A 40s Boyhood in the Bay

What a beaut place to have grown up in. The tramcar destination boards said it, ‘No. 1 Island Bay.’ 

We were living in Ribble St when I was born in 1936 and shifted shortly after to 32 Liffey St where we stayed until 1951. Living in Liffey St with a good friend living at the head of Liffey Crescent, one of our major recreational areas was the hills above there up to the high ridge trig station.  Buckley Rd ended close to where its junction with Melrose Rd is today and we had the whole hill from there over the top and down to Bristol and Brighton Streets as our domain.  Melrose Road itself existed only as a few hundred metres beyond the top of Mersey St and ended as our local tip.  Great scavenging!

From the trig station we were able to keep an eye on all comings and goings and really were lords of all we surveyed.  I recall lying in the long grass there and watching the Finnish barque Pamir leave Wellington in 1948 after having been impounded throughout the war years.  Below the trig station we could run our sledges down the steep hillsides with only gorse as our braking system.  Gorse prickles and the removal of them were just a part of life! 

The steep streets at that end of the Bay also provided great trolley rides.  With normally only  one motorcar in Liffey St and one in Liffey Crescent during most of the war years and later, we had an unimpeded trolley or scooter run down the street with an emergency turn left at the bottom into Brighton St (if one made it).  The large dirt piles that local gravel merchants, Tonks and Andrews, left beside each drain after clean up and before removal were also useful braking spots. 

I am in awe these days of the efforts so many of the delivery people made in getting their merchandise to houses around the Island Bay hills at that time.  By horse we had both the municipal milk delivery and the private milk delivery from Knight’s farm in Happy Valley.  As an aside on milk deliveries: the war years produced a manpower shortage and I guess milk rounds suffered.  The result was we had to paint our milk delivery requirements on the street curb and that was what you got each day!

Having an invalid father had some benefits: we were able to order cream which was rationed.  We got this whether we wanted it or not and it did give my mother a bargaining hand.  Our local greengrocer, Mr Wong, got rice.  He liked cream.  We had rice puddings! 

Both our butcher and baker delivered to the door as did the coal and coke merchant and our rubbish tins were emptied from the back of the house Although I have written of steep streets only, Liffey Crescent offered a flat broad piece of grassed land that became the Liffey Crescent cricket pitch for the boys from Liffey and the Melbourne Rd area. We played regular and (for us) quite formal cricket games against the boys from Brighton St and the Esplanade area who had a small grassed area, between the road and the rocks along from the old bait house – now the Marine Education Centre.  This area went under the official cricket title of ‘Puddle Park.’

My father had been injured in the army in 1942 and was mostly, from then until he died in 1946, either in hospital or nursing homes. With my mother trying to make ends meet, I guess looking back, that I had unparalleled freedom.  Unless specifically instructed to be home at a certain time, my bike and I would leave in the morning and as long as we returned in time for tea, would often disappear on one adventure or another for the day.  Without phones to check up on us, most parents had a pretty good idea where we were at most times.  Usually the beach if it was summer, or not too far away from there.

I had a couple of friends whose fathers were fishermen and we had managed to  acquire an old fishing net which we repaired.  With a borrowed dinghy, on summer weekends we would set our net off the rocks between Island and Houghton Bays and with luck catch the odd terakihi or blue cod.  Lots of people, either singly or as families walked around the coast, Lyall Bay to Island Bay, on Sunday afternoons, so we would sell direct to this public from the roadside at Princess Bay.  A shilling a fish went a long way towards an ice cream and toffee bar!

I attended Island Bay Primary School from 1941 until 1947 when intermediate schooling thereafter  took my classmates and I to the old Berhampore School in Rintoul St, behind Athletic Park.  Island Bay School was a good school with predominantly long term, dedicated teachers. Deborah Hannan’s book, From Slates to Computers far more ably tells the story, from school milk in brown bottles through to air raid evacuation drills and under the desk earthquake warnings.  It was a sports-oriented school and we were fortunate to have the swimming pool across the road in Victory Park.  Deborah Hannan makes mention of us wearing our dog tags throughout the war years. I also had to wear a small camphor bag around my neck and down my shirt to help ward off the continual colds I seem to have had.  Must have looked like a Masai warrior and smelt like a jar of Vicks Vapour Rub!

