Keen, Michael Interview

Good afternoon, Michael. I’m introducing Michael Keen of Hastings, on 21 April [2021]; so Michael, if I can leave it to you to give us your family history?

My beginnings in New Zealand were almost accidental. I was in Buenos Aires on a ship called the ‘Paraguay Star’, and I received a letter from my eldest brother who was employed by SHAPE, [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe] Fontainebleau, as a cipher clerk. His letter to me was that after thirteen years he was planning to leave the Royal Navy, and he had a hankering to go to New Zealand. And knowing that I was a merchant seaman, the best chances of this happening was for me to change companies and proceed in the direction of New Zealand on the ‘Ruahine’, which I joined in 1952, because I didn’t arrive in Wellington until August of ’52. And it was the surprise of my life, because I’d never been in a port where it blew so hard in both directions, north and south, and it rained for seventeen days and seventeen nights. So this put an impression on my mind because everywhere I went I went by taxi – going to and from the ship to the cinema, to the pub, to the dance, it was by taxi. And I can honestly say that if I had not gone to Auckland and had a beautiful month there of [in] September 1952, I would never have come back to New Zealand. Now, that was how New Zealand struck me in the early years.

My younger brother was a ship’s cook on the ‘Rangitiki’. My eldest sister’s husband was a compositor on the ‘Akaroa’, and my cousin’s husband was a cook on the ‘Hurunui’. And so when we were home for the Christmas of 1952 in Margate in Kent, we decided that we were going to emigrate, and we were going to emigrate to New Zealand. This was a blow to my father who was fifty-seven, and my mother, because he felt that he was being deserted by his family, so in no uncertain ways he let us know that we weren’t leaving him behind and he booked a passage on the ‘Rangitoto’ for a berth for two on 12th June 1953. He’d sold his business and his property and he left my mother with sufficient money just in case he came back, or in case she needed funds; so it was virtually a visit by him to see if he was going to like it as well. My eldest sister’s husband arrived in Wellington in the January of 1953 … late January … and he worked for Illots, who were publishers. My sister took up abode in Lower Hutt and lived at Belmont from ’53 until five years ago when she was eighty-nine, and moved to Hastings.

Now the inter-island ferry boat, the ‘Maori’, was being built in Scotland and it was a one-way trip, so I put my name down as steward on the ‘Maori’ and my young brother put his name down for ship’s cook. The ‘Maori’ sailed in the November of ’53, but I was not on it because I’d taken my father’s offer of the empty berth in his cabin, so I came with him. And during the course of the month that we were on board I met a lovely woman who was travelling with her mother. She was twenty-one, and she was visiting her brother who was a vet in Dannevirke. Their supposed holiday was a total of four months; little did she realise that she was going to spend the rest of her life in New Zealand, [chuckle] because the first time I saw this lady she was sitting about thirty metres away from me in the dining saloon, and I had a constriction in my throat and my heart was pounding, just looking at her. I never realised I would ever speak to her, but fate has a funny way of working. My father had a good voice; he sang in the choir, and after lunch, in the ship’s lounge, he would stand behind Val Norris who was a girl from Christchurch who played the grand piano; and he would sing to all the passengers who were letting their dinners go down. Everybody seemed to eat well on the vessel. And so this lady that I mentioned, she’d made herself a friend to the pianist Val Norris, and then as a result of this my father came back to his cabin one day and said to me, “I’ve met a very nice Scots girl.” Well I didn’t have a great regard for Scots because having served for two years in the Army with some very small, very short men, possibly five foot two or five foot four, [chuckle] who, after a few drinks, their size became the size of Samson and their fighting capacity was enormous. So being a peaceful man I kept clear of quite a number of these Jocks because they weren’t quite my cup of tea.

