ELEANORA LELLO
12 February 1901 - 23 March 1991
by her youngest daughter Gwyneth
She was simply Mum, the ever-lasting fountain of love I drank from. Compared with the appalling lives some children have, we inhabited a kind of heaven. My shy mother did a perfectly marvellous job, while battling with terrible difficulties, including being away from her own Tasmanian family, who had played such a huge part in her life.
She and my father planned their whole lives around their children, choosing a beautiful city to raise us in, top schools, and never questioning the cost of anything we needed.
***
As luck would have it, my mother, whom I shall refer to as Nell, wrote a great deal about her own life in her published memoir, A Tasmanian Girlhood. Regrettably, she stopped at the point where she left Queenstown after Christmas 1926. When I began trying to work out what she did between then and my first memories of her in 1940, I was amazed to realise just how little I knew.
First, a rough summary of where Nell got to, and when:
1901 February - 1903 West Tamar, Frankford, Beaconsfield.
1903-1918 Queenstown
1918 March-July Gormanston, July-December Wynyard
1919 January-July Not teaching, perhaps back in Queenstown. July-December Hobart
1920 Jan-July Not teaching, perhaps Queenstown. July Birralee
1921 Birralee
1922 January to August Birralee
1922 September-December Gunn’s Plains
1923 Strahan
1924 Strahan
1925 January to June Strahan
1926 July to December South Queenstown
1927 Marrickville, Sydney
1928 to 1930 Mudgee
1931 to 1933 Rockdale
1933 March to December England, temporarily in Essex
1934-1937 Middlesex
1938-1940 Birmingham
1940-1946 Kidsgrove, Staffordshire
1946-1966 Norwich, Norfolk
1966-1980 Highcliffe, Dorset
1981-1982 Bracknell, Berkshire
1983-1991 Melbourne, Australia
***
Nell, named Eleanora after her father’s Scottish grandmother, was the first girl to survive in a family of nine. There was always something of a mystery about exactly where Nell was born until recently, when the truth came to light. She was born in the house of Alfred Hopper Traill, now number 102 on the South Frankford Road. On the birth registration entry, her mother Bessie gave a home address in Beaconsfield. Maybe my grandfather didn't trust his Johnston in-laws with the delicate task of minding his young pregnant wife and his first little son while he was away looking for work in Queenstown.
Her own mother, known familiarly as Bessie, was a domestic servant of pedigree Tasmanian stock, one of eight sisters and half-sisters. Nell said her Johnston grandparents were 'immigrant dairy farmers' living somewhere on the north coast 'behind' Launceston. This was a shade inaccurate: the Johnstons were farm workers, and her other ancestors were a mix – one free settler and two transported convicts. Some of them, including her mother's aunts and uncles, weren't averse to a little hanky panky – all still going on when Nell was born in Frankford in West Tamar.
Nell's Johnston grandfather died before she was born. She perhaps saw her Tasmanian grandmother when she was too tiny to remember – Maria died in 1905. Nell's English relatives were an even more unknown quantity – she only met her Lello grandmother, Eleanora Crocket, in her very old age in Cheltenham in England.
Her own 'hard man' Anglo-Scottish father, ex-grammar-school boy Harry (Thomas Henry Lello), arrived at the age of 16 in Tasmania in 1885. He was following his rich uncles who somehow managed to leave the youth on his own in Tasmania. By all accounts short of stature, Harry laboured first in the mine in Beaconsfield, then in the Mt Lyell machine shops in Queenstown. In his spare time he played the piano, violin, cello and double bass, and tended his garden.
Why did he stay, raising his children in a life of near poverty, when he could have worked in an office in England and lived a middle-class – wealthy even – life? We shall never know, but it makes a good story, and means Nell spent her girlhood in a dusty, smoky valley, with a polluted river running at the foot of the garden in a house her father built with his own hands. Her mother had to work to supplement the family income. Nell was held back, she always felt. She wasn't, it has been said, the only one of the children unable to pursue her dreams: others had to work rather than continue their studies.
Yet Queenstown life seemed to do Nell no physical harm. She grew into a ruggedly healthy woman, even if without her own teeth and tonsils. She was seldom ill. She would have the occasional cold. She had scarlet fever during the war, and had her appendix out. She had an operation in old age on her oesophagus. She had her hip replaced. But otherwise, she was of strong stuff. She had her five children with apparent ease and stoicism, the first when she was already 32. Less than two years later, she gave birth to full-term and full-size identical twin girls (she breast-fed them together, one propped on each arm of an armchair). She had two more children before she was 39.
