Granddad’s Photo

“Grandma, Grandma”, called Millie from the study of my 2 bedroom retirement villa, “where was this photo taken?”

My 10year old granddaughter came into the lounge room clutching a large colour photograph of a farm scene, with two horses leaning against a fence, lightly scattered snow along the top of the fence and heavier snow on the ground. In the distance the flat scenery led back to a far off stand of gum trees. The sky was gun metal grey and mottled clouds hid the sun.

The other two grandchildren, 9 year old Sam and 8 ½ year old Pippa, clambered over me on the soft, velvet covered couch to get closer to Millie and see the photo she was holding above her head.

“Calm down, calm down”, I said as the friendly jostling threatened to escalate into outright warfare. “Give it to me so I can have a good look at it. Let me see… oh, I remember now”, I mused.

“This was taken on my parents’, your great-grandparents’, farm at Cooma, in about 1966, the year that we had snow right up to November.”

“Grandma, Grandma, were they your horses? Did you ride them? What were their names?” demanded Sam, the outdoor, animal loving boy.

“Well…,”I said, “let’s all sit down together over here and I’ll tell you all about why great Granddad took this photo and why I still have it 65 years later…

I can still remember how cold it was that day, even though the weather was clearing and the watery sun was trying to peek through the heavy clouds. It was the end of another cold and miserable day in the middle of November. I remember that by this time I was no longer excited by the sight of snow; when we first saw snow five years before it was a novelty, but now we realised that it always snowed in Cooma in winter. It was such a change from my early childhood years in sunny north Queensland.

“But Grandma, why did you move away from the sun, if you hated the cold so much?” asked the ever-inquisitive Pippa.

“Well Pippa, “I said, “when we left the north I was only 10 years old, the same as Millie is now, and we had no say in the move. Our Dad, your great-Granddad, had been sick for some years and the heat made him worse, so the doctors said he had to move to a cool climate. After looking for about 6 months he decided we were moving to Cooma, so in 1961 we went to live there on the farm at the end of the bitumen road, 15 km from town.”

Our house was much smaller than the one we had in Queensland and I had to share a bedroom with my sister which we both hated. Nothing about that house or the town or the school was as good as Queensland. I remember feeling dreadfully homesick for about the first year we lived there and I wished we could go back “home”.

There was only an outside toilet, about 100 metres from the back door of the house, and that was very hard, especially in the middle of July one year when we all had gastro.

We all had a giggle thinking of how dreadful that must have been.

There was an old wood stove which my Mum, your great-grandma, hated; it never heated up properly, the kitchen was always full of smoke from the chimney and she had to get up at 5.30 every morning to light the fire so we could all have breakfast in time to catch the school bus at 8 o’clock. So one of the first things we bought was an electric stove and that was an incredible luxury for us all. No more chopping wood for Dad, no more collecting kindling for us kids and no more ridiculously early mornings for Mum.

Now it was Millie’s turn to interrupt. “Grandma, what’s kindling? How do you collect it? Is it like eggs or mushrooms?”

“No Millie, kindling is just small sticks and bits of wood that you use to start a fire. We would crumple some newspaper, then build a little tepee of small bits of wood or kindling and light the paper. When the kindling was alight then you could add some larger pieces of wood and build up the fire. Haven’t you ever made a fire, any of you?”I asked.

Three heads all shook in answer to my question. “I think our next holiday should be in a retro farmhouse somewhere far from civilisation so we can all learn some bush skills. Let’s suggest that to your parents when they come home from the club.” Again three heads in unison, but this time nodding.

“Back to the story Grandma,” said Sam.”Why did great-Granddad take this photo? There’s not even a person in it, just the horses.”

“Well, Sam, the reason there’s no one in the photo is because my Dad forgot to take a photo until after the guests left.”

“Guests! Who were they?” demanded Millie.

“Well, there were a few people but one of them was Prince Charles”, I told them smiling.

“Prince Charles!!...of England?” shrieked Pippa and Millie in unison.

“Yes, that’s right, HRH Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales. This is how it happened….”

We had all been excited at school for weeks because Prince Charles was going home to England from his boarding school at Geelong, and he was scheduled to stop in Cooma on his way to Canberra before flying to London. There was to be a civic luncheon, the school choir was singing and best of all, we got the afternoon off school.

There had been snow overnight, and you can see what’s left of it in the photo, but it cleared by morning and we were able to catch the bus to school. Mum was helping with the catering at the luncheon in town so she left home soon after us, but Dad had to stay behind to hand feed the sheep and cattle; it had been a very dry winter and there was little feed for them in the paddocks.

He had just gone inside the house for a morning tea break when he saw a convoy of three black cars driving slowly down our driveway. The middle car seemed to have a broken windscreen and it was going very slowly.

“What happened then? Did Prince Charles hop out of the car and say ‘g’day mate’?” asked Sam with a grin.

“I don’t know Sam, I wasn’t there, but I do know that the security guards travelling with the Prince asked to use our telephone to phone Canberra and have a replacement car sent for him. It was way too cold for anyone to drive any distance in a car with a broken windscreen on a day like that.”

Eventually it was decided that the civic reception in Cooma would have to be held up until another car arrived. Dad didn’t know what he should do and he had his farm jobs to do, so he offered them all a cup of tea and hoped they would let him get on with his work. They all accepted a cup of tea and were happy to sit around in our little kitchen to wait for the car to arrive. All of them that is, except Prince Charles; he was very interested in the farm and wanted to go with Dad to finish feeding the sheep. So Dad loaned him a pair of gumboots and they went off in the truck with the security guard riding on the back, clinging on for dear life as they rattled around the rough tracks of our farm. Dad said they were out for about an hour and the Prince did his share of throwing hay bales off the back of the truck but still managed to keep his suit trousers clean. When they returned to the house for another cup of tea, there was a fourth black car driving down the driveway towards the house. It turned out that the Governor-General was staying on a property not far away and they had managed to borrow his car for the trip to Canberra.

With a lot of rushing around and much hand shaking, the Prince’s entourage settled themselves into the three cars and drove away at a much faster speed than when they arrived. It was only as they disappeared into the distance that Dad realised he had forgotten to have a photo taken with the Prince. So he went into the house, retrieved his faithful Ricoh slide camera and took the photo that you can see here. It was the same place where the Prince had been, it’s just that he wasn’t in the photo.

“…………. And that’s why your great-Granddad took this photo at this time. Luckily it was a good photo so we had it blown up and framed as a memento of the day that Prince Charles helped Dad with the hand feeding”, I said, as the children’s parents arrived home from their dinner at the Surf Club.