Haward, Brin Interview

Today is 19th June 2019. I’m interviewing Brin Haward on the life and times of his family in England, Wellington, Havelock North and Waipatiki. Brin?

Sure. Well, I’m going to make a start after I got married to my wife, Hilary, in the UK, [United Kingdom] and we were married, funnily enough, in an old people’s home which my parents, or my mother and stepfather, ran. And the home was called Brookwood and it was in Luton. We had a very low-cost wedding because my mother promised she would put some money in my bank account, which … this is the way it worked, so we didn’t have a big deal. It was in a registry office, and just the family … very close family … that came along. And yeah, so that was pretty good. After the wedding, we’d already got a flat which was in Bedford which was about fifty kilometres north of Luton. The address was Flat 2, 4 Clapham Road; it was a dingy old place [chuckle] … big old building, right on the corner of a couple of busy roads.

At the time I was a student apprentice at a company called Hayward Tyler & Company Limited in Luton, and I’d been there probably for four years – I think it was a four-year apprenticeship. And that year I was student apprentice of the year, and I graduated from being an apprentice to an engineer in the technical division of Hayward Tyler.

Now it was about his time that I was feeling that you don’t stay with the same company for too long; you have to make progression, and that’s the time I applied for another job. And this was in Peterborough for a company called Perkins Engines. And so we got quite excited about this ‘cause there was the prospect of buying a house, even though it was a semi-detached in an ordinary street, like a typical English house – dingy by today’s standards. And so we sort of got into that mood; I used to go up to Peterborough to play volleyball with a club up there. I joined them because that’s where I thought I was going to live, and we got … yeah, quite excited about the move up to Peterborough.

And then the coal miners decided to go on strike; and it became a general strike, I believe, and a lot of places went on a three-day week. The coal miners weren’t working at all, [chuckle] but a lot of the other places … there just weren’t resources, so they had to go on a three-day week; and Peterborough Perkins Engines, likewise was going to go on a three-day week. And so here we were just signing up for a mortgage which was just about going to take pretty much most of the salary, even though I was moving to a new place. And three-day week means … we had no idea how long it was going to go on for, so it’s [it was] kind of [a] bit worrying at that time.

Well, Perkins Engines were a worldwide diesel motor manufacturer, and it’s surprising that they were affected by the coal strike …

So many businesses were, Frank, so many businesses were. I was going to be on the test bed, and it was going to be a really interesting job; I was going to be doing testing engines in the environment, and went up there, did all the interviews and got the job. And basically I came home one night from work, from Hayward Tyler; I had given my notice and I’d been given a slip of paper that told me how much my superannuation was, or what I was getting as my part of that. And it wasn’t a huge amount by today’s standards, but it was about … must’ve been about £1500 – something like that – and I said when I got home to this dingy flat that we lived in … Hilary was there, and I said, “You know, we’ve got all this money now”, [chuckle] – £1500 – “we’ve got all this money now; why don’t we go round the world? Let’s chuck in this bloody job going to Peterborough, and let’s go somewhere else” … expecting her to say, “Don’t be so silly!” But she didn’t. [Chuckle] She said, “It sounds like a great idea.” I said, “Holy ..!” You know? And she was serious, and I thought, ‘Oh, okay. All right, okay – let’s think about that’.

And how old would you both have been at that stage?

Well that’s a very good question, Frank, I haven’t put dates to all these things yet …

Don’t have to …

… but I would imagine I was about twenty-one, twenty-two, something like that.

You were young?

Oh yeah – twenty-two, yeah. Yeah. I think I was about twenty-two; might’ve been a bit older actually. Anyway, we thought, ‘Where shall we go?’ [Chuckle] So we had Canada, Australia, New Zealand; and we got lots of brochures and things like that out, and Australia … Queensland was a big … But all the brochures were good, it was all about sunshine, good schools, all those sorts of things. Canada was out, it’s too cold, I think; and in the end we decided to go as far as we could, which was New Zealand; and spend a few years here and then perhaps if we didn’t like it, work our way home via other countries. So that was the plan.

So I think at that stage we might have told family, and they probably didn’t take us too seriously but we said, you know, “This is what we’re going to do.” And so I started corresponding with companies in New Zealand; there was a newspaper that New Zealand brought out. What was it called? The New Zealand Gazette? Is that what it was called?

Yep.

And so we started getting those, and I saw a company … I was in pumping when I passed … in Hayward Tyler built pumps for nuclear power stations; for little boiler circulator pumps; little bore hole pumps that go down for water supply. We did pumps from 500hp, [horsepower] … more than that, 1000hp … down to tiny little things. And I worked for the bore hole division which was water supply, so it was quite natural that when I looked for companies in New Zealand I looked for companies that dealt in that. And one that stood out was Andrews & Beaven in Christchurch; but not manufactured, because basically everything was imported. So I did write to Andrews & Beaven and told them … you know it’s funny, when you put your CV [curriculum vitae] together and all those things – when you look at it now you think, ‘Oh God, that was a bit naff!’ [Chuckles] Oh dear! But they replied. And they didn’t offer me a job but what they said is, “If you’re ever out in New Zealand, come and look us up”; probably thinking, ‘What’s the chances of this happening?’ So as far as I was concerned we had a position.

We looked at Christchurch because my wife was a keen skier; she liked skiing, she did a lot of skiing. I was probably … if she was like an A-grade skier, I was an F-grade skier. But never mind … there’s always opportunities to do that. So we were going to live in Christchurch; we didn’t want to go to Auckland – too big; Wellington was too cold and windy apparently, and so we went to Christchurch. That seemed to be fairly near the ski fields and the sort of place we wanted. So that was the plan. And we then had to tell family that this was gettin’ a bit more serious now; we set some dates; we booked some flights.

And the story was that our flights that we booked were for April – we arrived on April 17th 1974. That was the date that we were to arrive, and we were probably looking around about August maybe, the year before. We were looking at how we were going to do it; we were going to buy a vehicle from my … my father-in-law, Hilary’s dad, worked at Bedford Trucks, Vauxhall Motors … and he had buying rights as an employee, and so we bought a brand-new Viva van. [Chuckle] Brand-new it was, no lining in it; it was a commercial, and in the UK you couldn’t put windows in these vans without paying the tax, but apparently in New Zealand you could just import them, cut … do what you like, no one’s going to worry about it. So that was the plan anyway, to bring a brand-new vehicle out with us. And so you prepared everything; you know, I had to go back to Hayward Tyler and ask them very politely if I could stay, because I’d resigned from Perkins Engines and so therefore I needed a job . And so they were really nice … Hayward Tyler were really nice about it, and told me “Yep, you can stay; you can work your time out until that time”, basically on a temporary contract I suppose it was, in those days. I remember talking to the marketing manager for Hayward Tyler … ‘cause he’d been to New Zealand and he’d travelled through this part of the world … so someone suggested that I went and talked to him about going to New Zealand. And so at that time, his recollection of New Zealand was that it was a very materialistic place, and if he had the opportunity he’d go and live in Fiji, [chuckle] because he thought that was really good. So I thought that was a waste of time talking to him – really was. He was one of these supervisors … bit bolshie; I think he’d been in the navy or something like that.

