[Tape recorded on 15 October 1974.]

Children suffer from a lack of knowledge of the background of their parents. Certainly I do in relation to my own parents, so I thought I would do a tape which, among other things, would fill in for [my children] Jacinta and Marc, Julian and Tony, Tina, Cordelia, Greg, and Paula my own background, and perhaps begin with something of my own parents.

I find that I am at a disadvantage in trying to reconstruct the lives of my own parents. I have to rely sometimes on information given to me by others and particularly by my brother Wilfred, who not only was older and more inquiring, but has a remarkably retentive memory.

My parents married in October 1919, I guess. Wilfred, the oldest child, was born October of 1920 after they had been married somewhat more than a year. At that time they were living in Rhodesia. They had married, as far as I know, in Port Elizabeth, and then perhaps at the beginning of the next year, 1920, January, my father went off to teach in Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia, where Wilfred was born, and Helen, my eldest sister, two years later in October. Then I was born in November of 1924. The youngest of the family, my sister whom we call Dolly – she was christened Catherine – was born in 1926.