Living in Hamilton

I lived at home in Grange Road through university and Training College, and only left to do my CMT at Taieri, and finally when I went to work in Hamilton. 

I obtained board in Hamilton with a couple who lived close to the shopping centre at Beerescourt, so near the Fairfield Bridge, which gave quick access by bike to school at Hamilton East. 

Mrs Norman was the mother of a girl I had known vaguely at university, and was a motherly soul. Mr Norman worked for the railways and was away a lot in his accommodation carriage. The meals my landlady cooked were good, wholesome fare. 

Unfortunately this arrangement came to an end later in the year when Mrs Norman learned that her husband had been having lady friends to stay in his moveable accommodation! 

So in the second year I looked for board again. I started with a Dutch couple, closer to the school, but had to share a room with another guy, older than me, just back from the war in Korea, where he claimed to have made lots of money in various rorts of the army systems for buying food. I still have no idea whether this was just bravado! 

However a couple from our church had a spare room and I spent the next six months with them, until my marriage to Audrey in the August holidays. 

We spent our first term of marriage in a caravan parked on the section of Audrey’s landlady, who lived just round the corner from the church, and not too far from the schools we both taught at. This was a good temporary arrangement while we waited for our departure for India. 

It was while we were living there that the Russians put the first Sputnik into orbit; we sat outside in the evenings watching the faint twinkling light cross the darkening sky.

 

Hamilton was a compact city in those days and pleasant enough to live in, because the staff at the school, and our friends in the church were great, hospitable and welcoming. I was extremely busy with work, study, negotiating with the mission, to say nothing of courting!

 

But the winters were cold; frosts fourteen mornings in a row one year, and fog to ride through lots of winter mornings. So we were not unhappy when the two years were up and we were on our way for our great adventure.