My maternal grandparents’ home, in the Melbourne suburb of North Caulfield, holds a special place in my heart. Treasured books were held in a rosewood cabinet in the lounge room, which also featured a shelf or two of piano rolls; sheet music, and a song book which I loved. I couldn’t read music, however, it had the melody in note letters written above the notes which I could follow. Three volumes of Shakespeare in immaculate condition brought out by my great grandfather George Charles Beech Hooper from England in the 1860’s were also shelved there, along with a my mother’s treasured first edition of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s ‘Elves and Fairies’ book of poems with illustrated plates. According to my aunt, my mother was a great reader ‘who always had her head in a book’--much to the chagrin of my grandmother, who rarely read and had to cajole her to get her to focus on other things, such as helping with housework! My parents built our home in the post war, increasingly industrial, suburb of Clayton. It was the time of Laminex, of good housewives in full skirted dresses running tidy houses. Few bookshelves were to be seen when I visited my friends. My parents were ‘older parents’, with mum already in her early 40’s and my father in his early 50’s when I was 10. There was no Laminex to be seen in our house. My mother preferred reading to us to doing the ironing, while my father could often be discovered reading books, that is, when he wasn’t checking out the form guide! There were dedicated bookshelves on either side of the fireplace full of books gleaned from various sources in my parents past, to which were gradually added our own books of ‘Black Beauty’, ‘Heidi’, ‘Famous Five’ and ‘Secret Seven’, ‘Biggles’, ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’, ‘Anne of Green Gables’, and then, as we went through our schooling, prescribed literary works such as ‘Great Expectations’, ‘The Merchant of Venice’, ‘The Getting of Wisdom’, books on clear thinking and analysing opinion. There were books which held a special mystery, including The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a book of love poetry which seemed to have been given to my parents by my father’s parents, who were also given a copy when they married*. As I reread Omar Khayyam’s A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread and Thou just now, I felt almost as bemused and confused by it as I was as a child… Dostoyevsky’s Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, also resonant with images of far off lands, also dipped into, untutored, before I was ‘ready’ for them. The novels ‘Inheritance’ and ‘Hungry Hill’ introduced the world of the industrial revolution, income inequality and class, themes reinforced by the reading of ‘The Tower Room’ by Mary Grant Bruce, awarded to my mother as 1st Prize (Girls) in Miss Fletchers Sunday School class at St Mary’s, Caulfield, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Inheritance was set in the time of transition from cottage industry to industrial looms, while ‘Hungry Hill’ by Daphne Du Maurier, is a family saga of five generations of Brodricks, Irish landowners and a copper mine, ‘Hungry Hill’, and spans the period 1820 – 1920. Interestingly, both books potentially shed light on the lives of my great, great grandparents as revealed in occupations listed in UK and Scottish census records. The book ‘A House is Built’ by G Barnard Eldershaw clearly belonged to my mother. M. Barnard Eldershaw was the pseudonym used by Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956). Their partnership, which lasted two decades, produced five novels, two short story collections, three histories, as well as plays and essays. Their first joint project was the novel A House is Built (1929). There was a section for War Histories, often delved into by my father, then later my brother, and very occasionally, me! 24 Hill Street, Daylesford, my home for two decades, had a room with a wall of bookshelves, from floor to ceiling. I still have most of them in Benalla, even if some are now in the garage. Whatever will become of them all? I recently came across this photograph of my great grand-aunt Emily Heseltine Hooper taken in the library of her family home in Bath. What wonderful bookshelves! Beverley Lee
*Story written for U3A Benalla Family Research class - topic - 'From the Bookshelves', October 2022. |
The Journey ...An 'occasional blog' recording elements of my renewed family history journey. This is the second wave in my 'family history' journey. The first lasted from 2010 to 2014. with intermittent bursts since then. It's time to revisit, to share more stories, to edit, to tackle uncertainties... Categories
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