When I got back on board the Lothian there was quite a lot of mail waiting for me, one was a telegram from my Mam which gave me a laugh, it said simply - "Come home as Joe is on Embarkation Leave", the telegram was about nine months old and addressed to HMS London, it was covered in postmarks all over the world and it was a wonder it reached me at all. Another letter from Mam informed me that I had an aunt in Sydney and enclosed her address. I made a note of it and promised to go and see her. The first weekend off I had, I travelled by train from Sydney Central station to Liverpool and then got a local bus to Hammondville where my Aunt Flo lived. I knocked on the door and my uncle Harry Hatton answered, I told him my Mam had asked me to look them up and he shouted "Flo!", I explained who I was to Aunt Flo who was a lovely motherly figure - she put her arms around me and welcomed me into their house. I was the first person she had seen from home in nearly twenty years, she had gone out to Australia in 1926 to join her husband Harry who had jumped ship in Sydney the year before, he was an ambulance driver and they had eight children, the eldest Arthur was about 20 years old being the only one born in England. Anyway, I stayed the weekend and many weekends after that, I slept on the veranda under a mosquito net and travelled back to Sydney on Monday morning with the city workers who lived in Hammondville, my cousin Flo was one of these and I got on well with her as she was the same age as me.
All my weekends and short leaves were spent at the Hattons home and I began to feel like one of the family. The house was made of wood and was practically self-built, Uncle Harry adding rooms whenever he could afford it, it was primitive but comfortable with one tap only in the kitchen and an earth toilet up the garden. While I stayed there I helped them to put a cement path round the house and up the garden, we used to swim regularly in the creek and had a dance in the village hall every Saturday night.
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