Plaisted, Vivienne Una Interview

Today is 10 April 2014, and today I’m interviewing Vivienne Plaisted of Poraiti, Napier. Vivienne was one of the Husheer family and she is going to give us some history now of the life and times of her family. Thank you Vivienne; look forward to hearing your story.

I’m Vivienne Una Plaisted now, but I was Vivienne Una Husheer, and I was born on 29th April 1942 during the war … the middle of the war. My father was Torvald, and he was the third son of Gerhard Husheer. My family are from very mixed areas. My father’s side of the family are from Europe; my mother’s side of the family were English. Only my mother was born in New Zealand, of my parents and my grandparents as well – none of them were New Zealand-born, so we’re immigrants, the whole family.

So when I came into the family, there was a mother and a father and a grandmother living in the home at the time – Fanny Elizabeth Godfrey. Her maiden name had been Harding, and … oh, we don’t know about the marriage part, but she had come to New Zealand with a Louis Godfrey, who was a steel engraver from England, and had a wonderful life as a steel engraver; and a lot of his own family had been. So she was the English part of my family. I also had a brother – a living brother – and he was fourteen years older than I was, and he was born in 1928. His name was Godfrey Asbjorn Husheer. There was another brother born, and Anthony was born before my time, in 1938. And he died in 1940. He had actually drunk some poison, and my mother was – they’d recently moved into 14 Nelson Crescent, and she’d gone into the garage and he’d followed her in; he was about fifteen months old I think, and he managed to grab a bottle and drink something and by the time the ambulance could come he was dead. So after that they were left with one child, so they thought that perhaps they’d better have another try for another baby, which they did, but they were a bit hesitant because Mum had had a lot of trouble having Anthony, and – I think she had bled a lot and she’d had to have a lot of help prior to his birth, and be looked after, after the birth. Anyway, the doctor said … old Dr Barnett from Napier … he said, “What you had passed away with the baby, so it’s fine to try for another baby”.

So then I came along, and everybody was happy ‘cause I was a girl; [chuckle] with a granny living in the house, who’d lost her husband in Australia so she’d come to live with us. And she’d had pernicious anaemia; when Mum had gone to visit her and thought she looked terrible, and very ill; and suggested she came and lived with her daughter in Napier in New Zealand. So that’s the basis of my family.

And I was born next door to our own home in [a] maternity hospital that is now Rawhiti Motel. A long, long time ago it was a nursing home at which my mother worked, because it was wartime and because she had a mother living with her. Although she had a small child the grandmother could look after me, so that meant Mum, who’d had to do her VA training, could also work. And it was a funny situation for our family because we were classed as aliens, because of my father’s side of the family. But Mum had done her VA training, so she used to disappear very frequently next door – they’d eventually made a gate between our house and the hospital because mum used to often stay with the women who were in labour, because most of their husbands were away at sea; or a lot of them were. They didn’t have anybody else. And my grandmother used to go over in the morning; she used to make the breakfast. She used to cook the porridge.

And so … as long as dad was home there was somebody home, but if I couldn’t find anybody I used to just go next door and look for them. And the first place I went to – I used to open the door to the theatre, and have a look in the bassinet [chuckle] to see the newest baby which would be lying on a sheepskin. And so that was sort of like a second home in a way, for a long, long time. ‘Cause Granny helped with the nappies and washed them, and then they went through the mangle. And prior to that they were hung out to dry, often in a … it looked like a big chicken coop, ‘cause it had wire netting walls but it had a roof over it. And I suppose there were lots of sheets and laundry that they had to dry, and that was where that was.

Just coming back to your family that came from overseas, where did they come from? Because that ties in with the fact that they were made aliens.

That’s quite interesting. My grandfather, Gerhard Husheer – he was born in Germany, and I think of German parents. Without looking at the book that’s as far as I know. And that was what he was classed as during the war periods. And so he had a chequered career, because he became a cigar … was apprenticed to a cigar factory. And he travelled a lot through Europe and spoke many, many languages. And then he met at some stage, my grandmother who was Norwegian, and she came from Bergen in Norway. And I don’t know when it was, but anyway, they became engaged at this … oh, there’s a little … real Stavkirke church there, which is where they became engaged. Anyway, then Grandfather went off for a couple of years I believe, and then came back, while she got her trousseau and all of that stuff together. And then they were married, I presume in Bergen, and then they went back into either Germany or Holland, where Grandfather carried on with his job which took him all over Europe. And it was there that Uncle Ingolf I think, was born. And he was the eldest, so he was born in Europe, either in Holland or Germany. And then Uncle Asbjorn … Uncle Asie … was born, and it was either in Germany or Holland.

And then at that point they emigrated to South Africa, where Grandfather had another business. He was a bit of an entrepreneur. And that was during the Boer War, and my father was born in Johannesburg in 1898, but they came back to Germany for the three boys, for their education, and that was when Dad was about two or three. So my father and his brothers’ education was in Germany, and they lived in Germany. And it was from there that they came to New Zealand in 1911. So my father had gone to school, and he was nearly fourteen, or thirteen, when they were leaving Germany and he, at his school, joyously went to tell the teacher they were going to New Zealand, and might be living in grass huts and stuff. [Chuckle] Very ignorant. And anyway, a few days later she said to him, “You’re not – you’re going to one of the most advanced countries in the world. All the children go to school until they’re fourteen.” Which wasn’t the case in Europe. “And all the women and the natives have the vote, so you just need to jack your ideas up a bit.”

So duly they went to England, and they came on the ‘Ionic’ to New Zealand and landed at Wellington. I don’t know how long it took and where they landed on the way, but it was quite a journey. And the three boys were in one cabin and Grandfather and Grandmother were in another cabin. They stayed in a hotel in Wellington for a little while because they wanted to be buying land I think, in Hawke’s Bay.

Grandfather Husheer, meanwhile – he’d been to New Zealand before the Pink & White Terraces had been destroyed, and he’d thought that this was where he wanted to eventually come. He liked the climate and he thought he could grow tobacco here. So the idea was that they were to buy a farm or a farmlet, or whatever they needed to … some land … and they were heading for Hawke’s Bay. And I think they went to the Horticultural or one of those Societies for advice, and eventually they … I think they were in Wellington for a few weeks while they got a few things together and found somewhere to buy. Then they came by train from Wellington up to … I don’t know where they got off the train, but they settled in Pakipaki. They bought a property in Pakipaki which was pretty run down – or else they leased it, I’m not sure. And it was from there that they started to try to grow some seedlings to start with because they were a bit late in the season, but they were trying anyway.

And I don’t know how much further after that my Uncle Harald was born. So that made … then they had four boys and there was fourteen years’ difference between my father, who was the youngest of three, and this new baby which apparently Grandfather wasn’t too keen on. [Chuckle]

But anyway, when he arrived at home … Grandmother went into Hastings to stay for a while before the birth of the baby, and then was in hospital for a couple of weeks and then came back to the farm, and was delighted to find that Gerhard had made a cot for the baby because they didn’t have any of that sort of stuff – in fact they didn’t have a lot of furniture I don’t think, either, and they’d been beginning to make furniture and make do for the house that they were in.

And so I think they were there for quite some time trying to grow their tobacco, and it was a very different life for all of them because they’d always lived in a city … in a town, big place … and were new to farming; and were a great entertainment to a lot of the farmers around because they had a cow on the farm. And they thought they should get the bull to the cow, but the cow wasn’t at all interested. And anyway, sometime later – not very long later – one of them came rushing home, “Oh! The cow’s got a calf!” So Uncle Ingolf and Grandfather went off to town in the buggy to buy some food for the cow and get some bottles and teats for the calf. They didn’t know any other way of feeding it; it was my father’s job as the youngest to feed the calf, and he had an awful job. And she drank too much and he couldn’t keep up, so Uncle Asie helped him – he filled the bottles and Dad fed the calf with the teat. And it was a real performance – too [a] very long time. And one of the farmers came by and saw all of this and he said, “I can show you a much easier way to do this.” So they put the milk in the bucket, and they showed them how to put their hand in the bucket and then the calf would suckle from their … oh! So dad still had that job but it was much quicker when he knew how to do it.

Well I wonder where the farm was in …

Well it must have been somewhere near Pakipaki because …

Some of the old families that used to live there – the Speers and MacDonalds …

Right. Yeah, well eventually they did know MacDonalds but I don’t know whether they were the same MacDonalds of all of those.

It would be. The MacDonalds in Pakipaki – everyone knew them.

Was that the MacDonalds that later had Kuripapango Station, maybe?

No, that was … the lady owned …

Rosie owned …

Rosie – yes. No, different MacDonald.

Right. But there was also the MacDonalds that had what would have been Church Road?

That was Tom MacDonald, yes.

[Speaking together]: Tom MacDonald.

And they were friends of the family. And when my family were – and I don’t know whether they were still at Pakipaki or somewhere else – because they were good friends with the Vidals. And whether they had adjacent properties or what, I don’t really know.

Well the Vidals’ properties were in Te Mata Road in Havelock North.

Is that now somewhere near where Clearview is?

No, Clearview’s in Te Awanga.

But I think that they might have had a bit of land out there, too.

They did. Where Clearview grow their grapes, Vidals had that.

I’m not very sure …

No, you’re right onto it there.

Somehow about that time there was a … we don’t know whether it was a place or a property called Clive Grange.

Yes, Clive Grange was in Clive, but there were several granges around the place.

Oh, right.

And it was a common name, The Grange.

Because often I think, Dad has spoken in his book about Clive Grange.

And they must have experimented with growing tobacco for quite some time but I don’t think it was ever greatly successful there. I don’t know how long they stayed in Hawke’s Bay but Uncle Ingolf and Dad and Uncle Asie were always sent off to be working because they had to earn some money to start a business, my dad being only fourteen or fifteen. They had taken him to the school at Pakipaki because it was compulsory for all children to go to school ‘til they were fourteen. But when they went there, there was a school; and he went off in his socks that came up past his knees, and he noticed the others didn’t come up to their knees, they came up to below the knees; or they were barefoot. And there were quite a lot of Māori children. Anyway, it was discussed and it was seen with the teacher, that actually they couldn’t teach him any more than he already knew, from where he was, so Dad was quite delighted that he didn’t actually have to go back to school again. But that meant he was now the cook and the housekeeper at the house anyway.

But it carried on for many years, and I know my father at some point was sent as a drover; he worked out the back of Gisborne herding sheep, or whatever you do with sheep.

Yes – shepherding sheep.

Shepherding I think, ‘cause I’m not a farming girl at all, [chuckle] so I don’t know. And the only way I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t know why this father of mine … I don’t understand all of that.’ Anyway, one day I did understand it, and he explained it to me one day when we’d gone gliding. And the glider had come down in a paddock in Tukituki, and he’d put his fingers in his mouth like I’d seen farmer people do, and he whistled, a piercing, piercing whistle. And I looked in shock at my father, because I only ever knew my father as a man with a collar and tie – even at the weekends he usually had a collar and tie. So he had to explain to me then how he had worked as a stockman or something, riding horses and things as a young man, and I think Uncle Ingolf had been sent out doing those sort of things too.

So he was a glider pilot?

Oh! Well my father – before he came to New Zealand they must have been living in Bremen, and he saw the big airships and he was absolutely fascinated with flying and airships. And so when they came out to New Zealand my father actually built himself a glider before the First World War, which I think must have been somewhere near Clearview, in that direction. And people reported it to the authorities, so the authorities came and broke it up.

You’re joking!

No, I’m not joking. He was only a boy … fourteen or fifteen or sixteen, but he’d built it. And so he had a great interest in flying, my father; all of his life. And I think after that, much later on – it would’ve been … I don’t know … all of his adult life – there must’ve been a gliding club in Hawke’s Bay, but whether he and Arnold Wright started the gliding club, the first one, I don’t know. But we have an old film actually of it too, that my father took on his cine photography …

Yes. There was early gliding from Bridge Pa Aerodrome, and I think Piet van Asch may’ve been …

Oh no, I knew Piet van Asch, yes. No, that was the second gliding club, the one where I was a founding member. This is before the Second World War …

Are you a glider too?

Yeah. I … when I was seventeen when I went to do my nursing training I was ready to go solo, but I went nursing instead, so I’ve never, ever gone solo …

Oh, right.

… and I haven’t been in a glider ever since. I would like to, but I think they’d have to get a winch to get me in and a winch to get me out again. Piet van Asch was one of the … he used to teach; was the early fifties when the Hawke’s Bay Gliding Club …

Well the one that was prior to the Second World War – I think they flew from somewhere in Riverbend Road. There was a man called Andy Peterson, and I think they used his land – this is before the earthquake, I’m talking about – and I don’t know much about him, but there was a Mrs Peterson who used to be a family friend of ours, and I only knew her; I didn’t know her husband. And he must have died when she was a young … fairly newly married, because they had no family. But she forever always talked about her husband Andy, and Dad talked about him, and so did Arnold Wright. Now Arnold Wright was another … he had come I think from Wairoa, but they must’ve been living in Napier at the time. And he and Dad were both mad keen on gliding, and there was a gliding club; a group of them, and they used to go down around Dannevirke and all sorts of places when my brother was a little toddler boy. And he was born in 1928 so it was a long time prior to that. But Dad did say, and we have got a movie of it, and it’s really funny – some of them are flapping their arms and their legs and … they were all home-built gliders, or I think they must’ve been. But when the boys went to the Second World War they weren’t interested in gliding, they wanted something with an engine.

Well, coming back to your father, when did he get interested in tobacco?

He wasn’t particularly interested in tobacco. No it wasn’t my father, it was Gerhard. Gerhard had been an apprentice to the cigar … in Europe.

Yes – I’m sorry, it was your grandfather.

And that was what he’d been trained or apprenticed to. And I don’t think they were doing … they might’ve been doing tobacco in South Africa; I don’t know, but he had his finger in quite a few pies there as well. And in Germany when the boys were at school, I really don’t know what he was doing; but it was his wish to come back to New Zealand and grow tobacco, and have a tobacco factory.

Which he did?

He did. After he had tried here, he then tried growing tobacco in Riverhead, and that wasn’t terribly successful either because the climate would’ve been too humid.

So where was Riverhead?

