Nance was a week short of her sixth birthday when she and Frank were
roused out of bed in the dark and lifted into the buggy, squashed in
with bedding, the cooking pots rattling around in the back, and her
mother shouting back towards the house: Goodbye, Rothsay, I hope I
never see you again!
When Kate Grenville's mother died she left behind many fragments of
memoir. These were the starting point for One Life, the story of a
woman whose life spanned a century of tumult and change. In many ways
Nance's story echoes that of many mothers and grandmothers, for whom the
spectacular shifts of the twentieth century offered a path to new
freedoms and choices. In other ways Nance was exceptional. In an era
when women were expected to have no ambitions beyond the domestic, she
ran successful businesses as a registered pharmacist, laid the bricks
for the family home, and discovered her husband's secret life as a
revolutionary.
