Chapter 33 Married Life

                                                           Chapter 33 Married Life
                                                                
Returning from our honeymoon after two weeks, Peter and I settled into our one bedroom flat with $30 in the bank. Rent was $17.00 a week. There was no phone, and we arranged with the neighbours next door to use their phone number in the case of an emergency. They were a lovely old retired couple and I remember their daughter calling her son, John, in their backyard.
   
    After leaving the Army, Peter returned to Malvern Star as an internal auditor. Advancement in the company however, would have required weeks away from home travelling the state, so he secured a clerk’s position at a sand mining company in the city. It  involved a boat trip over to Stradbroke Island once a fortnight to pay the workers at the mining plant. He learned about sand mining and inspected the rehabilitation of the areas where the sand had been mined. He was impressed..

      After work, he continued to devote several evenings a week as an honorary ambulance officer, volunteering at the city centre. When his first-aid exams were completed, and a position became available in 1969, he was appointed full-time as a driver-bearer. Of course no women were employed by the ambulance in those days.

     At that time all officers worked alone on a car, and joined the QATB because they wanted to help people. Poorly paid, they did the job for love, not money .

    One evening Peter was in the city at a lecture and he parked his car in a narrow side street. When he didn't arrive home for hours past the due time, I was beside myself with anxiety, sure he'd had a car accident.

    Eventually he arrived in a taxi “The car’s been stolen..” I felt as if someone had punched me in the chest.

    We were both appalled, felt lost, and personally assaulted. Pete’s mum and dad, worried and distressed, insisted on replacing the leather first-aid kit that was in the boot of the stolen car, as well as bringing over their own car for us to use.

    I got a job at St Luke's District Nursing Service. We worked out of an ancient wooden house with a dreary dark basement where we went only to feed stray cats. When I went down  into that hollow empty place I had a strong sense of yesteryear... of ghosts not anxious to leave.

    I caught the train to work, getting off at the station near the 4X Brewery, two stations on from Central. I breathed in the yeasty, warm odours of hops and beer as I walked down the hill to our office. As luck would have it, the train stopped at Central Station for alighting passengers who worked in the city, and the train from Ferny Grove that Pete's father was on arrived on the next platform at the the same time. As he walked through the carriage to the door with his friends, he and I waved to each other. He’d give me coy grins because his mates teased him about the young girl he was waving to, and he'd be chuckling good-naturedly as he left the train.

     One morning about five a.m, the man from next door arrived in his pyjamas and dressing gown, banging on the door. Pete answered his knock.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       In a few minutes he returned to the bed, looking anxious. His mum had rung from the  Royal Brisbane Hospital where the ambulance and taken his dad.

    When we got to the hospital, the casualty doctor emerged from a small room with Pete’s distraught mother. His father had passed away from a massive coronary. Being an only child, that left Pete the senior male of his family, having to take care of his mother, which left him little time to grieve himself. It was 1970. Nearly sixty-two when he died, ‘Norm,’ as he was known, never got to see his grandchildren. We moved in with Pete’s mother to help her through the grieving process, as there was only three months to go before the building of our first home was due to be completed,

     During my time at St Luke’s, Neil Armstrong and his co-astronauts landed on the moon, and we all sat around in the dining room watching them on TV. I enjoyed my time district nursing, but most of our clients lived in stilted little wooden houses that clung to the steep hills around Red Hill and Paddington. As I wasn’t a driver, my car sickness kicked in big-time. After five months, the nausea won, and I left.

      I found a job at Rosemount Repatriation Hospital. That meant Peter and I both worked shift work. Sometimes we only passed on the stairs, but there were also times when we were both off at the same time, slept late, or went shopping together. Financially we did well. We lived on Pete's wage and all of mine went into the bank. If I wanted to buy an item of clothing though, I simply skimmed $10 off the top of my wage and bought it. It was a happy time with no money worries.

     We bought our first block of land at Lawnton on the north side of Brisbane, and paid the princely sum of $2600 for the 32 perch block. When it was paid off we went to the Commonwealth bank, where we both banked our money and had done so all our working lives, to apply for a loan to build the house. We were disappointed if we thought we were going to get a hearing there though. 

    “But we’ve paid off a block of land,” I protested   

    "Well you should have put the money in the bank!"

    After a time we approached Sullivan Homes, who drew up plans and arranged an interview for a loan with a Building Society. Maybe the guy from SH was getting a kickback from the BS for his efforts, because he was a slick talker and made all the arrangements. However the young female receptionist at the building society was disgustingly rude and made us feel like begging dogs. We made up our minds we would never accept a loan from that company or do any business with them, ever. And we never have. Later on they became the Metway bank, and our policy held. When we found out through a friend that the building company was shonky, we changed companies.

    Through a young ambulance officer friend, we managed to get a mortgage curtesy of the Bank of New South Wales.

    We built the best home we could afford. It was a third the size of today’s houses, had a brick base and champherboard walls, three bedrooms, and cost $9,000.

    At Rosemount there were five of us, all young married trained nurses working on the staff at the same time, and Julie was the first to get pregnant. It was an unplanned pregnancy but she went on to have a little girl she called Kylie. After that my friend Sue became pregnant and eventually delivered a baby boy she called Peter.

    Then my friend Thelma and I became pregnant at the same time.

     Work friends remarked, "Poor Thelma, she looks so pale and thin, but you look so well!”  Blooming, I think was the expression,

    Meanwhile in 1971,  Mum and Dad sold the hotel and bought Hummock Hill Island, a ten-square mile grazing property south of Gladstone. Larry and his wife and two children settled there as well. It was an idyllic place with seven miles of uninterrupted beach, and  surrounded on two sides by mangroves teaming with mud crabs. But it was a nightmare to access.

    Ironically, Thelma went on to have a lovely baby girl she called Marnie, while I only made it to four months before disaster struck. One night I woke up in the middle of the night haemorrhaging copiously. The ambulance took me to hospital where I miscarried the baby. Pete and I were devastated.

     Despite depression for some weeks, I soon became pregnant again.
   
    On our first trip to the island Peter and I happily tackled the narrow bush road leading off the highway into the box trees, but it soon deteriorated into a dusty track of potholes and deep ruts. I worried for the baby I was carrying; Pete worried for the safety of the car! After eleven bone-rattling miles, we made it to the causeway. Negotiating the crossing depended largely on the tides, and luckily, we arrived at low tide. We found out later that at high tide it was a 200-yard-wide bottleneck of determined, salty sumo strength water. Abandoning our car on the mainland, we walked across the sand and pebbles to where Dad waited on the other side with an old jeep. It would be the first of only a few rare occasions that we found the tide conveniently out.

     Dad was obviously on a high, still buoyed by the novelty of owning the island. He approached the rutted six miles across to the houses with alacrity, defying the potholes as he ducked and dived the jeep, laughing with gusto at every gasp of his passengers. I gritted my teeth, holding my chest with one arm and my stomach with the other. 

    We found the houses comfortable enough, although they were little more than beachside shacks. Larry and my father revelled in catching the huge mud crabs, which they then presented to my mother to cook and serve.

     Over time, the island proved to be a fishermens’ paradise, and one day Larry and Owen netted a huge catch of deep sea mullet, detected from the houses by the dark shadow of the shoal swimming by. Larry said he ate so much mullet that the oil came out on his skin!

     Despite my introductory road shakeup, I went on to give birth to a healthy baby boy. Pete and I had terrible trouble choosing a name, but at the time Pete was working with a handsome young ambulance officer who had a wonderful personality and whose name was Ashley, and it rather appealed to us for our son.