When I was eight my favourite Friday night entertainment was to travel
across the newly-opened harbour bridge with Mum and my grandfather to my
father's IGA shop at 20 College Hill, Ponsonby. As soon as the blue Ford
Prefect had pulled up outside the shop I would rush out to see if the
display in the window had changed since the week before.
Sometimes there would be a large pyramid of tins of spaghetti, baked beans
or Palm corned beef and I would marvel at the symmetry and apparent
stability of these tin edifices. At other times there might be a tea chest
with loose tea cascading over the sides and onto the floor below. Those tea
chests suggested hot, exotic countries many miles away and gave me my first
intimation of the lure of foreign travel.
The interior of the shop was as cluttered and congested as the window. Open
cases of fruit and vegetables were crammed together inside the front door,
and densely-packed wooden shelves ran along both walls. The solid kauri
counter, twenty feet in length, was piled with goods on both sides of the
cash register and around the scales. At the far end of the counter was a
tiered wooden biscuit stand and, behind that, an alleyway with a large
five-door Kelvinator refrigerator on one side and a Berkel bacon slicer on
the other.
On arrival at the shop we would settle into our roles. Mum would don a
clean apron and place a ballpoint behind her ear, ready to add up long
lists of groceries and to write most of them down in the books of accounts
belonging to regular customers.
There were very few pre-packaged items in those days and so Pop would
usually head out the back of the building where he was kept busy weighing
potatoes, sugar, tea, rice, tapioca, barley, split peas, salt, washing
soda, flour, sultanas, currants, raisins and dates into one-pound, three
pound and six-pound bags. He was an integral part of 20 College Hill and
when he had finished weighing a weekly supply of the bulk items, he would
scrub out the back room before moving into the shop itself after the doors
had closed at nine on the Friday evening.
As soon as I entered the shop I would edge my way behind the counter until
I reached my special seat near the shop window - an empty wooden apple
case. There I would sit, white sandals dangling above the wooden floor
while I studied the customers.
One of the first to come in on a Friday night was usually Mrs Goodwin, a
vivacious redhead. She would sweep through the shop, stopping to fill her
basket with tins of fruit and packets of biscuits. "Merci, monsieur,
merci!" she would call to dad as she went out. Her schoolgirl French
sounded very glamorous to me.
The next customers were likely to be Suzi and Ivan, fresh from the six
oíclock swill at the Rob Roy, and both in very high spirits. More often
than not, Suzi would clasp her eyes on Pop's wiry figure as he emerged from
the back room. In no time at all, she would have him bailed up in the
corner and would be kissing him effusively while Ivan cheered her on. Pop,
who was ticklish, would collapse in a screaming heap.
While Pop was still doubled up with laughter, Harry, the debonair Canadian
who lived further up the street, would saunter in full of good cheer,
another regular, also straight from the pub. "Hello, my dar-r-ling," he
would say to Mum in his soft North American accent.
By this time, Pop would have managed to escape, and Suzi and Ivan, having
bought their groceries, would be standing on the footpath clutching at each
other and staggering on to the kerb as the 6.30 p.m. traffic roared by.
When dad saw them he would leave a queue of customers and rush outside, to
escort them across College Hill.
He would barely be back again when Mrs Norris from the dairy next door
would rush in, panicking because she'd run out of change. While Mum helped
her out, old Mrs Pudney would wander in and settle herself down on the
chair in front of the counter for a short chat. She was a lovely, motherly
old lady with a mane of white hair wound into a compact bun. Always full of
homilies and home-made remedies, she attributed her thick hair to the
constant use of Sunlight soap. She scorned shampoos and other such
new-fangled concoctions.
But there would only be time for a brief conversation before the shop was
crowded with people who had finished their evening meal and had come to
stock up on groceries and supplies for the weekend.
In the course of an evening, the place would be crammed with Pakeha, Maori,
Cook islanders, Tongans, Niue Islanders, Fijians, Samoans, Canadians,
newly-arrived Scottish and English immigrants and the occasional Greek and
Yugoslav.
Most of all I liked to watch the Island women in their bright western
clothes, often with a fading hibiscus behind one ear, as they carefully
selected coconuts, taro and potatoes.
The Indian women who came to buy rice, curry powder and spices were
reserved and shy and almost always traditionally dressed in pink, purple or
saffron saris. They didn't linger to laugh and joke with us.
The rich smell of freshly-cut bacon and ham, combined with the aroma of
newly-ground coffee beans made me feel hungry and I was pleased when I
heard the whistle from the Zip in the back room, a sound which signalled
our evening tea-break. As a treat, I was allowed to choose a bottle of soft
drink from the crates stored in the back room. My other treat was to choose
a small bag of 'pick and mix' sweets. Dad sat by the open doorway so that
he could jump up to serve anyone who came in. The rest of us sat on old
wooden round-backed chairs around a battered table, eating broken biscuits
Dad couldn't sell in the shop.
