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put to good use years later. His younger sisters fared less well.
Annie would much later tell her daughter Alma something of what her life then had been like.
For some reason Annie and Ellen were apparently not allowed to see or speak to their older
brothers and had to arrange any such encounters in secret and by stealth - although this can't,
however, have applied to Willie and his young wife Esther, who was Annie Chapman's daughter
after all, and would
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presumably have visited her mother and her former home now and then. But was Esther aware
of the indifferent treatment of the Honeycombe girls, especially by her unmarried younger sister,
Nellie? For when Granny Chapman was out, the two girls were looked after by 16-year-old
Nellie - and not very kindly or well. Amongst other things she often locked the girls in a room so
that she could go out on a date. Once, before doing so, she put a lot of wood on an open fire in
the room. Somehow the house caught on fire, and the girls were only rescued when a neighbour
used an axe to break open the locked door. Another time, when Nellie hit Ellen with a poker
and drew blood, Annie escaped from the house and ran to the mine where Bob and Willie
worked. On the way she met Willie, who came to his sister's rescue. But what he said or did we
do not know.
In the absence of both his mother and father Willie was theoretically responsible for his sisters'
well-being. But what could he do? His wife Esther had borne him two children by March 1902
and he must have had financial and other worries of his own. Besides, it is said that his father,
John, wherever he was, was paying something towards the cost of Annie and Ellen boarding at
the Chapman home. So John was theoretically still in charge. And Willie, one imagines, would
have been reluctant to accuse his wife's sister of cruelty and lack of care. Nonetheless, both his
sisters were badly treated, it seems, being made to do so many household chores each morning
before going to school that they had to run to school to avoid a caning for being late. When
Nellie died in the 1930's, Ellen said: 'Oh, good! She should have died years ago!'.
Annie once rebuked her daughter, Alma, by saying: 'No, don't laugh. We had a very unhappy
childhood!'.
Not surprisingly, neither Annie nor Ellen did very well at school. Annie's grammar was so poor
in her letters to her father - and she was the one who wrote to him most - that he complained
about it and even paid for her (via Willie perhaps) to attend a private school. But either the
money ran out or Annie proved to be no scholar, for she was not there long.
Meanwhile, Bob Honeycombe married Selina Thomas in August 1903, and five months later,
on 30 December, his mother Mary was freed from her third confinement in the mental hospital
at Goodna, presumably of sounder mind if not altogether cured.
Hospital reports say that relatives kept promising to take her away but failed to do so. And it
seems that the length of her final stay at Goodna was determined by the fact that she had not
enough money to return to Charters Towers and that her family there were in no hurry to bring
her home. In effect, they (that is, Willie and Bob) abandoned her - much as she had been
abandoned by John.
How she must have hoped and waited for someone to take her away. How she must have
yearned for the sight of familiar, unofficial faces, and to see her children again. But she never
did. She humbled herself, and endured.
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