Recording #1 of The Kitchen Tapes 9 April 2018
[GM: This recording of 9 April 2018 was the very first in a series of 24 recordings]
THM: The nineteen sixties were a decade of huge change for me and … for the world.
“…so my childhood was in some ways idyllic, in some ways terrible. I didn’t know the difference between the two”
My family had started to disintegrate. I began to have my own memories of my own life. I didn’t understand what life was about so my childhood was in some ways idyllic, in some ways terrible. I didn’t know the difference between the two.
I was born with my Mum’s condition Marfan’s Syndrome, which restricted a lot of my life. But, even though I had it, I didn’t really know what those restrictions were.
The fact that I couldn’t see, I didn’t know. I just lived within those limits, and did whatever I wanted to do. Which would usually be running amuck with the kids of my own age.
“All my school holidays were spent at people’s places all over Western Australia that I just went to. I assumed the same happened to everyone else.”
I was quite assertive in some ways because I always had the ideas – to go and play and do something. But I was also incredibly shy, but wanted to be happy all the time so that people would like me.
I didn’t understand family structure because my mum died when I was two. My dad was sick, and we seemed to only just go home with him sometimes, which I barely remember.
All my school holidays were spent at people’s places all over Western Australia that I just went to. I assumed the same happened to everyone else. It wasn’t that I felt it was different, but I never understood why I didn’t go with my sisters or brother. I was just sent somewhere. And I would meet people I’d never met before, and I would stay with them.
Some people were prepared for children, and felt they had to make the life of children such fun. I would go to farms, or I’d learn about milking cows, and then drinking the hot, creamy milk straight from the cow out of a bucket. It would have bits of green grass floating in it, which I found highly peculiar, but nevertheless I still drank it.
We would raise chickens, and the chickens would need to be kept warm. I would be given the chickens to put down my jumper. Although, I don’t know why I was wearing a jumper, because my holidays, I always assumed were in summer, but I guess I went to holidays in the May and September school holidays. So, it may have been in May, and been quite cold.
Some people were very nice. Some houses were very old and battered. The walls were made of hessian, floorboards were exposed, and some were missing. That didn’t mean that I knew they were people who had no money. They were just interesting houses, and good fun to play in, like cubby houses, but homes that were like cubby houses.
I always seemed to sleep in bunk beds as a rule, but I quite often have no idea where I slept. I never recall the food that I ate – the quality of the food, other than to go and get lollies. Ice creams were never something I enjoyed. I liked icy poles.
I liked being with people, but I also didn’t understand a lot of things. In my later years I have realised how remarkably well I survived all of my visits to places I knew nothing about, because I had cataracts when I was born, and they were never attended to until I was about 8 years old.
It meant that a lot of information would pass me by. I would notice the smells of things. I would always find the animal, unfortunately, that was always by itself and a little runt. I would feel sorry for it. I would realise later on that quite often that it was what we had for dinner that night after it suddenly went missing.
I loved being on farm properties. We were given absolute freedom. We would be told not to go to certain places, but of course, we never obeyed that.
We were going to the rusty tanks that had water in them, and jump in them and swim in them. We’d put our heads under the water. Who knows what was in there? I don’t know!
We would climb the highest trees we could find, and see if we could jump from one tree to another. Miraculously, I never had a fall. I didn’t break any bones. I was skinny as a stick, so I’m sure they would have been easy to break.
But it was tinged with a lot of sadness, because I never really knew my sisters. They were my sisters, and I had a brother, but he lived in another Cottage to me, and my sisters were assigned tasks where they had to look after younger children, and I would be one of the assigned children, so I wasn’t considered a sister. It was considered that I had to be looked after not as a sister, but as one of the kids at the Home. So, I knew I had sisters, but I didn’t understand the concept of what they were.
The Home I lived in was called the Mofflyn Children’s Home. It was run by the Methodist Church. The cottages were run by women, who I assume were unmarried women, but older women, and they were known as “Mum” and then their surname.
