May 19, 2008
We’ve lived in eight houses since we were married in 1955, and it is possible we may yet shift again before we are returned to our maker. Five of them were rented, three of which went with the job, and three we have owned. So shifting is perhaps less of an upheaval for me than it is for those who have clung to one pad throughout their married lives. Our kids, who have known more stability, are more sentimental about the houses they grew up in than we are.
Our first house was in Shirley, near Christchurch’s north-eastern boundary at 28 Bampton Street. It belonged to an acquaintance, a fellow student and a returned serviceman who must have had a little money and who had used it to build this tiny one bedroom cottage with a flat roof and walls of creosoted weatherboard. He said it had charm and dignity, and perhaps he was right, though the hot water cylinder was in the toilet, and made it necessary to turn round and bend your knees before you sidled onto the seat with the cylinder more or less on your lap.. It also had a laundry not much wider than the single wash tub it contained, but there was a nice little bedroom, and a kitchen/lounge/dining room with a fireplace at one end and the sink at the other.
We bought a Swedish dining table and four chairs with the hundred pounds Uncle Murray gave us for a wedding present, and with a couple of second hand easy chairs we were very contented there. Pam worked as a junior lecturer at the University and claimed me on her tax return as a dependent while I finished my thesis. Then we both marked the University Entrance papers over the Christmas holidays.
The little house, with a tiny garage alongside, stood forlorn in the middle of a quarter acre of pasture, broken only by two concrete strips leading from the road to the garage. Across the front of the section was a deep drain, crossed by two stout wooden planks. The drain was deep enough for you to stand in the water and reach up between the planks to remove the sump from the 1946 Citroen we had, when the big ends needed adjustment. A sardonic friend once remarked that the planks would break one day, and drop my aged Citroen into the ditch. I protested that they had stood up so far, to which he replied, “They never do break until the first time.” Anyway they lasted the eighteen months we lived there, and may still have been there had the council not covered the drain and widened the road.
I borrowed a scythe from the neighbour, a retired farmer. He handed it over with the comment that you should never lend your wife or your scythe, for if you got it back at all, it would not be in the same condition as it was before. In fact it did need some adjustment and sharpening, - not many people understand scythes, - but it cut the grass before and behind the house short enough for you to push a lawnmower over it, and gradually it became quite a respectable lawn. We also grew livingstone daisies between the concrete car tracks, and some sweet peas up the fence. The place looked quite nice.
Behind the garage I made a vegetable garden, and with a packing case and a roll of wire netting made a yard for four Rhode Island red chooks that we got at the auction. We were getting quite domesticated. Cousin Terry, who was a travelling salesman for Wormald at the time, would call on us when he happened to be in Christchurch, - he seemed to regard us with kind amazement, - and would brighten our lives with beer and yarns.
It was a good life most of the time, but a year back at Christchurch Tech convinced me that teaching was not my vocation and we moved to Samoa where I had got a job as entomologist with the Department of Agriculture. That was at the beginning of 1957.
In Samoa they put us in the Casino Hotel (now demolished and replaced by the Tusitala), and then into an old German house near the hospital. It was built for tropical comfort on long stilts to let the air (and chickens) circulate underneath. It had flyscreen walls on three sides surrounding a deck and a central living area. It was cool and pleasant, but privacy was not a major feature, and simce the deck also served as a corridor between rooms, you needed to be quick if you wanted to get from the bathroom to the bedroom without a towel.
We were only there for a couple of months when the public Works finished a nice new house next door, and we moved into there and were at last able to unpack. It was a fine house, built on a concrete slab with a concrete nib wall about two feet high, I presume as a precaution against termites. It had three bedrooms, one of which had its own toilet and shower, for the live-in housemaid, though we didn’t employ one. We had no kids and it was enough to have an old lady come in once or twice a week to do washing, starching and ironing.
The house had an iron roof painted red, I suppose in memory of New Zealand. It was inclined to get a bit hot at times, but it had large louvre windows with insect screens, and a big slow ceiling fan in the lounge that kept it pretty comfortable. On one side there was an enormous mango tree which, when the mangoes were ripe, attracted large numbers of fruit bats that squealed and flapped and mated and dropped mangoes through the leaves all night. By way of punctuaton, one of the coconut palms near our bedroom would occasionally and without warning drop a nut fifteen feet or so onto the iron roof. That could give you quite a start.
We were supplied with basic furniture which included “planter’s chairs” with canvas seats and backs, and a settee with an uncovered squab, but Pam made cushion covers and curtains from the limited range of material available from Burns Philp, and everyone in apia had the same selection. One of the Burns kids chiacked the Stainforth kids for wearing shirts made of their bedspreads, and the Stainforth kid retorted, “They’re not! They’re our curtains”.
