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SUPERMUM - Mabel Kilby
The tale behind a snow-white nappy, Ballimore, New South Wales
His Holiness the Dalai Lama once said that what the world needs most is mother love. Mabel Kilby is an expert in that most fundamental, joyful and taxing of occupations-mothering. She was a child of the Great Depression when people learnt to make do, so she is practised at that too.
A small woman with a sweet, round face and wearing a cross around her neck, Mabel meets me at her house in Ballimore, east of Dubbo. She has lived in the same house for 54 years. Watch out for the dogs,' she calls. The two woofing terriers don't look too fearsome but specialise in nipping ankles. Mabel hugs me as she pulls me towards the back door. I see the outback loo across the backyard, a chilly walk on a dark night. Mabel says she always takes a torch in case of snakes.
Shoes are discarded at the back door to keep the house spotless. In the kitchen an old wood stove warms the gust of cool air. This is Mabel's kingdom. In what was a one-bedroom house she cared for her husband and family of fourteen children. Here she still lives with one of her sons, a daughter and the daughter's teenage son.
A fellow volunteer guide at Taronga Western Plains Zoo suggested Mabel to me. I might have a story for you,' she said. "At 70, Mabel became one of my TAFE literacy students.'
In the lounge room is Mabel's pride and joy, a glass cabinet of wedding presents and treasures she has kept safe from tiny fingers for over five decades. The walls of photographs, all of family occasions and children, are a tangible record of her life.
This room wasn't a lounge room back then. We had double-bunks here, here and there where six children slept.'
I imagine children chattering and climbing into bed. The only space left formed the passageway to a veranda.
Out there was another double bunk. In our bedroom were two cots and a bassinette for the three youngest. By then the eldest boys, David and Barry, had left home so there were only eleven kids at once.
The veranda now houses sixteen-year old Julian and is plastered with pictures of trucks; via a CB radio he talks to 700 truckies around the country. Every so often, a deep honk echoes from a truck driver zipping by on the Golden Highway beyond the railway line.
Mabel's dreams seem uncomplicated - a new wood stove and hot water connected to the house from the village supply now running past the house, but she can't afford it on a pension and is too proud to ask her children for help.
Her life is a window into a more spartan past, which she describes without complaint or expectation of sympathy. I can only wonder at her level of tolerance, or perhaps it's a gentle woman's acceptance of her lot. Until a few years ago, Mabel had only a kerosene fridge and no water or sink in the kitchen. She would bucket water from a tank in the yard and wash up in a basin. Her son, John, has connected cold water into the kitchen, but the tap is near the floor, so Mabel has to bend to fill a jug. Now the stove has passed its use-by date, she feeds the household from a small stovetop and a crock pot. The bathroom across a breezeway is recent.
Before, we adults used an old-time galvanised washtub and washed the children on the kitchen table.
Mabel bought the bathtub in which she and the family now wash, cleanest one in first.
Mabel looks around her house as we talk and finally says,
I loved my husband, but he could have made life easier. He was set in his ways; I would sooner keep the peace. The only squabble we had was over some horrible blinds on the veranda. The boys who slept out there got wet when it rained. I said to John, "We've got to fix this." She paid for it out of child endowment. 'I hated the children not getting what they needed because I had it tough as a child.'
Mabel shows me a photo of her childhood home. It's a bark hut her father built near Box Flat, south of Dubbo. The bark strips didn't quite meet and the wind whistled through. He cut holes in the walls to fit windows he found and added bits and pieces of iron for roofing. The dwelling was hot in summer and cold in winter. Mabel's mother packed the dirt floor hard by damping it and laying bags over the soil. Wheat bags hung from the ceiling were sewn together to form 'rooms'. Mabel's mother stuck large pages from Women's Weekly on the bags and applied whitewash to stiffen them. The pictures brightened the rooms,' Mabel recalls.
Merle and John O'Farrell were easy-going parents of eight children. The mailman used to drop their groceries and freshly baked bread at the end of a lane five kilometres away. As senior child, young Mabel would fetch the food three times a week.
By the time I got back home there were pieces picked off the warm loaf. Mum would say I'd had mine and that was it until next delivery.
Cooking was not Merle's strong point. Tasteless stews and rubbery scones coated in powdery flour stick in Mabel's mind.