I was a recipient (only once) of the principal’s (Mr W.Burgess) corporal ‘running practice’ wherein two parallel lines were drawn a distance apart in the main corridor or occasionally on the playground.  I was allowed to select for him a cane from the wall behind his desk and then on the word ‘go’ ran from one line to the other and the principal, cane in hand chased.  If caught, and one always was, the cane ended up in contact with your legs.  It seems to me that girls were not subject to corporal punishment but our teacher in the final year at Island Bay had a strap nick-named ‘Tickle Toby.’   One girl in our class did feel the sting just once that year.  As I recall, the strap was kept in the teacher’s drawer and toward the end, or maybe right at the end of that year he opened the draw to find the strap cut into small pieces!

The move to intermediate ended up a disaster from an educational point of view.  The first year rolled through OK but over the end of year holiday period an earthquake dealt the already ageing school buildings a fatal blow and a decision was made to demolish most of them.

On return from holidays we found ourselves about to spend the whole of 1949 being bussed daily up to Brooklyn school.  Our teacher for this year was the well-known and much admired Mr Jim Kirby who had taught at Island Bay since 1925.  Mr Kirby was most unhappy to move to Berhampore and even more unhappy to spend his last year or so being caught in this disruption with the further problems of head counts and supervising  youths on and off buses before and after school.  The result was a lowering of his interest in furthering our education and I’m a little ashamed to say we boys (especially) did little to make his last post a memorable one.

I find myself hard pressed to accept that any other suburb of Wellington had as many youth groups as Island Bay had during the 1940s.  All the churches had either Scout/Guide groups with associated Cubs and Brownies or similar Boys/Girls Brigade, and the Salvation Army had its Youth Group. I belonged firstly to Cubs and then on to Scouts at St. Hilda’s Church.  This group, I believe, eventually became Ist Island Bay Scout Group.  I can recall combined services and marches down the Parade with all youth groups participating - flags and banners waving. 

In my time with St, Hilda’s we were fortunate to have had the services of firstly Skip Stephenson then later, Jack Worgan as our Scout Leaders.  Both these men epitomized the objectives of Scouting - the formality, adventure and fun.  We had unquestionably the best and most organized camps, many as far afield as the back of Blenheim at the foot of the inland Kaikouras  and following closely what would later be the Duke of Edinburgh youth achievement award standards.  Coupled with tramping and confidence-stretching trips like a mid-winter Southern Crossing of the Tararuas, I can quite confidently claim that much of what came from Scouting stood me in very good stead as I moved later into the Armed Forces.  With two of my best friends we were also members of the Island Bay Surf and Lifesaving Club from an early age and remained involved in surf-lifesaving through most of our lives.

We (I) weren’t always angels!  Mr. Burrell, our local policeman (complete with bicycle) was a very firm but I believe fair gentleman.  He kept a close eye on most of what was happening in the Bay, knew a large portion of the population and I’m sure that the once when he gave me a good clip over the ear, I must have deserved it.  Lacking a father figure at home I’m sure I pushed the boundaries a little.  On one occasion two of my friends and I were cycling around Point Halswell and as we passed through the RNZAF base there, we stopped and had a browse at some retired coasters.  No one appeared in charge so we wandered around one of these ships (which had been stripped) and while peeking into corners came across an old emergency flare.  This went into the saddle bag and we took it back to the Bay. What to do with it?  Well we decided to give it a try on the beach. Followed the instructions written on it, not really expecting it to work but it did.  Fortunately the normal Wellington northerly was blowing but that didn’t stop gigantic clouds of bright orange smoke covering the Bay out to the Island.  The policeman (on his bike), the fire brigade and an awful lot of people turned up!  We mingled.

