When Peggy’s husband left her with three little children in the late 40s she sold everything she had and bought a terrible little house in Aspendale. They had been living as a family in Melbourne, she was an Essendon girl – born and bred – but she’d spent holidays as a child in Aspendale and remembered thinking to herself on one particular afternoon, ‘I’m going to live here when I grow up, and then everyday will be a holiday’. And so when she had nowhere else to go, and was forced to start from scratch, she gave strict orders to the agents in Aspendale to contact her only when they’d found a property within a skip and a hop from her young summer getaway, one that opened up directly onto the beach.
She had very little money and, although her mother was in a position to help her, she was left her to fend for herself. These were the days well before the single-mothers pension and so Peggy had little time to figure out exactly how she was going to raise the funds to support her young family. Aspendale at that time was on the very edges of Melbourne and attracted some pretty footloose characters and with all the land around the house Peggy thought that she might get lucky renting out a few caravans. And so that’s what she did. Her brothers helped her out and she bought three caravans and over time rented them to several families of ten-pound Poms, who thought it was romantic to live in a van in the sticks, and the occasional mob of down-and-outers in the need for any kind of roof over their heads.
As a kid, apart from getting away with the family to Aspendale for summer, she spent a good deal of time with her brothers at a cafe in St Kilda. A little place with a rooster out front that sold coffee, regularly, and packed itself with jazz-loving youngsters whenever a band was in town. She loved the music but was a little shy in her appreciation. Her brothers didn’t hold back. She remembered Brian in particular, jumping up onto the tables and dancing like a wildcat, with no care for the tables, or his asthma!
Well, music was the thing that kept Peggy afloat and her one indulgence was bringing home the occasional record. She’d doll up and head into town whenever she had the opportunity to get away from the little ones and, even more unusually, had money to spare. In spite of her slender income, she’d managed to put away enough to buy herself a record player, now she just needed to collect the music. She met a newly arrived Englishman behind the counter of Brashs music store on Elizabeth Street in Melbourne. He talked with her about the kind of music she preferred and over time they struck up something of a musical friendship, he would make suggestions and she would share her thoughts and feelings about the records he sold her. After that first trip into town she made her way happily home with an album of French chansons and a collection of modern German tunes. In among the chansons was hidden the young Edith Piaf, and there began Peggy’s love affair with the ‘little sparrow’.
Her children benefited quite nicely from these occasional jaunts into town, as well. Along with the kids belonging to the caravan families, they spent their days off dancing up a storm on the shores of Aspendale Beach to the sounds of Edith Piaf blasting from the open doors and windows of Peggy’s terrible little house.
with a song in my heart 
