My Mother Marjorie

Marjorie Gingell, better known as Marj or Jing, grew up in Western Victoria, Australia. Her father Jim (James Albert) Gingell worked as a station master for the Victorian Railways. I think she was born in Camperdown, but they also lived in Colac and Maryborough, moving towns every few years so Jim could move up the promotion ladder. He did well, ending up in the grand controller's office at Flinders St Station, overseeing the comings and goings of all the trains.

Marj's mother Jeanie is listed as 'spinster' on her marriage certificate but we do know she was the life of every local dance, or social event, playing the piano and leading the singalongs, always the last one to ride her horse home in the wee hours of the morning.

Marj always said she had a happy childhood. She was an only child as Jeannie was very ill for several years after the birth and couldn't risk giving birth again. Jeannie was one of 8 or 9 children so there were plenty of cousins and a grandmother who looked after Marjorie when her mother was sick. Grandma Tonkin ran a boarding house called Penzance in Camperdown. (Google confirms this fact and tells more: 'turn left into Scott St. To the right, at no.43, is 'Penzance' (c.1859) which was originally the home of early shopkeeper James Tait').

Marjorie (left) with a cousin and G'ma Tonkin with baby at Penzance.

 G'ma Tonkin's husband was became ill so to survive she took lodgers in. The physical absence of Marj's mother in those early years may well have been behind the terrible depression that in later life took Marjorie in its jaws and never let go. Marj would scribble down such pieces of information in notes we would find in all the drawers and cupboards of her house, alongside her desparate pleas to help her 'get off the planet and leave this Hell behind.'

But young children can at best only sense the loss absence brings, and carry on allowing those around them to love them and keep them in their fold, and once things were back to normal the Gingell family continued on as before. Like her mother, Marjorie learnt piano, although by the time I was born there was no piano in our house. But she loved poetry and copied and illustrated her favorites: Wordsworth, Yeats, Donne, with pen and ink in flowing cursive script and decorative daffodillia. She was a champion hockey player, her petite frame and lightness of foot proved a match for any burly hockey bully.  She went bush walking with friends in jodphurs carrying canvas knapsacks and sleeping out under the stars on nothing but a ground sheet. When she reached teachers college, she won the popuarity contest, which is when my father, Chassa (Charles Rowland) enters the story. A sporting champ in his own right he already had a glass case full of trophies and of course had to have Marjorie too.

They kissed and fell in love, so the story goes, beneath the pear tree in the grounds of the Melbourne Teachers College, the same college us three kids would also attend many years later. The pear tree was long gone, replaced by ugly modern buildings, but the old 1888 building, where they studied and lived, still remains.

On completing their diplomas Marj and Chas were sent out teaching to far flung places like Chilingollah and Swan Hill but their innocent idyll was soon cut short by the advent of war. Married simply in a no- frills ceremony, Chas flew off to Canada for his officer training in the RAAF and then was posted to the UK with Squadron 279, where he spent his days flying reconniasance missions in the navigator's cockpit, over Greenland and the North Atlantic Ocean.

The emblem of Chas's Squadron 279

It was a long three or four years before he returned. I remember Marj telling me she worked with the WAAFs in St Kilda Rd in the mail sorting room and went out to dances with polite and charming Canadian and American soldiers. She and Chas communicated by letter and aerograph, he the loving husband and her the loving wife. From all accounts Chassa boy was living it up, carousing and certainly drinking, safe from combat or being shot down in flames above the wide grey oceans he was patrolling. When the end of the war was announced to jubilation everywhere, Marj tells me she and a friend were driving down Swanston St in a Morris Minor when the exuberant crowd carried them and the car up the steps left them sitting at the entrance to St Pats Church!

Chassa Boy was demobbed along with thousands of other army and airforce chaps and back in Melbourne their married life began. Marj had some idea of what she was in for. On her marriage night before he left for the war,  her charming groom had gotten blind drunk, passed out in the marriage bed and snored so loudly, she didn't sleep a wink.

Jan Cornall began writing in the 70s. She has written plays, musicals, screenplays, a novel, short stories, and three CDs of songs.  Since 2004 she has led writer's retreats in inspirational international locations including Bali, Laos, Burma, Cambodia, Morocco and Fiji. In 2014 she is planning a Vietnam trip following the footsteps of M.Duras in Vietnam. More info here.


(c)Jan Cornall 2013