Anyway, we got things packed up, and about … I think it was early January or may’ve been later January … the New Zealand government changed the rules on immigration. Up until that time I think there’d been a lot of £10 Poms, as they called them, to New Zealand and Australia. That may’ve stopped by then – I’m not sure when they stopped that, but what they’d done is tightened up the things so you couldn’t just arrive. You had to have a job, you had to have a certain amount of money, from 1st April 1974 – that’s when those regulations came in. So as I said, we were arriving on the 17th [chuckle] – 1st April when the regulations changed. I’d gone into work at Hayward Tyler, sat down, I was talking to this guy, and he said, “Have you seen the paper?” So I opened the paper up and there’s all this stuff about New Zealand. Oh sh–! So I said to the boss right at that moment, I said, “I’ve got to go to London.” [Chuckle] It was this train trip down to London, so I thought, “I’d better go to London.” So I got on the train that morning – cup of tea, got on the train, got down to London … Haymarket; called in at New Zealand House; and I’d have to say there were probably thirty people there enquiring, and probably three times the number of newspaper people there, asking questions and finding out – “What do you think of this?” “Why do you think New Zealand[‘s] done this?” “How’s this going to affect you?”

Now I had previously been to New Zealand House to find about work and other things there, and so I did know my way around a bit. And I finally got to meet somebody and told him what we were doing, and he said “Oh – that’s all right – you’re fine”, he said, “there’s a three week amnesty. You’re arriving on the 17th?” “Yeah.” [Chuckle] “It doesn’t come in ‘til the 21st; if you’ve got flights booked and you arrive before the 21st”, he said, “there’s an amnesty, so that’s good.” Phew! [Chuckle] So I’d made that trip … I could have rung up actually, and found that out, but you never know. So went home and went back to work, and that night told Hilary; and so everything was all go.

We got the car and started getting our stuff packed up as the day came closer; made sure we visited, had parties to see our friends. And I think most of them thought we’d come back. We have been back of course, but not ever to live again. I think some excitement within Hilary’s family because I think they saw maybe there’s a way of themselves coming out here, which eventually they did. But I think at that time it was probably pie in the sky, to see what was going on. Anyway, so we packed everything up; most of our possessions were in tea chests and we had wires … cables … put round them at Hayward Tyler, and so they were pretty secure tea chests. And then we brought out a washing machine, a twin tub. Now I don’t know if you had twin tubs …

Yes.

So we had a brand-new twin tub we’d just bought for the flat, so we thought we’ll take that, and we put all our records in it; radio and a few other bits and pieces and coats and stuff all round it; nailed it all together. The mistake we made is we didn’t put steel wrapping round that particular box, so somebody in the stevedoring in New Zealand, have [has] got our twin tub. [Chuckle] Good luck to them. Records was the big thing we worried about; we couldn’t replace those records – we replaced a few of them, but you couldn’t replace … So that was the only thing that didn’t arrive, everything else was strapped steel tape – they all came, and it was the one bloody thing that didn’t. And they were all sent, because one of the guys I worked with, he had a sister who lived in Sumner in Christchurch, and so we needed an address to send all this stuff to ‘cause we [were] doing it pretty casually; and so I got him to give us their address so all our stuff was addressed to their place. Yeah, so that went to their family in Sumner, so we were pretty stuck that that’s where we were going to go. So there we go.

We go to the airport … my sister took us to the airport. And I remember as we drove away from Hilary’s parents’ house in Dunstable that Hilary’s mum was at the window waving, [chuckle] and I said to Hilary, I said “There’s your mum at the window; you’ll always remember this little thing – you’ve got to remember this little spot of her by the window.” She had this immaculate hair, and waving to us as we went by. And of course we were crying, and she was probably [chuckle] crying as well, as we drove away. So we drove down to my sister’s in London … Bucks Hill … and stayed the night there; and then left the car there because my other brother-in-law was organising the export of that. And then they took us to the airport the next morning. We stayed at Heathrow Airport Hotel, got up the next morning, got on a flight to Brussels. We were going cheap, through the New Zealand Gazette; Sabena Airlines I think, used to run things out here, and so we flew to Brussels, got on a Sabena Airline[s] flight with about six stops [chuckle] throughout. The first stop was Vienna, and then we went on to … I could go through them all, but we ended up going through Tehran, Bangkok – I’m pretty sure we went to Bangkok – Singapore, down through Sydney, and then over to New Zealand. We arrived in rain, pouring rain.

But before that, I have to say this. I had a moment when you look out of a plane and you see something that is absolutely mind-boggling. And it was when we took off from Cairo – the plane took off over an oasis, and you could really see quite closely as you climbed, Arabs, and camels. And you looked down … they’re real people; they weren’t just in pictures, they were actually real. And that was amazing, you saw the sand, you saw the palm trees and things, and … wow! We’d been overseas once before, but never, never to a place like that – that was absolutely incredible. Getting out of the plane at Tehran was amazing, ‘cause it was so hot – it was like getting out into an oven. And then there were these guards everywhere with guns; the toilet – it was such an austere place; waiting in the lounge and things; but that’s what you did in those days, that’s how the flights were.

Going back to our near-miss of not getting into New Zealand because of this amnesty thing … there was a guy on the flight – I always remember ‘cause he was sitting in a suit and he had a carry-on bag. And I got chatting to him and he told me he’d been to New Zealand, he knew what New Zealand was like; him and his wife had moved out to New Zealand, she didn’t like it so they’d gone back. And when this amnesty had come up saying you couldn’t do it, he’d said, “Shall we go back?” And she’d said, “No.” So he said, “Right – I am.” [Chuckle] And so he’d apparently left her at home and he’d gone to New Zealand; and he said, “That’s the end of that.” So I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a bit brave!’ So we met a few people anyway, so that was quite nice.

But when we arrived in New Zealand, in Auckland on a wet day, the first thing we were greeted with … now we’ve got a connecting flight going to Christchurch, right? Headline: ‘Massive floods in Christchurch – Bealey Ave [Avenue] is under water – River Avon’s broken its banks – Do Not Travel to Christchurch unless absolutely necessary’. [Chuckle] And so what do you do? You get on the plane and go to Christchurch, and it’s never as bad as what they made out. So we stayed when we got there at the Blenheim Road Motel. Okay, so a little story about the Blenheim Road Motel.

We worked out we had six weeks of money, that we could stay at the Blenheim Motel for six weeks, and then our money would run out; so we didn’t come with a hell of a lot of cash. So we put the TV on; there were two black and white channels … I think there might’ve been one [chuckle] black and white channel. Oooh dear! So we’re starting to get the picture now, what New Zealand was like; it was a pretty austere sort of unit that we had; smelt of cigarettes and was quite strong; old curtains. Anyway, we went to the restaurant – promptly got told that I wasn’t allowed to wear jeans into the restaurant. Are you kidding me?! I couldn’t wear jeans into the restaurant? Didn’t want to cause any trouble, so I said, “Yeah, that’s fine, I won’t do that again, sir.” Can’t believe that! Now you could wear just about anything into a restaurant; it’s the Blenheim Road Motel for God’s sake! It’s just nothing! And so we had to get out, so we had ‘bout five days, I think. We found another cheap flat in Peterborough Street in Christchurch, which has now of course gone; but I got my first driving licence with Peterborough Street on it – it’s one of the things you have to apply for as soon as you get here.

