One Christmas when I was ten and my sister eight, our parents gave us identical Rothmans dolls. Gigantic baby dolls relative to our size and the most amazing present of my memory beyond the bicycle my elder brother restored for my twelfth birthday and the anthology of poetry my mother gave me for my fourteenth.
Some gifts stay in your memory as perfection itself. And my baby pink Rothman’s doll was one such gift. That my younger sister should receive an identical doll – her doll’s nappy was pink while mine was blue – capped my joy.
We played for hours with our dolls, dressing and undressing, nursing, feeding, caring. We collected accoutrements, as we called them. Plastic baby bottles that were lined inside with a thin tube of plastic into which the manufacturers had tipped a white liquid so when you lifted the bottle into the doll’s mouth she appeared to be feeding. Plastic toy potties for when we could help our babies learn to pee properly.
That summer we took ourselves outside to the scrabbly patch of grass underneath the lopsided Hills hoist. The washing line tilted to one side and its outer layer was useless after our brothers had used it as a type of flying fox. No one ever bothered to fix it. The place was a rental, and my mother struggled every time she hung out sheets to find enough space.
We alternated mother care with rounds of hopscotch on the strips of concrete that led beneath and around the washing line. A perfect hopscotch patch, it ran in a line from the house to the garden then spread its wings under the washing line.
We scoured the back yard and beyond the rear laneway to the street to find the best and heaviest taws. Heavy taws skimmed the ground and offered a better aim.
Part of the skill in hopscotch was not just your ability to hop one legged from square to square but also your skill at aiming your taw bang smack on target one square at a time.
We were a competitive bunch my sister and brothers and me. We played to win. These games went on for hours during the endless school holidays only interrupted by a full bladder that demanded attention or my mother calling to come for dinner.
Dinner the worst time of all. We sat to order, two little girls alongside the little boys, four to a bench. My eldest brother at one end, my father at the other. My mother to his side opposite on the bench and the highchair for my little brother beside her. My little sister on the other side followed by my big sister and my second eldest brother. All of us sardined around the table with knives and forks at the ready as my mother piled great lumps of hudspot, mashed potatoes onions and carrots onto each plate with a sausage or two standing to attention alongside for the bigger kids.
We ate in silence ever mindful of the looming presence of our father who, if you stepped out of line, would reach across and rap on my brothers’ knuckles with his fork.
The meal over, we lined up plates and scooted them through to the scullery where my eldest sister took up at the sink, her elbows laced with soap suds, while we little ones took turns to dry, stack and put away. It took the best part of an hour to clear up after dinner by which time the only ones remaining in the kitchen were us girls.
The boys’ ability to stand at the sink was limited and somehow no one complained when they failed to see the task through.
There was one night when my little sister came screaming from the back yard with a bone skewering her wrist. She had fallen on one of the dog’s bones left scattered across the yard. My mother rushed her to the hospital. She must have prevailed upon my father to drive as she did not drive herself until years later when she began to work outside of our home and needed to travel.
Accidents were common fare in our oversized household. My own included. I thought of myself as cat like with nine lives. I had lost the first four by the time of my second collision with a car when I was seven. That one left me in the Box Hill Hospital with suspected concussion. I stayed overnight. A car had hit me on the zebra crossing in Canterbury Road. It was peak hour and I went to buy butter from the milk bar man at my mother’s request.
The impact knocked me unconscious, and I came to on the butcher’s floor resting on saw dust that clung to my hair. My mother this time took me in an ambulance. Years earlier when I was three I threw myself into the deep end of the local swimming hole and my elder sister fished me out by pulling on my hair.
Another time my second oldest brother rescued me from a train. I have no memory beyond the story told. My mother was with my little sister in her pram when the train stopped at Watsonia station. She eased the pram out first and then lifted one of my other sisters onto the platform. I stood behind this sister in the train waiting for my turn when it took off. Still leaning out to be lifted onto the platform, my older brother had the presence of mind to rush at me and sent me flying across the carriage as the train gathered speed.
My mother met us then at the next station after my brother helped me off. And around the same time a memory of colliding with a car in Greensborough near the creek where my brothers caught yabbies. A car whose driver stopped in alarm, and I was unhurt but fearful for the trouble I might get into for causing anyone an inconvenience.
Childhood is like this. A mass of memories, the good, the bad and the downright ugly.