LENA Spall was pregnant with her first child and her husband was about to go away to war when they were evicted from her house in Tin Town … evicted by her mother-in-law, no less.

They’d argued about clothes pegs.

“Gave her son a letter to read, she did - couldn’t even tell us to our faces,” she says.

The senior Mrs Spall, who then lived in an adjoining place, had copped a mouthful after borrowing Lena’s pegs and failing to return them once too often.

“I upset the applecart … did me ‘nana,” Lena says.

“I said to ‘er: ‘Every time I’m doin’ the washin’ I ’ave to chase me pegs,” Lena says.

“I speak me mind.”

Still, after six years in a home they subsequently bought (for 600 pounds) in Royal Park, Lena and Graham dutifully moved themselves and their three kids back into the same house they’d been thrown out of … to look after her mother-in-law, whose health was failing.

The family had tried to put her into a home, but Graham was having none of it.

So they nursed old Mrs Spall until her passing.
Deference to his difficult mother aside, Graham was any woman’s dream fella.

“ ‘E ironed all his own things,” Lena says.

“Could do anything - cook an’ all. When the kids come along, they all used to ask Mum (Lena) to make pancakes on a Sunday. When I’d cooked lunch I’d finished. I’d say: ‘Ask ya father - I don’t know how to make pancakes.’ ‘E’d say: ‘C’mon, I’ll show ya.’

“Then the kids’d say: ‘Mum, we forgot - we got cakes at school tomorra.’ I’d say: ‘No, I’ve finished - ask ya father.’ ‘E’d cook ‘em, and ‘e’d ice ‘em, and they’d take ‘em.’”

Graham had been trained proper by the Army, see.

“ ‘E was batman to his colonel in the Medical Corps during the war,” says Lena, puffing up with pride and pointing out pieces of memorabilia.

Make no mistake - she can cook.

In later years Lena also served - the cabinetmakers next door, that is.

“I knew Paul (the boss) and the family,” she says.

“One day I thought Paul was working there on his own - everything ‘e had to do! ‘E was under the car, fixin’ that, ’cause ‘e was broke … it’s different now - ‘e’s got seven lads workin’ for ’im now at Royal Park.

“Anyway, ‘e was there on ‘is own … an’ I thought: ‘That poor fella, ‘e must be hungry.’ So, ‘e’s got ’s legs sticking out, an’ I went over an’ said: ’You under there, Paul?’ ‘Yes, Lena.’ ‘What would you say to some rissoles, Paul?’ ‘Oh boy, my stomach’d say yes please, Lena!’

“So ‘e’s come out … an’ I didn’t see ‘e ‘ad two blokes talkin’ to ’im! So ‘e’s come out: ‘Aw, lovely.’ ‘E said ‘Guess what, love, I’m gonna ‘ave to give two of ‘em away’ … and that’s how it all started.”

Her kitchen window looks out directly into a workshop window, see, behind which there’d be a young carpenter standing all day.

“I’d be cookin’, an’ the aroma would go through, an’ they’d say: ‘Whadda you cookin’ today, Nana!?’ An’ I’d say: ‘It’s not me, it’s the shop (her other neighbour).’

“I’m always cookin’.

“I’d be here, an’ I’d think: ‘I might make the boys a batch of pancakes.’ An’ I’d put jam an’ cream on ’em … they used to like that.

“One young one, Shane, ’e played rugby. An’ ‘e said to me: ’You know, when I work Sat’dee mornins an’ you bring over them lovely chicken rissoles, we win the match.’ I said: ’You know why? You got chicken legs extra to run on!’ ‘E said: ‘Oh Nana, you are ’opeless.’ An’ I said: ‘No it’s not. That’s my way of sayin’ they was made from a chicken.’ ”

And calling her conserves mock jam is her way of saying the raspberries are actually tomatoes - an old trick.

Her latest batch is extra good.

It’s been flavoured with BoBo’s cordial - the one you used to dilute before putting into re-used bottles, ready for re-diluting. You can’t buy it these days, but Lena found a little bottle in the cupboard.

The jar of raspberry jam she got from the supermarket to give her mock jam that little bit of authenticity was a huge disappointment.

“The recipe needs a can of raspberry jam - I’ve always used Monbulk,” she says.

“You can’t get a can of Monbulk jam, now. So I got this jar, which said ‘raspberry’. Well, you’d never seen such inferior jam! I reckon it was made with pet melons - I got the recipe for that.

“Mine might be mock jam, but it’s good jam!”

It is, too.

Plus, Lena’s jam is honestly called mock.

It was often enjoyed next door, when Paul and his people were there. There hasn’t been a fence between the workshop and Lena’s place for more years than she can remember.

All the time the joiners were there, they looked after their ‘Nanna’ and she after them - in whatever little way each could manage.

“Got arthritis in my hands, see,” she says.

“I got to depend on them to do some things for me. The workshop that’s there now, I ask them boys to take me green bin out - I try, but I just can’t do it. It’s different with them, though. They’ll do it if I ask, but it’s different.

