Australia was once a kinder place. There really were boundless plains to share with those who came across the seas and share them we did. To be fair though, many of those who took refuge on our shores ended up in camps for a time but there were no high fences or guards and they were free to come and go as they pleased.
I was
born during the years when Australia's post-war intake of refugees and migrants
was at its peak. With much of Europe
deviated by WWII whole populations were on the move. Some were searching for better homes and some
just for homes because they had none.
Others searched for a country because theirs had ceased to exist or its
borders had changed so drastically that it was unrecognisable and their
particular ethnic, cultural or religious group was no longer welcome. Countries were split, countries were fused,
countries slipped behind a curtain of iron.
What was left of the Stepans family awoke one morning to find their country not only in ruins but absorbed into the Soviet Union so they started walking westward while they could. They hoped to find their way to America but ended up in a displaced persons camp outside Bathurst in rural Australia. This was the site of one of countless post-war miracles.
When Germany invaded Latvia, Lily's son from her first marriage had just turned 16 which was a very dangerous age for a boy at that time and in that place. He was conscripted into the German army and marched away. That was the last Lily and her husband Nicholas saw of Leo until they arrived at Bathurst with their young son Ziggy and Nicholas' mother who I only ever knew as Grandma Stepans. There was Leo, half a world away in the middle of rural New South Wales.
Reunited, they were transferred to the displaced persons' camp in suburban Hornsby which is where the connection with my family was established. The camp was on the corner of the street where my parents and sister lived with my maternal grandparents. Car ownership was not quite the norm back then so our whole family walked past the camp every day. It wasn't long before my mother met and befriended Lily who I came to know as Aunty Lily as our families intertwined.
When the camp finally closed the Stepans found accomodation just across the road in a large house that had been divided into several flats. Somewhere along the way Leo met Felicity and before you could say veiksmi there was a wedding and a baby on the way. In fact there were two babies on the way, one in the Stepans family and one in my own with the latter being me.
Peter and I were born at around the same time but whereas my arrival was planned Peter's was not. My mother had organised to take time off work and when she finally went back there were four eager grandparents ready to care for me. Everyone in Peter's family had to work just to make ends meet and Grandma Stepans wasn't up to looking after a new baby.
That's where my mother and the Misses Abbott stepped in. The Abbotts were single middle-aged sisters who lived next door to us, they were referred to as spinsters back in the day. Between the Abbotts and my mother there was ample care for Peter who spent his days with us and his nights at home with his family.
As the interaction between the two families increased so did the exchange of language. This was mostly a one-way street although I did grow up with a basic understanding of Latvian, especially where it involved food.
But then came a major change. My parents had finally scraped together enough money to qualify for a War Service loan and build a home of their own. At £11/10/6 a month that may have been a bit of a challenge at first but the repayments were fixed at 3% over 45 years so when my father died in 2003 he had only just finished paying off the house. The highly memorable £11/10/6 had converted to $23.05 and was extremely manageable by then.
As it happened, my paternal grandparents lived in a house with five spare blocks of land attached just a little over a kilometre from my maternal grandparents - a few hundred yards short of a mile in the old money. They had, quite coincidentally, sold one block to my mother's brother before my parents even met although this ceased to be significant because he died a short time later and his widow sold the small house they built there. Another was sold to Roma King, mother of Elizabeth and more importantly Diane who was my childhood friend; and my father bought the two blocks which ran through the middle of the site. That left his parents with one dislocated block behind the house that late Uncle Jake had built. My mother convinced them to sell that to Aunty Lily and Nicholas and the connection continued along with Ulli the dog which terrified poor Grandma Stepans who hated being left alone with him while everyone went to work. She was afraid that she would die and Ulli would eat her. In fact the only English she ever spoke were the words "Ulli eat me!"
Poor Grandma Stepans, she was a lonely soul who appeared much older than her years. I don't recall much interaction with her. She was usually in another room when we visited or sitting on a chair in the garden shelling peas but would appear on our doorstep at the first sign of rain because thunder was the one thing she feared even more than being eaten by Ulli. And of course that would follow quite naturally after she was struck by lightening. As it happened, Grandma outlived Ulli by years and never experienced a single storm related injury.