Very shortly after that I visited Andrews & Beaven, and met a guy called Peter Mansell … Mason? And he says, “Oh – yeah that’s right, I remember you – I remember your letter.” [Chuckle] “You decided to come?” I said, “Yeah.” So he said, “What do you think about working in Timaru?” So I said, “Oh, I don’t know, where’s that?” He said, “Oh, it’s a hundred kilometres south … quite nice.” So I said, “Well, okay.” He said, “You’ll have to do six weeks here to see how the company works, and do things, but it’s Irrigation Division – pumping and irrigation which sort of suits you. We’ve just had a guy leave, and the job’s yours if you want it.” So I said, “Oh, well yeah – what else am I going to do?” So I’ve got my job. But the thing [that] got me was, that was it. A shake of the hand – I’ve got the job. No medical, no nothing. He didn’t ask me anything. He didn’t ask me background of my … didn’t check my Facebook history … [Chuckle]

It was New Zealand at that time.

Yeah. [Chuckle] So, good job; no … nothing. What is also really interesting, the man who ran Andrews & Beaven at that time, his secretary was a lady called Jan Alford. Jan Alford is the wife of one of my business partners at Fuelquip. [Chuckle] She was secretary of … yeah. So isn’t that interesting? We found out years later that she was his secretary.

Anyway – so Peter took me down to Timaru; had a look round – Timaru’s the ‘Riviera of the South’; quite a nice task, it was a nice day, the mountains were … I looked up on the mountains; can you imagine what it was like? I’d just come from the UK, and suddenly you see the mountains and all this open road; big cars, powerful vehicles, lots of stuff going on. So [he] showed me where the office was in Washdyke, and said, “Do you still want the job?” I said, “Yeah, fine [chuckle] – it’s not a problem.” So he says, “Well, this is when you start.” So obviously I went back and we talked to Hilary about it, so that was fine.

At that particular time we were staying in this other motel which was the cheap one. The kitchen was, I would say, probably two metres by two metres, with a little oven, and so you know, you go out to the cinema; you do a look around; ‘cause we had six weeks there. One night we went to The Exorcist – that was a new thing that was on at that time – so we’re talking late ‘74 aren’t we? April, May, June … June probably – we went to see The Exorcist, came home, cup of tea, went to bed. In the middle of the night we heard this rustling. Well, we both laid in bed, eyes wide open, breathing, trying to hold our breath. “What’s that?” “I don’t know” … “oh my God, what is it?” “I don’t know. ” Anyway, it turned out to be a mouse eating some chocolate that we’d left on the side; it was crinkling the paper. Well, I tell you what – I’ll always remember that frightened the living daylights out of us.

Yes, it does.

And so that was a great time for me; I enjoyed that time in Christchurch learning a lot. Wasn’t a great time for Hilary, because she had nothing to do; couldn’t get a job in teaching because she needed a New Zealand Teaching Certificate. What she did find out was she could get a job in a private school; and it was too early to do anything in Christchurch but she did apply to Craighead School in Timaru. Got the job. But that six weeks, she read a lot of books and she ate a lot of chocolate [chuckle] so she put on a lot of weight. Can’t be helped, that’s just the way it was. Anyway, she got a good job at Craighead School and met a lot of really nice people there – a lot of people from overseas. Got very friendly with a guy called Bob, and Cassie who we went around with for a while. Okay – so that was our move to Timaru.

Now, as I said before, we knew these people in Sumner. It was a family, four kids. The wife was the sister of the guy in the UK; her husband, I think, was a bit crazy … like, [chuckle] not the full biscuit, right?

Okay.

He worked for Motor Bodies, I think Christchurch Motor Bodies, something like that, and he was weird – really was, I think a wee bit weird. But they had some friends, and they had a place in Temuka … what shall we say? A bach in Temuka. Well, they were a bit crazy too. [Laugh] And I thought, ‘Bloody hell, people in this neck of the woods are all crazy.’

So these friends of our friends said that they had this bach so they’d rent it out to us. So we went down and had a look at it; wasn’t too bad, it was a little bach sort of thing. So they said, “It’s all right; you won’t mind if we come down the odd weekend and just stay? There’s two bedrooms.” “Oh, I suppose that’s all right.” And we just moved down there and I started working. So it was probably only a week, and I guess they wanted to see what we were like and how well we looked after the bach, and they turned up. And it was very interesting, ‘cause they turned up on the Friday, were going to stay Friday night, Saturday night and then going back on Sunday. So they turned up on Friday night; so we said, “Oh, are we going to have a meal?” Or something like that? She said, “Well we’ll cook ours, then you can cook yours.” ‘Oh, okay – this is how it’s going to work, is it?’ That would be the plan, when they were there they’d look after themselves, and we’d have to look after ourselves, so there was none of this sharing – they didn’t know us too well. So we thought, ‘Okay, that means we need to look somewhere else.’ Before that happened, on the Saturday – I think it must have been a nephew? I think it was a nephew of theirs arrived with his girlfriend; and I thought, ‘This guy’s a bit simple.’ He was. What had happened was, they’d been looking after him at a swimming spot on the river, and he’d spent a bit too much time under water before they pulled him out. And so he had a bit of brain damage, which … not a problem. But his girlfriend was fine; it might’ve even been his wife, I can’t remember now, but she was quite fine. But, we got in conversation about things they were doing – we were just talking – and she’d knitted a jumper for herself and knitted one for this guy. There were some mistakes in it, but you don’t comment on them, do you? But the person whose bach it was, she said, “Oh, you’ve made a few mistakes on there, that doesn’t look very good.” [Chuckle] Hilary and I looked at each other and thought. ‘Oh my God, [chuckle] what are we talking about here?’ And they decided they needed to take me down the pub, and I thought, ‘Poor old Hilary, she’s going to have to stay with the girls.’ So the three boys, we went down the pub; jugs came out – it was jugs all around – and they were so proud that they could drink jugs, you know? And I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is not what’ [chuckles] ‘I’m used to.’ So that was a bit of an awakening, wasn’t it?

So we hunted in Timaru to find somewhere; we did, right opposite the old gas works, Arthur Street Timaru. I think it was Flat 4, 2 Arthur Street. That was our flat, up the top. And what did we have? A refrigerator that had a gap in it; we had to buy a bed; oh, there were some chairs supplied with a table that hinged on the side, and that was it; there was nothing. Absolutely there was nothing in it. And we had a bit of fun; ‘cause I worked for Andrews & Beaven we used to get a lot of cartons holding parts for tractors and headers and all those things, and I made a coffee table out of a packing case. ‘Cause I had no tools, so I just had to knock something up – it was just a bit of bloody plywood, and the legs were four-by-twos nailed from the top. And the only way it could be dusted was with a vacuum cleaner, ‘cause [laughter] the top had sharp edges all over it. Oh dear, that was so funny. But it was better than the one we had before that, which was the box that the ironing board came in. [Laugh]

Anyway, so we found out that the fridge had a gap in the side, and the door was distorted. One day, after Christmas I think it was, we had a ham in there. And Hilary was carving the ham, cutting a slice, and a little maggot [chuckle] pokes his head up out of this hole. [Chuckle] And it was a really big maggot. [Chuckle] And she was a bit … didn’t like that at all, so we had to get rid of the fridge and get a new fridge, but oh, that was good.

