“It’s not a brick house, because we couldn’t get bricks. After the war you couldn’t get brick, we only got enough bricks to lay a foundation. I wanted the house further down the block so we’d have more back yard, because the wind tears you apart in the front, although as it happens it didn’t really matter. You couldn’t get tiles, you couldn’t get lots of things. We waited for months for tiles, and for about two months we only had sarking on the roof. It took a long time to build a house. And you had to pay in advance for everything, to get anything. It would have been nice to have been brick. It’s fibro.

“And then the children arrived one after the other. When they came in and handed me her ladyship, they said ‘here’s the nought that goes with the 2, 4 and 6’. Then there wasn’t enough room so Cec decided to put the extension on at the back.”

– Kathleen Catterall, 16 June 2016

Photo by Nina Kourea