I think the most thing that excited me mostly was when they put a man on the moon. The marvelous part was going to bed at night and looking up at the moon and thinking, “There’s a man out there!” It was marvelous, I thought. Well, my name is Myfanwy Lavie. I was born in Perth, WA, on the 27th of July, 1924 My mother was Yvonne Levy and she had been a nurse. A good mother and I look back on, these days, I realized she was very strong. I didn't at the time of course. Theone, my sister, was a quiet sort of child. No trouble. I was more trouble. I know not very much of my father. His name was Ernest Brown, and he worked at Parliament House. I did have a brother who died early, My mother called him Athelstan because she thought he might be a doctor and Athelstan Brown sounded rather good. We thought that was very funny. My grandfather, who was a very successful tailor, he bought this wheat farm which was a failure. And I remember a big pile of wood and the dog used to climb up that pile and fetch a snake, and he threw it up in the air to break its back. I remember that. My mother didn't go shopping as now. There was the the back and egg man, the vegetable Chinese man. There was the milkman. Things were delivered and we’d put a pail out the front door with some money underneath it. The milkman would come along in a horse and cart, rather like a chariot, and he'd fill the milk pail up, and the horse would amble along to the next house, because he was used to it. Sounds medieval to me. I can remember my great grandmother, Grandma Howard. She was married to a piano... he had a piano warehouse in Sydney. And, I was very fond of my great grandmother. I was about 12 when she died. And my grandmother used to spend time at the piano warehouse, and she learned how to tune the piano. So she played the piano all her life, and she used to tune it herself. She was wonderful. She had six girls and two boys, and she packed everything up and the whole family would go to the beach. Cottesloe. They would complain bitterly that they didn't want to go. When they got there, they had a great time. My parents separated when I was eight years old and we left Perth and came to Melbourne. I went to Caulfield Central School. It went to grade six at primary school, but it had two extra years. Two years of high school, but I did them as a primary school. And that was the end of that because we were very short of money and I went to work then. I regret I didn't have more education. That's probably the biggest regret I could think of. I had the impression when I was young that everybody was short of money in the Depression. Everybody. I remember my mother putting water in the milk to make it last, you know. That's about all. I mean, we had a very, you might say, a hard physical life, but it was happy. And we were not poverty stricken, but we just had to watch our money very, very carefully. That's about all. As long as you're working, you can cope, you see? And all the children were working too. My mother worked as a dental nurse so that she was able to care for us. Looking back on it she was a strong woman. They were not actually divorced until years later, but they were separated. But people looked down on as a failed marriage. It must have been hard for her. I don't know why, but she kept moving to different flats. I don't know why, except maybe she was looking for something better. Something better. We lived in Caulfield, we lived in Malvern and also St Kilda. but we liked living in St Kilda. next door to St Moritz ice skating rink in Alfred Square. We had a lovely view right across the the bay from where we were and I went skating. There are my skates there. I think I won them. I don't know how I did, but I think I won them. My sister and I went skating a lot. She was very much better than me. I played with two little French girls, and I was absolutely enamoured by their language and their formality. They were very formal and I thought, oh, I’ll learn that language. That's so such a beautiful language. And I used to go to school practicing a French R, because I knew that was the difficult hurdle. We used to go to the Saturday matinee at this cinema. We called them ‘the pictures’ in those days and during the film someone came out onto the stage and told everyone that war had been declared in England, which meant we too were at war. Here is the Prime Minister of Australia, the Right Honorable RG Menzies. Fellow Australians. It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that as a result, Australia is also at war. I was surprised of course. That’s me, not the others, not the rest of the land. But we wondered what on earth would happen. But it affected us nowhere like it affected England. Now way, no way. I didn't have any male members of the family who went to the war, but one. And he came home safely. So