Stories for our grandchildren

Many people found the 11-week total lockdown in early 2020 a stressful period. But we didn’t. Once we’d sorted supermarket home deliveries, re-organised our deepfreeze and got into the habit of long walks every day, it was wonderful to be free of the routine pressures and commitments of ordinary life. We were able to do things we’d put off for a long time. For instance, I did some home improvements using wood I’d stockpiled, and each evening we wrote a brief family story for our grandchildren. Here are some of those stories.

Boats on the beach

Lots of people in Waikanae have boats, and fishing from a boat is a popular pastime. But getting a boat into the water and then out again afterwards is quite a performance. We often pass them when we go for a walk on the beach, and when there is any surf it can be interesting and dramatic operation. The boats are brought to the beach on their trailer, and down the ramp in the sand dunes at the Boating Club.

Unless the owner has a big four-wheel drive truck, they then have to get a Boating Club tractor to back the trailer into the sea. There are two tractors, one called “Harry” and the other one called “Wilf”.

Each boat is pushed off the trailer backwards into the water. Then it has to be turned around so that it’s facing out to sea. And that’s the tricky bit, because when the boat has been turned around halfway it is side-on to the waves, which try to push it back onto the beach and even roll it over. Some days it’s impossible to launch a boat successfully, and on other days there can be a lot of shouting and pushing and pulling and people running to help. Everyone gets rather wet.

On calm days the tractors can be very busy. I’ve seen days when there were eight or nine boats at a time waiting to be put into the sea or pulled back onto their trailers.

Smells

Do remember smells? I mean, when you smell something, do you remember where you smelled it before? I often do. Here are four examples that are all plants.

• At the river estuary in Waikanae there’s some tauhinu (cassinia) growing. It’s a nothing-looking grey-green shrub, but if you brush against it has quite an unusual sharpish sort of smell. It’s a smell that reminds me of when I was a teenager and I decided to walk around the Wellington south coast. I took some food and a sleeping bag and I walked from Owhiro Bay to Red Rocks. That night I slept in an old military lookout above Sinclair Head, and the next day I walked inland up the valley where there was still old gold mining machinery, and from there all the way to Makara, where I got a lift to Karori and caught the bus home. There were lots of tauhinu bushes growing around the coast, and I always remember that big adventure whenever I smell them.

• One summer holidays my family stayed in a house in Auckland, and there was a sort of unusual smell I couldn’t identify. It wasn’t a sweet smell or a perfume smell. In the end I found it was from a flower arrangement that had flax flowers in it. I didn’t know flax flowers had a smell. Now we have lots of flax plants in our garden, and we have tui who like the nectar they can get from the flowers. When I smell the flowers it reminds me of Auckland and the holiday that I had there, because that was the time I learned to drive.

• Do you know what a tomato smells like? Not the red part. That doesn’t really smell at all. The part that that smells nice is the green part — the leaves and stems. I think that tomato plants growing in a garden have a wonderful, delicious smell. If you grow your own tomatoes, go and sniff the leaves and see if you like the smell. If you buy tomatoes in the supermarket, get the ones that still have a bit of green stuff attached (it’s called the calyx). I think those ones taste better anyway.

• When I was studying at the university, I had to get there by puffing my way up a very steep and narrow track that passed by the Mount Street Cemetery. The cemetery was not very well looked after, and there was always a lot of wild fennel growing there. It had a very strong smell, a sort of vaguely curry smell. These days people often use fennel bulbs in cooking or in salads. I never have, because I think it would remind me too much of when I was running late for lectures or (even worse) for exams.

Jimmy Baxter

I had some really good teachers at school, and one of the best was Frank McKay. He was my English teacher in Form 6, and he introduced us to some great writing. He later became a professor at the university.

He was a great friend of the famous poet, James K Baxter, and later wrote a book about him. While we were at school, Jimmy was working as a postman, because he wasn’t famous yet. Twice, he came to our English class. He talked about writing poetry, he answered our questions, and he read some of his poems.

That was fantastic. I hadn’t realised until then how important it was to hear the poems, not just read them. And Jimmy read them beautifully. He had a deep slow voice, and the best way to describe it was that he had a lugubrious voice. Listen to that word: LOOGOOBRIOUS. It sounded like that. Wonderful.

When I read poetry now, I don’t just skim through it, I read every word slowly in my mind. That way I can hear the sounds that the poet would have said when he was writing it. At school I tried writing poetry myself, and had a poem published in the school magazine.