Now the thing about working for Andrews & Beaven as an irrigation person – it’s a summer job, right? I can’t have time off, really, in the summer over Christmas because it’s the time when all the gear’s working and they need you on the farms if there’s any breakdowns or doing all the irrigation work. And so that Christmas … well, I had to work basically, be on call. And Hilary didn’t really want to do that, so she decided to take our van which had arrived – but I haven’t told you how that arrived yet – decided to take the van to some friends from school who went to Queenstown. Now the road to Queenstown at that time was mostly a dirt road over the Lindis Pass, and the big scrapes down the side of the cliff where the buses and trucks had caught it and done those things – it was a hell of a bloody drive. Anyway, she decided to go and meet the friends, so there was no big deal. She was supposed to be coming back on one particular day, and it got quite late … got [to] about ten o’clock at night and she still hadn’t arrived, and I was getting a little bit worried. I got a phone call: “I’ve nearly run out of petrol.” [Chuckle] I said, “Oh God – where are you?” “I’m at Cave.” [Chuckle] You know where Cave is? On the other side? She said, “I’m just going to have to keep going.” I said, “Do you want me to come and get you?” [She] said, “Oh, I don’t know”. No cell phones – she must’ve gone to some farmhouse or somebody’s house to make the phone call; but they told her then that there was in fact a fuel pump up the road … might’ve been Fairlie … somewhere, I can’t remember which side. But it was coin operated, and she had enough coins to get some and she arrived home just after midnight. So … I was bloody worried actually, as you do with those things.

Anyway, so – working at Andrews & Beaven in Washdyke – well there’s a few little stories there; but I had to go to Wellington to pick up the car which she eventually took away the following Christmas. So I drove to Christchurch I think, then got on the … what was the name of the ferry, the one that went to the Falklands … “Rangatira”? Got on the “Rangatira” at Christchurch and went to Wellington; docked in Wellington, got out, and the idea was to go and get the car and to then get on the ferry and drive it home. So we arrived, and it was about 18c and there was a southerly coming through. I’d never been to Wellington before, and the southerly came through and the temperature dropped 11c. [Chuckle] And that was while I was walking from the terminal up to Aro Street where [the] garage was. And what they’d basically done – the car comes in, goes up to the place, I think Auto … oh, I never remember the name of the place … and they steam clean it and do all those things. They also pinched my radio – well, somebody pinched the bloody radio out of the car. It was just a little black radio from Halford’s, probably worth nothing, right? And so that had to be nicked, didn’t it, ‘cause it was loose, and … anyway, so they nicked it. I wasn’t dressed for it – dropped 11 bloody degrees in that walk up there. Geez, it was cold!

So then I had to get the ferry, but I had some time to kill so I went to Petone, had a look around there, and that’s the days when the meat works was on the foreshore. Had a cup of coffee, sat around and did some things then went and got on the ferry.

They drove the car on, they tied it down – they were tying these down, not with [?] but ropes on my bumper. They tied it down anyway. I said, “You know, be careful with that.” Anyway, so whatever. We got upstairs; I thought, ‘I’ll have a breakfast as we’re going out.’ So [the] guy says to me, he says, “Yeah, you’d better make the most of it, mate.” I said, “Why’s that?” He said, “Oh, it’s a bit rough out in the Strait.” I said, “Oh, is it?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “We’ll have to put everything away.” And so I thought, ‘Oh okay, I can handle that.’ Well – [chuckle] to this day I haven’t been on a rougher bit of crossing. I wasn’t sick. I stood in the middle of some place, and just stood up rocking with the boat in the middle of … both ways. There were people spewing everywhere – over the side, yuck. Oh, it was … Honestly at one point I remember, the boat sort of went up, lost completely the sight of the sea; almost we did 360 degrees; we came down and there’s the sea; and I’m looking to [chuckle] see where the sky was. Wow! Was that a sh– of a crossing! Man, that was terrible, Frank. [Chuckle] But I wasn’t sick. There were people around me – I just tried not to look, and watch what was happening.

So arrived in Picton, bit calmer when we got into the Sounds, and then drove all the way down to Timaru. It was enjoyable because it was the first time I’d done that drive; it was really fun. I did enjoy that – at that time I was pretty settled. I thought, ‘Yeah, this is a good country, I like this.’ So drove all the way down there.

So part of the job was to go out on farms and help with irrigation, put the irrigation in. They had a lot of flood irrigation; they had dykes; they had these pumping irrigators and spray things.

Sprinklers and … yep.

All sorts of stuff. But there’s a couple of stories. I had to go up to Christchurch quite a lot, pick up gear and take it back. Two memorable journeys from Christchurch back to Timaru. The first one I’m loaded on a TK Bedford – I have to tell you how I got my licence, but anyway – irrigation pipes tied up on the … the boys had put them on, tied them down. I get probably thirty k [kilometres] out of Christchurch [chuckle] … and they were all over one side. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Geez, I’m not a truck driver, I don’t [chuckle] know what this is.’ Anyway, I threw a couple more ropes over, tried to level … anyway, they’re aluminium. I didn’t want to have to unload the truck in the middle of the road and move them all. I don’t know, I tied them on. If there’d been today’s traffic officers I’d have got shot, right? It was just absolutely ridiculous; limped into Timaru and got these bloody things unloaded.

So the next trip was a little bit more dramatic. I had to bring a diesel pump down, and this is like a twelve-cylinder Cummings diesel – big, you know, like on trucks – on wheels, with a big pump at the back of it. And so it’s a major irrigation pump; going to put out five thousand litres a minute or something – it’s a huge pump and you’ve got this huge diesel engine like for a truck, driving it. So they hooked it up to my vehicle … not my vehicle, but Timaru’s vehicle … I remembered it the other day, I can’t remember what it was but it’s quite big, like a ute but twice, three times the size. We coupled it up. The guys didn’t say anything to me; they said, you know, “Good trip”, so I left. Well I got pretty much down to Levels, you know, just outside Timaru, and a wheel went past me on the inside. [Laughter] I thought, ‘Holy crap! What’s that?’ So I look in the rear view mirror, and I see this diesel engine on one side [chuckle] being towed along the road. I couldn’t feel it. It’s just sitting down on the hub, going along the road. So obviously, pull over, stop at the side of the road. There’s this gouge mark down the road, which stayed there for years, ‘cause I used to go past it and see … ‘There’s my gouge!’ [Chuckle] All down the road. Couldn’t find the wheel; gone into some trees on the side of the road, I don’t know, I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time getting [it]; uncoupled the car, went to Timaru, told the guys. I said, “Look, that’s where it is. You guys have to fix it, I can’t.” “Oh, I’m not going back out there to do that – that’s bloody it’s ridiculous, the wheel coming off.” So I complained to Christchurch, you know, “What are you doing with this?” They said, “Didn’t you check the nuts after a hundred k or fifty k?” I said, “No.” “Well you’re supposed to check the wheel nuts, you know, to make …” I said, “No you’re not!” [Chuckle] “That’s not the bloody rules, is it?” Apparently it was [chuckle] in those days – new vehicle, new things not being done up; you should check the rules. So that was a bloody disaster, that was.