Riverhead’s out of Auckland … the Riverhead pub.

But we thought Riverhead Gold was the name of a horse.

No! No! It is a name of an area …

We all used to smoke in those days.

Yes – yes we did, including me when I was young. Well Riverhead was opposite … well there’s a pub at Riverhead, near Kumeu and out in that direction.

Not near Puhoi?

No, Puhoi’s on the other side. It’s near Hobsonville – go across the harbour and across the harbour from Hobsonville is Riverhead, and that’s the head of the whole of the harbour … goes up to Riverhead.

And my mother was born in Riverhead, and she was of English parents and she had an older sister too – Violet. Mum went to school in Riverhead and went on a horse to school. We had a lot of family friends there; the Jonkers were there, and they had another farm on the Point.

And my grandfather, Godfrey – he was the steel engraver that’d come out – they shuttled back from Australia and New Zealand quite a lot, but he’d come and he’d settled in Riverhead after … there must have been a time … he had bought a lot of shares in Australia, and in those days they were unsecured. And something had happened to one of the companies, and if you were unsecured you were up to pay for that. And the sharebroker said to him, “You go and disappear.” So he said to Fanny Elizabeth, his wife, “What shall we do? Will we go and get lost in New Zealand, or will we go – I can make another living in South America. I can do the steel engraving for bank notes and those things, and I’m happy to go to South America.” “No”, she said, she wasn’t going to South America. She’d been so seasick coming to New Zealand, there was no way she was going on another long voyage. So they went and got lost at Riverhead. I don’t know whether Aunty Violet was born there, or whether … because she was about eight years older than my mother, and Mum was born definitely at Riverhead and she went to school at the Riverhead School. [Background hum] And it was a pretty poor area in those days, but it’s not so poor now. No. [Chuckle]

And they were great friends with the people at the pub there. But Grandfather Godfrey, he decided … he was a bit of an entrepreneur too. I don’t know how I’ve came out as normal as I have, because I had two quite eccentric grandfathers. And so Grandfather Godfrey, who’d been to art school in Paris and done his steel engraving – and all his family were artists – he built a boat. And he had an engine in it which was one of the first engines on the Waitemata Harbour. But they lived at Riverhead, so he used to take the boat from Riverhead to Auckland and tie up at the steps there, and used to run there once a week on a Friday, and he’d take the locals up there. And when mum was a little girl, she said, “Oh, often there was a box on the boat”. She didn’t know it, but it was a coffin – it was going up to be … [Chuckle]

So he and the Jonkers used to bring their eggs down, and their plums down, and they all used to bring their produce down and come on the boat and off they’d go up to Auckland, and they’d sell their produce and then come back in the afternoon. Meanwhile he’d driven it up there and he was driving it back, but he used to go up to the Art Gallery for the day, and Granny Godfrey went and did some shopping.

So Dad and Mum, they were living at Hobsonville – my father, Torvald – Gerhard and Ingolf and Torvald, and I think at that time Uncle Asie would’ve still been there, alive. Uncle Asie was actually killed in a quarry accident up in Whangarei. So he was the second son down, but he died; so Dad was the third one. And he met my mother who lived at Riverhead when she was probably still … well just about a school leaver I suppose, sixteen. And eventually they became engaged, and then her parents decided to go back to Australia so she went back with them, engaged; and dad went over and they got married two years later.

But it was during the time that they were trying to grow tobacco, and where the Riverhead Gold tobacco got its name, before they went down to Motueka to try and grow tobacco there which was much more successful.

But all of my life, I remember as a child … a young child … my father, on a census and things, he was noted as a tobacco expert. He used to go down in the winter time for three or four months and stay in a hotel in Motueka, and he was buying tobacco and just deciding which he was going to select for the factory.

So was his father still running the factory at that stage?

Yes. Grandfather … the first factory that was built, before the 1931 earthquake – yes, it was – and I don’t know how much before my life, but I know when I was a little girl he used to go down about the end of April and was away for three months. But Grandfather had built the tobacco factory, and it was employment. And then Uncle Ingolf was involved at the tobacco factory and my father worked in the tobacco factory. Uncle Harald, who was much younger, never worked in the tobacco factory, and he was still at high school. Yeah, he went as a boarder to Napier Boys’ High. So the boys, once the factory was built, they were always involved with the tobacco factory, whether they wanted to be or not – I don’t know. I think Uncle Ingolf was more involved in the office, but they were involved in the whole running of it; and Dad was always sent to buy the hands of tobacco and oversee the running of everything down there.

That was a major job, going down to the drying sheds and selecting the leaf and …

Well they were done into hands, and they went over to go into the kilns to dry.

So just going back – we’ve missed a part …

We have.

… and that was where your grandfather was made an alien.

Oh, right. During the First World War, and I don’t know too much about that, but of course after my father’s glider had been broken up they were classed as aliens, because they were foreigners coming into the country. Although they had been naturalised New Zealanders, or like … citizenship or whatever you had then … that had happened before the First World War came, but we were still declared as aliens. And come the Second World War – yes, it was the same thing again, and Grandfather Husheer used to have to go to report to the police twice a day; he had to go in the morning and in the afternoon. So he used to leave the factory, and the chauffeur would take him at just before twelve o’clock. So he’d roll up and he’d go into the sign in; that was his morning bit, go back and sit in the car for ten minutes or something, and go back and sign in for his afternoon visit.

It’s amazing that that could happen.

He had a house in Duart Road, which I think he lived in during … when their house in Napier at 10 Elizabeth Road was being rebuilt, or fixed up after the earthquake. And I can remember only very occasionally going there on a Sunday afternoon. I think they often used to go out there for the day at the weekends or something, after those years … the time when they lived there when the earthquake … And it was a big house, and I don’t know exactly where it was on Duart Road, but it was in Duart Road.

So you left school ..?

Aah, but … yes, but as a little girl during the war, when not only … my Uncle Ingolf, I think he must have been the one born in Germany, and I’m not sure whether he actually had a stint at Somes Island – this is the Second World War I’m talking about. My father, having been born in Johannesburg of a German father and a Norwegian mother, well he wasn’t allowed on [in] the Home Guard even. But he was allowed in the voluntary fire brigade, which he thought was … he’d always wanted to go on a fire engine.

And the other thing which not many people realise, in my home as a wee girl, I could not understand why it was Granny’s car and why it was Granny’s radio. My grandmother who lived with us and had been there from before I was born – she had rooms at the front of the house. She had a big sitting room with a fireplace and she had a bedroom built off there and then she had a handbasin and a toilet off that. And she had a radio in her room – a big standard one that used to stand up like that, and it was called Granny’s radio. And the car that was being driven by my mother and father, was Granny’s car which I could not understand.

Was that because they were not allowed to …

We were not allowed to own a car or a radio during the Second World War, which was a bit stupid in our house, because the English Granny was allowed a radio. So if we wanted to listen to the radio … We didn’t get one in our sitting room ‘til later, and I remember sitting around that one listening to ‘Dad & Dave’, and ‘It’s In the Bag’ and those things – not that we used a radio – not very often at all. And Granny of course, she couldn’t drive a car; she had no licence; she couldn’t drive a car, but it was Granny’s car.

So who drove the car then?

My mum or my dad.

Isn’t is strange the rules that people make?

‘Cause we used to go in this funny little car up to Kuripapango, or … wherever we went.

So picking up your life when you left school …

Oh, I had an interesting life at school.

You went to which primary school?

I went to Nelson Park. I went to Intermediate then; then I went to Napier Girls’. There was no other high school to go to. So it was interesting times, because we had milk in school in those days, which I think Grandfather had instigated, but it was in bottles, and it was left … We were so lucky at Nelson Park.

They used to stand it in the sun to condition it for us …

No, ours was lucky because we had willow trees, and that’s where the milk was taken – the stands were there. No, I enjoyed school. And of course we had a polio epidemic when I was quite young, so we didn’t go to school for quite some time, and we couldn’t play with the children down the road or anything else.

And I always used to say to my mum, “Mum, why are my pants always hanging down in every photo you’ve got?” She said, “Well we couldn’t have any elastic during the war”. She said, “I had to take the elastic out of my pants, put it in your pants, and I sewed a button and made a buttonhole on mine.” And there was no rubber teats, no hot water bottles – there was none of that because they just … ‘til well, well after the war, because we had rationing and other things. And I do remember that some of the roads had gates on them; there was a big gate somewhere on the way up on the Taihape Road, because we used to go up to see Rosie MacDonald up there, which I thought was a big treat because – it was a big treat, and I was always sick at Willowford. I used to be sick all the … [chuckle] that’s the first time I was sick on the way up.

And Rosie MacDonald was a character, and she had her mother … I can just remember her mother, and she had big round glasses. And the kitchen – there were two sort of kitchens; there was one that had the big coal range in it, and then you went down a step, and I think there was – I don’t know whether it was a dirt floor, or … might not’ve been … but there was a big kitchen table there, and out from that there was a creek; and you went over the creek and through the chook pen to the toilet. And there was a big eel in that creek. But no running water; no electricity; none of that. It was very basic, but it was always exciting to go there because we had all of those things.

And then there was old Jack – he lived out in the whare out in the back, and he was the roustabout. Nobody ever knew his surname. He had come from Australia and he lived in there. After old Mrs MacDonald died there was only Rosie left, and Rosie used to bring him down in the car. And she had a big De Soto car, ‘cause her brother had MacDonald Motors in Auckland, so she always had a very posh car, and Jack had to sit in the back seat. And when they came to our place for a cup of tea on the day when they’d come into town, she’d come down with duck eggs and all sorts of things – butter – and mum would swap things, and I suppose that was during rationing. I don’t know. But Jack wasn’t even allowed in the house; he had to sit on the fence, and mum used to take him a cup of tea and some lunch out – he had to [chuckle] sit outside. But he had a whare up at the farm at Kuripapango, and it was quite separate from the house and he had one of those corrugated iron chimneys. I was fascinated with that – not that we were really allowed in there, we could just sort of look in the door.

Yes, they were a cross between a hermit and a tramp, weren’t they?

Yes. And he was always polished up when he came to town, and he had rosy, rosy red cheeks. I can remember that. And he was always kind – I thought he was a kind old man, but … well he looked old, but he can’t have been that old.

Well to have driven up there in a small car – a lot of that road was shingle all the way to Kuripapango …

I’ve only … I’ve never been on it since it’s [been] tar sealed. I’d love to go up there. They were just before the Gentle Annie, and as entertainment we used to go over the bridge sometimes, which had a rabbit gate on it because they used to always have rabbiters. And then you’d walk up the Gentle Annie, and that was your entertainment for a walk. [Chuckle]

‘Cause that was a great staging post for many years, wasn’t it, for stage coaches?

Yes, and Grandfather Husheer was friends with them too, and that was not when I remember, but I understand that’s how he had been friends with them. And maybe there was a Mr MacDonald at that time – I have no idea; but she never had a husband. And they were next door to the Lowrys I think, at Ngamatea was it?

That’s right, yes.

But she was the daughter of old Mrs MacDonald; but the old Mrs MacDonald, she must have had a husband surely? Because Rosie’s cousins were the MacDonald Halligan Motors, or one of them … the Mr MacDonald of that part was.

Right. So you enjoyed school?

I did. I did. No, I didn’t enjoy some of it. At Intermediate we had a teacher, Mr Goodall, who was a Socialist. And he made Helen Etheridge and myself’s [mine and Helen Etheridge’s] lives very miserable at Intermediate, ’cause he didn’t like us ‘cause we had a little bit of wealth, I suppose he thought.

Was she Graham Etheridge’s sister?

No. Different Etheridge – I think that they had an import and … They lived in a house down Nelson Crescent, almost next door to my cousin – Uncle Harold and Aunty Jean Husheer.

So from high school you decided to go nursing?

Well, no before that really. When I was in high school I took French and Art; because my mother wanted me to take Commercial so I could have a job in an office. But that was not my idea of anything – there was no way I was going to go and sit in an office like I had seen [background noise] at the tobacco factory – a great bit room with a whole lot of girls sitting at a typewriter, banging away on a typewriter. That was not my idea – I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I certainly didn’t want to do that, and there was no way I was going to do it. Fortunately my father was on my side, and said I could take French and Art. [Chuckle] I didn’t like the French very much, but you had to do it and I don’t know whether we did it for one or two years. And I do remember we had a nice young teacher called Miss Governs – the poor young lady, we used to make her life hell ‘cause she didn’t wear any makeup. Nasty girls, tried to make her cry.

And I didn’t like it at high school. The other thing was my brother was teaching there. He had gone off when I was probably at Nelson Park … I don’t know, he was gone for many years. He had been doing his science degree down at Dunedin University; that’s where they had to do it when he was a boy. Because he was fourteen years older than I was he was gone when I was about three or four, and so he went down there.

And he used to work at the Whakatu Freezing Works during his holiday times to earn some money; he had a big motorbike and at one stage he had a big accident at the Ellison Street crossing, and he was thrown up above the telegraph wires and came down with a broken leg. When they took him to hospital he was unconscious. I was only three or … four, I think then, and he was in hospital for about nine months. But to get his leg set and some plates put in Mum and Dad had to pay for a [an] orthopaedic surgeon to come from Wellington … to come and set the leg with the plates in it. And he was in hospital at Napier Hospital, so I mean it was a very [chuckle] … And I thought, when my mum told me that he’d had an accident and he had a broken leg, I thought it was like my doll’s legs that used to fall off, and Dad used to put some elastic or something inside them and tie them back on again. And I was crying because I thought he had no leg at all – that’s what I imagined.

And I do remember we used to go up on a Sunday and take him a roast dinner, ‘cause he was there and he was in a bed frame; well there was a big frame over the bed and he had traction on his leg and all sorts of things. But he was unconscious apparently, for quite a long time before he regained consciousness, and he had a big scar on his head. When he did come out of hospital eventually, which was after his twenty-first birthday, he had a calliper on his leg that he used to do something at the knee to straighten it out or bend it up – I can’t remember how it worked, but it was something like that . And then there were nurses – they used to come and visit us at home when he was getting better; there was a lot of nurses came to visit us. [Chuckle]

But Mum must’ve been quite good, ‘cause they had to live in the Nurses’ Home, and on their days off they could come and … they used to use her sewing machine. And they were nice to me too, ‘cause if they were going for a swim they’d take me to Westshore, and I was just a girl.