Flying

Up until the time we flew to Australia in the 1970s, I had flown in a plane only twice.

A DC-3 of the National Airways Corporation (NAC)

The first time was when I was very young (about 5). It was in the 1940s, and my mum and I went to Auckland to stay with my dad, who was working on a big Army construction project there. We flew on a DC-3 passenger plane that not long before had been an Air Force transport plane. It was mostly silver on the outside, but inside there was still a lot of Air Force green paint. We climbed up the ladder to get on board, and then had to walk uphill to get to our seats.

There were two nuns in seats in front of us, and they made a fuss of me because I was a cute little boy. Mum gave me some chewing gum so that my ears wouldn’t ‘pop’. I didn’t know what that meant, so I swallowed it. Then I got worried because I thought it would stick my insides together. We sat by the wing, and during the flight I got bored and wanted to go out on the wing to play. Mum told me I couldn’t, which was disappointing.

The next time I flew was when I was in the Air Training Corps at school, and stayed for a week at Ohakea Air Force Base. Us cadets were given a ride in a Bristol Freighter. It was very noisy, but it was fun because there was a window in the nose, and if you lay on your stomach you could watch the ground go by and it felt like being a bird. The pilot had to climb down the ladder from the cockpit and tell us to stop running around, because it was making the nose of the plane go up and down.

Library books

The first book my mum helped me get from the library was about an elephant named Dumbo. His ears were so big he could fly. That’s all I can remember about that book, except that with a bit of help I was able to read it by myself.

The Wellington Public Library was in the middle of the city, on Mercer Street, and I was soon able to go there by myself. I went a lot. It was a big concrete building with polished lino floors. If it weren’t for all the books it would probably have echoed inside. It still did a bit. These days it’s an art gallery, and Mercer Street has become Civic Square.

I would go in the front door and turn right to go to the place where all the children’s books were. My favourite part was where the “Science Fiction” books were kept. Science Fiction stories are about thing that aren’t real. But instead of being about magic, they’re about things that might one day actually be real. I liked the books that weren’t one long story, but were a collection of different short stories.

I used to get a little bit of pocket money, and the library would sometimes sell books that were old and nearly worn out. They were very cheap, and I was able to buy some. I liked adventure stories, and the best books I got were about six children in the lake district of England who sailed boats on the lake and pretended to be pirates. There were books about things to do as well, and I bought one that was all about how to make wooden models of real aeroplanes. Looking at the pictures I got very good at telling one plane from another.

I liked reading books, and sometimes I would read by the light of a torch under the bed clothes. My Mum thought I was asleep.

Viruses

Right now, everyone’s a bit scared of catching the COVID virus and getting sick because they don’t have any immunity to it. That’s why you’re keeping away from other people — some of them might have caught it and they could pass it on to you without knowing.

This isn’t the first time there have been sicknesses like that. In my first few years at school, there was an epidemic of polio. Polio was a virus that made your muscles stop working, but nobody knew what a virus was in those days and they didn’t know how to treat it. Some people thought that camphor might be able to keep polio away. Camphor is a smelly stuff that is used to keep insects away. People put camphor in the drawers where they keep their clothes, to stop moths eating holes in jerseys and socks (moths like wool). So my mum made a little cloth bag full of camphor for me to wear around my neck. I didn’t feel silly, because other mums did the same thing and lots of kids wore camphor bags. Of course it wouldn’t really work, because a virus isn’t the same as an insect, but nobody knew that then. It was nice of Mum to try and protect me though.

The best way to get immunity to a virus is to have a vaccine. There was no vaccine for polio until I was at secondary school. I was surprised when I got it, because it wasn’t an injection, it was a drink in a little paper cup, and it tasted like cherries.

There was another vaccination that we got as well at school, which was to protect us against tuberculosis (a lung disease). That one was an injection, into our arm. It left a scar, which would show that I’d been vaccinated. There’s still a scar on my left arm, but it’s very faint now and hard to see. I’d have to show you where it is.

These days everyone gets vaccinated when they’re very young, to give them immunity against common diseases. We didn’t have those vaccinations when I was young, so I caught chicken pox, measles, and mumps. Those are all caused by viruses and every one of them made me feel sick and miserable. When I had chicken pox and measles I got covered in spots, and when I had mumps it made my face swell up. But by getting sick and then getting better again, my body had enough antibodies to give me immunity. I wish I could have had a vaccination instead though.