Anyway, how I got my driving licence – so I had a New Zealand driving licence which was complimentary from having an English driving licence – show that, pay the fee, get a little sticker. Remember those old driving licences? You had a little sticker that goes in and shows the thing – I’ve got it upstairs actually. And so I said to the boss at Washdyke, Timaru, “I need to be able to drive the TK Bedford” sort of thing, so he said, “Yeah, that’s all right, we’ll get the traffic officer round”, which [who] he knew personally. So this guy turns up – he’s a traffic officer, not the police. Have a chat, he says, “Yeah, okay.” Well, there’s a TK Bedford there that was their Bedford; he said, “Oh, take it up there, back it in there, take it down there; we might just go up the road and come back.” And that’s it. So he was talking to the boss, so I took the truck up there, backed it in there, took it there, backed it back up. He said, “Yeah, that’s good.” I said, “We’re not going for a ride?” “No, no – don’t need those, you seem to have got the hang of that. I’d better ask you a couple of questions – what’s the maximum loading rate for this?” I said, “Oh, it’s that.” He said, “Yeah, that’s good.” [Chuckle] Got my thing; and so my boss then said “Oh, while you’re here, it would make sense to have wheels and rollers; do the wheels; get him to drive the tractor.” You know, “Can you get a licence for that?” So he said, “Sure, not a problem – jump on that new Fiat. Can you do it?” I said, “Mmm, think so.” [Chuckle] One of the guys came out and he says, “This is easy stuff.” I said, “Okay.” Start the thing, did the same thing – took it here, took it back, took it up, took it back. He was still talking to the boss; I said, “How was that?” He said, “Oh – oh, yeah good.” [Chuckle] He didn’t watch me do it! [Chuckle] And so then I had a licence to be able to drive a tractor; so I can drive a heavy goods vehicle and a tractor, which is special – wheels and rollers – and I’ve had it on my licence ever since, which is quite crazy, eh? Actually crazy in those days. So … I learnt something else while I was there – don’t ever throw out an invoice. If you’ve made a mistake on an invoice, don’t bin it, because there’s a sequential number. And [chuckle] I caused a problem, but I was an engineer, how do I know that? I never did anything like that.

I think I was there a couple of years; the reason I had to leave was it became a little bit uncomfortable; I wasn’t enjoying it quite so much. There were two instances I suppose where I got in the bad books with my employer. The first was, I was called out three o’clock in the afternoon to an irrigator that wasn’t working properly on some guy’s farm. And he got there, and he wasn’t happy with this – it was a new irrigator. And so I played around with it and got it working; got it working three or four times, and I went home. Anyway, next morning I came in; the boss was furious. He says, “Oh – did you make sure that thing was working when you left?” “Yeah.” He said, “Well as soon as you’d bloody gone it stopped working.” I said, “Oh dear. Bugger. Why didn’t you ring me?” “Well we couldn’t get hold of you … …” So I was in a bit of trouble, and I thought … I was a bit sick of that so, yeah – so it wasn’t good.

And then the next thing that was interesting was – and the boys were telling me a yarn; they were saying that he listens in to your phone calls, ‘cause he’s got one of those old phones. So when you were making a phone call he would sometimes listen in, right? So a couple of the guys knew this sort of thing was going on. So he was talking to this guy outside, right? And he was saying, “Yeah, things are going all right – the work that we’ve done on your baler is working fine, yep. But I think, you know, all in all the warranty should be for another year. Hey boss – that’s right, eh?” [Chuckle] The boss said, “Yeah, that’s right”; [chuckle] before he realised that he was listening in to the call. [Chuckle] So that was the end of that, wasn’t it? I think he left a little while after that, but then I’d had enough.

So anyway, I applied for a job at the NZED in Wellington – that’s the New Zealand Electricity Department – because basically I wasn’t using my engineering capabilities, just doing a bit of irrigation work. Which meant of course, that Hilary had to leave as well, but she got another job with Queen Margaret College which was another private school, which was pretty good.

So the story about me leaving … funny how things happen sometimes. So I applied for the job, got told by the government that they’d spoken and the position was approved; so I was assistant engineer on the coal handling plant at Huntly. So everything happened – Hilary stayed back in Timaru and I went up, and I was going to stay up there, get a flat and all those things and get that organised, and start the job.

So I arrived on the Monday morning, drove in to see my new boss. Two days before I arrived I’d had a letter from the Engineers’ Registration Board. It said that they had reviewed my qualifications and had decided that the High National Diploma endorsements that I’d got from the UK were not necessarily equivalent to … well, they said it wasn’t equivalent to a degree standard in New Zealand, and I would have to do alternative papers to bring it up to that standard, right? and therefore I didn’t meet the qualifications for the job. But I was starting on Monday, and I only got the letter on Friday, right? So I spoke to the boss, but the first thing I said to him was, “Look, we’ve got a little bit of a problem ‘cause I’ve received this letter.” He says, “Oh good”, he says, “I’ve got one too.” [Chuckles] Anyway, he said, “I’ve spoken to the Minister for Electricity”, and he said, “they’re going to continue with the employment.” I said, “Oh, thank God for that”, because that would’ve been a bit difficult to deal with; it would’ve been really difficult to deal with. But I was glad I was straight up and honest right at the front, because that could’ve been a bit difficult. And so I started with NZED as an assistant engineer on the coal handling plant for Huntly, which was an interesting exercise.

So, we moved to Wellington; organised a flat at Northland, and had to get ready for Hilary coming up probably two, three weeks later after end of term, I think it was. And so there was a couple of little things; I needed a table and some chairs. And a guy at work who was going to Canada, said, “Oh, you can come round and have a look at [the] table and chairs I’ve got for sale.” [Chuckle] I’m so stupid! Anyway, I went round and saw them; they were at Ava – I had to go on the train to get to Ava. I don’t know how I got them up our place … he must’ve delivered them or something like that. But it was a formica table; had a chip out of it, and the chairs were pink. [Chuckle] They were pink chairs with the pink plastic weave. What was I thinking? Yeah – I never lived that one down, actually. I was reminded of the pink chairs and the table for a number of years after that.

Anyway, so we got this flat; Hilary arrived, we move into the flat; she said, “I don’t like the flat.” So we move out of the flat [chuckle] and find another one. And we got a flat in Karori, and the people that owned it lived above us. And one of them was a very well known artist in Wellington, and her husband had run for a number of years the Wellington Polytech. They’d done so much travelling; I mean, we thought we’d travelled the world, right? We’d come all the way to New Zealand. Oh, man – they’d done some things. They set up schools in Kenya; they’d done a lot of work in Africa, and done other things. They were very intelligent, very nice people. Their daughter lived further up and she was on Home and Away – not Home and Away. What was the other soap that was on at that time?

Hilary: Close to Home.

Brin: Yeah, she was on Close to Home, that was it. She was an artist; they did a lot of artistic stuff. They were really nice. And the flat smelt a bit because … you know, but it was a really nice flat compared to the other ones. And we started to put a few things together, tables and chairs and stuff. And Hilary had a job at Queen Margaret College teaching physed. [physical education] She loved that, so that was really good. I continued to work with NZED.

You were in Huntly?

