A Pandemic Tale
My grandmother and I have both gone through a pandemic, although I am still in it I have this strong sense of belonging to her all over again. She was twenty-five years -old with a three year-old-daughter and I am seventy-five-years old with a nineteen-year-old grandaughter. We are so far apart in every way yet we are so close. I haven’t caught Covid at this time of writing while she fell very sick with the Spanish Flu. The fact that she survived to carry on as a mother to her orphaned child is a testament to the strength of her good health and fighting spirit; both of which I have inherited. The fighting spirit has been her greatest gift while we both suffered bereavement and loss of husbands, two each, and felt the cloying fingers of depression is testament to the thread of heritage that doesn’t break its tensile bond. I know she suffered from bouts of depression when she would drive in her car to the Fremantle wharves and park and watch the waves. Her home, “Ivanhoe”, on the Swan River in Claremont was full of the clamour of adolescent children by this stage and she preferred to keep signs of her weakness away from their curious eyes. There was no place for it in a vulnerable household where she was the sole carer of this noisy brood, apart from her ‘rock’, Daisy Corunna, who had been with her since “Towera” days in the Pilbara.
To go back to her Spanish flu days she was widowed in the Great War in 1917 when her proud young husband, Major Richard Clement Gregory of the Imperial Camel Corps, was killed in Palestine by a buzz bomb. That he left her with a Military Cross and a legacy for her and their tiny daughter was small reward for the loss of his powerful love and desire.
Her life as a young widowed gentlewoman was uncertain and peripatetic, where she travelled from married sister to married sister, staying in genteel boarding houses along the way. Those boarding houses so peculiar to strict Victorian mores, were run on a traditional fare of high teas and Irish Stew and catered for the traveling throng of indigent single women, just one tragic by-product of the wholesale slaughter of young men overseas.
It so happened that Alice and little Pat were staying in one such boarding house in Adelaide. The only child amongst a crowd of females of all ages, much was made of this quaint precocious three-year-old. There was one among the guests who could never hold her bitter tongue, complaining one evening of a poor meal when young Pat took her to task with a, “think of the little starving Belgianese!” To liken the next day to a festive child’s Christmas is no exaggeration when Pat found her bedroom filled with gifts from the other guests!
It was soon after this my grandmother fell victim to the virus and needed to be moved to the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Forced to leave Pat behind and doubting she would ever return to claim her she cast the child into the landlady’s care. In clouds of fever yet ever practical, she had enough strength to sign a book of blank cheques to provide for the child’s care and subsequent removal to relatives in the event of her death.
My aunty Pat thrived in this household of caring women, and my grandmother, Alice survived......... both to live through other times of great happiness and great misfortune.