Making photographs

Hobbies are things you get very keen on and do a lot if you can, but you do them not because you have to but because you like doing them. I’ve always had two main hobbies — taking photographs, and making models. This story is about photographs, so I’ll put in a few of my first photos.

When I was at primary school I was given a camera. It was a Kodak Box Brownie, and it looked like a little box. The film came in rolls that you put into the camera. The film had a paper backing to protect it and you had to be careful not to let any light get on the film. You could take twelve photographs and then the film had to be taken to a chemist shop and sent away to be developed.

I sometimes took photographs when we went on holidays. Some of the photos made people embarrassed and I was told to get rid of them (I didn’t) and some turned out to be quite good. Some were awful, but I couldn’t tell until I got the prints from the chemist shop.

This is a model battleship I made with Meccano. That funny bit on the left that spoils the picture is where some light got onto the film.

This is one that Mum didn’t like. Susie didn’t either.

This is a better one that Mum liked.

Shoes

Not so long ago, shoes used to be made of nothing but real leather.

Except sandshoes, which are canvas on top with rubber soles. These were great to wear in summer, because you didn’t have to wear socks with them and it didn’t matter if they got wet. And you didn’t have to polish them.

And of course gumboots. You can just slip gumboots on or kick them off without having to fiddle with laces and knots. You could go anywhere with gumboots. Except climb a tree. Or maybe run fast.

Sandals had straps instead of laces, but they were leather too. And young kids’ shoes had straps because little children can’t tie knots. (Can you?) Since shoes were expensive, you had to be sure they fitted right. We got shoes at Hannah’s in Cuba Street (their factory was close by in Egmont Street). The shop was fun for me because to see whether the shoes had enough room in them for growing toes, you put your feet under an x-ray machine and watched the screen as you wriggled your toes. You don’t see that sort of machine in a shoe shop any more.

Leather wears down quite quickly, so you’d have to take the shoes to the bootmaker to have a new sole or a new heel put on. The bootmaker near us was on the corner of Cuba Street and Arthur Street. He was a big Indian man called Dale*, and he was very nice. He let me watch as he used his big stitching and grinding machines, and he cut the leather to shape with short sharp knife. He must have been quite strong.

At home there were two pairs of clogs (my dad was from Yorkshire). Both pairs had leather tops and wooden soles, but one had soles that were hinged in the middle. They were comfortable, and I used to wear them sometimes when I was mowing the lawn. For the steep part of the lawn I would wear running shoes that had sharp steel spikes that stopped me slipping.

When I started at university, I bought a pair of ripple-sole shoes. They were much more comfortable than school shoes because they had thick rubber soles, but when I walked on a polished floor they made a loud brrrrp noise, like an octopus pulling up the suckers on its tentacles. Librarians would glare at me and go “Shh!”

I wear down one side of the heels on my shoes (I must walk a bit funny), but these day instead of having them fixed, I get a new pair of shoes. I feel good in new shoes. I feel like I’m standing taller and straighter and I can walk smarter.

* I’m not sure how to spell that.

My ‘trolley’

In the early 1950s, when I was about 11 or 12, I made a ‘trolley’. It was sort of a local craze, and a lot of my friends made one as well. Nobody knew who made the first one, but they were all very similar. They were just made out of a few bits of scrap wood and a few nails and stuff. There was no way of finding wheels, so we used three big ball bearings as wheels. The ball bearings made a lot of noise, and because you sat very close to the ground it seemed like you were going very, very fast. But actually you could probably run just as fast. Unless you were on a really steep hill. It was very scary then.

My trolley was made of one biggish board to sit on, a narrow piece of wood across the back with a ball bearing at each end, and a swivelling wooden bar at the front to put your feet on and steer it. Underneath this steering bar were two blocks of wood with the front ball bearing between them. There was a rope tied at each end of the steering bar to hold on to and to pull the trolley by. That’s all there was to it.

The really hard part was getting the ball bearings: one big one which would be the front wheel and two smaller ones for the back wheels. They were from old car engines or car wheels, and to get them you either had to know a friendly car mechanic who was throwing some out, or you swapped with a boy who had got some. Swapping is how I got mine — I can’t remember what I traded them for, probably some comics or a boomerang I had made out of plywood. My wood was from packing cases we had for firewood. I cut the wood with my grandfather’s saw, and nailed everything together, except the steering bar was held on by a bolt and nut.

