1971 - Part 1

For Xmas, P gave me a watch.  Engraved on the back was "To Beth with love, P".  He explained that this had belonged to his ex-girlfriend.  He had gotten her pregnant, but as she was in the Navy based in Sydney, they took care of it for her.  When they broke up, he had asked for his watch to be returned.  It was a nice watch, but I did contemplate scratching off the engraving.

In early February 1971, P had his 21st birthday party under his parents' high-set house.  Mum had made me a beautiful halter-neck, backless dress from a peacock blue satin jersey fabric.  Of course I couldn't wear a bra with it, so I strategically applied some sticky tape. ☺

We were having a great time and I danced with P and some of his friends, but as the night wore on, P got very drunk.  He bailed me up against the fence outside and accused me of making a play for his friends, then he hit me.  I fought back, scratching his face, which immediately sobered him up.  I went upstairs and he followed me into his bedroom.  His mother and grandmother burst in, but J didn't say anything except for L to leave us alone to sort it out.  L wasn't having any of that and started screaming at me for scratching P's face.  I got up and left, telling my parents that I was going home.  After I caught a taxi home, P went to sit in B's car (the woman I'd replaced in Cashiers) where she consoled him for the rest of the night.

I kept going over that night in my mind, trying to see what actions of mine could have been misconstrued by P ... I found nothing!  After a few days we talked it out, made up and I chalked it up to a one-off event.

Later in February, Twin gave birth to her beautiful daughter H!

 

Mum and Dad adored H and couldn't do enough for her.  I had always known that Twin was my parents' favourite and now it seemed that her daughter was favoured even more.  ☺

In March we celebrated our 19th birthday with dinner at the Angus Steakhouse in the National Hotel in Brisbane.  In the photo below are A, Twin, me and P.  The boys were 21, but Twin and I had no problem ordering alcohol.

Our wedding was scheduled for July, but in April I discovered I was pregnant.  P and I agreed it was too soon for a baby as we both thought it would put too much pressure on a new marriage.  My sister had only been married 6 months, but her marriage was already a bit rocky.  P asked around and found the name of a Gynaecologist who performed illegal abortions at his house in Ascot.  P insisted that I would have to go alone, otherwise his price would double, so we sat down to work out how much money we could scrape up together.

I made the appointment and attended his house one night.  After his examination, he confirmed that I was approximately 6 weeks pregnant.  I burst into tears and told him I couldn't have the baby so he offered to solve my problem for $2,000.  It might sound like very little money now, but in 1971 it was a staggering amount to someone earning $50 per fortnight!  After more tears and a bit of haggling, he settled for $250.  He wrote me a prescription for some painkillers and antibiotics, telling me to take the painkillers 30 minutes before my next appointment.

On Friday night a week later, I returned to his house while P waited up the street.  As I approached his door I could hear music playing loudly, but over that I could hear a woman moaning.  I was so frightened that I knocked rather timidly on his door.  Of course he couldn't hear me so I tried again loudly until he ripped open the door.  He told me he was busy and to go away for about one hour.  I explained that I had already taken the pills, but he said it would be fine and slammed the door in my face.  When I looked up the street for P, he was nowhere in sight so I wandered down to the park and sat on a bench.

When I returned he was ready for me and much to my horror, he performed a D & C without giving me any further pain relief.  I won't go into details except to say I've never felt pain like that before or since and the procedure seemed to take forever.  I paid him his money and left with an appointment for a check-up in 6 weeks.  I slowly wandered down the street until I found P waiting around the corner.  He called a taxi and took me home, as I was bent over in pain and feeling very weak.  I let myself in and, telling Mum and Dad I was feeling sick, went straight to bed.  After spending all week-end in bed, I was feeling well enough to go to work on Monday.  At my follow-up appointment he gave me a clean bill of health.

I would like to say something to the extremists.  I don't expect you to change your minds, but please remember that abortions have been happening since the human population started walking the Earth.  Women should be allowed to control their own bodies and I don't want to see anyone forced to use "backyard" abortionists ever again, because that's what will happen if legal abortions are ever banned.

P and I married in July.  Twin was my Matron of Honour, my best friend L and P's best friend R's girlfriend were my bridesmaids.  R was P's best man and his groomsmen were T and my brother-in-law A.