So no wonder you went nursing …

Well! No, I had no idea really. Mum didn’t want me to go nursing because she thought that was too hard a life. But I really wanted to go Karitane nursing, but I’m glad I didn’t now because that all folded up. But at the time I found I had to wait nearly eighteen months to get into a course and if I went general nursing I could start straight away. But the reason I wanted to go nursing – the other one – was ‘cause I could travel. And during high school I had done a project, and it must have been on Canada, and there was Banff and Lake Louise and all that beautiful … oh! That’s where I wanted to go. So that was part of the prime mover to go nursing.

And did you ever go there?

I did indeed. Absolutely beautiful. But it was many, many years from when I’d done my school project before that ever happened. But it did happen because I did my nursing training, and I went to Auckland to do my nursing training. So I finished my schooling in December, not long … a few days before Christmas, and on 6th of January I started my nursing training up in Auckland, because we had family up there, and …

[Speaking together] ‘Course you did.

… as a child we didn’t go on very many holidays. Although people thought we had a lot of money, Grandfather certainly didn’t; didn’t spread it around the family. He might have spent it in other places and he was pretty generous in many other ways, but he wasn’t to his family. And there was periods in my family as a growing up girl that were just not nice at all, ‘cause it was during the time when the factory was being sold. I didn’t understand that all that much; Dad wasn’t allowed to go to work for about a year or eighteen months, so he stayed at home. He’d learned how to make crayfish pots and nets, and he used to go down and catch crayfish and fill in his time. He started doing Māori carving at that time and he also did … he’d always done wood carving before that. And there was a little backyard business when they were making pies, and that was when I was at Intermediate school I would say.

So he could turn his hand to many things?

My father could turn his hand at a hundred and one things. He was very versatile; he was very artistic; he was very practical. When I was packing up a lot of things after my mother had died, I found books where Dad had done like … long distance courses in all sorts of different things ‘cause he had manuals for all of those.

Okay … so he was very studious?

He was. He was, and when I was at school – yes, he did have a very curious mind. When I was at school I didn’t go to my mother … the English person … to learn my grammar or fix my sentences up or do any of that – I went to Dad, because he did a lot of the business things for the factory and he was always the one that was sent to Wellington to the business meetings. He was a person who could talk to anybody; he could talk to … he could’ve talked to the rubbish man, and he could’ve talked to the Queen. He had a very gentle way about him; he had a lovely personality.

When the tobacco company was sold – it was sold, wasn’t it?

It was sold. Yes, as I say my father was … he was part of the tobacco factory, and I think before my grandfather died when he wasn’t very much down at the tobacco factory, there were a lot of arguments between my father and Uncle Ingolf, and their father. They wanted to modernise the way the tobacco factory was being run, and the finances and all sorts of different things, and he was not in favour of any of those things. And I don’t know whether by the time he died, which was in the fifties – I was at Intermediate, because we as children were not allowed to go the funeral, because children didn’t go. And Nurse Aldridge looked after us while the funeral was on. Now she was somebody that featured in that family quite a bit, whenever anybody got sick. I don’t know how they knew her, but she used to come and she used to look after Grandfather or whoever needed looking after in the family. And she was a busty lady! She had a big bust, and a uniform on – I don’t know whether she was actually a nurse of any sort at all. I have no idea, but she was part of the … well she had a lot to do with the family. But there were a lot of people that had a lot to do with the family; a lot of the people that looked after Grandmother later, and all the staff that they had there; they were quite good to their staff.

Because most of us only knew the National Tobacco Company from the packets of cigarettes we used to buy. I smoked on and off for sixty years.

I smoked for a long time, too. And I know I got caught smoking. But there was always cigarettes round our house. My father never … he used to smoke roll-your-owns, and he always rolled his own and he had Pocket Edition – that was what he used. And I suppose Uncle Ingolf did. My mother must’ve smoked on rare occasions but she had a cigarette holder, because I went and told the neighbours my mother smoked a pipe. [Chuckle] And I was about four – then she realised it wasn’t actually a pipe, that it was a cigarette holder, and I don’t think she smoked [chuckle] again after that. [Chuckle] And I suppose it was only to be sociable that she did, because she wasn’t a smoker.

So had you gone away nursing when the company was sold?

It was a bit – I can’t really remember ‘cause Grandfather … it must’ve been sold,

because although Dad had this long period of time when there was … oh, I don’t know whether it was the shareholders or whoever they were, of the company, there was a lot of bad blood anyway. And … oh, there was a Mr Lindeman somewhere along the line there; and a lot of things actually had disappeared from the factory – I know that, ‘cause the Indian man has, and the lions off the … that rode down the bannisters – I think they went somewhere to somebody who lived at Poraiti. They just disappeared there; they were taken. And I don’t know where the Indian man that used to be in the foyer has gone to.

Yes there were many photos of that taken.

Yeah, but I can only remember it in my head.

Because it was a focal point.

Yes, it probably was. Anyway, it’s disappeared somewhere.

I think when the factory was dissolved, or sold – it was first sold to Rothmans. And a cousin, John Husheer – he stayed on there, and he was there for many years until he went out on his own. And he went travelling overseas, and I think he was like a tobacco expert, and he was based in Singapore and overseas for a long time. So the factory then – as far as we knew it was Rothmans, and then it became British American I think. And now it’s going to be a part of a brewery … [chuckle] I think. Oh, it’s been storing a lot of stuff for the Museum.

So little Vivienne went off to Auckland to train as a nurse …

Well, not before I’d learnt to fly the glider.

Oh, of course, let’s talk about that.

Well … so when I was at high school, some people came to my father, and they wanted to restart a gliding club again, which must have been in the fifties somewhere. And they wanted to import a German glider called a Ron Lark, and so they came to him to do the translations because he could still write his German; I don’t think he could still speak his German but he could still translate enough for that. And so there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with people coming round to the house to get the glider. And then the glider arrived, and then it had to be set up and of course Dad was pretty familiar with those sort of things having built his own, and the gliding club was formed. And I think it was called the Hawke’s Bay Gliding Club, and Dad was a life member, and I was a member … a founding member … and I think my brother, Godfrey, was a founding member, along with a lot of people like the van Aschs and … Bill McNutt …

Yes, from Waipukurau.

Yes. Now he used to sometimes fly the Tiger Moth to tow, but the main way that we flew in that little Ron Lark, and I’ve got a photo up there of me sitting in the seat. They had a winch. I’m not at all technical, but it looked like a big drum that a big wire went around. And you used to go for a circuit and bump, and there was some – I don’t know whose farm it was on, but it was beside the Tukituki River below Te Mata Peak. I have no idea whose place it was when we used to go out there every weekend, and I suppose Dad paid – I have no idea – you had to pay a certain amount for a circuit and bumps, and we’d go up once or twice. And I still have got my log book. And Godfrey used to come – that was my brother – he did too; and occasionally we went out from Bridge Pa, but not very often ‘cause that was very expensive to have a …

That was a dual glider, wasn’t it?

Yes it was.

And the instructor at the gliding club those days – I can’t remember his name …

Well one of them was one of the Van Aschs. That’s me sitting in the glider. [Shows photo]

I marvelled at the fact you could fly and there’s just the sound of the wind in the struts.

It was amazing, because I can remember, sometimes if we were lucky and we’d had a circuit and bumps from down on the Tukituki River, we’d get up and we could get above the people that were on the top of Te Mata Peak, that had driven up. And because it was so quiet you could hear what they were talking about, just below you.

And of course that’s where you got the greatest lift.

Yes, from up there.

And when you think back to those days, on the weekends there was always a glider above the peak.

Yes.

So you didn’t actually get your gliding licence?

No, I was nearly due for it. Well, I’d always flown with somebody – yeah, No, I enjoyed it … thoroughly enjoyed it.

After that you were in Auckland?

Yes, I started my nursing training in January 1960. We had to have three months – we had prelim training. I didn’t go to Market Road. They had big intakes in those days, because we always had to live in and everything. And prior to going there it was like having a baby’s layette – you had a whole list of clothes you had to take with you. It was really … really weird. And of course it was my first time to be going away from home and living away from home, and living in Auckland. But I wanted to go to Auckland, ‘cause we had had relatives that used to live up in Auckland. And as a child a regular occurrence in the summer holidays was to go on the bus to Auckland which took twelve hours. You got on the bus and you changed buses at … it was just out of Taupo, and it was a most uncomfortable bus after Taupo; and then you went through all the forestry – occasionally there was fires. And if we didn’t go that way then we had to go by train, and we had to go by railcar down to Palmerston North. And we waited on the platform there until the express came up from Wellington, and then you got on with your pillow and you got to Auckland at eight o’clock in the morning. But anyway, Auckland was somewhere where I could have somewhere I could go on my days off.

So up I go to Auckland, full of enthusiasm, and I went to the Greenlane class. As I say there were two classes, one at Market Road and one at Greenlane. I suppose there must have been perhaps thirty in both classes, I don’t know. And we had three months of prelim, so that meant we were in class each day, and on a Saturday morning they took us into the wards. So I went into the wards at Greenlane, I suppose from nine ‘til twelve – I don’t know – that was our weekend; we finished after we’d a couple of hours in the wards. And we went into the sluice rooms … seemed to be our place where we cleaned the bedpans, polished the shiny bench, and perhaps tested a couple of urines with the bunsen burners and things – very old, ‘olde worlde’ it was then. And then at the end of the three months I guess we must have sat an exam, and then we got our photo taken all together and then we went off – being Auckland, there were three hospitals – you either went to Greenlane, Auckland Hospital or Middlemore, and you put down your preference. And I was accepted to go to Auckland which was more central. So there you are – you’re all new in your uniforms. And you got your uniforms – you had a blue dress uniform and a starched cap, and you were issued with … I don’t know how many … white uniforms, because they all had your name in them because you put them in, for the laundry. And then you had to put the buttons on each one of these – I’ve never seen buttons like these – you had to put the loop of the button through, and then you had a thing you pushed through … a clip thing, to keep them on. So that was … every time you had a clean uniform you had to do all this button business, but you had a dress uniform that you walked to and from the ward in, when you got to the ward you changed into your white uniform. And you had to change out of that one again to go to your lunch, and into your dress uniform, and then when you’d had lunch you came back and you got in your white … And you had a cape as well, and that was nice in the winter.

So my first ward that I went into – I suppose it would have been March, April – about this time of the year I guess – was Ward 32 at Auckland Hospital, and that at that time was mostly a paediatric ward so they were all children; and they were all TB children because at that point in time there were still the sanitoriums around, but I think mostly they were finished. And before we’d gone to go nursing we all had had to have a whole list of vaccinations. There was smallpox vaccination where they … oh, I had horrible … horrible wound from that one. And you had to have your TB inoculations, but I think we’d them already at school, I think, but you had to have a TB one anyway. And then you had a typhoid one and then you had another one that was a very regular thing in those days. And all of those had to be kept up to date all through your nursing training in those days.

So my first ward was these TB children, which were long term children in the ward. There was a ward that had six little toddlers in it, and I might add they were all Maori children apart from one Indian, and the Indian one was one of the six toddlers in the room. I love children, that’s where I liked, was paediatrics – or children, I liked children anyway. And these kids in the cot – they had a harness on them which was tied to the sides – they could stand up in the cot but they couldn’t climb out. And there were bars on the window as well. And if you got them out to all sit on their potties they’d end up tipping it over each other.

And the rest of the ward were older children than that, and some of them were in side rooms to start with, and then … most of them had chest TB, but there was one little girl who had TB in the bones of her legs and she didn’t get up and run around or do anything. The rest of them did – they were a wild mob. And one of the big main rooms had about … there was four beds in each sort of cubicle, and there were a lot of children. But they used to go down … during the daytime, down to the schoolroom which was below them, and they were so … I had never come across children like this ever, in my life before. Their main joy in life was to try and flick gravy onto the nurse’s white caps. There were partitions around that were, I don’t know, I guess they’d be six feet or more high, and they used to get up there and they’d flick things down onto you. It got so bad that they eventually used to have to have an orderly come, and he’d stand at the door so they couldn’t get out. But they used to get out the windows and sit on a little ledge outside, and the fire brigade used to have to come and get them in. And if we took them over to the Domain for a walk in their pyjamas and blue towelling dressing gowns we had to check their pockets for duck eggs when they were coming back. But I suppose these poor little kids were bored out of their brain[s]. They went to school for a little while of the day, but that didn’t entertain them for mu… And nobody ever came to see them – nobody.

So how long were you in that ward then?

You stayed in there for six weeks on your first ward. And I can remember buttoning my uniform very often. I was going; I was resigning, I wasn’t staying there, and I’d go and I’d button my clean blue uniform to go to see the Matron and resign. But it never happened; I never eventually got there. [Chuckle] And from there you rotated in six week programmes – I think it was six weeks – on various wards.

So you enjoyed nursing obviously?

Ah, about half way through I really, really wanted to leave, but I thought, ‘well, I’ve got to do something – there’s something I have to do, and I may as well keep going; I’m half-way now.’

But we lived in a Nurses’ Home – now that was fun for me, because my brother was fourteen years older than me so I hadn’t really had any brothers and sisters around me. And we grew to be very, very close friends, all of us in the same hospital; in the same Nurses’ quarters. And we’d come off … we all smoked like chimneys – we started smoking in prelim. I can remember that – there was somebody who smoked a cigar, but she wasn’t a prelim nurse, she was an older one. That was the first time I’d ever seen cigars …

[Chuckle] I can imagine.

… ‘cause people didn’t smoke cigars. But anyway, we were all smoking by then. And we used to have an hour at lunchtime so we’d come back from our wards and we’d rush into the dining room … food wasn’t all that great, and I did get into big trouble once ‘cause I said, “Look, we’ve got donkey plops again”. And so I was sent … ‘cause the dietician heard me, and I was sent off to see the Matron and then there was a letter to my parents, and … a great to-do about that sort of thing. But I suppose the food was adequate; I did get very sick of Melrose cream, it was not something I liked.