Behind the table (which Mum kept covered with a white plastic table cloth)
was a cast-iron fireplace. The kauri wallboards were so hard it was
virtually impossible to hammer nails into them, and so Dad and Pop gave up
trying to erect conventional shelving and instead used empty packing cases
stacked one on top of the other to store cans of spaghetti, baked beans and
tinned fruit.
The original bathroom and laundry was situated in an annex at the rear of
the kitchen. There Dad had both laundry tubs piled high with potatoes and
onions ready for Pop or the grocery boys to weigh up. Coconuts filled the
porcelain bath. I loved shaking them hard and listening to the milk
sloshing inside them.
Whenever I wanted to use the toilet I had to push open the sagging back
door and step out into the fresh night air. As I walked across the backyard
towards the stables and the toilet, delicious smells of curried sausages,
stew and boiled potatoes wafted across from next door where Brian Washer
cooked the food for his pie-cart, the White Lady.
It was dark inside the toilet and I had to leave the door ajar. Shafts of
light from the moon and the stars illuminated intricate patterns of borer
and I could just make out the calendar on the wall, a bevy of voluptuous,
half-naked women, all pouting in the Marilyn Munroe tradition.
I was fascinated by the old stables, although I didn't like to linger there
at night. It was in the stables that Pop bottled kerosene, methylated
spirits and turps. During the winter he would spend hours there weighing
carbonettes into sacks, a once-white towel wrapped around his head for
protection against the sooty dust.
When I grew tired of watching the passing parade through the shop I would
wander up the kauri staircase to the rooms above. At the top of the
staircase was a landing area with a small corridor (stacked with tins of
biscuits) leading to three rooms that had originally been bedrooms. In
these rooms floral wallpaper on a scrim backing waved gently in the wind
and the frieze near the ceiling was stained with water marks where the roof
had leaked before Dad and Pop had replaced it with sheets of iron.
Each room crammed full of stock was a gourmand's delight - an endless
supply of canned peaches, pears, pineapple, guavas, strawberry, raspberry,
blackberry and apricot jam. Dad instructed his grocery boys to stack the
tins around the edge of each room in case they should prove too heavy for
the sagging floorboards in the middle.
In the far room was a fully-rigged model of a sailing ship, handcrafted by
my father's grandfather. It lay there for years waiting for Dad to have a
son. I thought it the most beautiful and intricate piece of woodwork I'd
seen and spent many hours admiring the shape of the hull, the symmetry of
the sails and the delicate lattice of the rigging. True to the conditioning
of the era, I never thought to ask to take it home so I could sail and play
with it. When I was eleven, my mother had another daughter and the ship was
given away.
Each Monday morning when my father turned the huge key in the lock on the
front door, he could never predict what the week would hold. It could, and
often did, involve anything from a drunken brawl outside the shop to an
imminent birth inside. Almost every week at least one customer would come
into the shop doubled up with labour pains, to wait in the back room for
Dad or one of the grocery boys to ring for a taxi to deliver her to St
Helen's. No baby was ever actually born in the back room, but there were
many times when a birth was only narrowly avoided by the prompt arrival of
a cab outside.
During the course of the week there would be many drunken arguments and
effusive drunken greetings inside the shop. Dad usually managed to sort out
any disagreements, but when Mary Benson pushed her way to the front of the
queue, no one dared to dissent. She was the terror of the Rob Roy who could
clean up any two men at once. Mary was always served first. "I know you,
you bugger," she would growl at my father through clenched teeth. "You're
scared of me, aren't you?"
"Yes, Mary, I am," he admitted.
Another who demanded to be served ahead of everyone else was Tracey
Greenwood who lived with his father in Hargreaves Street and who was a
well-known character around Freeman's Bay. He spent most of his time
wandering the streets, playing an imaginary tenor horn. It always made
Tracey's day when there was no one waiting to be served and he and Dad
could have an impromptu concert in the back room, parading around in a
circle playing their invisible instruments. Pop would stop weighing onions
in the laundry and come through to grin and cheer them on.
No week was complete a range of samples of local home brew being brought in
for Dad to taste. A small group of connoisseurs would gather out in the
back room each holding their glass up to the watery sunlight filtering
through the dirty sash window. The brews ranged in hue from pale lime to a
thick black treacle. Many a glass sent a spine-wrenching shiver down dad's
back, but he still managed to pronounce each a superb brew.
Many of the Polynesians, newly-arrived in New Zealand, experienced
difficulty with the jargon and format of the social security forms and so,
almost every week, there would be a new arrival seeking Dad's help with the
paperwork.