No, I was at head office. We were doing the contract for the coal handling plant at the NZED. Huntly was being built; we were doing the contract management, so all the power station and coal handling plant was being designed by Fox Manufacturing from Australia. And they were really nice guys; they weren’t allowed to give us anything ‘cause it could be seen as a bribe. They were lovely guys; they took us out to dinner a few times, and in fact they gave me at that time a little gift; it’s an opal, which I gave to Mandy about [a] couple of years ago and she’s made it into a ring. I kept it in a box and Hilary never used it, but I found it and I thought, ‘Well, it’s silly to leave it.’ We’ve done it; we’ve put into a little ring which is really quite nice. But they were good guys, and built the plant. And I did a lot of work with how much coal was going to be used and all that sort of thing, but as you know Huntly Power Station went gas in the end, and now it’s pretty much not doing anything. So that was that.

The other thing was – this was a consequence of my qualifications not being enough – I reached a salary bar, and if I wanted to stay at the NZED I’d have to do some more papers, which really, in Wellington, it’s really difficult to do that; I’d have to either go to Christchurch or Auckland or do them by correspondence. I just found the correspondence too hard, so I looked for another job. Up to that point I’d never worked in the government before … government-type job. And you felt like you were safe because they had the PSA, the [Public Service] Association, and the PSIS, [Public Service Investment Society] which is where you got your money from for your mortgages and all those things. I remember when I first arrived the first day, the secretary there who was in charge of the engineering division – well I’ll move on; Level 3 Rutherford House which is now part of Victoria University – she came along and she introduced herself, and she said, “Right”, she said, “I’ve got these things for you – a stapler, a hole punch, a rubber, two pencils, a couple of pens. But”, she says, “you don’t qualify for a coat/hat rack” … somewhere to put your coat. [Chuckle] I says, “Oh, don’t I?” “No”, she said, “you’ve got to be a different grade before you get one of these things to put your coats on.” I thought, “That’s very nice.” [Laughter] Can’t remember the other things we got – she showed me where I could go to the cupboard to get paper and other things and stuff, and I thought, ‘Yeah, okay.’

Anyway, [it] got to the point where the salary bar was starting to embarrass me a little bit, because it was annoying, you know; and so I looked around for some jobs. I saw a job advertised with Gilbarco for an industrial engineer in Miramar, so I applied; I got it. And that was a little bit of a change; I was very nervous about taking it, because going out of the safe environment into the private sector where you didn’t know what could happen. But it was obviously … best move I could’ve made really, at the particular time. The job was $2,000 or $3,000 a year more. So when I started at Andrews & Beaven I was on $4,000 a year. I’d left the UK, my apprenticeship, on £1600 a year, so I saw $4,000 as a step up … well, kind of. At the NZED I think I reached $9,000 a year, so going there was pretty good; but pretty sure Gilbarco offered me $10,000 or $11,000 a year to start. So it was a lot cheaper in those days. It was pretty good because an airline pilot was probably only on ten. [$10,000]

That’s probably right.

This was about the time we went back to the UK. We’d been out from the UK now for a while … for a number of years … and Hilary started to get a little bit … not happy. Little bit depressed, and had seen the doctor a few times; and so we decided we needed to … ‘cause it was not what we wanted, we didn’t really want to live in a flat. We were quite comfortable living in New Zealand but we weren’t sure it was really long term, what we were going to do, so she was a little bit down a bit. Didn’t really seem to worry me, but she was – missed her mum, missed her sister, missed her family, and so we decided to go back to the UK. And at the same time we’d had home ownership accounts with the Wellington Savings Bank, right? So however much you put in, I think you got something … the government gave you equivalent; so we’d saved £5,000 – we’d got $5,000 each in two accounts, plus the government then gave us $1,000, so we had $12,000 for a house. And so we were getting to the stage where we could get a house, so we actually – I think at that time we were applying for a mortgage to buy a house in Whitby – pretty sure that’s what happened, because the mortgage came through and how much they were going to give us to be able to do it. We decided to go to the UK anyway, [chuckle] – spend some of the money doing that. So that got rid of any problems about going back and living in the UK, ‘cause it was ridiculous. We just got back and we said, “Oh my God, we want to get home.” Nice to see everybody and go through, but we just suddenly realised, and Hilary especially obviously – it was really good for her, because she couldn’t wait to get back to New Zealand. Absolutely brilliant. So we came home and we had a house, at 19 The Companion Way in Whitby.

Well that’s a fairly new suburb.

Yeah, Whitby was yeah, at the time. We had the house [at] 19, and I put the big storey on the top.

‘Cause they were all ships …

Yeah, anything [that] was naval; part of Captain Cook coming out and things like that. Yeah, so we got the house. I mean we decided when we were buying that the Paremata Bridge was our northern boundary, because it [was] quite easy to keep going north and getting cheaper; so it seemed like every two hundred metres or three k [kilometres] you dropped $10,000 with your house.

That’s right.

And you could get quite a lot of house for your money. So I think we paid $37,000 … no, that might be too much. I think we paid $37,000 for it.

Would’ve been a nice home.

Yeah. It was only thirteen hundred square feet; found out later it had been built by some Mormons, and they hadn’t built necessarily all the walls square, and there was [were] a number of things that weren’t quite au fait with it. The previous owners had done some extension, but they’d really done a very, very poor job; very poor job of puttin’ a floor in and stuff; so there was work for Brin to do, and learn to do, and that was probably the start of my being okay with a few tools.

So around that time we also had visitors from home – Hilary’s mum and dad came out for a visit, and they pretty much decided that they wanted to come out. But they couldn’t come out and live here without their other daughter coming out, so when they got back they had to convince their other daughter and son-in-law and two kids that they needed to go [chuckle] and live in New Zealand. [Chuckle] ‘Cause I’d really messed up their family, ‘cause you know, I’d sort of split the two sisters up, and that sort of caused a few hiccups. But anyway, that’s what happened; so Hilary’s sister, Annette, and her husband, Roger, and the two kids came out; and yeah. They lived in Plimmerton, and that enabled Hilary’s mum and dad to come out.

Hilary was a very good tennis player; being a physed-er she played good tennis. Then she decided that she would take up golf. I think that was after the kids were born. So she’d take up golf at the local Whitby Golf Club, and that suited her father who was a bit of a dab hand – he didn’t play great golf, but he wanted to do that as well, so that kind of worked out pretty well.

Did a hell of a lot of alterations, you know, on the house over the years; we did a lot of work on the house, round the garden and stuff. But it was about that time that we had our first baby; it was Nicola, and she was born in August ‘81. And shortly … within three or four months of that, my mother and my sister came out and pretty much nearly set fire to the kitchen. [Laughter] They were cooking something in the oven, and when you’ve got two people doing the job, and one thinks somebody else has done something else … anyway, they caused the oven to catch fire while I was at work. And we had a vent up above it – I’d put a vent into the ceiling, not going anywhere; the grease up in the ceiling must’ve been a shocker! But anyway, it’d been in a while; didn’t really worry about it. But it was my sister, Muriel, who’d actually caused the fire, and Mum, with all the smoke, thought she’d get rid of it by putting the fan on to suck the stuff … but very nearly sucked all the flames up into the roof space. But it was saved. So everybody was quite quiet when I got home; then I gradually got the story, so that was quite interesting.