I'm pretty sure that our wedding was one of the few in history to have hecklers!  As we left the church after the ceremony, we could hear a woman yelling out comments like, "You'll be sorry!" and "I'll give it 6 months!".  There she was ... with her friend sitting in the gutter, both drunk!  P's friend B who had comforted him on the night of his 21st.  He could have walked over to her and told her to go, but no ... he thought that if he pretended she wasn't there ... she would just leave so P did nothing.  All through our photo session, we would smile for the camera then scowl off to our left, then smile again.  I developed a tic at the side of my mouth after a few minutes of this absurdity.

Finally, we escaped to our reception at the Metropolitan Motor Inn.  I should mention here that after my Aunt L died in 1965 my Dad, being one of her executors, spent up lavishly.  Aunt L and Uncle G were childless so she left her entire estate to her five nieces and nephews.  Mum and Dad immediately paid cash for a large block of land in Sunnybank, a new Valiant sedan then they sold our shares in BHP to pay for Twin's wedding and her new car.  Dad insisted that P and I should have a great honeymoon so as well as paying for my wedding, I paid for our flights to Mackay, accommodation there, a week-long cruise around the Whitsunday Islands then tickets on the Sunlander back to Brisbane.

I'm sorry my story is taking so long to relate, but each post is more difficult to write than the last.  Thank you for your patience.

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1970

As I became more involved with P, we would have lunch together, sitting at his desk eating his Mum's sandwiches.  I hadn't met her yet, but she made extra for P to share.  I knew he played football and drank a lot, but I'd grown up around a lot of drinking so I didn't see it as a problem.

The first time P asked me out, it was to be after work on a Friday.  He had disappeared after lunch as usual and I waiting until almost quitting time, but he didn't return so I phoned Dad to give me a lift home.  I was waiting in Ann Street when I spotted P staggering, very drunk, along the opposite footpath.  When Dad pulled up, I jumped into the car as P raced across the road in front of us, yelling at me not to go.  I just told Dad to ignore him and we drove away.  When P and I discussed it later, I told him I wasn't prepared to wait around while he got drunk.

He did some funny things, like pulling the ring-pull off his can of Coke to give me an "engagement ring".   I thought it was cute at the time and I was sure I was in love with him.  It wasn't the "head over heels" type of feeling, just one of inevitability or fate, because I couldn't see my life without him in it.  I think he reminded me of Dad in a way, which should have sounded a warning.  We went out with his best friend, R with his girlfriend J and his other mate T.  I don't think they liked me very much but I really didn't care as long as P stayed reasonably sober.

When he introduced me to his parents, they welcomed me warmly.  I thought they were great, but I was a bit shocked to hear them swear.  They said "shit" and "bastard" ... words I had never heard my parents use.  The strongest equivalent in my parents' vocabulary was "basket" instead of "bastard"!   Like my parents, his drank every night although it was only a large bottle of beer each.  His Mum J told me that she suspected her husband, V kept a bottle of spirits or plonk under the house, which he also drank on the sly.

J and I became fast friends and she earned my respect.  She had always wanted a daughter and I found her much easier to talk to than my mother.  She had also worked all her married life to help keep the wolf from the door, only because V liked to drink so much he didn't give her enough money to live on.  She had lived most of her life in incredible pain because when she was very little, she was playing downstairs when her mother, L, emptied out the old copper she used to boil the laundry.  The scalding water burnt her back so severely that she spent a long time in hospital propped up on her elbows.  When she came out of hospital, she had to learn to walk again and after a while, osteoarthritis caused so much pain in both her elbows that a surgeon removed the head of the radius in both her arms.  Even with cortisone treatment, the pain never left her and simple things like turning a tap or peeling a potato caused her much pain, which she tried to hide from everyone around her.

I made sure that we bought her things to make her life easier, such as an electric can opener and an electric carving knife.  She was so very brave and so different to my mother who complained about everything and was almost happy to be diagnosed with Angina.  J's mother L was similar to mine, because the first time I met her she pulled up her skirt to show me a large scar on her knee and thigh, then pulled up her top to show me another one on her back ... way too much information for a first meeting!  L even listed off multiple doctors and specialists she frequented in Mt Isa and Brisbane.

