Chapter 24
Final Destination
We sailed from Sydney to Melbourne on January 5th 1961, with many new passengers boarding the ship on their way to England. I had spoken with a couple of English families who had migrated to Australia in the mid-fifties. They had settled in Sydney and they didn’t like it at all; they were returning to England. We met up with them several times on board. They were at the next table in the dining room with their cheeky children. They complained about the service and didn’t like the food. From then on we avoided them like the plague. Jack, the steward who was English also, wished they were anywhere else but in his section of the ship. He called them ‘bloody whingeing Poms’.
From the top deck we could see my brother Peter, Dad, cousin Len, Uncle Norm, his wife Mary and son Paul on the dock in Melbourne. The ship would remain in port for two days, and we had permission to sleep on board that night so we could collect our household belongings from the hold the next morning.
We went to Mary and Norm Little’s house in Burwood, for afternoon tea. Norm drove us back to the ship in time for dinner. It gave us a chance to say farewell to some of the crew we had come to know so well on the voyage. The children were especially fond of Jimmy, their cabin steward, and wanted us to adopt him.
“Please, Mom and Dad,” Billy pleaded, “Jimmy would love to live in Melbourne. Can’t we take him with us?” I had visions of having five children in a very small house. Jimmy, a young man of 21 years, didn’t appear to be ready to mature within the next 20 years!
Peter arrived at the dock with his trailer the following morning to collect our coffin and trunks from the hold. Norm, Len and a young fellow that Peter brought with him to help. Lyle was Peter’s future brother-in-law. When the two cars plus very sturdy trailer arrived at 14 Aberdeen Street, Hawthorn, some of the residents of the street watched the unloading with great interest and curiosity.
The six-feet-long coffin-shaped box made to the measurements of the tent poles had to be partially unpacked: at least down to the tent packed on the bottom along with Bill’s tools. It was then light enough to be hand-hoisted by many willing hands over the front fence in line with the front door, owing to the tiny frontage of the terraced house. Once through the door it had to stay in the hallway because it didn’t fit anywhere else. We realized then, with the wisdom of hindsight, that Bill should have built two or three smaller crates. I’m sure we unloaded a whole heap of ‘commonsense’ that day, and we learned from our mistakes.
While all the men were busy unloading, we four Frost girls inspected the rest of the house. My dad had partially furnished it with all the old furniture that he had put in his storage shed after my stepmother died. There was one double bed for the three girls in one bedroom, a double bed for Bill and me and a single bed for Billy in our bedroom.
The living room had two rather tattered looking, over-stuffed chairs with broken wooden armrests hanging off the sides. The fireplace looked as though it wasn’t capable of warming more than one person at a time let alone the whole room. Thank goodness it was summertime; we hoped to be out of that house by winter. In the adjoining room there was an ample sized table, four odd wooden chairs, an antiquated ice chest with broken hinges, and a rustic kitchen cupboard. This was the dining room.
Two steps up to the kitchen and to the right was a gas stove, a badly stained sink and draining bench of plastic. To the left, close to the backdoor and on the opposite side of the back door was a bathtub with a plastic shower curtain and the bathtub was against double concrete washing troughs, which seemed to be cemented to the bricked-in copper. This completed the tour of the very small kitchen-cum-bathroom-cum-laundry. I showed the girls a neat trick:
“Watch this girls! I’ve got one foot in the kitchen and while I’m cooking at the stove, I’m washing the other foot in the bathtub while stirring the clothes in the copper with the poker.” I kept up the patter as I pantomimed the action. We were all doubled over with laughter as the girls tried to step out the same pattern. I left them in a heap on the floor when I heard Bill calling me from the front of the house.
“Honey, do you think you could find some cups somewhere? Peter has gone to get some beer for the fellas who have been helping,” Bill said. I did remember it use to take a few bottles to get a job done.
