Mayfield Girl: A woman's search for a mother's love: A memoir of Newcastle and country NSW

By Jean Sharp

Jean Sharp grew up in working class Mayfield, Newcastle, NSW, in the shadow of the BHP steelworks. Her life spanned the steelworks’ very beginnings to nearly its closure in 1999.

Jean recalls in remarkable detail the big and small events of 20th century life: school during World War I, the growth of Mayfield and Newcastle, domestic a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hunter Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780994586346

Jean Sharp

Stephen Wallace AM is a filmmaker whose films include The Love Letters from Teralba Road, Stir, Blood Oath, For Love Alone and Turtle Beach as well as television features Mail Order Bride, Women of the Sun, Captives of Care, Olive and others. He formed his own theatre company, Impulse Theatre, and has directed17 full length plays, mainly for schools. He received an AM for his services to the Australian Directors Guild. He is married to Fiona Verge and has two children, Lucinda and Guy.

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Prologue

One hot day in 1921, when I was eleven years old, my mother took my siblings and me to Newcastle Beach. As we played in the sand, I overheard my mother talking with an old friend that she had bumped into. She said something that shocked me. In the tram on the way home, I asked her bluntly why she had lied to her friend about me. She didn't answer but remained silent, as was her way. When we arrived home, I ran to one of our neighbours to ask her about what I had heard. What she told me was to haunt me for the rest of my life.

1 · Crybaby

I was two years old. The adults were absent and Cynthia, my six-year-old sister, had me at her mercy. I don’t remember her face, just a feeling. I was a crybaby and I knew she delighted in making me cry. Tom, my brother, aged four, was her henchman. He was just a feeling too. They set to work.

I had a small toy dog, a tan-and-white cloth dog with a bell tied under its jaw. It stood upright on stiff little legs. Cynthia and Tom decided to slaughter it, like they’d seen men in the country slaughter a calf or a steer. I closed my eyes and screamed. They skinned it, ripped it apart and placed the hide out to dry on the fence, just as they’d seen the men do. I was aghast. My little dog, slaughtered and his skin hung out to dry on the fence. I was inconsolable. Poor fool that I was, I always gave my affection to inanimate objects. It was the beginning of years of torment from Cynthia.

I know now that this happened in the autumn of 1912 in remote, north-western New South Wales. Our family was living in an isolated place called Dolgelly. We lived in the Dolgelly hotel (or what was then called a half-way house) — an overnight stop for coaches and buggies travelling between Moree and Goondiwindi or Garah and Mungindi on the Dolgelly Road.

I remember, from a later time, the battered hotel stone and wood building on the desolate Dolgelly road, the massive backyard, the stench of the stables, the horses and buggies, the never-ending wooden post-and-rail fences, and the surrounding flat, almost treeless countryside.

I sat on the hotel verandah and cried. Ah Fong, the hotel’s Chinese cook, came out and sat beside me. I can still remember his round, kindly, smiling face. He put his arm around me and said, Don’t cry. I’m the one who should cry. I have no wife and no children and no one to love me.

But I love you, I said and I kissed him on the cheek. He was very affected my father told me years afterwards. He had watched us from the hotel doorway.

I met Ah Fong years later when I had grown up and he was a vegetable dealer in Moree. He told me, Oh you were a cranky baby. You cried and cried and cried. He made no mention of the kiss.

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Jean’s father, Tom Sharp, as a young man; probably dressed for his wedding in 1905.

My father, Tom Sharp, had become the teacher at a public one-teacher school in a nearby town called Boomi in 1903 and I was born there. The family move to Dolgelly came late in 1910 when the halfway house or hotel became available. I don’t know why my parents moved from Boomi. Most likely my Dad just wanted a change from teaching.

Boomi was then a very small, isolated town in the outback. It had a few houses, a school for the district sheep-station and wheat-farm families, a pub or two and very few shops. It was a shire centre for sheep graziers and wheat growers with a population of less than 150. I didn’t go back for eighty years and I didn’t recognise it when I did, but my birth certificate says: Born in Boomi in 1910.

Life felt strange and cruel for me in those days at Dolgelly. I cried a lot. I knew something was wrong in our family but I didn’t know what. As I grew older I was to find out just how cruel life could be.

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Tom Sharp, right, with his one-teacher class at Boomi, 1908. Cynthia Sharp, aged two, is in the front row, seventh from the right. (Photo: NSW State Archives)

2 · Horses, buggies and steam trains

We lived another two years at the hotel at Dolgelly before leaving for good. I was four when we left. The whole family set off in a two-horse buggy. Mum was pregnant again. We had many suitcases with us. It was a long trip (roughly thirty-five miles) to a big town, which I know now was Moree. We fought and argued the whole trip and it took such a long time I was sick. We were heading for Gosford, near Sydney. Why we were going to Gosford was a mystery to me, just one more mysterious decision that adults made.

