Florence Elsie Smith

  Noted events in her life were:

• note. ²⁴⁰ Greg Petersen notes:
Flo has outlived three husbands & when she (jokingly?) told John Hobson, one of her sons, that she was looking for number four he told that three husbands were enough and he was not going to walk her down the aisle again.
Flo is still very capable & in full possession of her memory, she has total recall and has kept her mind active. After the death of her last husband and at a loose end as she put it, "feeling a bit down" Flo decided to enrol at the university & completed a Batchelor's degree in English literature, Flo graduated at the age of 70.
We discussed her favourite book and the one that was her first taste of English literature, "Beowulf", I recommended that she read "Njal's Saga". After graduating Flo then travelled overseas & upon her return was invited to tour China with the Orchid Society she loved both these adventures & has a strong fondness for the Chinese people & their history.
Flo is also an accomplished painter & has still life paintings on her wall as well as a painting of her late husband (number three) in a chair with their cat on his shoulder, she has not picked a brush up at her new unit as the small area doesn't allow for the mess of her paints & canvasses.
Flo remembers that she & her mother & father went to live at Johan's house selling their own house.
Her father & Johan barely spoke to each other & soon had a falling out.
(Johan had overheard talk in the hotel that Ivy White was "an easy lay", not realising that there was another Ivy White, of easy virtue, working at one of the local stations. It was this Ivy White the station hands were referring to.) A blazing row followed & Theodore & his family moved out.
John & his wife Jean then moved in with their son Hubert and daughter Betty.
Flo recalls an abiding hatred towards John & Jean as they also took her dog
(they had left it behind as the new home was much smaller than their former one another source of anger as they sold their first home to move in with Johan), she clearly remembers attacking Hubert in the playground nearly tearing his hair out, something she looks back on now in horror.
When he finally realised his error, Johan attempted to patch up his mistake but Theodore had had enough & in Flo's words, "would prefer to camp on the river bank than go back to that house".
Despite the falling out, whenever Johan's health was troubling him in his later years, it was always Mary Ellen he turned to for help. According to Flo, John's wife could be a little cold & was not much of a cook Flo & her family often thought it was poetic revenge having Jean's cooking inflicted upon him.