Grandma milked cows on her small farm nearby. She had that many chooks too, but we had to buy eggs and butter from her. Now and again, we had scrambled eggs with lovely macaroni custard.' Potatoes and pumpkin were staples. The first time I tasted cereal was when my husband-to-be brought out a packet of Weetbix. Mum couldn't afford bread with butter and jam. Sometimes the only food was a slice of bread fried in dripping with Pick-Me-Up sauce poured over it.
The rabbit plague of the 1940s was a mixed blessing. Rabbits introduced towards the end of the nineteenth century by settlers homesick for Old England reached plague proportions by the mid-twentieth century. With few natural predators they flourished and literally took over farming land across the country. As they swarmed westwards a rabbit proof fence was erected in Western Australia but it proved useless against the onslaught. Countless burrows pock marked farms in the eastern and southern states. The rabbits caused immense environmental degradation and economic hardship as they displaced livestock and cash crops and ate out habitat for native animals. Finally, the government introduced myxomatosis, a disease causing blindness. Sightless rabbits would crawl out of their dugouts only to become a target for circling birds of prey.
Rabbits also provided income for families. When he was young, my own father earned money bagging rabbits. Mabel's father constructed a race of netting and the children herded the hordes of rabbits into the race.
Dad would close the run, so he could catch them by the ears and put them in a coop. Then he killed them and took them to a carter who transported them to the freezing works at Yeoval or Dubbo. Racks of rabbits would hang by their long ears in the back of the old truck.
The family had a meat safe, its wire surrounds draped in hessian to keep perishables cool and marauders out. Inside it, Merle O'Farrell would leave the rabbits soaking overnight in salty water then boil them in a big cast iron pot.
Mum stewed or roasted the rabbits, and sometimes she curried them. Once a fortnight we had sausages. I never want to eat rabbit again,' Mabel declares.
The children walked to Wambangalang School five kilometres away.
When I first started at school, Aunty Dot used to double me on her pushbike. I bought it off her when I was fifteen to get to my first job.' Some students had no shoes. 'I wore cheap canvas Volleys until they wore out. Mum would sew patches of material over the holes and blacken them with boot polish to disguise the patches. We didn't wear uniforms. I would turn up at school and some girl would say, "That was my dress." I felt like the poor relation.'
Merle was always sick and kept her daughter home to look after the younger children. 'I loved going to that little school and wish I hadn't left in Fifth Class. Mum was uneducated and Dad could barely sign his name. Sometimes I wondered how he got his driver's licence.' She greatly admired her teacher, the principal, Mr Bewglass. He would give the O'Farrell children a lift home, or to the Christmas party at the Toongi Village Hall in his tourer model Chrysler with the canvas top.
The family followed whatever jobs John O'Farrell could find. They moved onto The Meadows close to Wambangalang, where Mabel's father was a farm labourer. He built a kitchen and sleep-out onto an old church to accommodate his growing family.
The Depression, set off when New York's Wall Street stock market crashed on Black Tuesday in October 1929, hit the New South Wales economy with particular severity. Unemployment, already at ten per cent in mid-1929, rose to 21 per cent a year later and reached almost 32 per cent in mid-1932. Australia's high dependence on agricultural and industrial exports meant it was one of the hardest-hit countries in the Western world as falling export demand and commodity prices placed massive downwards pressures on wages. In rural Australia, the Depression and droughts of the 1930s, combined with the rabbit plague, reduced many land holders to penury and forced farm labourers to look off-farm for work. The O'Farrell's were no exception. John got a job at the Edgell canning factory in Narromine, which meant another move for his family.
Mabel was an obedient child.
Dad only gave me a belting once, but Mum was fiery. Dad and Uncle Mick's mother had abandoned them and remarried. She had another family of ten children. Twenty years later Uncle Mick heard her name on radio and the boys found their mother. Grandma moved in with us for a while. My parents never used to drink, but Grandma did.
Mabel remembers loud mouths and the child rearing being left to her from when she was thirteen. A year later her mother gave birth to twins.
- MarleneGrandfather, John, worked on Burrendong Dam. His mother was an Allcroft who originated from Wagga. Grandpa's mother divorced his father and there was grandpa and his brother from the first marriage. She went on to marry again and had 10 or 11 more children - mum never got over the fact that Pa’s mother left the two boys and went onto marry again and have more children - it always perplexed her. When Mum was thirteen John's mother visited by car and stayed for three months. Grandma Allcroft and Granny Farrelly knew each other, they were friends when they were young girls and went to school together.