She never complained. She quite simply got on with it.
***
As the oldest girl, Nell took a big part in raising the younger children, something she always felt competed with her career aspirations. She would have done this well: she was completely at ease with little ones, and as a housekeeper being naturally, patient, kindly, firm, and inventive.
She had all the domestic skills: she was a superb cook, a capable needlewoman, a brilliant improviser. She knew how to starch and iron linen, the proper way to fold sheets so that they open across the bed with a sharp flourish. I reasoned she learned these techniques from her domestic servant mother, right down to how to swaddle a baby to quieten it, laying it on its side, right side one sleep, left the other. How to make a mattress from chaff, bake the contents in the oven to sterilise them, make a little nest for the baby. Line a nappy with dried sphagnum moss. Rock a baby to sleep, change the nappy with the baby on your knee (no plastic pads in those days), talk and sing to the baby while pushing it out in the pram (no bored babies at knee height in pushers, facing away, their mothers behind them, glued to their mobiles).
While we were girls, she was always busy with her hands: knitting (later with a machine), sewing, mending, dressmaking, rug making, leatherwork, even crocheting and embroidery. She cooked, cleaned, wrote letters home, took occasional photographs, sang, worried, read, argued behind closed doors with my father, and openly with us. Her rule of thumb was ‘Never say no to a child if you can say yes.’ She seldom said 'no' to anyone: it wasn't her nature.
***
Nell’s mother worked in the Queenstown area as an unqualified community nurse, midwife and wet nurse. She wanted Nell to train for nursing. Nell refused, even though this would have enabled her to escape Queenstown. Instead, when her home duties allowed, she became a pupil teacher at the age of 14.
But her career was interrupted: her mother had more children. Nell was made to stay home to mind them. She once said how much she wished her mother had lavished as much attention upon her own children as she did on other people, and how she wished her father had been less remote, stern, and unapproachable. I have no doubt, though, that without my grandmother's income, the whole family would have suffered. Nell's father wasn't going to go crawling to his wealthy English family for help.
***
What did Nell look like? She had straight, glossy chestnut brown hair and rich dark brown eyes. Her skin was pale. The impact of Australia's hot, drying, sun showed in the creases on her forehead. She smiled seldom but shyly. Her gaze was strong, slightly grim and staring, as if she was reading the situation. I’m sure she was. She had powers of observation that left all of us standing, even if she wasn't a particularly good judge of people. I think English refinement baffled her. A polite smile was, to her, a mark of genuineness. She was taken in time and again.
What was she like as a mother? She was the angel in the house, working tirelessly at her home duties and seeing to our needs. She filled our lives with music – she had a fine and rich contralto voice. She arranged for us all to learn two or more instruments. She had a word for everything, or a quote from the Bible, or a little snatch from a song. She taught us how to do mental arithmetic using all kinds of handy techniques, checked our homework, taught us the rules of spelling, watching over her growing family with a sense of puzzlement: our school world was soon completely unlike her own. Yet she never gave up trying to teach us: she read avidly and broadened her own knowledge and understanding of the world until she was too old to see.
She was, I think, one of the best – gentle, modest, unpretentious, long-suffering, patient, and her own worst enemy. She let herself be used, and she was basically too shy and accepting to fight much or for long, even against us. We once found her, in retreat, weeping inside the tiny back pantry with the door pulled to. She simply couldn't cope with her big argumentative daughters.
***
So what about her career? Her teaching records, as shown in the Appendix, reveal a giddy series of schools, some appointments for a few months only. She began in Linda, moved to Wynyard, went to college in Hobart, on to Birralee, Gunn’s Plains, Strahan, South Queenstown. Over to the mainland. Marrickville, Mudgee and Rockdale.
At Rockdale Girls School, she lived in lodgings at Arncliffe. There she met her English-born future husband, Frederick Trevor Daniel, known as Trevor. The story Nell told was that my father was taken in as one of two male lodgers after a burglary in her all-female boarding house: they would act as a deterrent, or safeguard the women. The burglary happened while Nell was out. She lost the family jewellery (said to have come down the Crocket side) that her father fetched from England in 1923, all bar two items she was wearing at the time – a solid silver bracelet, and a gold necklace with small topaz pendants.
