Emboldened, if not EmBowdened

Well, thanks to (and for) your encouagement Robert, I shall wrap up some more Bowden St Memories.

Mrs Winterbottom, yes. It's just the name that grabs me. What's more, across the street in no special order were Mr Chin, Mr and Mrs Woodhouse, Mrs Rottenberry (I'm not making this up, you know) and as Robert mentions, Mrs Hood and son Graeme. Don't they all sound like characters from a Roald Dahl kids story?

Mr Chin, opposite Nona and Grandfather, had a circular lawn. He also had a self powered mower with roller, the sort that you saw on bowling greens. He had it tied to a long rope which he wound round a stake dead in the middle of the lawn and, believe it or not, he'd start up the mower and it would gradually travel in a spiral from the centre to the edge of the lawn while he sat in the shade and read.

The Woodhouse's son was Kevin, a few years older than me. His favourite thing was to get out his collection of National Geographics and show me pictures of bare-breasted dusky maidens. He even had a magnifying glass. I was particularly uninterested, but thought it polite to feign interest. It was something for confession, too.

In the afternoons, esp Friday, I'd have to "do the messages". Mum would write up a shopping list and I would go up across Victoria Rd to the corner shop run by Mrs Scott and her adult daughter (Helen? Dorothy?) Usually I was allowed to add a McNiven's ice cream cone to the list, at a cost of threepence halfpenny (4c to the youngies). Then to the other corner, to Mr Hall the butcher. He already had Mum's weekend leg of lamb wrapped up and also Nona's rolled roast beef tied in string, wrapped in butcher's paper with Mrs Burns written on it. And he'd always say when I asked, "Aah, Mrs Burns, the lady with the one top lip". I didn't get it for ages.

On the subject of weird names, next to the butcher's shop lived the Crusts. June Crust was a school chum of Nanette. I remember very little of Nanette, strangely - she was seven years older than me - but I do remember her taking me on my first day of school at St Charles Borremeo, Ryde - the Mercy nuns (oxymoron). I started school at four years and four months and was forever after the youngest in the class.

The doctor you spoke of Robert was Dr Wherrett. I didn't have a traumatic encounter like yours, but I do remember being rushed off to Camperdown Hospital in the middle of the night with croup. I was in hospital for a few days and have never spent a night in hospital since - touch wood. A little further up from the doctor were Ryde Police Station and Courthouse, where I'd go with Mum to pick up the monthly ration coupons for butter, sugar and such like - this was only just post WWII.

As I write, more memories of Ryde and those years come rolling in, more than I thought I knew. John has subsequently told me that we drove up from Melbourne in 1944, not'45, when I was barely two years old. Auntie Bonnie had a flat in the Stanley St flats, that's how we ended up there. Maybe we'll train him to add his own blogs, and maybe I'll reread Dad's memoirs before reporting again. But there's certainly more to tell.

Hugh