Holiday Jobs

For several weeks in early 1951 I worked as a labourer with the Mt Eden Borough Council. When they found I was too young and undeveloped to shovel road metal they sent me up Mt Eden to work with the gardeners there. 

The garden department was on the slope of the mountain, just below the Kiosk.

There were two permanent workers, an older gardener and a younger man who was deaf and dumb. I soon learned how to communicate with him by signs; in those days there was no formal sign language. 

My job in the mornings was to wander over the slopes of Mt Eden with a grubber in my hand and grub out thistle plants. I eventually covered just about the whole reserve area but by that time there were plenty of little plants waiting for my attention. 

In the afternoons I helped the other two in the nursery, but I don’t remember much work being done.  It was a pretty easy job really. 

In the early weeks of 1952 I joined the outdoor staff of the Auckland City Council, and was allocated to a road gang, which toured the suburb of Epsom chipping and spraying weeds from the kerbs, gutters and footpaths as we went. 

One of the other members of the gang was also a student, Warwick Elley, who later became a prominent educational researcher, and Director of the Council for Educational Research. 

There was not much variety in our work, but it was fun being with a group of men, all working together and sharing smokos and lunch breaks, especially the friendship with Warwick. 

This period of work was interrupted in February when King George VI had a heart attack and died suddenly, and we were given a couple of days off work to mark his death and the accession of Queen Elizabeth II. 

In November of 1951, on my eighteenth birthday, I took the test for a heavy traffic driving licence, after a brief course of instruction from the local driving school. 

So I applied to the Public Service Garage, which ran all the vehicles for the main Government Departments, in Stanley Street. I was not successful in getting a truck driving job, but was allocated to a Ford Prefect which was working out o0f the Ellerslie Post Office, delivering telegrams. 

So, for several weeks up until Christmas I drove around the wider Ellerslie area, including Panmure, Mt Wellington and bits of Penrose and Remuera, delivering telegrams, which came thick and fast as Christmas approached. 

The areas close to the Post Office were still delivered by schoolboys on bikes, but the car was used for the more distant parts of the suburb. 

I managed to keep up with the flow, until the last morning. On Christmas Eve I got a puncture as I was delivering just about the last telegram. Being Christmas Eve it took hours for the garage guys to send a repairman to change the tyre and enable me to limp back to the garage.  

So I was hours late for the family celebrations, and arrived home tired, hungry and not a little frustrated! 

The next year I applied earlier and at last was allocated to truck driving. 

For the first few weeks until Christmas, I was put in charge of an old Ford V8 truck, with a very old gearbox, nothing so modern as synchro-mesh! I had to drive to the wharf, pick up a load of parcels of “Christmas Puddings” – mail from the UK – and toss them off at the back of the CPO (where Britomart now is) on to the conveyor belt which took them upstairs to the sorters. A total distance of about half a mile return. 

However, after Christmas, when some of the regular drivers were on their annual leave, I was allocated to a new Bedford, which toured the outer suburbs twice a day picking up and dropping bags of parcel mail from the suburban Post Offices. I also did a couple of runs around the inner city to places like Ponsonby and Symonds Street, but the big run each time went to Remuera, Onehunga, Avondale and Post Offices in between. 

As it was holiday season there was not a great deal of mail and I had time to chat to the PO staffs at the places I visited, and to read several of my textbooks for the next year’s study.