Sometimes they have a glass of wine, sometimes a cup of tea, but every afternoon there are a few more crocheted poppies produced.
Danette Rowse, whose life has changed irrevocably after a brain injury sustained during a car accident in 2013, calls into her 93-year-old Hazelbrook neighbour Patricia Williams five afternoons a week.
They’re making poppies to mark the centenary of the end of World War I in November 2018.
It is hoped knitters Australia-wide will create 60,000 poppies – a poppy for every Australian life lost in the war – to carpet part of the grounds at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in time for commemorations.
Mrs Williams was raised in Woodford and her parents Nell and Charles Laffin both served in the Medical Corps of the Australian Army.
Nell trained at Bathurst hospital and nursed soldiers at Lemnos, Egypt and in England. Her first fiancée, Will Rose, was killed at Fromelles.
“Will lay in an unmarked grave for over 90 years until DNA testing of graves in Pheasant Wood allowed identification and a headstone,” said Mrs Williams’ niece Sue Tongue.
“At a Last Post ceremony at the Australian War Memorial Patricia’s and Will’s families were able to re-unite his two sergeant’s stripes. He had inscribed the back of one with love to his mother and the other with love to Nell before he went to the Western Front.”
After the war Nell and Charles helped many soldiers who struggled to recover from their experiences. Mrs Williams’ older brother John wrote extensively about the war and helped establish the Families and Friends of the First AIF. He also wrote of the family’s life in Woodford in his autobiography A Kind of Immortality.
Mrs Williams remembers World War II when she was working in Sydney for a shipping company.
“It was not a very happy job. I heard about ships sinking,” she recalled.
When the war ended she was asked to give up her job for the man who had it before. She happily obliged.
Mrs Williams had many happy years with her first husband Glenn Hart, who was an accountant with Qantas, before he died at just 49. She remarried, an Englishman George Williams, spending 15 years in England before returning to Australia. Mr Williams died in 1997 at age 73 from deep vein thrombosis sustained during a long-haul flight.
Mrs Williams has lived in Hazelbrook for the past 17 years and only met Mrs Rowse last year when she had a fall and was assisted by Mrs Rowse’s husband Evan. Since then the two women have enjoyed each other’s company.
“Danette is wonderful,” Mrs Williams whispered to the Gazette while her friend was out of the room.
So far they have a tally of 41 poppies, and plan to create hundreds more before next November.