This morning we decided to journey up to the Boggo Road Goal Markets with my aunt Glenda who has been staying with us over Christmas. Such a good idea until we quite carelessly managed to lose Glenda. One minute we were buying tomatoes and she was at the ATM. The next minute she had vanished without a trace. Gone. Lost. And it was quite some time before she was sighted.
It turns out she was whisked away into the jail her crime being that she had admitted that her father, my paternal grandfather, was a warden at the goal.
To Jack Sims (pictured above), the operator of tours at the historic prison, that makes her gold and he was not letting her escape without taking her details for an oral history project he is working on.
After her particulars were taken (and possibly fingerprints, who knows) she was released without charge and allowed back to buy a German sausage with mustard.
Glenda remembers the gaol well, especially being sent up there on pay day to collect the wages so her mum could go shopping. She would be greeted at the guard house where most of the officers knew her by name. This is the kind of stuff Jack wants to know about.
He is also very keen to get his hands on a bar of soap delicately carved by a prisoner which my late father had. The soap, which has been stored in a tobacco tin for decades, was a present to my grandfather from a prisoner and it has always been considered special by my family.
It is now in Glenda's keeping and may end up in the prison museum if it gets off the ground.
So it seems kind of fitting that she was again getting money and being escorted into the prison.
Next time we might need to lock her up and throw away the key.
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