But it was good to see Mum, she was there with Nicola when she was six months old. She did come back later with her third husband, the Jehovah’s Witness, probably a few years later than that … couple of years later. That was probably the last time she came out.

It was probably around this time also, that Gilbarco was going through – we’re talking about 1982 now – Gilbarco was going through a bit of an upheaval. It was owned by Gilbarco Australia, which was owned by the Exxon Corporation in America. And it was about that time that they were looking at the profitability of affiliates and subsidiaries and things, and we were going through various budgeting exercises and stuff. The shortcome out [short outcome] is that Gilbarco decided that they needed to downsize the operation in New Zealand, in terms of – sell the factory that we had where we built road tankers. In fact I was in charge of the area where we manufactured pumping equipment, road tankers, calibrations and all those sort of things. And they were going to close that and stick just with service; do away with the pump manufacture as well, and just stick with the service operation; and sell the property and then rent, and that way change the capital structure of the business. So if they changed the capital structure, that means that the return on their assets looked higher, and that was more in line with the way they like to operate.

And we saw an opportunity; and in our naïve way we sent a letter – I typed the letter out actually – we sent a letter to Gilbarco in Australia saying, “Why don’t you sell the business to us? We’ll buy the operation.” He was dead against anything like that, the managing director, but he was under an obligation to send the letter to America. And the Americans loved the idea, they thought it was fantastic and they told him to proceed with haste [chuckle] … [get] these poor blokes to buy it. And so we got this thing back from him saying, “Okay – we’re coming over on such and such a time; we’re going to start negotiations.” Well that’s a story in itself; I mean, I could talk for hours on how all that went through and I’ll probably put that down somewhere. But needless to say, after about twelve months of negotiations I think, we bought the company, four of us … four guys. We mortgaged ourselves – we each took out a $200,000 mortgage on our house, which in those days, I suppose we’re talking ’82, was a huge bloody mortgage. We could fund it because we had the salaries; we organised it so we had the salaries to fund it . But, I mean my mortgage before that was probably something around the region of … I think I must’ve borrowed $20,000, so I was down to about $15,000 … I had about a $15,000 mortgage after that time. And of course that was during the period where interest rates went from … when we bought the house in The Companion Way, interest rates were sitting at about ten percent, and within a space of what? Three, four, five years? – they were up at eighteen to twenty percent.

I know …

I actually wrote to the bank – again, naively – and said, “What do you think you’re doing? We had an agreement at ten percent.” [Chuckle] “How come you’ve put my mortgage up?” They told me one of the [home] truths. So yeah, we had to borrow a lot of money, but you know, that’s the story of Fuelquip, and it’s a great story on its own. Also round that time we had the second daughter, Louise. She was born on 20th January ‘84. And that was it.

We’re now going to talk a little bit about me going to boarding school when I was eleven-ish. So the reason I had to go to boarding school, ‘cause my mother and her husband, Reg, who was my stepfather, decided that they were going to retrain as wardens for old people’s homes – probably gettin’ ready for their own retirement – and they were going to work at council. And this required them to go away to work in a home somewhere and to learn the tools in trade, and the last thing they wanted was an eleven year old boy draggin’ around and gettin’ in the way of things. Now you’ve got to remember that my mother had me when she was forty-two, so she’s now fifty-three; been with Reg for about four or five years. It was a rekindled relationship as we will find out later at some point, and so I had to go to boarding school.

So at least Mum did try to find me a good boarding school, and this particular college was Hilsea College in Basingstoke in Hampshire. Now it must’ve cost Mum a fortune; it was quite up-market, I think. Anyway, the outcome was I hated it of course; ridiculous, but what can you do? The school building is there; the school has gone for many years – it’s now a high end hotel. I have visited it, but they’ve probably got guards on it to stop people like me going anywhere near it. But yeah, it’s a very, very high end hotel, and at the time it was a beautiful house, Hilsea College, or it was Hilsea House, an aristocracy type of … yeah, it was beautiful … large acreage and everything else around that place. Anyway, as a [an] English boarding school of reasonable renown, it attracted children from all over the world. We had Iranians, and people from what is now Iraq, which were Persians … we knew them as Persians, South Africans, Jamaicans, Indians. We had a few from the LGBT variety, although at the time they weren’t the LGBTs …

LGBTs?

Yeah, lesbian, gay …

Oh, okay.

Hilary: they were all boys, weren’t they?

Brin: Oh, there was a girls’ school. Girls’ and boys’ school; and there were of course the usual frittering of sadistic teachers, you know, as you would. The Latin master was usually the [chuckles] … the worst one. Anyway … and did I mention that Reg went to boarding school? No I didn’t. I think that was probably his idea that Brin … would do him the world of good to go to a boarding school.

Anyway, our classroom was a Nissan hut. There were four Nissan huts in the grounds. The accommodation … the top floor was the boys’ dormitory, the middle floor was the girls’ dormitory, the lower floor was the canteen, the kitchen and some of the staff in the school, and the big halls and things where we did stuff. So our classroom was a Nissan hut, and we had about twenty-five of us in the class; there were twenty boys and five girls, and the age ranges were eleven to eighteen.

So we had Iranians and Persians who were eighteen-year-olds, so when we came to class football … soccer … it was a bit hard [chuckle] ‘cause I was a goal keeper in the team. I didn’t like playing in goal but I got stuffed in playing in goal – wasn’t particularly fit in those days and things. Found myself in goal, and then you’d find an eighteen-year-old charging at you and kicking the ball – knock you through the back. I have to name one memorable game we had – I think it was the class or the school competition; it was the final of something or other. Maybe we were playing away … anyway, it was a wet day, and the football pitch was on a slight slope; it sloped from one goal down to the other and slightly across. And I just have to say, we played in winter in all weathers, and it was bloody cold at times. Anyway, we played this game and I was in goal. The first half I was on the upper end, the high end; at the end of the first half it was two all. [2-2] Then we changed ends, and at the end of the second half I think it was something like twelve-two, [12-2] [laughter] because the water ran down the hill. The goal at the bottom was a quagmire, [chuckle] and if you tried to jump to catch the ball you couldn’t get your feet out of the ground. [Chuckle] It was a nightmare, and the guys ended up just kicking the ball high towards the goal, and it would probably go in. And so it was really funny; but we some funny times, ‘specially in the winter. God! There was one boy, I think he was from a warm climate, and he was looking most uncomfortable. And the guy that was taking us – there was snow on the ground, playing with ice and snow – and the guy said, “Well, come on – what’s the matter?” He says, “It’s very cold.” Turned out his testicles were [chuckle] very cold, and the teacher, [chuckle] he says, “You’ve got to warm them up.” [Laughter] And we can all remember … we were absolutely in fits of laughter for this poor guy, because he wasn’t used to the cold.

