I was born in Wellington at 12.10 am on 22 April 1945. My mother was obviously slightly miffed that
I missed Princess Elizabeth’s birthday by ten minutes. She said that it was because the obstetrician
was playing bridge and told them to ‘hold the birth’ so he could finish the
game! I was born in a maternity home in
Willis Street in the centre of the city.
It was an old house and still existed in my childhood. Another girl in my class at Marsden was born
there two days later.
It was an exciting time for the end of the War and Mum used
to say that she and all the other mothers would listen eagerly to the news,
waiting for Berlin to fall. Many of
these women, including my mother, had husbands who were serving in the
forces. My father was in England but we
were told that he was about to leave for Europe and that as the truck he was in
left the air force base, someone chased it down the drive to deliver the
telegram saying I had been born! My
sister Margaret has written up a lot of letters about my father’s time in
Europe but unfortunately there is a gap for this period.
After the customary fortnight, or thereabouts, in the
maternity home, my grandfather took my mother and me home to their house in
Kelburn. We went in a large taxi
belonging to someone called Reid. I
lived there until the end of 1945 when my father finally returned from Europe. It was a big house and I know my mother had a
Karitane nurse (a trained nursery nurse). I think she
probably stayed for a month. I never met
this woman until my mother went into the local old people’s home in 2002. On my first visit to her, my mother proudly
took me to visit her as she was also a resident there.
We now know that my father was attached to an RAF unit and
that meant that he was not discharged as soon as he wanted to be. He served in Germany and France in 1945 and,
so we were told as children, spent a lot of time driving lorries round
Europe. His letters make very little
mention of these trips. The letters made
me realise that he must have passed long lines of refugees on the roads as I
know he drove all over Germany. These
are the letters he sent to his parents and I know one self-censors letter to
one’s parents. My father spoke more
about the journey back to New Zealand. I
know he returned to England first and I can remember as children he used to
tell us that on the ship on the way back from Europe he was a ‘potato peeler’
until he discovered there was a library and managed to get himself allocated to
duties there. I also know that the ship
called at Colombo in what is now Sri Lanka but was then Ceylon. There he bought a set of three elephants made
of something black (ebony?) with proper tusks.
These stood on a side table in our first house and later ended up on the
top of a bookcase. At some point in this
journey he also bought me a stuffed koala bear which he managed to carry in his
kit bag. He had already bought me a doll
in France. This doll was so precious
that it lived in a camphorwood chest which held all the valuable things. I used
to take it out occasionally and stroke it.
I knew there was a story attached to it.
He had bought it in the south of France and the person from whom he had
bought it tried very hard to persuade him to also buy the ‘husband’. Only in recent years have we uncovered the
full story. My father used to say that
the seller told him it was either ‘St Anne’ or ‘ancienne’ but his French was
atrocious. It was in fact a figure from
a church Christmas crib and it was probably a nineteenth century figure as it
had real hair and very old clothes. My
interpretation of the story is that people were so poor at that point that they
were selling anything they could.
Of course, I cannot remember anything about my time in
Wellington as a baby. What I do know is
that when my father arrived home, I took one look at him and burst into
tears! A bit of me thinks this coloured
our relationship for ever. In January
1946 we moved to Hawkes Bay where my father came from. He returned to his job in the South British
Insurance Company in Napier but we lived in a bungalow in Havelock North.
We do not know who owned this house. It may have been my paternal grandmother as
the letters Margaret has transcribed talk about the possibility of our living
in a house in Napier that belonged to one of my father’s Hoadley aunts. This did not happen and the aunt and uncle
moved to Melbourne, Australia to be near their only son and his Australian
wife. I think I must have been about
four when they moved as I can distinctly remember going to visit them in
Napier. The house was on one of the
hills on a very steep street and I can remember being afraid the car would take
off down the hill once we had got out! I
also remember going there more than once although I only have memories of
getting out of the car and of the approach to the front door.
We lived in Havelock North until I was three and a half so I
have clear memories of it, plus obviously memories of memories that people told
me about. The hall was decorated with a
series of hunting prints and I can remember being held up to them. I used to say something about the horses and hounds
finish with ‘Alba’ which was the name of the Karitane nurse my mother had after
Margaret was born. My father essentially commuted and was out of the house all
day. My mother became very depressed
(this may have been partly post-natal depression) as the house was nearly a
mile outside the village on an unsealed road and, although there were
neighbours, they were not very close.
