When my cousin Graeme Lee died in 2010 I was unable to attend his funeral in Perth, but I was prompted to record some memories - because I had known Graeme for longer than anyone then living. Some of what follows was used in Graeme's eulogy. The whole memoir may be of interest to those attracted to a bit of social history and, indeed, may be "news" to my family.
Graeme and I were both born in 1939, me in the August and Graeme in the December. We were cousins – my father Gordon was the younger and only brother of Graeme’s mother Cath.
It isn’t just that we were cousins, but we spent a lot of our early years together.
Graeme’s father, Alec Lee, was a policeman, and died tragically when Graeme was very young, before the age of two. Graeme’s mother married again, to Ron Napier. I never knew Napier, or ever heard a word spoken about him. The marriage clearly failed, although Aunt Cath in her professional life always went by the name Napier.
There was a lot of dislocation during the Second World War, and Graeme and I were thrown together – although I have no personal recollection, and am relying on photographs and the memory of later conversations. Where Aunt Cath and Graeme spent most of the War I have no idea. Gordon, as a farmer, was reserved from active service but, in the down-time from wheat farming, worked at the Maribyrnong munitions factory. I believe that at those times he stayed with his aunt Em Templeton at Essendon, and that Graeme was there too. There are photos of me and Graeme together at Essendon, but no firm evidence of how much time we spent together during the War years.
But our lives really came together after the War was over. Farming in the Mallee region of Victoria had become a disaster because of prolonged drought, and my parents Gordon and Gloria, were forced to leave their share farm, and the land. Their farm was only a mile or so from Pa Andrews' farm near Chinkapook, land that he had selected around 1910. Meanwhile Cath Napier was operating a delicatessen in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. I never learnt the story first-hand, but by whatever means Cath and Gordon in 1946 pooled their resources and took over a delicatessen in Chapel Street, Windsor. The arrangement was a lifeline for Gordon and Gloria (and, by extension, for me and my sister Margaret - who was just a little over a year old at the time). It was also a lifeline for my grandparents, Fred and Margaret Andrews, who had had to leave their Chinkapook farm of 35 years after foreclosure by the bank. The upshot was that while the delicatessen operated at street level, behind and above the shop the private dwelling housed two grandparents, the four Gordon Andrews family, and Graeme and his mother.
Graeme and I went to Windsor State School, just a couple of hundred yards away. My only recollection of the School is that we were given hot cocoa at morning break! Graeme and I were in grade 2. After school we were playmates in the paved yard behind the shop.
Doubtless the living arrangements at Windsor were rather cramped. But we stayed there for around six months only; and then we moved to Bridge Road, Richmond.
The Richmond “shop” – numbers 294 and 296 Bridge Road - was really two shops in one – a delicatessen and a cake shop. The place was very large [see the background photo to this Blog, taken circa 1990], mirror image premises, but opened structurally into one at both ground floor and upstairs levels. Behind the delicatessen were a work space and a huge cool-room, and three other rooms - an office, a storeroom, and a kitchen. Behind the cake shop were two rooms that made up the bakehouse, a produce storeroom, a scullery, and a laundry. Upstairs the residence comprised eight spacious rooms.
Aunt Cath ran the delicatessen, my mother Gloria ran the cake shop, and Gordon ran the bakehouse – and, in the process, taught himself to be a pastry-cook.
Grandma and Pa Andrews were with us at the start. Pa stayed on, but Grandma soon moved out to run a rooming house in Hawthorn. Graeme and I shared a bedroom.
All this time Aunt Cath’s romance with Bill Warren was developing. Cath and Bill had met on Flinders Street Station [shades of Brief Encounter]. This was back when Cath was running the delicatessen in Elizabeth Street. Bill was living at Cheltenham, I expect having recently been demobbed. Cath and Graeme and Grandma Andrews were living at Aspendale. I'm not sure where Pa Andrews was residing at the time – maybe still back on his farm at Chinkapook, more likely with Gordon and Gloria (and me) at the nearby share farm – but he’d certainly caught up with us by the time we all got to Windsor; and he later moved with us to Richmond.
Cath and Bill were married; Bill moved in with us at Richmond, and there was another re-arrangement of the sleeping quarters. Graeme and I moved in with Pa Andrews.
So Graeme and I were kids together from age six. We were different in size and shape and every other way, and I recall that we brawled a fair bit. But I also recall that we played incessantly in the back yard at “cowboys and Indians”. Since Graeme always played Tom Mix and I always played Hopalong Cassidy (or was it the other way around?) it must be that Beverley Cummings, our tomboy friend from school, always played the Indians.
Our years of living under the same roof ended when Cath and Bill managed to extricate the Andrews family farm from the foreclosing bank (where it had languished unsaleable for five years), and with Graeme and Pa Andrews moved to Chinkapook – for Aunt Cath and Pa Andrews a return to their roots, for Bill the life-changing experience of rural life, and learning to be a farmer. Graeme would have been eleven at the time.
Graeme simply loved farm life. Bill was an easy-going and non-judgemental step-father. The four or five years together on the farm were wonderful bonding years, and Graeme always thought of Bill as his dad, and always called him Dad. If Graeme ever missed city life I never heard of it.
I spent several school holidays at the farm; but saw a lot more of Graeme when his family sold the farm and returned to Melbourne in 1954. Cath, Bill and Graeme moved into their newly-acquired place in Brighton; and the connection with Graeme strengthened again when he later became apprentice pastry-cook to my father, Gordon. Given the early-morning start time in the bakehouse, Graeme was always there when I went off to school or university, sometimes still there when I got home. We saw a lot of each other in those days, one reason being that Graeme had by then become a member of the water polo squad based at the Richmond Pool. He had taken lessons from the legendary Tom Donnett, and was an excellent swimmer and water polo player.
We saw a lot more of each other after my father Gordon died in 1960. Some time in the mid-1950s Gordon had acquired a second cake shop in Bridge Road, a few hundred yards closer to the city, number 158A. The vendors had baked behind the shop, but Gordon discontinued the bakehouse, and supplied the new shop with deliveries from the original shop. After Gordon died my mother, Gloria, continued the businesses, with Graeme as her mainstay pastry-cook. But she could not cope, and the original delicatessen and cake shop were closed – and my family moved to Canterbury. But Gloria continued to run the new shop, and Graeme stayed with her and re-commissioned the bakehouse. Graeme was an excellent pastry-cook. That arrangement continued for another year or so. I doubt that this was an easy time for Graeme, but he showed true kindness and loyalty.
Graeme and I had an inevitable drifting apart. My career took me in one direction; and marriage to Kaye and young children took Graeme’s interests in a different direction. Then Graeme and family moved to Western Australia, and for some years Graeme was an ore train driver based at Dampier. After returning to Perth he established a wedding-car hire business. In later years Graeme and I rarely saw each other.
But our lives were intertwined right into our twenties, and that can not be gainsaid.
By way of postscript, and something that I did not reference for Graeme's funeral, I note that Graeme was dyslexic. The condition was not diagnosed early, and he had difficulty in his school years. He read very little, and wrote even less. But despite the drawback he was able to complete his pastry-cooking apprenticeship, and to qualify as a train driver - persistence and hard work overcoming adversity.
Gary Andrews
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