Fleming Street

What I remember most about the house at 5 Fleming Street, Onehunga, is that it was so small.  It was tiny compared to the large bungalow we’d lived in in Christchurch.  The house was cheap, but it took all the money my mother could afford.  On the day the purchase was settled she took me out of school so I could empty my meagre Post Office Savings account to augment the cash she’d managed to scrape together.  This was the first home my mother had owned.  Previously the family had always lived in rented accommodation, the house in Christchurch having been rented for at least fifteen years.

The walls at Fleming Street were made of fibrolite, and the situation was on the edge of an industrial area.  There was just one bedroom which we shared, as we’d always shared in the six years since my father died.  There was a hedge at one side and my mother planted sweet peas in front of it.  When these flowered I was suddenly assailed by hay fever, something I’d never experienced before.

House at 5 Fleming Street. Note Sandy the cat in the letter box

Soon after we moved in it was the long summer holiday and I was left mainly to my own devices while mother worked.  In early January we flew back to Christchurch for my brother’s wedding, and I stayed there with friends for a few weeks.

I was glad to avail myself of the Onehunga Carnegie Library and remember discovering books by Janet Frame at that time.  I made friends with a younger girl who lived next door and we spent time together.  Mother and I also met other neighbours, and when school started again I took the bus daily to Manukau Intermediate School near Royal Oak.  The small house was adequate for our needs and especially convenient when mother got a new job as Accountant at Rickstan, a firm just around the corner which made formica furniture.  When a new pattern of formica was launched Mother was delighted that the name she suggested for it Spindrift was chosen.  We had a radiogram and played records, but there was no television in those days and both of us spent hours reading our library books.

Each Friday afternoon we would take a bus into the city, have a meal at a cheap café, and go to a movie.  There was a movie theatre in Onehunga as well, plus a range of shops.  At Intermediate School I made a close friend, Dianne, who lived in Te Papapa, a short bus ride away.  Sometimes I would stay the night with her and we would go to the local cinema there.  This was in an old hall, where locals threw stones which clattered on the roof during the film.  My Intermediate School years were happy ones, especially Form Two where Dianne and I were the pets of our teacher Mr Bush who took us out one weekend to introduce us to his daughter who was a similar age but went to a different school.

During this time my mother negotiated to build a home in the Theosophical Society enclave at Mt St John in Epsom.  At the end of my Form Two year, encouraged by Mr Bush, I won a scholarship to St Cuthbert’s College, but while fees were covered there were extra expenses which my mother would have had difficulty meeting, so we declined.  I would have been happy to go to Onehunga High School, as many of my classmates did, but my brother, by now a secondary teacher in Christchurch, persuaded Mother that I should be enrolled at Epsom Girls’ Grammar School (EGGS), near where we would soon be living.  My application for an out-of-zone place was declined, so Mother briefly rented a flat in the EGGS zone, and I was duly enrolled.  At an early assembly the headmistress noted the roll was overfull because of people who’d unexpectedly moved into the zone, and I knew she meant me.

Our new Epsom home was being built and we went to the site at weekends.  Mother collected foil milk bottle tops which she fastened inside the walls as a form of insulation, this being in the era before pink Batts were available.  This house consisted of two units, the idea being that one would be rented out to provide Mother with an income when she retired.

It was an exciting day when we moved in, and at age 13, I finally had my own bedroom. Did you share a bedroom as a child?

The early Onehunga house
where cat ensured there was no mouse