The Dressmaker's Daughter (5 page)

M
y maternal grandmother, Granny Shemmeld, was the fourth child of Johanne Eleanore and Johan Gottlieb Lehmann, who had arrived at Port Adelaide in 1850 from Prussia. They were fleeing religious persecution, along with hundreds of other Lutherans from Prussia, having been unable to worship in their own way because a more dominant form of the Lutheran religion had forbidden it. Pastor August Kavel, from Zullichau in Brandenburg, had been sent by their congregation to Hamburg to investigate the possibility of emigration to America. Unable to find a ship with the small funds available, he chose a cheaper ship,
The San Francisco,
which took 235 passengers to South Australia instead of America. The voyage took 121 days and the congregation’s faith was sternly tested with a storm that broke the masts and swept a lifeboat overboard.

I had always believed that my grandmother was born in Germany but now, after reading my family history, I
see that this is not true. She was born at Fechner’s Bridge near Angaston in the Barossa Valley in 1862 and went to a Lutheran school at Light Pass, where she learnt to read and write, not in English but in German.

My mother believed to her dying day that her father was born in Cornwall, and was an illiterate shepherd boy who had been too busy minding sheep to attend school. She did not know (and, until recently, nor did any of her children, nor theirs) that he was the son of a convict, John Shemmeld, transported from Sheffield for stealing. Her father, William Shemmeld, the convict’s son, had been born at Strathalbyn in South Australia. Whether her mother knew the truth, I cannot say, but if she did she made sure none of her children knew he was a convict’s son, born in South Australia. They all died secure in the knowledge that their father was a shepherd from Cornwall. Sometimes, though, my mother said he was from Wales and that he spoke with a Welsh accent.

(In the 1980s, my mother wrote her autobiography, and my brother Tucker had it privately published. She declined to number the pages, so the editor had the challenging task of putting it in order. It is called
The Humble Folk.
A friend of ours, hearing of this title, said, ‘Humble folk! Good God! They are all a mob of gogetters!’

It took my mother many years to write the book and, before she ended it, she was in a retirement village, airily
dashing off pages. She passed her days writing, knitting and cooking her own vegetables, which she had a friend buy for her. She didn’t like the way they were cooked for those in the communal dining room.)

This is how the marvellous tale of the convict’s son is described by my mother:

A young Welshman was employed as a driver of coaches, he was not long out from Wales. In Wales only the wealthy went to school. William had no schooling and could neither read nor write. He had spent his young life minding sheep in the mountainous country of Wales. We cannot find any record of how he came to Australia.

Now I see how many stories and beliefs that are held within a family are tainted with myth, apocrypha, tall tales, misunderstandings and inaccuracies. Nobody has been telling lies but stories grow up of their own accord and bend and sway with the years until the history has more the flavour of a novel rather than being a list of actual events.

Cherries have a part in this tale for several reasons. One is that in 1872 Gottlieb Lehmann drove his horse and buggy from his small farm into Angaston and brought home a branch of ripe cherries for his ten-year-old
daughter, Bertha. (My grandmother’s name was Hannah Maria Bertha but it is German custom to call a person by their last Christian name.) My mother wrote in her autobiography, ‘All her life she remembered with tenderness the unusual gift’ and that when she had children she told them about it.

Cherries were a luxurious fruit and they still can be, so it was memorable that my mother could hang from her turned-up nose a pair of cherries – which she did every Christmas. None of her children could hang cherries from their nose with so much ease. So, to me, cherries are entangled with laughter.

Gottlieb died soon after the gift of cherries and Bertha’s godfather, Gottlieb Stieler, became her stepfather. In her autobiography, my mother wrote of what happened to my grandmother after this:

Bertha was not a big build, in fact very small for her age. One day her stepfather harnessed a team of horses attached to a scarifier and told Bertha to drive across the paddock which was to be prepared for a crop. Being small, Bertha was unable to guide the horses straight—she drove diagonally from one corner of the paddock to the wrong corner. This greatly annoyed her stepfather and Bertha was in disgrace. It was then that Bertha and her mother decided it was time for Bertha to leave home.

