Val – Dad’s favourite model.
Wilf Lowe.  Tru- Life Studios

There was always something to do at home.  I would spend hours sitting on the fluffy carpet in front of the bookcase in the passage.  Books were to be treated like people; gently and with respect.  We weren’t allowed to touch the ones on the top shelf but there were two shelves just for us.  Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter took up a lot of the space.  Then there were the Bobbsy Twins and all the Annuals of our favourite magazines; Lucy Attrill, Topper, Beano, Dandy, Thunderbirds and of course Black Beauty, Rupert and Paddington were all there.   I read them all numerous times.   There was a picture book about a little boy on the Amazon River that I read over and over again.  I was fascinated and dreamt of going there one day.  Reading was my favourite thing to do.  Val would catch me reading under the blankets late into the night.  The torch told on me.

The passage was also for practising gymnastics. It was perfect for headstands against the wall, backbends, splits and forward walks; just too small for cartwheels.   I loved that passage and hated it too.  Dave loved to hide and jump out at me from the rooms.  I was a nervous wreck.

There was one bathroom with a tub and washbasin and a separate room for the toilet.  It was tiny.  We all tried to get in there before dad and his newspaper did.  They were immovable until the paper was finished.

The bookshelf on the back veranda was piled high with, “World of Knowledge” and “Look and Learn” magazines.  They would arrive in the post every month and there was a fight to see who could read them first.

When we got too old for family concerts, dad would play dictionary scramble with us.  We each had our own Little Oxford Dictionary. He would say a word and we raced to see who could find it first.  I loved words and spelling was my forte. My favourite word was the longest one in the dictionary and we learnt how to spell and say it: floccinaucinihilipilification.  I loved that it meant “meaninglessness”.

Then there was our wooden “Flick” board.  It was square and there was a pocket on each corner.  We each got a red “goon” and we had to flick the black and beige discs into the pockets.  There were a few rules and they were usually broken; especially the one about having to stay in your seat.  We got at those discs in whatever position we could.

Getting ready for an evening at home.

When we were bored we would open the fridge door and stare into it and if dad wasn’t around we drank out of the milk bottle.  Val hid the tins of condensed milk on the top shelf of the highest cupboard.  She should have known that nothing was hidden from us.  We got the tiniest nail from dad’s workshop and banged the tiniest hole into the side of the lid.  Whenever she wasn’t around, we each took the tiniest sip and put it back on the shelf.

At night we would go to sleep listening to the Jazz greats crooning away. Big Bands were our lullabies.  Dad’s jazz collection covered one of the walls in the lounge and that was his favourite place in the evenings.  We would sit and listen to the drama about Porgy and Bess or anything else dad thought might interest us.

TV was banned from our house until we all grew up and left home.  Family concerts, dress ups, singing, dancing were much more fun than sitting around watching other people doing it.

One of our favourite comic characters.

The Schwegmann family consisted of 7 children; 5 girls and 2 boys.  They were the Pentecostal family in the circle. They were the ones who kept us all feeling guilty for any bad thing we thought or did.  Movies, parties, jeans, make-up, jewellery and anything else the Lowe’s loved, was “sinful”, but they did join in our escapades when it was convenient.  Their mother, Dawn, ruled the house and kept everyone on track. Gary Snr was a South African boxer and a non-church-goer.  He was like one of the kids.  Dawn preached to him from the moment his eyes opened to the time he went to sleep.  He just wasn’t interested.  He was a lot like us and we liked him.

Gary Jnr was the first boy I kissed and “spin the bottle” was the game that made it happen.  A bottle was put in the middle of the circle of boys and girls.  Someone spun it and if it pointed to you and you were of the opposite sex, you had to go into the cupboard and kiss them.  Most kids flew out of the cupboard wiping their mouths in horror and disgust.  Others were quite happy to keep kissing even when the game had stopped.

There were many sleepovers at their house.  I loved their big bedroom with 5 beds lined up next to each other, one for each girl, from oldest to youngest.

