Wood is Good

Hope you had a nice Easter. Mine was lovely.  Three separate family dinners, and I (we actually – Johan did the heavy work) cleaned and sealed my deck, and bought and planted new pots.  Perfect weather and wonderful people.  Who needs the south of France?

After my parents married my grandmother lived with them.  It wasn’t planned that way.  At least not by them.

She had signed over the lease on her little unit, sold them her furniture lock, stock and barrel, and headed up north to live on the farm with older daughter Maisie.  By then Maisie had settled down and married a far North subsistence farmer and eventually they had two adopted children.  Her natural son, born under murkier circumstances, was out of the picture.  The two women clashed when together  under one roof.

Well they would, of course.  They had not lived together since Maisie was seventeen.  The farmhouse was small and isolated.  It had two bedrooms and no electricity.  There was some indoor plumbing, but the toilet was a long-drop outside.  Cooking on a wood range is fun only up to a point.  Then there was the husband, Big Joe.  Good natured, slow.  And later, the kids – Bubba Joe and Delores, although they cannot be blamed for the initial failure to settle there.  The nearest town of any description was thirty minutes away over poorly metalled roads on the back of a truck.  Grandma came home.

She came home to my newly-wed parents, turfed them out of the only proper bedroom, and proceeded to settle in.  

By the time I was born my parents had bought an ex-State house just around the corner.  Still only two bedrooms, and my grandmother had one of them.   I can remember that house, which I lived in till I was seven, like the back of my hand.

It sat up high above the road on the lower slopes of One Tree Hill.  The two bedrooms and the lounge looked out the front towards South Auckland, but not as we know it now.  You could see Otahuhu in the distance, but the main attraction for me was the huge “Wood is Good” sign on the Forest Products building at Penrose.  The floors were dark-stained pine floor boards, with Axminster carpet bought on credit from Smith & Brown (where the Sheraton / Langham / Cordis sits now) in the lounge.  When Dad built two tiny bedrooms on the back for me and my brothers I had Dior-style models in pink for my wall paper, and he had cowboys and Indians on a blue ground.  Both rooms were freezing  – unlined and cantilevered above the sloping section, with feet chilling lino on the floors.

I had nightmares in that room.  Every night for years, until I learnt to think of the bedcovers as a cave to hide in.  And ear infections that had me awake and screaming night after night until at five I had my adenoids removed in the doctor’s surgery in Campbell Road.  That night I vomited up a bucketful of blood, but afterwards I was pain-free and could eat without nausea.

In the lounge was an old oak dining table and a round-fronted china cabinet.  I used to peer out across the street through venetian blinds that had to be laboriously spring-cleaned annually, and which somehow got into a tangle whenever I went near them.  Against one wall was an old, plush maroon velvet sofa with enormous, curved art deco arms.  Perfect for bouncing on or lying curled up with a pile of Walt Disney comics.  The fire surround was a feature wall, with grooved plywood painted flamenco pink.

Out the back was the kitchen with a built in alcove for the radio (Aunt Daisy in the morning, then The Archers), and a very modern formica and chrome dining set.  We ate there every day except for Sunday evening, when we had a roast dinner followed by peaches and cream at the lounge table.  Although we had a fridge and an Atlas stove, there was also a safe – that is to say a cupboard that had a wire grate at the back cut into the house exterior so that air could circulate and keep the perishable food fresh.  

Between my parents bedroom and the kitchen, at the head of the hall, was the bathroom.  It had a toilet with a varnished wooden seat, a basin and a bath with a shower over.  When I was small there was also a potty with a sort of wooden armchair Dad made me to sit on.  I am told I was toilet-trained before I was one, and I believe this to be true.  But the bathroom was a place of terror to me, because my mother (whose bowels are a lifelong torment to her and to her family) insisted on ‘regularity’; which meant endless hours sitting uselessly on the potty while the more interesting things in life passed me by.

Off the kitchen was the porch and entry to the wash house (laundries were a later invention).  Early in my memory it had a copper and scrubbing board, Sunlight soap and a blue bag for rinsing the whites.  Later there was an agitator washer with a roller mangle on top.  Then there were two cold, grey tubs, usually with washing soaking.   You had to go past the laundry to get down the back steps to the back yard.  But that was a glorious place.  Sunken and set in solid rock with the porcelain mushroom head of the septic tank to sit on, it was filled with sunshine and fruit trees and daisies.  I loved it.

On one side of the house was the trellis gate that our dog, Major, chewed through the one time he was shut in the night before the SPCA came to take him away to be put to rest.  Next to the gate was a wooden door leading to the cave-like area under the house where Dad stored paint and ladders and bits of wood and stuff.  The timber supports were marked with paint stripes where he had cleaned off his brushes, and it smelt of turps and dry earth.  On the other side of the house he built a garage.  The whole section was solid scoria from One Tree Hill, so he and my uncle used dynamite to blast out the building platform and put down a concrete floor.  The garage was fitted with a hoist. When my mother got her driver’s licence he used it to haul out the engine of the little Morris Cowley he bought her so he could re-condition it. 

In those days a father could paint a house, use dynamite, build a garage, and re-build an engine!

He could mix and lay a concrete drive too, and he and my uncles (real and social) built a two-strip concrete drive for every new house anyone we knew moved into.  Paths around the house and to the clothes-lines as well.  I once tested one of those paths for dryness with my little red gumboot (it wasn’t dry!) and got a thrashing for my trouble.  

Then there was the concrete terrace and steps he built to improve the front of the house, which was edged with a flower garden perpetually full of oxalis.  My mother is an enthusiastic but inattentive and untrained gardener.  But the lawn was mowed every weekend, and the edges trimmed, before the car was washed and polished dry with a real chamois.

We even had a white timber rail (not picket) fence that Dad designed and built, and that I promptly appropriated as a balance bar to walk on.  Life was neat and tidy, and everyone had their own bedroom.  My parents went to the movies on Saturday nights, while my grandmother baby-sat me and fed me chocolate.  What could have been more perfect?