Media: paperback - 142 pages 
Author: J. Penna
Year: 1992

Our family lived in a back-to-front house. It had been built before the district was surveyed, and was left standing with its back door facing the street, and the front door looking down the long back garden.

In the early 1900s ten children were reared in this small house—a family whose roots were in Cornwall, England. The Cornish grandmother had a definite place in the family and parental control of the children was absolute. Birth came often to the little back-to-front house, and death sometimes, but life, often happy, at times full of hardship, went staunchly forward.

This is a true story of a Bendigo family

From the first chapter

Our family lived in a back-to-front house. It had been built before the district was surveyed, and was left standing with its back door facing the street, and the front door looking down the long back garden.

Bendigo, in Central Victoria, was a mining town and we grew up relying on the mine whistles to tell us the time—day and night. Each mine had its own distinctive whistle, and the children all knew which ones blew at breakfast, dinner, school, home, and shift-work times.

Our family was a large one, often enlarged further by Grandma’s busy presence. We all loved her, with her long black skirts, snowy aprons, and—for shopping and church—her black bonnet trimmed with braid and dangling jet beads. This she sat on top of her scarcely grey bun of hair and fastened it firmly with elegantly coloured hat pins.

She told us tales of Cornwall, where she had been born, and she made us mind our manners and say our prayers. One of the great treats was to go with her to church on Sundays, lustily sing the hymns and put a penny into the collection plate. Grandma went to the Methodists but called herself a Wesleyan. Once, when a girl, she had heard John Wesley preach, a wonderful experience she said, and though Mum and Dad were Church of England, I secretly wished 1 could be Wesleyan too. Then perhaps I’d have pennies to spend on school books.

With my brothers and sisters I went to Golden Square State School No. 1189, but hated it when I had to go without books—boots—and sometimes even without breakfast. But generally we liked school.

Our lives were crowded, cluttered, and noisy, often happy and rumbustious, sad at times to the point of tragedy, poor in all worldly goods, yet full of warm affection and companionship.

The ten children of John and Annabel Leech—eight girls and two boys—were all born between the years nineteen hundred and three and nineteen eighteen. I arrived in nineteen-hundred-and-nine, the fifth child and the fourth girl ...