As Time Goes By

Sung by my favourite singer, Rudy Vallee 1931

You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by

And when two lovers woo, they still say, “I love you”
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by

It is the 25^th August, 1933 and it is my 16^th birthday.  My name is Elsa May Hall although my birth certificate says Elsie Mary Hall.  The woman who registered my name made a mistake with my middle name and I don’t like Elsie.  Elsa is much more grown up.

This is me when I was younger. I can’t find any recent photos.

My mother gave me a gold bracelet for my 16^th birthday.  She wants to start a family tradition of passing it down to the firstborn girl in each generation of the family.  I wonder will I have a daughter to give it to?  I find it a bit unusual as it has her hair plaited inside it.  Apparently, some admirer of hers gave it to her but she didn’t marry him.  When she was 20 she ran away with a much older man (my father) and they were married in Melbourne. I was born in 1917 in a little railway cottage in Williamstown.  My mother was very sick afterwards and nearly died.  I started school in Williamstown when I was six so I was much older than the other children.  I was only at the school a short while when my mother said, “We are leaving on a train to go to Sydney today.” I didn’t ever see my father again.

Mother rented a house in Glebe and I started school at Forest Lodge.  I was happy there, as I made one very close friend called Ruth.  My favourite thing to do when I got home from school was to ride my scooter down the gently sloping path in Jubilee Park.  Ruth told me I was too old to ride a scooter but I loved the feeling of speed and the wind in my hair. I remember one day when I was in sixth class rushing in the front door, telling my mother excitedly about my promotion in the netball team.  She told me to sit down and listen.  She said that times were hard and dressmaking jobs were scarce so we were moving to Queensland.  She had a job at a cattle station as a housekeeper and cook so there would be food, accommodation and some money as well.  I didn’t realise that the cattle station was a long way from the nearest town of Charleville.  Nor did I realise the nearest high school was in Roma, hundreds of miles away.

It took several days to travel to Roma by train.  Instead of going to the cattle station, Mother took me to a hostel for students whose homes were a long way from the school.  I hated it.  I didn’t make friends and the food was awful.  I started school at Roma High School but was very unhappy.  In fact, I thought about running away but where would I go? I sent so many letters to Mother she must have realised that something needed to be done.  One weekend she arrived and took me to a house near the school.  The owner had a spare bedroom and said she would treat me like her own daughter.  At least now I had my own room but I didn’t like the woman at all.  She would make notes if I did anything to displease her and then she would send letters to my mother.  She also expected me to do housework the minute I got home from school and I didn’t think that was part of the agreement so we argued a lot.

It all came to an end when I made a friend.  Like me, he was an outsider.  His parents were Greek and ran the local fish and chip shop. We would walk home from school together and one day the snoopy landlady saw us.  Of course, she wrote to Mother straight away and said I was “boy mad”.  Mother arrived next weekend and decided that as I was almost 15, it was time to leave school and start dressmaking.

I thought I might be living with Mother at the station but a letter arrived to say my father had died and his sister (my aunt) was offering me accommodation while I did my training as a dressmaker.  Before I knew it, I was travelling by train to Williamstown, which I had left nearly ten years earlier.

I am now working at Lucy Secors.  It is a dressmaking firm which employs hundreds of girls, training them from the ground up.  I spend two or three months perfecting each part of a garment.  Starting with seams I progressed to collars and then to sleeves and buttonholes.  It is all very boring.  My aunt and uncle are quiet people, and my cousin is not at all exciting.  

1927 advertisement in “The Home” magazine for Lucy Secor from Circa Vintage Clothing Archive 4th June 2015

So here I am.  Everyone expects me to work my way up through the ranks at Lucy Secors until I become a manager or get married.  I have a good mind to pack it in at the end of the year and go back up to Queensland.  Maybe I can get a job dressmaking with what I have learnt. What does my future hold? I hope it’s a bit more exciting than my life has been so far.  Things have got to get better.