Chapter 12 - The End – and a New Beginning

The end of the war in Europe, and plans for the future.

1945 came and brought with it the news that the war was over.  The official end to hostilities in Europe came on May 8^th, with Churchill announcing that ‘we may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing’.  But it was not until August 14^th of that year that Japan finally surrendered.

After the end of the war, things did not change much for the general population in Great Britain and Jane and Eric carried on living and working much as they had for the previous six years.  Food was still in very short supply, and rationing, for the large part, was still in force for quite some years yet. Jane and Eric’s ration books were still clutched in their hand when they eventually left England in 1947.

The last few of Jane’s letters are all dated 1945, none later than that.

 On January 1 1946 Vera was married to Allan Edward Hickman, and they had three children together, Paul, Phillip and Andrew.  It is a shame that we have none of Jane’s letters to hand to tell us about these events.  I feel sure they would have been minutely descriptive of her precious sister-in-law’s big day.

Eric continued his work with the Ruberoid Company, and Jane continued to be a mother and general household manager.  Some time after the cessation of hostilities Australia’s Assisted Migration Scheme commenced and British families were actively recruited to emigrate to Australia, both to relieve the strain on the British economy and to boost the population there. (Lots of British Stock for the dominions, eh, Eric?)  We became what was known as Ten Pound Poms. This because families had to pay £10 toward the cost of their passage to the antipodes.  Eric immediately applied for passage, and after payment of the prescribed fee and a long wait, was told that he and his family were to travel to Australia on board the SS Asturias in 1947.

Around June or July of that year Jane, Eric and their three wee bairns packed up all their belongings from Portobello and went down to Bromley to stay with Eric’s parents to await their turn to board ship. At this time Richard was 7 years of age, Gillian almost 5 and Phillippa 3. 

Notification of available berths was eventually received, and Jane and her family packed their bags and on July 31 went down to Southampton in the south of England to board the SS Asturias to journey to Fremantle in Western Australia. They arrived in Fremantle on September 22 1947 and were met by Jane’s parents, her sisters and brother, and immediately taken to the Graylands migrant hostel in Perth. A couple of weeks later Jane and Eric moved in with Jane’s parents, the two girls went to stay with their beloved Aunty Peggy on the farm in Kojonup, and Richard was sent off to a boarding school which he loathed.

Jane and Eric had, as part of the deal with the Australian government for assisted passage, arranged for Jane’s father to obtain for them a house to come to in Australia, and some sort of arrangement for employment.  Jane’s parents also had to furnish a guarantee of support during their initial settling-in period in their new home. The house was duly obtained, and because there was a considerable wait before passage could be made, the house was rented to tenants on the understanding that their tenancy agreement would end and they would have to move out soon after Jane and Eric boarded their ship.  This proved not to be as easy as it sounded.  It appears that the tenants chosen (an elderly couple by the name of Lever,) were war veterans from Africa and could not be asked to leave if “suitable” alternative accommodation was not available.  It seems this ‘loophole’ was taken advantage of to an excessive degree, as it took Jane and Eric about five years and a protracted court case to get the Levers to move out.  After about three years of court cases, it was agreed that Jane and Eric would have possession of the rear part of the house, with the kitchen and bathroom shared between the two families.  Not ideal, but a step in the right direction.

This arrangement continued for a further two years, and  eventually the Levers did move out, and Jane and Eric had sole possession at last! The girls moved back from Kojonup, Richard no longer had to stay at his detested boarding school, and life for Jane and her family got back to some semblance of normality. The family lived in that house for a good many years after that.

The Ruberoid Company’s plans for an office in Australia came to naught, and Eric obtained a job as a salesman with an importing and indent agency in Perth.  He proved to be good at his work, and as time went by he became a shareholder in the company, and eventually a director, which position he held with a great deal of success until he retired.  He was an active freemason and also played a part in local politics for a while.  He had an unsuccessful tilt at a seat on the local council at one time, but found that it wasn’t to be. 

