The Bloomfield Chronicles – Part 1

by Sally
The Bloomfield Chronicles
PART 1
DAD

 It was the 24th January, 1932, my mother and I had been up flying in her little Tiger Moth. We had looped the loop over the family home ‘Overnewton’ at Keilor and on landing, we were driven to Myoora, in Albany Road Toorak where, in the early hours of the morning on the 25th, I was born!!

My father, John Stoughton Clarke Bloomfield, was 31 years old at the time.  He was a young solicitor practicing in Melbourne and Mum, Beatrice Madge (nee Taylor) was 30. I was provided with a nanny to care for me, as were most of the young children in the social strata in which my parents moved. They were both mad keen about sport, playing golf, tennis, riding and all the popular sports of the day.

In 1935 my sister Joan was born and Dad had been made a partner in a legal firm he had worked with for some years. My first interest in motor cars was sparked at this time, when our neighbour Sir Edmund Herring, bought a Lancia Lambda, which I feel in love with. I attended Miss Gregories, a kindergarten in Douglas St and one recollection I have of this period, was of my father putting me on the cross bar of his bicycle and cycling to the St Kilda baths, where I was thrown in at the deep end and made to swim!! A cruel way, but I did learn very quickly!!!

In September 1939 the war broke out and we moved back to the family home. I was just eight and, as there was no alternative schooling nearby, I was sent to Glamorgan Primary school in Toorak as a boarder, the youngest they had accepted. Mum, Joan and Granny Taylor lived at Keilor, which may as well have been hundreds of miles away instead of 13. It was during my first year of school that I became ill and was put into hospital which was to be my home on and off for the next four years.

More to read