Living History

Walking the Pier

I was born in 1941 in Adelaide, I was the youngest of five children, all girls. We were all spaced out quite far with my eldest sister Rebecca being almost twenty years older than me. Rebecca left home shortly after I was born and moved to be near the beach. Sometimes Rebecca would take me to her house where she lived with her friends and we would go for a walk on the jetty at Glenelg all the way up to the Tea Rooms at the end. Back then it was the place to go to and you would have all kinds of people walking along there. Of course later the jetty, aquarium and Tea Rooms were destroyed by a hurricane. They rebuilt the jetty but it isn’t as long as it used to be.

I started school early because I was bright for my age, but that was only because I liked learning what my older sisters were learning at school so I didn’t feel like the baby of the family. At school I had a lot of friends, we used to play hop scotch which I was good at because I had the longest legs. The boys though used to play war games because the war had just finished, they would pretend to be aeroplanes or shoot each other with pretend guns. In class I talked a lot and got into trouble but I never got the cane because the teachers usually blamed my best friend Judy, she was known as the bad girl in our year level.

One of the worst things about school was the milk, we had to drink this horrible milk that had this thick cream at the top. The milk was supposed to make us healthy but I would have rather been sick than drink it, in fact the first time I drank it I actually was sick. It was always warm and thick and disgusting. It smelt worse than you can imagine, even now I can’t drink milk or even eat cheese, it turns my stomach. The only way to get rid of the milk without drinking it was to spill it or hide it. Every lunch time I made sure to sit close to the bin and when none of the teachers were looking I would pour it in. If I couldn’t get close enough to the bin I would just pretend to spill it. I always acted very upset that I had spilt my ‘lovely’ milk so they wouldn’t think I had done it on purpose. I soon learnt that this was a bad idea because the teachers felt so sorry for me that they found me another bottle!

Elizabeth, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory

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