Gallery Samples Stories of our Ancestors | Page 55

Alma’s daughter’s piano top. Fortunately a few other small but precious possessions, which
must have been wedding gifts, survived.
It is not known how Rebecca and the children coped or where they went after that fateful day.
This episode marked the complete collapse of Jock who was then shocked into a realisation of
what he had done. In spite of his horror and regret, it was still a long time before he was able to
get himself together sufficiently to earn a living again. There was no AA or any help available
for his addiction. During his slow process of restoration I surmise that he ‘fell off the wagon’ on
a number of occasions. Certainly, even his youngest child, Les, remembered the effects of his
Father’s addiction. At one stage they actually lived with their eldest child Ellen who was then
earning a nice living for herself dressmaking and already owned her own home.
I have no idea of the sequence of events but there were many years of struggle before Jock had
completely recovered. One wonders if his family ever did. A spin-off was that not one of their
children ever drank and Leslie, who had witnessed the after effects, if not the actual breakdown, was vehemently tee-total.
How DID they survive? Looking up Welfare in those days it seems that the Church was the only
Welfare body to turn to. There was also some sort of welfare for the families of soldiers but it
was now a long time since Jock had left the Military. One of the strange and somewhat
desperate things Rebecca did to ‘supplement her income’ was to foster children. It became a
joke in the family (much later when they could laugh again) that she spent much more on these
babies than she received.
Rebecca was obviously involved in some sort of fostering organisation in order to have been
granted a stipend for their care, so it seems her life touched on the lives of the poor all the time.
Perhaps she was helped by this organisation? It is likely that it was the Anglican Welfare as she
certainly wouldn’t have approached the dreaded Catholics!
I don’t know what Jock did to earn a living after his alcoholic sojourn but at some time later he
drove Coney’s Funeral Carriages.

J J C O N E Y ’ S H O R S E A N D C A R R I A G E HE A R S E W I T H J O C K S E A T E D A T O P

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