Our life as a family was very happy, even though much of it occurred during the Great Depression. In our house, this led, symbolically, to the use of lard instead of butter and torn-up newspaper as toilet paper. Mother was the ‘Rock of Gibraltar’, loving to all of us, very supportive of Father at home and indispensable on his overseas trips. She was helped in the house from time to time by her unmarried sisters, especially Christina (Crin), who came over from 101 Eyre Street and lived with us for months at a time. Another Aunt, Anna, died in our house in 1927. For all of the children, it was our first experience of death.
In his otherwise perceptive essay (see Chapter 14), Hyams comments that Charles Fenner was ‘a rather stern father to his children’, presumably because he ‘never took them to sports games; instead he delighted to conduct them on nature study walks and expeditions’. The latter statements are correct, but in the collective memory of the three children currently alive, Frank, Winn and Bill, he was anything but a stern father; the children had little interest in watching sports games but considerable interest in playing them, and we all delighted in the nature study walks and drives. As noted in the testimonial written at the time Father left the Ballarat School of Mines, Charles Fenner had ‘the power of inspiring in his students a love for the subjects he teaches’, and this applied to his children as well.
As well as the usual bedrooms, bathroom (water heated as required by burning paper), ‘front’ room and dining room (both used mainly for visitors, although we used to sit in front of the dining room fire in winter), kitchen and bedrooms, there was a large room at the back of the house, the ‘den’, which was sacrosanct. It was here that Father wrote his scientific papers and fortnightly articles for The Australasian, and the shelves and desks were filled with his papers. Besides his own extensive library, Father bought us Arthur Mee's The Children's Encyclopedia and we were encouraged to use it whenever we asked a question, and among the other books was a series on the Myths and Legends of Greece and Rome, which I remember reading from end to end. We had plenty of space to play in the back garden and the lawn on Alexandra Avenue, and for much of the time we had a much-loved dog, a fox terrier named ‘Flinders’, after the great explorer. We had fowls and different children had responsibility for looking after them as we grew up.
Associated with his government work, in the early years Father had use of a car and chauffeur, and later we had our own car. As well as his use of the car for driving to work, the family were often taken for drives to Golden Grove and Teatree Gully, in the Mt Lofty foothills, and during the Christmas holidays, trips to various parts of South Australia (notably the tip of Yorke Peninsula) and Victoria, where the majority of our relatives, on both sides of the family, lived. These were memorable because Father knew so much about the geology, wildlife, plants and human history of the countryside and explained it all to us.
Other experiences that remain in my memory were the summer holidays on a wheat farm at Ebenezer, near Kapunda, which was owned by German relatives on my mother's side, the Kleinigs. It was wonderful for city kids to be able to wander in the countryside, see horses and cows at first hand, participate in the reaping, have a chance to try milking the cows, and enjoy the family meals, always preceded by a prayer in German (which I could not understand).