1947
Aged 4 with sister Jacqueline Margaret Ray
The immerser
A memory from the time I was about four was seeing an "immerser" at Horace Young's house down the road in Lily St. Horace was, like my father, a timber contractor at the time and there was some contact between the two families.
An immerser was like an electrtric jug without the jug! It was just a heating element with a plug for an electric cord at one end and you put it in a bowl of water to heat the water. I was quite fascinated by it and, once, when the Youngs were all out, I went down there and tried it out for myself. In an Australian country town at the time, back doors were not locked and children wandered around pretty freely.
So I put the immerser in a bowl of water on the Young's kitchen floor, turned it on, saw it working, and went away quite pleased with myself. Of course it eventually boiled off all the water, cracked the bowl and burnt a hole in the kitchen floor before some adult came along and found it.
When later asked if I had done it (somebody must have known how much I likded that immerser!), I admitted that I had and was taken to see the neat circular hole burnt in the floor -- which I can still remember.
A tourer
I am pretty sure we were living in "the red house" when I was taken for my first ride in a car. It was a 1920s tourer belonging to some friend of my father. I must have been aged about 4 but I still remember the black leather (leatherette?) interior vividly and I still like tourers to this day.
Broken ladies
At that time there were a lot of advertisements in the newspapers and magazines which just showed the head of a lady -- presumably advertising hats, cosmetics, soap etc. They showed what sculptors call a "bust" of a lady -- a cut-off figure.
These used to upset me,. I used to cry over these "broken ladies". My mother used to try to explain it to me and she must have eventually succeeded.
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E.&O.E.
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