Her parents started to frequent the hotel in Dubbo. Maureen, aged four, and Rick, six, tagged along as their older sister wheeled the twins up and down outside the pub in a double pram.
We had nothing to eat or drink. Mum and Dad would finish drinking when the money ran out, then we would drive the 34 kilometres home. Once Dad fell asleep and the car went off the road. It made me detest alcohol.'
It also made the teenager determined not to live as her parents did.
Mabel left home at fifteen to work as a nanny for the Batten family on a farm near Dubbo, but they soon sold up and moved away. Another Batten family, Kelvin and Gladdy, snapped Mabel up to help with their eight children. She was paid eight pounds a week, half of which her mother commandeered. Mabel had every second weekend off.
Mum would save a big wash for me. I had to lug water in buckets nearly a kilometre from the creek because there was no tank.
She learnt to cut wood with a mattock in the absence of an axe.
Mrs Batten was lovely to me, like a mother.' Gladdy Batten made Mabel's first dress. It was green with a waist and a collar tied at the neck by a black velvet bow. 'I went out and bought myself a pair of white wedge heels and a green straw hat with flowers around the top. I wore it to the Dubbo Show when the Queen came in 1954,' she says proudly. 'I was going with John then.
John Kilby had noticed the girl wheeling her sisters in the pram outside the pub. He was a ganger on the railways and kept bees. The young man loved children and was fascinated by the twins. He chatted to their pretty young minder and asked her out to the pictures the following Saturday.
It was my first date and first movie, The Wizard of Oz, in black and white. I loved it. John took me upstairs and we sat in the love seat on the corner. It had no armrests, so we could hold hands.
Mabel was decked out in her green dress and high heeled shoes. 'I thought I was it!'
Like other young people, they went to dances at the Railway Institute. John was a good dancer and Mabel loved the music and fun. When she was seventeen, John Kilby presented Mabel with a diamond ring and asked her to marry him. Her mother refused to buy the material or make the wedding dress, so Mabel learnt to sew.
It turned out beautiful, white cotton embossed with flowers.
They married at St Brigid's Catholic Church and moved to the village of Elong Elong near where Mabel now lives.
I love it here, so peaceful and quiet. Mabel says as she brews us a cup of tea. My father-in-law bought my husband and I this house when our first son, David, was six months old.
Mabel remembers the beginning of her marathon of mothering when she was nineteen. John's mother, Lucy, arrived at Elong Elong.
We had a deep pit toilet I kept wanting to go, not knowing I was in labour. "Don't go there," my mother-in-law warned. "The baby might drop in."" The nearby Talbragar River overflowed its banks and cut the road to Dubbo hospital. Mrs Webster from down the road had experience of birthing. She and another woman helped deliver a healthy boy. The floodwaters washed out bridges, so an ambulance man propelled himself the 30 kilometres from Dubbo along the railway tracks on a motor trike. 'He gave me a tablet to stop the bleeding. They had to carry me over the creek on a camp bed to go to hospital because I had bled a lot.' She didn't have enough milk to breastfeed David and grew used to boiling bottles.
Before the family could move into the Ballimore house, another flood the following year brought water swirling up to the windowsills. The Kilby's had to shovel mud out of the house, scrub the walls and paint the weatherboard. Later on, the outdoor toilet blew over in a windstorm and the priest offered them the church toilet from the neighbouring block.
At the same time as they moved house, John was admitted to Dubbo hospital with rheumatoid arthritis and languished there for three months.
Doctors injected him with gold, the treatment of the time. I couldn't even touch the bed he was in such pain, my sister-in-law was wonderful. I stopped with her, otherwise I would have been by myself with the baby and not able to drive.'
When John came home he couldn't walk, but hung onto furniture to move around. Mabel cared for him and David while heavily pregnant with her second child. During John's long recovery, the Department of Railways sacked him.
The family had to rely on beekeeping for income. John loved bees; Mabel didn't.
They sting. They're fascinating the way they form wax over the honey, but I was scared of them. They swarmed from their boxes and chased me when I was helping John. I had to jump in the old truck, but they never attacked him. John sent away for well-bred queens and would get the larvae out with a needle-like thing, just like a doctor.