P and I became engaged in November 1970.  When told of our engagement, his friend T didn't believe him and bet him dinner at the Room at the Top restaurant in the Tower Mill Motel.  I don't know which of us he was insulting, but we enjoyed a very good meal thanks to T's scepticism. ☺

I was 18 and P was 20.  I splurged on my dress; it cost nearly 2 weeks wages ... $32!  I finally took P home to meet Mum and Dad who typically, drank him under the table.  I had to pour him into a taxi and make sure he had the huge fare from Upper Mt Gravatt to Virginia, ie. $5.  One of our work mates wrote a poem to celebrate our engagement, which he happily recited at our work Xmas party.

It goes as follows:

When P to M popped the question

M pensively made a suggestion

C**** she said is rather a strange label

But I'm willing if you're ready and able!

My engagement ring was unique and in all the years since, I have never seen another ... unlike his best friends who went to Diamonds International so their Fiancées sported exactly the same ring.  Both girls were not happy!

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Working Life - 1969/70

I started work in April, 1969 and my letter of appointment told me to start my first day in the Rates Dept, but when I arrived through the Adelaide Street entrance of City Hall I was told that I would be working in Cashiers.  The girl I was replacing had taken the job in Rates.  I didn't really care at that stage, but with the clarity of hindsight I can see that my life would have been entirely different if I had never met P.  I would also have never met the best friend in my life, L.   I started off sitting at the desk beside P learning B's job, which was to collect all the cheques from the cashiers on a regular basis during the day, use an electronic adding machine to total the amounts then to cross-check this figure against the cashier's total.  I became very good at touch-typing the keys and could always "feel" when I'd hit the wrong one, so my totals were usually correct.

I'd then run all the cheques and the adding machine tape through a Microfilm camera.  At the end of the day, I would prepare the enormous deposit slip, with a carbon copy, to accompany the cheques and cash to the bank.  Even back then, the totals were a staggering $1million + per day.  These were the days of micro-mini skirts and I wore the first pair a platform shoes in the office, earning ridicule from my workmates, but the effect displayed lots of bare, shapely leg.  I spotted L across a waist high divider in the Licensing & Metered Parking section.  She also subscribed to the long, shapely leg philosophy and I knew she was a kindred spirit before we even met.  For some reason, the "boys", including P, delighted in flicking rubber bands at my legs, but I was damned if I was going to let them know it bothered me.

On 20th July 1969 we watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the Moon on multiple TVs set up in the City Hall's main auditorium.

B moved on to some other department and I took her place.  I seemed to be the only one to notice every time I had to collect money for a birthday, engagement, wedding or baby, some of the cashiers would take the money straight out of the till.  I asked one day out of sheer curiosity and was told they all received an allowance for "unders".  Crooks!  I also noticed that the boys who counted the 20c pieces from the parking meters, also left at night with bulging pockets ... nobody else seemed to care.  The most amazing sight was the absence of male staff from lunchtime onward on Friday.  They all went to the pub and never came back.  I used to feel quite conspicuous, being the only one left outside the boss' office, but he obviously knew and took no notice.

Easter weekend 1970 saw Twin and A in the front seat of his panel van, four others including me crammed into the back and two others riding pillion on the two accompanying motor bikes, as we headed off first to A's brother's place in Sydney, then out to Bathurst for the races.  We were all hopped up on NoDoz (caffeine tablets) and drove straight through the night then crashed on the floor of D's house in Paddington.  When we got to Mt Panorama A took us out onto the track and tried to make his van fly, but it didn't really have the engine for it.  It was so funny that every guy we met just happened to be a "racing driver" as if this was a magic formula to get a girl hot and bothered! ☺

As night fell, Twin and A made it very plain that nobody else was welcome in the back of the van, so the rest of us spread out a ground sheet and tried to sleep on the cold, hard ground.  I've never been so bone cold in my life, then or since and I'm not sure if I went off to sleep or slipped into a state of hypothermia.  I woke with a rude shock, to find one of my male travelling companions with his hand in my panties ... to get there he's unzipped my jeans!  After I'd thumped him away and demanded to know what the hell he was doing, his pathetic excuse was a plaintive ... "I thought you were awake".  Yeah, right!  I bet he was sorry I woke up.  The racing was pretty boring and time dragged.  We were supposed to head back early on Monday, but Twin and A were having too much fun.  Nobody seemed to care that I had to be at work on Tuesday morning, our birthday.  Twin phoned Mum and Dad and told them the van had broken an axle and to make my apologies at work.

