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In the summer of 1971-2 we were ready to start boat building, but there were other things to think about first, like a paying job, somewhere to live and another baby on the way.

We’d been looking to buy a house for a while but been put off by prices. Our memories differ about some of this. I recall liking the idea of Ponsonby, and Dad recommending against it. It was too working class. We’d once visited his Uncle Jack’s gloomy little house on Richmond Road — but Uncle Jack was a Communist, he’d bought in the wrong place and it made no sense to repeat his mistake. Anyway, places in Ponsonby were out of our price range.

Heather remembers us starting out to look in Royal Oak, but at $16,000 they, too, were more than we could afford, so we started looking further West. There were new suburbs like Kelston and Glendene out there, but they didn’t appeal to someone like me, who took Pete Seeger’s Little Boxes song seriously.

In the end we bought a little white weatherboard house on Ambler Ave, Glen Eden, from a young law lecturer who was off to Cambridge. Glen Eden appealed to me because it seemed to have grown pleasantly and higgledy-piggledy around a railway station and the massive Waikumete Cemetery, and the little boxes certainly weren’t the same. It turned out to be perfectly placed for the school where I was teaching, and for the boat, both a quarter hour drive away.

Dad approved of our house, solidly built in the 1950s, with surprising quality details like copper guttering, which, except as an upmarket option, had been supplanted in newer houses by cheaper materials. It had a little kitchen and separate little lounge, two little bedrooms and a larger one for us, a bathroom and separate toilet, and, off the back door porch, the separate wash house, where Heather says she broke her hand in the Twin Tub. The passages to connect up all these spaces seemed like a waste in such a small house, but all this was typical of its era.

The original 1/3 acre section had been subdivided, meaning we shared our drive — two parallel concrete strips — with a new house that had been built behind us. Out front we had an expansive view across to the next ridge, green lawn behind a white wooden fence, and a concrete path sloping up from the drive to plastered steps and the front door.

But In working class families, friends always went to the back door, behind which a guava hedge grew next to a little copse of massive bamboo, in which hundreds of noisy birds nested. There was a garage out the back too, which we ended up demolishing to make way for a big prefabricated steel double garage with room for a workshop for Heather. All in all we loved the place.

The brick house next door belonged to the Town Clerk, Clare Ambler, and her retired brother George. George was a very nice white-haired man in his late 60s, I’d guess, who wore gumboots and tended his garden, chooks and pigeons.

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To buy we capitalised the Family Benefit, a weekly per-child government grant to parents that could be turned into a deposit towards a first home. Mum and Dad lent us some more money,  which I remember as covering the legal fees etc. And our mortgage payments ended up, if anything, less than our rent at Marama Avenue.

Meanwhile I got my first teaching job at Henderson High School. I presented for the job interview as a conventional, clean-cut, clean-shaven young man, but turned up for work after the summer break, bearded and with a mop of hair. I’m not sure they recognised me.

Settling into our new home felt fresh and exciting, but there were older challenges to keep us on our toes. One was the perennial issue of cars. We now had a drab old green Hillman with brown leather seats that you didn’t so much drive as herd along the road. It should have had a tiller rather than a steering wheel. That approximate sense of control didn’t stop me  — impatient and with lots of important things to do — from speeding in it along Great North Road through New Lynn, overtaking the occasional car as I went.

In almost all cars at the time you changed gears manually. In New Zealand that normally meant operating the clutch with your left foot while you changed gears with your left hand on the gear stick, front and left of your seat. This was preferred by young men, who got to perform double de-clutch manoeuvres and generate sexy engine noises to impress passers by.

But our car had a sophisticated column shift. In other words you changed gears by moving a lever on the steering wheel shaft, which lead through a long, indirect series of rods and joints down to the gearbox. This would have been reassuringly up market when new, but by the time we owned the car those rods and joints had become rather worn, and would occasionally lock up. This tended to happen at intersections, and meant you had to pull on the handbrake, open the bonnet, and reach in to fiddle the column shift rods to free things. It was embarrassing at the best of times, but it happened once when Heather was pregnant with Adrienne — in fact past due — and she couldn’t reach the rods to free them! Another motorist helped her get going again.