As part of his job he was responsible for entertaining visiting company representatives from both England and Asia.  Jane, of course, rose to the occasion and many, many dinners were hosted in the Allberry household to entertain these visitors.  These evenings are remembered with fondness by Jane and Eric’s  children, who were thereby given a solid grounding in the social niceties of social entertaining.

Jane continued to be a mother and ‘household manager’ except for a short period during which she went back to work in a dress shop, where she used her dressmaking skills to earn a little extra. In 1950, however, she discovered that she was pregnant again, and in 1951 gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Nigel Eric. So now we were a family of six, and the house in Subiaco soon became too small for the extended family, and we moved to another house in Claremont.  We continued to live there until we children all eventually moved out in one direction or another. 

Jane and Eric then moved out to a house in Como in Perth, where they lived until Eric retired from business life, in 1978.  Six months later Eric contracted lung cancer and died after a short illness aged just 66.  He had been a heavy smoker all his life.  Before Eric passed away, he arranged for Jane to move in to a small unit which they had purchased for their retirement years. She lived there for almost twenty years, before contracting Alzheimer’s syndrome.  She was accommodated in a nursing hospital for a couple of years before passing away in 1999 aged 85.

Jane and Eric’s ashes are placed side by side in a rose garden in a garden cemetery at Karrakatta in Perth, where they are visited from time to time whenever their children find themselves near. 

 

            They are missed greatly by their children, but Jane and Eric live on in their memories as perhaps the best parents in the world.

 

Sadly, all the other characters, with the exception of us four siblings, in this story have passed away also. Peggy’s husband Geoff was the first, in 1964, aged just 51, after which Peggy retired from farming, and moved with her parents and Richard (senior) to a seaside house in Busselton in the south west of Western Australia until their eventual demise.  Daddy died in 1967 aged 88, and Mummy in 1979 aged 97. Richard (Sen.) died in 1990 aged 78. He never married.

Peggy continued to live in Busselton for a further 17 years, eventually moving in to a retirement village on the southern outskirts of Busselton, where she had a small unit to herself.  She was a wonderful Aunt to us all, and dearly loved by all her nieces and nephews.  We visited her often and she travelled anywhere in Australia at the drop of a hat, to attend family gatherings of various sorts.  She was always a very practical person, and believed fervently in recycling, and making things by hand; skills she acquired both from her parents and from living on a farm for all those years.  She even found old plastic shopping-bags useful and at one stage used them to fashion herself a very respectable crocheted sun-hat.  No-one knew what it was made from until she told us.  She lived at Ray village in fairly robust health until she simply became old, and passed away quietly without any undue fuss, on Jan 1^st, 2007 at the age of 94.

Celia and John continued to farm their property in Kojonup until they retired.  John died in Cairns, Queensland, whilst on holiday in 2004, and Celia died in Perth in 2009, aged 91.

Vera went on to live a happily married life in England and had three children, Philip, Paul and Andrew.  Her (and Eric’s) father passed away in 1955, aged 69, and her mother in 1967, aged 84. Her husband Allan left Vera to her own devices in 1994, aged 82 and Vera lived on until 2008, passing away at the age of 90.  She was a lifelong friend to Jane and Eric, and came to visit them in Australia, together with her sister-in-law, Claire Allberry, who had married Vera's brother Edward.

All of these people shared their lives, the experiences of wartime, raising their children and left us a better world in which to live and raise our own children.  Some would argue that nothing much has changed, others that the changes that have come about are just a natural progression, but I like to subscribe to the notion that without these people and their influence on us, life on this planet would not be as good, or rich, nor would we have learned the lessons from them that we have, and our lives would be the poorer for it.

Richard, aka ‘Tiny Wee’ is now 71 and lives with his wife Carol in Brisbane, Queensland; Gillian, aka ‘Lulu’ is 69 and lives with her husband Peter in Perth, WA; Phillippa, aka ‘Ponto’ is 67 and also lives with her husband Bob in Perth, WA; and Nigel, who may or may not have had an in utero nickname, is still the baby of the family at just 60 and has made his home in Ontario, Canada.

 

Our parents, Jane and Eric, will live on in our collective memories, and hopefully this book will have given others a taste of their very fortunate lives.