Out in the bush, they would lift the frames from the honey boxes and replace them with fresh ones, then take the honey home to extract. John cut the wax caps off with a hot knife before they placed the frames in an extractor. A sieve stopped wax falling into the jars.
My job was to watch the honey run into the drums so it didn't flow over. My husband was a great believer in giving good honey with no scraps of wax in it. People used to travel all the way from Dubbo to buy our honey.
The family ate a lot of honey, substituting it for sugar and chewing the wax. Mabel used the beeswax to wipe her flat irons and keep them clean and shiny.
In 1957, a measles epidemic struck. Routine vaccinations were still a thing of the future and many children fell sick. Young David contracted the disease. Philip was a fat, healthy baby, ten months old. 'John had left for work at Rowe's farm. I put David in the yard to play away from the baby.' Mabel noticed Philip wasn't drinking much and bathed him. He lay in the coolest place, the lounge room.
Mabel checked David, but when she returned to Philip he had turned blue and wasn't breathing. She picked up her baby and ran to a neighbour. Together they raced to the village hotel where they rang for the ambulance.
The officers tried to revive him, but there was nothing anybody could do. My little boy had died. Philip had contracted measles.
Mabel was not yet 21 and expecting their third child. She was admitted to hospital and David to an isolation ward.
When I came home from hospital there were Philip's things. I never had a photo of the little fellow.' In the yard is a small shrine of white roses and statues of cherubs where Mabel stops to remember.
Pope Pius XII would have been proud of the Kilby's and other Catholic families like them. In 1958 he gave a defence of large families in The Pope Speaks, calling them 'those most blessed by God and specially loved and prized by the Church as its most marriages, precious treasures'. To him they signified 'more Baptisms, more first Communions, which follow each other like ever-new spring times'.
Mabel explains that John always wanted a big family because there was only he and his sister.
He was a strong Catholic; my family was also Catholic but not church-going. The church was strict in those days. We saw the priest before we married. He told us the rules about not using birth control. Over the years I thought, 'Why should a priest, who's not even married, have the right to tell you to do these things?'
John Kilby once declared to a Dubbo chemist, Bill Morgan,
'We usually try to have a child this time every year,' and he followed that path religiously. Mabel was pregnant for 23 years with only thirteen months between each of thirteen children. 'I would have been happy with four, although I loved them all. I went along with it, but my nerves had gone on me by the thirteenth child. The doctor told John, "Your wife's body is tired out with childbearing and rearing," and she put me on the pill.' There were no more children for seven years and then Pam was born. 'I don't know what happened there,' Mabel laughs. She was 42 by then. 'My mother-in-law would look after the other children when I went to hospital to have the next baby."
The dogs set up an excited chorus outside and in comes Mabel's grandson Julian. 'How was the movie?' his grandmother asks.
'Great.'
'Take your shoes off.'
'Grandma, I'm just here a short time. I'm going to install some surveillance cameras in my bedroom. I can't tell you why. I can't tell anybody.'
You can't be too careful in downtown Ballimore,' I tease him.
I've got some alarms, but they keep going off. You can't trust anybody.'
As the device squeaks, I can't resist saying, 'Here comes a burglar,' and Julian's Uncle John walks in. He's an affable bachelor who indulges Julian with his CB and security camera passions.
Mabel had no need of a gym to keep fit as she washed by hand for eight. She carried buckets of water to heat in the large copper outside and then carted masses of pre-soaked clothes and nappies to boil in it. The only way to lift the steaming clothes from the boiling water was a wooden pot stick. David, now 55, isn't surprised his mother has carpal tunnel problems in her hands from lifting wet nappies with the pot stick.
Mabel was proud of her washing expertise. A scrubbing board and elbow grease kept John's white overalls clean. 'We only had white sheets and lovely, snowy white nappies. They all came up beautiful.'
'How on earth did you do that?'
'Do you remember Reckitt's Blue?' With that she jogs a memory of my mother adding knobs of a blue chalk-like substance to the rinsing water. When dissolved, it bleached the washing.
Mabel heated flat irons on the hob of the stove. 'I had three irons going at once.' She made sure the children stayed well away from the boiling copper and red-hot irons. They never had an accident from washing.
Two clotheslines crisscrossed the yard between tall poles. Sometimes I would get all the washing hung up and next thing the lines would be down on the ground.' She would have to redo the dirty clothes. 'I got sick of it and said to John that we needed a rotary clothesline, so he erected one.