Anyhow, my father having mentioned this, I changed the subject straight away. And so I now proceed to two days later when Dad and I are walking along the deck; and walking towards us was Val Norris and Elizabeth Shearer. My father said as we got close to them, “Hello girls – this is my son Michael.” Well, I didn’t know that this young lady had had her eyes on me from the time that she’d boarded the ship. Some two years later I married her at St Andrew’s Church in Hastings, and my father stood up as toastmaster and said, “You know, after I introduced this couple I could hardly get into my cabin.” I said, “Dad, that’s a lie, we were in the ship’s lifeboat.” So that squared that condition off, because this woman I lived with for fifty-nine years. She was a heartache to me because I loved her in a way I can’t explain. I fought with her continuously, as our minds were quite opposite. We were chalk and cheese when it came to minds, but physically we were wonderfully matched; so I have as a result of that, three fine daughters. And the words to me were, “I’m not having any children after I’m thirty, so you’d better make up your mind on this third one”; because I was hesitating on thinking I was going to have a netball team. The very thought of any more girls was not my cup of tea, so it took about four months for me to get round to thinking, ‘Well, there’s a chance I might have a son.’ And so my daughter Eleanor was born as a result, and that was the end of our children. 1961 Eleanor was born.

We’ve got to go back now, because it’s a case of memory being correct. Memory sometimes moves around a bit, but to have a memory and be correct in your times … it’s very important. After we were married my wife went to work at Soma in Heretaunga Street, and amongst the ladies she worked with was one Joan Eddy, whose mother was Scottish; and another lady who was a Betty Groves, who later became a councillor on the Hastings City Council. My wife’s friend Joan – her mother virtually took my wife in as though she was one of the family, and introduced her to the Scottish Society so my wife had a very good group of early friends when she was first in Hastings.

On the other hand, being an Englishman, I had a little more difficulty because English people being quite critical – they’re critical of themselves as well – but New Zealanders do not like too much criticism. And as a result of the number of English people who had come before me, little did I know that I was walking into a hotbed of controversy because of different opinions which had been given, and the people had left. So after two and a half years of working with the Post Office Lines Branch I was working in Tomoana Road ramming a pole into the ground with a post-hole rammer and standing next to me was Charlie Thoms. Charlie Thoms was a Maori, and he also had a post-hole rammer; and somehow his elbow caught me under the ribs while he was ramming. And I stood back in pain because I couldn’t think that it was anything other than an accident; but when Charlie hit me a second time I realised that this accident was becoming a habit. And I stood back and I said to Charlie, “Charlie, if you as much as touch me I’m going to hit you between the eyes with the end of this rammer, so if you don’t understand that then you will when I hit you.” Now my old foreman was a Jim Hollis, and Jim Hollis was a peacemaker. And he came along and said, “What’s the trouble, boys?” And I said to him “No trouble at all Jim, no trouble at all; we’ve got it sorted.” So [in] the process of taking out these poles and pulling down this aerial cable we came to where the old Egmont Dairy was in Tomoana Road, and sitting on the wall having their cup of tea, or smoko, was Jim Hollis, Ivan Banfield, Merv Bowen, Colin Tibbenham, Jimmy Hatiss[?], and Charlie Thoms. And I thought, ‘Well perhaps it’s time that I let these guys know that I’ve been here two and a half years and I’m planning to stay’. So standing up with my enamel mug … ‘bout three quarters of a pint of tea … I walked in front of them sittin’ on the wall, and I said, “Now look chaps, it’s taken me a while to get here and I’ve been here two and a half years. Now I want you to realise you’ve got to get used to me ‘cause I’m not going away, and when you’re all gone I shall still be here. Now that’s what I want you to get into your heads – when you’re all gone I shall still be here.” [Chuckle] Well the look on their faces was one of total amazement. I [They] thought, ‘And what the hell’s he talking about?’

So going some years ahead … I’m broaching this because it’s very important … we are now talking 1953; we’re talking then, somewhere in the September. And we’re now changing the days until Jim Hollis retired – 1973 Jim retired. I went over to him at his retirement and I said, “Jim, you’re the last one.” And he looked at me and said, “What are you talking about?” I said “D’you remember sitting on the wall opposite the Egmont when we were pulling the aerial cable down in Tomoana Road?” And he said, “No.” I said, “Well I told you that when you’re all gone I shall still be here; and you’re the last.” [Chuckle] So I had to put that bit in to make sure that the time factor was right. I felt very sorry for Jim Hollis. He lost one of his four sons at twenty, and he was a broken man. I’ve never seen a man who broke down and took five years to recover from the loss of his son.

