Papatoetoe

At our wonderful new Papatoetoe house, there were lots of trees, oranges, plums, tamarillos, guavas, passionfruit, lemons and so on, besides beautiful natives like totara, kauri and puriri.  The puriri was in the centre of the front lawn and for all our time there was a wonderful tree to climb. I later learned to climb the kauri as well.

One of my first chores was sweeping up the leaves under the orange trees in particular and wheeling them in the barrow to the compost heap. Later I took over responsibility for mowing the lawns and eventually Dad bought a motor mower – from his friends at Mason and Porters. It was a sturdy spindle mower with a small petrol motor on top, and the spindle was driven by a chain. It started with a handle, not a rope, which you pulled hard on and usually managed to get going easily.

 

We regularly played games like “Go Home, Stay Home” with our friends and neighbours, with the garage door at the end of the long drive serving as “Home”. The garage door was also useful for practising tennis against.

 

In those days the train service between Papatoetoe and Auckland was good, and the bus service via Otahuhu even better – half hourly during the day. Dad used to travel by bus to work in Queen Street, and Grandpa regularly came to lunch on Sundays by bus.

 

When I went to AGS for secondary school, the train was an exciting part of each day. Especially exciting was the train smash at Papatoetoe railway station one Saturday morning, with an incoming train hitting head-on into a train waiting to leave for Auckland.

 

I jumped on my bike and pedalled fast to the station to find the two locomotives locked together by their cow-catchers, and a small crowd of onlookers gathered to see the event of the week for our small, semi-rural suburb.

 

Papatoetoe when we went there was a borough with around 2500 people. There were green fields between it and Otahuhu, and again between Otahuhu and Penrose along the Great South Road, which was the only way to get to town, unless you took the longer, and more indirect route through Mangere and Onehunga.

 

And there were lots of open spaces with grazing land between the houses in the borough itself. In Kolmar Road there was a large field on our side of the road a couple of hundred metres towards the town centre.

 

Our shopping area was Hunters Corner, with its half-dozen shops, including our grocer on the corner of Great South Road, which in those days was two narrow concrete strips between tall grass verges. Our butcher and greengrocer were also at Hunters Corner, and that was just about the sum total of the shops there.

 

On the eastern side of our section there was also a gap in the housing, so we sometimes had grazing stock almost right outside our window.