Chapter 1 - The Proposal

Eric proposes marriage to Jane.

Chapter 1

The Proposal

 

1938 was the year of the Munich Pact in which Czechoslovakia ceded to Germany all of its territories in which the population was at least 50 percent German. It was also the year in which the war in Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War air battles commenced, which served as a testing ground for aircraft design and tactics. Aircraft also appeared in another sphere of operation; Antarctica. Whilst aerial exploration of Antarctica had begun in the 1920s, it was not until this year that Germany conducted the first of two aerial explorations of the continent.

            This was the year the fluorescent lamp was produced to light our homes and factories; British climbers made an unsuccessful attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest; and Enrico Fermi, the physicist known for achieving the first controlled nuclear reaction, was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics.

            When the Germans occupied Austria in 1938, Sigmund Freud, a Jew, was persuaded by friends to escape with his family to England. He died a year later. 

            This was also the year in which Orson Welles’ radio production of H. G. Wells’ War of The Worlds was so realistic that thousands believed an alien attack was actually occurring.  It was in 1938 that Gracie Fields was created Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

            Hungarian inventor Georg Biro invented a viscous, oil-based ink that could be used with a pen with a rolling-ball tip.  The biro became a household word.

 

            This was also the year that LSD, the potent hallucinogenic drug, was first synthesised from lysergic acid in Switzerland, but at the same time, the purification of penicillin by the British biochemists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain was achieved, thus ensuring greatly reduced fatalities during World War II.

These events show the present-day reader what was happening in the world at the time our two love-birds were contemplating starting a new life together.

            But there was a much more important event, at least as far as Jane and Eric were concerned, that occurred that year.  Jane received a letter from Eric, dated 26th September 1937.  There can be no doubt as to why this particular letter survived, but very few others of Eric's from this period did.  He had doubtless written many letters to Jane whilst she lived in Sydney, but sadly, very few of them survived.  These two letters were written to Jane whilst she was in Armidale, a year before she left for Perth and England. This first letter is the one which precipitated her decision to make the trip.  One can make allowances for the sticky sweetness of the contents.

 

            My Own Dearest Jane,

            Since writing to you last week you have been constantly in my thoughts.  Your letter, which arrived last night, cheered me up immensely, because I must admit that I had been worrying about you a little.  Whatever happens you mustn’t let yourself become depressed, however difficult and trying things seem to be.  You know how very dear you are to me and that I want to help you as much as I can even if we are separated by thousands of miles.  I sometimes curse the tremendous distance which separates us both because our letters to each other take so long, but so far as I am concerned this distance is making me fonder and fonder of you each day, and oh! how I long for the day when you arrive in England.  What I said to you last week were not just idle thoughts which so often come to us when enjoying a holiday but they came right from the bottom of my heart.  As each week passes and your letters arrive and I write to you,  more and more do I long to hold you close to me and smother you with my kisses.  Please don’t think me horribly sentimental, but love is really a very wonderful thing.  I think that two people in love with each other are to be envied rather than pitied.  I realise that you have many ties in Armidale, with your business and also, of course, having partly to support Peggy.  As things are going in business with me, I shall be in a position to support a wife in about a couple of years and I am going to ask you if you would be prepared to give up your friends and connections in Australia and allow me the honour and very great privilege to provide you with a home in England.  I know that I am asking you a tremendous lot, but I am sure that we will be most happy together.  I would like you to think this over most carefully, and let me know your thoughts and feelings on the idea.

            So far as your fare to England is concerned I am not at present in a position to provide this for you, but if you came to England in about a year’s time I could no doubt be able to provide you with all you want.  I look forward more than I can say to your answer to this letter.  Please, Darling, be candid in what you say and don’t be frightened to upset me.  Just let me know exactly how you feel about it.

