LOLA

Lola is one tough chick. In fact, in my world, she is the original tough chick. She is my grandmother.

One of ten children, yes ten, Lola was the fifth born and the first girl of the family. She was born into a world of churning your own butter, riding a horse to school and no electricity or cars. In rural New South Wales, on a farm 25 miles from anywhere, the kids lived a life outdoors.

“Once the beds were made and the dishes were done, you weren’t allowed back in the house.”

With the kids occupied, Lola’s mother of ten was free to tend to the cleaning and cooking. Every now and then, giant bags of flour and sugar were fetched from town but otherwise the family of twelve were self-sufficient. They grew their own vegetables and killed their own chooks. And not even the flour and sugar sacks were put to waste, being repurposed and sewn into pants for the rough and tumble boys to wear. Those same boys shot pigeons and rosellas with sling shots so they could be made into stew.

“There was nothing else to eat. If we didn’t do that, we would have gone hungry.”

For the kids, getting to school was either by foot or by horse. Lola remembers one day on the way to school, one of the local boys whipping the girls with willow sticks from the safety of his horse. She told him then and there that she’d get him back some day. And Lola’s sassy nature meant she was always true to her world. Some time later that same boy was on foot and she took chase. He fell and dobbed on her to his mother.

“I still remember his mother marching across the paddock towards the house. She wanted to speak with me. When I explained what had happened, she took my side and he was the one who got the hiding, not me!”

At age 13, with new babies being born into the family at regular intervals, Lola left school and went to work helping to maintain the house and raise her siblings.

“Dad wouldn’t let me go to high school. That’s where girls went wild. I would have had to get a lift into town with the cream carrier and stay in there for the week before catching a lift home. And I quite fancied the cream carrier’s son so I wasn’t allowed to go.”

“It was hard, there was never any money. But we had a good life.”

Lola’s birth stories are further testament to her strength. After being married, she and her husband Ronald lived on a sawmill in Timmsvale and it was a ‘bush nurse’ who was consulted when her waters broke before she was driven down the mountain to town, being car sick on every corner. What is now an hour’s drive, the roads and cars at the time meant for a long journey with a baby pressing to be born. By the time she reached town and was laid on a plank of wood, her first baby’s head was crowning. When asked why after the stress of it all she went back for more, Lola explained simply.

“That one didn’t hurt!”

By the age of twenty three, Lola was a widow with a two year old son and a five month old daughter. Her husband died unexpectedly and left her a single mother needing to support her young family. She uprooted and moved back to where her family were based and snagged a job as a telephonist at the local telephone exchange. She worked shift work, looking after the kids during the day then working at night.

“I can’t remember much from that time. You go through everything in a daze, just going through the motions. There were weddings and funerals to attend. Life doesn’t just go on hold when something like that happens.”

Lola frequented the local dances, accompanied most often by her older brothers and their friends. She was beautiful, popular and sure knew how to hold her own after growing up one of ten.

“I was never short of a dancing partner. I remember one night, I went to the dance with one boy then left with another! He had a nice car and it beat going home in the pig truck. These days, I’d probably be labelled as a flirt!”

“I met him at one of the dances. He put my bike in the back of his utility and drove me home. Before he left he asked if he could see me again. I told him I had two kids asleep inside and didn’t expect to ever hear from him again. But, a few days later he called.”

Lola met her second husband Jack and went on to grow her family by three. She recalls Jack dropping her at the hospital, after her waters broke, on his way to work so she could have her fifth and final daughter. He returned at dark, having worked a day on the banana farm, and Lola had birthed yet another child for the family. She remembers coming home from the hospital with a new baby on the Saturday and on the Sunday being expected to go to church. Getting five children ready and trying to squeeze her milk-filled bosoms into clothes that barely fit, she did what she had to do to keep the house running and the husband happy.

Jack worked on their banana farm and was away most of the week. When asked about how often he was home Lola responded with nonchalance.

“He came home once or twice a week. Whenever he ran out of food. It was like being a single mother but you just had to get on with it.”

When cyclones would come through and knock the banana trees over, it was a really hard time.

“A banana grower’s life is hard at times. The wild storms and cyclones flattened the crops and you’d have to start over. Jack would come home devastated. Seeing a grown man cry was one of the hardest things. We needed money to pay the school fees so I had to find work.”

Lola worked in the fields stripping sugar cane and picking tomatoes under the hot sun of an Australian summer to make ends meet. With some of the five children not yet in school, there was no option but to take them with her. They would sit at the end of one row while she worked, picking tomatoes all the way down and back again only to find the child still sitting where they’d been left.

“I couldn’t imagine kids these days sitting on a blanket while their mum picked rows of tomatoes.”

Her children remember Lola coming home day after day from working in the fields. Caked in dirt and sweat, she wouldn’t even come inside. In the laundry she would remove her t-shirt and shorts which had done nothing to stop the sun’s rays. Her body was a deep brown from long days in the sun.

Removing her underwear would reveal skin untouched by the sun, highlighting the dirty, tanned skin of the rest of her body. Only then would she come into the house, shower and then go on with the cooking and cleaning and the everything else that came with raising five children. She made their clothes from matching paisley material, which they hated, cut their hair into matching styles, which they hated, and the girls slept four to a bedroom.

Many years later, Lola would go on to be widowed a second time, losing Jack in 2000. When asked to talk about one of her toughest moment though, it wasn’t the death of either of her husbands that she spoke about.

She removed her glasses to wipe her eyes as she explained that one of the hardest times was when my dad, her son in law, had passed away. At age 32, my mum, Lola’s second born daughter, had been widowed. Like so many losses we experience, this one occured on another ordinary day. She was at another of her daughter’s houses when the police arrived and our family’s lives changed forever. Michael’s death left behind me, his four year old daughter, and my mum, who never saw it coming.

Lola’s heart broke for her daughter.

“She was now going to have to go through what I’d been through and I knew how hard it was. Going back to work and raising kids on your own, I fell apart that day.”

This amazing woman, who had been through so much, found that her toughest moment was watching somebody else in pain. She remembers our closest friends and family sitting around that afternoon, like only happens in a small town, and everybody crying.

For 35 years she had held her grief in, for her children. She maintains that while, in the quiet moments, she has done her fair share of crying, it’s important to look closely at what you do have.

“A lot of women are worse off than what I am and if you stop and dwell on things for too long, you won’t get back to living.”

She went on to be a rock and sounding board for her daughter. Two generations, who knew each other’s losses like nobody else ever could, would create a support system like no other. She built a life where she made great friends, learned to play golf and bowls and raised nine grandchildren and many great-grandchildren.

Lola’s advice for anyone reading this who is going through a struggle is simple.

“Just don’t give up. Living is great.”

Wise words from a woman who truly has seen it all and who inspires me every single day. She is living proof of how we are capable of handling much more than we ever dream life could throw at us. If I manage to be even an inch of the woman she is, I will be one happy lady.