Johanne was quiet and demure and lived in the same township. She was not known as a beauty, but she was more than a suitable wife for a farmer with prospects. She was of good farming stock, hardworking and had good childbearing hips. There was some muttering in the township because Johanne was more than six years older than Mathes – crueller tongues said it was more like ten. There were those who thought she was well past childbearing age. Mathes married my mother when she was three months short of her thirty-fifth birthday. Like me, she had been a domestic servant. But unlike me, she worked in her position for over ten years for a local doctor in Blumberg. What she may have lacked in looks, she made up for in bearing a brood of seven children. Some time before Johanne and Mathes were married, he moved down the hill to the drier lands on the Murray River Flats where he bought 150 acres of open flat land on a credit lease. It was 1888, fifteen long years, before he could say the farm was his.
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