Mabel's day was made when her husband bought her a shellite fuel iron, and a kindly farmer, Tom McCann, who had observed the toil, gave her a washing machine.
The Kilby's rode a motorbike until just before the first child was born, then invested in an old green Pontiac. When the fifth child was born, John bought an Austin truck.
We'd fit four in the front with us, one of them on my lap, one squeezed between my legs and another two between John and I. The back was like a cattle crate with the mesh sides up where three more children could sit. If it rained or was windy, we rigged a tarp over them
Mabel couldn't drive. She never found time to learn, so when John was away for weeks with the bees she had to rely on neighbours if a child was sick and she needed to get to a doctor.
I asked if child rearing became easier the more children you had. No, it didn't,' Mabel is emphatic. But she was meticulous. At times, four children would be wetting their beds and a baby crawling around.
I scrubbed and polished the floor. A neighbour said you could eat off my floor. I said, When you've got little ones crawling around you've got to keep it clean.
With numbers six to twelve, how did she manage? I just had to,' Mabel laughs. She would rise at the crack of dawn to organise two packs of children. The first four left for St John's in Dubbo by bus at 7.45 a.m., so I packed their lunches the night before and put them in the fridge, did their shoes and clothes and organised their breakfast.' The next five attended Ballimore Primary School and the last three were still at home.
I enquire whether they helped out and Mabel pauses, 'I was really fussy. They always looked so smart in their clean, pressed uniforms.' The children were around ten before they lent a hand.
Meals had to be in two sittings at a big square table. When the children finished John and Mabel had what was left.
We ate stews and sausages, Weetbix and bread and milk because we were scraping, but we never went hungry. Teddy from Elong used to bake a couple of loaves of bread a day for John's parents gave us pumpkins and spinach. The younger children ran home from school for lunch. On Sundays the family treated themselves to jelly and custard made from eggs also given by John's mother. In later years the ice-cream man used to drive past the house. I would buy those big metal cans of ice cream and put them in the freezer for treats. The children would be waiting for it, God love 'em.'
Mabel made most of the children's clothing. 'I sewed and knitted at night. It's what kept my brain alive, instead of being stuck on other chores.' David remembers making their own toys, steamrollers of milk tins with cotton reels for wheels and billycarts out of old prams.
Their father didn't stand for any nonsense. 'He was a hard worker and never smoked or drank, David recalls. 'Dad would do anything for anybody. He thought things through before doing them. He was also a bit of a worrier.'
Despite her best intentions, Mabel came to depend on her eldest daughter.
'I used to help Mum a lot, Diane recalls. 'I was often feeding a baby or toddler, or cutting wood. Once I had to take three months off school because Mum was sick.' She describes her mother as 'barefoot and pregnant, confined within four walls. Sometimes Mum played ball in the yard with us, but not often because she was always pregnant. She's had such a hard life, even having to buy whatever we needed with her child endowment money.'
They had one family holiday at Hawks Nest on the coast for a month. It wasn't quite the break Mabel envisaged. The baby, Robert, and her husband got sick, and young John contracted measles. 'I was never so glad to get home again,' Mabel says. Once they went to faraway Bathurst to see John's grandmother. Up and down the hills we went, the truck going about 45 kilometres an hour. In the village of Perthville, houses were made of mud and straw. It was a shock to see, like a foreign country.
The bees weren't making enough honey, so John had to cart the hives further away to blossoms and flowering crops. During the holidays he would take the boys with him and camp out in a tent. He'd be away for a week lifting boxes filled to the brim with combs of honey oozing from the wax cylinders. 'Those boxes were heavy, too heavy for me to lift,' Mabel remembers. He would be that tired.'
John Kilby was tending his bees at Coonabarabran when he suffered a massive heart attack. He staggered to a nearby farmhouse and they took him to hospital, but he didn't recover. It was 27 February 1982 and John was 52. He left behind a widow and seven young children still at home.
Mabel was overwhelmed as she battled to cope with John's jobs as well as her own, chopping wood, carting water. The baby was two.
I brought Pam up on my own. It was hard to care for all the children and manage with the old stove.
John had always been the money manager. To her horror, Mabel discovered she had to pay back a lot of money. Her brother-in-law helped with funeral costs. She sold the bee business and repaid her brother-in-law. She had $12000 left to extend the house and build a sleep-out, but worried that the government might take the money because she was on a pension. A man connected with the Sisters of Mercy in Dubbo offered to invest her money. 'I signed a form for him.' David, who was 27 then, grew alarmed when his mother told him. 'I knew he was no good. Mum was on tablets and panicking about the money.'
