Enid Bird

Story

Enid Lucy Edwards, nee Bird. Born 15/12 /1915, Died 8/02/1952

‘If you do not give of yourself, you give nothing.’

My mother passed this pearl of wisdom on to me, little more than a year before her life was so tragically ended by Hodgkins disease at age 37 years, on 8 Feb 1952. Although I did not understand her at the time, it has stuck in my mind because that thought so clearly illustrated her approach to life.

Enid emigrated to Australia with the rest of the Bird family, travelling on the ship Euripedes, and disembarked at Melbourne in 1923. Soon her father (John Frederic William Bird) was allocated his farm near Bass in Gippsland under the Empire Settlement Scheme. Starting up a farm on previously unused land meant hard times, and harder work, for the whole family. Enid and her older sister Marjorie Alice (‘Mollie’) attended school at Bass, as well as shouldering most of the work of running the house. This was made necessary by the ill health of her mother (Alice Marjorie). It was also the beginning of a special closeness and mutual support between Enid and her mother, that was to be so important in the last years of Enid’s life.

The Bird family moved to Wye River on the Great Ocean Road late in 1933, and Enid’s father returned to the trade that he knew best, that of hotelier. ‘The Rookery Nook Hotel’, was largely built by Enid’s brother, Frederic Norman Bird, (‘Eric’). The hotel was always busy each year from September through to the following Easter. Enid and Mollie did all of the housework, as well as working in the kitchen. When the hotel was in the quiet periods, Enid went to work in Melbourne. It was there that she met and later married Albert Charles Edwards on 16/3/1939.

Marriage for Enid was an experience of many lows and few highs. She coped with a husband who often beat her physically, usually when he had been drinking. ‘Charlie’, as he was known, was also a gambler. He had difficulty in finding and keeping a job after the war. Thus Enid had to find ways herself to generate income to be able to feed her children. This resulted in a move back to Wye River where she had the support of her mother and family. Alan John, her first child, (born 31/12/1939) came with them from Footscray, the others were all born whilst the family lived in the house ‘Seaview’ at Wye River. They were Joy Patricia Ð born 6/9/1943 ; Paul Richard Ð born 28/2/1945, and Peter Charles born 19/8/1949

Enid was resourceful, brave, a good nurse, a talented cook; and stoic in enduring the privations that came with her illness, and the isolation that occurred when landslides blocked the Great Ocean Road. Providing for her family involved running a small cafe, catering for the bus tours that came along regularly on their Great Ocean Road scenic trips. Taking in lodgers, and servicing the needs of campers holidaying at the beachfront camping ground were also part of her business. In the midst of all this flurry of activity, she also managed to provide a billet for a Latvian family of Displaced Persons called Liguts, and also nurse Alan through another episode of rheumatic fever.

Diagnosed with Hodgkins disease early in 1947, Enid resisted it for 5 years. Towards the end she was kept going by fortnightly injections of Vitamin B caringly administered by Dr. Grey of Lorne.

We never once heard her complain in all of that time, when her life most difficult. There were shattering blows that she suffered during and after the war. Her youngest brother, Peter, died whilst on military service in 1942, her father died suddenly of a heart attack in January 1945, and her mother died as suddenly, of a stroke in the November of 1947, not long after Enid learned of her own terminal illness. In those days, cancer was a death sentence, and she had to face it without the solace of her mother who had always been her closest support.

This is the way that it came to be, that a woman who loved poetry and singing, and was a genuine ‘gold star’ mother devoted to her children; came to the end of her days without the satisfaction of seeing them grow up.

Enid gave and gave until there was nothing left to give. She gave her total self without ever knowing the extent of the inspiration that she became.

Alan Edwards

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