Money, required for everything from a toffee bar to camping and tramping gear was forever in the forefront.  Some things don’t change!  One of my earliest jobs was when a family friend bought the sweet shop alongside the Empire Picture Theatre.  A friend and I took on the role of ice cream boys at half time.  We would have to make up our trays of ice creams and be ready to parade these around the theatre for patrons who didn’t wish to leave their seats.  Not sure about the pay but the perks were good!

At one time I had a paper round delivering The Evening Post to the area south of the Terminus, around the end of Derwent St, Milne Tce and the streets in that area.  All the paper boys would gather at Dallow’s Bookshop on the Parade and our papers would be distributed from there.

There was an elderly lady, a Mrs Barnard, who lived in a house a few doors south of Shorland Park and who had become famous for the  thousands of gingernut biscuits she had made throughout both world wars for the men serving overseas.  I believe she eventually received a government award for her services.  While over most of my paper round the papers were rolled up, bent into a boomerang shape and thrown onto people’s porches or similar, I always hand-delivered Mrs Barnard’s paper to the door.  I would like to be able to say here that this was to pay respect to her age and infirmity but in truth it would have been more likely to be the handful of hot, button-size ginger nut biscuits she would pop into my raincoat pocket on a cold, wet southerly evening.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

The tough one was when I took on The Southern Cross, a Labour Party daily that ran from around 1946 through to around 1951. This was a morning paper and the round meant getting up and delivering daily before school.  We lived of course at the southern end of the Bay but the papers were only dropped off outside a shop on the corner of Dee St at the northern end.   I had to bike up there in all weathers then deliver these papers over the whole Eastern side of the Bay from Volga St round to my last delivery on The Esplanade.  All before school! Fortunately the paper did not have a large circulation. Mum occasionally assisted by getting up and covering some of the round closer to home.  

Tougher still was the fact that the delivery boys were also required to collect the weekly fees from the subscribers each Saturday.  I would have been around thirteen at the time and it was very easy to put off the paper boy each week when he came knocking.  Looking back I’m sure the Labour Party would not have been happy had they known that the agent held back my pay for each non-payment which meant that the responsibility for getting money back from adults now rested with me.  Eventually my mother said enough was enough and we gave it up.  I never got paid for the missed fees and learnt a lesson.

My last and best job was delivering groceries for Mr. Ron Cook who had the Four Square store on the corner of the Parade and Humber St.  Despite there being a myriad of grocers in the Bay, Ron’s was a very busy store and we delivered over quite a wide area.  Grocers’ shops were a wondrous place for a young man where everything, from biscuits, flour, sugar, eggs and all were stored loose and had to be packed.  Most of the orders would be made up in cardboard boxes ready for me for after school.  The last to be added were eggs.  These were packed in doubled brown paper bags and carefully perched on the top.  Seems precarious these days and certainly Ron must have had a good relationship with his customers as balancing doubled up cartons on the front basket of the bike with the eggs sitting on top, then struggling up the Island Bay hills without some form of accident was an achievement. Making the top of Melbourne Rd with a double load was a killer. I broke a lot of eggs!  I also ate a lot of broken biscuits (but that’s no secret to Ron who remains my friend [at the time of writing]!)  On Tuesdays we delivered over the hill to Happy Valley in Ron’s car and I would often drive the car up two or three houses while we ran back and forth delivering.   As time went by we became so busy with deliveries that we couldn’t manage to complete all by bike and I started driving the car within the Bay.  This really helped with the hills.  However, experience can be expensive.  In one case I managed to balance the car like a see-saw over a high curb up a driveway in Severn St and the vehicle had to be put back on the road by tow wagon.  The final straw was when I managed to damage a garage door when turning the car around at the top of the very steep Valley St.  I was after all only 14 and by the mutual agreement of everyone (except me) my driving days ceased.  Ron never scolded me for any of these though I must have cost him more than the value he got from me.

Shortly after this, our house in Liffey St became no longer available to us and with heavy heart all round, my Mum left her bowling mates, my sister her school friends and me, my ‘Bay’. True to his word, Ron let me use his car to obtain my licence as soon as I turned 15.