When we first moved in there we had no car, and Alan Higgins, who also worked at the Department of Agriculture and who lived nearby in Centipede Alley, would take me to work in his Austin A30. He would also pick us up after work or at weekends and take us down to Vaiala for a swim, or to crew on his Flying Fifteen yacht that he had moored there. Later we got a second hand Vanguard van, which lived outside while I was building my “Solo” sailing dinghy in the garage.
At one stage the laundry lady found us a “garden boy” but really he hadn’t a clue. His technique was to use a hoe to scrape the surface soil into ridges running up and down hill, so when it rained, the deluge would scour out channels and deposit the soil against the bottom fence. Then he would make little holes in the ridge and put about a teaspoonful of seeds in each. Nothing grew. Like I said, he hadn’t a clue. Later I grew beans, Chinese cabbage, and lettuces along the contours, and cassava in the accumulated dirt at the bottom of the slope, but it was pretty hopeless. The mango tree gave too much shade, and feral chickens of the neighbourhood were very competitive too.
We kept a long legged, long tailed lean tropical cat while we were there. It had a clever technique for keeping cool by sleeping on the window louvres. We also imported a nice German Grundig radio through Retzlaf’s store and a stack of 33 rpm vinyl records of Tchaikovsky and Mozart and Beethoven direct from England. We played them on a gramophone pick-up through the Grundig and lived quite a good life, though one of our Samoan visitors said he “didn’t understand the songs”.
It was an easy life in Samoa. Charlie Tua’i, my driver and lab assistant, had picked up quite a lot of entomology from my predecessor, and knew all there was to know about local people and customs, as well as a great deal of devious trickery which he had picked up as a taxi driver during the American occupation in World War II. There wasn’t much he didn’t know about the baser side of humanity. But he was a real Dutch uncle to me, and I found him totally reliable in all things.
I went to Samoa on 990 pounds a year rising to about 1200 by the time I left. I think the rent for our house was about 2 pounds a week, and as income tax was only about 9% and there was not much temptation to spend up, we saved about 500 pounds in an English bank account, and bought a new Volkswagen car to bring home, at the end of our three years there.
From there, I got as job teaching zoology at Massey College at the beginning of 1960, and we moved to Palmerston North. For a few months we rented rooms with a Mrs Borreson, of whom I mainly remember that when expressing agreement on the phone she would say “Of course! Course course course course course!”. Meanwhile we bought a back section in Hokowhitu for 900 pounds and got one of Walter Nash’s 5% State Advances loans to build a house to our own design on it. The house with a carport cost 2820 pounds.
It was skewed on the section so that the kitchen and bathroom got the morning sun, and the bedrooms got warmed by the afternoon sun. The lounge had a deck and overhang outside so that it got the afternoon sun in the winter but much less in the summer when the angle was high. I often wonder why architects and builders pay so little attention to the height and direction of the sun. Is it because they don’t have to live in the houses they create?
I guess we were still sentimental for Christchurch, for we had the house built in creosoted weatherboards with white facings, like our little Christchurch house. To make the creosote/tar mixture “take” properly the boards had to be rough sawn, not dressed, and since the only such timber available at the time was matai, (usually reserved for flooring), we had a very robust house with matai weather boarding. The timber was so hard that the builder had to drill all the nail holes before he could drive the nails home. He cursed a bit, but he was a good lad and did a good job. His name was Max Carpenter, so I suppose it was in his genes.
We planted a gingko tree on the front lawn like the one we used to sit under outside the Zoology Department at Canterbury when we were students. We had some teak furniture that we had brought from Samoa, and I went to a woodwork evening class at Palmerston North Polytech, and made an imitation teak dining suite in rimu with the appropriate stain. With a few rugs on the polished matai floors the lounge and dining area looked pretty smart.
However we had only been there a couple of years when I got offered a house on the Massey campus in return for acting as a warden of the student hostels there. It was a cold little state house with a tiled roof, but at 30 shillings a week you could hardly refuse, so we let our nice new house in town and moved onto the campus. Like I said, it was cold and a bit cramped, but it was handy to work. Pam made a spectacular flower garden in front of it. She also got friendly with the library staff and Mary Campbell was babysitting for us when our second son was born, so he got Campbell for one of his middle names. Pam also taught in the zoology labs, so some of the students were happy to baby sit for us in return for a bit of peace and company. The other wardens were good company too, and since the duties were not arduous it was a pleasant enough existence living on that large and well landscaped campus, with tennis courts and a swimming pool.
In 1963 I bought the chassis of a light trailer for the VW to pull, and built on it a body that could convert into a sort of camper van which would conveniently sleep the four of us. We used it to do a tour of Northland and had beach holidays at Pourere near Waipawa. I still have the chassis and wheels after 41 years though it has had two other bodies built on it in the meantime.
The rent on our house in town was more than enough to cover the mortgage so we accumulated enough to buy a section on Cooke Street and put a deposit on two flats that we got built there. They had concrete block walls and a roof of pressed steel “tiles”, and they looked quite smart. One of our first tenants was Wilson Whineray’s brother, as it happened.