I used to wait until there was not much traffic, then start my run at the top of the steep ramp leading from Hankey Street (where I lived) down to Hopper Street. At the bottom I had to swerve across to the other side of Hopper Street because there used to be three side roads crossing the footpath on the side where the ramp is. On the other side there were no side roads and a kerb crossing where I could get back up on the footpath. If I had enough speed up I could roar all the way to the dairy at the bottom. The trick was that I had to cross the road by going straight across or else the wheels would get stuck in the tramlines.

I was very lucky that there were never any cars coming when I crossed the road, because I had absolutely no way of stopping or even slowing down. It’s a good thing that none of the grown-ups knew what I was doing or else I would have been told it was dangerous and I wouldn’t be allowed to do it any more.

Boys’ games

Most of the games I played with other children when I was a little boy were just running about or hiding or exploring. Not only on our property but all around the neighbourhood. Other kids’ places, or the park near us, or the council reserve with lots of trees and bushes where the steep steps led to the park.

The first card game I learned from mum was Patience, and I still play that a lot on the computer (where it’s called ‘Solitaire’). When I got older and could stay up later at night, I joined the grownups playing Canasta, and I’m still a good player.

At primary school we played marbles in the playground. Everyone had a bag of marbles. The boys who played put their marble inside a chalk circle, and everyone took turns. You flicked a marble out of your hand with your thumb, and if you knocked someone else’s marble out of the ring you got to keep it. Most marbles were just balls of stripey coloured glass, but there were two other types, aggies and glassies. The aggies were polished balls of agate, which is a hard rock and very sought after, and the glassies were a pale green transparent glass ball that long ago used to be in the necks of old-fashioned fizzy-drink bottles to seal them. They were very rare.

All through school I played rugby. I was always a forward, either a lock or a prop (ask your dad). I was very very bad at it, and so were most of the other boys in my team. We never won any games. There were two reasons I was bad at it. One was I hated running about in muddy fields in the cold and wet. It just wasn’t fun. And the other was that I didn’t know the rules. Everyone thought I knew the rules, and didn’t explain anything, and when I asked questions I didn’t understand the answers. But I played every Saturday in winter, and had to travel by bike or tram or train long distances to get to the right places. And I had to walk through the Mount Victoria tunnel to get to practice during the week. My jersey in the primary school team was green and white stripes, and at secondary school I wore blue and white stripes.

I never played cricket. Cricket is played in summer and the long school holidays are in summer, so there wasn’t much chance anyway.

Doing the shopping

Once upon a time, nobody had fridges and there weren’t any supermarkets. You had to buy meat every day or it would go off. You kept it in a meat safe, which was a kitchen cupboard that had a grill to keep the cupboard cool by letting in fresh air from the outside. And we had big bins to put stuff like flour in.

The verandah of the grocer‘s shop (on the left) was also the shelter for the tram stop

I had the job of doing the shopping. I’d take the black leather shopping bag and a purse with money in it and go to the bottom part of Hankey Street where there were two shops, the butcher and the grocer. There is a very long flight of steps down from our middle part of Hankey Street, with hand rails made of shiny metal pipe. It was shiny because it was polished by the seats of little boys’ pants. I would sit sideways on the handrail and slide down very fast. The trick was to sit on it facing forwards and both legs tucked under on the same side. I never fell off. I didn’t have so many accidents in those days.

I would go first to the butcher shop, which was run by Mr & Mrs Walker. Mr Walker’s name was Horatio Nelson Walker, which I thought was really grand, but his wife just called him Nelson. There was sawdust on the floor of the shop to stop people slipping, and a big chopping block where Mr Walker cut up the meat you wanted. I would ask for something like mutton chops or a pound and a half of chuck steak or skirt steak or mince or whatever was needed for dinner that day or the next day. I’d also get scraps of meat for Tim the dog. The fun part was when Mr Walker was doing something interesting, like making sausages in a long string or brining corned beef with a pump and a big hollow needle. I would hang around and watch him, and he would explain what he was doing.

Then I would go to the grocery shop. It was run by Mr & Mrs Burley. In their shop everything was in bins or drawers or shelves behind the counter, and there was a pan above the counter for weighing stuff. You asked for what you wanted, like two pounds of sugar, and it would be scooped into the pan, and then poured into a paper bag. I liked watching while they held the bag by the top corners then whirled it around to twist the top shut. Nobody ever spilled any, even though it could be quite heavy.

The grocery shop smelled nice because there were spices and fresh bread. But it didn’t have lollies like a dairy. Every so often we would need more than I could carry, so Mr Burley would put all the things into a cardboard carton and Graham the delivery boy would bring it to our house later. He was older than me and stronger. I liked the way he whistled tunes, so I taught myself to whistle too.