There was one neighbour who was really supportive. This was the childless middle-aged woman who
lived opposite. We knew her as ‘Thompy’
and her husband as ‘Thompy Man’. After
Margaret was born she used to have me every Thursday morning so that my mother
had a bit of time with just the baby. I
still have very clear memories of those Thursdays. The house was a concrete Californian style
house (as were many in Hawkes Bay). It
had a sunken rose garden and there was a straw doll that stood on the front
verandah. I think the doll had some function in the garden. It might have contained stakes or similar
tools. Thompy lived above the road and
the house was approached by a drive up the side of a slight hill. Our house was almost directly opposite and
was below the road. Thompy’s house was
the only house on that side of the road although there were three on our
side. Like a lot of childless people in
that generation, the Thompys were collectors.
I particularly remember a wonderful dolls’ house which must have lived
in a scullery or similar. I also remember
sitting in the sitting room looking at ‘Old Cole’s’ annual which was an
Australian publication. There was a
collection of hand-tinted postcards which probably dated from the beginning of
the century. Then there was the kaleidoscope:
a wonderful tube like a small telescope which contained coloured glass. You held it up to your eye and turned it and
the coloured glass moved so that you got a succession of pictures in jewel
colours. Magic for a two year old.
Typical Havelock North bungalow - Thompy's house was bigger than this with a verandah all round
I also remember incidents from my life in Pufflett
Road. My mother used to bath Margaret in
the sitting room. Then she would tip the
water out the small window next to the fireplace. I remember that one day the cake of soap
which used to be on small table, got stuck and the newspaper it was put on
‘melted’. The mark was there for ever. Then there was the day when Margaret tipped
her dinner off her high chair table and all down the wall.
The first year there was no garden. My parents planted potatoes where the lawn
was to go. (This was believed to soften
up the ground.) I can remember opening
the front door and being faced with lumps of earth, and I think leaves, that
were as tall as me. I also remember the
flowers that grew along the side wall of the house.
My clearest memory, however, is of cooking. This must have been the year I turned
three. It is dark and my mother and I
are making ‘lemon pudding’. I do not
think my father had returned from work.
I am standing on a stool, shaking the grater to get the lemon rind out
of it. That is about all.
On wash day we had a copper that had to be heated in order
to do the household washing and I can remember the room (shed?) it was in. In the summer we hung a ‘safe’ from a tree
and put the butter in it to keep it cool.
Hawkes Bay has a fairly extreme climate by NZ standards, very dry with
hot summers and lots of heavy frosts in winter.
I know we did not have a fridge because my mother told me that they
bought their first fridge the week they moved into the Hastings house so could
not appreciate it properly.
My paternal grandparents and my aunt, their daughter, also
lived in Havelock North. My grandfather
died in 1947 when I was two so I only have a couple of ‘memories of memories’
of him. At one point my father’s brother,
who lived in Auckland, brought his son, who was a year older than me, to
Havelock North and I can just remember meeting him: being in a sitting room and
someone telling me he was my cousin. I
can also remember being in a car beside my grandfather but cannot remember his
face. My maternal grandparents used to
visit from Wellington, driving the two hundred miles as far as I can
remember.
Today we would say Havelock North was a very hippy village
but it was all we knew. There was one
main shop which belonged to M. Bourgeois whom I assume was French. Gargie (my mother’s father) had served right
through the First World War, at Gallipoli and on the Somme. He was a great Francophile so he taught
Margaret and me to say ‘Bonjour M. Bourgeois’ every time we went in this
shop. I know his love of France had been
lifelong and that when my grandparents were first married he used to read
French literature to my grandmother. She
did not understand it all as, like most women of her generation, she was not
very educated. She had attended secondary school but was removed when she was
found to be wandering up the street from the tram, bumping into the lamppost
because she was so sure the end of the world was coming that she shut her
eyes! This was in Wellington.
The church in Havelock North was St Lukes but we were too
young to go to church. My father had
boarded at Hereworth School but the headmaster beat his younger brother (who
cannot have been more than seven) so my grandfather removed all three sons and
sent them to St Georges preparatory school in Wanganui, a huge journey right across
the north island. My father loved it
there. I can remember that on one occasion
he played cricket in Havelock North and came home with grass stains on his
trousers. It is the stains I
remember. That’s all but I seem to
remember he was playing for the Hereworth School Old Boys team.
Building in the centre of the village - still there
Apart from two girls’ boarding schools at the top of our
road (Woodford House and Iona College) and Hereworth there was not much in Havelock North. There was a primary school and a doctor and also an orphanage. Basically the village existed to service the
farming community. It was very small and not the desirable place to live that it is today although it was popular with retired people including my grandparents. Like much of Hawkes Bay it had been badly damaged in the Hawkes Bay earthquake in 1931 and most of the buildings were new and one-storied. This was before the development of the wine industry and a lot of the land was fruit orchards.
View of Te Mata peak from the top of Pufflett Road
still very rural
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