Arabian Autographs: My Nan The Busker
Angela Townsend introduces us her Nan, Hazel. When Hazel stopped driving at 85, she had a mountain bike specially designed for her. Ten years on, and Hazel still enjoys playing old-time music on the mouth organ.
Agela writes a glowing tribute to a wonderful lady.
I love my life as an expatriate but it has its drawbacks. A particularly painful one is when loved ones back home become unwell, as with my nana recently.
Hazel is 95 and has been a resident in a home for the aged for the past six years. Before that she was happily living in her little flat by the sea, completely self-sufficient.
She swam in the rolling West coast surf almost everyday – summer or winter – and once she gave up driving at 85, had a mountain bike specially designed for her. That made the local paper but she was already well-known in her neighbourhood, and the city, for busking with her mouth organ. She once owned more than eight mouth organs but was forced to give all but one away when she moved into the rest home. Hazel loved nothing more than playing old-time music for her friends while they sang along.
When I visited her last year she was distraught at the loss of her precious mouth organ, openly accusing every man in the rest home of stealing it from her.
Her eldest daughter took her shopping for a new one and a week later her favourite instrument was discovered inside the lounge room piano. It appears she had placed it there for safe keeping and promptly forgotten where she’d hidden it.
Hazel was many times a champion lawn bowler but detested the “cattiness” amongst the women, preferring to team up with the men.
Once it was discovered she was leaving the stove elements on – complete with burning food – and wearing the same clothes for days, her safe little world came crashing down. Her children’s faces were familiar, even if their names were not. It was time for the dreaded rest home. Like a frightened child facing boarding school for the first time she pleaded, argued and cajoled – but none of it worked.
Descended from a convict several generations before, my nana was born in Tasmania in 1910 and taken to New Zealand as a baby.
As was usual for the day, she was part of a large family and grew up on a farm in an isolated part of the country. Hazel, a free spirit and tomboy, did not want to marry but the boy next door – one of five brothers – took a fancy to her and asked Hazel’s father for her “hand in marriage”.
Hazel found herself living the life she never wanted – what she considered a life of servitude. She had trained as a nurse, and topped the class, but that was all by the wayside now she was married.
However, it wasn’t as though her husband was so bad. Tom was a quiet and patient man. He was also a champion woodchopper and cross-country cyclist. Unfortunately, his vice was gambling. He would spend most of his meagre wages at the horse races. After many arguments – with no favourable results - Hazel decided if she couldn’t beat him, she might as well join him.
Hazel tasted her first ever cup of tea in hospital after giving birth to the first of their six children, a son. She found being a wife and mother stressful and, with her fiery mother-in-law just over the fence, it was sometimes all too much. She would occasionally disappear into the hills for days until Tom found her and brought her home.
Her husband left her a widow in her fifties when he died suddenly at the age of 62. While she missed him terribly, she took to her new life enthusiastically, doing things she had never been able to before.
She travelled to Tasmania and met family members she had only ever written to, and joined her youngest daughter and her young family on a cruise of the South Pacific. Hazel was an attractive lady who was popular with the men. She had many marriage proposals over the next twenty years but turned them all down. Hazel loved her freedom and even sold her historic stone cottage by the sea to spend time with each of her children and their families over several years. She then bought her little flat overlooking the sea where she remained for fifteen years.
Now she is back in the rest home, recovering from kidney problems and a stressful hospital stay where she conducted a week-long hunger strike and reacted like a wildcat to the appearance of a needle.
Even though I can not be with her at this time it is good to know there is still a lot of fight in the old girl yet – my nan always said she’s waiting on a telegraph from the queen.
