NaNoWriMo Day 15

The tally today stands at 32,512, leaving 17,488 to reach the end of month target of 50,000 words, although a word count is purely academic if there is no substance to the words written.Yesterday I found myself so confused with the swapping of Christian names in different 'official' records that I've skipped forward a generation today to give myself and my brain a rest from it. With the name, George, appearing three times in the one family and these same three going off to war and only two returning, it's important I get this right. and if I'm having difficulty with all the resources available to me in this digital age, what hope did those have in the past, when names chopped and changed so much. In this same family the name Hugh also appears four times, including in-laws, just to further confuse.

Today's excerpt is part of Eugene's story, written before her death in 2001, which gives insight into daily life in the country a century ago.

My father was offered a position working for a Mr Lew Richardson at Elizabeth Town. To move all our belongings, he borrowed a wagon and horses from his employer at Burnie. Furniture and all our personal  belongings were loaded onto the wagon and my father went by road to Elizabeth Town, while my mother and us children travelled by train, which was a journey of adventure in those days. We were met by friends at Moltema station and taken to our grandmother’s house, which was vacant at that time, where we were to live while my father repaired our new home.

Our home was in a bush setting, some distance from the highway, a small house with two fairly large rooms, a back porch and a store room. The house was built from timber cut from nearby trees, palings had been split with an adze hoe and paling splitter, with a maul and wedge used when needed. The chimney was not made of brick as they are today, but made of stones gathered from the property and stacked, with clay from nearby pits used to seal the gaps between the rocks. The floor was just rough palings, which we had to scrub each week. Inside the house the walls were covered with scrim, which was really just cut open chaff bags, then covered with old newspapers of the time, the Courier and the Daily Mail.

Sometime later my father built on another room that we called the down in the room, because you had to step down into it. We were a large family in a small house. In the children’s room we had a double bed, which slept three at the top and three at the bottom, while in my parents room they had a single bed and a cot.