We had a Mum White, and a Mum Black in our cottages. I only recall the mum in our cottage, and another Mum who was particularly willing to use the belt on the legs of the children who disobeyed her orders like “don’t walk on this little wall” or “don’t do this”, or “don’t go near the little tent”.
We thought the little tent was fabulous, but it was really where the septic tank or the bore was. To us it looked like a tent, a teepee, and we played “Cowboys and Indians” around it.
We would invariably end up getting the strap. There were a lot of Aboriginal kids there, although I never realised that until I became a teenager, and saw them through a teenager’s eyes. Those girls had very black skin. As a child I never saw them as children of any different colour to what I had, they were just my friends, and we played together.
There was a kindergarten at Mofflyn Homes which was open to not only the children at the home, but also outsiders. At the kindergarten the Home children wore little overalls, and we played in the kindergarten and we also played on a lot of wooden playground equipment. This had been made by my father.
He was a very handy man who could make quite revolutionary types of things that had never been made before – that weren’t things you could buy. His play equipment was always exciting.
He came by some old phones which he spent a lot of time modifying for the children to be able to contact each other, hoping in the future that he would have them all over the ground so we could contact each other.
Unfortunately, he never lived to make them extend beyond the ones that were in the kindergarten, but they would have brought great fun and joy to so many children.
I think I was a very lonely child there. I don’t remember the few years after my Dad passed away. He died when I was 6, in 1963, and I stayed at the Home until July 1965. I only recall a year, and that was the year I went to school.
Grade 1 at East Victoria Park Primary School. I only recall going to school, primarily because I was so excited because my sister Barb, or Barbie as I always called her, was in grade 7 when I was in grade 1.
“In hindsight, I realise I was placed at the back of the band, out of sight. And I wasn’t allowed to sing”
She would always come to see me at play-lunch and lunch time. She was very beautiful, and I was a very thin and sickly looking child, with very bad teeth. I did wear glasses, but they didn’t help my vision very much.
I remember very little about school, except I remember that I had a friend called Irina. A Greek girl. And that I was so looking forward to playing in the band at the end of the year. I got to play the triangle. I felt like that was the most, … best instrument I could play, and that I had been picked because I was the best person to play that triangle.
In hindsight, I realise I was placed at the back of the band, out of sight. And I wasn’t allowed to sing. I was not gifted with any sort of singing voice.
I don’t remember being good at school work. I have been told that I was, but I have no memory of the actual classes.
I remember lining up for some sort of injection [immunisation]. I also remember that each day we had to show our fingernails, to show that they were clean.
We also had to come to school with a hanky pinned to our chest. I didn’t have any hankies, so I came to school with a couple of pieces of toilet paper pinned onto my chest. The toilet paper of those days was very shiny, almost like greaseproof paper. I know I felt humiliated about it.
I think I could be naughty in that I picked on kids at the Home. Susie Island was my friend. She was deaf and I took no mercy on her because I knew I had bad eyesight.
It was good to pick on someone, other than myself being picked on. So I sort of took a bit of joy in picking on poor Susie, even though she was my friend.
I recall by the tennis courts there were some tomato bushes and other fruit trees that grew there. They were un-tended, so there was quite a lot of rotten fruit and we would throw them at each other. I would always be the one in charge because I knew that if anyone threw them at me I probably wouldn’t see them coming.
Despite all of this, I was a good runner. I was athletic. Across the road from the Mofflin Homes was a big fenced off area of yellow sand, which we were informed never to go into.
“someone said they held onto your foot and they never let go until they bit it off”
In later life I remember seeing signs that were on the fence. If they were there when I was young, I don’t remember. To us that was the best playing area of all, because you could run down these hills of yellow sand and get buried in the sand.
It was the block of land next to the Agriculture Department, so who knows, it may have well been filled with all sorts of toxic waste! That was of no concern to us. It was just a fabulous place to go, and we knew we weren’t allowed to go there.
I know that the older girls and boys at the Home did interesting things. Television was new. We didn’t have a television, but there was a television in one of the other cottages. I think towards the end of my time we did get a television in our cottage, but I’m not sure.
