§4. Wartime Marriage

Patricia Foran and Gilbert Voysey were married at Woolarah Registry on Jersey Road, Paddington, on the 5th of February, 1938, with the written and surely glowing assent of the bride’s father, Stanley Foran.

The groom’s father failed to appear also, no doubt due to being in New Guinea managing a plantation, which makes Stan’s effort seem feeble by comparison. 

 If it’s slightly puzzling why the fathers were not in attendance, I find it even more curious that the wedding wasn’t held at Eastwood, and Gilbert’s aunts Emma and Doris invited. Gilbert was their charge for nearly 20 years and they utterly doted on him. They were devout Christians and church-goers, and this was surely the culmination of their fostering. Was it a rush job, a secret, did the aunts not approve? So many questions. There is one good reason, and daughter Jan has some thoughts:

I'm sure the marriage was shrouded in shame. If Mum was 19 when she had me, and she'd already had a stillborn son before me, she might have been pregnant at 17.  Also, the aunts were simple, cultured, but naïve women… I don’t think they attended a wedding in their lives.

But that’s how it went down. In love and married at last, unaware their happy romance was about to dissipate in the realities of home-making, child-raising, and trials of wartime Australia.

Pictured at right is the happy couple in 1938. A companion photograph from the same photographer, in the same locale but on a different day, includes Phil Foran. The improbability of two different captures tends to confirm they were married and living at Bondi. The second picture (see chapter 1.1) also adds to the little we know of Phil's destiny since the truant days when he disappeared from our scope. 

And so to married life.

It quickly descended into darkness and despair, when marriage should be the most creative and exhilarating time. Bonnie’s first child was stillborn, which must have clouded what should have been their happiest time. We needn’t guess at the effect this had on the couple, especially the mother. Bonnie was in good health with no pre-existing conditions likely to cause a stillbirth. A placental abnormality or infection were common and hardly the parents’ fault. 

Happily, a year later Janice Kay Voysey became the third family member, on 12th October 1939. Barely a month before, on 3rd September, Prime Minister Robert Menzies joined Britain and France to declare Australia was at war with Germany. Their daughter’s birth had the joy sucked out of it by European affairs, just as mischance had marred the first pregnancy.

The future had barely begun for the new bride and life was serving tragedy, anguish, and deep forebodings. It isn’t too hard for us to imagine the disturbed mind of the young mother as the year ended. Weeks after the birth, when she most needed the support of her husband, he joined the army. This was a grave decision for him. Despite parental imperatives, the national cause was overwhelming. It was not just a war in Europe. Japan was wreaking havoc in China and showed no signs of stopping there. 

Pictured ~ Bon and Gil Voysey with daughter Jan in 1939. He had just joined the army.

Bon and Gil, as everyone knew them, and I will call them that from now on, lived over a shop at Bondi after the wedding ceremony. It must have been a brief but wonderful time at the seaside suburb. 

Gil had worked for the NSW Department of Road Transport and Tramways as an apprenticeship patternmaker since leaving school. For reasons unknown, when his apprenticeship ended the department sacked him - just months after his marriage. Was this a government training policy or was he an unsatisfactory employee? He got work at Cockatoo Island’s shipbuilding yards in Sydney Harbour as a patternmaker, but Bon was unhappy with his working there. We don’t know why. It might have been the long commute - tram to ferry, ferry to island - lessening his time at home. 

Aged 23, two months after Australia entered the war, Gil enlisted in the army’s 2nd Workshop and Park Company at Kensington. Although closer to home, if he lived in the barracks (if there were barracks) during training the wife would have been even more upset, alone and tending her infant daughter. 

Pictured ~ Bon and Gil Voysey in late 1940 in Sydney, shortly after he joined the air force. 

Six months later he transferred to the air force as a “Carpenter Pattern Maker.” The trio moved to Eastwood and lived over a shop to be nearer Bradfield Park, a RAAF training centre created near Lane Cove river in 1940. With training completed, and no doubt adding to Bon’s increasing distress, they moved again when he was assigned to Richmond RAAF air base and found a house at 186 March Street, Richmond. 

Bon’s step father, Albert (‘Bert’ from now on) Stepto at some time during the war had joined the army with the 7th Division Engineers, A.I.F. If he was in training in 1940 it would explain the presence of Bon’s mother, Winifred, back in her life at Richmond, and who appears in several wartime photographs around Sydney with her two daughters, Bon and Des. 

I believe this was the darkest time in my mother’s life. She was not handling her role well, and the young daughter was in now the care of a mother whose personality, as the child perceived it, was a rather fearsome and unsympathetic tyrant, supported in every censure, it seemed to the timid toddler, by her able lieutenant, grandmother ‘Nanna’ Stepto.

“I ran away from home when I was 2 or 3 and went to Richmond Railway Station and requested a ticket to Aunty Ems. My aunts were much more our grandparents than Nanna (Winifred Stepto).” ~ Jan. 

Hurt lasts a lifetime. And this was not a single incident. Bon’s moodiness and ill-suppressed anger dragged on through the war years, driven by the steady flow of bad news about that war - during which, to date, Japan had sunk the British battleship Prince of Wales near Malaysia, destroyed the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbour, invaded New Guinea, and was shelling not only Darwin but Australia’s east coast. Her anxiety and helplessness was exacerbated by Gil’s frequent illnesses and chronic sinusitis, and increased with each addition to the family. Even the move closer to the air base at Faithful Street, Richmond, failed to ease matters. 