Trevor was a persistent suitor, and an educated man with a good future. But Nell was not free to marry. She was paid £285 15s. 4d. per annum, a pretty good salary. Marrying would have been a breach of contract and she would have had to be re-engaged on a lower salary. So they married secretly in November 1932. Nell continued to teach, masquerading under her maiden name. I can imagine the excitement of this forbidden marriage: sneaking into each others’ rooms at night, Nell only wearing her wedding ring when they were away from the gaze of anyone who might find out.
***
They set off for England in March, 1933. Their first child was born in August in Essex. Although intending some time to return to Australia, they began a way of life very little different from almost everyone else’s in their own social context: he worked, she cared for the family.
They had enough income to afford domestic help. They lived in a series of semi-detached houses in large suburban estates, with three or four bedrooms, a rear garden, transport nearby, and neighbours on all sides who lived mainly middle-class existences.
Hitler was soon on the move in Europe. Britain began rearming as early as 1936. By then twin girls were born. My father was snaffled to work in the munitions business: going back was no longer an option until war was over. Nell's life changed in ways she could never have foreseen. She described this period as 'the most exciting' in her life. War began not long after I was born. The cosy suburban existence evaporated. After being split up as a family twice through evacuation during the bombing of Birmingham, we moved to Kidsgrove in Staffordshire. By then, my brother had arrived to complete the family.
Trevor was now Deputy Superintendent (from 1940 to 1946) at Radway Green Royal Ordnance factory. He and Nell rented a damp, late Georgian red-brick cottage in half an acre of garden, opposite the infants’ school and the church. The old cemetery stood on one side, at the foot of the garden lay a canal, down a steep drop to water and a towpath. Two doors away was a busy railway line. There were old ventilation shafts to mines in the wood beyond the school up the hill in the wood. There was a lake not far off.
It wore Nell out and worried her. The dangers of the canal robbed her of peace of mind, but at least we were more or less insulated from the worst effects of the war. Nell had seen that at close quarters: two incendiary bombs hit our house in Birmingham. She had even brought home an evacuee from the doodle-bug blitzing of London, and nearly managed to adopt him as a mate for my brother. He talked almost obsessively at first about the bomb sites on which he played. Nell must have been very relieved my father's work allowed us to live in a safer spot.
***
With the end of war came big changes: Nell now had teenage children. She and Trevor moved us to the beautiful cathedral city of Norwich, in East Anglia, to a six-bedroom Victorian house on a main road, bought at auction, an executor’s sale. We were 25 miles from the sea, and the countryside was ideal for cycling. Big city life with a challenging adolescent family put Nell sorely to the test. Our grammar-school education was a mystery to her, but that's another story.
It puzzled me that Nell didn’t find a way to return to teaching. But I now think she worked out that she had two things against her: her slender colonial training (a crash six-month course with some distance learning afterwards), and her accent. In some circles colonial accents were a curiosity, unnecessary and ugly. Decent Australian girls, surely, speak the King’s English? In an outrageous display of gutter manners, one of my father’s colleagues once told him he couldn’t understand why Trevor had brought ‘that low-grade woman’ back to England with him. I hope the man in question suffered a long and painful death.
***
The war trapped Nell and Trevor in England: going back was too far, too dangerous. By August 1939, German U-boats were already stalking naval convoys from their battle stations in the North Atlantic. Nazi armies were ranging across half of Europe. Trevor had already been commandeered for the war effort. He was managing the production of munitions, first in Birmingham, then from 1940 at Radway Green. He could not have got away from Britain.
This separation from her homeland must have been hard for my mother in more than one way. Looking back, I think it must have affected her to be so far from her own family. Certainly, she was used to being away from home, and plainly didn't want to live in Queenstown, or even Tasmania. But she came from a large family. Now, she was isolated. I think it influenced her naturally sober disposition. She was quite often gloomy and distracted.
I was too young to be conscious of Nell’s father dying in March 1940, five days before my brother was born. She never talked about this, except to tell me that both my grandfathers were dead. I was more conscious of Nell’s nephew Allan drowning in Queenstown. The news came when I was four and shocked us all. I don’t, though, recall Nell’s sister Jean dying in 1939 when she was only 23. Later, Mother talked about how grief-stricken she had been at the thought of Jean's baby girl with no mother. She even considered sending for her, but she need not have worried: the family raised her in Tasmania.