Going back to the work – I worked with different foremen on the old Post & Telegraph. That was what it was called then. I joined where the Exchange is in St Aubyn Street, on 5th August 1953. In 1954 with a new foreman, Trevor Forward, we were given the task of building the Exchange at Maraekakaho. Now our first job there was to pour the concrete around the RAX – that’s Rural Automatic Exchange – at Maraekakaho, where Highway 50 divides from Kereru Road; and I worked for four years on that area from Gwavas to Te Onepu, and from Kereru to Big Hill – the area as far as the Napier boundary, which was the river that came down to where the golf course is at Waiohiki. So that was the Napier Engineering District. Although I worked in the Napier Engineering District at different times because I was driving a machine which they only had one of, and so naturally, me being the driver, I had to do other areas besides the Hastings District. But the Maraekakaho Exchange – we put one hundred and forty-three farmers on the telephone, and that was some very, very hard digging; there’s a very, very hard pan across the Maraekakaho area. There are parts which are shingle; there are parts that are red metal; and there are parts that are limestone rock, and the hardest part of all was crossing the Burma Road to Te Hauke. That is gelignite; you throw a crowbar into the ground there and it jumps back out at you, so you have to change tactics and do it gently with gelignite. Nevertheless, with Trevor and five men, we cut four thousand hours off the estimate of the job. So in spite of the fact of the ground, and the fact that we had a highway borer mounted on a Caterpillar tractor, it was still quite an effort to do this amount of construction. And I came away from [the] area in 1958 when I was sent to Porangahau to dig for the Waipuk [Waipukurau] area.

Although they were under the Napier Engineering District, they were still a little separate working party there. And so, having boarded in the Duke of Edinburgh [Hotel] at Porangahau – wonderful times there, because in my young days I was a barber; from the time I was fourteen to eighteen I worked in a hairdresser’s. So the pub was open to boarders at night, and closed at ten o’clock. Everybody by that time had had a pretty good skinful, and even the local policeman would pop in to make sure that everything was going nicely. And I cut the guys’ hair there; and the chap in the local garage said, “Would you be able to cut my hair?” And I said, “Definitely, I will.” And after that he said to me, “Would you like to see a really old car that I’ve done up?” And I thought he was talking about a Model T or a Model A. We went across to his garage, and he showed me a Potier Benz, 1896, which he had done up from photographs. And the story was that a local farmer who had quite a big holding, owed him for several jobs; and he wasn’t going to do any more jobs until he received a payment. So having informed the farmer that he was doing no more work until he received the payment, the farmer said, “Would you be interested in an old vehicle?” Well he thought it was probably a Model A, a Model T; and so they drove to the farm where there was a shed which had collapsed, and the roof had come down; and they had to tear the roof off to get to where the car was, where all the chickens had laid their eggs and brought the straw in, and the body of the car had rusted off. And he said he only had a screwdriver with him, but when he scratched the engine his heart leapt, because he saw ‘Benz’. And he said he was so shocked with the fact that it was a historical car … a really historical car … that he said, “I more or less made to the guy that I really wasn’t interested but I’d take it as a part payment; so that’s how I got the Benz, that’s how it came into my possession.” He said, “It took me five years to get it to this stage”, where it was now looking beautiful. He had had the custom work done, the panels, and also it had even a whistle on the end of the exhaust pipe; so you pulled a cord and the whistle blew on the end of the exhaust pipe [chuckles] – that was his horn. But that was really something, because I had never seen such an ancient vehicle – 1896 Potier Benz – that was really one out of the bag.

My days at Porangahau were quite happy because I boarded there in 1958 from June until October. And in that time my wife had returned to Scotland with my eldest child, Margaret, so I boarded in the pub so I didn’t have to worry about meals or anything like that, and I’d made good savings while I’d been boarding there. I cut the guys’ hair for a shilling a time, so there was that few extra bob.

My wife came home on 4th October 1958. My baby didn’t want to talk to me; she didn’t know who this strange man was when I flew up to Auckland to meet her. And that year was an extraordinary year because Porangahau is not the driest part of Hawke’s Bay in the winter time, and we’d lost one day [of] work through rain. Now the rest of Hawke’s Bay normally goes green in the winter time, but I said to my wife when we were coming into the airport, “You won’t believe that flying over the hills at Napier, Hawke’s Bay looks like the Sahara Desert.” And we flew over the Waikato and it was like a green velvet carpet; and we flew over the hills to Napier and there in front of us was the Sahara Desert, as brown as it would be in the mid summer. It was extraordinary year, 1958.