Mrs Murray, who was a Scot, employed maids and she took my grandmother to live with her and she taught her, at the age of thirteen, to speak English. As a result, all her life Granny spoke English with a German-Scottish accent and she did not teach her children to speak German at all.

On one occasion some years later, coming into the dining room at her house in Angaston with a plate of food, Granny found the men at the table boisterous. These men were boarders, labourers who were building the railway line from Angaston to Adelaide. One said, ‘Missus, we have had a bet. Some of us say you are German and some say you are Scottish. What are you?’

‘Yes,’ she said, turning on her heel. ‘The cheek of them!’ she said to her daughters in the kitchen.

After leaving the Murray household, Granny went to work for Mrs Perry, whose family organised the Cobb & Co. Coach service between Angaston and Freeling, and it was here she met William Shemmeld.

My mother wrote:

William Shemmeld, the young Welshman, was miraculous with horses. He courted Bertha and eventually they were married on April 28th, 1885, at the Lutheran Church, Lights Pass…with blessings
from the Perry family who had grown very fond of the young couple.

She lists their children (her brothers and sisters) as:

Olive May	Born 1886
William Percy	Born 1887
Died 1888
Eva Winifred	Born 1890
Ruby Myrtle	Born 1893
Otto William Malcolm	Born 1895
Edna Lillian	Born 1897
Nora	Born 1899
Ivy Marjory ‘Tommy’	Born 1902
Ralph Oliver ‘Billy’	Born 1904

There were some other sons who died at birth and therefore the two living sons were considered very special. Even so, boys were thought to be more important than girls. For instance, there is a photo of Granny with her two surviving young sons and it did not occur to anybody to include the girls lurking behind the photographer laughing. Girls did not need to be photographed with their mother.

My mother was the last of Granny’s daughters and, like the other girls of the family, she stayed at home until she married. At night, the unmarried sisters would sit at the table sewing their ball gowns, frocks and trousseaux. This was how my mother learnt to be a dressmaker. Her sisters taught her.

None of the Shemmeld children could speak German. Perhaps they were not taught because we were at war with Germany. Yet all of the children had been born before World War One, so it cannot be the whole reason. Above all, it was because my grandmother didn’t want her children to have an accent as she did. As a consequence of this awareness of the importance of speaking English properly, my mother found an elocution teacher for me when I was ten.

Vera Chenoweth had been away to the city from Tumby Bay where we lived and she had learnt elocution. She had studied acting, perhaps. Her father had a horse and dray and collected rubbish around the town. They lived on the edge of the swamp outside the town and it was there that I walked for lessons, avoiding the muddy patches among the beautiful purple and pink salty swamp flowers. ‘A-E-I-O-U,’ I would say over and over. And ‘Pretty Polly picked a peck of pickled peppers.’ And ‘She sells sea shells by the sea shore.’ One day I fainted and hit my head on the dining-room table, covered with its maroon velvety fringed protector.

This fainting became a common enough event. Once, in a heatwave, waiting in Mrs Lockyer’s ice-cream shop at Tumby Bay as she delved deep into an almost empty icy churn, holding the steel spoon in one hand and the cone
in the other, her white hair dangling from its bun into the churn, I fell down again. When I woke, Mrs Lockyer was leaning over me, her hair still falling, saying, ‘She just lay there sulking!’ Somebody sent next door to my father’s office at Elder Smith and he came and drove me home.

At school assembly I would have that swirling feeling and suddenly know no more. Denis, a boy who had epileptic fits, and I were forever falling onto the asphalt. This fainting was never investigated – in those days people seemed to faint more often than now – and finally I not only grew out of it but learnt to sit down at once and put my head between my knees whenever I felt that swirling sensation.

Stories of fainting seep down through the family, punctuating events and making them memorable. For instance, in 1901, a year before my mother was born, Grandfather Shemmeld leased two hundred acres of land at Pyap on the River Murray. Grandfather worked some of the land and was the manager of a sheep station and also caretaker and inspector of the rabbit-proof boundary fence that stretched hundreds of miles. In 1906, the family, with their eight children, moved in a wagon from Angaston to live there. The wagon had a cedar couch across it, which formed a seat for the younger children. Olive, the eldest, drove a horse and dray loaded with household goods. Eva and Otto rode horses. Near a river settlement, which was later the town of Loxton, they rode
ahead, calling out, ‘Circus coming!’ When the rest of the family passed the settlement, they wondered why so many people had come out to watch them go by. Sometimes Grandfather had to cut branches to make room for the wagon carrying the furniture. A branch fell on Granny and she fainted.

