I have a reasonably clear memory of the event as it unfolded. I plonked myself down next to an elderly woman passenger—she may have been twenty or twenty-five—and simply sat there for the journey into the city. The guard came around and clipped tickets…He didn’t bother with me: obviously I was both younger than the age needed for paid passage, and also I was clearly in the care of my ‘elderly’ companion. That companion had no intention of being lumbered with a more permanent little partner, however, and I ended up, alone and forlorn and wandering around the cavernous Wellington Railway Station. I have a very clear memory of being apprehended and taken to the guards’ room at the station, where I was given an enormous bunch of keys to play with while I was interrogated, and maybe given refreshments. It all ended up satisfactorily, as I knew who I was and I knew where they could find my mother. The two of us were reunited and the whole escapade made quite a splash of light reading in the next day’s newspapers. Certainly much lighter reading than the usual wartime diet of news. I even have some memory of the train trip home again…Although maybe here it’s other trips I am dreaming of.

As if the black fur coat, the brilliant red jacket and the rest of her eclectic wardrobe were not enough, Mother was a singer. This might have been OK had she restricted herself to singing in a choir, her voice lost in some soaring, but at least joint, effort. Might have been even more OK had she stuck to the popular melodies of the day, sentimentally extolling the white cliffs of Dover or your more jitterbuggy Chattanooga choo-choos. No such luck. Mother had sung in opera, oratorio, as a soloist with choirs, patriotic concerts during the war years and, frequently, in recital on radio. She had trained in Wellington with a top teacher of those times, and possessed a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice. She was in much demand from the mid-1930s through until her last radio broadcast in about 1950. She had won herself a place at an Australian conservatorium of music, but didn’t take it up, opting for marriage instead. Whether she had regrets on this choice will never be known. If she did she never expressed them, and it may well be that the pathway in music had been the choice not of herself but of her sister-cum-guardian, Agnes.

Margaret and I were not of an age to appreciate her ability, and at ages ten or eleven would squirm in embarrassment whenever we were carted along to hear her sing somewhere. I can remember we were with her when she recorded her last radio recital. I still have her music case from what was probably her last appearance: Dvořák’s ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’, Schubert, a couple of other ballads, something Gaelic, and ‘Hine e Hine’ from what looks to be one of the earliest published editions of the sheet music.

I do remember once or twice when she was singing at some public concert and she would dress for the occasion. The long gowns that I remember were both black—one in velvet, and the other a more elaborate taffeta creation. Pearls, and the black fur coat, of course. She certainly didn’t bike to these events, and someone would arrive to chauffeur her. Memory can be faulty, but I have a feeling the black velvet ended its days as cushion covers.

This woman was no dilettante. Schubert and Dvořák, surely, but during our years at Roslyn Road she also milked our house cows, cooked, baked and sewed, gardened avidly, and was largely responsible for harvesting the crop of what became quite a large cut-flower farm…Several tens of thousands of gladioli take some cutting and packing for market. Raising four kids can be added to this; one prewar, one beginning-of-the-war, one end-of-the-war, and one post-war. Rosa Dorothea was over forty when my youngest sibling, Janette, was born. Already her health, never very good, was in decline. She loved us all, her kids, deeply, passionately…but we were too much for her.

Quite likely my mother didn’t have much idea how to be a parent. She certainly had no role model for the job, not that ‘role models’ had even been thought of or invented back when she was born in the Edwardian England of 1907.