Old Photos batch 1

Up to School

These photos are from an old album compiled by my mother. The first few pages record snaps from my first five years, roughly until the day in September 1938 when I started school. This was at Owairaka School, which was new and wanting to grow, so we were allowed to start school at the beginning of the term of our fifth birthday.

Here I am learning to walk down the steps at my grandparents' bach at Milford on our way to play on the beach. It is summer, so I must have been about 12 months old.

Here I am riding my favourite toy.. I'm not much older than in the previous photo.

Olwyn was born when I was two and a half, and I must have been three to be able to ride such a massive trike!

A more formal occasion

I loved nothing better than playing in the sand on Milford Beach:

Here we are with our Gaze grandparents, Fred and Julia. From Olly's age I cannot have beenmore than three.

Dressed in my Sunday best.

Ready to leave for school that first day. Olly and I are on the front steps of our Ruarangi Road home.

Here is that bike again, this time on the footpath outside our house. By this stage it was two or three years old and I rode it everywhere until the day the main pipe broke at the neck and I came crashing to the ground. 

Another shot with our grandparents, outside the basement of their Mt Eden house.

Here is Olwyn with our first dog, Joe. Joe was a retired sheepdog from our great-uncle's farm at Takanini. Our family looked after him until he died.  He looked after us in return, accompanying me to my music lessons about a kilometre from home, waiting the 30 minutes of the lesson, and then seeing me home again. That was a year or two later when I was seven.

Finally a slightly earlier photo of our family on a holiday outing.