The Day Before The Wedding

What a day! Forty years later I'm still astonished that I survived without having a nervous breakdown.

My parents and I were up bright and early on the day before the wedding. Mutti and I drove to the markets and bought armfuls of flowers which we were taking to the church. We had organised to meet Frau Mikalauskas who cleaned the church and did the flower arrangements there. The door was open and in we went only to be completely horrified. Nobody had told us that the church was being renovated.

All the pews were on one big pile covered with drop cloths. There was scaffolding all around the walls where plasterers and painters were working. Everything was covered with dust and chunks of plaster. Frau Mikalauskas met us with a smile and assured us that the place would be clean and that enough pews would be set out for our guests. She warned us however that the church would still be unfinished.


Mutti and I left The Goulburn St premises quite distressed. Next we headed up to the reception venue where we were delivering the wedding cake, place cards, the seating plan and the vast number of boxes of beverages. Before unloading the bounty we popped in to check on the room and to borrow a trolley to make our task easier. Horror of horrors! The wallpaper was hanging off the walls in strips and the carpet was being pulled up. The place was crawling with workmen. We just about collapsed when we saw the disaster. The functions manager assured us that everything would be perfect 'on the day'.

Mutti and I came home distressed and absolutely exhausted. We had lunch and a bit of a rest before T rang, said he had arrived from Canberra, had something to show me at his house and could he pick me up.

Nick, T's best friend, was sitting on the gutter behind his combi van outside T's house. He was wearing ancient shorts with the fly buttons missing, no undies and his goolies hanging out. At the time he had long hair way past his shoulders. This apparition was going to be our best man the following day!

T's surprise came next. He took me around to the backyard where his sister was feeding a bottle of milk to a piglet!!! I freaked and was pretty sure my parents would too. The piglet was really cute though.

T had turned up at the piggery on his way from Canberra to Sydney and the farmer had forgotten all about keeping a piglet for him. All he had were breeding piglets which were much more expensive. T said that after giving it to my parents as a joke we would take it to a butcher and then eat it. The farmer agreed the original price as long as there was not going to be any breeding, put the squealing piglet in a sack which then got dumped in the car. Luckily it stayed quiet except for once when T took a corner sharply and the sack slid to the other side of the car.

We couldn't keep the pig in the sack, that's where Nick came in. T got a big wooden crate which had been his dog's kennel, put it on its side and put the pig in. The two boys loaded the crate into Nick's combi van and drove over to my parents' house, deposited the box at the foot of the stairs and rang the doorbell.

"Here is the deposit on the bride price," T announced when my parents turned up. My mother started a sort of hysterical giggle but my father had obviously forgotten what he said at our engagement a year earlier and looked confused. What do you do with a pig in the suburbs of Sydney? We decided to put the crate in the laundry, which was in a separate building from the house, feed the pig and decide what to do later.

Nick, in his ancient shorts, and T were invited to stay for dinner. We had finished the meal and had gone into the lounge room when we heard an almighty smashing noise. We rushed back to the kitchen to see what had happened to be greeted by some laughing family friends who had sneaked down the side of the house and were smashing crockery in the German tradition of 'Polterabend'. This is a tradition where crockery is smashed for good luck and the couple about to be wed sweeps the shards up together.

What sounded like yet another disaster wasn't. We all had a jolly evening filled with much laughter. Finally everyone went home and I went to bed excited that by this time the next day I would be married.