31/365 Monday 01/31/2011

This is the only I picture in my possession of my mother as a young adult and her mother, my grandmother. There is one more picture of them, but my mum is about 3 in that one. This picture was taken in Christchurch, New Zealand where my mother attended the University of Canterbury, probably from 1948-1952. (She was born in 1930). She had attended boarding school at Nelson Girls Boarding School (now it's Nelson Girls College) in Nelson, a town on the northern coast of New Zealand's South Island. I know they had a difficult relationship after my grandfather had died in the war (he was killed on Crete in 1941). I remember my mother talking about feeling bitter about having been sent off to boarding school--and jealous of the "day girls" who got to go home to their families after school.  I remember her also telling us that when her mother sent her there she was the youngest girl to be boarding there. That must have been rough. I have a feeling this would be one reason why she would not have enjoyed the Harry Potter books/movies--she was always sceptical of depictions of boarding schools, especially by people who had not attended one themselves.

I do like this picture of the two of them, which must have been taken around 1950. My mother emigrated to Australia in 1954 with her first husband. My grandmother passed away a year later. Her name was Mamari Augusta Lockett née Taylor.

One more interesting tidbit: Christchurch was the setting of the infamous 1954 Parker-Hulme murder and court case which Peter Jackson turned into the film "Heavenly Creatures".