 |
Clothes from an era past.
My connection to my grandparents. |
Hi folks,
Well, here it is - episode 1 of 'What Kate Did'. It is all your own fault.....you all asked for it here!
We introduce my grandmother Kate in 1905 just before her 16th birthday living in Gulgong NSW with her parents.
Episode 1
Kate stared wide-eye at her mother as a feeling of deep
apprehension radiated out from her stomach. “Y’not to tell a soul. Y’hear me
now Katie-girl?” her mother whispered urgently. Kate nodded, her eyes not
leaving her mother’s lined face as the realisations and implications of what
she had just been told organised itself in her head. Kate hopped up off the old bed and went
outside to process the information – Grandpa was a convict! A criminal in the
eyes of the law! Kate knew that if anybody found out, then the family would be
instantly marginalised and not treated with same equality that they had been to
this point. Gulgong NSW (where Kate and her parents, sisters and brother lived),
although a fast growing community since the gold rush, was still a small town
and scandal like this travelled fast.
Kate now knew within herself that at some point she needed to move away,
move away to create an existence of her own, where her secret could never be
discovered…..somewhere that she could forge a new life that utterly transcended
this shocking information.
Said Grandpa (Kate’s mother’s father, John Chandler) was
such a character with his tattooed arms and his seemingly endless stories and
songs about the sea. It always seemed strange to Kate that Grandpa had lived
all his life in Singleton as a farmer and woodsman, yet his stories were of the
sea – now it all made sense. Kate
recoiled at the unfairness of it all. Imagine a young sailor, 24 years old, a
young father, being transported for ‘stealing’ a horse blanket and having to
leave three small children and a young wife to fend for themselves in London
town….never to see or hear from them again.
As Kate pondered this reality, the next realisation crashed down on her.
Grandma and Grandpa could not have been ever legally married if Grandpa still
had a wife alive in London town all those years ago. No wonder her mother was
so insistent that this secret be never told. Her mother and her Uncles and
Aunties were then obviously all bastard children and Grandpa was a polygamist
in the eyes of the law…..the same law that had imprisoned and transported him
on a stinking fetid ship ten thousand miles across the seas to Australia. It
was this same law that would again condemn Grandpa, his children and their
children (indeed Kate herself) as the irretrievable scum of society….if it ever
found out. Kate reeled as she tried to
catch her breath through her tight corsetry and she quickly reached out clinging
to the fence post to steady herself as everything she thought she knew about
her family exploded into smithereens in her mind like a fire cracker.
The more Kate thought about these newly-acquired facts the
more vulnerable and angry she felt. Kate now was more determined than ever that
this situation would never shackle and shape her life the way it obviously had
her Grandma’s and her mother’s. It explained
her mother’s constant guardedness and her arms-length treatment of her
parents. It probably explained why her
mother had married a well-educated Danish man, many years her senior, despite
Grandpa’s and Grandma’s deep disapproval – it was probably her mother’s
subconscious attempt to escape this dreadful social reality and gain some
security, respectability and connection back to the civilised world of Europe
and England. Kate was thankful her last name was Peters and not Chandler…….a
small mercy though.
Kate’s mind quickly became engrossed in the myriad of
realisations that naturally manifested themselves in her family due to this
terrible secret – the arguments, the whispered jibes, the way Grandma always
over-emphasised the word MRS when she introduced herself, the families aversion
to convicts or children of convicts of any description, the embarrassingly false
airs and graces indulged in by her mother and grandmother, the aversion to
meeting new people in town until they knew all about them..….. a million things
now made sense.
Kate wandered over to the shade of the big Ironbark in the
front yard and sat down to fully and rationally process what she had been told
by her mother today and to get the story straight in her head. She needed to totally
reorganise every single memory and thought in her head to match these new
facts. Grandpa the criminal, Grandpa the deported convict, Grandpa the
polygamist, Grandpa the sailor assigned his time as a field worker to a farmer
in Singleton NSW, Grandpa who after seven years of hard labour receiving his
ticket of leave (pardon) but still considered a convict. Criminals were known
to be a different breed to normal people – tainted blood, dull minds, children
of the devil, scum, unhuman. Even though the secret of this social disgrace was
now two generations old, Kate still knew its power to lay low the life of her
whole family and scuttle her own future if it were ever to be let out. All it
would take was for the real Mrs Chandler (or someone who knew her) to appear on
the scene or to write to the authorities making enquiries. Worse still, if one
of Grandpa’s London town children hoping to find their father in Australia appeared
on the scene. In the event of any of these possible scenarios the whole sordid
affair would explode like a screaming banshee all over New South Wales. It
would be in the papers and on that telegraphic invention thingy Kate had heard
about recently. With so many people from England and Europe now willingly
sailing out to Australia in the gold rushes, the threat of exposure and
subsequent disgrace was a rising daily possibility. It was 1905 and the modern
era, but Kate knew the toxic attitude of respectable folk when it came to
convicts, let alone polygamous convicts! Whilst Kate just wanted to shut it out of her
mind, she knew she could not – she MUST actively reinvent herself. Kate
fervently wished she could reinvent herself then and there without delay.
Maybe Kate should have been more careful of what she wished
for as she sat under that gumtree………. (to be continued)
*************************
Hopefully this story thus far is up to your expectations folks.
Mr HM