Anyway – what did boarding school teach me? It told me how to make a bed, do a hospital corner, do all those things. It gave me an insight into playing volleyball, which I went on to play for a couple of years for New Zealand, which was very good ‘cause it wasn’t a contact sport and I didn’t like contact sports too much. I don’t know why … ‘cause I was a bit weedy … soccer was all right. Had to clean my shoes every day. It taught me to ignore and accept two boys who were a little bit gay, and used to not hide it at all in the dorms; so that was very good. And my friend, a very good friend of mine, got me into the Everly Brothers, so I was very much into that. The girls had access to a swimming pool which was a beautiful swimming pool, but the boys weren’t allowed to do that. It’s one of the complaints I sent to my mum – I said, ‘This bloody school, it’s got a lovely swimming pool; we’re not allowed to use it. Boys aren’t allowed to use it, only the girls can use it. The girls can use the big, beautiful lawn out the back of the house; boys can use the front.’ And it’s just a dirt … you know what I mean? And on the dirt we used to play a game called Gilly Gunter – you’ve probably never heard … we might’ve made it up. It’s like a bale – you get a bit of wood about five or six inches long, and you point it at each end, all right? So it’s about an inch in diameter in the middle and you point it at each end. You then get another stick which is probably six hundred mls [millimetres] … two foot long … and the idea is you hit the gilly on the end and it jumps up in the air; and then you hit it as hard as you can to see how far you can hit it, right? Without injuring anybody. [Chuckle] And people did get injured at times. But that was a game.

Never came here.

No, no, I’m sure it wouldn’t; I thought of making a set up, because I thought it would be quite good, but I think it could be a little bit dangerous. Now, I left boarding school when I was thirteen, and I did take it to the old peoples’ home that we eventually were living in that Mum and Reg were running; we then had a place of our own, and we stayed there and lived there. And I was playing outside, and overlooking the old peoples’ home was a block of flats, and I think they were pretty rough people living in there. Anyway, I was experimenting playing Gilly Gunter on my own, and some guy shouted some unmentionable comment about what I was doing, and told me [chuckle] to get a bloody job. I still remember – it’s funny how you remember things like that, eh? I was quite put off by that.

The other thing we did was every Sunday we had to go to church … Church of England. So we all had to troop down to a little village, Oakley, which was near the school which was probably a kilometre walk; down to see the vicar. And some of the senior boys would talk about when they were going to confirmed and do all those type of things. It was annoying to have to do it every Sunday, but you sort of got used to it. Singing was good. Playing cards underneath with the boys, it was quite good; didn’t take a lot of notice of things like that. We walked down, and the girls sat on one side of this church and the boys had to sit on the other side of the church.

They certainly kept you apart …

They kept us apart. There was a time however, when you could actually touch girls, and that was old time dancing; so I did old time dancing. So Mum bought me some black pumps … plastic pumps … and so I did old time dancing for a while. Yeah. I did learn waltzes and various other things; it’s not like you do today.

Now the other thing I learned was never bath with your togs on. Now when the boys go up to go to bed basically, you have to go to the big washroom. There was a bath in there, and every so often, probably twice a week, you’d have to have a bath. No showers – you had to have a bath, right? For most of the Europeans, you just got in the bath, didn’t you? You know – took all your clothes off, got in the bath. Well, [chuckle] it’s a bit hard for little Muslim boys – ‘cause we had a few; couple of Muslim twins as well, I think. And they were very, very careful … very shy of those things. Anyway, the nurse had told them to get into the bath, and they’d got in with their underpants or togs on, or whatever; and she didn’t know. And [of] course she came in to make sure they’d washed their back and do those things, and then stand up and that. “What d’you think you’re doing?!” She said, [chuckle] “Get those off immediately”, [chuckle] “and wash yourself properly!” So [chuckle] yeah, it was so funny. These poor little boys – they were so upset, they really were.

Anyway, another thing that happened was we had pillow fights of course, on the dormitories. Lights out was a certain time, and most of the teachers had rooms quite close to us; but the dorms were pretty separate and they used to leave us alone, pretty much. Went to bed about half past eight, nine o’clock, and lights out at ten – I think it was something like that – and so there was the occasional pillow fight. And these two little Iranian guys were having a bit of a bash, and one pillow split; it split right across the bottom as the guy lifted it up, and the feathers just emptied out all over him [chuckle] and all over his bed. So … what to do? [Chuckle] It’s an old house, and so some of the floorboards were a bit loose and we had little storage areas where you could lift the floorboard and put something secret … you know, you could keep something under … So what we did, we decided to stuff all the feathers underneath the floorboards. [Chuckle] So this kid went, “Why don’t we put them back in the pillow?” I’ve got no idea why we didn’t put them back in the pillow, right? And say to the nurse, “Oh, the pillow’s split, can you get it sewn?” We didn’t know; we thought, ‘We’ve got to clean up the mess’, [chuckle] ‘otherwise we’ll be in trouble.’ So we put all the feathers under the floorboards. Anyway, next morning we were at breakfast; and you go downstairs, and breakfast was absolutely terrible! It was shockers. We had bacon and eggs and tomatoes, but most of the time they put tomatoes that’d been cooked, and then that … you know that juice in tomatoes? It soaks in everything. By the time we got it, right – ‘cause it had to come from the kitchen – the bacon was cold and soggy … oh! My God, it was terrible! Anyway, so the matron comes in. “Now there’s been a serious incident in one of the dorms. You boys in 3”, or something, “now – what happened? Why has this pillow got no feathers in it?” [Chuckles] They were serious! “Don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know.” [Chuckle] I can’t remember what happened after that, but we were in a bit of trouble. Oh dear, that was …

Didn’t have to recover them?

I think we probably did at the end. Yeah. But lots of things went on at boarding school – all sorts of things. You know the first week I was there I think, Mum had bought me a clothes brush – I mean, there was a whole list of stuff you were supposed to take, you’d take your trunk with all these things and you’d do it properly, but after the second year you know the story so you don’t worry about a lot of stuff. But she’d given me a clothes brush … lovely clothes brush …

Wasn’t a wire brush?

No, no, it was a proper clothes brush. And I’ve still got it, and it’s highly polished, you know, with polyurethane I suppose. Anyway, I found it – I picked it up and it’s been dented and it’s got all marks on it; and one of the guys had used it to knock a nail in his shoe, right? That’s what he’d done. His shoe had got a nail come out so he’d used my hair [clothes] brush, the back of it, to knock it. And I’ve still got it to this day, and it reminds me every time I pick it up to use it for something, it’s got all these marks on it and they go back to when I was eleven or twelve. I don’t know, but there are so many blimmin’ stories there … one incident where my knee seized up. I don’t know why but it locked up, and I spent about three weeks hobbling with the knee in one position. It cleared itself, [but] that’s the way it went.

Obviously the cartilage had been dislodged …

The other thing, you mustn’t swear at boarding school unless you like the taste of soap.

Weekends we’d go into Basingstoke on the Saturday for shopping. You weren’t allowed to go to Woolies [Woolworths] because there were people there who could spread disease. Yeah, we weren’t allowed to do anything like that … any chocolate; but you could buy knives. Most of us bought knives; I’ve still got knives now which I bought, and I used to walk around with them. I mean they were just sheath knives for cutting timber and wood and stuff like that; but you take them now – they’re offensive weapons.

You kept them in a sheath?

They were in a sheath, yeah; used to put them on my belt, hanging down, yeah.

Gosh, it sounds like real cowboy town …

Yeah. And so that was it, and so I was there for about two, two and a half years. Saw Mum a few times when they came down; went home for holidays; and then when they’d settled in a new place in Luton, that’s when I joined them. So that was my boarding school days.

[Ends]