The Allan family lived near the entrance to the circle.  There was Old Mr and Mrs Allan, Gregory Allan, his sister and his mom, who we called “Fatty Allan”.  We felt the reasons were obvious.  One afternoon, Gregory came huffing across the park with an envelope in his hand.  5 minutes later, Val was marching across the park to his house.  Fatty Allan was fuming mad and inconsolable.  Someone had cut up a Little Lotta Comic and written some pretty ugly stuff about her and Fatty Allan being related.  We were all called in and interrogated and Val was convinced that her kids had NOTHING to do with such an awful incident. Every child in the circle was blamed and every one of us was innocent.  Susan Lowe and Glenda Schwegmann owned up months later when they thought it was too late to get disciplined for it.  They were wrong.  Val and Dawn made sure they felt very sorry.

We got to the Schwegmann kids and then they got to us. It took years of preaching and telling us how sinful we were, but when we finally came round, the Lowe family was changed forever.

The prodigal

For some reason, we were always threatening to run away from home.  It was usually after getting disciplined for something.  We would plot and plan together but there wasn’t ever anywhere to go.  The circle was all we knew.  If Val heard of our plot she would ask us to get our school suitcase out and she would offer to help us pack.  That really scared  us.

Peter almost pulled it off.  He was about 6 and he was running away from home.  Mom, trying not to laugh, calmly helped him pack his tiny brown suitcase with some small white jockeys, a shirt, some shorts and his toothbrush.  He kissed us all goodbye more than once, and he walked out of the front door, down the stairs and out of the gate.  We all watched him from behind the lace curtain at the lounge window.  He was so cute and chubby.  He had big red cheeks, lots of dark hair and short stocky legs.  He walked really slowly across the park and kept looking back at the house.  He got to the end of the grassy park and he stopped.  He turned around and started walking back.  Two minutes later there was a little knock on the door.  When mom opened it, he looked up at her and said, “I need to go to the toilet”.  That was that.  The prodigal had returned.

Us kids thought we were pretty poor and we made jokes about it.  Dad did what he could and we never went hungry or naked but it was often tight.   We would lie awake at night and jokingly pray,  “Thank you for the straw above our heads” and , “Thank you for the mud under our feet”.

Sue and I shared a room and so did Dave and Peter. When it was way past our bedtime, Val would shout down the passage, “Susan, David, Linda and Peter, stop that giggling, turn over and go to sleep!”  “Turning over” meant away from each other to face the wall.  Sometimes that worked and sometimes it made things worse.

Sue was fastidiously neat.  Her things were always in place and her bed was made army style.  She would sit on her pillow and slide her feet between the sheets.  If the sides came loose she would get out and start all over again.  They had to be tucked in so tight that she couldn’t move.  Sue would blow dry her hair until every kink was straightened.  If she discovered a kink, she would wet her hair and start all over again.  Dad was convinced she was going to lose it all.

I was fastidiously untidy.  My things were all over the place and my bed was my cupboard.  At bedtime I would push everything to the end and climb in.  It did help that I was short so I didn’t need the whole bed anyway.  My hair was full of kinks and waves and I just bunched it into a pony tail.

The thing we agreed on was that the new red-head twins at school had the most beautiful rosy cheeks we had ever seen.  We couldn’t stop staring at them.  One night in the bath, we came up with a brilliant idea.  With our shower caps on, we got our soapy face-cloths and started rubbing.  By the time we got out of the bath, our cheeks were raw and bleeding. When we woke up the next day our cheeks were far from rosy.  They were big brown scabs.  The red-heads couldn’t stop staring at us, and they weren’t the only ones.

We  seldom bathed alone and the water was often left in for someone else to use.  Our bathtub was small but its capacity was large.  Four small girls could bath at a time or three bigger ones.  We kept filling it up with hot water and we would stay there until our toes and fingers were wrinkly.  We giggled and talked until someone knocked on the door and told us to hurry up.  David discovered he could climb up on the bookshelf on the back veranda and peep into the bathroom window. He wasn’t the only one.  Dad caught quite a few boys on that bookshelf.