At what stage did you meet your sailor boy?

Oh, not for years after that – many years! I was a nurse for the time it took to be a nurse. And we had had such a lot of fun in the Nurses’ Home, though – all of us, and we’re still lifelong friends … they’re still my closest friends. But anyway, eventually we all finished our training amidst boyfriends and various things. I didn’t really want to go out with boyfriends, ‘cause I didn’t want to get mixed up with anybody in case it stopped me going overseas. Anyway, eventually, getting towards the end of my training I decided I was going to immigrate [emigrate] to Canada because that was where – lots of people were going to England for their OEs, [overseas experiences] but no, I was going to go to Canada. And another girl and I – another Napier girl, who had started her training in Napier and left it, and then restarted it again in Auckland and finished it. And we immigrated [emigrated] to Canada, in which case we had to go as immigrants [emigrants] because you couldn’t get a working visa, so we had to have medicals and all sorts of various things.

And we left here, we went on the ‘Oriana’, and it stopped in Fiji and Hawaii on the way, and then we got off in Vancouver. And we were met by a much older nurse than us who had been a friend of my brother’s when he was in hospitals when he was twenty-one. And she and her husband took us to their place and we stayed with them for a few weeks really, until we found a job and got organised. I remember we left the ship and they went up one of the main streets, I can’t remember – and there was this big, shiny, brightly lit building going up, I think they called it the BC Aluminium … I can’t remember, but that was my first sight of a big huge, huge building, many stories high.

And then we eventually went for an interview; we decided what we wanted to do. Pat already … her name had been Pat Connor and her people had a big farm out at Omapere, which – I think the Connors are still there. She was one of them, but she had married and she was living in Vancouver, and she had two little children. And so we stayed with her which was lovely for us, to help us get settled in. And then we got a flat during that summer, because I remember looking for flats in the long twilight afternoons ‘cause it didn’t get dark until quite late at night. And we got a flat fairly near Vancouver General Hospital, and Diane was working in the Admitting Department and I was working in a paediatric ward, and I enjoyed that – I really enjoyed it there. But we had to be able to produce … we had enough hours and all of a variety of different areas of nursing training before you were accepted for your Canadian registration. And I … fortunately … but most of [the] people coming didn’t have enough hours in psychiatric, but I had spent quite a long time in the psychiatric ward at Auckland Hospital and I fortunately had enough hours, so I didn’t have to sit any other papers or exams.

And it was a very different experience from our hospitals in many ways, because we had – some American students came up, and they were really only allowed to watch, they weren’t allowed to do anything. And I can remember asking one of the girls to … I think it was to change a baby that really needed changing, and I got into big trouble for that because they were only there to observe; they weren’t there to do anything.

But we used to have two weeks … was it two weeks on nights, two weeks on mornings and two weeks on afternoons – that’s how my shifts rotated. And Diane’s shifts really weren’t the same, she was a bit different in Admitting, so for a long time when we were very first there, mostly we hardly saw each other because we were on separate shifts. But we had a flat, and … an apartment I suppose we’d call it. It was a few blocks away from the hospital but not too far. And by the first Christmas we had a white Christmas, which they hadn’t had for six years when we got to Canada. Vancouver doesn’t always have snow – did that year – very deep snow. But it was very slippery walking to work I must admit, and it was very dark. You went in the dark and you came home in the dark if you went on a morning shift and came home on an afternoon shift.

What was your friend’s surname?

Mill. Diane Mill, and she lived in Higgins Street …

In Napier?

… with her family. Yes. And her sister … her younger sister … had been in my class at Nelson Park School. Diane was a prefect when I was much further down, younger than her at Napier Girls’ High School. She was the first I think, Commercial girl to be a prefect, instead of one from the professional classes. And I’m still friendly … she’s recently been to stay with me with her husband and she has stayed a few times.

So in Canada – yes, it was driving on the opposite side of the road. Had to go for your licence all over again. The first holidays we had there we planned to drive to San Diego from Vancouver, so we set off and it was in [at] Easter time I suppose. It was a long weekend because Diane’s boyfriend who then became her husband, he came with us. And we had a blue Volkswagen which was an unusual car really, to be having in Canada and the States. Anyway it did us very well ‘cause it didn’t have to have water, but that’s beside the point.

We left and Eric came with us, and he came down as far as San Francisco with us. And he showed us how to be getting out of San Francisco, on the wrong side of the road as it was to us still, and then we tootled off further down, ‘cause we must’ve had a month’s holiday. We drove right down through Santa Monica … or down past Big Sur I think it is, and we had a wonderful time – absolutely wonderful. We were camping, and … most of it was camping or staying in cheap accommodation. And we got down as far as San Diego and then we took ourselves over the – we didn’t drive over the border – we went over the border into Mexico; a great experience seeing the painted zebras … the poor donkeys painted to look like zebras with stripes on.

Were they?

Yes. Oh, it was … it was very … it just looked so sad. Anyway, we only had – we went there for the day and then we came back, and then we went up to the Hoover Dam, and we went all over. And we also went to the Grand Canyon on the way down, because in those days you could just say you wanted to go down on the mules. We went on the day trip down and we went half-way down, which meant you went half-way down and you had your lunch there, half-way down, and then you came back up again on the mules. And I can remember the mule, and I looked at it – and I thought a mule was like a donkey; I had no idea it was the height of a horse. I couldn’t even get my foot in the stirrup, it was too high up; they had to hitch me up. And it was a bit spooky going down those narrow paths going down, but it was an amazing experience – it was, really and truly.

And so we did that, and then we must have spent too much money by then, and we were somewhere near the Hoover Dam so we camped there. And that was somewhere near Las Vegas, but we couldn’t afford to go into Las Vegas ‘cause we’d run out of money, ‘cause we knew we had to keep enough to get home. And some boys were there; they took us in for the evening, and that was nice. And we came up through Lake Tahoe and then back up to Vancouver. So that had been quite an experience.

So then you obviously later went across Canada as well?

No, not right across Canada. But while I was still in Vancouver, following us two more girls came over that were nurses, and following them two more girls came so there were six of us altogether – Diane and I in one flat, and the other four – they were around in Vancouver, but they first of all went up to 100 Mile House [British Columbia] for a while to earn some money, which was quite a way north of Vancouver. The Mounties were up there and it was a little settlement, and they were working in a cafe place where in the winter time it was warmer in the deep freeze than outside. [Chuckles] Then they came back down to Vancouver, and I eventually left Canada with them. But before I left – all of the others had been to see … apart from Diane … the thing that I was there to see, was Banff. I had … and Lake Louise … in my project that I had done so I went on the train on my own, and got on and went up to the Rockies. What a marvellous experience that was on the train and in the dome car.

So saw Banff and Lake Louise?

Yes, yes. So that fulfilled my dream there. But Diane and I before that, had also … at some stage … had taken the train to Jasper because in those days there was a CNR [Canadian National Railway] and a CRP; [CPR: Canadian Pacific Railway] one went on either side of the Fraser … think it was the Fraser River.

That’s right.

None of those trains go – you can’t go across Canada now any more on a train. I never did it.

Well you can, but …

You’d have to get off and get on, and …

… they’re just tourist trains, and then the grain trains.

Oh, right – yeah. Yes, so we went up there to go skiing the first winter we were there, and then we hired our skis in Vancouver and they gave us fibreglass ones – not that either of us could ski very well, and we’d only been on wooden skis. Oh! These ones were so fast, for people who really couldn’t ski. [Chuckles] People must have laughed at us. And we had nearly a week up there but the train up and back was just stupendous, and I can remember waiting somewhere coming back, and waiting and wai… It was snow all around us and you were way down the track, because you went way, way down to get on where you were supposed to be getting on – there’s snow all around us, and even though I had a hat on my ears were cold … so cold. But anyway, it was a beautiful, beautiful country, and if I had to live anywhere else in the world I think I would choose Canada.

It’s a different world.

It is a different world.

But anyway, so you eventually came back to New Zealand?

Well, not directly, no. Diane as I say, had met Eric by this time so she stayed behind because they were going to get married. And they did come back to New Zealand and were married, but I was in England by then.

But the other five of us – two went one way on the Greyhound buses because you could buy a ticket for ninety-nine days for $99. And then there was Kay and Alison and I – the three of us went together, and – ‘cause you had to keep going forward on the Greyhound buses – and we took six weeks to zigzag backwards and forwards across America, to end up in Florida and meet up with the other two girls; although we did meet them in New York, because it was Robyn’s birthday. And we met in a certain hotel, and we all stayed there; and we stayed just a few days, and then went our various ways and met up again. And we stayed in a motel in Fort Lauderdale, and we had about a week there. And we hired a car and went right down to the bottom of Key West which was not that far from Cuba. You know, all the gun runners were from down there.

You’re right; I know; That’s right; Yes.

Yes, yes. Great experience. It was a great experience zigzagging across America and going to the Smithsonian Institute and New York and all of the wonderful places that we did. And we’d often sleep on the bus because that was cheaper than staying in a hotel. [Chuckle]

Right – ‘course it would be, absolutely.

And when it was big areas that there wasn’t going to be an awful lot to see, that was fine, because there was big areas when … We had to do some very funny zigzags to get to the Niagara Falls up there, to keep going forwards, and of course in those days the French-speaking people over there, they would not go out of their way to help you at all. We … none of us spoke any French. They’re a bit better in France. They know that … they can understand. They all have … a lot of their packaging and everything’s in French and English, and I think they all have to learn – if you live in the French part you have to … compulsory to learn English and the other way around.

So we got on the ‘Rangitane’ in Fort Lauderdale; so there were five of us there, and of course that was a New Zealand Shipping Company, I think. Nobody’d talk to us; because we’d got so used to saying ‘tomato’ and ‘banana’ [American accent] – they thought we were five Americans … thought we were five Americans. But anyway there were five of us and so we could make our own company, and also the crew … the officers … were very friendly, and they were very kind to us and we had lots of fun so we didn’t need the rest.

It wasn’t all that far – oh, we went through Bermuda and had a day in Bermuda, and all hired moped things; went around there. Then we went into Tilbury, and I can remember standing on the deck thinking, ‘what have we done? What have we done?!’ [Chuckle] It was November/December, and everything … everything was grey. The weather was grey, the buildings were grey; it was just horrid! And we got off and Kay, one of the five girls, her brother and his wife were there to meet us and we went with them – I think we all went with them; I don’t know how we fitted in their car … I don’t know. Oh, they had a van.

Anyway, we went back to their place which was a flat, and you went up lots of stairs to the flat. And they had to go across the corridor to the califont where they had a bath, only on certain days of the week, only on the califont and then the toilet was in a different place altogether. [Chuckle] Oh … it was awful. Anyway, I had the best bread and cheese I’ve ever had in my life – after the bread and cheese in Canada or America it was beautiful! It was real bread and it was real cheese, and it wasn’t orange like cheddar cheese in America is.

And then two of us went to stay at a YMCA, Alison and I; and Kay stayed with her brother and the other two went to see … oh, they were staying with some other people. Well it was a hard job then, for us all to meet up to go and look for a flat. And where we were in the YMCA, I’d never seen a heater that you had to put the money in to make some heat; and it was cold – it was a horrible place we were in. And they wouldn’t take phone messages, and you had to put money in the slot for the phone, and it was …

Anyway, eventually we got together and we thought we’d go to the East End, but then we realised we were going to be working with a nursing agency and most of our work would be at night, ‘cause the new ones, first on, we worked nine ‘til nine. So you were going to work in the dark, and so we thought, ‘Oh, perhaps that might not be such a good idea’. So we ended up getting a very nice flat in Swiss Cottage which had central heating, and it had a bathroom with a toilet and you didn’t have to put any money in any meters. [Chuckle] It was luxury. And we had a telephone, and so it was luxury for us. So most of us – Kay was a typist so she went to a typing pool – and the rest of us joined a nursing agency and did various jobs. And most of my job[s] … I did occasionally work at St Mary’s in Paddington, and sometimes they were split shifts; and that was a long way from Swiss Cottage I must admit, and I didn’t like the split shifts very much. And, I couldn’t come to grips with how antiquated it all was in the English hospitals. And they used the same linen again, being counterpanes and mattress covers, if they weren’t dirty – and that was in the private Lindo Wing. Couldn’t understand that; and glass syringes and needles. We’d had disposable ones where we’d been in Canada.

But anyway, that was the way it was, and I didn’t very often work in a hospital; it was mostly private duty in homes, and that meant you started at nine and you came home at nine in the morning. But one or two of them were quite long-term ones, and one was a lovely one in Hampstead and it was quicker for me to walk than to take transport. And so I arrived at nine and the lady met me at the door and she said, “Oh, I’ll show you your bedroom”, and I said “Oh – really?” And she said, “Oh yes”, she said, “this is your room.” She said, “I go to bed about nine, so as soon as you’ve arrived I’ll be going to bed, and when you hear me getting up and having a bath in the morning, if you wouldn’t mind getting up and going and making me some China tea and toast.” So that’s what I did. So I stayed there as long as I could. [Chuckle] I didn’t have any days off. She actually had a day person, and the day person used to see me in and out quite often. But she didn’t really need a nurse, it was just an easier way of having somebody stay in the house overnight, I think. But some of them did – you had to give them their bed, bath, or whatever it was before you went in the morning.

Well we were nurses so we were still a bit skivvy. And there was one dowager lady duchess and she was several floors up and the kitchen was several floors down, and that was my place. And she used to want bread and milk, and fortunately I knew how to make bread and milk, but I don’t [chuckle] think a lot of people might’ve known. She ate bread and milk and Linnet’s biscuits. And if she wanted to change her radio station she would ring the bell and I’d go up two flights of stairs to her room; change the radio station, and then I’d go back down to the kitchen. I wasn’t there very often. But it was a great experience, and we went to a lot of places; and on the days when I was able to and didn’t need to sleep during the day, I would frequent the art galleries and the museums and all those sorts of places.

So how long did you stay in England?

