To recount childhood memories?
When I was young (about 8) my parents had a dairy/grocery shop - actually they had two over a few years - in Auckland. In those days supermarkets hadn't arrived properly and there was money in the corner dairy thing. Anyway every Friday Mum used to drive out to Albany and buy eggs (large amounts of eggs actually) for the shop. In the school holidays she had to take all three of us kids to stop us bugging the hell out of Dad while he ran the shop. It seemed to take hours.... actually sometimes it did take hours since the mode of transport was a Thames van of 1950s vintage called Gertie. Gertie was interesting since she only had two seats and a slippery steel floor in the back. We'd take a blanket each and slide all over the back of the van at every corner. Amazingly I don't recall anyone ever hurting themselves while undertaking this mode of travel - apart from your bum getting sore. The other thing Gertie did was overheat and drop all the water out of the radiator onto the road in an almighty rush. So you had to stop, let her cool down and refill her. We always had to share the back with several bottles of water - which were in a cardboard box that also slid on the corners. For some reason my parents had this van for years and only fixed the radiator just before they sold it.
Anyway we'd slide our way out to Albany, with a stop or not depending on Gertie's mood and the ambient air temperature, and it was country out there. There were paddocks, and cows and sheep and a gravel road to the poultry farm. And we'd all pile out and go and look at the battery hens while Mum bought 60 dozen eggs or so. Self centred little savages that we were it never occured to us that a hen might not like being in a cage she could hardly turn round in, it was just the way it was. Then with some wooden crates of eggs sharing the back with us we'd slide our way round the back of the van back into suburbia.
I went to Albany today. I've been past in the meantime but haven't actually taken the turnoff and gone to have a look. It was only about 10 minutes up the motorway from the city. And it was covered in factories, not a cow in sight. Strange - that wasn't how I remembered it at all.....
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2 comments:
Great post. I love to hear folks childhood memories.
Bloody Albany, don't get me (and Rosa the Baggage) started. It's my nearest town - I thought I'd died and gone to hell when I saw it. AND it's getting worse by the day. if they ever try and knock down the old library then I'm prostrating myself in front of the digger.
It's a sign of passing time...
have you read In My Father's den? There's a similar thing - the orchards all built over (Henderson, I think although it's called something else in the book).
The opposite happened when I returned to our village in Wales - the slag heaps from the mines, which dominated the countryside, had all been forested & looked fantastic. (although the hillside I used to play on had become a motorway).
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