When I got back to the office on the Wednesday, I'd been transferred into the Licensing & Metered Parking section, because a supervisor BK who lived not far away from me, told everyone I had big parties at my house every night.  He was not only an idiot, he was wrong.  We lived on the widest part of the winding street, so everyone parked in front of our house as it was the only place buses wouldn't have to squeeze past.  He assumed these people were hanging out at my place constantly!

In Licensing & Metered Parking I started off creating files for all complaint letters, then moved over to conduct searches and type summonses.  Parking regulations at that time gave a person 14 days in which to pay their ticket, then the charges would escalate as we incurred search fees from the MRD (Main Roads Dept).  The parking officers, who had engineered their uniforms to look as much like the police as possible, were a bunch of swaggering jerks.  There were three copies of every ticket.  The orange card was affixed to the windscreen wiper, the white original and blue carbon copy stayed in the filing cabinet.  As the paid tickets were received, the copies were removed to another area.  After the due date, I had to separate the unpaid originals from their copies, bundle them up and take them around to the EDP (Electronic Data Processing) Dept.  Here operators would key punch all the information onto cards and these cards were then read by the massive computer.  A few days later I would return to pick up the originals and an enormous printout produced by their line printer (a multi-part sheet with an original and two carbon copies).  I would then manually de-collate and burst these sheets into separate, matching stacks and walk the original to MRD.  Everyone around me hated these days, because I filled every available waste paper bin with sheets of carbon paper.

MRD would send me back a stack of Statutory Declarations, naming the vehicle's owner and giving address details.  After I matched them with the original unpaid tickets, I would take them up to the huge, grey Xerox copier.  It had a curved glass and instead of a hard, flat cover it had a rubber mat that I would lay over the glass before hitting the start button.  I used a form letter that was embedded in a piece of curved perspex to exactly fit the copier's glass.  There was a cut-out piece on the back of the perspex that allowed me to place the original copy of the ticket before making the copy.  So I would stand there for an hour or more, lifting back the rubber mat, removing one ticket and replacing it with the next before hitting the start button.  These letters were sent to the owners demanding immediate payment of the fine plus search fee and threatening court action if the new amount remained unpaid.

After two weeks, I would match the Stat Decs with the unpaid tickets so all the typists could start work on summonses.  These long documents also had multiple carbon copies, which were a real pain to correct as we had to place cardboard under each sheet of carbon paper, then rub out the error on each page before retyping (the CC always smudged or if you rubbed too hard, a hole developed).  It was a legal document so no liquid paper was allowed and it wasn't until after I left work in 1973 that they brought in word processors to make the job easy!

The parking officers had to record every word of abuse the driver had said to him by writing on the back of the white original.  In turn, this horrible writing had to be deciphered by us, so we learnt all the four-letter words under the sun.  One pathetic driver actually used his parking ticket as toilet paper, then sent it back to us through the mail.  The stupid idiot left all the vehicle's details and ticket number in place so it was easy for us and Australia Post to trace him and bring charges.

Although my new section was in the same large office and only separated from Cashiers by a waist-high divider, it was another world.  Our boss was a little man, in body and spirit, who wouldn't let a woman smoke within sight of the public counter, but a guy could walk up and talk to the public with a smoke hanging out of the corner of his mouth.  Mr K would never speak to you at his desk, because he didn't like being stood over so he'd say, "Talk to you in a minute" and when you sat down, he would come over to stand beside your desk.  He made all the women work out a roster for making the morning and afternoon tea/coffee.  We would have to serve the men at their desks.

One sleazy accountant made the mistake of running his hand up the back of my leg, so that afternoon I doctored his coffee.  I emptied a large blob of glue into the bottom of his coffee then emptied an entire glass bowl of pins into the glue ... well, I didn't want him to swallow the pins!  I kept my eyes on him as he took his first couple of sips and watched the colour drain out of his face.  He never touched me again and even went so far as to ask me out.  What a freak!

L and I got our revenge on Mr K by meeting in the ladies room, where we'd sit on the couch and smoke a few cigarettes together.  Each time we walked out, we were gone for about 30mins, so he lost a lot of productivity with his sexist attitude.  We also had lunch together over at the Carleton's Ladies Lounge.  In those days, it wasn't really acceptable for women to drink with men in the Public Bar.  We each ordered toasted ham and tomato sandwiches (45cents) with a Blue Lagoon (Gin + Blue Curacao) cocktail (45 cents).  The barman loved experimenting on us, so we tried Black, Red, Mauve and Green Lagoons too.