One day in the spring of 1953, when I was 14, and only Geoffrey and I were still at home, I came downstairs to go to school, to find my father hadn’t gone to work. He was sitting at the dining table with his arm round my mother. She was wiping her eyes. In front of them on the table was the familiar blue airmail letter. My Tasmanian grandmother had died. Nell mourned quietly for a while.
***
Our house in Norwich, 102 Earlham Road, was a double-fronted Victorian grey brick terrace house. We had plenty of space to spread, and a main bus service stopped outside, while there was a phone box and a church opposite. Nell found it handy for shopping: there was a good butcher round the corner, a post office, and a tuppenny ride into the marvellous outdoor market, with its excellent fresh vegetables and fish stalls. The city had good choirs, orchestras, sports facilities – everything needed for our tastes and interests.
Once we children had all left home, with Trevor retired from industry, he and Nell moved to an estate bungalow at Highcliffe on Sea, then in Hampshire. They set about travelling – to America with my sister Brenda to see my brother, their first trip back to Australia, all round Britain in a campervan, and finally, each year, to their winter apartment on the beach of southern Spain. They loved the drive across from Bilbão in the autumn then back again in spring. They would return to England for Easter each year, fit and brown, until Trevor’s health forbade it. They sold the apartment the year before he died. I think he knew he was on his way out.
Spain gave Nell just the kind of interlude after raising her children that she needed. She set about learning Spanish and cooking the Spanish way. They walked the hills, marvelled at the spring flowers, mixed with their Spanish landlord and his family. Nell baby-sat and taught their children English. I don’t doubt she had some of her happiest moments in that small ground-floor apartment, with its French windows that opened direct on to the beach, and the view of the blue line of mountains ranged behind the coast. When I think of it, it was a kind of repetition of Tasmania. I wonder if she spotted that.
There was a blot on the bliss, though. When Nell and Trevor went back to Australia on a long trip in 1973, their first since leaving, Nell barely spoke about it when they got back. They were both confronted with what they had lost, and I think it hurt them both. After all, the whole of their families were either on the mainland or in Tasmania.
Now, the darkest shadow of all soon fell upon them: my sister was probably going to die. They didn’t know my father’s days were numbered too. He was diagnosed shortly before he died with multiple myeloma.
***
After my father died in 1980, Nell sold up their bungalow in Highcliffe, and moved to a ground-floor flat in Bracknell, Berkshire, just round the corner from my own little house. But she couldn’t settle. She had trouble walking. She had a mini-stroke one day while we were eating lunch. So I persuaded her to take a trip to Australia to try it out, believing the warmth would help with her aching joints. She stayed, so I sold her flat and some of her possessions, then shipped what she wanted out to Melbourne. She went from my sister’s house but was still restless for some years.
One big advantage to being in Australia was that she at last had her much-needed hip operation (the waiting list in England was years long). Before this, she came back once, in time to see my first grandchild and for my wedding in 1984. She explored with me coming back to England to live with me, but we counted it out. Wherever she turned there were children: she'd had enough of that. Nor could she cope with English houses with their staircases.
When her hip operation was over, I flew out to see her, arriving not long after she had come out from recovery. The nurse showed me in. The curtains were drawn round the bed. White as the pillow, Nell lay on her back with her eyes closed. I thought she was dead. I steeled myself.
“Is that you Gwyn?”
I laughed. “Of course.”
“Shush,” she said, without opening her eyes. “Listen. Next door.” She was fascinated by the goings-on in the next cubicle, and had been sticky-beaking, following some entertaining thread in the conversation.
I stayed in Melbourne until I was satisfied she was up and walking. Her young surgeon took her on to the landing, left her standing, moved away and put out his hands for her to walk to him. I’ll never forget her creeping towards him, a mix of anxiety and amusement on her face. He hugged her. They laughed. He was in love with her, I think. The men always were.
The surgeon who repaired her hip just before she died, used to take his lunch up to her ward on a tray and sit beside her. I once found him trying to tempt her to taste his pudding.
