More family homes

I knew vaguely where my maternal great-grandparents lived in St Mary’s Bay; in London Street and Dublin Street, but only remember seeing their houses from the outside.

 

They were nineteenth century two-storeyed wooden houses, one with a high flagpole flying the New Zealand flag, and both overlooking the Bay where the Bigelow family operated its ship-building yard, and where the motorway to the Harbour Bridge now runs.

 

Occasionally I would stay with Grandpa Bigelow in Banks Street, Mt Eden.  He lived in a house that his father-in-law had built for them all to live together when the family shifted from New Plymouth to Auckland in 1912.

 

Especially when there was an election, I would stay with Grandpa and listen avidly to the radio reports, giving the progress results of the vote-counting, and helping Grandpa write them on the chart provided by the Herald. Those were the days of the Labour Government during the war and I can still remember vividly Grandpa’s disgust each time the Labour Party won another seat.

 

This house has since been demolished.

 

In school holidays we often went to spend a week or so at the Gaze bach at Milford, in Prospect Terrace, overlooking the Wairau estuary, the Pirate Shippe, and Milford Beach and Rangitoto. We could see the lighthouse and watch its light flashing at night.

 

The house was two-storeyed, and we always slept downstairs.  In the early days there was no electricity, only gas for lighting and cooking, and candles to light us to bed. We spent many happy holidays there, walking both ways to the beach, swimming and playing on the sand.

 

Sometimes we would walk up to the Milford shops, of which there were about six in those days. My most vivid memory is walking to the newsagent’s to get a paper with Grandpa Gaze; the news page was covered with the names of casualties from Europe.

 

The bach is no longer there; it was replaced years ago by closely-packed suburban housing.

 

 

In 1942 we shifted to Papatoetoe, to a large house on Californian Bungalow lines in Kolmar Road, on a 3000 square metre section. The house was built as a farmhouse around the time of World War I by a relative of my mother’s of the Dreardon family from Northland. The mortgage was from the ASB, and I can remember one of Mum’s Brown uncles coming to inspect the house for the mortgage.  He was a Board member of the bank.

 

The section and house were a wonderful playground for us as children: large rooms, a long central hallway, three entrances, and a sheltered concrete back yard to play in. The washhouse, and toilet were separate from the house, over the backyard area. We had room to keep chickens, and a windmill which in the early days pumped water for the house. In those days we had no refrigerator, so the butter was kept in a tin in a hole in the ground under a tree in a corner of the back garden.