The continuing adventures of my honorary aunt Joan ‘The Bone’ Byrne, my father’s cousin, who left Australia with us in 1967. The plan was to travel across Asia and Europe and on to England but Dad’s ill health forced us to leave the trip and head to Hong Kong, where we stayed put for the next 20 years. Joan kept going. We last caught up with her in Switzerland, weeping by the banks of Lake Geneva for a world still divided after the horrors of World War II.
Joan had travelled across Asia and Europe through India, Hong Kong, Japan, Siberia, Poland, East and West Germany, Switzerland and France savouring all the food, culture, art, language, history and experience she could cram in.
But there were miles to go and promises to keep.
Joan and my father Jack were inspired to travel by Joan’s grandfather, William Joseph Byrne, known throughout the Burrangong district of New South Wales, Australia as WJ.
Jack and his brothers spent most of their summers with the Byrne family. He was particularly drawn to the man he knew as ‘Father’ Byrne. Dad was a gentle boy and his own father had died when he was very small.
He said ‘Father’ Byrne was the first man in his life who didn’t make the walls shake when he entered the room. And perhaps there was an added bond because WJ, too, had lost his father very young.
Joan remembers WJ as a gentle, educated man determined to grow roses in the harsh climate. “I can still see him carrying buckets from the dam to give them a little water,” she said.
It was Jack and Joan who joined WJ in the evenings on the front step to watch the sun go down. “We had wide open spaces, and that’s all we had,” was how Dad put it. “Father Byrne told me about a world beyond the plains and, boy, did I want to see it for myself.”
Joan said it was there, on the front step, that she made her promise. “He was enjoying the sunset and telling us stories and it was there one evening, when I was about three years old, that I said I would go to England and meet these relatives who featured in them so often,” she said.
“And the person he most wanted me to meet was his youngest brother Viv.”
WJ was 12 years old and Vyvian just four when they were separated following the death of their father in 1894. The family was split up. The two youngest children remained with their mother while the eldest two – WJ and his 13-year-old sister Isabella – went to Australia. The others were sent to relatives in Ireland.
They would never see their mother Barbara or their other siblings again. But they exchanged letters and photographs for the rest of their lives. There is a photograph in Joan’s collection of an elderly Barbara inscribed, “Mother’s love to Dear Isa.” And enclosed in another letter, “a lock of your dear father’s hair taken just before he died,” and signed, again, with “mother’s love.”
And in 1955, Viv wrote to WJ and Alma, the sister-in-law he would never know:
“Just a few lines to wish both you and all your dear family and grandchildren a most happy and enjoyable Christmas, to let you know that you are all in our thoughts although so far apart and strangers to each other in a way that you could pass each other in the street without knowing. So many years apart Will – I do just call to mind as a child on Temple Meads station Bristol in 1895 saying goodbye to you and Isa on the platform. I cried to go with you both and was taken into the Station Master’s office on No 4 platform while the train steamed off with you…”
By the time Joan got to England in December 1969, Uncle Viv was a frail old man of 79, still struggling with the effects of mustard gas from his service in France during World War I. He lived alone in the ground floor section of a two-storey terraced house in Streatham, in south London.
The front parlour and back bedroom were crowded with furniture and bric-a-brac which his late wife had collected, and he lived mainly in a small dining room with a kitchen through a wide opening. His bed was a small couch and washing hung from a line strung over the stove.
“He knew I was on the way but had no idea of the date of my arrival, so he met me with first a look of utter amazement and then disbelief, which suddenly turned into the widest smile of recognition,” Joan said.
“The first thing he insisted on showing me was his garden where, even on that wintry December day, his beloved roses still bloomed.”
Together they cleared a space in the back bedroom for Joan, a base for her time in England.
“The house had many features familiar to me from literature and film but it was a world away from my experience of housing in Australia,” Joan said. “Mail was delivered through a slot in the front door and a metal cover protected a coal chute where coal was dropped into a cellar below. The bathroom upstairs required money to be put into the gas meter for hot water and you only had one bath a week.”
Streatham itself was still a small village, with a proper high street and good transport in to central London – somewhere the neighbours, who often brought Uncle Viv his meals and did his washing, hadn’t visited for more than 10 years.
“Uncle Viv had a number of bouts of pneumonia while I was there and probably also an element of dementia. Once I was rather surprised to come home from work to find him in his rather soiled long johns shovelling snow from the front path.
“And when he coughed he would often gasp that the Germans were “gassing” again.
Still and all, I was glad I had made it to see him and could provide some care for him during his last years,” Joan said.
“In many ways it was like caring for that little boy who had been separated from so many members of his family years before. I was glad to be there for his funeral service, especially when the hearse containing his coffin moved slowly through the streets of Streatham where he had spent so many years.”
Joan was still in London when from far away Australia came news of the sudden death of her own brother Damian, aged 23, in a car accident. It was time to lay down her adventuring.
“I was far from those who had known him, and I had been spared in a car accident at a similar age,” Joan said.
“With his loss I knew it was time to give of my talents and experience to others. That, together with the short winter days when sunlight was a rarity, convinced me it was time to go home.”
Stay tuned for more Adventures of my Extraordinary Aunt. Meanwhile, you can read more about her here:
My Extraordinary Aunt: Taking the long way to London – before she joined us in Hong Kong, Joan travelled through Asia.
My Extraordinary Aunt: In the shadow of Lion Rock – Joan arrived in Hong Kong in May 1967, where working conditions were about to lead to one of the most turbulent times in its history.
My Extraordinary Aunt: College Days in 1960s Hong Kong – When the school year began in September 1967 Joan started teaching at Wellington College to earn enough money for the next stage of her journey.
My Extraordinary Aunt: The Adventure Continues – In 1969 Joan left Hong Kong for Japan, before heading for the USSR and the Trans-Siberian Railway.
My Extraordinary Aunt: Visions of Moscow 1969 – Behind the Iron Curtain in Moscow, St Petersburg and an accidental stop in East Berlin.
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