They camped out at least one night, and Edna and Nora can remember being sent to a farmhouse with billy cans to ask for hot water. They had to say
hice wasser.
The house at Pyap was built of logs and was surrounded by paddocks with emus eating small caterpillars called ‘spitters’. My mother remembered them making the sound ‘peek peek’ as they ate. She was four.

When, because of the heat and the miserable conditions, the people of Pyap were unable to find a teacher for their school, Granny took her six youngest children and returned to Angaston so they could be educated. The two eldest girls Olive and Eva stayed to care for their father.

Back in Angaston, Granny used the house she bought for the family as a maternity hospital. It was her proud boast that in one hundred births in her home she never lost a mother or a baby. Sometimes the local doctor would call for my grandmother in the middle of the night with his horse and buggy. She would dress after she had answered the knock on her door and go with him into the country where a woman was in labour.

Granny then began a boarding house. The boarders had their washing done as well as lodging in the house or in their tents in the yard. Some of the men stayed so long they seemed, to the family, like brothers.

Attached to the house was the wash-house, which held cast-iron tubs, a copper and wood-framed glass washboards. Once, Edna was stirring jam in the washing copper that was normally used for boiling clothes. (After being cleaned with salt and vinegar until it shone, it was also used for making jam.) A boarder, who tugged her brown ribbons when she waited on him at the table, came alongside her as she stood in the wash-house stirring the jam. He had pulled her ribbons once too often. She turned, lifting the stick with the jam on it, intending to put some of it in his hair. Instead, she dislodged his wig, which came away on the end of the stick, and she fainted in shock. She thought she had killed him.

When my parents were first married, my father took my mother out to lunch with the Puckridges at their spectacular farm at Yallunda Flat. Mrs Puckridge was carving a roast of lamb. A blowfly buzzed over the meat. She grasped the blowfly, squashed it and tossed it away. My mother promptly fainted. She must have been standing up or she would not have fainted. I have it on medical authority that people don’t faint sitting down. They have fits sitting down. To faint, you must be standing. I have my doubts about this.

Once, when I was married, I was out to dinner in a new house and fainted into the iced soup. Waking up on the hosts’ double bed covered with a hand-crocheted white spread, I saw that the burgundy wool of my dress had soaked and stained the cover. While I was unconscious, I had been incontinent.

Martin Begley, a friend of ours and a physician at the hospital where I had trained as a nurse, was bending over me. ‘How are you?’ he said.

‘I’m fine. I just fainted. It’s nothing. I’ve been dieting, that’s all it is.’

‘No, you didn’t faint; you had a grand mal fit.’

‘Nonsense! It’s just a strict diet, that’s all. My blood sugar must be low.’

‘Look, Jill, you can’t diet so much that you lower your blood sugar to the extent that you have a fit.’

‘Well, I did!’

‘No, you didn’t! Later in the week, you are going to have to go into hospital and have some tests. You can’t faint sitting down.’

‘Oh all right.’ So with that, I stood up, and, to my surprise, wasn’t driven home but was, I saw, expected to sit up at the table and continue the conversation as if nothing had happened. And this I did.

Later, when the tests were done, it was proved that I did not have diabetes, or a brain tumour, which must
have been at the back of Martin’s mind, but had simply dieted so much I had induced the fit.

Granny Shemmeld’s house was the last house at the northern end of the main street of Angaston in the Barossa Valley. Called ‘Ivy Holme’, it still stands on the corner of Murray Street and Truro Road. After returning to Angaston from Pyap, she had saved up and bought it in one of those miracles of frugality and good fortune that occur sometimes. With a deposit of two pounds, this old house, which had been a manse, was secured from the auctioneer John Dallwitz, who, to his lasting credit, refused a later offer for cash and let Granny pay off the house. It had a stile on the side entrance and as a child I was fascinated by this gate. An old white cockatoo sat in a cage on the back veranda, shouting as people passed.