I don't have the feeling that a lot of people have. I was unaffected in that way. We used to see headlines in the paper: so many German bombers were shot down. We used to read those numbers as if it were a jolly sport. You know, last night it was so many; the night before it was fewer. Oh, you know, that was... But I was very young, you see. It's amazing really. But... it was much like the depression, you know, shortages, queues... I had some some nice jobs. I worked at the Alliance Insurance for a long time, which was interesting. Shorthand, typing, office work. I suppose going to England changed my life. Most of my friends settled down like my sister, got married and had children. But I took a different path, you see. Those little decisions change your whole life. And I'm very, very glad that I did, too. I look back on my discoveries with great pleasure. I think I was about 26 or 7. I was working for an insurance company in the city, and someone told me she was going to England. She told me all about it and I thought, well, I'm not going to Queensland for my holidays. I'm going to England. I only kept diaries when I was travelling. My friend Laurie said it was good for you psychologically to keep a diary. So I thought, good thing, Laurie, I'll definitely do that. And I made up my mind to do it, and I kept it religiously. Even though I was fed up with it, I've kept the diary going, Most people stretched out on the deck chairs looking like white faced corpses. And there was six girls in a cabin in the second or third class... in the bottom of the ship, and we went through the Suez Canal. There was no air conditioning, and it was horribly hot. And people took a pillow and slept on the decks... because of the heat. We stopped at Algiers. I remember that was interesting. The Casbah. Occasionally we saw wealthy Moorish men and women. They looked too romantic for words. All wear white. And the men wear a headpiece like a sheikh - made of voile. Yesterday there was a live classical concert. Joan Sutherland, the winner of The Sun Aria sang. She is very good. I was not a tourist because tourism wasn't... I don't think it was mentioned much those days... Tourism hadn't hadn't taken off at all. But I was too busy, too greedy, looking for interesting places and historic... And I liked history, so of course it suited me. When we arrived in London, to say I was excited would be an understatement. I had some friends who had gone ahead. I was looking for a girl’s hostel, you see, and they gave me an address in Chelsea. I went to the address and I found a bomb site. It breaks my heart to see the bomb damage though. Every time I see one I feel how dreadful it must have been. There was bomb damage everywhere. It wasn't cleared up. Well it was cleared up, but it was evident all around St Paul’s. There were blocks of bomb damage. They were well fenced off and you’d look down into the basement. I remember seeing a tree growing in the basement. They'd suffered great... Much more than we could imagine, I think. We found another hostel where we stayed for a few years. A girl’s hostel. There were quite a few Australians in this hostel. This hostel is very strict, lights out at 10:30 p.m. We have a horsehair mattress, washstand with large drawers and a small wardrobe. Wonderfully cheap compared with flats and other digs. We'd have a bath every fourth night. You were allocated a time, you see. You could use the bathroom every fourth night. And another thing, it had flat irons to iron your clothes. Can you imagine that? Bath night was a big deal. I can tell you. And sometimes you could, if you were careful, you could sneak a bath in when no one, you know... When someone finished early or so... but it was funny. Sitting on the landing on the first floor, I took a chair and sat by the window and watched the snow. They thought... the English people, girls they thought that was very funny. But it was so lovely to see it falling on the chimneys and the roofs. Something new for me. It was snowing lightly when I got up. White roofs and a pretty little church with its spire rising in the mist. Snowing heavily as we leave London. 29th of March. I’m writing on the train and it's snowing heavily. The boat was delayed indefinitely owing to the weather. 22nd April, we had to lift with three other hitchhikers by an amorous young Frenchman. He took us there for the fun of it. He would have taken us anywhere. I said. “Je ne comprend pas” to everything. Well, I got this au pair job, you see. That was a great experience. I wrote to them and said I was used to children, which I wasn't. There were two families, sharing this country house for a holiday. The husbands were working, and they'd come home for the weekend. There'd be a big fuss made when the husbands came home. The food was improved. Everything was right. The house was right on the Atlantic, not far from Mont Saint Michel. It was right on the beach and the tide went out kilometers and came in fast. I had about five children, I think. 