Evelyn lived next door to her parents for as long as I can remember, and maybe for as long as she was married to Bob. A lawn and a narrow concrete path linked the two houses. A clip I shot one Christmas on Dad’s new 8mm movie camera shows him striding purposefully between the houses, coughing his smoker’s cough silent-movie style.
Jack and Annie were mortified when Bob and Evelyn decided to separate the two properties by building a carport and fence on their side of the boundary, and when Heather and I visited later they were fretting about what might have gone wrong with the relationship. The answer was “nothing”, but they were hard to reassure.
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Evelyn was Cliff’s little sister, ten years younger than him. She grew into a rather lovely young woman very different from her pushy brother, always gentle and quietly spoken when we visited them. Although Cliff’s relationship with his mother had been difficult as a kid and a young man, Evelyn’s lifelong loyalty to her parents, and the fact she lived her married life next door to them, suggests she could cope with her mother’s flashes of temper. Photos of her with her father suggest the two of them were certainly close.
It’s hard for us to comprehend how close-knit communities like Hikurangi were. Robert Ackers, the man Evelyn married, was another coal miner’s son. He lived a few hundred yards down the road from the Baugh family and would have attended the Hikurangi School with Evelyn. Their mothers were close friends.
Cliff recounts how the Ackers family were hit by tragedy when three brothers, Bob’s uncles, died in a mining accident during the Depression. There is much newspaper coverage of the event and a brief audio of Bob describing it. It’s good to hear his voice — he was about five at the time of the incident. On their lounge wall there used to be a photograph of the funeral cortège.
They had three kids — Graham, Kay and Paul. Graham died more than a decade before his parents, and his wife Margaret followed a couple of years later.
Auntie Evelyn was as modestly spoken as her father Jack, but always engaging. And she was a good home baker who could be depended upon for freshly baked biscuits — maybe pikelets — a cup of tea and warm conversation whenever we visited.
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Bob, on the other hand, was the opposite of his father-in-law — jovial, gregarious and outgoing, with a laugh halfway to a trumpet. He opened a butchery in Hikurangi with Ted Lloyd, a likeminded man, and I never saw them anything other than cheerful. The two men, always up for a laugh, were good value at neighbourhood parties, where they’d team up as practical jokers. One year I watched them dressed up in drag, complete with lipstick and rouge, laughing and waving to their fans from the back of a decorated truck in the Hikurangi Christmas Parade. I’m pretty sure they were a regular attraction but I can’t be sure.
Bob and Ted would buy in carcasses — beef, sheep and pork — break them down and store them in two big chillers at the back of the shop. There was a massive tree trunk chopping block on the sawdust floor behind the counter. When customers came in they’d be greeted by the boys, who’d swipe a knife against their steel, cut the order, weigh it, wrap it in grease proof and brown butcher paper, tie it with string and ring it up on the till.
The whole animal had to sell. You could buy anything from tongue to oxtail depending on your wallet and your tastebuds — fillet or brisket, liver or kidneys, sweetbreads or tripe. They made their own sausages too. Heather watched the operation — grinding the offcuts of meat, mixing meal and flavourings through it — bloody good recipe, Cliff reckoned, and not too much filler — grinding it a second time, filling the sheep intestine casings, twisting them into links of three sausages and hanging them in the cold store. We used to buy sausages to take back to Auckland, and the boys were proud that one of the Governors General would have his chauffeur stop to buy some on their way up to his beachside hangout.
The building is till there, although unrecognisable except for the beef logo above the verandah. But small operations like Bob and Ted’s were gradually put out of business by the Meat Act 1964 and its mire of licensing and inspections, equally nose to tail. Not to mention fridges and freezers, and the supermarkets that hoovered up most of the market.
Meanwhile things went well and you didn’t need to advertise much when you could wave to your customers from the Christmas Parade float.
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In retirement Bob and Evelyn helped set up and manage the Hikurangi Historical Museum, one of those wonderful little places run by local enthusiasts that you nose around until someone nudges you and says it’s time to go. You leave wondering how long it will be before the things you take for granted each day will be somewhere like this, being nosed around in turn. Maybe by your great grandkids.
Evelyn was doing with Bob what her brother Cliff wanted to do — helping the past reach out and touch people. Me too, I hope.
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Cliff stopped driving in the late ‘90s. He’d been involved in a traffic accident and a kindly policeman told Cliff that if he promised to sell the car he wouldn’t charge him.
It must have been about the same time a cop stopped me for speeding on the way up to Whangarei.
“What’s the hurry?” he said.
“I’ve got to take my Dad to hospital for a check up.”
“What time’s his appointment?”
“11.30.”
“It’s only nine o’clock,” he said, “you’ve got plenty of time.”
“You don’t know my Dad,” I said.
The cop let me off, proving again that there are kindly policemen.
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It’s sad to put things this way, but Cliff’s stress levels went down after Dorothy’s death. They’d had carers visit them at home, and Dad loved that one of them would sit down with him for a smoke. But by Christmas 1999 he was unable to cope with Mum, and after a bleak search Heather and I moved her into Riverview, a small rest home that had once been a vicarage or some such. Joanie and her staff cared for her well, and after she passed away the following June Cliff was content to move in himself. His needs were cared for, the staff were friendly and considerate, he could smoke out in the sun room with a couple of mates — and they let him keep his dog, the Jack Russell Toni — let him keep her, that is, until, terrier style, she decided she owned the place. At that stage, as we’d promised, Toni moved in with us.
Cliff kept up the ritual he’d established with Dorothy of phoning me every night at 8.00. But he wasn’t lonely. The government had a scheme that let him drive around Whangarei for practically nothing and he’d head down to the town centre for a cup of coffee and a fag, waving gidday to people who knew him as a regular. We’d take him to the Anzac Day parade and back to the Hikurangi RSA, dense with smoke. Once we went to the Rest Home Olympics, the sort of event you leave, emotional, thinking about the caring people who really make our communities worthwhile.
And he had visitors, in particular Bob and Evelyn. They’d take him out for a drive — stop for a cup of tea and a sandwich somewhere. A cigarette on a park bench maybe, looking out over the harbour. He’d have his legs crossed, the fag between his fingers, his hand resting on his knee. And from time to time he’d take out on them whatever frustration and grumpiness was still in him. Not much, just grizzling a bit. I remember Colleen saying that what her father lacked was a sense of gratitude, and she was right. He got very close, just not all the time, and sometimes Bob and Evelyn coped with the shortfall. I hope I do better but it’s going to be a stretch.
So if you’re thinking Bob and Evelyn were good people living a good life in a good relationship you’d be right. Real people.