Untold Resilience by Future Women

Author:Future Women [Women, Future]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760145361
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Alice Moshi is fifty-nine years old and lives in Sydney. Alice shared her story with Helen McCabe.

‘I’ve led a normal life and helped people along the way when I could. I wouldn’t change one bit of it. I’ve been satisfied in life. I haven’t striven for what I couldn’t afford.’

Faye Snaith

When I was younger, women would sit around the tea table and talk. They shared their experiences, not only so they could remember the past, but to pass on their wisdom through the generations. Most young ones I know nowadays don’t do that. They have a computer on their lap, a phone in their hand or are watching the television. When I tell my grandchildren stories they say, ‘I didn’t know that,’ and, ‘You didn’t do that!’ But I know everything that our family went through and I have a very good memory.

I was born in 1928, after World War I and just before the Great Depression. My father was born in London ‘within the sound of the Bow Bells’, as they used to say. The Bow Bells are the bells of the church of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, London. To be born within their ring meant you were a Cockney. My grandmother, who worked as an ambulance driver during the Boer War, nursed my grandfather and then they got married. They had two children before my grandfather died young and my grandmother had to bring up the children on her own.

My grandmother was a suffragette who fought for women’s rights. At one stage, she chained herself to the gates outside Downing Street and was put in jail overnight. Today, I enjoy taunting my children and grandchildren that they have a jailbird in the family. When my father was a boy he went to a private school with the Duke of Gloucester. He had wealthy French relatives who funded his schooling, otherwise my grandmother could never have managed it financially. My father wanted to join the navy but my grandmother wouldn’t let him. She wouldn’t sign the papers and so my dad became a bugle boy instead.

Not much later, my dad came out to Australia; he was likely still a teenager at the time. He started with nothing. He landed in Western Australia and had never seen so much sunshine in his life. He was dumped on a farm and, at the time, all he knew about farms was that they had animals on them. Dad slowly worked his way over to Sydney and that’s where he met my mother.

My mum’s Australian childhood was a religious one. On Sundays, in her family, you didn’t do anything. You had a prayer meeting in the morning, and in the afternoon you went around to visit sick neighbours. That’s how my mother was brought up, and that’s how we were brought up too. My mum was one of twelve children and because her mother died when she was three years old and her father died when she was fifteen, she had to make her own way.

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