“I’ve got just the thing - those paper cups the children collected on the ship.” I then remembered something else: “Just a reminder Bill, check where your tools are so we can hammer a few things together. I think your tools are down the bottom of the coffin under the tent: a bit hard to get to. I just read where we packed them. In my diary.”
Yells and screams coming from the girls outside the back door had me running back down the side of the house in a panic until I realized it was laughter - nothing to worry about.
“Take a look, Mother! It’s a toilet with a pull chain!” Diane said. “We were afraid to try it. How does it work?” From then on Janis wanted to go to the toilet every ten minutes. They were all fascinated. We had raised some pretty ignorant American children when we failed to educate them about pull chains and outdoor toilets. The cut up newspaper was not an acceptable offer for toilet paper. I told them they could use what money they had left to buy their own toilet rolls and they threatened never to talk to me again. I should have had the camera for that lesson. Beyond the toilet was a tiny backyard, hardly room to grow a vegetable garden and hang up six loads of washing on one single clothesline.
We were all getting hungry but no one thought to offer to feed us or send some nourishing snacks while we were moving in. I was missing that kind of neighbourliness they showed me in the States. It was a Saturday, and all the shops were closed from noon on a Saturday till Monday morning. It cost a lot more to shop at the local milk bar for cold meat, three loaves of bread, plus some staples to keep us going over the weekend. We bought only enough meat and milk for dinner because we had no ice to keep anything fresh.
On Sunday morning my father showed up with his infamous little black book, with an accounting of every penny he’d spent for six weeks holding the rented house till we arrived. Oh! How well I remember that little black book. We had a choice: we either rented the house or went to a migrant centre. On our first night in the house Bill and I thought we might have been better off in a migrant centre!
No window screens to protect us from the mosquitoes which were the biggest we had ever seen. Rats were coming in under the wall where the floor had sunk out of sight in the girl’s room. The girls were scared to go to sleep. None of us got much sleep that first week, except Billy.
On second thought, it was better to have a house than to live in a tent down on the beach. Or was it?
My third thought: anything would have been better than killing rats and being bitten mercilessly by mosquitoes. Pioneering as a migrant was not at all what I expected. If anyone wanted to go back to the States right then, I did. I would never admit that to another living soul. We would make it work no matter what!
Billy had made friends with an older boy who supplied us with a stack of newspapers, and we all worked at stuffing the newspapers in the huge gap where the rats were getting in. We fooled the rats for three days, until they caught on to our ploy and ate their way through the paper. The next time, we soaked the paper in kerosene. That was more effective for a longer period, but I just hoped a smoker didn’t throw a lighted cigarette down the walk beside the house!
We learned from our next-door neighbour, Mrs Johnson that the rats and mosquitoes were coming from the abandoned quarry at the end of our street. She sympathized with us and admitted she had seen the condition of the house before we moved in. “The owners won’t fix anything for you. They want you to move out as soon as possible and then they are going to fix it up and sell it,” Mrs Johnson said.
I took the children to investigate the lower end of the street. A high fence shielded the quarry from the street, and further along the alleyway palings had been ripped off, which made it quite dangerous for young children. Billy was the one I was mostly concerned for, because he admitted he had already been through the fence with his friend Bobby to see the big hole - the quarry! With a young family to think of, these hazards were a worry.
Something else we were not aware of - Australia practically closed down for about six weeks for the Christmas holidays. Shops and markets were open for business five-and-a-half days a week, factory deliveries or services were not available. Nothing had changed since I’d left! This also meant that jobs were not available. There were no jobs listed in the ‘wanted’ ads in the newspaper. We scanned the papers each morning at 6.00am – nothing! What were we going to do?
Bill had his ‘letter of introduction’ from Shay Gordon to present at The Herald and Sun newspaper so we thought that Bill at least, would get a foot in the door.
Shay Gordon was well known in the business arena and was my boss during the latter part of the war.
Bill called to make an appointment for an interview and the only time available was with the nightshift manager at 10PM. Cousin Len offered to stay with the children so I could go with Bill to the newspaper office in the city.