This is a time now when because of an incident, I was determined to work myself out of the job. We were working on new connections in Marewa, and this old dear, the builder had left her room to put the phone on [in] a very narrow passageway.

A dwang?

Yeah, a dwang. So we didn’t have any wall phones, we only had desk phones and the damn phone couldn’t possibly sit on four inches of wood. So I happened to say to this elderly woman who was in her eighties, “Now, looking at your wall …” She said, “Oh I’ve put a chair there so that I can put the phone on the chair.” I said, “But you’ve hardly got any way to get around the chair to walk up the passage.” I said, “Just hold on a minute.” So I had a look at it, and at the back of this wall was a cupboard, and I said, “Now, what I can do is I can cut a piece of board out at the back of this wall, and if you’ve got somebody that [who] could put a little box on the back, then we could put the phone there and it’d be quite comfortable.” “Oh”, she said, “that’ll be fine.” So I went out to the truck and I got a hacksaw blade, and I’m busy there sawing my way through this plaster board at the back. And my foreman comes in; he says, “What’re you doing?” “Oh”, I said, “I’m just making room to get the phone in.” And he went, “Get out! Get out!” And I looked at him; he said, “I’m telling you, get out!” Well he lived in Napier so we used to drop him off, and we’d come home. When we got back to St Aubyn Street where the line yard was, Fred Irwin came out, the overseer, and he just said, “Mick”, he said, “I want to see you in the office.” Went into the office; he said, “I hear you’ve been using your initiative.” [Chuckle] And I realised that … he said, “Look, you don’t do it; you don’t do it! I don’t do it”, he said, “you don’t do it.” He said, “When the phone rings”, he said, “I pick it up. I write down what’s been told to me and I pass it on.” He said, “Now, you don’t use your own initiative – you do what you’re told and that’s it.” So I went out of that office and I thought, ‘This is no bloody job for me!’ I’m planning to ease myself out of this job, but I’m going to do it very, very gently.

And so as a result, I leased three acres up Panapa Road, and I planted strawberries – I borrowed the money and I bought twenty-eight thousand plants, and I grew strawberries. And I did it part time; and it was ideal in this respect – that the women would take their children to school, and after nine o’clock they could come and work; and they left at half past two because they had to go and pick their children up from school. So I had a workforce of women who were reliable, and I paid them by what they did; so if they picked a hundred they got paid for a hundred; if they picked two hundred they got paid for two hundred. So other than the ladies who worked in the shed, I had to put them on an hourly rate because we couldn’t work out … So at that time the first of the Red Gauntlet were coming in, and Red Gauntlet were a strawberry that you could play marbles with before you packed it. There were many others that were Shasta and Lassen that you could pick them and leave your fingerprints on, but with this Red Gauntlet it grew a berry like that, [indicates size] and you could play marbles with it before you packed. So this first year my forty-hour week wages at that time in 1960 were £675. Right now – part time I was doing fourteen hours a day; and I was working at the Post Office as well, but I was doing fourteen hours a day altogether. And after my first season I had £3,500 gross from my strawberry patch, and when I’d paid all the bills and settled up everything, I had £1720 that I had from my part time job. And so I realised that I could manage on my own quite well.

My wife was bitterly opposed to what I was doing. She was quite happy that she was getting a wage from the Post Office, and all the rest was, you know – “You don’t see your children; you go in the morning, you come back at night, you don’t see your kids.” So anyhow that was …

I thought hard about this because they used to grow in sawdust – they used to put sawdust down instead of straw, and when the berry sat in the sawdust it used to get a brown tip. And also what I found was in planting the row, that when I used plastic the berry would go out and lay on the plastic and it would cook. So there were two things here – one was I had to get rid of the sawdust; and secondly, I had to do something about the plastic. So what I did was when I put the plastic down … the idea of plastic was to keep the weeds down … I planted alternatively like that, so when the plant threw its berries it threw it on top of the other plant so it didn’t cook.

