Her story. Her voice.
A book your family will treasure forever.

Margaret started at Hillside Primary in the autumn of 1949, a small figure in a starched uniform carrying a tin lunchbox her mother had packed the night before. The school was a long walk from home — longer, it seemed, in the cold months — but Margaret rarely minded. She and her brother Tom had their route down to a science, cutting through the corner of old Mr Patterson’s farm whether they were supposed to or not.

There was a large gum tree halfway across the paddock that Tom always raced her to. He always won. Every single time, for six years. “I never once beat him,” Margaret recalls, laughing. “Not once. Though I did give him a good fright one morning when I took the long way and somehow got there first. He never quite worked out how I did it.”

Her teacher in those early years was a Mrs Crawford — strict in the way that all teachers seemed strict in those days, but fair, Margaret insists, and quietly encouraging to a girl who was better at reading than most of her classmates realised. “She never made a fuss of it,” Margaret says. “She just left harder books on my desk and said nothing. I always thought that was rather elegant of her.”