A third daughter, Lynnette, on 15th August, 1943, was, we would sadly suspect, a doubtful delight by this time. Three young girls under four years of age would try any wartime mother. She might be hoping for a son by now. Most certainly the husband would be. But the first son had been stillborn. Might the next son also be stillborn? Will there ever be a son? Should we keep trying?

Bon’s life had become an endless string of worries. A oppressive dark cloud would crease the brow of our despondent and depressed mother for almost a decade. And Jan, being the eldest, endured the never-ending brunt.

The four years spent at Richmond are chronicled by a series of military documents that describe Gil’s progress towards his medical discharge in October of 1944. Whether his release was a relief or not to Bon we cannot say, or even guess. For on one hand he was (presumably) at home to assist in the daily toil and responsibilities that had so overwhelmed and oppressed our mother. On the other, income had stopped. His military back pay was roughly six months’ wages, so at least the immediate future was not too bleak.

There was no option but to move. Again. 

Pictured ~ Winifred Stepto and her daughter Desiree with Bonnie carrying Jan. In an era when clothes maketh the person, Wini kept herself and children smartly dressed. 

We don’t know when Winifred - Nanna Stepto to us - moved to Burns Road, Springwood. For her it was a return to an old stomping ground. For the young Voysey family it was a leap into the unknown. Bon and her mother’s again destinies remained tied, afor in 1944 Gil Voysey bought a nine acre farmlet at the very end of Burns Road and there the family moved. 

Gil’s sinusitis was severe, and disabling enough to be discharged from wartime duties. One might ask why he wasn’t transferred to a military role that didn’t aggravate this affliction. His medical history in those four air force years would answer that, for it was not only his sinusitis but other ailments including an unexplained testicular swelling and various ailments that landed him in the base infirmary. Maybe at Winifred’s suggestion, the young couple were sold on the “clean air of the mountains” and a fresh start away from the coal-burning industries of the Sydney basin. Australian cities mid last century were coal-burners, their air heavily polluted.

Stan Foran loaned Gil £400 to buy a farm. That’s four hundred Australian pounds, almost twice a tradesman’s annual wage at the time. As for the “farm,” it was a shabby run-down five room house in a small clearing on a property of mostly uncleared mountainous bushland. We now wonder why such a place was even considered, and not a normal house - especially in retrospect, as we’ll see shortly the ongoing difficulties it brought on the family. Hopeful dreaming could have been a factor. Gil had studied agriculture by correspondence in 1943, or signed up for it that year, so he probably envisaged living off the land, or getting a job in that industry. Winifred had moved to Burns Road, so it was natural for the Voyseys to choose nearby. Maybe this sad little farmlet was all they could afford.

There can be little doubt that Stan Foran offered Gil work in painting and signwriting - if not only to help his daughter’s family, but to ensure his loan got repaid! Stan’s offer would have been irresistible. It had the upside of immediate income, so that Gil could buy food and clothing for five people and meet expenses of a move and settling in. It promised a career when the dream of farming the stony infertile mountain loam had fully evaporated. 

To any young man a new property and a new job would be a source of optimism and pride. But for his wife it was the worst possible outcome. Springwood became an immediate and devastating situation, wherein her husband was, yet again, absent from the home, possibly for weeks at a time, with she alone (again!) with the children. Far, far worse: there was no electricity, no town water, no telephone, and not a friendly neighbour or helping hand in sight.

Pictured ~ The young family at Richmond. Christmas, perhaps 1943. Kerrie at left.

In 1944 after the move to Springwood, Bon Voysey’s state of mind reached an entirely new low point, as Jan will later testify.

War still raged across the globe. Although the reality of a Japanese invasion had long passed, maintaining the myth suited the financial interests of the newspapers. That probably suited the morale police too, and they kept silent. Australians would not lose their anxiety until the very end, and that was still a year in the future.

Bon Voysey was now alone with three small children in a decrepit, isolated house miles from town - without electricity, running water, or telephone. Although neighbours were nearby, they were beyond sight of the house. Every day there was much to do and none of it easy. In the freezing Blue Mountains winters if wood was not cut and split, the stove could not cook, the fireplace could not warm, and the tank water would not be heated to bathe, nor the boiler fired to wash clothes. 

As the year 1945 progressed, optimism grew about the war. The Japanese were being driven from the Pacific and Asia. In Europe the Germans were retreating, giving up their conquests. But just months before World War 2 was to end, Stan Foran got news that his son, Phillip Darcy Foran, Bon's cherished brother and best friend, with whom she had shared her vagrant and tumultuous childhood, was dead. Killed by a land mine set by the Americans who had mislaid their maps. 

A lifetime ago, it would now seem, Bon Voysey lived in a wealthy Vaucluse home surrounded by symbols of affluence and prosperity. Her future could only be this and more, she believed. But, in a mere six years, events far beyond her control had led her to a miserable predicament. For although the war was over, Bon Voysey’s situation was, in her mind, now permanent. There was no escape.