By 1967 we were eligible for sabbatical leave, so we put our furniture into storage and took our two kids, aged six and four, for a great trip around the world.
When we got back we moved back into our black and white house in town, and lived happily there among the lawns and flowers until we moved to Auckland at the end of 1969. My new employer, the Ministry of Agriculture, kindly gave me a return train ticket to Auckland to look for a house, and a former student and babysitter, called Peter Hubscher, found me a tame land agent to help me find a place near the Mount Albert Research Centre.
So we sold our house and flats in Palmerston North and bought a big old house at the top of Fowlds Avenue. From work I could walk home for lunch, so we didn’t need a second car. It cost us $12 500. It had white walls and a red roof, but Mark, to whom a real home had always had creosoted walls, supposed we could always paint it black. We didn’t though. But we did paint the roof silver-grey to reflect the summer heat, and found in the process that the iron was pretty much on its last legs. I got quotes for reroofing the house and one of them I remember came to $3500. But when I mentioned it to Peter Money at work he assured me that reroofing was a do-it-yourself job, and gave me a vivid description of Joan and himself sitting on their roof in their night attire, holding the iron down when the wind got up one night halfway through the process.
So I got some good advice from the staff at N S Irwin, and Mark (aged 14) and I, with some help from Malcolm,12, and Tom, 5, did the job bit by bit over a series of weekends. It worked out to cost $800, so we could have paid ourselves airline pilot’s wages out of the saving we made. There were occasional problems of course, such as when little Tom tried to pick up a sheet of longrun iron and the wind got under it. For a moment I had visions of him wafting away over Sandringham.
Living mortgage free made my salary go quite a long way, and in 1971 we sold the Volkswagen for $600 and bought a new Renault 12, for $3 300. Then in 1972 we bought a bach at Huia. The bach was in Foster bay, and there was a great little community there, largely kept alive by the two Lawrence brothers and their families. They organised socials and dances (where Tom sometimes played the saxophone) and spit roasts, and jumble sales, and on Christmas morning, a champagne breakfast for the parents while the kids enjoyed their presents. Pam encouraged our kids to make decorated menus for Christmas dinner, and Malcolm who has always leaned towards the visual arts, and towards food, turned out some fine examples which we still have.
We bought a dinghy and a flounder net, and caught mostly mullet, which Jim Lawrence showed us how to smoke. We also made taramasalata out of the roe. We built a plywood two seater kayak that the kids could paddle around the bay and up the creek towards the dam (which was still under construction at that time), and later again we bought a “Starling” sailing dinghy that Mark learned to sail quite capably, even venturing across the harbour to Wattle Bay on the Manukau south coast. There were bush walks up the Karamatura valley, and over the Tom Thumb track to the dam side, with Tom in a pack on his mother’s back, or later dragged along the track by his brothers on a nikau frond. There were frogs and tadpoles. Life at Huia was about as good as you could get.
But children grow up and circumstances change. Mark went to University in Sydney on a scholarship in 1979, and Malcolm got involved with rugby and scouts in town, and soon we went mostly to Huia to mow the lawns. Pam got to be Director of the Observatory and I did some time on the Mt Albert City Council. In the mid 80’s the bach was let for a couple of years, and by 1990 we decided to sell it, and declare a dividend. Mark bought a new car. Malcolm set up a commercial illustration business, and Tom went on a grand OE to Indonesia and Thailand. I bought some land in the Hunuas and started a sheep and forestry venture as a sort of hobby.
The house at Fowlds Avenue gradually got extended. We developed a basement under one end of it, with a room for a pingpong table and space for the kids’ track cars and a model railway, and a sort of mini flat for visitors, or for the kids when they were living at home from time to time. We built a block wall to enclose the back yard and set up a plastic swimming pool in its shelter. We built a sunroom and a deck near the back door, and got the kitchen extended and redeveloped. By the mid nineties there wasn’t much more you could do, and the family had shrunk to just Darby and Joan.
So in 1999 we moved once again to where we are now, and Tom and Sheryl and their new son took over the Fowlds Avenue house. In some ways this house on Hillsborough Road is a miniature of the Fowlds Avenue place, with a developed basement where visitors have their own en suite, two sundecks, three bedrooms upstairs, and a tiny back garden. But it’s sheltered from the south and west, it has a bit of a view to the north and it is reasonably handy to Waikowhai Park and the Manukau beaches and walkway. A coat of paint has made it quite presentable in a rather Lockwood kind of way.
Pam uses one of the bedrooms as an “office” and I use part of the basement as a study and a technical library. There is also an enclosed garage with a workbench and some space to store the many items which there is no room or reason to unpack. Altogether we’re pretty comfortable, and within ten to twenty minutes drive of all the kids. What more could you ask?