ANNIE MARGARET ROWLEY (nee Cain) 1888 - 1978

Annie was one of the thirteen children of Michael and Mary Cain. As a young girl she went to Melbourne and became a waitress at an up-market (for those days) men�s club, I think it was the Commercial Travellers Association. She eventually returned to Rye and married my father Robert Rowley, who was also one of thirteen children.

They lived in a small cottage behind the general store which was opposite the dry end of the Rye pier.

The depression was in full swing and the first Great War (WWI) had not ended so things were very tough. I think my father had a job cutting ti-tree for Mr Sullivan who shipped it to Melbourne for firewood.

My sister Alma was born in September 1918 and I was born in May 1920. So far so good, until one of Dad�s sisters arrived from Sydney with her two kids to escape the whooping cough epidemic which was raging there and, of course, bought the disease with her. As she stayed with us initially it was inevitable that Alma and I both got the disease and I was only 6 weeks old. So Annie the waitress became a nurse to one of the most distressing diseases imaginable, especially in young babies. How she managed to keep us both alive I will never know.

I don�t remember much about that period except I have a memory of being at Sullivan�s house opposite ours and their daughter Grace gave me an egg to take home. I recall the concentration and care it took to get that egg home safely. I think we must have left that house soon after because we were in the Weir Street house when my brother Bob was born, by which time I was four.

Folklore has it that I was distressed by the howling of the new born in the night and my father told me it was just a cat under the house to which I replied �well get the gun and shoot the bugger�.

The Weir St house was very basic, no sink, no bathroom, no laundry but it did have a stove, a table and chairs, and a dresser; also a tank with a tap into the kitchen so we were better off than a lot of people.

With the depression still on and our house on three blocks of land, we could grow vegetables, also, our father trapped rabbits to eat and sell and sold their skins to make a few bob.

I started school from the Weir St house but, by about 1927, we moved �up-the-back� on to a small dairy farm, out the back of Tootgarook, so Annie then became a dairy maid. Here she worked harder than ever. The house was an unlined corrugated iron shed with a stove, curtained in half to make a bedroom, we two girls slept in one bed while young Bob slept with the parents who must have taken the kitchen furniture with them from Weir St. Water had to be drawn from a well at the bottom of the rise, the only other amenities were wash tubs and a copper.

Annie had to �bring in the cows� at daybreak. While Dad started to milk the cows that were close in, mum often had to wear a coat and hat of Dad�s because Billy the bull would attack anyone who didn�t look like a man. Annie would then help with the milking until it was time to return to the house to prepare breakfast for everyone. Later she would return to clean the dairy while my father delivered milk to customers. One piece of advice my mother passed on to me was �never learn to milk a cow� and I never have! Alma and I walked from there to school which must have been 4 or 5 miles but to young legs seemed like 10. We took short-cuts through the bracken fern paddock, sometimes with ferns head high to us, then through the wattle paddock where we gathered and ate the gum that exuded from the trees, that was the nearest we got to having lollies!

I don�t know how long this situation lasted but it must have been too long for everyone.

We eventually moved back to Weir St because the Jennings family took over the farm.

Eventually my father started a butchery business which consisted of a corrugated iron shed with a large ice box and a chopping block made of a large sawn log. Meat and ice came from Wilson�s in Sorrento, who I think financed the deal.

My mother worked part-time as a waitress at the local hotel to earn some money while the business got going, as it eventually did. It then became obvious that my father needed a shop to work from so we moved to one of Mr Fordham�s shops and things started to take shape. By this time Dad had a vehicle of sorts, a secondhand T-Model Ford, and many were the curses my father heaped on Henry Ford�s head when it wouldn�t start.

Things didn�t get any easier for my Mother because Annie now became a butcher, she learned how to help cut the orders for my father to deliver and while he was away she served the customers in the shop. I think Des arrived when I was 9 or 10 so my Mother had a pregnancy to cope with as well as housekeeping, butcher�s laundry on top of ordinary laundry � and still no washhouse!. I know that when Des was able to sit up and someone came into the shop while she was bathing the baby, she would take the baby, bath and all into the shop while she served the customer.

Somehow we all survived and I can only recall that I had a happy childhood, give or take some sibling fights and an occasional belting. I spent a lot of time up a tree or on the beach.

After Bob left school when he was about 14, he became a butcher and relieved Annie of a some of work, followed by Des some years later.

Alma and I had left home to find work and before long the country was at war again. As I was by this time a trained nurse I joined the Army Nursing Service.

The butchery business thrived and my father built a new shop two doors away. Annie was retired, much against her will, and since dad was by now unfit to work, the boys took over the shop.

Annie, at a loose end became a plane spotter on Tommy Short�s hill. When our father became ill, Annie and Alma nursed him through his terminal years. Annie and Alma eventually started a small clothing shop in the old butchers shop so Annie became a shop girl again. This lasted for many years until mum became too old for the job and eventually Alma died. So that put an end to an era.

I can�t imagine a worse fate than having your children pre-decease you and that happened twice to Annie, because Des also died prematurely leaving his wife Bonnie and six children.

Alma and I shared the care of our mother until Alma died, then I managed as long as I could but it finally became too much for me and mum spent her last days in a nursing home at Shoreham so she would be closer to her relatives and friends in Rye than at my home in Sandringham.

This was not the way anyone wanted it to be but sometimes there is no choice. I, at least was able to take Annie to the beach at Shoreham where she could look out at her beloved sea.