast.
So the toast was put out well ahead of breakfast, we never had hot toast for breakfast, it was cold. Leftover toast was put in a big enamel vat that was kept in the bottom of a cupboard, and the treat for us, when we got home from school and were hungry, we were allowed to have any leftover toast.
From time to time toast was not removed so there would be mouldy toast, and sometimes that didn’t really bother us, we just cut the mould off and ate the toast.
We could have any excess cut cheese from the sandwich making from the morning, because the cheese just came in a very large block and we sliced the cheese on a slicer. We had a silver slicer that was used to slice the cheese with a handle that cut the cheese and you ran it through.
That was also how you sliced any meat that we might have leftover. Like if there was roast ham or corned beef or brawn, we would have that.
Sometimes there were beef heart’s left over, and we would do that with beef hearts. Beef hearts were not as bad as sheep’s hearts because we just saw them as sliced … something [Trenna gives a small giggle], some type of meat, with holes in it. We never saw the actual ventricles or whatever.
So the jobs were setting the table, we had to get up early if we were on sandwich making.
School Lunches
Matron would do an impromptu check of your bag, probably because she could smell the damned things
Like picking your plate size at the beginning of the term you also got to pick how many rounds of sandwiches you had. Of course all the girls picked one round of sandwich.
You could have up to, I think, three rounds of sandwiches. I am not sure, but I think the oldest boys who were in year 12, or 5th year in those days, might have been allowed to have four rounds of sandwiches.
So we would all get a sandwich and some sort of biscuit or cake, like a rock cake or a coconut cake, something that was always dry and hard, and a piece of fruit.
The fruit invariably was rotten. It really never was great fruit.
People were renowned for having their bags full of rotting sandwiches and rotting fruit, and we had to dispose of them. But as always kids forget to do those sorts of things, and often Matron would do an impromptu check of your bag, probably because she could smell the damned things.
I always ate or disposed of my sandwiches. A lot of sandwiches had cheese in, and they were cheese and celery, cheese and sultanas, cheese and gherkins, cheese and pickles.
We made “mock chicken”, and I still don’t remember how to do it, but I did like mock chicken. A lot of kids hated it.
[GM: After this recording Trenna and I made “mock chicken” using an internet recipe. We both agreed it was terrible!]
We liked when we had leftover roast beef, but the sandwiches were always stale. It was hard to have fresh bread. Bread was kept in a bread bin, which was lifted up with a slide up handle.
I don’t know how we managed to eat our bread, but it was never fresh.
The Kitchen
In the middle of the kitchen there was a double sided fridge. It was an old fridge and it had those handles that were long and you had to press the button to make them open.
Down the bottom was where there were two freezer drawers, and that was where all the meat was kept and where I rarely looked except for if my job was to do the cat meat.
Because the cat, Matron had cats, Keever the cat, Marmalade the cat, she loved cats. We would feed them meat from the freezer, which I think probably mostly was either kidneys or liver or something like that. It just looked like meat to me, and you would cut up that.
There was no such thing as giving the cat canned food, it was meat from the freezer. Actually it wasn’t a freezer like deep freeze, it was a freezer where it kept it colder than usual, but the meat would not be solid.
It was only later in the 70s when we got the chest freezer that we were able to freeze ice cream and things rock hard, and they were … that was very impressive when we got that.
The kitchen, as I say, adjoined the dining room, and there were benches where you could do the dishes. There were overhead cupboards, there was a main, I think gas cooktop, which was a large cooktop and oven.
I never was allowed to do anything except scoop the water over the large pan that was used for poaching eggs. You put the eggs in these round circles and filled it with water. That would poach a dozen eggs in it at a time, but they had to be checked to ensure that they were covered with water, and I was allowed to do that.
I was allowed to do the toasting when I got older, but I don’t think that at any time I did any cooking.
I’m not sure if any of the children did do the cooking because we had cooks.
Breakfast – a Mixed Bag
There was Mrs Grant who was the breakfast cook. She was a funny old biddy. She had something wrong with her skin, and she had sores all over her hands, and although I couldn’t see the details of them, everybody would tell me that they would be weeping when we were having our breakfast.
We used to sit and eat our breakfast. That was another thing that put me off having meals that something could drop into, because I wouldn’t know if it was there [because of my poor eyesight].
As a rule, I loved breakfasts. Breakfasts were always cooked, and they consisted of scrambled eggs, poached eggs. I think we had fried eggs and bacon, but not very often.
Matron’s favourite breakfast, which a lot of girls hated, was the fried breakfast. Matron, for those times, was considered a large woman. In 2018 she would just be considered to be slightly overweight, certainly not obese like people are today.
But the fried breakfast either appealed or made people gag. The toast was fried in the bubbling fat, and I mean bubbling, it was a good inch deep of fat. Lard that is.
And we would have fried bread, fried … a banana which would be sliced in half lengthwise and the banana would be fried in the fat, and bacon. And that’s what we had, banana, bacon and fried bread. It dripped fat.
We also had a mixture of tomato and onions on toast, which I loved.
We had devilled kidneys, which I also loved. And of course anything to do with offle a lot of kids didn’t like, but I did love devilled kidneys and I think I could have eaten that most days.
There were occasionally sausages, but not often. I don’t think sausages were a huge part of our life there, which is a bit strange. I don’t remember them.