Jim Wattie then was a very approachable man. Jim Wattie was a nice man to do business with, because when I rang him up his secretary said, “Do you want to speak with Mr Wattie?” And I said, “Yes please”. She said, “Just a moment”; and I said to him, “Actually Mr Wattie, I’m a strawberry grower and I’m planning to lease twenty acres.” He said, “Well, what’s this to do with me?” I said, “Well would you be interested if I was growing twenty acres, to take my crop?” He said, “Well what are you getting for them?” I said, “Five shillings [5/-] for my first grade and 2/6 [two shillings and sixpence] for jam”. He said, “Forget all that”, he said, “I’ll give you 2/3d [two shillings and threepence] for the lot, on single trays.” So I thought, ‘Well, now that’s a damn good proposition because there’s no packaging; it’s just pick them out in single trays.’ You could stack ‘em that high; it was all single trays, you know. I came home and I told my wife what I was planning to do, and she just looked at me and said, “You realise this is going to cost you your marriage, don’t you?”

This is a sweet young Scots girl?

She said, “You realise, what you’re doing … it’s going to cost you your marriage, don’t you? You realise that?” And I thought, ‘Oh well, that goes by the board.’ I loved the woman so much that … it was so much, Jim, that for the next nine years I lost all my incentive. I went to work at the Post Office; I studied for my foreman’s … I’d never studied for my foreman’s papers before, but I studied for them because I realised there was no future otherwise. And I only did it because Trevor said to Joe Ayres, who was sixty-four, “Joe, stick a ladder up that bloody hill that you’ve got to climb to stick a ladder up that pole.” And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be doing that when I’m sixty-four’, so I did my papers and I got my foreman’s job in 1964.

So now we’ll leave Porangahau, and we’ll come into the 1960s, because this house was built by Alan Arrell next door in 1959. And we lived for three and a half years in a garage with Margaret, our eldest. Linda was about to be born in the July and this house was finished in the May of ’59, so we were only in the house two months before we had the next baby so I think what I’ll do is, I’ll start from the beginning … see, I lived on the section from November ’55 until May ’59, so I think I might take up the story from building the garage, because I wasn’t a builder, I was a barber. Matter of fact, I reckon that considering I put a wooden floor in that garage; I put eight-inch totara beams in the floor, and a second-hand floor that was so hard I had to drill every hole. You couldn’t bang a nail in it – it split the wood or it bent the nail. It was a native wood beginning with a ‘P’ – think it was puriri. The wood was hard because it had been in a house that had been demolished, so I had these long eight inch totara, eight by twos, for the floor. The garage was lined, it was all like a house except it wasn’t a house, it was a garage. And I had it in three compartments, a kitchen, living room and a bedroom. Do you remember Thompsons the butchers in Heretaunga Street?

I do.

Well Russell Thompson – he was a very nice man and he married one of my wife’s Scottish friends, the office girl; he died a couple of years ago.

We’ll go back now then to buying the section. It’s now 1954, and I’m living in my father’s house in Konini Street. My wife … no, she was still my fiancee, but we were saving up to buy a section and I was informed there were some sections in Williams Street that were up for sale. One of the chaps I worked with, Colin Clouston, he had already put a deposit down on the biggest section in the street, and so following him, I went down to have a look at the next biggest section in the street, and was informed that a deposit of £64 was necessary, because nothing further could be done until the council had put in the facilities for water, sewerage, footpaths and roadway. In the meantime, my father had put a deposit down on the two next sections which were … mine was 1014; 1012 and 1010, my father had put a deposit on them. And so because my wife was friendly with Joan’s mother, whose husband was Fred Webb from Webb’s Nurseries who was the field officer for Birds Eye, he said, “Well why don’t you take my advice, and plant for Birds Eye? They’ll give you the planter and they’ll give you the seed, and they’ll give you a guaranteed price for your beans when you take ‘em into the factory.” So that summer we planted a French dwarf bean, and it was a heavy producer because on my quarter acre I picked three thousand two hundred pounds of beans which added up to about £65 in money.

