The Free Pom by Susan Thrun Willett

Introduction

A few years ago, I thought that if I ever wrote my autobiography, it would be called Living Life Backwards. However, I have come to realise that my early life as a five-year-old English migrant child and the ensuing years shaped who I was and, together with my life adventures, who I am now. I wouldn’t choose that title anymore. But those thoughts are for a different time.

As ten-pound Poms (I was a free Pom!), Mum and Dad, both born in 1909, migrated to Australia from the north of England in 1953. Poorly educated and out of work, they grasped the opportunity of creating a better life in South Australia for my brother and me and, of course, for themselves. Education was not a priority for them, having left school at twelve years old and put to work in factories. What was most important to them was having a job and an income.

Given that my parents would have been considered low-working class, I must highlight that they were all class; honest, hard-working, and compassionate. My gorgeous brother, who is ten years older than me, was fifteen years old when we arrived in Australia by boat and soon after accepted an apprenticeship to help our family income. Effectively I was the only ‘child’ in our household. I got the occasional threepence, sometimes sixpence, to spend, more often from my brother. I usually bought a thick slice of Fritz or some lollies at the local deli. I was spoiled within severe financial constraints, but there were no limitations on love and support.

When I was young, I wasn’t aware that we were rather poor compared to some others, because I was happy. Neighbours were living in similar conditions to ours. The only thing I can remember thinking — this was when I was at high school when I was probably more attentive to what other people may have had compared to us — I remember thinking that if a classmate lived in a brick house, they must have been rich; we lived in a non-builder-dad-built wood and asbestos house which was quite normal in our street and surrounding suburbs of that era.

Mistake?

I jokingly tell people sometimes that my birth was a mistake, and technically it was! Mum and dad’s first baby, a girl they named Sheila, died at three and a half months. My mum told me once and never spoke of it again. Sheila was born with a hare lip, and cleft palate, so required surgery to repair the abnormality. During the operation, they overdosed her with ether, the common anaesthetic of the time, and she died on the operating table.

My brother was born later, and because mum had had two caesarean sections, she was advised it would be dangerous to have another child. Consequently, she had her tubes tied to prevent further pregnancies. So, I hear you ask, how did I get into the world?

Well, ten years later, I simply snuck through. Perhaps the knots on mum’s tubes had loosened, or the material used to tie them dissolved; who knows? Thankfully mum got through her third caesarean birth successfully, and here I am. Mum always said I was the daughter she was meant to have, so I know that although my seed self defied a medical procedure, I know that I was never really a mistake.

*Regular socials were held at the I.C.I. (factory where dad worked) Hall at Largs Bay. Families took supper, and there was dancing, and we kids just had fun.

Surgery at 79 Years Old

Writing of operations made me think of my mother having a major operation to remove her cancerous bladder in 1988 when she was 79 years old. Below is a poem I wrote after seeing her immediately after surgery when she was still groggy with several tubes attached to her nose, neck, and body. A confronting scene for me, and a traumatic event for an elderly woman who had lost her husband, my dad, nine years earlier from a stroke and massive heart attack.

A Young Woman

After leaving high school at sixteen, I married at nineteen, had two children at the age of twenty-two and twenty-four, completed a university degree as a mature-age student and became a secondary teacher. I became a widow at thirty-eight after an, at times, difficult marriage. In hindsight, I was too young and too naïve to get married, but we produced two beautiful children who have grown into fabulous people, so I do not regret those years of marriage. I grew up. I became stronger. I had two amazing teenagers to support.

Literature, Writing and Me

When I think back about when I started to write, it’s quite difficult to really pin it down to a specific time. I began to write seriously about three years ago but had dabbled infrequently, before that time. I was always a reader, something I picked up from my parents. I remember the Heidi and Lassie series, and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, for example. And I loved my Rupert the Bear Album. I spent a whole Christmas Day one year, curled up in an armchair, reading a Heidi book I’d received as a present.

An Incident from my first year of high school, year 8, sticks in my memory. I wrote a story for English but about what I can’t recall. What stands out in my memory is that my teacher praised me for using the word ‘retrieve’. I’d heard the word while watching an episode of Lloyd Bridges’ television series, Sea Hunt, a fictional show based on scuba diving with all the usual conflicts needed for a drama series. Ironically, in that same essay, my work was corrected because I had spelled the word ‘Darwin’ as ‘Darwen’. But I had my sweet revenge as it was the name of where I was born in England, and ‘Darwen’ was the correct spelling. Obviously, the teacher was thinking of the Northern Territory’s ‘Darwin’, but he did apologise.

At high school and university, although there were quite a few years of marriage, and the birth of two children in between, I loved studying literature. Shakespeare (Henry V in year 8 had me hooked), year 10 and Shelly’s poem Ozymandias. Moving on to Keats, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, Bruce Dawe, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and many other writers, classic and modern, who took me into their worlds.

Now, here I am. I don’t model myself on any writer; I write what is in my imagination or where my feelings about social issues take me. When I re-read my work, I often wonder where it all came from. The mind is a wonderful library to be plundered.

AUTHOR BIO