A New Blog

You might have noticed if you have logged into my blog recently that all the postings are in a muddle. Some of them went missing and the others suddenly appeared the wrong way up.  I have no idea how on earth they came to be like that and have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to correct them but it was beyond me. Eventually I gave in and asked for help from my son Jace, the computer programmer. He did help me with some of the problems that I had but neither of us could work out how to get the postings into the correct order so I have decided to stop wasting my time, and Jace’s, and just start a whole new blog.

I have called my new blog “A Zimbabwean in Australia”. I have transferred the last 24 entries from “Zimbabwe to Australia” to the new blog as they were the offending articles that would not go where I wanted them to. They appear to be behaving themselves in their new home so here’s hoping that they will continue to do so.

My blogs have put me in touch with some old friends over the years I have been writing it so I do want to keep it up and hope that other old friends will read it and get in touch. So if you read this and it brings back some memories for you please feel free to get in touch so that we can swap stories.

55) When I was young

 When I was young, about six or seven I should imagine my cousins came to stay often. Their mother, my mother’s sister Elfina was not well and the boys Paul, Laurence and Eric spent quite a lot of time with us.One day my cousin Paul, who was a couple of years older than I was, fell and scuffed his knee. I remember the terrible fuss that he made. I remember that my mother responded by making an equally big fuss over him. She got him inside, gently cleaned the wound, gave him a sweet and sat him in a chair beside the fire to have his tea with his leg up on a chair with a pillow under it.I was incensed, a few days previously I had had what I thought was a much bigger accident, with lots of real blood and the only treatment I got was to have it cleaned with iodine. I wonder if any of you remember how much iodine used to sting. Mom had just put a sticky plaster on it and sent me out to play again. I still had the scar to prove it, in fact I bore that scar for many years. When I protested to my Mom that this was surely unfair treatment she excused her behaviour by saying that as Paul’s mother was very sick we should be extra kind to him and after all he was a boy and we all knew how boys were such sissies when it came to a little bit of pain. I often wonder how much this incident has influenced my attitude to ‘Woman’s Rights’. I am a firm believer that woman should have the vote, be allowed to own their own property, have equal pay for equal work and not be treated as possessions but I am not sure that I want equality with men. I think women are far superior to men and it should stay that way. But of course to get men to do all the heavy lifting and labouring we need to appeal to their egos and butter them up and let them think that they are really in charge. Seriously though I often wonder why women are so determined to be treated the same way as men are. We are different and I think we should be celebrating our differences and making the most of them.

Christmas Lights

Just a few more days and it will be Christmas once again. A practise that is common in Australia that I have not seen anywhere else is the custom of decorating ones house and garden with hundreds of coloured lights. They really go for it in a big way here. The decorations range from a couple of lights or a string of tinsel festooning one of the trees in the garden to very elaborate and I should imagine very costly displays.

Our local paper even publishes a list and a map of the best of the decorations so that parents can take the children on a tour of all the lights before Christmas. Some of the householders have been putting up their displays for many years. They started as just a small token but have been added to each year and now rival New York’s Time Square or London’s Oxford Street.

The imagination and ingenuity is amazing. There are lights everywhere – along the roof, up and down the walls, in the trees, on the driveway, the gate and the chimney. If the house has a chimney one can be pretty sure that there will be a huge blow up Father Christmas climbing into it. Or sometimes going in head first with his black boots sticking up into the air. Another popular feature is the sleigh and all the reindeers – these can be bought in the shops- wire frames in the shape of the sleigh and reindeers with coloured lights attached to them. Some have a series of lights that flash on and off so that the reindeers’ legs appear to be moving and one can see them galloping along the roof top. The shops also sell Nativity scenes, snowmen, Santa’s little elves, fairies, stars, letters that spell out “Merry Christmas”, wishing wells and loads of other things to delight the heart of the dedicated decorator. These displays must be very time consuming to erect and must cost a great deal of money besides the cost of the electricity it must take to power it all. I can’t help feeling a little concerned about the sanity of people who are so dedicated to this time and money consuming pastime.

There are competitions for the best but I have no idea how they are judged, it would be very hard to pick the winners. Many of them have figures that move, maybe snowmen that sing or reindeers that Jingle their bells. If you would like to see some of the winning entries go to
http://express-advocate-gosford.whereilive.com.au/photos/gallery/show-us-your-lights-winners/

I like to go and look but I am more interested in the looks on the faces of the little children as the lights flash and sparkle and they see all their favourite Christmas characters depicted and I feel a nice warm Christmassy feeling towards all the people who put so much effort into bringing such delight to the children. Merry Christmas and God’s richest blessings to them all.


And to you too.

A Very Happy Christmas from

Marina

Spanish Sailors

 Last week I heard someone on the radio talking about the West Coast of Ireland, he talked about the most westerly point and how legend has it that Spanish sailors from the Armada came ashore there and that they are responsible for the many olive skinned beauties in the area. This snippet reminded me of a funny incident with my mother.

