Always a Kilbreda Girl

It was 25 years recently, since my beautiful mother died. She lived and breathed Kilbreda and was always quoting Mother Margaret Mary and others. She lived all of her life in the same street in Cheltenham, from birth until she was married at 19, at Number 1 McIvor Street and then 15 McIvor Street.

She was an inquisitive child and was bored at home, so she was sent to Kilbreda when only four in 1941. She caught the train from Cheltenham each day and followed the crowd to Kilbreda. On the return journey, Mr French, the station master at Cheltenham (a relative on my father’s side from Beechworth), was under strict instructions from my grandmother, not to let the city bound train leave until Beverley had appeared!

Mum talked lovingly of all her teachers and friends at Kilbreda. She was particularly taken with the very beautiful Sr Canisia, who arrived that same year. She would have loved my involvement with Kilbreda’s history and would have contributed to A View from the Tower, I’m sure, but that was not to be.

While here, she was regularly Class Captain and also top of her class, or at least in the top three. She was Lisieux House Captain in about 1952 and a member of various committees including the YCS. When Kilbreda turned 90, we celebrated at an Assembly. As I left the Hall, I was met by a huge blown up photo of the YCS in the foyer and there was Mum smiling back at me. I asked who had made the display and was pointed to Sister Maree Simm, who was delighted to hear my mother was living locally in Cheltenham. Sister Maree enlisted Mum to come down once a week to go through old photos and identify them. At that stage the archives was a random collection of stuff in what is now the disabled toilet on the Colonnade. Occasionally, I come across Mum’s distinctive writing (Kilbreda Hand) on photos in our collection. 

One of her most loved teachers was Mother Carmela Connell. On one occasion, Mum was given the task of throwing an old book in the fire. On her way to the fire, Mum opened the book and found it to contain a page about every Kilbreda student, with their personal details and results. Fortunately, Mum tore out her own page, as did her accomplice. But dutifully, and in hindsight, very sadly, committed the rest to the flames as requested.

Mum always said that Mother Margaret Mary thought her too delicate to be a teacher, but still wanted her to be a nun. In early 1953, Mother Margaret went to Ireland for the General Chapter. While she was gone, Mum left Kilbreda, ‘taking a position’ at Hedewick’s, a law firm in the city, where she remained until she married. 

Mum’s love of learning never left her and she was rarely without a book in her hand. Throughout my secondary years, Mum studied for her HSC at nights, following her passions for history, literature and politics. She sat her final two exams with my classmates in St Bede’s Hall.

Following a cancer diagnosis and various treatments in 1995, she ended up in Bethlehem hospital in 1996, and another Kilbreda connection, Sister Cletus Dullard, who reminisced with her quite often and who was with her when she died. We had celebrated Julia’s Baptism at Bethlehem two weeks earlier. Father Frank Martin had found it odd when I suggested that my mother would be her godmother, but after I had explained the significance of the connection, he not only agreed but preached about it from the pulpit the following Sunday. 

Mum was a member of the Parish Council at OLA, a reader, eucharistic minister, Mother’s Club President, you name it. In the Probus newsletter following her death it was written “She and her husband Jack had six sons and I can assure you that there was not a dry eye in the Church when those same six strapping sons carried her coffin from the Church.”

 Damian Smith 

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