Not all that long … enough time to save some money. We’d always save some more money to move on. We arrived in the early … beginning of winter, and I think it must have been the following spring in the May, my grandmother … my Norwegian grandmother … wanted me – I was the first of the grandchildren ever to go back to Europe. My brother had been to England and he’d got stranded there, but for me, she wanted me to meet some of her family and to be there on May Day, which I think’s 1st May. So I went over, and I went on a train to Newcastle-on-Tyne and I got a ferry from there to Oslo. And that was a surprise to me – what they had for breakfast on the ferry before you got off – it was cheese, and I shouldn’t have been surprised because Dad often had cheese on toast, or things, especially Gruyere cheese which he used to get in Wellington; you couldn’t get it here in Napier. But I love Gruyere cheese. But there was a cheese that I didn’t know; it looked a brown-ey sort of colour, and it was actually Norwegian cheese and it was a very hard cheese, and it almost tasted like hard condensed milk I would have called it, almost. It does have a name – I can’t remember it, but it tasted a bit sweet you see, and a bit like condensed milk.

Anyway, I got off the ferry and then I got on the train, and the train went from Oslo over to Bergen. And the family met me on the station in Bergen, and I had no idea what they were really going to look like; I knew I was meeting a mother and a father – Finn was the father and that was my relative, Finn Gulbransen, and they had three children. His wife was actually English – I can’t remember her name. Anyway, when I got off the train they were standing as a group. And there they were, and I knew that that was my family because the littlest one was an absolute clone of my cousin Karen. And she had a pink and white complexion; she had a cowlick in exactly in the same place on her head – just … the facial image … everything was Karen all over. And it was quite a gap between … what, they wouldn’t have been cousins – I don’t know what they would’ve been, but they were some sort of relation.

It’s surprising how family likenesses do travel down …

Mmm. And her name was Kirsten, and she understood English because her mother was English, but they were spoken to in Norwegian. But both Johannes and his sister – they both would speak to me in English, and the parents would speak to me in English.

And that’s where I first came in contact with a doona. Well Grandmother Husheer always had a doona on her bed, and big square pillows. Of course they were big square pillows again; I thought, ‘how am I going to keep this thing on with no sheet on the top?’ Sheet on the bottom, no sheet on the top, just a big feather thing over me. But it’s lovely! [Chuckle]

I was there for May Day, and that’s a big celebration there, so they took us to a hotel to have breakfast, ‘cause the celebration must’ve been in the morning. And they took me to a lot of places around, and we went to see the Stavkirke where Grandmother and Grandfather had become engaged; and to another very elderly … I don’t think she was Grandmother’s sister, but I really don’t know what she was. She was a very … she was Finn’s mother anyway, and she brought in a lunch, and it was smurbrauð. And smurbrauð were pieces of bread, or toast I suppose they were, like a half a slice of a small piece of bread, and it was very … it had either fish or salmon or a meat, and it was like a pattern – it was all decorated. And you – I think you ate it with a knife and fork; I can’t remember how we ate it, but it was beautifully … each piece was decorated. But it would’ve been a piece of meat or fish or egg or something with an arrangement of a little piece of tomato or something else, and something else – all different colours – it was just lovely.

There was [were] cousins of Finn’s cousins and relatives there; there were some that were my age and there was one called … can’t remember her name; doesn’t come to me straight away now … and she said, «Would you like to go and see the movie ‘Judit’?” and I thought, ‘Oh, okay.’ She said “There’s English subtitles” … it’s in English or there’s subtitles – can’t remember. Anyway, we went to see ‘Judit’, which – I should have known what she was talking about. ‘Judith’. Because Grandmother Husheer could never say ‘ju’. My cousin John was always Yonny, and my cousin Joanna, she used to call her Yoanna; and I should have picked it up, but I didn’t. And we went to see the movie and it was all very nice and they took me up on the Fløibanen [Norwegian funicular on Mount Floyen] or whatever you call it, where you go up the … tramcar straight up the hill … up the mountain. I’ve sort of lost track with that family now.

So you eventually came back to New Zealand?

Well no, before that, after my little sojourn over to Norway, then there was a very, long, long trip all around Europe in a mini van. Yes.

So we were going to set off for Europe for several months in our camper van. We had a trial run first; I had brought a tent with me, and it had actually come from New Zealand; it’d been to Canada and it was now in England. And one of the dummy runs was up to Scotland in the van with Don & Judy, the married couple, and Kay, my friend, and off we set. Anyway, we put the tent up – and it was a blow up tent; it was a funny tent – it had big arches over it that you pumped up with a foot pump. It was a pretty easy thing to put up. But anyway – I suppose it might have been age – but … pouff! And it all collapsed. So that was the end of that.

So in Edinburgh we had to go and buy a new tent to be going camping for three or four months around Europe in, which we did, and this time it was a very modern tent but just a little tent enough for two camp beds. And its poles were all connected with chains so that you could just tuck them in. Anyway, it did us very well, so we came back from our little trip to Scotland and after that … a week or two later … we set off for Europe. And we went on the ferry across and we ended up in Bruges in Belgium. [I] remember we got off there because we were going to visit that morning – I’d had a boyfriend in Canada who was a Belgian, and he spoke Flemish and French – and I was going to meet the family, which in the end turned out to be a heck of a big shock. It was a very old part of Bruges that these people lived in, and it was a very … fairly poor part. Well I suppose it wasn’t all that poor, but to us coming from a modern world it seemed very backward. And it was a very dark apartment … flat or whatever they lived in … I can remember that. And none of them spoke any English – not one of them, so they had brought a friend in to translate, and they sent us off – the four of this and this translator – off on a canal ride around Bruges, which was lovely. It was lovely, and it was very kind of them and we had a cup of tea or coffee with them, and a sticky bun, I think – something anyway, and then we waved goodbye. And I couldn’t believe that this boyfriend that I’d left in Canada was anything to do with this lot in Europe. However, that’s beside the point.

We continued on on our journey and we had a big programme ahead of us, because from Belgium I think we went into Holland and then we stayed with some friends who had brought … they’d brought a toaster back from New Zealand to Holland, ’cause they don’t [didn’t] have toasters in Holland in those days, and it was a really … very modern gadget. However, we went on from there and headed north up to the Scandinavian countries. And one of the big highlights I do remember was seeing an old vessel called the ’Vasa’, and that had just been brought up out of the seabed from being on the floor for … I don’t know how many hundreds of years; it was an old wooden vessel like a galleon, I suppose it was. And we were able to see – it was in some special solution, the part that we could see. To me it was terribly exciting – it was something from the past coming up and they were finding something new. Just in this last year or two I have been back to that same place and seen it all; however, it isn’t finished now! Can’t believe it! But that was a long time ago. We did see a lovely lot of things up in the north there … lovely lot of mosquitoes and itchy things if you were near a lake – it was just horrible. But we also came further down and we eventually came down through … we went into Germany. We also went … because it was still behind the Iron Curtain, a lot of these … [interrupted by phone call]

And we did go into both East and West Germany. And to get to Berlin we had to go through East Germany, so that was quite a procedure because they had to check your vehicles going into the country, with mirrors underneath and looking in pockets and sideboards and behind panels in car doors. Well we did have a man with us – we might’ve only been in our mid-twenties … [chuckle] and Kay with her ginger hair, and I had dark hair, and Judy was the married woman, to Don – they were a couple so we were alright. But of course I still had my maiden name, Husheer, which didn’t always do me so well. But however we went … oh, it was amazing, it was quite scary driving across.

And we got to Berlin and we were camping; we were camping the whole way around Europe for three or four months. And the camping ground that we had was … at night time we could actually hear the dogs barking and guns being fired, and that was a bit scary. But we did go into East Berlin, so we went through Checkpoint Charlie. And that’s a long time ago. And Don and Judy and Kay – they all had the same surname, and they were Stotter, and they were ahead of me and they went in – that was fine, they let them in. It came to me, Husheer – I couldn’t speak a word of German – and they kept me. And they kept me for about twenty minutes and I couldn’t understand anything; and then they released me out in to East Berlin where the others were, which was a dreary, dreary grey city because it was still behind the wall. And we had had to purchase some Deutchmarks that we could use in there, which we couldn’t change back into anything else – we had to use them, it was quite a lot of money, it was like £10 at that time; it was a long time ago. We each had to have that, and there was nothing to spend it on. The shops didn’t have anything in them to buy really, but we did buy a tin and that was to keep our cutlery and our knives and forks while we were camping … [chuckle] the only thing that was of any use to us. And we came out again, and sort of … we were quite depressed by the whole affair really, I suppose, and it must have been just ghastly for people living there, or divided families or …

Because of your name contact with Germany, you’d wonder at them questioning you of all people?

Well I suppose they thought I should have been able to speak German or something maybe, I do not know. [Chuckle] I don’t know – anyway, that was the outcome there. And then when we came back out of … but we probably had to come on the same route out of Germany, through across East Germany, as we’d gone in – I can’t really remember that.

And then we were going further south; we were going to get to Turkey, and to get to Turkey we had to go through Bulgaria. And Bulgaria also was behind the Iron Curtain and we had to buy visas and they would only take American dollars, so we had to scrape them together, whatever we had, for enough visas to get through. And you weren’t allowed to stop – well, you could stop, but we weren’t allowed to stay overnight or anything, we had to go in in the morning and be out that night. So we drove and we drove … a lot of their roads seemed to be cobbles … horrible, with grapes growing on either side or crops. But you felt as though you had people looking at you all the time, eyeing you up and down. When we got through Bulgaria we came out into Turkey, and it was getting dark by that time and we set a tent up. We didn’t realise we were in the middle of a field, and when we woke up in the morning all the working people [chuckle] were carrying all their working things and they were off to work. And here we were sitting in the middle of a field.

Istanbul was quite a sight for us too – the traffic! The traffic just went every which way and that way, and I remember going to the toilet somewhere there – it was at the Sofia, I think it was – absolutely bursting, and that was a pretty primitive affair too. And the lady dished you out, when you gave her a coin, with a little tiny piece of toilet paper, and I don’t think it was a flush toilet, I can’t really remember. I just remember being very shocked about it all, but it was a huge experience to have gone down that far.

But before we’d got down there we must have come through … before we got to Bulgaria maybe … yes. ’Cause when we’d come out of Austria we’d come straight into Yugoslavia as it was called then, and it was extremely poor. They had brown paper in their windows and no glass and the ladies wore yashmaks that they’d pulled across their face when we were out in the country, when we were coming past. And there were girls carrying water in big ewers on their heads … just so poor. And then we got a bit lost somewhere and we ended up in some market, and the men had … up their legs they had like stockings, but they had strapping wrapped around them like the Greeks. And they spat at us – because we were in a vehicle I think. But we had also brought a ha’penny’s worth of green peppers because there was nothing much else to buy. And I’d never had a green pepper in my life, I had never seen one! But we had them on sandwiches [chuckle] – that was a really new experience.

But at the time we’d got down to Turkey, and – oh! We also went to Greece, and when we were in Greece we went out to the island of I think they call it Edra … it’s H-y-d-r-a. And it doesn’t have any vehicles on it, and I believe it still doesn’t have vehicles on it. And I thought this was the most beautiful place in the world; the water was clear and blue; and it was just glorious! I thought if I ever got married I’d like to go there for my honeymoon, but that didn’t actually happen. I mean I got married, but I didn’t go there for my honeymoon. And things … you could see them, there weren’t all those people there, other tourists, although it was different; it was very different to see everything then, than it is now.

And once we’d come out of Turkey and we came up the coast – so that was like … Croatia I think, the coast of Croatia – it was so very, very different than the part we had come into at an earlier stage. And it was beautiful sea, and it was coast, and Dubrovnik was a beautiful place that hadn’t been bombed or anything at that stage; was just a wonderful old place. And another place we went to – we went to Split I think, and to get out to the coast we came over a road that had grass running up the middle, and it was very, very primitive; and very primitive toileting arrangements all through that area, but it was an amazing experience.

And eventually we kept going north, and the last country we were visiting was France before we were getting back, and it was beginning to get a bit cooler then and it was getting into October, and by the time we got to Paris it was teeming with rain. And it rained and it rained and the only place in the camping ground for us to put our little tent up was on a bit of a knoll that nobody else seemed to want. But anyway, it turned out to be much the best place in the end because we went into the city during the day and when we came back out ours was the only tent that was really still on a bit of dry ground. And the rest of it, people’s lilos were floating out and away. And everybody had to sleep in the toilets, [chuckle] so my idea of Paris was not a happy experience whatsoever; it was rain, it was cold, we’d to buy some shoes to keep warm, and I thought Paris was the pits. And they still had those pissory [pissoirs] things, or whatever they called them where the men went in and they walked around and they talked over the top, and I can’t remember what their real name is. [Chuckle] They’re not there now. But it was a great experience.

And from Paris we came back to England, and it wasn’t very long after that when I decided I was ready to go home to New Zealand. So I went and booked a fare, and came back on the ’Oronsay’ through the Suez Canal just before it was closing again. It had closed many, many years ago when my brother was … well, he got through it going somewhere, it might’ve been going up, I can’t remember. But for us it was … we weren’t allowed off at one end, and we were at the other end. And as we went through the passing bays there were children – and there were army there with guns but there were also children begging – and we could throw oranges and things down to them off the ship, because we weren’t allowed off.

So from there we came through Perth … Perth or Melbourne? Anyway, then eventually round to Sydney, and I got off in Sydney because I was going to stay a week with my Mum’s old friend who lived in Sydney who’d been her bridesmaid. So I stayed there, and I flew home. And that … in those days you got dressed up to fly home; I bought a new suit – a pink … mostly pink silk suit – and some pink shoes and a pink handbag, [chuckle] and my parents met me at the airport in Auckland. And I suppose I’d been away a few years at that time, although I had seen my parents in between because they had come to Vancouver while I was there, and we’d gone on a road trip over to Vancouver Island, which we’d all enjoyed; and we’d been up to see where the salmon were, and all sorts of things on Vancouver Island; and the lovely, lovely gardens at Victoria.

