Mother of Ten Read Online Free

reflected in two of the
conditions of the agreement that stated they were to be given access to her ‘at
all reasonable times hereafter’, and if the adopting parents were to die while
Millicent Myrtle was still a child, Alick and Vera were entitled to custody of
her.  
    So,
at the age of four and a half months my mother became Myrtle Webb, the daughter
of James and Etti Webb.  James Webb was a devoted husband and father who
owned a fruit and vegetable orchard. He was twenty-four when he married Etti,
five years his junior, in 1905. When they adopted Myrtle, they had been married
for fifteen years with no children of their own.
    Myrtle’s
life as the daughter of James and Etti Webb was, as far as I can find out, a
contented one. She attended Lavington Public School and seems to have had a
happy childhood and been brought up in a nurturing environment. She developed
close relationships with her cousins Henrietta and Lily (Rose), two of the five
children of Anne and Reginald Sutherland; Etti’s sister and brother-in-law.
    When
I met Lily on my quest to discover what happened to cause Myrtle to be
separated from her first children, she told me how the three girls would often
meet when their parents went into the township of Albury for shopping. Later,
as teenagers and young women they attended the local Saturday night dances
together. On these occasions Myrtle would stay over at the Sutherlands. The
girls would whisper to each other long into the night, recalling the evening’s
shared fun. These dances must have been family affairs because the girls
started attending when Lily was in her early teens. Although Myrtle was older
then her two cousins, there was only a few years difference in their ages so
all three girls would have been considered too young to go out without a
chaperone. The gowns Myrtle wore to these dances were later confiscated by me
as a kid. It must have pained her to see those marvellous taffeta and satin
creations, probably made by her mother, reduced to a child’s ‘dress-ups’ but
she shared them with me willingly.
    Perhaps
it was at one of the local dances that my father, George Rowley, first met Lily
after he arrived in Albury with the Australian Army. George was twenty years
old in March 1941 when he left his hometown of Orbost to enlist. Thousands of
army and other services personnel were sent to Albury which straddles the
border of Victoria and NSW. About eighteen kilometres from Albury at Bonegilla
on the Victorian side was one of Australia’s largest military camps.
    As
far as I can work out from the hand written records of the Australian Army,
George arrived in Bonegilla around August 1941. He was not a man who liked to
dance so I imagine he stood awkwardly on the sidelines in the dance hall
watching the lovely young women and their partners swirl around the floor. Lily
told me George ‘set his cap’ at her but she was too young to be ‘serious about
men’. Myrtle would not have been attending the dances at this stage, certainly
not regularly, as she was already a young mother of two, with a third child on
the way. However, when George later met Myrtle his heart was lost and he never
wavered in his love for her.

Chapter 4
    WhenMyrtle arrived in Orbost in 1944 pregnant with George’s first child, she
was now almost 400 kilometres from Albury where she had been forced to leave
her three young children from her first marriage. At this time, her home in
Orbost was with George’s parents but, thankfully, her new mother-in-law
welcomed her with kindness and generosity. George was still a soldier in the
AIF but was desperate to be discharged so that he could go home. His desire to
find a way out of the army increased after Myrtle gave birth. His letters to
her reveal his distress at being separated from his wife and child.
    In
a letter dated February 20, 1945 from Seymour, Victoria he talks of ways of
getting out of the army to be with Myrtle and ‘young Bobby’. If all else fails,
he