We didn't do this every day, because after 6 cocktails at lunch we could barely walk back to the office ... remember we were wearing platform-soled shoes.  We would spend a blissful afternoon not getting any work done, phoning each other to have a quiet giggle or carefully walking around to the ladies for a smoke.  I don't know who lead who astray, but we didn't really care.  We made plans to buy a VW Kombi and just travel around the country until L met K, a budding cop (meaning he still had a neck).

Twin wanted to marry A, but Mum and Dad wouldn't allow it so she deliberately set out to get pregnant.  She and A were married in September 1970, renting a house in Ashgrove and baby H was born in February, 1971.  Twin was a bit overdue, so A decided a good fright was in order and took us for a midnight walk through a large cemetery.  They visited the spot where they first kissed, in a rather large tomb.  It worked remarkably well. ☺  Let me point out that although we visited several cemeteries at night, we were not vandals and never did any damage.

Following are some of Twin's wedding day photos, showing our entire family.  At this stage, she worked in a bridal store and designed both our outfits ... she had so much artistic talent and such potential!

                                 

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Mt Gravatt - 1969.

A brand-new house means lots of work, landscaping the grounds to prevent storm-water and mud from pushing in under the front door and flooding everything under the house during the first storm.  Dad and I got drenched and filthy digging a channel across the front door to divert some of the slush running down the bare slope from the road.  He hired some landscaping contractors, who conned him into paying a lot of money up front, laid some shoddy concrete mowing strips around a large rock retaining wall then promptly disappeared.  He hired a jackhammer so he and I could take turns breaking up the concrete.  He then hired someone who knew what they were doing, to expertly finish the job.

Toward the end of grade 10, every student in Queensland had to sit a compulsory Scholarship exam.  My results were listed in the newspaper and posted to our new address.  I was one of the few who was offered a free trip to QIT (Qld Institute of Technology, now QUT).  My father thought it was a ridiculous idea because, and I quote, "It would be a waste of time, since you're only going to get married and leave work to have children".  He drafted my letter of refusal, which I copied in my own handwriting for him to send off.  I never thought of arguing with him, but it hurt that I was held in such low esteem.  He sent me to a secretarial school in the city to increase my shorthand and typing speed ... it seemed that his only ambition for me was to hang off some man's every word!  He then organised for me to get a job in the Local Government with him.

Meanwhile, Twin was working and stealing money in a city department store.  She made a friend there who lived at Hendra, so we would go over on weekends and take turns getting drunk, although she seemed to have a few more turns than me.  The legal drinking age was 21 then, but at 17 we never had any problems buying alcohol.  We would buy a large bottle of Gin or Vodka and not nearly enough soft drink to go with it, so would polish off the bottle straight.  As she became very drunk, Twin would become very violent and the only way to handle her was to hold her down until she ran out of puff.  Luckily, I was always bigger, stronger and abhorred violence so much that I didn't retaliate when she tried to hit me.  I always hated the idea of losing my self control, so I never drank enough to get what we called "paraletic". 

One night we went to a party at another friend's place in South Brisbane.  Twin met her man, A and decided that she wanted to move in with her friends.  Rather than confront Mum and Dad, she packed up in the middle of the night and just left.   She woke me to tell me she was leaving, so it wasn't a total shock when the uproar started at the crack of dawn the next day.  When our parents finally realised she wasn't coming back, they told me I would have to leave too.  Why, when I didn't want to leave?  To look after my sister, of course!  Were they crazy?  I was so sick of being "the responsible one", so I thought good riddance.

We had some great parties at South Brisbane and would sometimes go into work without any sleep.  In the early hours of the morning, the bakery behind the house would perfume the air with fresh bread.  We'd jump the fence, buy a loaf and let the butter melt into huge slices.  Heaven!  We moved from there to a house in Taringa and from there to a flat, three bedroom plus sleep-out, in New Farm.  Four girls shared this space and one by one, they lost their jobs.  I was the only one employed who could pay the rent, $19 per week.  Sadly, my wage was just over $38 per fortnight.  We ate big bowls of noodles, smothered in tomato sauce.  One by one the others moved home, until we were left with no other option.  I have no photos from this time period because during one of his visits my parents' house before we married, my fiancée removed and destroyed any photo with a man in the picture.

Meanwhile, I was being pursued by a guy at work I'll call P.  When I first met him I thought "Every office has to have one" ... he was so arrogant and a real smart arse!

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