You moved home …

I arrived and I came back down to Napier. And my idea was … I hadn’t lived at home for quite a number of years … that I would have some time at home, living in Napier. So of course I needed to have a job, so I went up to the hospital on the hill and the only two jobs available were – I could do tutoring or I could go and work in the theatre. And I thought, well I don’t know about the tutoring, because I would actually have to look everything up the day before if I was going to have to give a lecture’. And I thought, ’no … don’t think I’d like that’, so I chose to go and work in the theatre, which I absolutely loved. And I think that was the place that I really – apart from paediatric nursing, the children – that would be the most interesting job I’d had, working in theatre. And during the time I was there, I also became Dr Sabiston’s nurse, which meant that you scrubbed with the surgeon when they didn’t have another registrar scrub with them for the surgery, you acted as the same, and you also looked after all the instruments and the needles and things. It was absolutely fascinating, and Dr Sabiston was lovely to work for.

He was a real gentleman.

He was. But he had some wild parties, but we did have a lot of fun working in theatre. And when you work in theatre you don’t see anybody else, because if you’re scrubbing for a surgeon, you’re already scrubbed up when they’re wheeled in and they’re half-dopey in those days because they’ve had some pre-med – I don’t think you get pre-med these days – and when they go out they go out, and you go off and scrub up again for the next one.

So you were working in Napier for Dr Sabiston and …

And all the others – there was Dr Alexander and …

So at some stage you must have met this sailor boy of yours?

Well, that wasn’t until after I left here. But during the time I was here – of course I’d come home with no money again – and as you do, I’d always … all of my life until then … you were always saving up to go to the next place, and the next place, and the next place. And although I had my twenty-first in New Zealand, I had left not that long after it, I suppose. I suppose … I don’t know if I was twenty-two when I left, or twenty-one – I can’t remember. And forever on after that you always were on a very tight budget; well even when I was nursing, because you didn’t earn very much during your nursing training ’cause you lived in and you got a little bit of money. But that didn’t matter; didn’t seem to matter, we were all in the same boat so it was no problem. So when I came back I really didn’t have anything, and I used to borrow the family car to go to work up on the hill ’cause you started at seven; so you were scrubbing, you had to be there to get your instruments sorted for your list in the morning, and then they had to be all done up, and you had to be done up, and I suppose we started work properly at eight o’clock – I can’t remember really. Maybe we started at eight … but I don’t think so, because they did a lot. So I had Mum and Dad’s car; they must have had something else at the same time – I can’t remember. So I was saving up for my next car, and I eventually bought a yellow Volkswagen.

But I also worked at the weekends, and my friend Pat Connor, whom we’d gone to stay with when we’d gone to Canada – she’d left her husband in Canada and come to New Zealand with her two children. And she was having to live on her own; there weren’t a lot of benefits still in those days, but they had a big family farm out at Omapere. And she said, “Well”, she said, “I do it at the weekends if you want to come and do it”. And I had a boyfriend at that time who was willing to come and do it too. Well he did – whether he wanted to or not I don’t know. But she said, “We can pick up pine cones all the weekend, and then you bag them up and deliver them through the week”. So that was one job we did.

But the other job we also could do was fill bags with sheep manure from under the shed, and sell that as well. So besides working in theatre [chuckle] in clean environments, at the weekend I picked up pine cones and shovelled shit! [Chuckle]

But anyway, I eventually got a car … a second-hand car, a yellow Volkswagen. And so [chuckle] eventually I was able – after a year or two here … it must’ve been a couple of years I think, I was in Napier … and Laurie, the boyfriend, he had lots of friends in the Squash Club, and also a lot of them were also rugby players. And Kel Tremain was young then, and at the weekends we used to all go out to Waimarama Beach and have … oh, there was a great big horde of us – a whole heap of girls, and a whole heap of boys, and we used to take a picnic with us, and they were lovely summer days that we had there.

But also, while you were in theatre you were on call; and in those days there were no mobile phones so if you were going to the movies you had to leave your number at the desk, and tell them what seat you were sitting in so they could come and get you, because you had to get straight away up to the hospital if it was an emergency, and it could’ve been. All the caesars [caesarean sections] were done at the hospital then as well as any other accidents or emergencies for kids. So that was interesting.

Anyway, eventually I missed all my girlfriends who’d also come back from overseas by this time, or most of them had, and were living in Auckland as most of them had been Auckland girls, that I trained with. So off I go – I set off up to Auckland, and went into a flat there and duly got a job with the Blood Transfusion Centre, which was a lovely job because that was more or less eight to four or eight to five. And I really enjoyed that; they had a mobile unit, and it went all over the North Island so you went away for a week at a time. And the bus left Auckland on a Monday morning, and you might have collected blood at Matakana or somewhere on your way to Whangarei, and as I remember we used to have to stay in the Nurses’ Home hospital during the week. And we went to varying … sometimes it was in that town, or sometimes it was other smaller towns around there. So I actually saw a lot of New Zealand in the North Island …

I can imagine.

… and we also went down as far as Waiouru, which was another – quite an interesting experience, because we were divided up then – the girls were. I don’t know where the drivers went to stay, but the registered nurses stayed in the Officers’ mess and ate in the Officers’ mess. The girls who did the book work, they went to one mess; and the girls that took your haemoglobin, they went to a different mess. And the only time we saw them through the week was one night when everybody came to the Officers’ mess for dinner, and then they had a dance afterwards. But what we as registered nurses could not get over … because in those days we still wore a cap … and every time another officer passed us (we were classed as officers being registered nurses), we couldn’t cope with this business …

Of being saluted?

… we didn’t know what to do; we just didn’t know what to do. And of course that only happened to the registered nurses – the others – it didn’t happen to them. And we used to watch where the others … oh, they slept in a separate place from where we slept as well, and we really didn’t see them all running around the quad with their knife, fork and spoon early in the morning, but that still happened. But it was a huge experience – in fact all the places we went to were amazing experiences. And if we were working in the place on a daily basis – it was quite a big, very new building, and we had Dr Stavely there, who was actually quite well-renowned for his haematology work. And he studied some of our Maori blood groupings which I found quite fascinating, that they actually didn’t have an RH Negative amongst them until they got mixed up with the Europeans. They shouldn’t have been having any RH babies, but of course by then they were.

And then latterly one of my jobs was – I was doing the plasma for Rhesus Clinic, where you took the blood out of the person … took a whole unit of blood, and then you swung it on a centrifuge and it separated the plasma from the red blood cells. And you gave the red blood cells back to the patient and you kept the plasma, which contained the antibodies. And that was for people who had had RH babies; while their levels of those antibodies were high we used to take blood from them. And also shingles patients to make a vaccine, but that was only being given to the very sick children; it wasn’t for general use for anybody else.

But it was a very interesting place to work because there was an awful lot of research going on into various fields. And we also … of a morning there was always a group of so many of us – one registered nurse and an office staff and a haemoglobin girl – would come in early and we would take blood from people who had been asked to come in at seven o’clock to give blood for heart bypass patients on that day. And so they would take seven or eight units, depending on the size of the patient who was going to have surgery; and then also the Mater [Mater Misericordiae Hospital, now known as Mercy Hospital] would sometimes do a bypass surgery at the same time. So it was an interesting place to work.

And it was when I was working there at the Blood Transfusion that I did meet my husband; one of my friends – she had been down to some parties on some ships. And I thought, ‘I’m not going down to these parties on ships … being a boatie’s girl or anything like that!’ But anyway, we were persuaded to go one time, and it was when I met Ross. He was sailing on MV ‘Amalric’, which was Shaw Saville & Albion Line, and it wasn’t a passenger vessel, it was just purely … the one he was on went around …

A merchant …

Yes, it was the Merchant Navy; it went around the Caribbean and South America when I first met him. And I met him at a party on the ship, and then I think the ship sailed; and it was a while later and I got this postcard. And I thought it was an emu and it wasn’t – it was a llama when I looked at it more closely. Anyway, he just said “Hi”, or something like that. And the next thing that happened was he phoned from when they got in at … often their first port of call from being away a long time was Dunedin … and he phoned from there, so they’d hit the coast again. And it was a while before they came up to Auckland, and then they’d be in port for a week to ten days sometimes, and that would happen about every three months. When I first knew him he was sailing … that was where they went and they didn’t have any time off; they only had time off when they were in port.

So where did he come from?

My husband came from, he was a Plaisted, and the Plaisted family when I knew … his family had come down to Auckland. And they’d been dairy farming, and they were up in … oh, it was just out of Auckland; plush place now, past Howick, Beachlands … I’ll think of it in a while, I suppose. I can see how you get there; can’t remember its name. And previous to that my husband had been born in Whangarei, and his father I think had had a dairy farm, or a farm through – when the service people came back – allotments. [Discharged Soldiers’ Settlement Act] But his family had been in Whangarei for many, many years prior to that. The Plaisteds were there and had run the stage coach or – you know, the vehicles going out, into town I suppose, from there. But Mr & Mrs Plaisted, which would have been my mother-in-law and father-in-law, they’d met when he’d taken the mail horse – and I don’t know how you put this ‘cause I’m not a country girl – up to the girls up north. And she came from Broadwood which was a small town up north; her family did.

And so you got married?

Well we eventually got married [chuckle] after many years. I had met him and it was … oh! ‘Cause he kept going away to sea and coming back, and going away and coming back, and going away and coming back, and it went on and on and on. Mind you, he did change ships; they didn’t stay on the same one forever. And he did go over to one over in New Guinea, and one of my girlfriends that I was nursing with, she and her husband, they went over to New Guinea with their three girls so Ross used to take all sorts of things over to them.

But when we were – Ross’s mother, when she died, she’d had cancer of the … I think it was the ovaries and then of the womb. And she’d surgery … oh, when she was about forty I suppose – quite young – and she died when my husband was about twenty; nineteen or twenty. And anyway, there’d been a family ruckus after – he ended up pushing his father into the blackberry bush because his father accused him of doing something – I didn’t know all of this at the time; I just knew he didn’t speak to his father, and his mother was dead, and he had one sister that lived in Auckland and another sister who was already overseas in South Africa, so there wasn’t a lot of his family around that I knew. His father had come from a big family and he was the youngest, so I never knew really any of his family much, apart from his two sisters.

And eventually, yes we got engaged, and we were engaged for a couple of years I suppose, and then we were married – I can’t remember the year either; in a Registry Office at Otahuhu because he didn’t want to go into a church because the minister, who didn’t come and see his mother very often, he felt was not very nice – it’d put him off church and things, anyway. So we were never going to be married in a church according to him, so that was all right by me; we were getting married anyway. And we had a reception at … across the lake from Pakuranga; it was a pretty place, and we had a nice rec… Oh, we had thirty-two people to the wedding; it was just a small wedding, just friends really, and my mum came; my brother couldn’t come, and his wife, ‘cause they’d just had a new baby. So that was in the spring when we got married, so we were married nineteen years before he died.

But during that period you had a son?

Yes we did, but that was many years later too. So I was married when I was thirty-two and Ross was thirty-two, and I carried on working at the Blood Transfusion throughout the years; he carried on going away to sea. But I could never get holidays … because you never knew when he was coming and going out to make arrangements to have your holidays, and … anyway, he was ashore … by the time we got married there were some arrangements that they had time off, and it was one of his longer time offs. [Times off] And eventually his time offs – they were on for six weeks; they were off for six weeks; if you were on for three months you were off for three months; and that’s how it seemed to work, and that was at the time when we got married. And oh, we had a … think we went to Wellington and back at that time, but later that year, or ‘bout six months later, we had my annual holidays and we went down to the South Island.

And although I was thirty-two when we got married we didn’t particularly want a baby straight away, and then when we did want a baby it didn’t seem to be that easy to happen. [Chuckle] So … and eventually I went to a specialist to see if we needed any help, and then when it did happen I was waiting to take some tablets that were supposed to help your fertility, and I never actually needed to take the tablets. But just prior to that I had been to have an examination, and I think they blew your tubes out or something … it was something a bit uncomfortable, anyway, [chuckle] and I never had another period after that. And so I must have got pregnant sometime very soon at that stage, and Cameron was born on 4th May 1979. And of course in those days they couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, or what was happening, and because I was 37 and having my first baby I was a real grandma doing that – a real elderly prima. [Primigravida]

Then it was, but not today, it’s not.

Not today, no! That’s an interesting thing, because at that time I was probably one of the oldest ones on the ward having a baby. And he was actually … because I’ve also had blood pressure ever since I was in my twenties. And when I was at the Blood Transfusion one day they were testing – somebody came in and if you had high blood pressure you couldn’t give blood. So the doctor said, “Oh, you look normal – let’s take your blood pressure and then we can check whether the [?] all right.” Anyway, he said, “Oh!” I must’ve high blood pressure, so he took it again later that day and it was still high. So then the doctors at work used to take it every day and eventually … well I had no doctor; they sent me off to Hypertension Clinic, and yes I did have high blood pressure, and I used to go to Hypertension Clinic for quite a number of years on an annual basis. And I was on tablets from then, and I must’ve been late twenties, I suppose, and I’ve been on blood pressure pills all the rest of my life. they said I would be on them for the rest of my life. So I still am on them, so when I was having the baby at thirty-seven, with blood pressure, we went to a specialist and so that was fairly close care, I suppose. He was going to be a precious baby anyway, seeing it had taken such a hard job to get it. [Chuckle]

Anyway, then of course he didn’t want to come. Ross was on the cement boat at this time and so he was two weeks away and two weeks at home. And the doctor wanted to induce me on the Thursday, and I said, “Well Ross won’t be home ‘til Friday – can’t we wait another day?” “Oh yes”, he said, “we’ll just put you in hospital.” And so I had a couple of days in hospital, and then he induced me on the Friday morning about seven o’clock. And Ross’s ship usually used to get in about mid to late morning. And the next thing that happened, I was … I don’t know where he rang or what happened, but anyway, he turned up at the labour ward or whatever it was. [I was] with a male nurse, which was a surprise to me at that time, on one side of me feeling to see whether anything was moving, and Ross on the other side, and it was a very uncomfortable sort of situation, I felt. Anyway, that was the male nurse [who] was looking after me – just had to get used to it. It was a funny place to have them in the labour ward, but when I got to the ward there was a male nurse there, but I was very pleased to see how …

But in between times – Cameron was a brow presentation, so in the end about six o’clock at night they decided I needed a caesar, ‘cause I was all right and the baby was still all right at that time, but it might have gone on. So I had a caesar and when I came to I was taken up to the ward, but then I couldn’t – oh, Ross must’ve been there when I was coming out, and he said, “D’you know what the baby is?” And I said, “I think they told me it was a boy”. And Ross said, “Yes, that’s right”, and he came up to the ward with me and then they had to go home.

