Introduction - Meet the players

An introduction to the story and the people in it.

Introduction

Meet the players

 

            This is a true story.  The events were real and so are the people. 

It is the story of  Jane Allberry, née Robinson, her husband Eric, and their children, Richard, Gillian, Phillippa and (later) Nigel, told against a background of the events leading up to the Second World War in Britain, the trials and tribulations of living in a country at war, and its aftermath.

We will also meet the families of both Jane and Eric: Jane’s parents, Ruth and Allan Robinson, and their children Peggy, Celia and Richard; as well as Eric’s parents, Hilda and William Allberry and their children, Vera, Reggie and the twins, Charles and Edward.

The story starts in Sydney in 1935, prior to Jane and Eric's marriage, and continues until they emigrated from the United Kingdom to Perth in Western Australia in 1947.  It is the story of a love affair of a young couple, and a family held together by an immense love and sense of family unity during an extremely difficult period.  It is told through the medium of over 200 letters which Jane wrote to her family in Australia during those years.  Jane kept these letters tucked away in a shoe-box until they were passed to me in 1996. It is a marvel that these letters survived at all, and all but a handful of the letters were dated, nearly all with the day and month and most with the year as well, making it an easy task to sort them into sequence and thereby map the family's progress through those terrible war years with all the highs and lows, the trials and successes, the births and deaths, and the eventual emergence of a family held together by a mortar of love and strength of character that was the hallmark of the way in which Jane and Eric brought up their family.

Jane and Eric met in a rather round-about fashion.  After he left school, Eric did not settle down to life in an office, and when he was about 23 or 24, an old school friend of his who was farming in New Zealand, asked Eric to join him as a partner. When Eric spoke to his parents of this, his mother Hilda, who had a keen sense of the dramatic and who was herself born in New Zealand, is reputed to have cried, “‘Tis the call of the Blood! The call of the Blood!”

            So, in October 1935 at the age of 22, off went Eric to the other side of the world on board the Balranald, and on the ship met, amongst others, Peggy Robinson (who was about 24 years of age) who was returning to Australia after a visit to her then fiancée’s parents in Ireland.  Eric cut a dashing figure, with a happy, fun-loving air about him, and an old photo album of his shows many snaps of him with a variety of different girls, including Peggy.

            The ship arrived at Fremantle in Western Australia on 27th November that year and continued on to Melbourne and Sydney. Peggy disembarked from the ship in Melbourne to see her fiancée, and Eric proceeded to Sydney, arriving on the 7th December. He had complained to Peggy that the next boat bound for New Zealand was not due to sail for some time after his arrival in Sydney, and that he was counting on her to show him around Sydney during that time.  Peggy said, “Never mind, I’ll give you my sister’s address there, and she can do it.”  She wrote a letter to Jane explaining the circumstances and got off the ship.  That night Peggy was told by her fiancé, Edward, that he had found someone else that he liked better, so she went home to Sydney to discover that Jane and Eric had struck up a very firm friendship.

            The farming venture in New Zealand unfortunately did not succeed. Eric returned home to the UK in June 1936, but not until after he had spent a little more time with Jane in Sydney, thereby cementing their relationship.  He eventually asked her to marry him, and this is where we take up the story.

Author's Note

Any constructive comments would be appreciated.