The flat featureless country that surrounds Boomi, the Dolgelly road, the desolate, long, straight Boggabilla and Carnarvon roads into Moree, the sweeping treeless plains, the rich black soil and occasional sparse rivers that flood mercilessly, the relentless Australian heat of summer and blanket frosts of winter were embedded in my psyche from that time, even if my memory of them is hazy.

All I remember of Moree is that it was busy and there were motorcars, which I’d never seen before, as well as horses and carts and buggies. We were there for a day. We went to the bore baths, which were opposite the railway station, and there was a big hailstorm afterwards. The hailstones were as big as cricket balls and we huddled under the awning of the hotel near the pool and watched them smashing into the ground. It was terrifying.

It was exciting when our steam train finally pulled out with lots of smoke and steam hissing and we got grit in our eyes and noses when we leaned out the window. We probably weren’t easy to travel with, Cynthia, Tom and me, with Mum pregnant. Dad told me later the train trip took thirteen hours to get from Moree to Gosford, which was to be our home for the next two years.

Gosford was where that I first became aware that I wasn’t the centre of the universe, that my family had bigger priorities than myself.

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Moree railway station, c. 1911. (Photo: NSW State Archives)

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Moree c. 1890–1910, when Tom Sharp first arrived in the area. (Photo: courtesy Royal Australian Historical Society)

3 · Please give me a penny, sir

In Gosford we lived in a furnished house owned by a Mrs White, who was very old and who lived in the house as well. We were boarders. Mrs White was an old friend of my father’s from when he was a miner in Minmi, near Newcastle. Years later I realised Dad must have been desperate to get away from Dolgelly and this was the best option.

I don’t remember where the house was in Gosford or much about it but my father obtained a job as a commercial traveller selling Corona kerosene pressure lamps around the country, and we saw very little of him. My sister Cynthia and brother Tom went to primary school, and I started kindergarten. My sister, Winifred, was born there in July 1914.

Gosford is where I became more aware of Cynthia’s hidden resentment towards me. I’m not sure whether it was her anger at me for being a crybaby or jealousy that I’d been born at all. She made a huge fuss over baby Winifred when she was born at the house. She was forever fondling and cuddling it. I didn’t look at the baby myself but I do remember wondering secretly why she made such a fuss over the silly thing. I was very timid and forever clutching a doll or a picture book, and spent a lot of time in tears. I began to be aware that along with indifference I wasn’t getting much parental love. Not only Cynthia, but Mum gave all her affection to the baby. I was just as much a part of the family as the baby. Why did I feel like an outcast? What did I do wrong? Why was Cynthia so awful to me? I must have had some feeling for Cynthia though because I remember being terrified of storms and I once shut myself in the toilet and prayed it wouldn’t rain until Cynthia and my brother arrived home from school.

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Gosford, date unknown. (Photo: source unknown)

Despite this there were happy times in Gosford. Mum’s family were always big on concerts. Mum (or Annie as Dad called her) taught Cynthia to sing and perform on stage and in a school concert at Gosford she sang a pathetic old English song, Please give me a penny, sir.

Please give me a penny, sir?

Please give me a penny, sir?

My mother dear is dead,

And, oh, I am so hungry, sir,

A penny please, for bread?

All day I have been asking.

But no one heeds my cry,

Will you not give me something?

Or surely I must die.

Chorus Please give me a penny, sir?

My mother dear is dead,

And, oh, I am so hungry, sir,

A penny please, for bread?

Please give me a penny, sir?

You won’t say no, to me,

Because I’m poor and ragged, sir.

And, oh, so cold you see.

We were not always begging,

We once were rich like you,

But father died a drunkard,

And mother she died, too.

Please give me a penny, sir?

Is heard on every side,

Lisped by little trembling lips,

And singing on life’s tide.

Oh, listen to their pleadings,

And pity these, the poor,

Then blessings brought from heaven,

Will shine on thee the more.

People showered the stage with pennies when Cynthia sang this song. I’m not surprised. Cynthia, a forthright little girl of eight, looked like a waif with her homemade ragged clothes, delicate face and a shock of well-brushed hair, singing her song so sincerely.

She was in another item with some little girls dressed as bathing belles and singing Splashing in the briny, splashing in the sea. Molly and me, Polly and me. What better fun can there be? That was also very popular and naturally all the girls looked adorable in their homemade bathing-belle outfits.

