Illy’s father, who was in the clothing trade, asked me several times whether I wouldn’t like to come and work for him. But there was no way I would have left my beloved metal trade.

For two years I was racking my brain how I could go out on my own as in those days, tool making was what the computer industry was thirty years ago. When I finally realised there was no way I could raise enough capital for a tool and die factory, I finally gave in and joined Illy’s father in the rag trade.

He showed me how to make patterns, how to lay them out the most economical way on the fabric. When the pleater who did our pleated skirts could not cope any more, I made up the cardboard patterns that I saw him use, and did the pleating at home, at night over a boiling copper.

Illy in a “papershantung” dress I made after
pattern-making lessons from Opa George.

By that time we had moved into a cottage at 5 Wilson Street which we bought for 3750 pounds using the money we got for the flat as a deposit. The building society was very happy to lend us the rest at 2% interest. We were paying the house off at the rate of 200 pounds per annum, over 25 years. The interest rate later went up to 3% and finally, after many years, to 4%.

Within a year or so, our traveller left us and I took over the travelling. I was away all week, and sometimes when I was too far away, did not come home for the weekend.

Eventually I decided to go out free-lance as one agency only covered expenses. This meant I was only away in high season and that I could stay home for two months at a time and work on the modernisation of our house. It started off as a one bedroom house and ended up with three.

Once, we had just knocked out the wall between the lounge room and sunroom, and I had ripped up the floorboards. The ceiling in the laundry underneath was fibro. The Balogs came to see what we were doing, and George walked through the lounge, and thought the fibro was concrete. He stepped onto it and through he went. There was a clothes rack down below, and it got him straight in the crotch. Maybe that’s why he had no more children! I don’t know how he survived, what with his asthma. He was a big man, 17 stone.