Mother of Ten (Whisper My Secret Book 2) by JB Rowley

Author:JB Rowley [Rowley, JB]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potoroo Press
Published: 2013-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

All this time, and for many more years, we (the Rowley children) were completely unaware of the Bishop children; our three half-siblings who were living out their lives without their mother.

At the age of three and a half, Myrtle’s first child Bertie was placed in a Home temporarily when the marriage of Myrtle and Henry Bishop fell apart in 1942. In those days the NSW Child Welfare Department issued licences to ‘respectable’ women who wished to set up a Children’s Home. A woman who needed to find a way to survive without a husband, such as a widow or deserted wife, was able to make a living by converting her house to a Children’s Home. No qualifications were required, no training was necessary. Children might be placed in such a Home permanently or for a period of time during a family crisis. It seems likely that Bertie, Audrey and Noel were placed temporarily in a Home of this kind.

Unlike his sister and brother, Bertie was taken out of care after a short time. He went to live with his paternal grandmother and grandfather at 536 David Street, Albury, where he stayed until he was around nine years old. Why were the other two children left in institutions? Perhaps there were financial reasons but I believe the main reason was that Agnes Bishop had got it into her head that Audrey and Noel were not her son’s children. This woman’s spitefulness came through strongly during my research into what happened to my mother. I have no doubt that Agnes was the instigator behind the rumours and events that led to Myrtle’s three children being taken from her.

Society made it easy for Agnes Bishop’s malevolence to bear fruit. At that time a woman could be declared an unfit mother, which would result in her children being removed from her care, simply because the children had been absent from school on several occasions. It was also a time when a neighbour or a relative, such as a child’s grandmother could, and often did, cause children to be placed in Homes even when the children were living in safe, secure and suitable family situations. Such an incident is related in Joanna Penglase’s book Orphans of the Living: Sylvia Baker’s maternal grandmother who ‘had never thought our father was good enough for her daughter’ asked the NSW Department to investigate how the children were being cared for after the children’s mother died. This resulted in Sylvia and her siblings being placed in a Home despite, or because of, the fact that the children’s father was willingly caring for his children with the help of a housekeeper.

Bertie was not able to give me detailed information about his life with his grandparents but I imagine he spent his childhood engaged in activities common to other children living in Albury at the time: picking mushrooms and blackberries, making ‘flying saucers’ out of dry cowpats, letting off firecrackers and indulging in other harmless mischief. He might have made a billycart out of a wooden fruit box from the grocer and raced it down a hill with other children.

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