4 or 5. They were very formal, but they were little devils as well. The oldest one was Dominique. And that's why my daughter's called Dominique. I used to have to bath them at night. They'd have black oil on their soles of their feet from the oil from the ocean washed up on the beach. But I'd have to wash them all in the same bath. One after the other. Funny. Dinner time, the mother would walk round the table putting the children's wrists on the table. She said that's the French fashion. And she said, not like the sneaky English. Which, looking back on it [was] pretty... All of their wrists were on the table. We’re always told to put them on our lap, aren’t we? 7th September We rounded Cape Leeuwin and there was a terrible storm. Difficult to write. Such seas we have had. The ship went over to 38 degrees. Half the furniture on the ship is broken 25 people went to hospital. 78 casualties. We sat on the ground and played cards. And then the furniture careered across the lounge at break neck speed. And when I finally got home, stepped on Australian soil, the best thing about it was no more diary! He was French. Oh yes, he was very French. Yes, he was a cartoonist in Paris. But he painted as well. And my flat is full of his paintings. See? Watercolours. I used to go to the Alliance Française to learn French. And I heard about a little club in Hardware Lane. It was very small, just upstairs over a shop. Four men playing cards. They played Belote. Any Frenchman knows what Belote is. And, they put down their cards promptly and took us to a cafe in Elizabeth Street where they served red wine in coffee cups. Now the French hadn’t been there very long, but they knew where to find red wine. So that was where they where we met. And we were married three months later. But we made love before we married, nevertheless. Oh, it's hard to say. I just liked him. Coup de foudre, that’s what they call that. I wanted to be married in a church. Henri wasn't too keen, but he didn't mind. He was Catholic, but he didn't go to church. I don't think he had much time for anything like that. So that was the end of my churchgoing days. We lived in East Melbourne. And then we just bought a house in Richmond and that's where Dominique was born. I would have had a second child. but Henri wasn't that keen so that was that. He was a kind person, a bit volatile, but underneath it all, no matter how difficult he was, I always knew he was a kind person, a good person. So I used to be understanding. We had our ups and downs so I can assure you but it’s all worked out in the end. I suppose I was very forbearing but I was determined to have a happy marriage. I put that first above, thinking of Dominique's point of view really looking back on it. Which I should have. But it it was a good marriage, really, you see. It was in Victoria Street, in what is now Little Vietnam, and it was called “La Seine” after the river. Because Henri knew a lot of French people and a lot of the French were chefs in those days. The chef did the cooking, Henri did the front of room. I was a waitress. And one day a man, he’d been watching me all the time and I wondered why. And he said, “I want to buy this restaurant.” I said, “Well, it's not for sale, but I'll get my husband.” Well, he bought it straight away. And we sold it for a good price. We bought a shop in the market. Now it was in the dead end of the market, near Therry Street. No one had used that end at all. But we took a risk and we bought it and we sold paté, quiche, fresh cheese and French products. Tinned things. And it was very successful. There was a shop, very small, with one woman, and she only sold butter. She had a big square of butter. She would chop off a piece and wrap it up. And she had an apron with her knees apart and the change in her lap. And she’d give you the butter. She must have weighed it, I didn't remember that. And give you the change. That was a shop. A shop! I like classical music. Playing the piano. I used to like playing Chopin in particular. But when I got married, I didn't have time for it. I gave it up. I used to play the Minute Waltz. I could play that in a dark room without, without seeing anything. Henri, I never called him Henry. I didn't like Henry. He died in 1987. He was 69. I felt like a ship without a rudder when he died. After Henri died, I went travelling again and I liked the Middle East. I did some wonderful tours: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco. Travelling really was marvelous. I enjoyed it so much. I think, I've lived through the best years, really. I'm interested in things about me. People, family. I'm just interested in life. That’s the best part.