Oral History Recording

S01310 13/01/2021 ORAL HISTORY RECORDING ACCESSION NUMBER: S00227 TITLE: Doreen Langley’s service with the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAF) during the Second World War. INTERVIEWEE: Doreen Langley INTERVIEWER: Joyce Thomson RECORDING DATE: 23rd August 1984 RECORDING LOCATION: Avonlea Beach SUMMARY: TRANSCRIBER: WRITEpeople TRANSCRIPTION DATE: August 2004 www.writepeople.com.au 1 S01310 13/01/2021 Interview with Miss Doreen Langley at 34 Chisholm Avenue, Avonlea Beach on the 23rd August 1984. LANGLEY: Doreen Langley, WAAF No. 110802. I was born in London. This was because my parents were married in Egypt. My mother was an English woman, my father was an Australian soldier, and my mother returned to England to have her baby, while my father returned with the troops from Egypt. I understand I was about six weeks old when I came out by boat with my mother in 1920. I’m reputed to have contracted smallpox aboard the ship. Anyway, I was an ailing baby. My mother hadn’t visited Australia before. Her life had been boarding school, university, in residence at the Royal Holloway College and then living in Egypt. Her father was Irish and her mother probably from Alsase. It’s a little bit vague but all her relations were in France and Holland, she was very much a European. I have one sister who is 7 ½ years younger and she was born in Warnambool, Victoria. I think my parents badly wanted a boy. There are no more Langleys of our particular grouping and my sister was named Patricia after Patrick Plunkett who was my mother’s father. I’ve rather said a lot about this because I think the fact that my father was Australia and my mother was English was a great source of argument and divisiveness in the family although they happily celebrated their golden wedding even though they were a highly incompatible couple. My primary education was at a large country town, Warnambool in Victoria. I guess as a small child, I had a feeling of being specially watched, as my father was headmaster of the local high school. There was strict vetting of one’s friends, compared to what children have now. The children I played with had to be children of my mother’s friends rather than children I had known. Perhaps I should say daughters rather than children because there didn’t seem to be any boys. My own interests were reading, dressing up, acting up, the usual kid’s plays, a fantasy world, play always had to be quiet and well behaved. Pretty well, it was always in my own home where we had a special playhouse where we could play. I learned a good deal of poetry and I think I must have started reading for myself at a fairly early age. Here again, the books were all English books and rather than the books that an Australian child would have. I did things like belonging to the Brownies because that was acceptable as a family friend was the Brown Owl. I was encouraged to cook and that again related to my mother because when she arrived at www.writepeople.com.au 2 S01310 13/01/2021 the first very small country town from England, she could not cook, quite literally, and had to return to England two years later to get as much information as she could about how to run a house. That’s to say that the expectation at that time was of course that she would not return to Australia but she did. We didn’t have things like camping holidays because she didn’t like them. We did live at a seaside town but again my mother didn’t like the beach, there was too much sand, we often had picnics in the summer evenings at some of the rocky scenic places but these were primarily designed for adults rather than children, compared to things that happened to children of my friends now. I learned the piano because that was the right thing to do but I wasn’t very successful and I suppose then and right through my life I’ve had the feeling that success was all important and it was not worth trying anything unless you were really going to succeed and be the best, so it means there’s a whole list of things that I simply do not do and perhaps haven’t even tried. In 1930 of all times actually, we went as a family to England because my father had never been and this seemed to be very important. We stayed with my mother’s mother who had actually visited Australia a few years before, but her main interest in life was not her family but contract bridge and I was ten at the time and felt very responsible for the behaviour of my small sister, especially when parents went to Switzerland and we were sent to stay with past college friends of my mother. It was a very successful year away but of course one did return to the Depression and a fairly unsettling time. The expectation for both my sister and myself were that we would automatically go onto University. My parents each had a degree. My mother felt very strongly, that we should earn our own living. We were not to be dependent on a man, but it was also a woman’s right that she should have a child, and I’ve fallen down on that very badly. Somehow this seemed to relate much more strongly to me than it did to my sister and I seemed to remember that I was the one who was responsible for my sister choosing, or being pushed, into physiotherapist, rather than my parents. I suppose that was natural because by that stage I had been to the university. Secondary education was at Warnambool High School after we returned from England in 1931. I must have been absolutely obnoxious because I loved London, had had several experiences that were unusual for a small girl from a country town, such as staying in a country house where there were butlers and servants, meeting Prince Ralph Motear, only a Polish prince but still, and these occasions were actually because of my father’s friendship with people who had been in the Imperial Camel Corp in World War One with whom he’d www.writepeople.com.au 3 S01310 13/01/2021 remained friendly. He had the ability to get on with everybody, he was a very likeable person, he enjoyed company, could tell a good story. There doesn’t seem to be the same success with my mother’s sort of school and university friends on that trip except for the husband of one of them where they all found they had a mutual fondness for cricket and of course this was the time of Bodyline and the Tests of 1930, which my parents attended. A lot of her friends had become what they were, English sort of upper class and we were very different being a rather impoverished schoolteacher from a country town in Victoria, a State of far-off Australia. So, because I was difficult, it was decided I would go to boarding school at the age of 14. One of my friends had gone to boarding school at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School and this seemed to be the right place for me. There were difficulties with me going to Warnambool High School where I did go for a couple of years. I was embarrassed that my father was headmaster. Whether he was embarrassed about me I don’t really know. My mother didn’t approve of the other girls there who were twelve, thirteen year olds who were interested in boys, physically well-developed and so on. I was very unhappy; I think puberty was a very unhappy time for me. I had painful menstruation, terribly bad skin, generally everything was wrong. So it was know as being good for me to go to boarding school but it was also expensive and how it was going to be paid for was rather a problem. At that time, my father became very restless with the Education Department, and became interested in politics. He hadn’t gone through the usual progression of local government because my mother didn’t approve of the local councillors but he had become very friendly with Jim Fairburn who was the State member at that time and Dad sort of ran his campaign, or ran his Warnambool office, and ran his campaign when he moved into Federal politics and parents became very friendly with both the Fairburns. So, this meant that we had the loan of the car, or permanent use of the car, and through the Fairburn connections my mother got a job on the Melbourne Herald, writing social notes once a week at tuppence a line, and when 1934 came along she visited the country homes in the Western District which were also celebrating their centenary at that time. So my boarding school was paid for at the rate of tuppence a line. That was one thing but there were also problems with clothes and how I dressed and so on, so this person, this woman who’d never sewn in her life went to the Warnambool Technical College, learned how to sew, made my clothes, and I also received parcels of clothes from her sister who lived in England and they were very exotic garments, some of which I can www.writepeople.com.au 4 S01310 13/01/2021 still remember.

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