28 January 1982

Posted on January 28, 2012 by

Thu Jan XXVIII

am Babysitting for Parkes’. Matthew woke up. New Zealand play 7 matches in May according to 1ZB. Read Annapurna South Face all day.

Came second in Monopoly this evening. Had a shower.

Trains = 23

The excitement was over the fact that, shortly before we left for New Zealand, the nation’s football team qualified for the 1982 World Cup finals. It was the first time that they had managed to do so (and they wouldn’t do so again until 2010) and I was excited that I might get to see a football match or two.

1ZB was the radio station that we listened to before we discovered the much better Hauraki Sound.

The mention of Annapurna South Face suggests that I went to the library, withdrew six books, but then read a book I had taken with me. It is one of my favourite books of all time, the story of Chris Bonington‘s first successful Himalayan expedition, and was given to me by my Uncle Bob when I was about ten, thus fuelling a lifelong love of books about mountaineering.

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27 January 1982

Posted on January 27, 2012 by

Wed Jan XXVII

Layed about. Went swimming twice. 2nd time played ball with the students looking after the pool. Got chips and steak for tea. More chips and delicious pineapple fritters from the chip shop. Bed at 10.30

Trains = 13

Look, more chips! And pineapple. I loved pineapple, anything pineapple, so it was an added bonus to discover that the chip shop not only did burgers with pineapple in, but would also serve up deep fried slices of them.

The entry about trains needs some explaining. There was a railway line which ran about a street and a half away from our house. From various points in the garden you could see the trains – mostly goods trains – passing up and down the line from central Auckland. For something to do I began counting them, and the cumulative total appears throughout the early part of the diary.

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26 January 1982

Posted on January 26, 2012 by

Tue Jan XXVI

Visited my new school MOUNT ALBERT GRAMMER. Its an old building. Saw Mr Douglas, the Ex-Dean. He told us about the school. Seems a nice place! Went swimming. Went with Mum to get some more uniform. Got stung!

I love the fact that I couldn’t even spell ‘Grammar’ correctly. Such schools had been phased out in England before I began secondary education so the whole idea of a grammar school was alien to me.

Mr Douglas had a teaching role which I cannot now remember (the linked article says that he was a language teacher). He may have been one of a few English born staff at the school, although he had clearly been living in NZ for quite some time if he was.

I was obviously in denial about the uniform. The grey shirt was fine (though I notice from my old school photo that I was the only one in the class to wear a short sleeved version), but the navy blue shorts and choice of either black knee length socks (with black shoes) or bare feet in sandals was completely anathema to a 14 year old from the UK. I hadn’t worn shorts to school for about five years by that point and I was mortified at the need to do so now. On the other hand, to fit in I had to wear what everyone else was wearing. As a result, I spent six months looking like a badly dressed giraffe.

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25 January 1982

Posted on January 25, 2012 by

Mon Jan XXV

Went to the library. Got out Six Books. Mum and Dad Bought Karen and I 2 Jigsaws and Lisa + Kevin one each.

Went to the pool with the Parkes’. Met Fred + Les Next Door

I was clearly excited by the number of books that I took out, though I would be hard pressed to name any of them now. The jigsaws were clearly an attempt to persuade us to do something other than play Monopoly. I do like jigsaws and keep promising myself that I will get back into doing them as a break from messing about on the internet…

Fred and Les were two gentlemen, brothers I think, who seemed very old to me at the time, which probably means that they were over 40.

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24 January 1982

Posted on January 24, 2012 by

Sun Jan XIV

Lisa + Kevin are being bloody pains with their non-stop nagging – Lisa especially. Lisa put sand in Rabbits’ milk and ‘Jellymeat’!

Looks like this was the point where the cabin fever caused by over three weeks of not going to school, plus the change of environment, really began to kick in. The odd thing is that I am pretty sure that it wasn’t me who was being nagged, even though I only had the very shortest of fuses where the pair of them were concerned.

Lisa putting sand in the cat food is something I remember vividly. As I have previously mentioned, it was my job to feed the cat and I was righteously livid on behalf of Rabbits at this turn of events. Unfortunately, the presence of a sandpit in the back garden, when coupled with a bored child and a cat who didn’t eat all of its food, was too much temptation to bear.

(Before any cat lovers complain, it was common to give cats milk in those days. Honest.)

