The second section, with a main bedroom and a bathroom, was situated towards the front of the block, close to the road. The bathroom floor was painted speckled cement – non-slip commercial grade. Coralie had wanted nice white tiles, but Neil George was thinking of children’s injuries, and no one would slip on this cement. We had enough emergency dramas as it was. Next to the bedroom was a large sleepout that became the boys’ and girls’ ‘dormitories’.
The dorms were separated by a thin partition wall with gaps at the top and bottom for airflow. The boys had their two sets of double bunk beds and on the girls’ side was another set of bunk beds and a single bed. I slept alone on the single bed and my younger sisters, Brig and Jo, slept in the bunks, usually in the same one. They were inseparable. We could all crawl underneath the partition, which led to lots of pranks that often ended in tears. During games of chasey, we could escape by scrambling under or jumping over and landing on the top bunk beds. Balls, pillows and profanities were also hurled over the partition.
Neil George was always chasing the breeze. As air conditioners were not affordable then, he installed glass louvres everywhere so there was always a cross-breeze somewhere to keep the house cool. On hot summer nights we slept under mosquito nets as mozzies came through the louvres too. Since there were also no blinds on the windows, we always woke up with the sun – there was no need for an alarm clock. In any case, Dad would never put up with us lying around in bed.
The two buildings were connected by a 10-metre-long cement walkway with grass on either side, leading from the bedrooms to the kitchen. At night-time we would run frantically between the two buildings, squealing as we sprang over huge, ugly cane toads. The walkway was covered with an aluminium roof for shade so we wouldn’t burn our feet. However, we would happily run barefoot on the scorching hot roof and jump down onto the nearby trampoline – often five of us at the same time.
The night of the Catholic Ball, a fundraiser for the parish, Mum was all dressed up. She was so excited because she hardly ever went out. Paddy didn’t want her to go and was lying on the trampoline, whining, when the boys started jumping from the roof onto the trampoline. Paddy flew up into the air and hit his face on the metal trampoline frame, knocking out his front teeth, with blood pouring everywhere.
‘Mum, Mum!’ we all screamed.
‘What’s happened now!’ Mum, dressed in angelic white, called as she rushed to Paddy.
Coralie immediately drove him to emergency and called Uncle Alan. Paddy had lost all six front teeth.
After that night, Coralie always said it was a master stroke of Dad’s to have our home situated in a ‘medical triangle’, which included our GP, Dr Tommy Nutley, Alan Agnew, the surgeon, Gerard Dowling, our dentist, and the general hospital smack bang in the middle. But sadly, I don’t think Mum ever did get to the ball that night.
The Hills hoist to hang washing was at the top of the driveway away from the house, and all of us children were known to swing on it at times. It was usually covered in cloth nappies to dry. There were no garden beds but there were big shady poinciana trees to climb. The yard was basically a jungle, perfect for wild kids.
There were large sliding glass doors between the kitchen and the yard. We would all try to jump the three steps from the yard up to the kitchen, but after most of us had hit the glass doors not realising they were shut, and poor Paddy frequently knocking himself out, Dad eventually added a stick-on danger strip to the door at child’s eye level.
Later, Dad had a slab floor poured under the lower section so we could put a table-tennis table in there. He also added on to the kitchen and replaced the barbecue area with an entertainment room and an impressive floor-to-ceiling library brimming with books. Coralie came to adore this room.
To cater for our large family, Dad bought an oversized industrial stove. It had two ovens, six burners and ran the length of one entire wall in the kitchen. We also had three fridges, with one dedicated to meat: Neil George would make a trip down to the butcher to buy half a beast that would feed us for eight weeks. He also saw another problem with all eight children going to one fridge to get water. That poor fridge was never able to keep up with the number of times it was opened, and the contents were ruined in the Rocky heat. Dad quickly solved this problem by installing a commercial water cooler near the kitchen. He put a rock beside it so the smaller children could step up to get a drink. Now there was no excuse for any of us to be opening that fridge.
It probably took eight years all up to finish the house. I think it was the finest and most practical house Neil George ever designed. It worked so well with eight rampaging kids, and we loved it.
Home life was very boisterous and chaotic but wonderful. We might not have had fancy clothes or the latest gadgets, but we had love and food. On a typical day Mum and Dad would be up at 5 a.m., with Dad heading off to work early and Mum doing a load of washing and hanging out all the nappies, wearing a large hat to avoid the scorching sun. She was never without a full-brimmed hat, and we girls were introduced to anti-freckle cream very early. She would then start on breakfast, usually with one baby on her hip and another around her ankles. She’d cook pan-loads of bacon and eggs and I’d be on toaster duty with two loaves of bread while the other children promptly arrived at the table, Dom in the highchair. I would be either holding or feeding a baby.
Every day, Mum had the task of feeding eight children morning, noon and night. She did this three times a day, almost every day, for twenty-five years! She got a brief respite for a few years when another helper, Conway, came on Wednesdays and Fridays. On those days she would cook breakfast and play the piano for us if we helped her with the tidying up. Often on Sunday nights, Dad would make a damper, which we would eat straight from the oven spread with butter and jam. It was a perfect, simple meal to have at night. On special occasions, he would come up with a delicious oxtail stew. We would sit on the benches at the long table in the kitchen. Dad insisted on benches instead of chairs so we could not lean backwards, fall off and break our neck or any other body part – there was enough broken furniture and broken bones in our home already.
After breakfast, we’d get ourselves ready for school, brush our teeth if we could find a toothbrush. Toothbrushes, towels and pillows always went missing, and likewise no one could ever find a hairbrush in the general chaos of family life with eight children. Unlike all my siblings, who had wavy brown or straight blond hair, I had huge bouffant hair filled with knots that would send the local hairdresser into despair. The only way to control the knots was to have them cut out at monthly visits. By that time, the knots were already the size of ten-cent pieces. Sometimes in between visits, I would just lightly brush over the top layer to hide the rest of the hair and hope for the best. It wasn’t my fault – I often couldn’t find the hairbrush!
With Mum completely overwhelmed by the laundry, cleaning, cooking and looking after small babies, some days she wouldn’t have time to make our lunches for school. ‘I’ll bring them over at noon,’ she’d promise, waving us off. Sometimes she said she’d buy us something from the famous Melbourne Fish Bar or pick up some Cranston Pies, which suited us. Whatever it was to be, occasionally she would forget. Starving, we’d eagerly wait at the gate for her to bring our lunches in her blue Hillman, but if she didn’t turn up, we knew we’d have to go and knock on the nuns’ convent door. This didn’t sit well with any of us.