Alison Hume: One hundred years young
IN 1922, the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) was founded, and Tutankhamun’s tomb famously discovered.
As well, a baby girl named Alison Kennedy was born in Sydney, on Monday, April 24.
This past week, the now great, great grandmother officially joined the exclusive One Hundred Club.
Alison Hume (nee Kennedy) joked with Dubbo Photo News that she doesn’t blame people for not wanting to get to 100 because she thinks age isn’t something to be achieved but her perspective on life is certainly worth it.
“You can compare so much of what’s happened in your life with how things are now,” she said.
The East Dubbo resident lives independently in a tidy apartment adjacent to her daughter’s home surrounded by antique furniture, chairs she has upholstered herself and her mother’s desk that’s over 100 years old.
On her loungeroom wall hangs a university diploma completed decades ago, however it was a long time coming as her early school years were disrupted by many family moves to follow her father’s railway work around the state.
“I don’t know how many schools I attended. Seven... in Sydney, as far up as Coffs Harbour, and as far down as Yass.
“I had six months of art and architecture at one school, two years of French and Latin in Newcastle. Therefore, I didn’t get to university until I was 70,” she said.
Though she has little confidence in her handwriting these days, there is nothing wrong with her mind.
“I’ve learnt a lot from books. I borrow seven books from the library every month. I did do speed reading at uni. I had to, to get through it! The book I’m reading now is called ‘Bewilderment’ by Richard Powers, and it’s puzzling me,” she laughs.
“I’ve got a book there called ‘Bill the Bastard’. It’s about a horse in the First World War. It tells the full story about Gallipoli. It brings back my mother to me,” Alison said.
Alison’s mother’s first husband died in France on the Sommes.
“My father was her second husband, so my mother was a war widow from her first marriage. War was anathema to her. She was not a King and Country person. She was a Country person, in as much as she loved Australia. She was Australian to her bootstraps, but specially after Gallipoli, she had rather a dislike of the Poms as she called them.”
By the time World War II arrived, Alison had already left school, started work and was about to get married.
“I left school before I had achieved the Leaving because I considered I’d failed. I left because there was no future for me. I badly wanted to be a teacher, but my father wrote to the education department and told them about my blind eye, and they said, no way can she have any physical impediment and so I said what’s the point of carrying on at school. I was 16 so of course, I knew everything about the world,” she said.
In 1939, Alison was lucky enough to land a job at the 2KY radio station.
“There were no jobs in the country, unless you were born there, went to school there and your father knew this person or that person. I was lucky I had a sister who was working in Sydney at the time, and she was friends with a woman who was secretary to the head shebang in the Labor party.
“2KY was a station owned by the Labor Party. My sister’s friend asked me to ring their office and speak on the phone, because they wanted someone who could enunciate clearly. She gave me a couple of lessons. “2K-Y!” You had to have a joyful sound in your voice and that apparently got me the job.”
If Alison was hiring today however, she’s not confident there’d be anyone up to the job.
“I say I’m a real old grinch. There’s no such thing as manners now. There’s no such thing as speaking properly. You listen to an Australian speak and it’s just gabble.
“Words run into one another. If you sent a child to learn elocution today, they’d sneer about it, but it was understood once, that you speak properly and clearly.”
She does however believe young people of today are “magnificent” and sees the opportunities available to them, like owning their own home as a dream, which wasn’t available to her.
“During WWII no houses were being built. When I moved from Maroubra to Muswellbrook with my husband, the only ‘houses’ available were louvered verandas in someone else’s house,” she recalls.
Alison and her fiancé Tommy were married at Maroubra at the Holy Family Church.
“We were on rations at the time. It was the Second World War. My mother borrowed from all the family, to get coupons to buy material. She made my wedding dress. I had a picture hat made of the same lace and carried a bunch of red roses.
“It was a short dress because you couldn’t get enough material for a long dress in those days. They didn’t produce any new material, only the silk for parachutes.”
It’s a shame that just a fraction of Alison’s story can be shared here, offering a glimpse of times gone by but while her age is a talking point this week, she’s got one grievance about it.
“The trouble is people treat you as if your brain is... they see you’re 50 and they think, ‘Alzheimer’s’. They don’t expect the brain to last as well as the body. There’s nothing I can do to counter it. It’s inlaid in people.
“I’ve had people take things out of my hands, for instance, and say ‘I’ll do that!’” but really, they just buggering things up,” she said.