But I do know that we would go to another cottage where we would watch films. I think they were either just Church related films or footage from the colonies [scenes of missionary work]. I don’t remember if there were movies or not. I don’t know if these are memories that I have, or these are ones passed down by my siblings.
We used to cut across the corner of Mofflyn Homes, which was just bushland, and we would always go that way, and quite often barefooted.
We would go that way to get to the shops to buy lollies, or to go to school. I remember my sister Barb saving me from a bobtail lizard. I was about to put my foot on it. I was so thankful because someone said they held onto your foot and they never let go until they bit it off. So I became terrified of walking alone through the bush.
I don’t remember a lot of the food, other than what my sisters talked about in later life. The only food I ever recall is boiled eggs, and they would be runny. And I couldn’t eat them. And they were, I think, what we had for dinner on Saturday night’s, because I associate them with the football.
I think we would eat our dinner and listen to the football. There might have been some salad included. I know my oldest sister talks about having to bring the jugs of custard from “The Main” which is what the kitchen was known as. It was in the main building.
One jug of custard would be made, and then it would be divided amongst four jugs. One for each of the four cottages, and then they would be topped up with water to make the right volume. I don’t recall that so much.
I do know we had a lot of freedom to do as we wished.
Strange and Sad
I do know also that when my father died, and I was told that he had died, that was a day that changed my world.
I came home from school, and the other kids had got home from school before me. They ran to meet me as I walked up what seemed to be a very long driveway.
They said, as children of six or seven would do when they had information that you didn’t have. They said, in a singing voice, “your dad is dead, your dad is dead”. And I got very upset and tried to fight and punch and get into a scrap with them. But we were separated, and the other children were sent off to, no doubt, get the strap, because they were told not to do what they had done.
“I was going to go … I became … I have no memory of that time. I lost my world – just disappeared”
Then, much later that night, when I was going to bed, I was in a room by myself with either Mum Black or Mum White who was going to tell me about my father. My sister’s weren’t with me, which I find incredibly … tragic … that I wouldn’t have any of my family with me. She said that my father had died.
My sister Barb was in the next room, and she heard me let out this awful scream which I wouldn’t stop doing. I don’t recall this, other than I do remember that I must have been doing something disturbing, or something that in my eyes was naughty, because the house mother said to me “if you be quiet, and be a good girl, and go to sleep, I’m going to go on a big holiday on a big ship to England, and you can come with me. Would I like that?”. How good would that be, and we would do that if I would be quiet. I had no idea what she meant.
So, to this day I find that the strangest and saddest of ways to be told my father was dead. And then my sisters and brother, who I already didn’t know much about, because I think my older sister Nancy and brother Colin had already left.
[At this point Trenna is struggling to find words]
I was going to go … I became … I have no memory of that time. I lost my world – just disappeared.
I had no Aunties, no friends, no nothing. I fell into a hole, until a nice man came along and he had bought me some pyjamas. Chinese pyjamas. And I just liked them.
But like anything I got, I just assumed it was something that happened. You got things, or you didn’t get things. I didn’t know about being thankful, or that my life was in any way different to anyone else’s.
Then, when this man, Mr Harkness, discovered that I was using toilet paper pinned to my chest he bought me a Fred Flintstone handkerchief. I showed it off to everybody.
I think suddenly money entered my world, because I was also given a doll that was a walky talky doll. They were like the best thing you could possibly get.
So a change had happened. I think that might have been when my life at Mofflyn, which was overrun with church orientated functions, came to an end.
GM: I’m going to stop the recording there.
THM: [in a disappointed tone] I’ve just raved on about nothing and no detail whatsoever.
[GM: As mentioned, this was the very first recording. Subsequent recordings were a bit more focused, but as happens when recalling the past, lots of additional memories enter the head and interrupt the existing flow of thoughts. Trenna also revisited most of these stories in subsequent recordings, often in more detail. The sandpit and the pyjamas are mentioned in the very next recording.]