Dad was also involved in budgeting problems. Most of the wage earners in
the area were on low incomes and for more than a few a large portion of
what they earned went on racing and beer, leaving insufficient for fuel and
groceries. To help, Dad would hold people's child allowance books as
security against the groceries booked up over the fortnight. When the
fortnight was up, he cashed the child allowance books to balance his
accounts, and the credit system would begin all over again. Although the
system was deemed slightly illegal by the Social Welfare Department, it was
the only way many families in the area managed to have enough to eat. As a
compulsory budgeting measure it worked quite well.
However, as in every system of credit there were always bad debtors who
either could not, or would not, pay and so every week dad was forced to go
out on to the streets with the unpleasant task of collecting debt ahead of
him. If he thought the job might get nasty, he took his friend Len Stott
with him for protection.
It was unnerving to arrive at an old villa, knock on the front door and, as
it was opened, see a line of heads peering from the doorways off the long
central corridor. As soon as Dad was identified every doorway would slam
shut. Dad and Len would then go knocking from doorway to doorway until they
found the bad debtor and elicited promises of payment.
Somehow the emotional lives of the customers had a way of overflowing into
the ebb and flow of the business in the shop and Dad would find himself
involved in a domestic dispute. A wailing woman would seek protection from
an irate, drunken partner, and there would be more than a few times when he
and some other man had to wrestle a knife or an axe off a jealous husband
or a demoniacal lover.
But there was one central tenet everyone held in common - a fierce loyalty
to Freeman's Bay and those who lived there. A fundamental kindness and
goodness lay beneath their behaviour. It was always a caring and sharing
community. No child was ever abandoned. If a mother couldn't cope with her
brood there was always an aunt, grandmother or cousin who would look after
any number of children until the mother felt well enough to cope once
more.
This code of loyalty was all-embracing and extended to the prostitutes who
lived in a two-storied house in Hargreaves Street. Once, when detectives
raided the house, nearby residents moved quickly to protect the girls. When
the detectives emerged from the house they found that their car wheels had
disappeared and the patrol car was sitting on four apple cases.
Over the years Dad had a range of grocery and messenger boys working for
him. Wati Samuels, one of the first, only narrowly avoided getting a
speeding ticket when a traffic officer clocked him speeding down College
Hill at 45 m.p.h. on an overloaded delivery bike.
Dad and Wati would scrub the shop out on a Saturday morning and once Wati
laid out a fire in the old fireplace in the back room and cooked a mutton
bird for Dad to try.
Ron Hunt and Claude Bradfield were Freeman's Bay boys who worked at the
shop until they were both in their early twenties. Morris Mutton from
Northcote worked with Mum and Dad from 1956 to 1959. He soon discovered
that although Northcote and Ponsonby were only physically separated by a
few miles, the two were miles apart when as a blushing fifteen year old, he
delivered groceries to the brothel in Hargreaves Street and to broken-down
houses where he found women breast-feeding their babies with an abandon
seldom seen in Northcote. He called taxis for women in advanced stages of
labour and he served customers who were only partially dressed, shopping on
their way home with an already ardent lover.
My favourite was Tilly Mathewson who worked part-time when I was sixteen or
seventeen. Tilly was a delightful person, a husky blonde who loved
classical music, endless discussions on philosophy and religion and who,
because she refused to wear a watch, claimed to be timeless.
Each year the Health Department inspected the building at 20 College Hill
and issued a new licence. Although the shop never could meet all the
regulations, it seemed to be recognised by the authorities that the old
place performed a much-needed service in the local community and Dad always
got his new licence. But, by the late 1960s, the area was beginning to
change. A supermarket up at Three Lamps on Ponsonby Road signified a new
transition in the grocery trade.
On an overcast morning in 1969, dad received notification from the Health
Department that the building no longer conformed to standards and that the
shop must be closed down. This was followed by a demolition order on the
building itself. There was no room for argument any longer.
Fortunately. dad found another shop to rent, just around the corner from
College Hill in Ireland Street. We loaded the white Austin van and trailer
with the remaining stock and moved around the corner to Ireland Street with
Pop spread-eagled over the groceries to prevent anything falling on to the
ground.
At the end of a busy day Dad locked the doors of the Ireland Street shop
and drove down the street to 20 College Hill. As the sun sank, suffusing
the rubble in a golden glow, he stopped the van and climbed out. Slowly, he
clambered over the smashed wood, iron and fragments of broken glass,
reflecting on the two and a half decades he had spent in the building, a
solitary figure against the darkening skyline.
"The six o'clock swill" referred to the fast drinking of beer in the
hotels between 5 o'clock when most men finished work until 6 o'clock when
the bars were forced to close by law. Few women went into the bars of
hotels at that time.
This story was first published in "Metro", September 1987 and has been
republished twice in "New Zealand Memories" since then.
