Chapter 36 Life Changes

                                                        Chapter 36     Life Changes

Soon after Christmas, an appeal in the local paper asked for Girl Guide leaders. I was looking for something to do in my spare time and they welcomed me with open arms. The problem was I had never been a girl guide as a young girl, and they gave me a group of about fifteen girls to arrange programs for and to conduct meetings with, without any prior training. I lacked courage to do much with them because I was afraid of doing something wrong, like breaking the law maybe. I really wanted to do so much with my little group, but didn’t.

    One weekend I sensed I had something wrong in one eye. I couldn't put my finger on what was the matter but I tried constantly to wipe the ‘something’ away. It lasted a couple of days only so I forgot about it after that. A few months later however, I had another episode, this time much worse. Blotchy patches partly obscured the vision in one eye. I went to my doctor who calmly dismissed the problem as short sightedness and referred me to an ophthalmologist he knew. I learned from him that I had optic neuritis and was referred to a neurologist. 

    The month was August. The Brisbane Exhibition, known locally as the Ekka, was underway. On the way to my first appointment, Pete and I were unprepared for the heavy traffic. Being on intimate terms with Murphy, his Law prevailed once more. Pete parked the car in an underground car park, and I rushed up the stairs onto the street above and into a chemist shop to ask directions. Following their advice, I tore down the street to a tall building and up to the fifth floor. Declaring I was there for my appointment, my heart sank as they explained to me I was in the wrong building! This was the office of an opthalmologist, my doctor’s brother! They, in turn, instructed me to go UP the street to another building on the 10th floor. Panting and exhausted I finally made it to the right office. I was twenty minutes late.

     My specialist was young. Annoyed that I had run late, he made it a nerve racking visit for me.

    Rushing through questions on my history, he ordered, "Get undressed, quick as you can. Take everything off."  Nervously, I did as I was instructed. 

    I took everything off, and feeling nuder than nude, I lay tremulously under the sheet. 

    When he discovered I had taken him literally, he almost fainted. "Oh," he said, turning quickly away, "Put your pants back on." As he almost ran from behind the screen, I scrambled back into my pants, feeling foolish. 

    He spent a long time testing my senses, prodding my legs and body with pins.  “Can you feel this? Can you feel that?”

    When I was dressed again, he sat me in a chair while he looked in my eye with an ophthalmoscope. "Don't move! Don't move your eye!” It seemed to take forever, staring at a spot on the wall while he continually crossed my line of vision.

    I had several visits with him and in the end he explained that I may never get this problem again, but if it returned I was to come back.

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    The system for advancement in the ambulance was an established protocol born out of years of habit. To get ahead it was felt young ambulance officers should go out to the country and 'serve their time '. Peter was looking for a new challenge and when Ashley was 15 months old, much to his paternal grandmother’s distress, we moved north for Peter to take up a job in an affluent regional centre.

    “But I thought you were happy here!” she agonised. 

    I was happy to move because all my family lived there, and we moved in temporarily with Mum and Dad, until our house in Brisbane sold. Ashley was sixteen months. I could hear his laughter and the shouts of the two little girls next door to my parents, as they rode around on their tricycles taking him for rides. Peter and Dad erected a strong wire fence arround the backyard, but it didn’t stop Ashley getting into the neighbour's house at five o'clock in the morning to play!

    After three months when our house hadn’t sold, we found a flat to rent twelve miles out near the coast. Local  people were horrified, and thought twelve miles to drive to work was ‘so far away’. We thought that distance without traffic was ‘a breeze.’

    One day when Pete was at work, I was vacuuming and Ashley was outside playing. He was not yet two years old and I knew I should have been checking on him, but I pushed my luck and finished the vacuuming. Then I rushed outside calling his name. Although I went up and down the street I couldn't find him anywhere. Across the road was a steep cliff down to the rocks and ocean. I wouldn't let myself think that he might have fallen over the cliff. 