When Mabel went to retrieve her nest egg the man had spent it. The police found out and he was charged, but he never paid it back. A lady ran over him in Dubbo. I felt like running over him too. He ripped off other people, including his mother-in-law and the nuns, but I was the only one who put him in to the police. I couldn't trust people for a while put after that.'
In the past, Mabel would discuss any problems with her husband, but now she had to be mother and father. 'I needed to really think to make sure I made the right decisions." Mabel's weight ballooned to a size 18 and her doctor discovered she was diabetic. I ate to keep myself company.
Two months after John died, Brian and Robert, aged seventeen and eighteen, were returning home on their motorbike through Dubbo when a driver failed to give way and collided with the boys. Brian had flesh torn from his left leg; Robert suffered internal injuries and a broken leg. They spent four months in hospital. Their mother and the baby used to come in on the school bus, or get a lift. When the boys finally came home, Mabel hastened to find work. But first she had to learn to drive. Tom McCann, who gave her the washing machine, taught Mabel on his nearby farm. 'Tom owned a manual car, which was harder to master, but I was so determined. I felt locked into these four walls and wanted to get out. The policewoman was lovely. She said, "You've only got one problem, reversing.""
Mabel's maiden drive was to Narromine to see her father.
Mum had died the year before my husband. Dad said, "You're driving?" I told him I went for the driving test four times and passed on the fifth. Poor little Marlene had to keep testing me on the questions.
On the grapevine, Mabel heard about cleaning work in Dubbo. 'I hardly had any money left.' She landed six cleaning and three ironing jobs. It was a battle, but worthwhile to educate the last six children. I enjoyed getting out and meeting the ladies.'
Veronica Morgan remembers Mabel as a thorough cleaner who took her responsibilities seriously. 'We would always stop for a cuppa and cake and bounce ideas off each other. Mabel would bring up the latest family problem. Once it was a son who had "torched" his car. To hear this ladylike talk of such things was amazing.' Veronica admired the way Mabel enrolled at TAFE to better herself. 'She was a natural with crafts. Mabel could figure out how to do a blackberry stitch for a tea cosy or some other intricate sewing.'
Without John as disciplinarian of the family, Mabel began to have problems with the children. 'My youngest daughter would set off to school but not show up.' When Mabel rang the school the secretary would say, 'No, Pam's not here yet. She was wagging school, either at her brother's or a friend's place. 'She mixed with the wrong sort, but managed to pass the School Certificate. I had spoilt her.'
The youngest son, who 'torched' his car, also gave his mother sleepless nights. Mabel dreamt the car was in Goonoo Forest, which was exactly where police found it. 'I thought, why do I have to go through all this?' Mabel reflects. 'I got to the stage where I just wanted to roll up the car windows and drive into the Macquarie River.'
I feel sad when I think of Mabel devoting her life to her family and never having time for her own interests or to make women friends. 'I only met up with other parents at school events like the end-of-year school Christmas Tree, so I had nobody to talk to. My mother-in-law had died by then.'
The women Mabel cleaned for were her support. 'I developed nerve trouble,' says Mabel. John had had it too. The doctor put us on tablets to calm us. I used to worry about a lot of things, everything.'
Mabel began to experience headaches that felt like a dagger in her forehead and her face became lopsided with palsy. David drove his mother to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney for a brain scan where they found a tumour the size of a chicken egg.
My mother had died of cancer and at first I thought the worst, if it's my time to go, God's going to take me and that's all about it. Then I thought, I'm going to get through this. I had a lot of people standing by me. My main worry was the family.'
Doctors removed the tumour in a five-hour operation. Three weeks later, she came home and is relieved that her brain is clear now.
In the paddock next to Mabel's house is Ballimore Catholic Church. Her faith has been her salvation.
Our eldest daughter, Diane, was the first one baptised here,' Mabel says, as we walk to the white weatherboard church. 'I go every fortnight. Fifty-two years of sitting here in the front pew.' She brightens as we make our way down the aisle where the family attended mass every Sunday. 'My husband and I and the children took up two long pews.
Light streams into the church illuminating the simple wooden statues of Christ and Mother Mary. It was where Mabel's sons were altar boys and her children received their first holy communion.