Once we were talking about surnames and their origins. She told us that in Cornwall there were many Spanish sounding names and she said that she had read that it was because many of the Spanish sailors from the great Spanish Armada had come ashore in Cornwall and for reasons best known to themselves they had decided to settle there. They married local girls and their off spring still carried these Spanish names. A few days later when we were all in our living room Mom walked in and said, without any preamble “Talking of Spanish Sailors” It took us girls a moment or two to remember that we had been ‘talking of Spanish Sailors’ but when we did we just burst out laughing. Mom was a bit put out that we had laughed and said “Well we were talking of Spanish Sailors” and we just laughed all the more and said “Yes but that was three days ago”. So in our house the phrase is still used. If you want to change the topic of conversation completely and talk about something different you just have to say “Talking of Spanish Sailors” before you start and then everyone knows that you are going to turn the conversation and it will not matter if no one has any idea why you are doing so.

I can’t find any reference to Spanish Sailors in Cornwall but I have found out that after the Spaniards had been defeated by Sir Frances Drake the remaining ships had to sail north and around Scotland as the English fleet were blocking the English channel and they could not get back to Spain that way. Off the coast of Scotland they were hit by a terrible storm and the few remaining ships sailed on around the north of Ireland and are said to have landed south of Galway in a place that is still called Armada Island. As the Spaniards were Catholics they hoped to receive help from Catholic Ireland in their fight against Protestant England but the Irish saw them as intruders and fought them off.

But I suppose with a fleet of 130 ships there must have been a huge number of Spanish Sailors and some of them could have deserted their posts and made new lives for themselves in Cornwall or Ireland. My Mom was always fascinated by surnames, she liked to look at the local telephone directory whenever she came to visit us and try to work out where the people in that area had come from.

54)Memories

My very first memory is going to the maternity hospital to see my new baby sister. As I am only 3 years and 4 months older than Adele it is obviously a pretty early memory. I remember that I was with my Aunt Emily and I think my Grandmother was there too but I’m not so sure of that. I don’t remember seeing my mother, I don’t think I was allowed into the ward but I think I was sneaked into the nursery by one of the nurses. I’m sure it would not have been allowed in those days.I remember the nursery was a long narrow room with windows all along the one wall and against the opposite wall there was a row of tiny cots. They were folding wooden frames that had a cloth attached to them to cradle the newborn infants. Pink ones for the girls and of course blue for the little boys. I don’t remember what I thought of the babies or my feelings about having a baby sister but as I was not even 3 ½ I suppose I was not old enough for such deep thoughts.Whenever I see in a newspaper or a magazine one of those articles of questions and answers to well known personalities I feel compelled to read them. You know the kind of thing – 20 or so questions to famous people like 1) what is your earliest memory? 2) What was always on your school report? 3) What did your mother always tell you? 4) What was your most embarrassing moment? 5) What makes you angry? 6) What was the happiest moment of your life? 7) What was the worst job you ever had? 8)Did you always know that you want to be an actress/model/politician/scientist/author or whatever? I have been wondering for a while why these articles always catch my attention when I often have no idea who the interviewee is or why they have been asked for their memories. I have come to the conclusion that I am more interested in the questions than the answers. I feel that I need to be ready with the answers in case I am ever approached by some magazine editor with that list of personal questions so that I am not taken off my guard.Well I have already told you of my earliest memory and what was always on my school report was “Marina could do better”. My mother always told me to wear clean underwear ‘in case I got hit by a bus’ and not to believe everything I read. I am not going to tell you my most embarrassing moment; I don’t want to have to re-live that. What makes me angry is the huge gap between the rich and the poor. There have been so many happy moments in my life I don’t know which one to pick . The worst job I ever had was selling Biltong from a barrow in a very cold spot in the open air and as I have never become an actress /model/ politician/ scientist/ author/ or whatever I cannot answer that last one. I know as a child I used to tell people that I wanted to be a nurse on board a sea liner. I started off saying I wanted to be a sailor but was told that I could not as I was a girl. Someone told me that the liners employed women as hairdressers and nurses during the cruises and I thought that this might be the next best thing.So now the questions are all answered, the magazine editor will not come knocking on my door and I can now give up reading those articles and getting ready for my moment of fame.

53) A Sewing Machine

Have you arrived at that time in your life when some of the items displayed in your local museum are things that you remember from you youth? Is this a sign of old age or are museum curators just very young these days. One thing I often see on display is old Singer sewing machines. We had one at home. It was set in a wooden cabinet and was powered by a treadle. I remember there was some sort of lever that joined the footplate to a large wheel that drove the machine. At the top of the lever there was a hole with a piece of bent metal through it. The piece of bent metal reminded me of a pair of arms and I when I was very little I used to imagine that the long lever was an angel and when the treadle was in motion I thought that the angel was waving her arms around and ‘flying’ I can’t really remember why I should have thought that as I don’t really remember what it looked like but I just remember, to me it was an angel.