Luckily, I took a book to read and my diary and had ample time to get caught up with my entries while waiting in the foyer. When Bill returned, after having a test on the linotype, he looked pale and haggard. I rushed to meet him.
“What happened? Let’s go get a cup of coffee.” I was worried, seeing all the fight gone out of him.
“Do you know what they gave me for the linotype test? Cricket, tennis and Australian Rules football scores. I have never even seen those games played, let alone….”
Right at that moment, before Bill could finish his sentence the manager, John came through the door with a smirk on his face.
“Oh Yare! Something I forgot to mention. We can’t hire anybody at the moment; the manager who does the hiring and firing is overseas. We’ll call ya.” He said, still grinning as if the past hour was entertainment for the boys in the backroom. He turned to leave.
John’s attitude really got my shackles up and I raced after him, got in front of him and blocked his entry through the door.
“What a way to dismiss someone who genuinely wants a job. You gave him sporting results; something he had never seen before!” My blood was boiling.
“Do you mean to tell me that there is only one man for this big newspaper that does all the hiring and firing? Where is he now?” The smirk had left his face. I stood my ground.
“We don’t know where he is at the moment.” He pushed past me through the door.
(Nine months later Bill received a letter advising him that there were still no vacancies.)
Three weeks after we arrived we were getting very low on ready cash. Bill saw an ad in the Saturday’s Sun newspaper: ‘Linotype Operator Wanted’ - the only ad in any of the papers!
Bill was sitting on the doorstep at Adprint, in Carlton, at 7.30am. At 9.00am the manager, Mr Economou, arrived and asked Bill what he was doing there.
“I’m here to apply for the linotype operator’s job!”
Mr. Economou laughed. “Everything is closed, no one works on Saturdays. We will be interviewing on Monday morning. I just happened to call into the office to pick up a present I had forgotten.”
“Well, Sir! You will find me sitting here at 7.00am on Monday, waiting to see you!” Mr. Economou showed compassion and asked him to come into his office where he interviewed him right away. After Bill told him of our migration from the United States, Mr Economou related a similar story of his family’s migration from Greece many years before. Mr. Economou was the assistant Greek Consul.
Bill got the job and started work the following Monday.
With Bill’s first week’s pay we had to buy a transformer to convert our American electrical appliances from 120 to 240 volts. In particular, I needed to use my tiny, featherweight sewing machine to alter the second-hand school uniforms advertised in the local newspaper. I enrolled the children in the Camberwell Central School, and then started looking for work in the newspaper columns, where the ads had started to appear at the end of January.
Before I started to look for work Bill and I took the children on a tour of Melbourne by tram. At first we went to St. Kilda to St. Moritz to do some ice skating and to show them the spot where their Mother and Father had met, right in front of the band stand; their Dad sitting on the ice and me trying to help him up.
The children wanted us to show them how it happened. They wanted a repeat performance. Bill refused to put on rented boots and skates, at least that was his excuse. I hadn’t had my skates on since I skated in the streets of Manson during an ice storm 10 years before. I really had blunt blades and could hardly skate at all. Bill and I decided that that was a huge mistake; one cannot go back and recapture those wonderful memories without exercising caution.
When we took them to see the Federal Hotel on Collins Street where I got my memory back 10 days after we were married, all we found was a big gaping hole in the ground: we were six weeks too late, the hotel had been razed.
On the way home on the tram I was busy hunting through the Job Vacancies in the newspaper.
I got the first job I applied for - one requiring microphone work in sales promotions at The Mutual Store in Flinders Street. I had plenty of microphone experience - my friends used to say I was born with a microphone in my mouth. It was definitely not a silver spoon!