But then I couldn’t go to the toilet, and that was when I was very pleased with the male nurse. And I thought, ‘oh, I don’t want a catheter put in’. So he lifted me out and he put me on a chair with a bedpan on the chair, and I was happily able to to go there, so … we passed that one, [chuckle] so that was all right. Yes, so we were in … I think I was in hospital ten days then, ‘cause it wasn’t two weeks, but it was longer than they normally were because I’d had a caesar.

And then we went home, and Ross – I think he went away back to sea about two or three days later. And the baby was on a bottle because I couldn’t seem to feed the baby. And it had the dummy as well, because they told me to get a dummy on the way home, because he cried, and he cried, and he cried. And that’s why he wasn’t on the breast, ‘cause he wasn’t getting anything from me. But he was a very late [?], and he just cry. And then he turned out to have a bad … wasn’t pyloric stenosis … it was reflux; and at six weeks I’d gone to the doctor with him because he was vomiting and vomiting. And the Plunket nurse kept saying, “Is he spilling?”, and I’d say, “no, he’s not spilling – he’s vomiting.” And eventually when the doctor … he [Cameron] had a cold, and he was listening to his chest, and he said, “ he’s got a heart murmur.” So I was very quickly sent off to Greenlane then, and they did a barium meal as well. And he wasn’t drinking at that time so we very quickly from there went into the ordinary hospital and they did another barium meal there, ‘cause they said to me, “Do you want to hold him?” And I said, “No, I do not want to hold him”. I said, “I was with him when he had the first barium meal and the barium was coming out his mouth and spilling, and I couldn’t cope with it.” But anyway, they found he had a very bad reflux, and as soon as it went down it came back out again. ‘Cause my mum had said to me … ‘cause she stayed with me when Ross went back to sea, and she’d say, “Why don’t you change that baby after you’ve fed him?” And I said, “’Cause he usually … it all comes out again.” And I’d lie him down to change his nappies and he’d open his mouth and it would all come out. And I’d spent about three quarters of an hour getting it in there – ‘cause he didn’t want it. But they gave him some Gaviscon, and I had to hold him upright most days for half an hour after every feed; I couldn’t lie him down, I had to sit with him. So he got used to going to sleep sitting up. After about fifteen month he was much better, but for a long time, if he didn’t like something, he could open his mouth and …

Spill it.

And we’d just moved into a new house with a new carpet and I was not having any of that business. Yes, so … yes, he was lovely; he looked more like a girl than a boy. I was terrified he was going to have orange hair because my brother’d had orange hair, and a cousin, Joanna, had orange hair, and nobody knew when Anthony was born where the orange hair had come from. Grandfather and Grandmother Husheer were away over in America on a holiday, and when they came back Granny Husheer said, “My goodness! He’s just got hair like so and so.” And this was my Norwegian grandmother, but my father hadn’t recognised this person; he’d known that person when he was a child in Germany, but it was faded by that time, so he didn’t realise it’d been orangey-red.

So Cameron grew up …

Cameron grew up as … yes, a toddler; he was a very shy little boy – Ross apparently was a very shy little boy – but he was just a normal little boy growing up, but shy. We had been saving for many years to build a house. Ross had had … because he was paid in overseas funds; he was paid with Sterling, being an English company. We’d actually bought an old house in Waipatu Avenue in Glen Innes, which was an old … it’d been a State house I think … and we had bought it and we used it as a rental, we didn’t live in it; we were using it to save some more money to buy a section. And we eventually bought a section which I could put some money into, because when my parents actually built a house at Poraiti on the corner of Poraiti Road and Puketapu Road, while Mum was in Australia before they were married. And Dad had brought her back here from Australia after their honeymoon, and into the new house. It’s still there. And it had a bigger section on the back of it and I think the Claytons bought it, or somebody out there bought it from them – they sectioned it off. As a child we used to go out to the section, ‘out to the trees’, as we called it. And then when my brother came back from overseas – and they’d had to bring him back because he couldn’t save up enough money to get home – they’d helped him build a laboratory in Onekawa. So he had that money, so I had the money from the sale of the Poraiti section which helped me buy a section in Auckland, which of course was dearer in Auckland, than here. And we bought a section in Pakuranga … Farm Cove in Pakuranga … and [a] brand new drive, and then we had an architect build a house – it was a basic one – which I lived in until I came to Napier.

But during that period you not only lost your son but your husband as well?

Yes, we were married … Ross and I were married for nineteen years, and he was fifty when he was diagnosed, and Cameron was about thirteen. During the years that we were married we had saved for a section, bought a section, built a house – oh, before we built the house we put potatoes in it, he and the boys on the ship. We were going to have Red Dakota; he’d bought them in the South Island as seed Red Dakotas, and the whole section was rotary-hoed up, and we were going to split between these three families. Anyway, the section behind us which was a right of way further away, was being built, but they didn’t go up their road, they came over our potatoes that were [chuckle] little [chuckle] like this.

Oh, the rotten buggers!

Did all these three-point turns; all the trucks – and so that was the end of that crop, so we never put anything more in – just used to be long grass that you had to get mown, and we used to get letters from the Council that the grass was long ‘cause it was about the last one built in on Bramley Drive. And then the mortgage came through when I was in the hospital having Cameron, and so we were able to put the slab down before Christmas. And then Ross had a long time off work and he acted as the builder’s labourer while the house was built – [the] slab was put down and then the builders went on their holidays, and then they came back; the frame went up and the house was built.

Meanwhile we lived in [a] tiny, tiny little one-bedroom flat that I’d been in for quite some time before we were married even. And it was tiny! [Whispers] And Cameron was about seventeen months old when we shifted from there, and of course he’d been in the same bedroom as us – he was about that far away. [Chuckle] I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know how this is going to work when we … go into a room on your own’, but it did seem to happen all right. But he’d always been a baby that slept all night but not all day … a very wakeful child during the day. So we moved into there so we were always doing things, and Ross was [had] a great enquiring mind, and he would put concrete down and he would have a go at anything. And he loved his engineering – he was always fixing other people’s cars in the garage or anything like that; and off out to sea and back again.

And as Cameron was growing up we did go away to America when Cameron was about … we went twice; Cameron was about eleven and as he was at primary school still. No – we must’ve gone before that; we went twice. We went for the day into the Grand Canyon; we went on a bus trip down from Big Sur and then in; we got another bus from Los Angeles and we went towards Las Vegas, and we went into the Grand Canyon just for the day. And then we picked up a tour from there and it went back up and ended up in Vancouver, and we stayed with Diane and Eric who I’d gone … with in Vancouver, and then we flew home from Vancouver via Hawaii.

And then the next time we went to America with Cameron, we went in and he and I … Ross wouldn’t come … on the mules down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and stay overnight. [Chuckle] I remember we had to go in the day before ‘cause you had to register, ‘cause you had to have certain footwear on, and they gave you your hat, and they gave you a water bottle to hang around your neck, and there was … you know, various things. And you had to speak English, ‘cause the mules only understood English; you weren’t allowed to speak any foreign languages – not that it applied to us but it did to the other tourists. And Ross – who didn’t want to come when we were booking in – and Cameron saw the width of the track and how deep it went down and says, “Oh … I don’t want to go!” I said, “Well you’re going – I’ve paid $1,000 for this, and you’re coming!” Anyway – and the horses had pommels in the front and you went “oh! oh!”, all the way down, and coming back you went “uh! uh!”, the other way. Oh, deary me! It was a procedure but it was fascinating – every little bit further you went down there were different birds, and different wildlife; different things growing. Then right at the very bottom we went over a bridge … a swing bridge … and I thought, ‘I don’t know about this’. I’d never been on a horse apart from the other mule before, and I thought, ‘I don’t know about this!’ And then we stayed at the Flying Angel Lodge where you had your dinner and had the best steak dinner I think I’ve ever had, and Cameron thought that was lovely. And then we had the biggest lightning and thunderstorm I’ve ever been in, and you could see it jagged coming all over from the window. The next day we went … they had to help me get up, I was so sore I could hardly get up on this mule again, and then you went up a much steeper route up and it was a much quicker route than the one we’d gone down. And when we got up to the top Cameron says, “Well! That was pretty good – when can we go again?” So that was all right, he had enjoyed it. And he had enjoyed the tramcars in San Francisco, and we had a lovely time with him there.

Then we’d bought a boat – Ross wanted a boat, so we bought an old dunger … a wooden boat … and it was up the river in Clevedon ‘cause there was more of a river then than there is now. And we’d had a lot of fun in that; he’d done up the engine and set it up. Then he’d had it taken out and he was doing it up; ‘cause we’d enjoyed it so much we thought we’d get a better boat and a nicer boat, so we put it on our front lawn and he was doing it all up, and he was putting in a handbasin and a bit better toilet and things like that. And he’d just taken it back and we’d sold it, and they’d come to take it away, off our front lawn. And I’d arranged a surprise fiftieth birthday party for him; the boat had been sold and we had had the fiftieth birthday party and all his mates from sea and their families had come, and we had a lovely, lovely party.

And it wasn’t terribly long after that that we were looking to buy another boat, and had gone down to – not quite as far as Tauranga, somewhere down in that direction. And he had a great love for classic cars, and we had bought a … oh, it had a big window in the back; it was a fast car but it was a classic … oh, I might remember some other time. Whitford was there where they had the dairy farm – I remember that now. Jensen Interceptor [name of the classic car].

Yep, okay – they were pretty smart.

Yes they were. And that had been what he really, really wanted, so he bought this Jensen Interceptor, and Cameron had to sort of get in the back, which was a sort of parcel shelf thing. It wasn’t my cup of tea as a car, but prior to that I was well aware of his sports car love ‘cause when I first new him he had a Borgward, which was a German car; and very soon after I’d met him he sold that and bought a Daimler Dart with a soft top and another hood thing which we had had a lot of fun in. And then when he eventually got rid of that, we got a Fiat Sports 124. And then we got a sensible car when Cameron was coming; we got a Triumph, and I still had my Volkswagen through all of this. [Chuckle] And then we had an Alfa Romeo, that’s what we were driving when Ross got sick, but he also had an Isuzu 4 Wheel Drive as well, ‘cause he was working for Sanfords, ashore at that time for a wee while.

And … yes, so we had this Jensen Interceptor, and we’d gone down to Tauranga or somewhere where there were boats being sold. And we’d gone down … it was a nice trip down, and we’d had a look around and then came back. He was sort of fiddling around … “I feel a bit …” I didn’t understand or realise ‘til we got home he had stomach ache, and he was leaning over on a chair a bit like the lazyboy there. I said, “What’s the matter​ And he said, “Oh,” he said “I’ve got a pain in my stomach”. And I said, “Oh – is it that bad? Should we go to the doctor?” And he said, “No – well perhaps tomorrow.” But all night he had pain, and we went to the doctor the next morning, and he seemed to … I don’t know what he felt – the doctor – I have no idea, but he sent … went straight to Middlemore. And he was in there for quite a few days and they were treating him for diverticulitis, because he was fifty. They then started taking biopsies, and they must have taken a biopsy in his groin, and they called me to the hospital one morning and they said he had a melanoma. They said that over the phone, and he said, “ We want to see you”. No – they didn’t say it was a melanoma; he said, “Well, I want you to come to the hospital with Cameron”, ‘cause it must have been holiday time – May school holidays maybe. So Cameron and I came and they took us into a side room and they told us that the result was a melanoma and it was in the bowel. ‘Cause I’d thought you could only get melanoma on the skin. But it was his primary source … was in the bowel; ‘cause they went over him like [with] a fine tooth comb – went through his hair, between his toes, under his nails – and he had nothing. They could not find anything on his skin. Nothing. And then they did … it must have been quite suspicious, they took some more from under his arms. Then as a final resort, once they’d decided it was a melanoma he was allowed to go home, and it was after that that we went back to the outpatients and they took a biopsy of his liver – they went in through here, and they let me stay with him while he had that ‘cause they said it was painful; and I wanted to stay there, only because I was a nurse. And they checked it there and then in the room and it was melanoma too, so that was … it had spread everywhere. And he had a little turn one other time, later, and he felt a bit funny; and then they found he had them in his head as well when they took x-rays or something. So at that time there was nothing they could do for him; a melanoma was one of the worst. They said to him at the time when we [were] standing in this room, “Just think of your life in terms of days or weeks.” So …

[Background engine noise] But – we were lucky because we had nearly … we had about ten months. And they said there was no treatment, but he pushed to have some chemotherapy, and I think the chemotherapy actually gave him time, and it was quality time. ‘Cause he started having hot sweats and the whole bed was wet. Oh, it was awful; and so they told us at the Cancer Society they would give him something you take for … anti-inflammatories … and that worked a treat for the hot night sweats – stopped them, just like that.

Yes, so we went through all of that and – oh! Well then, it came time … oh, they’d started the chemotherapy I think, and there were certain foods he could eat and certain foods he wasn’t to eat while he was having this chemotherapy. And it was mid-term break; he must have started the chemotherapy because you did it for so long and then you had a break in between. And we’d decided we were sick of people telling us to try coffee enemas and all sorts of different things, and eventually it was mid-term break, so Cameron was going to have … ‘cause we were still on three terms in those days … we were going to go away on our own, only the three of us, and we were going to go up to Coopers Beach ‘cause that’s somewhere Ross and I’d always gone together a lot, and that was our favourite place. So we were heading up there and we were staying in Tutukaka for a night or two … one night I think it was … ‘cause we had friends in Whangarei we wanted to see, and they had a little boy and he came out and stayed the night with us out at Tutukaka as well. And then we carried on, and we got up to Coopers Beach and we stayed at the motel there. And we’d been up to Cape Reinga one day on the bus trip, and come back down, and I’d sent a postcard from there to my brother saying we were way up here.