Now we had all this time to grow a crop before the roadway was put in and the rest of the facilities that were necessary, and so the moment that the footpaths were formed, the road was put in, we were then expected to pay the full amount for the section, which was £564. Now I was getting from the Post Office when I joined £445 for my salary for forty hours, but with my overtime I was making about another £100 a year, which was roughly the price of the section. But because my wife was working at Soma, between the two of us we were saving my wages – we were living on her wages and saving my wages. The part I remember most of all was when Bert Webster came along and said, “How much did you pay for that section?” And I said, “£564.” He said, “You’ll never get your money back, boy – you’ll never get your money back.” Well, I thought, ‘Well I’m a new chum round the town, and I don’t know much but I need somewhere to live.’ And so we had cropped the section, and it was now a point where we were having to think about where we were going to live.

She was boarding at Avis Hannan’s in Miller Street, and as I say, I was living in my father’s house in Konini Street. Russell Thompson who was Helen Turner’s boyfriend – he said, “I’m going to build a garage that I can live in.” So this gave me the brilliant idea of copying him on building a garage. Russell was a very fussy man, and he had very good tools from the farm. He built a weatherboard shed, whereas I decided that I was going to build a stucco shed. The thing was that timber then was … if you built with pine or kahikatea or anything that wasn’t bug-proof, you were likely to be eaten up by the borer; so I decided that the timber that I was going to use I was going to soak in kerosene, and the construction went ahead. It was watching what Russell was doing, and I thought, ‘Well, it’s looking like a shed’, but the materials were so difficult to get at the time that I used to get the lead that was cut off the cables … the telephone cables … and melt it down to make my own lead-head nails; while my wife held the nail with a pair of pliers I poured the lead, so we made our own lead-head nails. And I felt like a real pioneer [chuckle] making my own lead-head nails.

At that time people were having their roofs made with asphalt and they were pouring tar. And these roofs were not good because the summer would virtually cook the roof and the winter would virtually contract it to the stage where it broke down. And the sarking and the boards that were underneath – they weren’t waterproof, they were just there as a foundation to hold the roof. So many of these rooves, in later times a new roof was built completely over the top of the old roof; being a flat roof it was quite easy to do.

The other thing was that when it came round to the plastering, I happened to have the good fortune to be in Holt’s [Robert Holt & Son] when Bill Spain who lived not far from me in Margate, who was a plasterer … his brothers were bricklayers and carpenters, and they built a whole street of houses about two or three miles from where I lived; St James Avenue. The old man was a builder too. So meeting up with Bill Spain and explaining to him that I wanted to plaster my shed, he said, “Well I’ll give you a hand, boy, but it will cost you a few bob.” And at that time, they used to use cow hair from the [freezing] works to put into the concrete so it kept the concrete from cracking so much; but Bill reckoned that you didn’t need to do that. So he put the first coat of plaster on my shed and that virtually made us windproof. [Chuckles] But getting the iron from [for] the roof was another job altogether, because you had to go to the demolition [yard] and pick the best of what you could pick over because they sold it for round about ninepence [9d] a foot. And you’d pick over the iron, and you’d pick the longest sheets that you could find; because I needed about ten-foot sheets, so sometimes it was a little bit more difficult to get. Anyhow, there was [were] two things to do with the iron; one was to knock the dents out of it, and the easiest way to do that was to get a piece of two-inch piping and lay it in the gully of the iron, and lay the sheet of iron on the concrete and just hammer the pipe, [chuckle] and so you hammered the gully back into the iron. And then the next thing was, when you’d done a stack of it you then got the solder and soldered up all the holes that were in the wrong places. So anyhow, I think altogether I had about fifty sheets of iron, which was more than I needed but I felt that I needed a bit in reserve just in case.

So that being done, the Smith brothers, who later on went to be teachers in the Boys’ High, the Smith brothers were plumbers. They did my plumbing for £85, and that was a hot water tank, and the necessary that I needed for the ninety feet from the toby to the shed, and then for the taps etcetera, and the tub for the washing machine, and the toilet; so for my £85 I didn’t do too badly from those chaps.

And I built into the shed the toilet in the corner; then next to that I put the shower in, and next to that I had a sink bench with a window – it was a second-hand window; then at the end of that bench was my hot water cylinder, and then next to that was my refrigerator. And it came to a wall then that I’d built for the kitchen. On the other side where the toilet was I had enough room to squeeze in and put a washing machine and a tub, so that was my kitchen. The thing I had to do next was get a chip heater and an electric stove, which was a Shacklock chip heater and stove. That fitted in my living room quite comfortably.

