My Ma had me on 21st October 1933, by all accounts that was one eventful year.  I was very young and even though it was all them years ago I can still remember it as though it was last week.  That’s what famine does to you, it eats you up inside and etches itself on your brain and you can never shake it off.  We used to grow mainly potato and flaxseed but we also grew cotton and had some sheep and chickens. That was all coming to an end now though. Grandpa used to complain that the only thing that thrived on the farm were weeds and grasshoppers.

Ma lived on the family farm with her own Ma and Pa (my grandparents) and her husband Billy-Ray. They had been married in the summer of ‘32 when my Ma was just 18 and my Pa was 21 and they’d been childhood sweethearts.   He left one year later to try and find work after Ma got pregnant.  Him and a couple of the other neighbour boys went out of state, hitching mainly, the plan was to hitch to the South Pacific Track to reach California to find work and send money home, plus it was one less mouth to feed on the farm. 

We don’t ever know if they made it or not, but we eventually had to assume not ‘cos the day my Ma stood sobbing on the porch with me in her belly begging him to stay was the last time she ever saw him.  She spent many a year searching for him as I got older, thought he may have ended up in Hooversville but we never heard from him again and that broke her heart; she never got over it and she never remarried – said Pa was the only man for her and he’d gone.

Times were hard, especially with me on the way and farms in the next state were being foreclosed and food was really scarce. Ma ate potato soup for damn near every meal through her pregnancy, it’s lucky I didn’t come out looking like one big potato (although I did weigh 9lbs).

They’d all sleep out on the porch of a night time until things got a whole lot worse and the dust storms started rolling in, even after the storms, the dust would hang in the air like a thick, dense, red fog, it was like trying to breathe glass.  At dusk we would light the kerosene lamps and then you couldn’t see anything at all, you were better off without.   Ma was laid up by then with me so she didn’t have to go outside and have her face blasted by the sand like the rest of them who had to work on the farm, but she did have to listen to Grandma complaining that she couldn’t keep the house clean owing to all the dust.  We’d heard that a couple of the people in the next county had died because of the dust pneumonia and if that didn’t get you there were a couple of hundred other things that would.

On the night I was born, Ma had been having the pains for days, not many people went to the hospital back then to have their children, that would have been a luxury and besides, our nearest one was in the next county.  It was also one of the hottest summers we’d had in a long while, it was over 100 degrees at night time and there was just no way of cooling down.  My Grandpa used to joke that my Ma got so big in the last few weeks of having me that the whole family could take shelter from the sun below her belly. 

So, on the 20th October, 1933, my Ma’s waters broke as she tried to close the window in the bedroom that hadn’t closed in 15 years.  The dust had started to irritate her more than the heat, which was so bad that my Ma used to say that she couldn’t remember what it was like to be dry.  Although she was sharing a house with her own Ma and Pa, she felt so alone without Billy-Ray, she cried and cried.  Grandma came in and sat with her and tried to comfort her, Grandpa just felt useless, if he’d been a young man he’d have left with Billy-Ray too.  Grandma had been glad he didn’t.

Grandpa rushed over to neighbour Dolores’s house to fetch her, she’d delivered a few babies in her time and now anyone within running distance used to just go knock if they needed her and she would always come, she said it was a joy to help bring new life to the earth.  All the neighbours were good though; in hard times we all helped each other and this certainly was one of the hardest times.  Dolores came running to the house, and she brought with her a couple of towels and some rope (I don’t know what that rope was for) and something for my Ma to bite on when the pain got so bad.  I guess she was prepared, she must have known we were gonna call on her services.

Dolores felt Ma’s belly and said that the baby wasn’t lying right but she would just have to try make the best of it now, it was too late to try and get her to the hospital and one of the worst dust storms was just beginning to kick up.  Ma was convinced she was going to die and was wailin’ and hollerin’ (and for a few brief moments, Grandma suspected she may have been right).  Grandpa tried to busy himself on the farm, he had worked so damn hard all his life and had always know what to do in times of crisis but he had never felt as useless as he did now, all he could hear was wind, frightened sheep and his little girl screaming for mercy and it was more than he could bear. 

The labour went on for hours and Ma, wet with sweat couldn’t go on any longer, she was just so tired and emotional – she was crying for Billy-Ray and by now she was almost delirious because she began talking to him as though he were actually there.  Grandma and Dolores didn’t try to tell her otherwise, Ma thinking that Billy Ray seemed to be about the only thing that calmed her.

In the early hours of the morning on 21st October, I made my entrance in to the world.  Feet first.  There are those that would say that I spent my whole life like that, always putting my foot in it and jumping in without thinking.  My Ma was so tired she slept for days, despite my hollering and Grandma and Dolores took me off to weigh me on the kitchen scales and get me cleaned up.  They said I came up a lovely colour, as though I had spent the whole summer basking in the sun, they said I must have caught the sun through Ma’s belly.  Grandpa came in to the kitchen and looked at me, he had tears in his eyes and said that he couldn’t believe that his little girl had had a little girl and he didn’t want to hold me at first because he said I was too small.  Dolores laughed and told him that she had seen many small babies in her time and this was one definitely not small. 

Although they all knew I was going to be here, I must say they hadn’t made many preparations.  I guess they had other important stuff on their minds because when they swaddled me in a white blanket and had finished passing me around and cooing at me, they looked for somewhere to put me and realised that I had no cot.  Not that they could have afforded one but I think they had always intended to borrow one from a neighbour.  For want of something better to use, Grandma called Grandpa to fetch the old trunk from the attic.  It was a big leather affair with straps and a brown lining and it was that big I’m sure Grandma could have slept in there herself.

Grandpa hauled the trunk in, and between them they cleaned it out and dressed it up to make it look pretty.  It did it’s job real well because I slept in that trunk for the first three years of my life.  The neighbours came over with things they had made for me, the store-bought days were all but over but to be honest, I think they just came over to see the baby in the trunk because it looked so funny.  One of the neighbours had made a straw dolly to hang from the lid, which stayed there for eight months until I learned to chew.

So, that’s how I came in to the world, I won’t go on about what happened in the years after that, there’s a reason why that time was called the depression.  It wasn’t exactly a happy time for anyone but we struggled on because we people do in times of crisis.  I don’t really like to talk about it, folk don’t want to be brought down with that kind of thing and there were many other wonderful things that happened in my life that I would prefer to talk about and people would prefer to listen to
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Strangely enough, I still have the trunk and it sits up the top of the house in my own attic now.  Over the years I’ve used it to store memento’s in it, but I’ve had my own children now, and they have theirs so the trunk that was in my Grandma’s attic is now in my attic and I’m a grandma myself, it’s all come full circle.  I guess you could say that I started life in that trunk and through my collections, my life is still contained in it.  There are some secrets placed in there, some mysteries and some clues as to the type of woman I was when I was younger and how life was back then. 

When I’m gone, my family will look through the trunk and they will realise that there was a whole other life I lead before I was their Momma and Grandma myself.  They will find my diaries, stories and things that will make them realise that I was their age once and I had the same kind of thoughts and feelings as them before I grew old and the roles were reversed and they felt they had to protect me, but, that’s another story for another time.