2 North Terrace, Kelburn

We loved staying with our Wellington grandparents as everything was so different from Hastings.  My grandparents lived in Kelburn which was an established area of mainly large houses. I now know that the area around Upland Road was only developed after the Cable Car was opened in 1902.  My grandparents lived in North Terrace which was the first street on the right after you left the cable car terminus.  We used to lie in bed and hear the noises of the cable cars going up and down. Their house  was two-storeyed and seemed old because it was built in a Victorian style with sash bay windows.  As a child I did not realise that the group of houses immediately outside the cable car had been built by one of the Kirkcaldies for his daughters, nor did I realise I knew all these people until many years later, although at one point my grandmother told me about this 'development'.

2 North Terrace

(Photo taken long after my grandparents lived there. The house next door is more like theirs was)

Almost all the houses in Hastings were one storeyed (possibly because of the Napier earthquake) so having stairs was very exciting.  2 North Terrace was a large house which my grandparents had been forced to buy over something more modern, because my grandmother’s father came to live with them.  My great-grandmother had died just before my mother’s parents moved to Wellington from Wanganui in 1929.  My grandmother was the sole surviving daughter so they had to have enough bedrooms to accommodate members of her family when they came to stay.  My great-grandfather died in 1941 before I was born but he had had his own sitting room, called ‘The United Party Room’ which at the time I am writing about was used as a dining room and study.  Next to it was an identical room that was only used for best.  It was the Drawing Room and was famous for the window panes blowing out if there was a bad southerly.   I can remember occasions when we could not go in there because the window panes were missing.  My grandmother used this room for her tea parties.  It also contained the family gramophone.  This had to be wound up to play a record.  It was in a cabinet that served as a china cabinet and had two drawers which were full of my grandfather’s collection of photos from the First World War.  When we were a little older we would frighten ourselves by looking at photos of dead horses.   The records were 78 rpm.  There were Sousa marches and ‘Oh, For the Wings of a Dove’ sung by Ernest Lough, a famous boy soprano and recorded around 1928.  You spent a lot of time winding up the gramophone as otherwise it went flat and stopped playing.

At the back of the house was a room called ‘The Meal Room’ where we ate most of our meals.  The piano was in there and also a bookcase containing my grandmother’s Victorian novels.  Next to the Meal Room was a large kitchen.  The identical house next door had three narrow rooms including a scullery but my grandparents had knocked them all in together.  There was a sink in one corner with an Ascot water heater over it.  It made a nasty explosive noise when it was switched on. Along the wall beside it were two clothes tubs for doing the washing.  They were covered with wooden boards but on Mondays Craigie came to do the washing.  This was a major exercise with a wringer(mangle) put on the edge between the two tubs for wringing out the sheets.  I cannot really remember how the water was heated but assumed there was also a copper.  We certainly had a copper in Havelock North.  On Mondays there was always macaroni cheese for lunch.  Criaige worked until early afternoon and washed the hard floors as well as doing the washing.  I think she also cleaned the bathroom.  She was Irish and I think spoke with an Irish accent.

Along the back wall of the kitchen there was a large gas cooker and what I now know was a gas fridge.  We did not have gas in Hastings.  There was a table in the centre of the kitchen where we children would sometimes have tea of boiled eggs.  My grandfather bought the eggs direct from a farmer who supplied his office each Friday so they came in a brown paper bag and you had to be very careful not to break any of the eggs. My grandmother’s old slate from school, complete with paint spots on it, was used for writing shopping lists.  The kitchen opened onto a narrow passage known as the conservatory (but it wasn’t a conservatory, simply a lean-to porch).  All the garden tools were kept there and it was very untidy, not to mention smelly.  I expect it was damp.

Upstairs there were five bedrooms and one bathroom plus a walk-in linen cupboard which smelt peculiar.  The bathroom had a red tiled floor and a nasty water stain below the taps on the bath.  When we moved to Wellington in 1953 the house was big enough to accommodate all five of us.  My grandparents slept in the room above the United Party room while the one above the drawing room was called the lumber room.  It had been my great-grandfather’s bedroom and was totally full of junk.  I later learnt that this was partly because my great-grandfather had died during the War and there had been on-one to clean it out, but when we were a bit older and living in Wellington we used to go into it sometimes.  It was a treasure trove of old things, ranging from my great-grandfather’s masonic regalia to army uniform and a couple of guns and my mother’s school reports.  Soon after we moved to Wellington I discovered her roller skates.  They were not adjustable but fitted me at the age of nine so I learnt to use them for a few months.  I used to go round and round the bus turning area at the top of the cable car but of course I was not destined to be a skater and I soon outgrew them.

In addition to the two front bedrooms the house had two single bedrooms and a large room called ‘the nursery’ which I think had been extended over the back part of the house at some point.  We children generally slept there.  I liked lying in bed and seeing the last plane coming along Tinakori hill on its way to land at Rongotai (now Wellington) airport.  The features of this room that I remember, apart from it having room for two beds and a cot, were the maidenhair fern on the chest of drawers, a toy train set which my parents had bought for my grandfather after a court case involving trains which he was involved in, and the Singer sewing machine that later became my mother’s.  I do not remember my grandmother ever using it.  Both my grandmothers were knitters rather than dressmakers.

View from North Terrace across the Glen., looking south

The house faced south which is the wrong way to face in the southern hemisphere.  This photo shows the outlook from the front.  It looked across 'The Glen', a sunken area of housing, to the teacher training college and the rest of Kelburn.  The window panes in the two front rooms used to blow out because the storms were always southerlies.  The house was detached but only by about three feet.  A path ran up the side with the front door halfway along the side wall.  The house next door was identical.  There was a small garden along the front of the house with a couple of hydrangea bushes, a daphne odorata and some cat mint plants.  The garden at the back of the house was the ‘main’ garden.  It was not very large but my grandfather was a keen gardener and grew flowers there.  I do not remember any vegetable plants although there were herbs.  There was a square lawn, in the middle of which my grandfather had sunk a tin can so that he could practise his putting.  As the house was very close to the botanical gardens there were a lot of birds which would visit and I can remember learning the names of them.  They tended to be British birds such as sparrows and thrushes rather than native birds.  In the botanical gardens there were plenty of native species.