A story in four parts 3..
Our journey was fraught with struggles as any new migrant will attest. New
ways..new country but we slowly began to acclimatise...to adjust.
My Mother cried for days...weeks..as we tried to fit in. Missing family
and friends it was a struggle. Dad worked back on the tools as a carpenter
builder. I later had a succession of boring office jobs and Mum ran the home and then
helped me in a business venture discussed in the next blog.
With the money we had left, which wasn't much, and with a large mortgage
my Parents bought a run down little beach shack and turned it into a home. I was
pleased to, at last, live on the ground floor where I could look out of my
bedroom window at the garden instead of being three floors up as I was so used
to. It was almost falling down and there were many things wrong with it..many
things indeed but it was all we could afford. At last I had a garden...at long
last my long held dream. Also I had a dog!
I’m so pleased we never experienced any earth quakes while we were settling
in that’s all I can say. Not sure how my Parents would have handled that at the
time. Things were...to say the least precarious!
A friendly neighbour dropped in a box of veges for us for our first
Christmas in a new country. Something we were very grateful for indeed and a
wonderful thought. Money was indeed tight!
Dad and I worked on the house and the garden. Grew vegetables and
remodelled the house (which we didn’t know at the time was full of health
damaging asbestos! Something I feel surely added to his death years later. So
far I have been lucky! That was something we had no idea about at the
time)
My Mother used to meet me at lunch time some days as I sat by the river
Avon. She was lonely and I wasn’t settled in my work. It can be cold, and it was, but we still met and still had lunch there on a park bench by the river.
But it didn’t end there unfortunately ...my Parents found it so difficult
to adjust. One day we met up in Cathedral Square after I finished work and as we
sat on the surrounding wall of the Cathedral Mum and Dad said “We are thinking
of going back home!” I was devastated. Maybe I was selfish but I knew we had
given up so much to move here and there was nothing to return to the UK
for. So much more happened in our lives. It didn't work out with the relatives, Dads brother and his wife, that we had travelled to see. People change...I guess we all change!
We did stay after all and as I stated in the next chapter of this
adventure...read on...things were about to turn around in a quite spectacular
way.... Maybe I had an insight...maybe I was just lucky... who knows...
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