Leo and Felicity built their own modest home a short distance away and soon had a daughter who was a few years younger than Peter and I. Aunty Lily, Nicholas, Ziggy and Grandma somehow arranged themselves in their tiny two bedroom house. I think a Grandma had a bed in the lounge room which possibly explains why all my childhood memories of that house revolve around the kitchen and a table below a window. There was always light and happiness and food.
Lieldienas or Easter was my favourite time in the Stepans' house because Aunty Lily made piragi which is a small sweet bun with a pocket of bacon and onion at its centre. No matter how many she baked there was never enough because we all loved piragi and they never lasted very long. She would also make traditional Latvian Easter eggs which I didn't want to break and eat as is the tradition because they were just too pretty. There was always a special one for my father that would be Lily's impression of him transferred onto a hardboiled egg. The one I remember most vividly was sitting behind a bar made from a Sunlight Soap carton with a beer in its hand. Some kind of cultural fusion was clearly going on there!
But then came 1961, another year of change. A new school opened close to Peter's house and after being in the same class since kindergarten he was now in a whole different school. We saw one another when he visited his grandparents but Hornsby Heights had been divided by a wall, not an actual one like in Europe but an invisible school catchment area. The line was a five minute walk beyond our house and the two populations simply ceased to mix.
Nicholas became a little touchy at about that time as well. He'd been a bank manager back in Riga and had never adjusted to life as a hospital orderly in Australia. Aunty Lily, on the other hand, simply accepted her lot and got on with cleaning other people's houses. Nicholas' escape was his garden and when a neighbour's horse that was agisting on our back block ate some overhanging shrubbery he was not happy. Overhanging though it was the horse had to go.
I felt sorry for Ray from down the road who owned and loved the horse but Tex hated me for some reason and I had to get past him to feed and water my chooks who were in a yard at the very back corner of the block. Some days I'd walk right around to the street behind carrying a bucket of water and a feed tin then climb over the back fence to tend to my girls and return the same way. It all depended on how I judged Tex's mood and if I could scrounge a few pieces of bread to fling in the furthest corner to distract the beast while I bolted to and fro the chook yard gate.
There was a huge storm a few months after that, the kind that sent Grandma Stepans running to our door crying "Ulli eat me! Ulli eat me!" She was followed a short time later by Nicholas who had just arrived home and was ranting about water from our yard destroying his garden. I remember the evening well. His rage appeared to have caused all of his English to evaporate.
What was happening had nothing to do with us or our garden, we were simply the conduit though which a massive dump of water flowed from the highest to the lowest point as water classically does. If there was need to apportion blame the finger should have been pointed squarely at gravity. But my mother, ever the drama queen, got out there with a mattock and shovel and dug a drain on our side of the fence in the darkness and rain to divert the flow through our property to the back street. Dad watched television throughout the whole performance and then the lot of us had to live through the two weeks of Mum's migraines and "pneumonia" which followed. We'd seen this all before and it didn't bother my father who simply took refuge at the local RSL club. My sister was married by then and gone on all but Sundays so that just left me at home to tend to a woman I now know ticked a great many boxes which indicated a need for professional help and prescription medication.
That was almost the end of our amazing Latvian connection. Nicholas erected his very own antipodean Iron Curtain along the fence line and Ruth reinforced it with an ephemeral moat on our side. The gate between the two properties was padlocked so Grandma just had to tough it out during thunder storms and take her chances with Ulli.
It must have been a weight off her mind when the cantankerous creature finally died but then so did lovely Aunty Lily who lost her battle with breast cancer but not before reconciling with Ruth. Grandma followed a short time later then Ziggy and his wife moved in to care for Nicholas who went on to outlive a Methuselah.
Despite all odds the Stepans' little house is still there. It was extended when Ziggy's family moved in and is now in the process of being doubled in size by the loveliest family in all of Hornsby Heights. Meanwhile my grandparents' house is long gone and my own family home was demolished by its new owners a few years ago. And me, I came home after nearly 40 years. My husband and I built on the block of land that was once home to Tex the horse, Lamby the sheep an undetermined number of chooks, a few ducks and a goose I have hitherto failed to mention.
Each Easter I make piragi, remember Lieldienas and think of Aunty Lily who was a most special lady that made a new life in a new land and held her family together as best she could. Priekā.
