When my grandmother was having a bath before dressing for her wedding the bath heater blew up and she rejoiced, knowing that she was leaving the house that day for a home of her own. The reality of the home of her own didn't register until later when she found herself living in a shanty in an isolated mining town. My grandfather, Len, was a mining engineer by profession, but the rigors of Mt Isa were too much for her and soon afterwards they moved back to the family property at Balhannah, in the Adelaide Hills, and took up farming.

They honeymooned at Victor Harbour and it rained for the whole time they were there. My grandfather spent the time taking his car to pieces and putting it together again and my grandmother felt obliged to sit and watch him doing it. She didn't enjoy her honeymoon. I don't think that she enjoyed her marriage very much although she was very much in love with my grandfather when she married him. He was a very romantic figure, tall and very good looking with black hair and blue eyes; he used to ride his horse over to her home to court her.

My mother was the first born and then Uncle Trev came next. There was a third pregnancy but it either miscarried or the baby was born premature and died. *It was another little girl. The marriage was not a happy one. My grandfather adored my grandmother and could hardly bear to have her out of his sight so that she always felt trapped. As the farm was too far away from a school he stayed up at Balhannah and my grandmother and the two children moved to the city. He used to arrive for the weekends and on his arrival gloom would settle on the household. He was never very well, being prone to violent migraine headaches, and was gloomy at the best of times.

He was a man who never believed in doing something the easy way if there was a hard way to do it and I was brought up with the axion that one must NEVER spend capital and one should always re-invest the interest. Consequently he was chronically short of money for the whole of his adult live and my grandmother found herself very comfortably situated after his death.

He was one of six children. His sister Ada was the eldest and then came Claude followed by Royden. Last were the twins, my grandfather Leonard and his brother Dudley. After the death of their father my great-grandmother remarried and had one more son, Clive.

Claude was a lawyer, Leonard was a mining engineer, turned farmer; Dudley was a civil engineer who moved to Tasmania and refused to communicate with his family and Royden was a miser who constantly had experiences which "ruined his life." Clive moved to Western Australia and took up farming near Collie in the south west of the state.

Len suffered a stroke when he was in his late fifties and died a few years later. He needed a nurse during the latter part of his life because he demented, probably as a result of the stroke. I was seventeen years old at the time of his death. My grandmother lived into her nineties and died in 1987.

*As with many stories told to me by my mother, this one bears a rather loose connection with the truth; She always avered that the baby was named Judith. However, I have recently discovered, through the exhaustive research carried out by Dean Martin Newman, a distant cousin researching the Martin Family, that the child was a boy who was born and died on 7th September 1918.