“I took them some tomatoes, once. I said: ‘I don’t care what ya do with ‘em - me daughters don’t want anymore and I’ve just made some jam.’

“Paul’s boys, they made a cover for me air-conditioner there.

“One day I’d been out me daughter’s, an’ when I come home I’d got this new wooden cover. I went over there, an’ I said: ‘Ere, oo’s the culprit that stuck a wooden box on my lovely paintwork out there?’ ‘Did ya notice, Nana?’ ‘What made ya do that,’ I said. ‘We were sick of seeing your air-conditioner with a shower curtain tied up around it.’ ”

Necessity is the mother of invention, and improvisation has always been the trick to being poor.

When Lena and her husband and three kids moved back to Tin Town from Royal Park, she had to kick out all the boarders who had been there - except One-Arm Bill … and Uncle Tom. Apart from them, the six-roomed place was theirs. A partition down the middle made it possible.

Several cats and dogs also shared the place. Chooks and pigeons were housed down the back of the backyard.

Old Mrs Spall, the mother-in-law, lived out back of her old shop.

Their backyards connected.

At one time, Mrs Spall owned several properties, as well as the shop and the house that was to eventually be Lena’s.

“She was business-like,” Lena says.

“They were milkmen, to start with. Out there where the dog’s home is at Wingfield … that was their property. Mrs Spall and ‘er family lived out there in an eight-roomed house with no electricity. She used to milk 25 cows in the morning, and the 25 again at night, for the milk round. ‘Er ‘usband, Graham’s father, ’e were killed the night we was married.”

Mr Spall was knocked down while crossing the road outside the pub at Rosewater after doing his evening round.

It was 1939, and the newly-weds were 23.

“I don’t know how we got home, but Graham (after passing out at the sight of his father in the hospital) turned around and milked 25 cows and went out on the milk round.

“Young Alan were there - ‘e were 11. ‘E said: ‘Now Graham, put Topsy in, and wherever Topsy stops, you know you got customers.’ An’ ‘e only lost two customers, an’ (managed to do it) all through a horse. Topsy’d stand at the top of a street an’ wait for Graham to run aroun’ to everyone.”

Graham stuck at it for six months.

Then he had words with the rest of the family - over the horses being used during the day, between his rounds - and Lena talked him into chucking the job in.

“I said: ’Tell ya mother you gotta get out of it an’ go back to Holdens.’”

Apart from his army service, at Holden he stayed.

Lena and Graham’s first place of their own was a room in an old boarding house, next to where the new-fangled Port Brewery is now.

“It was owned by a fella who worked at Holdens. He said: ‘No worries.’”

With Graham back at the plant, life was good.

Fun was close at hand.

Within a block they had The Royal Arms, The Port Dock, The Wharf, The British, The Exchange, The Commercial, The Admiral and The Railway. And they’d cross the street to The Britannia’s cellar, for the darts.
Twice, Lena won the two bottles of beer for most bulls-eyes.

If they didn’t go to a pub, there was the pug-hole speedway up at Brompton, or ten-pin bowling in the city.

Later, when they had a backyard, there’d be barbecues.

“What the fellas used to do was get 10 bob each, put it in the hat, and when we got so much to buy booze and chops it might be at our place, it might be at Jack’s place, it might be Tom’s place, it might be Johnny Roche’s place.

“An’ we’d have all our chairs and our music. We used to have a wonderful time, sittin’ there singin’ our ‘eads off, tellin’ the neighbours: ‘Don’t ya wish ya was like us poor people? Come and join the party! We may be poor, but we know how to have a good time!’

She and Graham had three children - Rhonda in 1942, Dawn in 1946 and Doug in 1949.

Graham passed away in ‘83.

He’s survived by eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

Lena’s 92, now.

By comparison with the decades of her youth, she thinks the world’s gone mad.

It seemed saner when sheep ran down the street.

“When we shifted down here (with the family), I got up one Sunday morning and said: ‘Quick kids, get outta bed.’ ‘Aw, Mum,’ they said. I said: ‘There’s sheep comin’ up the road.’

“Well, three bodies - shoop, shoop, shoop!

“Along come a man with ‘is ‘orse an’ cart and all these sheep, and ‘is dogs … coupla men with ‘im … and you shoulda seen the look on their faces!

“We ‘ad no gate, then, an’ some of ‘em come up ‘ere ‘longside the ‘ouse. The kids sang out: ‘Mr Man, you missed some!’ Well, Mr Savage, ‘e whistled up the dogs there an’ they jumped up over the sheep, quick as ya like, an’ they ‘ad them straight outta there. Our kids was like: ‘They’re ridin’ the sheep!’

“The sheep used to come off the ketches every Sunday morning’ - over from Thevenard, on the (West) Coast. They used to drive ’em from there, right out to our abattoirs out there at Pooraka.

“ ‘Course our kids was straight to school to tell their mates. ‘Ad to ‘ave ‘em over every Sat’dee, so they could see the sheep.

“ ‘You ‘ave to get up real early,’ my kids’d tell ‘em.”

All things considered, Lena hasn’t missed out on much out there at Tin Town.