Holiday Jobs

My first school holiday job was with the book shop in the centre of Papatoetoe, run by a family named Timewell. I don’t remember much about the actual job, but I do remember that my pay for that one week was 27/6, ie 27 shillings and six pence, or one pound seven shillings and sixpence. This translates to $2.75 now, and was a reasonable week’s pay before the second world war; in fact it was more than my father sometimes earned in a week during the depression.

 

Wages had remained very similar for a couple of centuries; Goldsmith’s line “passing rich at forty pounds a year” was about what my father earned as a young law clerk in the 1920s. Someday I will ask an expert economist why everything has suddenly inflated over the last century to such an amazing degree. Perhaps it is global warming!

 

Another school holidays at Christmastime, I worked for a couple of weeks at my great-uncle Jack’s bookshop at the bottom of Shortland Street in the city. Uncle Jack, Grandpa Bigelow’s younger brother, had established a well-known bookshop (J H Bigelow and Sons), popular for its specialisation in subjects like water sports (especially sailing and rowing in those days; the Bigelow brothers were leading members of the West End Rowing Club of Ponsonby).

 

It had very cramped premises, including an underground work room, where school holiday staff spent their time unwrapping newly-delivered packages of books from overseas and getting them ready to put on the shelves, writing the price in pencil neatly in Uncle Jack’s special code.

 

There was a spiral staircase leading up to the ground floor of the shop, and another leading to an upstairs set of shelving. There was very little room for either staff or customers to move around. 

 

I enjoyed the excitement of working with books, and the quaint geography of this shop. My second cousins, Roy and Selwyn, who worked with Uncle Jack, were quiet, gentle men. It was a brief introduction to a successful family business.