Jeannie (with the Light Brown Hair)

 Among the outstanding diversity of the 8.2 billion people who inhabit this planet, there is just one certain thing we all have in common. We are all mortal.

I have always had a picture of life as a moving footway, like one of those things that you see at airports – only longer.  We are all on it, all 8.2 billion of us. Some have only recently stepped on it, like our grandchildren, and some of us, me included, are getting closer and closer to the end.

Now before I become accused of painting a morbid picture, in my defence let me just say that it is what we do while we are on that travellator that is so much more important than when we get on and when we get off.

My lovely sister stepped off it on Sunday, 83 years and 10 months after she started her journey, in Nottingham, England in 1941 and I need to share just one or two of the memories I have of those early years when the bonds between brothers and sisters are first shaped.

In May 1941 an event occurred in Britain known as the Nottingham Blitz. Taking place over a couple of nights nearly 500 high explosive bombs were dropped on Nottingham by the German Luftwaffe during a dozen raids. Nearly 200 people were killed, and Nottingham was on fire.

This then was the setting that greeted Jean Anne Williamson when she arrived in July of that year. Her mother Eileen was 25. Arthur (later known always as John) was 28. He volunteered for active service but was refused because he was working in an essential industry. He was head mechanic at Chilwell Ordinance Depot a mile down the road from our family home in Beeston. He was also a member of the Fire Service and the Home Guard.

The city was regularly bombed throughout the war, and it is hard for most of us to imagine just how difficult it would have been for John, Eileen and baby Jean during those times.

We have only to look at early photos to see that Jean was a beautiful child. Her smile and her sunny personality lit up the room – it was something that characterised her life.

During her first six years, Jean was the livewire who kept Dad and Mum on their toes. She tore around the house and the yard on her three-wheeled bike, she ran as fast as a hare and was a mean hand behind the wheel of a dodgem car.

Then came the winter of 1948. One of the worst with persistent ice and snow, transport chaos, power outages, air pollution and food rationing. It was during this time that Jean first started to have breathing difficulties and developed a chronic cough. It turned into a chest infection and hospitalisation, where she was diagnosed with a lung condition known as bronchiectasis. She had surgery which included removal of parts of both lungs.

It was while she was in hospital that she contracted polio, an infectious disease which was rising to epidemic proportions in children. There was no cure and until the vaccine came along a few years later there was no way of providing immunity.

The polio caused paralysis which affected her lower limbs and chest muscles. For many months, she was only able to breathe by being placed in a huge metal box attached to bellows known as an iron lung.

The prognosis was not good, but she was strong-willed and in due course she started to recover. She regained strength in her breathing but the paralysis in her left leg remained with her for the rest of her life and she wore an iron caliper for many years.

Jean was indomitable. She started school in Beeston and despite the caliper and the shortness of breath, I have clear memories of walking from school every day (7-year old Mike and 11-year old Jean) from Beeston High Street, past the rubble of bombed out buildings, through the local park and to our home in Queens Road.

I remember it in summer rain. I remember it as we scuffed through brown Autumn leaves, and I remember slipping on icy pavements in dark winters. Jean was always there, and I would follow her all the way home.

But the English winters were not kind to her and the advice from her doctors was to consider moving to a warmer climate.

Australia was the destination of choice. Jean said to me, “we’re going to Queensland.”  It meant nothing to me, but it must be OK, if it was the Queen’s land. Maybe the Queen lived there.

In 1955, Eileen and John and the kids, 13-year-old Jean, 9-year-old Mike and 5-year old Phillip boarded SS Strathaird, Ten Pound Poms, bound for Australia.

After arriving in Brisbane, and with a job already lined up, Dad flew north where he was to start work as a garage mechanic in the small Far North Queensland town of Mossman. His first task was to find a home for us to live in. The rest of followed by train a few weeks later.

The trip was an introduction to Australia for my mother that she would never forget. Fresh off the boat, having left a comfortable life in England, she was on a train with three kids in tow travelling 1,000 miles to God knows where.

The air-conditioned Sunlander was still a few years in the future, as we headed north on a clattering old train into the North Queensland wet season. Stopping at sidings and stations for hours at a time, it was a slow, uncomfortable trip with Mum doing her best to look after and feed three kids. There were no sleeper cars, just sitting up all the way, with the kids trying to get some sleep on the floor when they could.

At the Burdekin, the old bridge was under several feet of water. Everyone lined up in the rain and waited their turn to be crammed into a tiny boat, not much bigger than a “tinnie” to be ferried across to the other shore. Once there we were put in an even older train for the remaining 300 miles of the journey north.

