I was the youngest child having three older living brothers and I believe one who died quite young.
My father was the youngest son of a family of six and was born in Ballarat Victoria on 1/12/1880. His family moved to New Zealand somewhere around the turn of the century, living first in Wellington and then moving to the South Island. He worked for his Brother Bert in a watchmakers shop in Greymouth before going to work for another brother Tom in Karamea. They ran a sawmill and Alf was the tally clerk. It was there that he met my mother and they were married in January 1912. The Jones family had settled in Karamea following the gold rushes at Gabriel’s Gully and Charleston. Evelyn was born on 2nd April 1885 and was educated at Karamea and later at the convent school at Westport where she learnt singing and piano as well as painting. She became a teacher and taught in Nelson.
Shortly after their marriage the sawmill closed with the cutting out of the bush. Tom moved to Timaru and then to Invercargill in the employ of John Chambers and Sons Ltd. My eldest brother Bill was born at Karamea in October, 1912. Alf and Evelyn moved to the King Country where Alf was employed as a mill manager and my brother Peter was born there in August 1914. By 1915 they were in Kohukohu on the Hokianga at another sawmill where on Xmas Day my brother Noel was born. The family then shifted to Auckland living in Glenfield where they grew strawberries and in Titirangi where Evelyn taught in the New Lynn School.
Next Alf took on house building but the depression after the end of World War 1 was a bad time for building. He built a house in Egremont St Belmont but the owner couldn’t pay on completion and having borrowed the money to finance it Alf took over the house and lived in it. He then built a house on 45 acres of land at Crown Hill just north of Milford and the same thing happened. He also assumed ownership of that property. He then let the Belmont house and set out to farm the land at Milford. For a time he could make ends meet. The boys were growing up and could help and he started a milk supply round in Milford and Castor Bay. As the depression bit deeper he had to walk off the farm and as the rent of the Belmont house was being collected by the mortgagee a struck off solicitor the family fortunes had almost reached zero. Alf and Evelyn joined with her sister Venus and her husband and rented a farm on what is now the Auckland International Airport. This was not successful and they had to walk off that as well. Venus got a job managing the clubhouse of the Auckland Aero Club while Alf and Evelyn took on a fruit shop in Herne Bay. This only lasted a very short time and soon they were renting a house in Penrose and Alf was trying to earn a living hawking fruit door to door. They moved to no 5 Waitangi Rd Te Papapa which became the family home for nearly forty years. After a long struggle trying to survive selling fruit Alf’s car was repossessed and he had no option but to go onto Relief Work. He spent several months helping to lay concrete footpaths in the area with other unemployed men. One of them was a chartered accountant who later went straight from Relief Work to being Town Clerk of Onehunga. The Government decided that Relief Work was costing too much and instead of getting 27 shillings a week Alf was paid fourteen shillings a week to stay home and do nothing. The rent was fifteen shillings a week and Dad was very proud of the fact that over the period we in fact paid an average of ten shillings a week. Alf earned extra money by cutting grass that grew on the road verges during late summer and thrashing it by hand for the seed. At length the depression lifted and Alf got a job as a sawmill manager near Te Teko in the Bay of Plenty. The wages were five pounds for a full week’s work but there were only orders for enough for three days work at the most. He had to keep the home in Auckland and pay board at the mill so he was not a great deal better off. By now the older boys were off his hands. They had been working on farms for miserly wages often not much more than their keep and on occasions would be home with no job. The middle two spent several miserable months at the single men’s camp near Wellsford working on the improvements to the main North Road. By 1935 the depression was receding and the two boys got jobs at Westfield and in 1936 Evelyn became a relieving school teacher when the new government lowered the starting age for schools to five. It had been lifted to six during the depression as an economy measure. Suddenly the family fortunes were buoyant again, Alf had a second hand car and we employed a housekeeper to look after the three boys who were living at home while Evelyn lived a life of luxury moving around the province filling in by teaching at schools while permanent appointments were being made.