***
In Melbourne, Nell decided to give up the idea of living with any of us and moved into Ellerslie, a home for ageing people. There she had a small room and kitchenette with access directly into the gardens. She pottered about happily enough, and pruned the roses. When Ellerslie shut down, she moved to an upstairs home, accessed by lift. The walls closed in on her. She hated it. When she fell and dislocated her hip, she had forgotten to put on her panic button. She lay on the floor for hours before someone came to check on her.
She’d already broken her arm. Her knees were packing up. She had glaucoma and cataracts. She was thin and shrivelled beyond belief. The strapping 5'9” woman I had known, was now a tiny waif. The quality of her life was finally so poor she no longer had the will to continue.
Nell passed her 90th birthday in hospital with her three surviving daughters with her. She died shortly after.
***
The finale in this account of Nell’s life is a marvellous tale that would have appealed to her wry sense of humour. Her ashes were to be interred, at her request, in the same grave at Highcliffe in England, along with Brenda’s coffin, and my father’s little casket of remains. She was cremated in Melbourne. The funeral was set up in England. The English family assembled.
But her box of ashes had not arrived. The vicar, my oldest sister and I, entered a secret conspiracy. We buried an empty box. When the ashes arrived, they had been walkabout to Christchurch in New Zealand. My sister and I returned with the Vicar, the box was disinterred and the ashes buried again with a short, sweet ceremony.
Her final joke was on us, her family. That’s quite normal for Tasmania, I'm told. And she did have that kind of humour. One of my abiding memories is of her chasing me round the garden at Kidsgrove, brandishing a cane. I have no idea what I had done wrong, but plainly it was pretty bad. I suddenly realised she was laughing. She went on laughing as she caught me and whacked me. Years later I asked how she could have been so callous as to laugh while she beat me. She side-stepped my question and told it how it had been – her sense of the ridiculous had overtaken her.
‘It was so funny. You were very carefully running the long way to escape me. Along the path, round all the corners, instead of cutting across the newly sown lawn. Dad had told you not to walk on it until he said.'
I didn't have the heart to blame her for that.
Dorset, 2 April 2005
APPENDIX
ELEANORA LELLO'S TEACHING CAREER
Nell’s Tasmanian school records in the Hobart archives, and her later New South Wales and Sydney records, detail her progress.
In preparation for training, Nell taught in the school at Linda while lodging in Gormanston. This was a fair walk down the hill. I can picture her labouring up there after a hard day with the children. She was there from 4th March to 7th July 1919. The Hobart Record Office holds the staff pay records from this first job: Book 1918, Gormanston area, Linda school, position 2A, date of appointment 4.3.1919, net salary £90+£10, transferred to the Table Cape Area school of Wynyard on 1.7.1919.
She would have taken the railway train through the mountains. She might have alighted at Wynyard – the lines are still there, and it’s not hard to locate where the railway station was. The school still stands, and the Information Centre has a book showing a photograph of the original school in Hogg Street, before it was extended. It now serves as a play school.
At Wynyard (probably lodging in Burnie which she referred to in her memoir, the next large town along the railway track) she taught as ‘TA’ (temporary assistant) until the end of 1919, then started her training in Hobart.
The 1918 staff records say the course ran from July to December. On graduating from Philip Smith College she took up her first appointment at the Westbury area school of Birralee. The 1921 staff pay book says this appointment began on 1st July 1920 so there is an error somewhere over the timing of her college course, or she taught somewhere else between college and this appointment, or was perhaps looking for work.
Nell’s appointment at Birralee ran for 18 months and she is still remembered in the village. The school was Class 6, and there were 3 rooms in the residence. The school had an average attendance of 24.4. She was paid £160 per annum. The old school can still be found at the top of the hill, converted now to a house. The Sturzaker family, with whom she lodged, still live in the area and in 2003, a surviving member remembered her.
Nell then moved to Gunns Plains, another Class 6 school, starting on the 1.2.1922, earning £170 per annum. There were only 17.7 children on average in the school and she was described as a ‘UT’ (under teacher). The school doubled as the church, so the desks had to be put away on Friday ready for Sunday. It was recently moved from the top of the hill to a field in the valley, and was open to be seen in 2003. By 2005, it is reputed to have been knocked down. This is a true desecration of Tasmania’s heritage. The building should have been listed for preservation as an example of a school and church combined.
