Family History 1.104

Gaze History:NSG Memoir

Prospect Terrace, Milford

 

In the second decade of the twentieth century Fred built a bach at Milford in partnership with his friends the Batts.  After a few years the Batts family withdrew from the arrangement and Fred bought their half of the house as well. 

It was set amid mature pohutukawa trees on two quarter-acre sections which ran down from the unsealed country road, Prospect Terrace, to the water’s edge of the Wairau estuary to the east and to the concrete strip of Inca Road to the north.  The buses from Bayswater (ferry) to Castor Bay used to ply along Inca Road.

 

At the roadside was a turning drive, two large ornate gates, and a garage, with a winding track up the steep hillside to the level of the house, which was halfway up to the top road.  Alternatively, one could climb a long wooden staircase which ran from the drive at the bottom up to the house level.

The Milford site now

 

 

The house itself was a long two-storeyed box.  The eastern side of the top floor, which looked out to the Rangitoto Channel over Milford Beach about 500m away, was one long living room, with large windows.  Behind this, and opening off it down the western side were several bedrooms, a kitchen and an entrance hall which was never used except to do occasional washing and ironing. 

Downstairs were three more bedrooms.  All this was extremely primitive, although the building itself was very solid.  The interior walls were undecorated plasterboard, and the lounge furniture was largely made of kerosene boxes covered with lightly padded upholstery material. 

There was no electricity that far from town, although there was a gas supply, which powered gas lamps, stove, iron, copper and heaters from a gas meter which was fed with shillings from time to time. 

Other lighting was by candle. The weekly wash was done outside under the trees and wrung with a huge old-fashioned mangle. 

The long-drop toilet was down the path under the pohutukawa trees.

 

Milford consisted of a picture theatre and about ten shops on both sides of Kitchener Road to the east of Milford Road.  All roads north of the Wairau Creek Bridge near the corner of Shakespeare Road were metalled and dusty as can be in the summer.  Shakespeare Road itself was sealed only for a couple of hundred metres and then metal surface continued to the junction with Tahoroto Road, along that road to the south and round to join the concrete at the junction with Anzac Street. 

Nevertheless communication with the city was good.  Regular bus services ran via Kitchener or Tahoroto Roads to Takapuna and Bayswater, from where there was at least a half-hourly service by ferry to the bottom of Queen Street.  Alternatively, by changing buses at Hall’s Corner in Takapuna, the site of the only shop there, it was possible to bus to Devonport and catch the Devonport ferry for a change. So it took a similar time to get back and forth from the Milford holiday house to Noel’s office in Queen Street as it did from the home in Mt Albert.