As I said, the weekends consisted of cereals for breakfast because the cooks had the weekend off. Cereals I hated because they were never the best sort of cereals.
We didn’t get Weet-Bix. We did get the occasional Wheaties, but mainly cornflakes. No Rice Bubbles, we got rice puffs which were I think sort of like Rice Bubbles. Puffed wheat which I thought was really disgusting and we did have porridge.
There were other sorts of breakfast cereals, which I don’t recall because I’m not a cereal eater. I blame that on Craig House because cereals would come in large boxes that were not sealed particularly well.
They were in a box, and in that was a sort of a greaseproof paper bag. It wasn’t sealed well especially if whoever’s job it was to get them didn’t bother shutting it properly.
the porridge I knew was always full of weevils but at least I knew they had been cooked, and they were dead, and they weren’t alive in me as I swallowed them, and living inside me
There were always weevils in our flour, cereals, rice, any sort of grain of any sort we would get weevils, and the trouble with weevils was that I could not see them, but the other kids could, in particular Sue Crossing.
Sue Crossing would sit and eat her cereal, flicking out the weevils from her cereal to the edge of her bowl, so she didn’t have to eat them, and I would sit and look at my bowl of puffed wheat and I wouldn’t know if there were weevils in there or not. I hated it.
I hated it so much, even if I had porridge, which I knew was alright, the porridge I knew was always full of weevils but at least I knew they had been cooked, and they were dead, and they weren’t alive in me as I swallowed them, and living inside me.
I do remember once discovering that I had worms as a child at Craig House, and I was terrified to tell anybody because I thought they had grown inside me from the weevils I had eaten for breakfast.
I think I just outgrew the worms but I was absolutely sure I would be considered a filthy child, dirty, and I would be punished for having worms. I never considered that it was something I should tell somebody I had.
More on the Layout
Going around the house … there were two doors into the kitchen. One which entered the dining room and one which came out to the back porch, which was enclosed.
There was one window that faced inside the house. It was a large window which faced into one of the girls’ bedrooms. Then there was the back door on the left side.
The window that faced into the girls’ bedroom had a large table under it, and there seemed to always be boxes of something or rather on it.
I think it’s where we sorted out fruit or vegetables that would go into what we called the fruit cupboard. A painted, sort of cupboard which was covered. It had two doors, again with those latches that you would open and be able to lock.
Those doors were just made of a fly wire mesh, so they were open to the air flow, and there were two at the bottom. The two at the bottom were for the vegetables that were being stored, and the top one was a double one, there were two shelves and that’s where the fruit was stored.
This didn’t apply to onions or potatoes. For some reason they were stored in the hessian bags in the boiler room which was outside in between the main house and the annexe, or the first room of the annexe which was the laundry, which also had a toilet in it.
It was the laundry where the staff did the laundry for all of the kids and Matron. And I guess that was the staff toilet. They didn’t have to use the inside toilet.
The boiler room had a large boiler which warmed the water. That was one of the boys’ jobs, to set the boiler and gather the wood. We had a large wood pile at the back corner of the property.
The onions and potatoes were peeled by the boys outside, before being brought into the kitchen. They would be told how many potatoes or onions they had to deal with.
I don’t know how they did that, but I presume there must have been a bench and they peeled the potatoes in a bucket or something. Maybe that would be chopped up inside?
In the girls’ quarters, off to the side of the next …. well actually I said there were two entrances to the back porch. The back door, the one from the kitchen, which also had a door that closed the kitchen, but then there was one that led to the girls’ room.
There wasn’t a door from that back porch so we went straight into the corridor, and just to the left there was a small two bed bedroom for two girls to share.
If you continued straight ahead you reached, at the end of that passageway, Matron’s bath. She liked to take a bath. There was a bath, and there was also a basin, and that was Matron’s personal basin with a mirror above it.
Bathroom
Just before you reached that, to the left, was the bathroom for the girls. There were, I think, 3 basins where we would clean our teeth, and along the passageway there were rails where we put our towels.
We would clean our teeth … there were mirrors with cupboards behind them, and we would clean our teeth and wash our face, and the older girls would put make-up on.
I don’t think there was any electricity or any electrical devices used in the bathroom. There was one shower room. It was a long shower room with one shower at the end of it.
Behind the door there was a slatted bench where we undressed and put our clothes. It was always just a natural thing that the girls would have their showers at the same time, and I think the most, as a rule, that had a shower at the same time was 4.
Then someone would yell out and say “there’s room for you to get in too”. I don’t think in all my time at Craig House I ever had a shower by myself. It was always just natural to have a shower with someone else.
Matron would have a bath, and all the younger ones, they would get to use her bath water after she had it. Usually that was either one or two girls.
I know when Helen and I were young, and probably pre teens we would have a bath together. Later on, when Barb Crossing came she would have a bath, and sometimes we would have a bath with Matron if there was just one child.
I don’t think there was anything untoward about that. But in later days there has been times when that’s been considered to be child abuse.
As much as Matron would not be a matron of today because she had strange behaviours that she found amusing, or she felt entitled to do.
I don’t think she did it in a perverse way. I think she just did it because she was The Matron.
I’ll leave it there now.
Trenna’s Previous Recordings in the South Perth Library
[GM: Trenna did some oral history recordings about Craig House for the South Perth City Council. In them she talks more about Matron and her interactions with her charges.
They are a bit hard to find on the South Perth Library website, but you should find the first recording here; and the second recording here.]