I clutched my doll and chewed my handkerchief and watched her, tongue-tied and inarticulate. I was in awe of her; she was so much bolder than me, so much more confident, so dismissive of any fear. Adults were impressed by her. I was proud she was my sister even if she was horrible to me.

I had a special doll, a rag doll with an old metal head on it with the mouth perpetually open. With my deep and growing maternal instinct, I stuffed pieces of food in its mouth. Any old thing would do — porridge or pieces of meat and potato. Nothing was too good for my child. However, as time went by the food began to go bad and people noticed a bad smell about the place and soon traced it to my doll. It was dispatched to the rubbish tip followed by me howling.

I was puzzled that I was ignored. I thought maybe some of us got less attention because we were older and were expected to look after ourselves. I believe Cynthia also felt some lack of attention and fussed over Winnie partly to please Mum and win more motherly affection, but then took out her frustration on me when she didn’t get it. Cynthia liked attention as much as me though she never admitted it. We were made to keep quiet about our feelings.

Suffering hurts in silence was the beginning of me learning to hide everything, not just keeping quiet, but not telling the truth about anything. It never got you anywhere. You were expected to hold your tongue on all personal matters and speaking the truth was not held in high regard. Nor was telling lies — only silence was acceptable. I never agreed with this and it would get me into trouble later.

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Australia Day parade, Donnison Street, Gosford, July 1915. (Photo: R. Hazlewood; Gosford Library)

4 · A King George V childhood

We lived uneasily at Mrs White’s in Gosford for two years until the early winter of 1916 when we moved to my grandparents’ farm in Boundary Road, Wallsend, just outside Newcastle. I wasn’t aware that they were my grandparents till later but I loved being with Grandma Sharp. Mum was pregnant again and Dad tried to go back to teaching. It was to be a temporary six to eight month move before we moved to a house in Mayfield.

Our grandparents’ house was a picturesque weather-beaten, grey-slab house in the then rural Plattsburg part of Wallsend. My grandmother must have done quite a lot of arranging to fit us all in: my father, mother, Cynthia, Tom, myself and baby Winnie. It was here I discovered I had another brother called Bill (Wilhelm) who was four years old and had been looked after by Grandma Sharp all his life.

I was confused. Why hadn’t anyone ever mentioned him? Why was Grandma caring for him? Mum explained that Grandma looked after him because she could not manage so many children on her own in the country. I supposed that’s what Grandmas had to do but she already had our grandfather to look after as well as her other eight grown-up children — two of whom were under twenty (the youngest, Bertram, was only seventeen) — who kept dropping in and staying over, often with their children. That this new brother of ours, Bill, was living there was a surprise. I didn’t know who was whom with my aunts or uncles, I just knew the house was always full of grown-ups and children. I thought Grandma was brave, being so old, to look after our young brother as well as us.

There was a large garden, fowls, cows and horses and an abundance of grapes, which I wrongly thought was a vineyard, for my grandparents to look after. Some months after we burst in on my grandmother, Mum had another baby, a son whom she and Dad named Stuart Granville. Suddenly, I had another brother, which made three.

My poor hard-working grandmother, Janet. I knew even then what a burden we were on her but families were different then . . . everyone depended on their extended family in some way. Even so, she was extraordinarily generous in taking our whole family for six months.

My grandparents became a big force in my early life, especially Grandma Sharp. I became very close to her and loved her dearly. She treated me as if I was her favourite grandchild, even when I knew she had twenty-eight others. She was quite short but had a friendly face and a warm smile — she had been very pretty when she was young — and that smile meant everything to me. She seemed both a grandmother and a mother to me.

My grandfather had married her when she was sixteen and he was twenty. She wasn’t even a bride; they married in a registrar’s office in Newcastle in 1876. Janet was born in Edinburgh, and emigrated with her parents in the 1860s. Thomas was the grandson of convict Thomas Sharpe, who was sent to Australia from Birmingham in 1833. They settled in Wallsend, then a coal-mining satellite of Newcastle, where my grandfather grew up and became a miner, like his father before him.

My father, Tom (the eldest boy in the family was always named Tom), was born in 1877 followed by five daughters (Janet; Mary, whom we always called Aunty Mollie; Anne; Maude; and Bertha) then three more sons (Ernest, Oliver and Bertram). It was a big family but my grandfather managed it well on his coal-miner’s salary. He somehow managed to save enough to buy the small farm and later on other properties in Mayfield, including a boatshed on the Hunter River near Hexham. He was hard working and industrious all his life.