My garage was now twenty-eight feet long and fourteen feet wide, and I think that my kitchen and toilet was something like about eight feet by fourteen; my living room was about fourteen by fourteen, and the rest of it was my bedroom and wardrobes. So I built the wardrobes in from the floor to the ceiling, and I didn’t put any sections in so it was all done with a pipe that went from wall to wall, and everything hung on coat hangers in the wardrobe. It was very, very useful … that’s how I would describe it, it was useful. I had space; and in that bedroom was a double bed and enough room to have a cot. So I moved into the garage before it was finished … before the second coat of plaster had gone on the walls. That was November 1955.

I was married in the March of 1955 at St Andrew’s in Hastings, the old wooden church, and the reception was held at the Farmers’ Tea Rooms. And at that time I think it was run by Bill France and a Dutchman; but everything seemed to be quite good with the Farmers’ Tea Rooms, and my wife was a bit fussy so we must’ve got it right because she thought it was okay. And that early part between living at my father’s house and moving into the garage, Avis had got herself a room with a Mrs Piper on the corner of Riverslea Road and Heretaunga [Street], and so my wife had moved in with her. So when we got married Avis said, “Well I’ll move out and you can have the room together.” So that was most convenient for us to be able to live with Mrs Piper for six months or so; that was our first months of our marriage.

As I say, by the November we had got ourselves established, and the rates were one pound twelve and sixpence. [£1/12/6d] And the second coat of plaster … having talked to Bill Spain, he said he was too busy, he’d got too much on; and so I decided that plastering wasn’t all that tough, and hired a concrete mixer and proceeded to plaster the rest of the garage with a wooden screed. And it was a proper Heath Robinson job, but nevertheless, it worked.

So that was my accommodation for the next three and a half years, because in 1958 the Labour government came in under Walter Nash, and they offered a three percent loan for anybody building a house and it was for twenty-five years … a three percent loan for twenty-five years, which was a remarkably cheap loan, although at the time it didn’t seem all that cheap. But looking back in hindsight and realising what people had paid for their mortgages in years gone by, we had a remarkably cheap twenty-five years of mortgage.

Now, in the May of 1959, Alan Arrell, my neighbour who was a builder, had constructed my house and we were able to move in. The house was very bare, we had bare boards on the floor, and it was quite frugal; but my wife was expecting the second baby which she had on 23rd July 1959. It was a remarkably fast birth, because I can remember going from home to the hospital; in some forty minutes my wife had had the baby, so it was a remarkably fast job. So I went home; it was probably half past four in the morning, and on the way home I told my father that my wife had produced another daughter. And so I felt well, that was duty done, and went back to bed.

You weren’t allowed to stay at the Home when your wife was in labour?

No. Oh yes, yes I did – I stayed in the waiting room. Yes, yes, Dr Thompson was there and he came and said, “Congratulations”, and that was …

Not like today.

You can’t stay?

The husbands are in there.

Oh. No, no, no. No. Anyhow, this new baby was an exceptionally good baby. It was a remarkable thing that we had such a good baby, because after the first one – it was dynamite, the first one – but I suppose it’s like a learning curve. [Chuckle] But the time went by, and I laid the lino in the bathroom and in the toilet, and then finally I laid the lino in the kitchen.

I began to feel like a pioneer, you know? In doing the work on farms I noticed how resilient they were in what they could virtually do. And one day I happened to be in a yard where a chap was welding the back of a truck to the front of a truck, and I said to him, ” you a welder?” And he said, “No, I’m a farmer”, and I thought ‘My God!’ [Chuckles] Very versatile men they were; it was something that I admired deeply in the innovation – they’d basically take on almost anything because of the distance they had to go from the farm to the town every time they wanted anything. To give them a telephone at one pound thirteen and sixpence [£1/13/6d] – the subsidy on the connection was £1/13/6d for the connection – the rest of it, all the work that was done outside of that was all paid for by the government and the Post Office. So the farmers weren’t paying any more than the people in town for their telephone, except for the fact that if they wanted to ring outside of the local exchange area – in other words, the Maraekakaho exchange area covered, as I said, right the way from Burma Road right the way to Gwavas, to Big Hill, and most of that land that was owned originally by McLean, the early lessee. That gave us quite a bit of pride to think that we had been able to put in communication. But the farmers began complaining about a toll call that cost them sixpence [6d] if they wanted to ring town. And I remember the engineer going out to a meeting of farmers at Maraekakaho and telling them that if the call wasn’t worth 6d it wasn’t worth making. So [chuckles] that quietened them down quite a bit.

