I've just been talking with a good friend who was born in Germany. I'm in NZ, and we are both 1950 babies. Our early lives could not be more different. She had had endless problems with her bones, owing to the hunger and poverty in 1950s Frankfurt. She is a tiny, thin little thing, in the mould of Audrey Hepburn, for the same reasons. She speaks of the shame of being born German back then. NZ was one of the richest nations in the world at that time, owing to the high price of wool and the need for lamb, beef, cheese and butter, worldwide. We still had rationing when I was a baby, because we sent a huge proportion of our agricultural produce back to the Mother Country. Even so, both my parents were of farming stock, and knew how to make a little home-grown food go a long way. We shared a house cow with our neighbours, and mother used to milk her in the morning, the neighbours at night. I remember her in a homemade flour-sack apron, bringing home pails of warm frothing milk from Beauty. We had a dozen chickens, a huge vege garden, many fruit trees, and we children were all actively involved in food production - feeding chickens, weeding rows of carrots, turning the compost pile, mowing the grass. I learned to sew and to darn socks, though refused to learn to knit at age 5, because my brother was not expected to do so, and I didn't think it was fair.
We played out on the adjacent farm, and parents never knew where we were or what we were doing. There were fast-flowing rivers, trees we climbed recklessly, bulls, and one one occasion, aged about 9, I remember being lost and the panic was awful. My sister developed pneumonia aged 6, and was off school for months. Mother used to leave her at home all day while she went off to play golf. Imagine that today!
The best of times, and the worst of times.
How do you acknowledge Easter.
Kate Garroway-Care at home costs