Grandma’s house in Boundary Road, three miles from the Wallsend town centre, not only had an abundance of grapevines, but also mandarin and orange trees and the first flower garden I had seen, which was full of Grandma’s sweet-scented stocks. She had red, purple, pink and white stocks with petals that were soft and reassuring. These were the first flowers I recognised and could name.

I learned through my grandmother’s garden how you could make a house beautiful with garden flowers. My family had lived in houses without flowers. Flowers were my first conscious pleasure in nature for its own sake; the mysterious beauty and scent of flowers was a liberating force for me. I took joy in them even as a five- and six-year-old. The love for those scented stocks never left me. I always associate them with my grandmother.

It was here, too, in Grandma’s garden, that I tasted my first mandarins and passionfruit. When I peel a mandarin, even now, the tangy smell of the rind reminds me of stealing them and lying to Grandma about it. What a conniver I was, even at five. This is my first memory of deliberately hiding the truth from my elders for fear of reprisal and reprimand. The lies increased as I grew older until I became a teenager, when I finally started to confront my parents.

The taste of watermelon and grapes was also special. I said to my friend Maizie Parks that the best tastes in the whole world were mandarins, grapes and watermelons. The world and its sensations were beginning to be known to me. I thought watermelon was the most beautiful taste on earth, except sweet black grapes. I said victoriously to another friend, I think grapes are the best and second is watermelon. I could not articulate it then but I meant for sheer and utter sensual pleasure in eating them. It was the sugar, but I was a deeply senses-driven child, be it food, physical comfort, flowers or affection.

Wallsend in those days was a place quite unlike today, a thriving mining community with a large population, many houses and churches, a hospital, pubs, a rail connection to Newcastle and, would you believe, a racecourse. It was dominated by, and profited from, the rich coalmines in Wallsend and nearby Plattsburg and Minmi. Wallsend was named after the coal-mining township of Wallsend outside Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north of England. The English Wallsend was built at the end of Hadrian’s Wall, hence the name.

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Wallsend, c. 1906. (Photo: Josiah Cocking collection, Cultural Collections, University of Newcastle, NSW)

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The sunken, barren landscape where Jean’s grandmother’s house and farm once stood in Boundary Road, Plattsburg, photographed in 1955 when she visited the site.

Although I started kindergarten at Gosford, my strongest early memory of school is first class at Wallsend–Plattsburg Primary School. This was my father’s old school. I remember the slightly faded pale-yellow two-storey building with the corrugated tin roof and big playing area and my first tearful days at the school, not knowing anybody in my class and everyone staring at me.

We wore long white dresses up to our necks and over our knees, pinafores in summer, dark dresses and pinafores in winter and lace-up boots. We always had a ribbon in our hair.

Every Monday morning in school we assembled around a flagpole and solemnly declared we would honour our God and serve our King (George V) and salute our flag and then the flag went up. That’s how we became little patriots and it was responsible for my later warm feelings for the royal family and for Britain, whom I felt personally related to.

I had no idea who King George V was or what Britain was or why we had a flag but I soon realised I was going to have a King George V childhood and there was more of this to come. It mysteriously made me feel safe and reassured and increased my awareness of an outside world and a life that had responsibilities. At this time, World War I was in full swing, there were soldiers everywhere, going off to fight in France and patriotism was rampant.

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Girls’ class 4, Plattsburg public school, 1916. Cynthia may be in the photograph. (Photo: NSW State Archives)

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Plattsburg high school in 1922. This is the same group of girls that Jean attended Plattsburg public school with. Alice Moss is in the second row, fifth from the right. (Photo: NSW State Archives)

My main preoccupation was not being late for school. We had to walk two miles from my grandparents’ farm in Boundary Road (surrounded by bushland and empty fields), up and down a long hill, then past the racecourse and the Racecourse Hotel, up the Minmi dirt road and down another hill to the school which was beside a huge bushland park. It took the best part of an hour to get there and to get home. I was six years old and I walked there with my sister and brother but I usually walked home by myself. I thank God for my friend Maizie Parks who lived near us and was a strong soul who protected me and took my part against other children on the walk home. I was unusually timid in those days.

My worst day at school was when another so-called friend called Alice Moss, also aged six and who had cropped hair, told me when I spilled a drop of sheep dip on my desk (we were given a dab of this antiseptic to wash our slates on Friday so they would be antiseptic on Monday) that when I came to school on Monday the desk would be rotted through and I would suffer dire perils. What a weekend I spent in despair and agonies of mind only to find out on Monday the desk was the same as ever.

These perils lasted another six months until our family packed up yet again