In all of this I was the baby of the family and took little part in the struggles. The only thing I had to do was to help in the fruit round which I hated. On Saturdays I had to carry a box filled with paper bags of fruit and knock on doors trying to sell them.
However I was an acute observer and out of it all I developed a distrust of authority and the establishment in general which was to shape my life and become part of my character.
My first brush with authority came when was eight. I was in Standard 2 at Milford School. It was Armistice Day and the Headmaster lined the school up outside in the sun and gave us a talk on World War 1. It was the custom for the whole country to come to a halt for a minute’s silence at 11 o’clock on the 11th of November and together with Anzac Day was a very important occasion so soon after the end of the war. I was a precocious child, I had learned to read at about four and used to read the headlines in the Herald. I would butt in on my parents conversations so when the Headmaster said something with which I didn’t agree I told him so. He was incensed, so much so, that a few weeks later I found that he had failed me and that I would have to spend another year in Standard 2. Perhaps my parents should have let me take my medicine and learn to keep my mouth shut, but they saw the injustice of it and sent me to stay with Auntie Venus where I could attend another school. I was put up on trial and the shock must have done me good because I did very well at my new school. I never did manage to get along with school teachers however and having found that I could speak out of turn and get away with it I ran into trouble with others as well.
I joined the Scouts and despite being made a Second in my Patrol, passing most of the tests for my Second Class Badge and even some for my First Class one I never managed to get my Tenderfoot badge. The Scoutmaster told me that he would withhold it until I showed some respect for authority and I left before that happened.
I joined the St John Ambulance with a similar result. Despite my team winning the Auckland Challenge Cup for stretcher drill and my gaining a Grand Prior’s Badge I never became Sergeant because of the enmity of the Cadet Superintendent. As my brothers had been given two years Secondary education I was allowed to go to Auckland Grammar School. I was lucky and got a holiday job at the Triangle Service Station at the Harp of Erin which paid for most of my uniform and books and I think that we got some help from a well to do lady in Herne Bay who belonged to the Writer’s Club of which Mum was Secretary. I got into the B form and stayed there without having to work very hard. Near the end of the first term the Form master took me aside and told me that I would probably have to spend two years in the Third Form as my work was not up to scratch. We then had the term exams and to his surprise I just missed out on being promoted to the A form. This continued until the fourth form when we had a Form Master who terrified us all and at the end of the year I finally made it to A level.
My parents were now much better off so they gave me another year and a chance to matriculate so as to gain University Entrance. Half way through my Five A year I broke my leg through dashing across the road at Newmarket and being run over by a car. My parents then decided that I could have a further year as there would be little chance of my passing with over a month being taken out of my school year. To everyone’s surprise including the Form Master I passed and as promised had a further year not in the Fifth Form but in the Sixth and a chance to get a Universary Bursary. I had a lovely year with no pressure on me to pass exams and although I didn’t work anywhere near hard enough I absorbed a more knowledge in that year than I had in the previous three.
My Mother wanted me to become a teacher and I applied to go to Training College. At the interview which was conducted by a man who had taught in Nelson with Mum I performed quite badly. I had unexpectedly become Head Laboratory Assistant for the school for a brief period and that morning had to prepare an experiment involving chlorine gas. I was a bit careless and got a good whiff of the gas so I wasn’t feeling the best. In addition I hadn’t bothered to dress up and wore an open necked shirt and slacks. The other applicants were dressed in their finest clothes and to cap it off I not only appeared disinterested but deliberately concealed who my mother was.
My birthday being in January, I was technically too young but if they had wanted me it wouldn’t have mattered. When I got the letter declining my application Mum was furious and rang her old colleague who told her how badly I had come across but undertook to see what could be done. It is obvious that it was not meant to be since although there were several drop outs and a further set of interviews was arranged fate intervened.
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