But you do remember Adrienne was overdue, she asked, and I had to be induced, and that it was Ken who took me to National Womens’? Well, yes… you were induced, come to think of it, but — Ken took you to hospital? Maybe it was on the way to work.

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I haven’t yet mentioned all the domestic goings-on, or my first month teaching, or the fact that, while she was pregnant, Heather was holding down a job sewing hospital theatre caps at Caxtons, which was just down the road from the school. She could sew twice as many as anyone else, so she asked them for a raise. Of course, they said, and offered her another 5c an hour. Even back then that wasn’t a lot of money for being twice as productive. It offended her sense of fairness, so they offered her another job gardening. This she accepted, working with the head gardener in both the factory grounds and around Berridge Spencer’s own house in Devonport until her pregnancy was too far advanced to cope.

What with her own handcrafts, helping Joy with her class, family demands and another baby on the way, Heather was already busy, but she started an extramural course in education at Massey University the following year. She’s never forgotten Piaget’s stages of Cognitive Development, and on a bad day still reckons I’m stuck somewhere in the adolescent Formal Operational stage.

When necessary Stephen was being cared for by a lady called Bella, who lived near the school. Don’t ask us about all the pick-ups and drop-offs. They’re all forgotten. I do remember that, since we only had one car, I was going to school fairly regularly with a middle-aged French lady, Mrs Rennie, who lived very near us and also taught at Henderson. Occasionally I’m struck by the difference between that almost entirely rural drive in 1972, and how built up it is today.

I do remember another car story, when Heather hooked — No, I should shift to the passive voice…

One day, when Heather was refuelling that damned green car at the gas station next to the school, the petrol hose got hooked round the bumper, pulling the pump over when she drove away. The station owner wanted to charge her for much more than the tank of gas. An argument ensued between the two of them, and also the fuel company, to settle liability. It didn’t land with us.

Two more stories about our battered child. One day the little boy was having a tantrum, so Heather decided to put him out the back door until he settled down. But when she closed the door on him he cried even more. In fact his wailing got so bad that she relented and opened the door for him — to discovered she’d shut one of his fingers in the door jamb. She nearly fainted with shame. Fortunately infant fingers are very malleable and he still has full use of all of them.

On another occasion, a year or two later, we had moved on to another car, a grunty, two-toned blue Standard Vanguard with its front seats covered in protective plastic. One day I asked little Stephen if he’d like to go down to the shops with me to buy something manly from the hardware.

Yes, he would! I grabbed my wallet and the keys, and jumped in the right-hand driver’s seat while Stephen jumped in the passenger’s side next to me. I reversed up our driveway, and headed down it towards the road. We turned left, and then — picking up a bit of speed — immediately right towards Glen Eden. At which point the passenger door flew open and Stephen slid across the plastic seat and out onto the road. He cried a bit but he was a brave boy really. Seatbelts were introduced a few years later, and by then I’d learnt to check that all the doors were shut.

The car was pretty robust too. I put that to the test when one day I drove to Henderson and parked in a nearly complete car park. Got out, did my shopping, went back to the car, started her up and headed towards the exit. I could see it over the blue bonnet, ahead and to my right. Drove, that is, over the kerb and into the hole where one day soon a garden would be installed. The car sat there looking embarrassed, stranded with its sump on the kerb. A lesser man would have called for help, but I do have my dignity. I got the jack from the boot, put the handbrake on, put the car in neutral, jacked the car as high off the ground as I could manage, got gingerly back into the car, let the hand brake off, moved to the front of the car and heaved. The jack tilted, tipping the car back onto the pavement. I raced around, jumped back in, pulled the handbrake on to stop her rolling, started her up and drove home without telling anyone.

That was life in 1972. Happy and fulfilled, and packed with youthful energy and minor mishaps. And we were going to build a boat and sail the seven seas.

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