            As I have already said your letter arrived last evening and I was so pleased to hear that some of your friends from Sydney have been visiting your Armidale address.  It must be very nice to see old friends and hear the news.  Needless to say I feel very envious of these people and wish I could get into a motor car and travel 200 miles or so and I would be with you.  Don’t you dare fall in love with Frank Lonergan or I shall come straight to Australia and spank you very hard (but not very often).  However, joking apart, enjoy yourself and be happy because by doing so you will make me happy too. 

            As you can no doubt gather, I am home from my two weeks’ holiday after a most enjoyable time.  Tomorrow I return to the office and will not close this letter until after I have added a few lines with regard to Chorley, etc.

 

            Chorley is a small town in Lancashire, where Eric had been sent to supervise a building job by his employer, the Ruberoid Co., who constructed, amongst other things, munitions factories.  The company was doing just that in Chorley and the Royal Ordnance Factory was a vast undertaking.  Eventually, Jane and Eric lived near Chorley for a while after they married, in the village of Heath Charnock, not far south of Chorley.

            Eric described his holiday at length and in great detail, and then continued:  

 

And so I have ended a most enjoyable holiday. I was naturally disappointed at not going to Germany but I have that pleasure in store for me.

 

            We should remember that this letter was written in September 1937 - two years prior to 3 September 1939, when Sir Winston Churchill announced to the House of Commons that day’s declaration of war against Germany by Britain and France. But of course at the time Eric was writing his letter, there were no thoughts of war in anyone’s mind.

            Eric went on:

 

I am feeling extremely well and have spent just the sort of holiday I needed - plenty of rest and fresh air, and I feel fit to face the winter and work hard and I hope make a lot of money for obvious reasons.  I will continue this epistle tomorrow evening and let you know what is happening regarding Chorley etc., when I come home from the office.

            I am going to send this letter by Air Mail so that it will reach you sooner.  [In those days sending letters by air was quite a deal more expensive that ordinary mail which went by sea.  These days of course, most international mail goes by air as a matter of course, but in the 1930s the reverse was the case].  Do think over my proposals to you in the first part most carefully.  Again I would like to say how much I realise I am asking you to do.  I feel certain that we should be most wonderfully happy together in England.  You will probably find the winter rather long and cold at times, compared with your long Australian summers, but to compensate that I am sure that you will be happy with my friends etc.  It certainly needs the most careful thought, and I don’t in the least want you to do something which you would afterwards regret.  Perhaps it would be well to consult Peggy about it and most certainly your mother.  Remember that I shall be disappointed if you feel that you could not live in England, but at the same time I shall quite well understand.

            I look forward more than I can say to your reply to this and whatever it is we shall always remain the very best of friends, I am positive.

            Goodnight my dearest, and a thousand kisses. Always your devoted, Eric.

 

            Of course we know what the answer to Eric’s proposal was, and unfortunately we do not have a copy of that letter, but when he answered Jane’s acceptance letter he was what can only be described as c**k-a-hoop with excitement, albeit with that classic English reserve.  On 31 October 1937, Eric wrote:

 