The church means a lot to me. It got me through when John died. It's lovely to come to mass, have morning tea and meet up with everyone for a chat. It's a real community. I'm flat out to get my grandson to join me. My son John, was forced to go to church by his dad, so he doesn't want to. I'm not going to force anyone, but it won't stop me going.
I wonder how she and John kept two pews of children quiet during mass.
One Sunday Lesley was tormenting Marlene and Dad was next to them. Then I heard a smack. It echoed around the small building and the room went quiet. I never had to take my kids outside.
On 4 August 2006, Mabel Kilby turned 70. Her family shouted her a photographic session and glamour treatment. I can't believe the blond woman in a large photo is Mabel. With her unlined face and smiling blue eyes she looks about 40. 'Oh well, they do your make-up and hair,' she says.
After she recovered from the brain tumour, Mabel was determined to learn how to read and write. She used to cover up that she couldn't spell or fill in forms. 'I had to get my son or grandson to help me.' Mabel also wanted to show her children what her life had been like by writing her autobiography, so she decided to go to TAFE. The rest of her class was teenagers. 'My brain doesn't work with a lot of people around, so my teacher, Nancy, helped me one on one in a separate room. She showed me how to break words up so I could spell them.' Mabel was enthusiastic about learning, had a willingness to take on new technologies and picked up the computer well. 'It wasn't that hard. At first I thought, I can't do this, but then I decided to have a go at it. If you don't, you don't know if you can, do you?' There are words Mabel still can't spell, but she can fill in forms now.
Nancy tells me she began the computer lessons with Mabel's autobiography. It's a subject the students know well and a good way to learn about a person and get them to talk about themselves. She had all these photos. We talked about them, so she could tell her story in words and learn to import the photos to illustrate the text.' Mabel compiled her thirteen-page autobiography for her family, scanning and editing the old photos. She shows me the beautifully presented story of her life. It makes you feel good, Marg, to do what looks too difficult at first."
Mabel's zest for life fascinated her teacher who saw her as an inspiration. She wasn't bowed down by what happened to her. Mabel was never going to give up, or let life beat her. She has a pride in her family and in her own achievements. Modest yes, but not humble. Others might have gone on the dole, not Mabel.' Nancy was paid to teach Mabel and enjoyed it, but was touched when her student gave her a packet of hankies in thanks.
Family is Mabel's core, a total of 36 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. 'I'm starting to feel old,' she laughs. Her determination to do the best by her children has been Mabel's driving force.
Sometimes I wonder what I've achieved in life, and then I think of my children. They call me supermum! Whatever I do, I know I'll get there eventually. Putting all of them through private schooling at Catholic colleges in Dubbo wasn't easy, but I didn't give up. I wanted my children to do better than I did, like Marlene. I like my daughter being a nurse. She's my rock.
Her sons and daughters are scattered throughout eastern Australia. They have used their education and found work in diverse occupations; only one has a big family.
Mabel has looked after Julian since he was two.
He's sixteen now and Grandma's shadow, although he sometimes gets on my nerves. One day he'll fight me for the vacuum cleaner, the next he tries me out. But it keeps me looking after others.
As she did for her own children, Mabel rises early and gets Julian away to school on the bus.
Marlene and John have already left for work and Julian won't go to school otherwise.
It was taxing when she was 40, let alone 74. Then she gets on with the washing and ironing, cleaning and cooking for the four of them. Her doctor has told her to slow down because of a heart complaint. Life has become easier since her son came home to live.
I don't have to do the mowing or chop the wood.
John has bought his mother a freezer and fridge.
John asks me, "Do you ever get lonely, Mum?" I should tell him the truth. Yes, John, I do. I'm glad to see you when you come home. On 11 October 2009, my husband would have been 80. I miss him.
Every year, Mabel inserts an in memoriam to her husband in the Dubbo Daily Liberal.
The dynamics of relationships in a large family test her. Now if there is conflict, she lets them work it out. 'I told one of them the other day, I'm mother for all of you. I love you, but I can't afford to get into your squabbles. She understood. Diane rings her mother every day.
Mum taught us well and I love her dearly.
Mabel has made an art of appreciating simple things, of caring for others and fighting her own battles.
There's no good of giving up. After John died, I thought, 'I got through today, I can get through tomorrow. I have learned what I can do.'
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