There is an old song called Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking. People who suffer from depression often hide their feelings with a smile and that was what I did. I just smiled at everyone and they thought I was okay. I wasn’t. My heart was broken, because I had to give up a baby for adoption in 1966. In those days if you entered a maternity hospital as an unmarried woman, you were considered unfit to be a mother. The…..
Another memoir, this book was originally just going to be a record of psychic happenings in my life, written for my grandchildren. By the time I was half way through I realised it was going to be another book. I was ridiculed as a young child so then learned not to tell people about things that happened to me. It was my secret and it is only in the last eighteen months that I have started coming out of the psychic closet. The…..
My brother Neville and I went to Ostend Primary School on Waiheke Island. The headmistress, Miss Ponsonby was a middle-aged spinster with permed hair and a sour face. I never saw her smile. She strutted around abusing and accusing. She used sarcasm and a heavy leather strap to keep the children in line. My brother was always being accused of doing things he had not done and would get ‘six of the best’ although he protested his innocence. One day,…..
I could see the shark fins. The sharks were swimming in a circle around our small dinghy. “Stop snivelling,” said my twelve year old brother, Neville. “Stop now, or I will throw you overboard.” “I want to go home,” I cried. It was the first Monday of our summer school holiday and our mother was busy doing the washing. We did not have electricity and so there was no washing machine. Instead Mum used a copper, which was in our backyard,…..
For all of my childhood I lived at Onetangi Beach, on Waiheke Island, New Zealand. When my brother was fourteen he went out with a local fisher for the day. My brother dived and caught four good sized crayfish. When he arrived back at the beach, the local man said to him, “See you later.” “Wait, don’t I get my crayfish?” asked Neville. “No, I am going to sell them.” Neville went home and told Dad he had caught four crayfish……