But nevertheless, soon after that when the government changed and Keith Holyoake came into government, the rates were looked at and there was a considerable alteration in the costs of telephone calls, because it was basically a farmers’ government and they were looking after the farmers. So in that time between the Nash government and Big Norm …

Kirk.

… that was a twelve-year period? We looked upon …

McIntyre? [Duncan McIntyre]

… we looked upon him as being the permanent member for Hastings because that’s what he seemed to be at that time. And he was a very nice man to have any dealings with, McIntyre. He at least listened to what you had to say, and did the best he could. And I remember my brother saying that “I went to see McIntyre, and he fulfilled my wishes to the utmost.” So I thought, ‘Well, perhaps we’ve got it right; he’s [a] pretty good guy.’ Of course his time finished when Norm Kirk came in, and I can’t remember who replaced him in Hastings, but the thing about government as we have experienced it, it didn’t alter us too much because whether it was a Labour government or a National government the only things that seemed to change were the taxes. [Chuckles] The tax rates.

But getting away from all that, the period of around about 1960 from the time that I decided to work myself out of my job at the Post Office and go into planting strawberries, this period of time was very, very hard for me because the length of my days after digging pole holes in the day and working my strawberry patch in the early morning and the late evening … I did have the good fortune to have these ladies who’d taken their children to school and come to work after nine o’clock and worked all day until half past two; they were regular, they were very reliable; and so in that respect I was very fortunate. But having gone through that spell of the difference in working for myself and my Post Office salary, it was so much difference that it was very rewarding financially. As I said, the salary was £675 … that was my Post Office salary … and I got extra for being a truck driver, and I got extra for being a Caterpillar driver with a boring machine; so I did get extra as a leading hand as well, but my strawberry patch outdid the rest by a long shot. [Chuckle]

The approach to Jim Wattie was about this twenty acres that I was going to lease because I’d done so well from my berries. And being that I was one of the early ones to plant in plastic which saved an awful lot of work because you didn’t have the weeds to bother you; and developing my own technique for stopping the berries from scorching or being cooked on the black plastic in the heat; this also added, so the offer from Jim Wattie was a very good offer. It was two shillings and threepence [2/3d] a pound for everything I could grow, and although it was only half of what I was getting from the rest of the crop it was still a very good proposition. This was banged on the head by my wife, who told me that should I go ahead with the project my marriage would be defunct; so being that my affection for my wife was greater than the strawberries, I put down the shovel and decided to be a normal man and go to work normal hours.

My father in the meantime [mike interference] had been talking to Storky Edwards who was a Seventh Day Adventist, and my father was listening to the preaching of the gospel by Seventh Day Adventists. And we’d been a religious family in the Church of England, and my grandfather before us; the unfortunate thing about being brought up in a religious household is that regardless of what religion it is, that you automatically inherit the faith and are brainwashed to the extent of whatever that faith produces in the way of belief. So in my last quiz last week … I go to U3A [University of the Third Age] now, and I have a lot of ladies who are quite aged, and very, very clever. They are users of useless knowledge. In other words, they’ve got a headful of things they’ve learned all their life that are no good to them at all except for when we go to quiz classes. And the question arose … it was a biblical question … and that was, “How old was Abraham when his wife conceived and had Isaac?” The answer was that Sarah had conceived when she was ninety, and Isaac was born when she was ninety-one. They must’ve been a couple of bunnies, because Abraham was over a hundred now; and his wife lived to be a hundred and twenty-seven. And he buried her in a plot in a parcel of land at Shiloh which he’d purchased, and he was a hundred and thirty-seven then. So for whatever that was worth it was a part of the quiz, and I thought to myself, ‘Well there’s a lot of intelligent people around, but I wonder to what degree one’s intelligent can stretch.’

Yeah. Well Michael, I want to thank you very much for that talk today. Very enlightening.