On 1.1.1923 Nell moved to Strahan and taught there under George. D. McPhail at School number 685. She lived with the Andrews family above the bank where Mr Andrews worked. There are still old residents who recall ‘Miss Lello’. Rhyllis Andrews gave her name to Nell’s oldest daughter, and took a memorable photograph of her. The Andrews girls were also teachers. Nell talked about fishing for cray from rocks in the harbour, and about a number of sailing escapades.
Two and a half years later, on 1st July 1925, she moved back to South Queenstown where she spent only 6 months. The school was just across the river from her old family home, and her little brothers and sisters were pupils. The twins were still there, aged around 10 or 11.
The 1926 pay book (page 120) shows her as a Teacher ‘A’, appointed 1.1.26, 3B, on £190+15 pounds pa. Her resignation was noted on 31.12.1926. It is tempting to wonder whether her quick departure was brought about by finding that she was once again minding the babies.
According to Nell’s own notes, she gave classes in eurythmics, and taught children to sight-read music by the tonic solfa method, as well as sing spontaneously in harmony.
She also trained a girls’ baseball team in Queenstown which toured the Tasmanian west playing other schools. (On the mainland, she told the author, she played goalie for a ladies’ hockey team, using her voluminous skirt to help trap the ball. She also learned to play golf and to ride.)
When encouraged by a friend’s tales of liberated life and broader horizons on the mainland, Nell next moved to Sydney. She started her service in New South Wales Department of Education on 24th January 1927.
She was first posted to Marrickville, an inner city girls’ Domestic Science school, probably lodging in Randwick nearby which she mentions in her memoir. Her staff card states that she was paid at the annual rate of £183 11s 11d. There she found she had to re-sit her examinations: her Tasmanian qualification was not accepted. The Education Department letter, dated 19th July 1927, advised that she must pass in all prescribed subjects for Third Class, ie English, Education, History, Geography, Arithmetic and Music, along with two optional subjects and the necessary three preliminary subjects, Reading, Writing and Dictation.
She was not quick to respond: she wrote to the Inspector of Schools on 9th March 1928, citing her performance ratings and applying for a permanent position while she took some of her examination subjects that June. The notes in the margin state that she was not, as she thought, a Temporary Teacher, but already on the permanent staff. She left Marrickville on 23rd May 1928 to travel north.
On 1st June that year she began in a post in the public school at Mudgee with an increased salary – by one shilling and eight pence a week. In her examinations, she intended taking English, Education and Arithmetic, along with the three basic skills. Her application to take her papers on 19th August in Sydney was dated 5th June 1929. She listed them all, including two options: Hygiene and Art.
In a second letter she stated that as the last subject to be examined was on Monday morning, she would need leave of absence from duty on that day. The Chief Inspector frostily responded at the foot of her application, in typescript, that ‘I recommend that Miss Lello be allowed to sit in Sydney but as this would complete her subjects by 11.30 a.m. on Monday 19th I further recommend that she be instructed to attend some practice school in Sydney for that afternoon.’ As Mudgee is some distance from Sydney, that was not a particularly kind thing to suggest. Doubtless, however, he knew the transport system as well as anyone, so she would be ‘working’ all evening too.
A notice to her dated 15th November 1929 gives her examination results: Reading Pass, Writing Pass, Dictation Pass, English Credit, Arithmetic Fail, Education Credit. The letter set out those she still had to do: Arithmetic — plainly a re-take, Geography, History, Music and her two optional subjects. Her results statement dated 18th November 1929 gave her full results: Arithmetic Pass, Geography Credit, History Pass, Music Theory and Practical Pass, Hygiene Credit, Art Credit (including Black Drawing, Brushwork, Modelling, Arch and Orn. Modelling – the only one for which she gained ‘Pass’ rather than credit.)
Nell was plainly neither a willing nor great performer in written examinations. However, she did not lack determination: on 26th November 1929 she wrote to the Chief Inspector of Schools in Sydney, pointing out that she had fulfilled all the requirements for Class III and had As in performance and that she would like to be promoted to Class IIIA rather than continue on IIIB. The Chief Inspector’s note at the foot of her application stated: ‘I consider that Miss Lello is one of the most competent teachers in the Mudgee Inspectorate and, if the Regulations permit, should be classified 3A as soon as allowable.’ From 1st January 1930 she was promoted to teacher Class IIIA.
She was soon to move to Rockdale and meet her future husband.