I was four years old when we moved to the dairy farm in the early 1960s as Australia was undergoing a credit squeeze. The squeeze meant people could not borrow money to build their own homes, so my builder father became under employed. With the help of Mother's father, he bought a dairy farm and it was successful enough. Give my daughter anything she wants was the only interest Grandfather charged. Can you see why Mother might be like she is? Of course, come divorce, all that was forgotten and Grandfather was repaid from the farm settlement, which ultimately went back to Mother, who made short work of the money. To be a little fair, a good bit of it was spent on bringing up brothers and sister and Step Father was a bit of a business dreamer and lost some of the money. Of course when oldest son wanted money for a deposit for his first house, sorry son, the money is tied up. I begged and borrowed more, and got my start and lived in penury for a number of years.
Shortly before that happened, Father built his in laws a rather good cream brick veneer on North Road, South Oakleigh. Who would have known that North Road would become a truck container route.
Grandma gave her daughter, Mother, her old three brush Electrolux floor polisher and bought a new two brush Hoover that was light but quite uncontrollable, as I remember it. Photo by Gugue @ Flickr.
Photo by Austin Russell @ Pinterest.
While the three brush model became too heavy for Grandma, the two brush Hoover had Grandma dancing around the kitchen as she tried to control its direction of travel. Left to its own devices it would have gone crazy like a high pressure water hose when released from your grip. The process with floor polishers was sprinkle the liquid polish on the floors and spread it with the brushes. Then clip on the felt pads to remove the polish, and then buff the floor with lambswool clip ons.
When I moved into R's Elwood flat in 1979, I came with some items, one being by then my late grandmother's floor polisher. It certainly brought up his bathroom terrazzo floor to a gleaming shine but age had not dimmed its enthusiasm for madly skating around the floor.
I don't know what happened to the polisher, but something of it remains to this day.
Now you may think I am changing the subject, but no, it will come together.
I bought some new work boots. Australian made Rossi boots (Adelaide family Rossiter) last about ten years and are amazingly good value at about $80 at the big green shed hardware shop.
My last pair had not really worn out but had developed a hole in the bend crease on top of the boot. I had also badly scarred them. I had only ever used liquid polish on them. One thing we forgot to take with us when we visited Canada and New York was liquid shoe polish, and oh, how we were ripped off for that at a shop at the Port Authority in New York. And, it was not very good polish either.
So, I have new boots, and I decided to I will go back to the old ways of polishing them with Kiwi Nugget, and then buffing them. But where to buy a brush? Woolworths at QV had a suitable brush for taking polish off, at $10, and I bought it and then found in an el cheapo Asian shop a brush for applying the polish. I should have bitten the bullet and bought two expensive brushes at Woolworths.
I had so forgotten about the twist thing to open the shoe polish tin. I need newspaper to protect the floor when cleaning shoes, but we don't have newspapers. I found a newspaper in the recycling room, but by the time I got around to polishing my boots, the paper had gone back downstairs in the recycling.
I sat on my lav seat in my ensuite and polished my new boots and my casual shoes. The cheap put on polish brush flicked loose shoe polished laden fibres onto my floor. Messy. The expensive take off polish brush did well though, but my shoes needed a final buffing to give them a good glow.
We have a shoe cleaning box that also contains a stock of new sponges and scourers. In the very bottom of the box I found something to buff my shoes up nicely. That would be the lambswool floor polisher clip ons from my grandmother's Hoover floor polisher and the pair of them would be over 50 years old.
Oh yes, the result with the boots, instead of having a flashy shine, now have a warm dull glow, so satisfying. R was doubtful that we had to polish our school shoes every night of school, but we did.