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Casey Jones

Posted on January 23, 2012 by

I had clean forgotten about this television show until someone tweeted about it over the weekend and I thought I would jump in with my memory of it before I forgot about it all over again.

The legend of Casey Jones is known throughout America, as a train driver whose death in a 1900 crash became the basis for a popular song. This song then became the basis for a black and white television show about Jones, a fireman named Wallie Sims and conductor Redrock Smith.

The show was aired at teatime on a Sunday during the time that I was living in Dundee. I loved it. Every episode revolved around Jones, with help from his colleagues, thwarting some attempt to interfere with the smooth running of his train, the Cannonball Express. Train robbers, marauding Indians, escaped convicts and the like were all ultimately defeated by the the ingenuity and derring do of Jones and co.

I am sure that the attraction of this show was that it was about trains. I was never a child who was massively into the whole ‘cowboys and indians’ scenario (which this was essentially a play on) and there were enough shows still shown in black and white for that not to be the novelty it would be today. And, of course, I had no knowledge of the story that the show took its inspiration from.

That last element, though, is quite possibly why I forgot about it. Basically, faster, brighter shows came along, shows which had more interest for me than a steam engine or a man in an enormous cap.

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23 January 1982

Posted on January 23, 2012 by

Sat Jan XXIII

Dull Day. Went Swimming A.M. Played Monopoly and came 3rd. Lisa won! Poured with rain.

Every time I re-read this I don’t quite understand why I would have gone swimming in an open air pool if it was pouring with rain. I suspect that the rain came on in the afternoon.

Not that that doesn’t make it a noteworthy event. We didn’t have that many rainy days whilst we were in Auckland (something made up for during the 2008 visit, when we caught the tail end of a monsoon and the worst weather for three decades) and so that sort of thing does tend to get recorded in here.

Note my surprise at Lisa winning the game of Monopoly. That almost never happened. She was only six, after all. How many six year olds nowadays could even tell you how to play the game?

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22 January 1982

Posted on January 22, 2012 by

Fri Jan XXII

Nothing special today. Dad went to work. Went swimming. Went for chips and got a massive pile.

Ah, the chip shop. It did well out of us. And, in fairness, we did well out of it, too. The food was fresh, with everything being cooked to order (I don’t recall ever going in there and not having to wait for it to be cooked) and more importantly for a family on a budget the portion sizes were huge. I don’t think I have ever come across anywhere quite like it in England, that’s for sure.

Dad was working at The University of Auckland. It has the curious distinction of being the only place he worked that I never visited him at. Which, if nothing else, shows just how busy I was once I got fully into the swing of things there.

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21 January 1982

Posted on January 21, 2012 by

Thur Jan XXI

Went to the library by the St Lukes Shopping Centre. Did some shopping. Had Lunch at McDonald’s P.m. Went swimming.

The truly alarming element of this story is the very scant mention of what must have been my first ever trip to McDonald’s. I have no recollection of it at all. If only I had known what a big part that company was going to play in my life!

Trips to the library were an important part of our life back in England. Karen (and later Lisa too) would have dance classes in a hall near our local library, so on many a Saturday morning Dad would take me, either one or both of the girls, and sometimes Kevin, and we would go to the library and the dance class. The library was fun. Waiting for the dance class to finish, in a strangely brown hall so old it had been opened by Sir Anthony Eden, was hell on earth. Saturday morning, so many things I could be doing, and I was doing nothing whilst watching a clock hand slowly grind around to whatever time it was that the class finished. The purpose was, of course, to get us out from under Mum’s feet for a while, but it can’t have been much fun for Dad at all.

With this in mind, and given that Mum and Dad met whilst they were both working in a library, it is slightly remarkable that it took five days for us to visit one upon our arrival in Auckland.

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20 January 1982

Posted on January 20, 2012 by

Wed Jan XX

The others went to the park this morning. Swimming again this afternoon.

I was at the age where, every now and then, I could be left alone in the house by myself. Even at that age I would mostly do what I do now when left alone, read and drink coffee.

One of the things that is apparent to me from this diary is that my parents were not forcing us into the New Zealand way of life. I suspect that part of that is that they, too, were just finding their feet and adjusting to being in a strange land, and part of it was because they knew that we would be immersed in local life when we started school at the beginning of the next month, perhaps even more immersed than they themselves would be.

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