Even more early memories

Julia Gaze and me

It is school holidays, and we are staying, as we often do, with Granny and Grandpa Gaze at their Milford bach. Outside the window a tui is singing in a kowhai tree.  Grandpa is showing us where to look to catch sight of the big black bird with the white feathers at its throat.

At night we watch from the same window to see the Rangitoto lighthouse show its red light every fifteen seconds, and Grandpa teaches us to count:” higgeldy-piggeldy one, higgeldy-piggeldy two” and so on, and sure enough at “higgeldy-piggeldy fifteen” the light appears again.

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It is a special Sunday morning and we are going to church with Granny and Grandpa to their church, the Baptist Tabernacle in Queen Street.  The organ is playing and the choir singing.  We are all in our best clothes. The church is full, ground floor and gallery. The seats are not pews, but individual wooden chairs with woven cane seats you can stick your fingers through. Each seat has a wire loop for the communion glass.  We all stand and sing: “All hail the power of Jesu’s name!” and the music is deafening. I stand on the seat so I can see everything.

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Fred Gaze and me

It is my birthday and Granny and Grandpa Gaze have come for my party. I am five and have been at school now for a month or two. We are expecting Grandpa Bigelow to arrive on the tram any minute, so Dad decides to take Grandpa’s car to meet him at the tram stop.

We travel to the first stop towards town where we stop the tram and Grandpa gets off, carrying what seems to me to be a huge brown-paper covered parcel, all beautifully wrapped and neatly tied with string, as Grandpa always does. It takes a long time, because Grandpa has had his knee fused so walks only slowly and with a limp.

 

When we get grandpa and the parcel home, Grandpa Gaze guesses it must be a big box of chocolates.

 

At last, after an interminable wait, I am allowed to open the brown paper, and find a collection of boxes, each with an item of a Hornby train in it. Together we all assemble the clockwork train with its oval layout, together with two sets of points, and get the train going around the track, to everyone’s great delight.

 

My pleasure is dampened a little because my two grandfathers and my father are so keen to help I can’t get my hands on the train for myself!

 

However, after they have all gone home, and Daddy has gone to work, I can play with it myself. There are 16 curved rails and six straight ones, two sets of points, both right and left hand. There is an engine, coal-tender, three carriages and a guard’s van, and a green tunnel.

 

It is fun, but not as much fun as the electric train set at our friends’ house in Mt Roskill.  The friends are Geoff and Hal Coop. Their father has died and they only have a Mummy, who is a friend of my parents, who help her.

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It is the middle of the night and I am awake and frightened and confused. Sirens are sounding from the city and searchlights are playing on the low clouds. All of this is very clear, because my bed has been moved out tonight on to the open verandah, newly built at the end of my bedroom. I start to cry and my parents come and shift bed and bedding back into my room and shut the French doors to shut out the noise and the lights, so I can go back to sleep. Next day the new radio is playing, unusually, because Mummy wants to hear the news. She is worried. 

Pearl Harbour, 7 December 1941, less than a month after my eighth birthday.