Betty
She had a special rapport with my youngest, Jared. He had just turned one when we moved in next door to Betty. Betty would come up to the side gate near the sandpit where he played and put her hand through the wire and hold his finger and talk to him for ages. She would also randomly emerge through the fernery on our adjoining side fence and try to start up a conversation with us. It soon became apparent why the people who lived here before us had gone to such lengths to make the patio private and grow great big hedges wherever there was a gap in the fence.
Our nearest relatives live four hours away so Betty was the closest thing my kids had to a grandmother. She certainly went out of her way to be that person for them. She would regularly give them $50 for their birthdays, always leave chocolate Easter bunnies at the front door step for them, give them money to give to the firetrucks for Royal Children's Hospital Appeal. She would stop them on their way home from school to have a chat and invite them in for a tour of her trinkets in her china display cabinet or a biscuit or cake she had made.
One day Lucinda was in the school play and I realised we had a spare seat in our car so I got an extra ticket and invited Betty to come and watch Cindy in the play. Her daughters told me she was so very happy to go as she had taken them for years to calisthenics concerts and she really loved going out.We also took her to the Horsham Saints (local Catholic football club) when the kids were playing junior footy.
Betty was fiercely Catholic and spoke of her late husband Reg quite a bit.
He had passed away many years earlier when they used to live out on a farm in Harrow and thus before Betty moved into Horsham. I remember her coming around to tell me that the nonagenarian American Bud, who lived on the corner of our street, had been round to court her. She was quite vexed, "Anna, he told me he could give me sex three times a week. I don't want another man in my life. If they stick around long enough they could have a stake in my fortune".
The other story I really enjoyed was when the vulturous real estate agents would come calling, "Anna, I told them I am not leaving this house unless I am in a box". In the end, she was more than happy to sign her house over to her daughters and tell the agents the house was no longer hers.
She was quite happy when I started working for the local Catholic college. I think she thought I might convert.
One day Lucinda told me Betty had been calling out, "is Mum there?" which was not unusual as she often did that. Later on that day her son rang and said he had been speaking to her and asked me to go over and check on her. I went around and it was immediately obvious that she had had a stroke. Her left side of her face was droopy, she was dribbling spittle out the corner of her mouth and she wasn't very lucid. She told me she had fallen over near the wheelie bin when she tossing some weeds into it and had bumped her head.
After much insistence on my part I managed to convince her to get in my car - bugger waiting for an ambulance - and I drove her to Emergency. They triaged her pretty quickly and she was soon lying in a hospital bed with a blood pressure device monitoring her while the rest of Emergency was in chaos with other calamities. I stayed with her until her son Jeff arrived. He told me the doctor sent Betty and Jeff home in the middle of the night and the next morning she had a much worse stroke completely debilitating her left side. She was sent by ambulance back to the critical ward, eventually she was moved to a less critical area and then moved to the nursing home section of the hospital.
We would visit her every Thursday after Lucinda's tennis lesson or on a Monday night after dropping off Ruben to volleyball. We visited regularly for 18 months until she passed away. The week of her passing the kids and I came in to see her and Jared held her hand again and she squeezed and smiled at him through her eyes. She passed away a couple of days later.
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