Reminisce

The Christmas that nearly became our last ever

Gillian Mason has been married for 61 years and has four children and nine grandchildren. She enjoys travelling, reading, knitting and spending time with her family in Melbourne. I GREW UP ON A RURAL FARMING PROPERTY

20 kilometres from Port Lincoln in South Australia. It is a city now, but in 1941 it was a country town on a beautiful, deep-sea harbour where cargo ships came in to load and unload.

I rode my pony to school, which was in a small Methodist church at the end of our one-kilometre long driveway. The school, made up of ten students from around the district, had one teacher and she taught grades one to seven in the same room.

In December 1941, at the end of the school term and just before the Christmas holidays, my parents invited our teacher to dinner before she left to go home for the summer break. After my two sisters and I went to bed, my parents and teacher played a card game together. The wireless was on with the volume turned down, so

they didn’t hear the news bulletin about the poison.

My parents had recently bought a kerosene refrigerator and Mum had made ice-cream – which was a special treat then. Since it was a hot evening, for dessert she offered our teacher the choice of ice-cream or a cup of tea and Christmas cake. The teacher opted for ice-cream and, as fate would have it, her choice was a blessing.

Later that evening, there was frantic knocking at the front door and in burst the local shopkeeper followed closely by a policeman. Both of them looked very worried. The policeman asked, “Is everybody alright? Have you made your Christmas cakes? Where are they? We must have those tins and even the basin they were made in.” My parents were shocked.

Earlier that year, the cargo ship Hertford had been damaged by a naval mine off the Great Australian Bight. It was towed into Port Lincoln where some of its cargo was unloaded. Among the salvaged products were tins whose labels had become detached. Some of these were placed in a crate marked ‘ammonium carbonate’ and distributed to our shopkeeper, who sold them as a raising agent for baking. Mum had bought some to make her Christmas cakes.

Fortunately, a lot of the waterdamaged cargo was sent to a laboratory in Adelaide for testing and the ‘ammonium carbonate’ was found to be potassium cyanide – a deadly poison similar in appearance to sugar and soluble in water. Much research was undertaken to find out where the cargo had ended up and it was finally revealed that some was in Port Lincoln.

Authorities contacted the Port Lincoln police who notified our shopkeeper, who remembered selling the product to my mother. He was a family friend and knew Mum was making Christmas cakes, hence the frantic, late-night pounding at the door.

Mum was astonished. She had made the cakes on the weekend when we children were at home. She said that we had walked in and out of the kitchen all day but didn’t ask once to lick the spoon or basin as we usually did. She had also said several times that she was going to cut the Christmas cakes but didn’t.

My mother always said about the incident that our time wasn’t up. God had other plans for us that Christmas.

“Later that evening, there was frantic knocking at the front door”

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