The Dressmaker's Daughter (31 page)

Granny Shemmeld with her Red Cross medal for twenty-five years of service. Born in 1862 in the Barossa Valley to German parents, she did not learn to speak English until she was thirteen, when she worked as a maid for a Scotswoman.

Our family at Port Lincoln Airport, leaving Tumby Bay for good to move to Minlaton. I was twelve. Leaving Tumby Bay was a calamity that marked us all for life.

Left to right: Me, Tucker, Bill and Peter at Minlaton. It was at Minlaton that I became friends with Rosemary Riddle and met the rest of her family, my first taste of the exotic.

Around the time I began nursing at Gawler District Hospital, I won ‘Belle of the Ball’ at Sandy Creek Hall, wearing a full-length, lilac, shot moire taffeta evening dress. I was eighteen.

Joanie Pitcher (Charge Sister at the Royal Adelaide Hospital)—my friend and godmother to our daughter. In 1957, when I was being sent to Royal Adelaide’s infectious diseases hospital as part of my training, Joanie said to me, ‘You’ll meet Dick Llewellyn.’

My nursing friends Clare Guthleben (nee Anderson) on the left and Anne Guthleben (nee Kennedy) with a patient at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Christmas Day, 1958. Clare, Anne, Joanie and the other friends I met during my last two years of nursing training are still with me fifty years later.

Richard and me at the beach with friends. It was a huge thing in our minds that we should be accepted as normal. Everything seemed possible and we never doubted we could marry and have a life together.

Left to right: Doug Wiles, me and Kenneth Stirling (Caroline’s godfather). Both Douglas and Kenneth were school friends of Richard’s.

KL with Richard in the car after our wedding ceremony in January 1960. The newspaper reported: ‘In a short frock of embroidered linen with a matching jacket featuring a stand-up collar, Miss Jill Brinkworth was a bride in St George’s Church, Gawler, this morning.’

At our reception, on my parents’ farm at Gawler. Surrounded by the fruit trees my mother had planted, Richard and I celebrated with his school friends and my nursing friends.

Morrie (Richard’s father) and my father yarning on the front railing of the garden at our wedding reception. They must have known the risks and feared the consequences of what Richard and I had just done.

Proud parents with our firstborn—eight-week-old son, Hugh, in 1962.