Uncle Harold, whom I used to adore, and for whom I felt enormous sympathy because he had lost a leg in a scaffolding accident as a young apprentice painter, then, his wife had died after a few years of marriage and Auntie Maud had him come live in their house. Their son went into the army and Harold had Jack’s room. He now presented himself as a grasping, money-hungry bore and loved to boast about owning eight houses. He was always talking about money and all the cash and cheques he had laying around waiting to be banked.
He was waiting when I arrived home from work with my first pay packet. The family were all excited but Harold ignored the significance of our joy while he claimed that he had cash and cheques lying around everywhere, just waiting for him to bank.
He was there every Friday night to collect the rent for the landlady, the woman with whom he was now bedding in Broomfield Road. Rumor had her husband relegated to sleeping in the bungalow while Harold slept in the house. Harold had become her lover and debt collector. The illicit affair was the glue that bound the neighbourhood together - once more everyone in the street was communicating.
Uncle Harold always said ‘yes’ when we invited him to join us in our meal and never considered waiting till we had said Grace. His food was half eaten before we started our meal. It was apparent when he quickly accepted a second helping that he wasn’t being fed very well since he moved out of Auntie Lila’s house. Perhaps he just looked forward to our cooking! I probably won’t have time to cook for my family now that I have started work.
“It is very impolite not to say ‘thank you.” Diane said, after he left the house.
When Uncle Harold said he was well acquainted with a refrigerator supplier, ‘a very good friend of his’ - he could get a refrigerator for us at wholesale prices. I jumped at the chance. I wanted a freezer more than a refrigerator. I could prepare meals well ahead and buy in bulk for our family while I was working such long hours. After Bill and I discussed Harold’s proposition, we agreed to accept his offer.
I accompanied Harold to the electrical shop in Richmond, where he told me to wait by the door while he talked to the owner, (his very good friend). I walked into the store to choose the freezer I wanted and could hear their conversation. It was obvious the manager had never met Harold before, and all this was Harold’s way of puffing up his ego. Harold came back to me with a fantastic offer from his so-called friend. He fabricated the story on the spot and actually talked himself into a debt where he lost money and I gained the benefit.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Harold confided. “I will pay cash and get an even bigger discount on the refrigerator, and you can pay it off along with the rent on a Friday night.”
“Harold! It’s not a refrigerator it’s a freezer I need. Here is the one I want.” For the next 10 minutes he argued with me ‘it’s not a freezer you want but a refrigerator.’
At that moment I was about to walk out of the shop and tell him to ‘forget it.’ He did believe that I didn’t know the difference in the two machines.
He finally accepted that I wanted a freezer and agreed to any amount I suggested as a weekly payment. It meant he stayed longer every Friday night and we had to listen to him tell us I was wrong in my choice of appliances.
There was method in my madness and satisfaction in knowing I had outsmarted my uncle who made a point of trying to make us feel as though we couldn’t get by without his help. We knew better!
As we still only had the ice chest, few people could understand why I bought a freezer first. I knew what I could do with a freezer. I was sure glad of my Yankee know-how! Our freezer, I was convinced, would pay for itself in the first twelve months. It did too - I kept a record of everything I bought in bulk and the money I saved. I had studied and learned about freezing fresh food and preparing meals in advance during the fifteen years I’d lived in the States.
We moved house several times and the children had no problems with making friends wherever they went. Best of all, they thought school uniforms were a great invention. I did too - they never needed to think about what they had to wear each morning.
Bill was content in his job at Adprint and they rewarded him handsomely every six months with a bonus. I soon found my niche in the promotional advertising field, and once established, I freelanced and worked for many local, interstate and international companies.
The adventures we experienced during the three years we live in Melbourne were recorded daily in my diary during the only quiet moments I could find in a busy schedule - as I rode home from work on the tram.
I make some good friends with those who traveled with me. They waited for me at the tram stop, curious to know more about my busy life, family and hoping for some humorous stories.
“Ruth! Why don’t you write a book?” One of my friends suggested.
“One book would never be enough, believe me.” I added with a joyful laugh.
I made a note of that suggestion in my diary. Some day….
