Mum died just 3 weeks after her 60th birthday in 1979, and like all who preceded her, she took the facts about her life with her. Both of her parents had died before her and she was an only child, making it very difficult to find out more than bare facts such as birth date and place. Mum came from the generation that believed that 'little girls should be seen and not heard', which meant that my younger sister Janet and I were always sent outside to play when family matters were discussed and argued.
About 12 years ago, I spent some time researching the background of the Spells family (Mum was a Spells before she married) and discovered that she came from a line of Master Mariners who had their own small shipping line, running ketches (small 2 masted vessels) into all of the tiny ports around the South Australian coast, carrying supplies to the farmers and taking on board cargo of bales of wool, bags of wheat, copper from Burra and slate from Mintaro - all bound for Britain in the huge windjammers lined up at Port Adelaide.
However, Mum had, on rare occasions, talked a little about how she met Dad in Melbourne during WWII, their 3 week whirlwind romance and then his return to fighting and imprisonment by the Japanese. She blamed this for his 'personality change' which led to the breakdown of their marriage not long after Janet was born in 1950 and eventual divorce in 1954, when we moved to Adelaide. Dad died in Brisbane in 1962, so I have had no contact with him to ever get 'his side of the story.'
I was always curious about Dad's war service and earlier this year applied for his war records, which came through this week. The very foundations of many of my beliefs about my parent's lives have shattered as I discovered that Dad, on return from active service in the Middle East in 1943, had a shocking accident while at an Army camp in Queensland and ended up with a depressed fracture of the skull (plus horrific facial injuries and a fractured collar bone). In March 1943 the Army declared him 'unfit for active service' and discharged him, honourably, before sending him to Melbourne for extended treatment of his injuries at Heidleburg Hospital.
My parents married in Brisbane (Dad's home town) on 16th September 1943, although her home address is written on the marriage certificate as South Yarra, Melbourne. Based on the facts on the official documents now in my possession, I have to question the truth of many of the 'family stories' Mum related when I was a child.
I spoke to my son and his fiancee about my disillusionment and they both agreed with me that it was preferable to sort out the facts from the fiction and to set the record straight. While I agree wholeheartedly with this, it is, nonetheless, somewhat difficult to discover that my mother created a tissue of lies about her early married life and the many, many untruths about Dad.
The reason I have written and posted this story on Legacy Stories is to urge those of you with living parents and close family to question them about their lives and to check some of the facts. I have always urged personal history clients to expose any family skeletons and to set the record straight and now is my opportunity to 'practice what I preach' for my children, and future family generations, as my legacy to them.