[pompeyfan]

Northern Star Voyage 26 Part Eight(Final Part)


I was getting used to my new life. On 13th December I applied for a job as Agriculture Port Service man, but did not get it. I was also looking for farm work, and had a number to ring just outside Auckland. I stayed with John and Sylvia until Boxing Day when I moved into my new digs near the hospital where I worked. Until then I biked to work from Mount Albert (an Auckland suburb a few miles from the hospital to Greenlane, another suburb). My birthday and Christmas was to come both of which will seemed strange in a new country where it was summer. Christmas on the beach did not seem right, although it was not beach weather, the temp on Christmas Day was 67f with showers. I worked at the hospital getting treble time. Had a nice traditional Christmas Dinner when I got home.

The next day I moved into my new digs at Greenlane Road, just down the road from Cornwall Hospital in Cornwall Park. The house has now gone as have the hospital. Later, we moved with same landlady just down the road into Great South Road. I was chucked out for a while having had an argument with a fellow lodger at dinner. He called me yellow, with a few other words in between. Well, I was still fresh from the Isle of Wight a tough former farm worker, not the sort of person to insult, so I flattened him! The landlady was not too impressed chucking me out. A Maori friend at the hospital found a room for me in a house he owned in Copeland Terrace in the City. It was a bit rough, and I only had the room having to eat out. The room was alive with fleas, so covered in flea bites. The rent was $3.20c according to my diary paid on 21st May 1969. I had a car by then, quite an old one but cars were expensive in NZ, even old ones. According to my diary, the diff lock went on it(whatever that was) selling it to Penrose Motors losing $330. I bought and even older car for $80, pictured below. That car, a 1939 Morris 12 took me everywhere, often driving up the Bay of Islands on my days off, but more about that later when I saw the brightest comet seen for many years in 1970.

The landlady decided to take me back fumigating both me and my belongings. Before all that happened, on Monday 30th December 1968, in the evening I found that once a month on NZBC radio in the evening we could listen to Two Way Family Favourites heard at home every Sunday at lunch time, and once a month including New Zealand. Both myself and my sister sent in requests which was played during my time out there. Many years later, I got to know one of the presenters, Sandi Jones very well. On Monday 23rd June 1969. I had a record played, which I requested for my niece Alison who was four on the 27th June. The song was Good Times by Cliff Richard.

Meanwhile I had made contact with Peter Grant and his family who were living in Rotorua. They originated from the Isle of Wight. I visited them for the first time on my weekend off on 7 and 8th June 1969 driving down there. It was the first of many visits including when they moved to Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands.

The week before that, Northern Star was in Auckland. Ray Dyer had brought my snooker cue out. My diary tells me that I got drunk on board with Ray, Ronnie and Bert, the Master of Arms. The day before that I moved back to my old lodgings bitten to pieces by then by fleas.

I had now been in Auckland for 6 months having forgotten about working on farms mainly because the ones I saw were too remote, and not quite the same as I was used to in England. I liked living in Auckland, a large city with everything going on. NZ is as big as the UK, but outside the main cities is a lot of open countryside with sheep as far as the eye can see. Also, to my amazement I liked working at the hospital. By now I had worked in just about every department, and was not put off by any of it. I went down to the docks a lot when all the passenger liners came in, and found P&O had Hospital Attendants. So I looked into it, what was needed. Suddenly, I could see a way into the merchant navy that I failed to join in 1961. So I decided to grab the opportunity offered to me so for the next 18 months I got my head down doing things I would have never dreamed of. Below is a picture of the hospital in Cornwall Park taken from One Tree Hill, demolished around 1978.

Looking through my diary, 21st July was an historic day. I was watching the television with staff and patients on Ward 31 Cornwall Hospital watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon. That same day we had Family Favourites again in the evening on NZBC. Earlier in the same month 7th July 1969 I moved into the hospitals living quarters, now fully established in my new career. Much better than lodgings having my own room, we also had a kitchen and television lounge.

On Friday 12th September 1969 I went on a ski tour of Mount Ruapehu with a friend, but the weather was terrible, the mountain covered in cloud like thick fog, so saw nothing expect the snow at our feet. Rather than going skiing in the terrible conditions we played snooker and drank a lot, too much in fact partying all day and night. It was also the Weekend of the NZ Skiing Championships. On our way back home to Auckland on the Sunday we stopped at Lake Taupo and Thermal Pools at De Brett’s. We also stopped at the Huka Falls in our Trans Tours coach.

After Christmas 1969, I had a two week holiday, so flew to Wellington to spend a week with Bill Rodger and his wife Sue who I met on Northern Star, Bill was in my cabin. I spent the other week in Christchurch when I stayed with Ewart Hobbs and his wife in the house they had bought. I also met Ewart and his wife on Northern Star. At the same time, I kept in contact with Robert Hailstones, now back in Scotland.

I stayed with Bill. They lived in the city, but he took me to his parents who lived in Lower Hutt. They showed me around Wellington. In Christchurch Ewart introduced me to his son and family who took me all around Christchurch and outskirts and over the Southern Alps to Hokitika, pictured below, and Greymouth on the western coast. Ewart had settled in NZ just as I had. The country was now home, and our trip on Northern Star a happy memory. It was summer, but winter back in the UK. We were basking in Temperatures of 80f, not what we were used to in the UK in January. Also we had no scenery like this in the UK, the Southern Alps being so scenic and hardly a soul in sight, huge lakes where you could see the mountains like in a mirror. But this was no different to an island I went to on my days off in Auckland, Waiheke, where I often stayed in a Batch(Hut)and often had an entire beach to myself. I think it is very different today.

After my two weeks holiday to Wellington and Christchurch, it was back to the hospital spending my days off fishing still being summer 1970 or going across to Waiheke Island.

On the weekend of Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th March, I drove up to Kerikeri in the Bays of Islands in my 1939 Morris 12. People often drove for hundreds of miles at the weekend, I was no exception. I set off over night, and came back over night to start work on Monday morning. I went to visit the Grant’s from the Isle of Wight who emigrated before me. They first lived in Rotorua, then bought an Orange Farm in the Bay of Islands. They had a swimming pool in the back garden that looked onto an inlet of the Bay of Islands, shown below. On my way home, my car broke down. I parked on top of a hill hoping to start on the hill. Sleeping in the back, I woke up before sunrise seeing a very bright comet in the eastern sky. It was Bennett’s Comet. Patrick Moore said it was the brightest comet he had ever seen, but was even better from NZ telling me how lucky I was when I wrote to him.

Our NZ members may know the place names mentioned.

Pictured below is the Cornwall Hospital in Cornwall Park, my car outside my room at the hospital, a 1939 Morris 12, Hokitika on the western coast of the South Island showing the Southern Alps, part of Waiheke Island, where I stayed when not at the Batch, and the inlet that lead into the Bay of Islands taken from the back garden of my friends house at Kerikeri.