I once asked my mother how old her machine was. Maybe seeing similar ones in museums I thought it might be worth a lot of money. Mom told me that she did not know the exact age, as she had never bought it. In fact it was not hers as she was just looking after it until someone came to collect it.

When my mother’s parents had started a business in Swansea many years before the premises that they rented had a flat above it. The lady who was moving out as they moved in asked if she could leave the sewing machine in their keeping as it was going to be collected by someone. She did not explain if she had sold it to someone else, if it had only been on loan or if it was being repossessed She just said that she had arranged for its collection and someone should be there in a day or two. My Grandmother agreed and off went the lady without telling them where she was going or who was supposed to collect the machine. The days stretched into months and years and no one ever came to claim the machine.

I thought about this story a little while ago when one of my clients told me that that was how she came to own her tumble dryer. She said that if you ask someone to collect an item and they do not do so within a prescribed time they lose their right to it and you are entitled to keep it. She told me that she had contacted the store where she bought the dryer a number of times saying that the machine had a fault and that she did not want it and that she had stopped the payment of it. They agreed to cancel the transaction but never came to collect the dryer. So eventually her husband had the fault repaired and they have been using the machine ever since.

I remember when I was young seeing a film about the American Wild West in which one of the characters on the wagon train was taking her sewing machine with her as she trekked across the country to start her new life. In the story although the wagon train was ambushed by Indians, lost without water and subjected to all sorts of hardship the lady would not leave her sewing machine behind. I could not understand why anyone would go to such great lengths to carry such a heavy item across deserts, rivers and mountains. In these days of mass production it is easy to forget how hard it would have been for those pioneer women. She would have had to make all the family’s clothes, all the curtains and soft furnishings for her new home. She would have had to mend and re-mend all their work clothes to make them last as long as possible, without her sewing machine it would have been a monumental task.


Does anyone remember the old song sung by Betty Hutton?

Ohhh the sewing machine, the sewing machine
A girl's best friend
If I didn't having my sewing machine
I'd a come to no good end
But a bobbin a bobbin and peddle a peddle
And wheel the wheel by day
So by night I feel so weary that I never get out to play

52) The Lovely Lisa

Not long before his 40th birthday our youngest son Dominic met a lovely girl called Lisa. We were beginning to think that maybe he would never find a wife but when he introduced Lisa to the family we immediately felt that maybe at long last he had found the one for him. As usual while adults are careful what they say children don’t have the same reluctance. After our first meeting with Lisa Claudia and Lauren spoke out what we were all thinking, they said, “We hope Uncle Dom marries Lisa”

Lisa works as a nursery school teacher for part of the week and as a nanny for a family the other days. She has been working for her family since the children were very young. They are now all in their teens, in fact the oldest is at University this year but they love Lisa so much they do not want her to leave them. She is still part of that family, going each week to do the shopping and other house keeping chores that the parents employ her for.

I don’t think there was ever much doubt that Dominic and Lisa were made for each other and it was not very long before they announced their engagement and started to plan their wedding. Dominic was keen to show Lisa a little bit of Africa before they settled down so they decided to go to South Africa on their honeymoon.

The wedding was planned for 20th September 2008 and the minister, Bil Ghali, married them in the Berowra Baptist church. Bil has been a good friend to Dominic since they both arrived at Berowra Baptist church about the same time in 2002. The reception was held at the Asquith Golf Club where approximately 100 guests helped them celebrate their special day.

Dominic and Lisa had worked hard to plan the event and everything went off very well. The dresses, the men’s suits, the flowers, the photographs, the decorations, the food, the music were all just right and we all had a great time.

Our eldest son Jonathan was Dominic’s best man and as such was entrusted with the ring. In the car on the way to the church Jonathan realised that he did not have the ring in his pocket and they had to turn around and go back to the house to find it. I think that was the only thing that went wrong the whole day.

We were a little concerned about the trip to Africa as we had heard of tourists being targeted by thieves and highjackers but Dominic and Lisa said that they received nothing but kindness and good service the whole time they were there. When they arrived at Johannesburg airport he asked a young local man where he could find the telephone so that he could inform the hotel that they had arrived and a car could be sent for them. The young man whipped out his mobile phone asked which hotel they were booked into and made the call for them. He organised where the driver should meet them and showed them where to wait. Dominic and Lisa said that this was the kind of service they got everywhere they went.

When the newly-weds came back from three weeks in Africa they settled into the little house that Dominic rents in Berowra and lead busy and happy lives, dividing their time between work, church and friends. Now fourteen months later they are looking forward to the birth on their first child in February.

In my job I meet many elderly ladies who do not have good relationships with their daughters-in-law. I think that this can be a very hard relationship so I am very blessed to have two lovely daughters-in-law. Siân and Lisa are very different but then Jonathan and Dominic are very different too so it is only to be expected. I love them both and am very grateful that they are good wives to my sons. What more could a mother want?