Our home was a tiny single-storey fibro dwelling a very long way from Beeston. We lived in Mossman for about a year and then moved back down the Cook Highway to the big smoke – where Dad got a job as workshop foreman at the Cairns City Council.

In Cairns we lived in the old pound keeper’s house, a three bedroom timber high-set home at the back of the City Council Depot.

Like all kids growing up we all had our share of ups and downs. There is one story I’d like to share which captures the type of sister she was. It was a Sunday afternoon in 1956, a few weeks after our visit from Cyclone Agnes. Mum and Dad were out, probably at Yorkey’s Knob Pub if truth be told leaving 15-year old Jean in charge of Phillip and me.

We were all fighting over something, which trivial as it is now, was no doubt important then – perhaps something as critical as how loud the music was or why I wouldn’t get out of her room and leave her in peace. In a moment of wickedness, I took the key from inside her bedroom door and turning the key from the outside, locked her in her room – now, see how you like that!

I was determined to teach her a lesson and leave her there for as long as I could. She pounded on the door a few times, but eventually things went quiet – so I left her to it.

Then I heard a scream. I unlocked the door. There she was, hanging by her fingertips from one of the windows. As I said earlier, the house was on high blocks, and she was hanging at least two metres above the concrete slab at the bottom of our back stairs.

She’d had the idea that to escape from her room she simply had to tie a few bedsheets to the foot of the bed and climb out of the window. It absolutely worked in the story books, but what was needed was a knot that wouldn’t untie itself as soon as you put any weight on it.

I couldn’t help her from inside, so I ran out the back and down the stairs. There was Jean dangling above me, legs kicking wildly, just out of reach.

Did we even have a ladder?

While I was thinking about it, her grip on the sill gave way, and she fell with a crash to the ground – I was not even there to break her fall.

She lay still for a while, with the breath knocked out of her and then started groaning that her back hurt. After a while she got to her feet and took a few painful steps.

All thoughts of our argument had vanished as I helped her back into the house. Mum and Dad were due home at any minute – I was a dead man!

Did Jean say anything to them about this? No she did not.

The next day, the family piled into the Vanguard and left for the long drive to Mackay for a holiday with friends. It was a long and uncomfortable two day drive over roads that bear no resemblance to the highways of today. Jean complained that she had a sore back, I can’t imagine what the bruises must have been like, but aside from a few meaningful looks at me, she never mentioned the bedroom escape incident – ever. 

I told this story to my father, about thirty years later and he still got mad at me. I don’t want to even think about how he would have dealt with it at the time.

Jean was 16-years old when she started her first job at a firm of engineering consultants as a junior typist. She was there for a long time working for the office manager, and many years later when I was coincidentally working for the same firm in their Newcastle office, the son of that Cairns manager remembered Jean and said her dad often spoke of her loyalty, her personality, and her integrity as an example to others.

Dad was a big cricket fan and any time a social match was arranged between the Council and other organisations, Dad was there to take part and sometimes so was I.

One such match took place in 1959 when the Council was hosting a visiting British warship the HMS Crane. It was a friendly picnic match held at the local cricket ground right next to the Council Yards and five minutes’ walk from our house. The whole family was there, Mum, Dad, Jean, Phillip and me.

One of the visiting players was a 20-year old able seaman from Bolton named Gordon. He took a shine to Jean and after the match, when a few of them came back for a few drinks to the Williamson house, Gordon was there.

Over the next few months, Gordon and Jean regularly exchanged letters until one day Gordon’s letter included a proposal of marriage – and Jean accepted.

The rest is history. Gordon left the Royal Navy, emigrated to Australia, got a job, found a house to rent and in October 1961 they were wed.

A few years earlier, Dad had bought a double block of land, in a new area at the top of Balaclava Road where there was nothing but cane farms and dirt roads. This was Earlville. Dad gave one of the blocks to Jean and Gordon and work soon commenced on the single story brick house which would become 2 Carmen Street – the Skipp family home for the next 40 or 50 years.

This then was our sister. For as long as I can remember, she was always the first person I would share my news with. If I did something I was proud of, it wasn’t my parents who I wanted to impress – it was Jean. Whenever I visited Cairns, it was always at 2 Carmen Street, where I stashed my sleeping bag and when I asked Pauline to marry me, and she said yes – it was Jean who I called first.

Until last week when she stepped off that travelator we call life, there was never a time when her face would not light up when one of us walked into the room.

She was a loving sister to Phillip and me; she adored her children; her grandchildren and great grandchildren and she was a wonderful friend to all of us.

God bless you, Jeannie – I’m sure you are with Gordon once again.