Grandpa, as far as I know had been working as a purser on liners.. certainly between Liverpool and New York....ended up in Australia, and being that time, joined the Australian Army.
He was apparently an artist, working where a camera would not be suitable. He was in Gallipoli, and invalided out with neurasthenia...so thanks to the Aussie army I am here...the British army had a nasty habit of shooting people with what woul now be called PTSD.
He then after the war travelled back to London...and married his first cousin, my Grandma. Being astute (aka tight!) with finances he realised that he could get her a free passage back to Australia!!
He studied and worked at the Art school in Adelaide. Learnt to swim by wading in a river and suddenly finding a deep pool. Rode a fixed wheel bike..I have a photo at home.
Grandma was extremely happy there...I have a photo on my wall of her wearing a hat that she made for a garden party in Adelaide.
Come the late 1920s and the strikes and hunger matches in England...her mother, grandpa's aunt, helped to run a soup kitchen in London. Grandpa thought that was not respectable, so decided to return to London...Grandma was broken hearted at that.
So mother was born in 1928 in Bromley, Kent.
My grandparents, after several moves (including being flooded out of their home beneath a church in London where he was the caretaker..at the bottom end of the Caledonian Road where five roads meet and a main water supply was hit by a bomb.) lived in one end of a terrace of three thatched cottages in Micheldever.
Mother returned there to have me.
An aside....the village is two miles from its railway station...by the station is a farm, where they had a lodger. Six years ago we started tidying the garden of that lodger, now living in Kirkmichael, South Ayrshire!! He had also been at Gallipoli....
Their next move was to one of the Homes for Heroes...an acre of ground, a concrete base and a wriggly tin house with wooden panelling and two good fires back to back. A dunny out the back and ice on the inside of the windows in winter!!
We had been living in North Wales where my parents were youth hostel wardens, and my brother was born, then in Darlington over a bike shop on the A1 road by where it went under the railway. Six o'clock every morning you could awake to the BingBingBing of the shunting yard.
I started school there, age 3..the playing was boring, the learning fascinating...and school milk defrosted on the school radiator was foul!!
I loved living in the tin house and started gardening there when I was 5. We had Walnut and plum trees and an apple orchard with Beauty of Bath early apples, and a barn where apples were stored.
Despite having thin soil over the chalk the vege and fruit garden was very productive.
Grandma used to call us "CooooEeeee" from the house...the call of the Grandma Bird she called it!!
Moving on to when I was at Junior school in Eastleigh in Hampshire. Grandma bought Arnotts biscuits from Australia, the thin savoury oaty ones, and Tim Tams, from a local deli run by German Jewish refugees.
A big jump then to the mid 60s..I was in Grammar school, Dad was working as a technician in Southampton University. He applied for a job in Sydney University in 1967, and we jumped through all the hoops in the application. At the last minute his sponsor pulled out, so no job and no emigration.
So in bits and bobs, there are some of my Antipodean links....
Pirate nearly moved to Auckland at the same time as we didn't move to Sydney..but his then wife wasn't sure...so he wasn't going to take her 13,000 miles away.
He still has the letter of introduction..and the firm is still going!!
When we got together, he had just booked tickets to go to New Zealand for just under six months....and he wasn't going to leave me behind...so I bought my own ticket.
That was in 2012....and I have felt at home here on every visit since.
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