City Girl, Country Girl by Liz Harfull

Author:Liz Harfull
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2016-02-29T05:00:00+00:00

12

LESSONS FOR THE TEACHER

The first time Jean Simpson set eyes on Sherryn, she politely told the nurse that the baby couldn’t possibly be hers. With brown hair and a dark complexion, she looked nothing like her older sister, who came into the world with blonde hair, blue eyes and peachy white skin. But Sherryn was definitely her daughter, and the initial shock soon wore off.

Sherryn was born at St Vincent’s Private Hospital in March 1977. Originally from Birmingham in England, her mother came to Australia as a child in the 1950s, as part of the assisted immigration program that became known as the Ten Pound Pom scheme. ‘The story goes that her family’s house caught fire, and my pop had always loved the ocean and the sun. It was either rebuild their lives there, or move to Australia and make a clean start, so they moved here,’ Sherryn explains. The family settled in the seaside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda.

Meanwhile, her father, Geoff Simpson, was growing up in the outer eastern suburb of Canterbury, which was still very rural in the 1950s, with open farmland where he and his brothers went rabbit hunting. The family had roots in the area going back to the 1800s. His great-grandfather, James Britnell, owned extensive holdings at Box Hill but family stories have it that he gambled his fortune away. ‘We could have been rich!’ says Sherryn.

As a young man in the 1960s, Geoff played in a band influenced by The Beatles. One of the band members, John, was dating Jean, and he started dating her sister, Paula. ‘They obviously figured out at some stage that they needed to swap,’ Sherryn says. John and Paula ended up marrying, too.

Her parents’ engagement raised a few eyebrows. Geoff was from a staunchly Catholic family and Jean was Anglican, at a time when the difference mattered to many, including his mother who Sherryn suspects never really approved. They married in St Dominic’s Catholic Church at East Camberwell, after a series of compulsory meetings with the priest. ‘Mum always says she was really lucky because they had a priest ahead of his time, who was not interested in converting her or anything like that. It was more about making sure they had thought about the big questions before they decided love conquers all. So she was really grateful to him and more than happy for us all to be baptised and raised Catholic.’

After their wedding, Sherryn’s parents settled in Blackburn, close to where Geoff had grown up. ‘Mum called it rural living, but it was really suburbia. We lived in a house in a little cul-de-sac and then when I was eleven we moved around the corner to a bigger house.’ By then they were a family of six and needed considerably more space.

Three years after Sherryn was born, along came Kieran, and then two years after that Rachel. The oldest by two years was Danielle, who Sherryn describes as one of the most important people in her life.

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