    Finally in desperation, I ran across the road and looked over the edge. I could see a fisherman hurrying over the rocks and I looked in the direction he was heading, only to see my son, his pants wet below the knees, stumbling around amongst the rocks. I was horrified. In places where there was a gap in the rocks, the sea was rushing in and splashing up in clouds of white frothy spray. The fishermen carried him up the narrow pathway of the cliff to me.

    It was some years before I found the courage to relate the story to Peter. This encounter with water was to be our son’s first of many.

     Still our house in Brisbane hadn’t sold. Another three months had gone by when we moved back to the town, renting a house a stone's throw from a school. Ashley's godfather returned to Australia from England and stayed with us for some weeks, hoping to find work. I was finding the budget tight under the strain of having to pay a mortgage and rent at the same time.

     In that September, Ashley turned two. Mum and Dad arrived for the party early, to see him walking along the top of our front stone fence. They were shocked at his precarious position, but he waved his little arms and cheered them as they drove through the gateway. A Council grader was often parked at the house next door while the driver had his lunch, and to my great distress, Ashley considered it his personal plaything.

     It was nothing to hear knocking at my front door, "Ashley’s on the grader again." The school children loved to report his escapades. 

    Persuading him to come away required my best negotiating skills. Like most politicians, I often resorted to bribery.

    In Brisbane, inexperienced  in the ways of real estate selling, we had been persuaded to multiple-list our house. Multiple listing was trendy at the time, the theory being that the more agents listing it, the more chance you had of selling. With the benefit of hindsight, we realised that none of the agents tried very hard to sell it. The listing agent didn’t try too hard because he knew he'd get his cut of the commission anyway, and other agents didn’t try too hard to sell it because they knew they wouldn’t get the full commission. As a consequence, the house took nine months to sell. For all we know, it might have been the first person that an agent showed through it who bought it. In those days the policy of the agents was to list the houses at grossly inflated prices, and then with argy-bargy between agents and clients, come down to a more realistic selling price.

    Eventually it sold for $22,000. The agent had listed it at $26,000

    Meanwhile, Dad had purchased and was driving a taxi, and through a customer, got onto a new house for us. Overanxious to get settled, we bought it without much thought, and paid $22,000. The market in Brisbane had been flat; the local market was buoyant. What’s that the song says? Buy low, sell high... Thanks Murphy.

    Pete grew vegetables, herbs and flowers, including a beautiful trellis of sweet peas. He built a tall wooden fence around the backyard, with the boards woven in and out between the posts, but this made it ideal for our little boy to climb, and while he was still only two years old he climbed on the house roof with the aid of the fence.

    Ashley was a difficult child to bring up. He had a very determined nature, and the ‘Alec Jorgensen temper,’ and possessed a desperate need to get outside the house to explore. I spent my days roaming the neighbourhood calling his name, trying to find him. Our next door neighbour rewarded his ‘outgoing nature’ with lollies, and that encouraged him even more to leave home.

     He was fearless in his play, one day yelling loudly from  the vacant lot next door, "Mum! Mum! Help me!"

    I rushed out to find him half way up a large, very tall, gum tree, "Help me up, Mummy, I can’t get up this tree!”

     After an old house was moved onto the vacant block,  a variety of tenants came and went, but one was a young chap with a  black beard and a motorbike, which was his pride and joy. Hearing yelling and abuse from outside one day, Peter suddenly jumped up from the table and ran outside. He returned panting and wild eyed, dragging Ashley by the hand. They narrowly avoided a beating by the man with the beard, for the belting his bike’s petrol tank took at the hands of our son armed with a hammer!

     Living on a street adjacent to cane fields meant living near ten feet deep drains.  Ashley thought of the drain on the other side of the road as his second home, soon becoming an expert at scaling the steep banks. The old lady with the lollies often had her daughter’s family to visit, and they had a little girl who was the same age as Ashley, and the kids loved to play together.

    One day Ashley returned to the house very concerned, "Mummy, I can't get Mia out of the drain." I quickly rescued her before her mother found out!