Cardboard Feet

This is the story of an ordinary girl growing up in a large family in Sydney, from the post-war era to the early seventies. Times were changing fast. The cold war began and there was talk of ‘reds under the beds’. After the war, Australia needed to be populated – populate or perish Arthur Calwell threatened - so began an influx of immigrants. Protestors called for the bomb to be banned. President Kennedy was assassinated and a man walked on the moon. Music changed its beat, hats and gloves were put aside, hemlines rose and men grew their hair long. As the eldest of twelve children, Trudy was forced grow up fast. At the age of eight, she was put on a bus each week to travel to the nearest centre to do the shopping for the family. With an alcoholic father who loved to gamble, life was a struggle for a large family. Trudy’s mother ensured that there were plenty of good times to carry them through the bad. There were light-hearted moments and some laughter. The peaks, as Trudy’s mother would say, made up for the deep valleys they fell into along the way. Trudy’s love of words and books were her escape from the poverty and the noise of a house overrun with children. Tucked up on an old horse-hair lounge chair, she followed the rabbit and fell down the hole with Alice. In warmer months, she climbed the old apple tree and sat astride an accommodating branch. With her back to the trunk and her young legs anchoring her to the physical world, she munched on tart, green apples and toppled into the water with Tom, the chimney sweep, vowing to live her life as a Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. Later, she searched her palm for a Star in The Hand and dreamt of becoming a writer, like the central character, Adam. Years of teenage angst led to disappointments. An unexpected pregnancy, shameful in an unmarried woman in the 1960s, led to a physical escape from the family. Later, marriage seemed like another escape but as Trudy would learn, one cannot escape from oneself, and marriage should be embraced for wise reasons, not foolish ones.