And then the next day we’d gone into Kaitaia to go and look at the museums; and we’d had a look at the museum in the morning and we were heading on our way back to Coopers Beach and over the car radio they said, “Would Vivienne Plaisted, believed to be travelling in Northland in a Suzuki” – and gave the car registration number – “please report to the nearest police station.” And I said, “Oh, my God – what’s this?” Anyway, so Ross was driving so we turned around and we went back into the police station in Kaitaia and explained to them what we’d heard over the radio. And they rang up and they couldn’t find anything out, and then they rang Whangarei, and Whangarei knew what it was – my brother had had a stroke and had died and … which day was this? This must’ve been on a Thursday, and they’d been trying to get hold of us for a day or two, because we’d told no one exactly where we were going. So the only way they could find us was this, and we happened to have the car radio on. And so we rang back down to here and we got Seamus on the phone, because I think Juliana had gone … her mother was ill, so she’d gone off somewhere … anyway we got Seamus on the phone and he told us that his father had died; he’d had a stroke in the laboratory and he’d hit his head and made a hole in the wall; and he’d lasted a few hours in the hospital when they’d got him to the hospital, and that the funeral was on Saturday.

So we went back to the motel, packed everything up, drove down to Auckland on Thursday afternoon, did some washing, got in the car, drove to Napier on Friday and on Saturday was the funeral. Cameron was a pallbearer for the funeral for the second time in is life – he’d been for his grandmother; and his two cousins Ty and Seamus – they were both pallbearers as well. And then Juliana’s family all had to disappear back; Ross had to be back on Monday for chemotherapy; Cameron had to go back to St Kent’s [St Kentigern College] on Monday; so it was me that stayed with Juliana, ‘cause all her family had gone and they had no money. Anyway, I knew that some would come out of the family Trust, that we could fix things up a bit, because my mother and father had set up a Una Husheer Family Trust many, many years ago when I was about twenty … it was before I went overseas … of which I wanted to know nothing at that time. [Chuckle] I was jolly grateful by the time these things were happening, ‘cause really it had come into play more when my mother had died, and that’s another long story.

But anyway, Juliana was left high and dry, and so I stayed down for a week and helped her go to WINZ, or – I don’t know what it was called in those days – so that she could get a widow’s benefit; and all those things you have to do, and I can remember sitting down with her filling out the forms, and she said, “Well I suppose this’ll be you next”, and I said, “yes, I suppose it will be me next.” And this was in the June or July and then Ross went the following April, the 14th. Yes, so she was left – that was my brother, my only sibling – so she was left here with her two boys to get on as best she could. And the labs [laboratories] – and the boys, actually – were very good. They were still quite young but they took over the running of the laboratory, and actually do a better job of it than their father in the end – not that it was anything they wanted to do; it was making hydrochloric [acid] from sulphuric acid and distilling it out – whatever you did.

So that was a bit disturbing – coming back, and having lost your brother, and then …

Then losing your husband …

Mmm. But he was very good most of the time. Sometimes when the Cancer Society lady came, she used to say, “Where’s Ross?” And I’d say, “Well, today he’s up on the roof, and he’s just fixing the skydome”. [Chuckle] And she … ‘cause he’d go to his chemotherapy; it never troubled him. I know he used to come back and he’d take some pills when he went to bed, and they were probably something that was going to make him feel sick; I don’t know.

And then it was probably the following … oh, we bought a boat. See, then we … while he was feeling better he still wanted to buy a boat, and I thought, ‘how am I going to sell this boat? I don’t know how to drive a boat and all of these things.’ But if he wanted to buy a boat we were going to buy a boat, so we bought a boat; and we bought a Vindex, which he had a lot of pleasure puddling around in and doing up, and fixing the engine better and all those sort of things. And it was nice for he and Cameron, and they used to go out a lot in it. But that summer when we’d got it done up … we must have bought it about in October I suppose, and got it in the water … and we had friends, Roger Bayliss was a local person here, and he was a mate on the same ship as Ross had been on. And they’d done a lot of their training together. Although he was a mate, he was different from the engine room; he was … captain-type one. They had a yacht, and some neighbours across the road, they had a power boat … a big power boat, and wherever we went, they might not be right beside us but at night times over the summer, if we were anchoring, they would be anchoring in the same bay and we’d all have a barbecue ashore. Yes, so it was – it was a lovely summer for that. Rakino was a lovely place; I loved going to Rakino. Oh, all those islands are … we did a lot in that summer, and then we were actually over at Coromandel … we’d gone to Coromandel … and Ross was having trouble crossing the road. And I said, “What’s …” You know, we’d looked up and down; we’d come ashore in the dinghy for the day – we were going to have lunch ashore and things – and I was going to step off ‘cause there was [were] no cars coming, and Ross said, “There are cars – there’s two coming, or three.” And I said, “No, there aren’t”. And … see, he was getting double vision, and that was the beginning of the end … of the downturn … so that was probably January, and slowly it got worse, and quite quickly worse.

So you just had March and some of April?

Yes. [Whispers] And then he was gone. He started losing the loss [use] of his legs, and I suppose because the mass must have been down here, so his legs weren’t working and so then the District Nurse used to come in. He didn’t want to go to any hospice or anything, but we had the Cancer Society nurse. She had been absolutely great ever since he had got sick, and she used to come whether he was sick or he wasn’t sick, just to check up on us as a family so that she knew us when the time was coming.

What was Ross’s full name?

Sydney Ross Plaisted. But he was always called Ross, ‘cause there were other S Plaisteds. He was cremated. When he died of course he didn’t want any religious service so we got the Mission; and he was a very nice man, and they did the service at the boat club down at Half Moon Bay. We were members of the boat club so we had the service there.

Nobody ever knew him as Sydney. He wouldn’t tell me, and he wouldn’t let me see his passport for a long time, and that’s only how I found out he was Sydney, ‘cause he was always called Ross, although for legal things it was S R Plaisted in anything.

So he was actually cremated, and he wanted to be put in a certain place up in the channel. So Jim who lived across the road, who had a big boat – and it was nearly a year later before I could come to scattering the ashes; as I found, there were certain things you couldn’t do – and so that came up and he knew where we had to go. Roger Bayliss and his wife – Ross liked orchids, and he’d had a little orchid house in the garden – so she went off; she wanted to get Singapore orchids, so we got lots of orchids at the flower market. And we had some of his sea friends – Jim’s boat was quite a big boat, so we could take quite a few people – and my friend, Joy, and her husband, Russell, who … Ross had flatted with Russell, and their youngest daughter Susie wanted to come; she was the same age as Cameron. So we went off with our bottles of bubbly and a picnic; and I didn’t know but the men had their rum bottle … one for Ross, one for them, and then we chucked it overboard. So it was really – it was lovely in the end. So I want to put a … wherever I’m going to go, up in the Park Island Cemetery … I want to get a notice put up.

And Cameron’s in a box in my bedroom.

So what happened to Cameron?

Cameron was in a car accident.

In Auckland?

In Auckland. I wasn’t here, I was overseas on a trip. I was over in … quite a life I’ve had. [Chuckle] Zagreb – that’s where it was. And in the middle of the night one night there was a knocking on the door about one o’clock in the morning – well, no, we’d had a phone call first – and it was Tim Round who was the tour leader. And I’d been away with him quite a lot, and he was on the phone and he said, “Oh – we’ve got to come and see you, but we’re bringing … the police are with us.” And I thought, ‘oh dear.’ Anyway, they came, and Cameron had had an accident – I think he and a truck had had a … I think he’d been overtaking – I can’t … my mind’s gone blank. I wasn’t here, no – no.

So you had to turn round and come home?

Well yes … yes. And here I am in the middle of Zagreb. And the tour goes on; and I know that’s what happens, but … I said, “I can’t go home on my own, because I don’t know how to … it was a long way to go. It wasn’t just getting on a plane and getting off; you had to negotiate some Singapore, and I thought, ‘I don’t think I can do that.’ Anyway, I think your insurances do cover that. But … then a phone call came. Seamus, my nephew … there was Ty who’s the elder, and Seam was the younger one. Ty was probably in New Zealand; Seamus had a Cambridge scholarship and was at Cambridge University doing his doctorate. And they said that Seamus would come and pick me up at Zagreb, so I only had to spend one day …

That was wonderful.

… on my own. Yes. So he arrived at night, and it was quite late at night and we were to fly to London the next morning which was fine. So we got up and … well actually he arrived late-ish at night and he hadn’t had a meal, so I said, “Oh, I’ve still got some money – go out and get yourself something to eat and come home.” And he didn’t come back; he didn’t come into the room and I thought, ‘Oh my God! What’s happened to him? I don’t know where he is in this city.“ Anyway, the little devil – young people – suppose he … off [chuckle] nightclubbing. It didn’t really matter; he turned up in time to have a shower and have some breakfast, and for us to get to [chuckle] … ‘cause I’d ordered the taxi to take us to the airport. And we got to the airport [chuckle] and we flew to London – ‘course he’d come from London. So there we are, we go back to London, and then he said – well he had to go and get his gear because we were flying out that night to come to New Zealand. So we get a train, and I said, “I’ll just follow you; I can’t think.” So I just followed him. So we landed at the [chuckle] airport in London, got a train up to Cambridge; and he had a very nice room in a very modern building in Cambridge, and it had a bathroom; a shower, and … Anyway, he was packing up his backpack because he was going to come out – I think he was going to be here a week or two … a week I think it was if he was allowed; or two, but I can’t remember exactly how long it was now. And he had some books he wanted to bring back or something; I can’t remember. We got ourselves all packed up.

Meantime he’s on the computer – they’re still trying to arrange a funeral, and where was Cameron, and what did he want, and where did he want to be? And I said, “Well I would like it at the church at St Kents”. And I think it might’ve been school holidays or something, and it was to be on a Saturday morning. And the minister from the church was away; he was somewhere else. So then it was fixed, but there was a lot of phone calls – on the computer it was; I didn’t understand any of this, not being a computer person – it was going back and forth. They’d arranged that it could be at St Kents; there was [were] also rugby games on at St Kents so the parking might’ve been a problem; then the minister was not there, so another bit of carryon; and then a cousin over here … a second cousin … her husband was a minister – he would do the service which was nice, ‘cause he was an Anglican minister and that was a Presbyterian church. But anyway it was all arranged … well part of it was arranged there once Seamus had got to me – he knew what he had to ask me, and I suppose it was quite hard for him too. And then he was email … or whatever you do on the computer … to Ty. I don’t think Ty was in Auckland but he must have been somewhere around – I don’t know how they all worked it out.

And then when we got to Singapore he said, “I need to use the computer”. I said, “Oh well I do know where you can find them here”, ‘cause I’d been in and out of Singapore a few times. And so I lay down on – there were some beds that you could almost lie down on somewhere – so I lay there and he came and got me after a while and he said, “I need to ask you some more questions.” And so he had some more questions and then he went back to the computer and I stayed there, and then we got on the plane when we had to get on the plane.

When we got back to New Zealand Ty was waiting for us at the airport in Auckland, so that was nice – and that was his brother … Seamus’s brother. So we drove back to my house then, and I can remember I shivered. And I think it was shock – being shivery inside and outside. Anyway, and then his friends started coming round to the house.

Then I had to organise pallbearers and all of this stuff, ‘cause the funeral – we’d arrived … might’ve been Thursday, and on the Friday they were trying to get photographs and things to go on …. we had to go and do all sorts of things; organise pallbearers; so in the end it was decided that the family would take him in and his mates would take him out. Then there was the girlfriend as well, and she was going to walk out in front of the coffin. So they worked it all out, and then that evening I think all the boys came for a practise, because Richard Niven came up. And he was still part of that family that had organised from the minister in the Niven family. There was a big family of them that were more like my … they were my age more, that family, but their mother was actually my cousin. And he had them practising how to get the coffin … put it onto their shoulders, the boys did, to take him out of the church – not to go in but to some out. So they were all having … whatever they were doing up in the front room, and then I did see them all up there.

So then you eventually sold your home?

Oh. Well yes, and I’d always thought for many years … oh, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But Cameron – I mean, all his life had been in Auckland. I had thought I might’ve come to Napier; this was even before Cameron was killed. And then afterwards I … I thought about it a lot ‘cause all of my friends are in Auckland; none down here, and it’s not that easy to make friends down here as an older person. And I thought about it, and I thought a lot more about it, and I waited for quite a number of years. And then I decided, ‘yes, I think that’s where I do want to be.’ I did have a sister-in-law in Auckland but she lived up at Orewa, so that would take me an hour or more to get to Orewa, and the other sister-in-law, Juliana, was down here. And my cousins … my closest cousin was Joanna, and we were more like sisters, because she’d lost her younger sister – when she was thirty-two I think Karen died. She was a diabetic … bad diabetic … so she died; but I had grown up with them – they were one end of Nelson Crescent; I was at the other end of Nelson Crescent. We spent a lot of time together as children and she now lives just up the road.

It’s more in the easy lane here, isn’t it?

[Whispers] Yes. I couldn’t stand the traffic in Auckland – that was the worst part of Auckland. And also in the last ten years or so … fifteen years, Auckland’s changed an awful lot. It wasn’t the pretty city that it had been; there were a lot of immigrants, and particularly in the area where I was living, Howick / Pakuranga, we had a lot of Asian immigrants. Not that they were any great problem, but it was in the schools because Pakuranga School was very full of them – you could go a whole block and not hear any English. And transport from Pakuranga and the eastern suburbs is not easy into the city. I never went into the city of latter years – there was no cause to go. If you wanted to go to the theatre at night – that was a mission because if you went on your own it was dark in the parking buildings, and I didn’t care for that. But it had been a very pretty, accessible city years and years ago, but they’d knocked down any buildings that looked half decent or were nice attractive old buildings, and put up all these ugly glass things, right down to the waterfront. Oh! They made a real mess, and the … I mean the transport in Auckland is impossible; I don’t know how they are going to fix that. They can’t fix it, I don’t think. And there has never been an east-west route which is what’s desperately needed.

Well – I think we’ve had a pretty good look into your family, haven’t we? But Vivienne, thank you for sharing this with Hawke’s Bay, and your families because one day some of your nieces or nephews or cousins will listen; hear your voice.

We probably might need a little bit more, ‘cause I’d like to talk about the earthquake and my parents and what they did in the earthquake and things like that.

Yes, we could certainly do that as an addendum, because at this stage this is definitely about your history.