I never had to carry heavy bottles of milk home, because the milkman delivered bottles of milk to us every day. I just had to go to the milkbox at our gate and get it, as I also did with the mail and the newspaper. The cream would rise to the top of the milk bottle, and I liked to be first to open the bottle so that I could pour the cream on my porridge in the morning.

We grew a lot of vegetables in our garden, but for other vegetables and for fruit we had to go down to Cuba Street, where there were two greengrocer shops, Kowk’s and Wong-She’s. We usually went to the shop run by the Wong-She family because it was closest. They were very friendly, and liked to talk to Mum about how well their children were doing.

It was good to help my family by doing errands like this, and I was proud that my Mum trusted me. For doing it I was sometimes given a small amount of pocket money. I spent it mostly on lollies or icecreams and comics.

Mice

You know that I had a dog called Tim. What you don’t know is that I had other pets as well. They were white mice.

There was a pet shop in Cuba Street, and I often used to look in the window. I noticed that the smallest pets were also the cheapest, so somehow or other I managed to buy a pair of mice. I loved their cute little pink noses and the way they used their front paws to eat as if they were hands.

I didn’t have anything for them to live in, so I put them in a big glass biscuit jar with newspaper on the bottom. Then I told my Mum. She wasn’t upset at all, but she was worried about what the others in the family would think. In the end I was told they had to stay in the laundry under the house. That was all right, and I used to play with them there — I even let them sail on my model boat in the tub.

They didn’t have names. Of course I was going to give them names, but I couldn’t tell them apart. They both looked exactly the same, so I wouldn’t have known which one was which. So I just said “Hello little mice” to them, and they didn’t seem to mind. As long as I fed them. I had a paper bag full of “RAT&MICE FOOD”, which was little pellets that they picked up in their paws/hands and nibbled delicately at. They liked gnawing at stuff hard stuff like that. And they liked fruit and vegie scraps as well. The more they ate, the more often I had to change their newspaper (because it smelled of mouse poo and wee). Every night they would tear some of the paper into strips to make a nest to sleep in.

Then, one night, they disappeared. I thought that mice couldn’t climb up glass and get out. I think that what I forgot is that if they really want to they can jump surprisingly high. We never saw them again.

Mum saw that I was upset, so she took me back to the pet shop and we got another pair of mice, and a cage to keep them in. They still had to stay in the laundry though. This worked fine for about a year. And then I got in trouble.

I used to take my mice on outings. They stayed quiet in my pocket most of the time, but I can remember one time in the grocery shop when I wanted to get some money out of my pocket and I put the mice on the counter. That was a mistake. I was ordered out of the shop, and Mum was told about it when she was next in the shop. She got upset this time.

So, what happened is that I had to give the mice to be pets in my class at school. They were in the cage at the front of the room, and I could see them every day but not take them home.

And Mum said that the laundry smelled a lot nicer (mice do a lot of poos).

Going backwards

About three-quarters of way up the driveway

After I learned to drive, there was a problem I had to solve before I could take the family car (a Morris Oxford) out for a practice. And that was our driveway. Our long, narrow driveway.

It was the only way to get to the house, and there was nowhere to turn when you had driven up the 70-odd metres. To take the car out, I had to drive backwards very accurately, especially where there was a dip in the middle. At that point there was a big drop on one side. One of my uncles had to get a tow truck to get him back on track after wandering a bit there. Other people had trouble too. A few times trucks came up the drive to make a delivery and then had to make many attempts to get back to the street. One truck broke our water pipe in the process.

And then there was the time my grandmother opened her door as my mum was backing out. There was a crunch as the door caught on the bank, and a sudden stop. We had to have the car fixed before we could use it again.

Anyway, I got very good at reversing out. I could go backwards very quickly, although I found going around corners pretty difficult, especially on hills. In a straight line I was a champion. Sometimes passengers got rather scared, and I had to slow down, but I never had any sort of accident.

The way I did it was to turn around and put my left arm around the driver‘s seat. Then I could aim the car by looking right through the middle of the back window. For me, it was much better than using the rear-view mirrors (which were rather tiny ones). My mum taught me how to do it.

And, I can still do it. My son‘s place in Hamilton is the third house down a long narrow driveway. He drives slowly and carefully using his mirrors. His wife has to turn her car before she can get out. I just turn myself around in the seat and take aim. So far I haven‘t hit the letterboxes at the end. It shows that when you learn something, and practise it often enough, you can remember it years later.

