When I was about six years old, we inherited an old
sheepdog called Joe from an uncle of Dad’s, who had had a farmlet at Takanini.
Joe was too old to work any longer, but he would come with me when I walked to
music lessons at the home of my teacher, Josie Goodsir, about half a mile from
our home, and sit patiently outside while my lesson went on, and then accompany
me home again.
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| All that lost hair! |
My Gaze grandparents lived in Bellevue Road
The house had been built in the 1890s and renovated in
the thirties. It is still almost exctly
as they altered it then, at least on the outside.
Their house was in walking distance of the city, and
close to Valley Road Auckland
We would sit in the sunny window seat in their
living-room and read from their stock of National Geographic magazines.
In the early morning you could hear the milkman coming
with his horse and cart down Bellevue
Road
A few times we would visit the original Gaze home,
half-way down Franklin Road in Freeman’s Bay. It was a standard late nineteenth
century four-roomed cottage, with an old well in the back yard, one of the three
original houses in the street, built in 1867, the year Grandpa was born. (It is still there, No 43, though much altered, and takes part in the famous lighting display each Christmas).
When I
was a child it was used by two of my father’s unmarried aunts, both older
sisters of Grandpa (Fred). Auntie Millie was a quiet old-fashioned lady who
died in her eighties. Auntie Lizzie was much more lively and lived until 96.
She visited us at Papatoetoe for a stay when she was not well around 1945, and
I remember her telling me her favourite dessert was peaches and cream.
Lizzie had memories of walking up the Franklin Road
hill to the Grey Lynn farm over Ponsonby Road to buy the family’s milk when she
was a girl.
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