Bond girls, Face Ache and Cocky

My great-grandmother, Frances Catherine, was a tall (over 6ft), lean and elegant woman who moved her family around the country to such an extent that by the time my grandmother, Leila Josephine, was 15 she had been to 26 different schools. This might explain why my grandmother loved geography and always had an atlas on hand. No, not just a Melways, but a full blown Times atlas of the world. 

As background to this, my great- grandmother’s first husband – Arthur Devlin Bond – passed away, leaving her with four young daughters – the Bond Girls, I call them. Arthur’s wealthy family were Protestant and not particularly happy that their son had married a Catholic and so they offered to take the four progeny of their son on the condition they be raised as Protestants. Frances Catherine responded with a stern no and so the wealthy in-laws of my great-grandmother turned their back on their Catholic relatives and nowt was heard of them again. Sadly, two of the Bond Girls subsequently passed away. Edna was not yet 5 when she died as a result of eating a poisonous toadstool and Catherine Frances died at the age of 15 of pneumonia, shortly before she was due to travel to London to study at the Conservatory of Music (or so the story goes). She was a great pianist. As was Frances Catherine and all her daughters.

Frances Catherine subsequently remarried a Mr Kaye, or Face Ache, as my grandmother used to refer to him. When I was a child, eating jam fancies at my grandmother’s dining room table, this term used to make me giggle. I tried to get my grandmother to tell stories about Face Ache but she refused, in a roundabout way so as not to upset me. She told me stories about every other aspect of her long life but Face Ache was forbidden territory. She obviously did not have a pleasant time growing up with him as a step-father. Fortunately for my grandmother, he left his new wife and step-daughters shortly afterwards. And so Frances Catherine was left alone again to raise her daughters. And my grandmother was happy again, without the evil Face Ache.

Frances Catherine knew New South Wales and Victoria like the back of her hand. She was a great cook and business woman and so after she was abandoned by Face Ache, in order to support her remaining two daughters, she would move around the country side setting up little diners. Whilst she spent time building the business, my grandmother and her older sister – Eileen Adele – were put in to board at the local convent, together with their dog, Scotty, and their pet sulphur crested cockatoo, Cocky. Regardless of the convent in which they were boarding, the nuns always delighted in the pets which of course had a positive effective on Eileen and Leila. My grandmother had many tales to tell about the antics of Cocky.

Cocky was notorious for getting in to their beds and nipping at their toes. Cocky would sit on the tennis net and run back and forth while the nuns tried to play tennis. Cocky would sit on the shoulder of the nuns, and make his way under their starched white guimpe where they kept pins which he would pick at until they were all on the ground.

During their travels they collected sheet music. They collected all the most popular music of the day. They would sew silk ribbon down the side of these booklets of music to keep them in good condition and on the top of each booklet there is the name of one Bond Girl, the name of a place in New South Wales or Victoria, and a date. Nowadays the collection is somewhat tattered from both age and that time one of my grandmother’s cats decided to nest in the music box, in preparation of having kittens. But we can still map the paths of the Bond Girls around the two States, until finally they came to rest on the Mornington Peninsula, by the sea, in tranquility.