            My Dearest Jane,

            Your airmail letter reached me last Thursday morning, and I hasten to answer it. I am terribly thrilled to think that you are prepared to give up sunny Australia and all your friends and settle down in England.  You are doing me a very great honour and I only hope that I can make you happy.  I am so pleased that you wrote to me in the way that you did, and put everything so clearly.  It certainly is a long time since we saw each other and when we do meet again there is always the possibility that our affections may not be so great towards each other.  That I fell in love with you the very first time I saw you, my darling, there is no question in my mind, and although we haven’t actually seen so very much of each other I think that through our letters we have got to know each other almost as well as if we had met every day.  Let us both hope and pray that when you arrive in England we will both love each other as much as when that first seed was sown on the shores at Manly.  Those glorious hours spent there will always remain in my memory as some of the most beautiful I have ever spent.  Before I went to New Zealand and met you on the way, most of my young life was spent in the company of girls and I paid little attention to my work in the Alliance Assurance Co.  Since my return to England, most of that has been cut out and you have been the ambition of my life.  I have taken my job with the Ruberoid Co. seriously so that one day, should you allow me, I could provide you with a home although, of course, it will be a very modest one to begin with.  I must now save enough money to buy some furniture with which to make ourselves comfortable in a flat or a wee house.  You have made me feel very, very happy and I long for the day when you arrive in England.  It is a pity that we are so many thousands of miles away from each other, or we could just telephone each day, but I feel we can learn a lot through our weekly letters.  I hope you will like my friends, and I flatter myself to think that you will.  The family is looking forward to meeting you and I hope you will like them all.  I’m sure they will like you and we will do all that is within our power to make you feel happy and at home.  England isn’t such a bad place after all, you know, and as soon as you get to know the English people, they are really very kind.  After all, you’re English yourself, and I feel I’m right in saying that although you may adopt Australia or any other colony as your own, if you were born in England, then your right home is in England.  In many ways I was happy in New Zealand but I knew all the time that England was home.  Surely it must be the same with you.  My dearest, I will do all I can to be a dutiful husband because I feel that since I have loved you so long that there must be something in it all.  You are the one girl in my life.  The others don’t count.  It’s no use for me to say that there haven’t been any others, but by knowing others makes me appreciate all the more the one I really love.  Let us continue to write to each other, my dearest, as we have done in the past and so get to know each other even better.  I would love to have another photograph of you if you would care to send me one. I will write to you again on next Tuesday by ordinary mail my dearest.  May our love continue for ever and ever, and may the time pass ever so quickly until you come to me in England.

            Always your very own, Eric.

 

            Time passed, and wee Eric was left to his own devices in his beloved England, saving furiously, while Jane got on with the business of saving for her trip to Southampton and getting her trousseau together.  Of course they continued to write to each other, making plans and getting to know each other a bit better.

            As we take up Jane’s story, it is three weeks before Jane’s 24th birthday.  At the time, she was living in Armidale in central New South Wales, together with her sister Peggy, preparing her life for the changes that were about to take place.  She operated a small but successful dressmaking business together with sister Peggy and a friend.  Jane was a dressmaker, Peggy wove cloth and their friend knitted baby clothes.   The business thrived, and the three were doing quite well. 

In addition to conducting a very full social life, Jane was also very industrious in her preparations for her wedding the following year in England. It could be said that there are not too many young brides today who would even consider taking on the smallest part of what Jane had in mind.  In addition to all these preparations, Jane had to dispose of her dressmaking business, and had this to say to her mother:

 

I have been scuttling round - even though very busy with my job - seeing agents and writing to James for help about how to sell my business, and have been told to ask £125 for it.  That sounds like far too much, but then I don’t really know anything about such matters, so even though I am scared to death at mentioning such a sum, I am being brave because after all, one can always come down a bit if necessary.  If I got anywhere near as much as that I would probably die of joy, it sounds like such riches.  I would be able to pay you all sorts of monies, and then put the rest in the bank for my boat fare.       

There isn’t much more to tell you about business matters just now because nothing has happened yet, but as soon as anything turns up I will tell you all about it.  I feel much more cheerful over it now, but still wish you were here for me to ask about this and that.  Perth seldom seems so far away as it does when I want a word with you on matters such as this.  It is aggravating enough when I want to know if six buttons would look better than sixty on the garments that I make, but when it comes to business dealings I am more aggravated than ever.  Very sad, but probably quite good for me.  I suppose I had better finish growing up some time or other.

 

At some point during all this it became apparent to both Jane and Peggy that since Eric had asked Jane to marry him, a proposal which Jane accepted with great pleasure, there was a small problem.  The local boys continued to pester Jane and didn’t believe she was engaged, so Peggy surreptitiously obtained Jane’s finger size, sent it to Eric and asked him to get her a visible evidence of their engagement, however simple. He responded with a beautiful sapphire and diamond ring, which is still in the family to this day.