The dental clinic

At school, both primary and intermediate, I would have an appointment with the dental nurse at least twice a year. That meant that about once a term I would be allowed out of class to go to the Dental Clinic for the nurse to look at my teeth.

She would look in my mouth, and when she saw a hole in one of my teeth she would clean it out with a drill and fill it up. The stuff she filled the hole up with is called amalgam. It‘s made by mixing mercury with other stuff and it sets really hard. It looks black, and I‘ve still got a lot in my teeth.

When I was at primary school the clinic that I went to was quite close, in a big old wooden building. That building now called Premier House, and it‘s where the Prime Minister lives when she‘s in Wellington. The nurse there in my day had very old equipment. The drill she used was one she had to pedal with her foot, like the way a spinning wheel is turned.

There was a big waiting room on the ground floor, with comics to read, but I thought they were a bit dumb

At intermediate the nearest clinic was quite a distance away, and we got half a day off school to go there. It was a huge concrete building with rows and rows of dental nurses — about 50 of them. Each chair had a number that lit up so you’d know which chair to go to. The nurses had electric drills, and little basins you could spit into. Most schools around the country had their own clinic and their own nurse, but Wellington was where the nurses were trained, so that‘s where we went.

Sometimes I would take a long way round to walk from school. Such as by way of Clyde Quay wharf, if I had my fishing line with me. One time the nurse asked me what was in the little bag I had with me, so I showed her the dead fish that I‘d caught. She screamed, and I got sent back to school.

About once a year a dental nurse would come to our school and tell us a how to brush our teeth and what foods to eat (apples but no lollies). She often had lots of the little cotton pads that they put in your mouth, and would make little dolls with them. If we asked very nicely sometimes she would even give us some mercury. It‘s fascinating stuff because it‘s a metal but it‘s liquid and it‘s heavy. We‘d play with the silver-looking blob until we lost it, usually between the floorboards. You wouldn‘t be allowed to do that these days, because it‘s really quite poisonous when it‘s not in an amalgam.

Lots of kids hated having their teeth done because they said it hurt so much. Well, I suppose it did really, but I didn‘t mind. It was only for a short time, so I just put up with it.

Getting to school

A tram like the one I travelled on to get to primary school

Here‘s how I used to get to school when I was young.

When I first started school, my Mum would give me the fare for the tram, and I would travel in it to the Railway Station, which was on the other side of Wellington. From there I would walk up the hill to the top of Guildford Terrace (which was very steep) where St Mary‘s College was.

I remember two things from that walk from the station. If I walked up through the grounds of Parliament, there were some big foundations of a building that been started (before the war) and never finished. They were full of water, and somebody had put some fish in them. We called them the Goldfish Ponds. They later became Broadcasting House. And in Hill Street where the Cathedral is now there was a factory. Sometimes they had the door open and I could watch men pouring molten metal into moulds. I don‘t know what they were making.

I went to the Marist Brothers intermediate school in Newtown. It was in King Street, but the back entrance in Tasman Street was nearest. From home I would walk up and along Wallace Street then through to Tasman Street. On Wallace Street there was a dairy that I went into one day, and discovered the Eagle comic. I bought a copy every week for a long time after that. It was so much better than American superhero comics or Walt Disney. I like the stories in the serials and the way it was drawn so well.

On Tasman Street there was also a biscuit factory. It was a bit in the wrong direction, but very occasionally there would be a sign that said “Broken biscuits — free” and you could take a bag of them to share.

My secondary school, St Patrick‘s College, was quite close, and I had a bicycle by then. Sometimes I would walk and sometimes I would bike to school. On Hopper Street near us there was a two-story brick building that was a pickle factory. I loved to go past it because the smells were wonderful. People live there now, but I bet it still smells of mango chutney.

Do you see the little roller being dragged along behind the back wheel? That was to stop the cart running back down the hill if the horse got tired. People would come out with buckets to collect horse poo to put on their garden.

Every morning I went to school at the time that milkmen were finishing their rounds and going back to the depot near our school. The milkmen didn‘t have to drive because their horses knew the way and were eager to get back to the depot and have breakfast. Having a horse was so much easier because the milkman didn‘t have to keep getting in and out of a truck, he just told the horse to move on a bit, and it did. The road up to our house was too steep though, and our milk was delivered by truck, fresh and cold and just in time for putting on porridge or Weetbix.