His wife and sister had said, “We won’t be too long,” with the stress on the ’too’ and he knew, from experience, that this highly flexible time period could be anything up to an hour. They were ‘just going to look at something.’ Something that was not likely to interest him. And they were right. Shopping did not interest him but people did. He was quite content to sit on the mall seat and entertain himself with the play of real life that was being enacted before him. To sit quietly in a mall was to wear the mantle of invisibility.
Two years earlier, also on a Saturday, the traffic in this mall had been much denser. It had been new then and still novel and his sister had insisted that he and his wife, up from the country, must see the districts latest acquisition: this cathedral of commerce which, somehow it seemed, was the pinnacle of man’s achievement. Now, this morning, two years on, it had been just as imperative that they first visit the district’s newer and glitzier mall that eclipsed this one in size and everything else. It was there that the fickle crowds now worshipped and paid their tithes.
Even so, there were more than enough people here to hold his interest. Woolworth’s Supermarket, still climging to this mall and now its main drawcard, was opposite his seat and before it were the chairs, tables and an ice cream booth. To his right was the branch of an appliance chain and to his left the mall’s main entrance. The traffic might be down a bit but there was still a cast of hundreds.
Though intent on everyone in his view, the young children particularly took his interest. He liked children and in some ways he envied them. Childhood could be a magical time, as his had been, in a world more fascinating and more exciting than it would ever be again. One’s sense of wonder was lost all too soon and it was a grievous loss. Although, when you were young you didn’t appreciate what you had. You wanted to be big. He had wanted to be big. Big people had seemed to have it all. He had longed for the day when he was old enough to start school only to find that the cold reality of the Infant Room was a near-retirement spinster who kept her savage charges in check with a leather strap.
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The concourse held several riding machines, dollar-in-the-slot bandits abetted by whining infants. How little they gave for their dollar or even for their previous fifty cents. The nearest, a miniature Ferris Wheel, gave children a ride in a one and a half metre vertical circle. It had a myriad flashing lights and music but its ability to excite must be surely near zero. Yet, in the time that he had been watching, it had gobbled up four dollars. A little girl was on it right at that moment.
The children of today were missing out in some ways. In his own childhood, in this same suburb, shopping expeditions had been high adventure. The then handful of local shops had dealt only with the basics and the need for anything more or the conduct of any business had meant a trip into Auckland itself, a day-long odyssey.
The lack of cars had been, he believed, a blessing and had meant that people were not steel-box- isolated as they had now become. The two miles to the station and township had been punctuated with greetings to those coming the other way, a few words of gossip, and enquiries after the wellbeing of their baby and his younger sister who had been left with Grandma. Everyone had known everyone else.
He could still see it clearly. The other people waiting at the station, all people that they knew. The muddy-brown waiting room with the ‘Ladies’ through the door on one side, the determinedly- modernist posters of the exotic places that could best be reached by New Zealand Railways, the heightening expectation when the bell rang in the nearby signal box, when the signal fell and the signalman came down the steps with the tablet in his hand. Every eye would be glued down the line.
And suddenly the locomotive would be rushing down on them like some ravenous beast of prey. It would screech in anger and affronted pride at being expected to stop and its sycophantic carriages would dutifully echo that protest. He had to admit that he had always cowered well back when the locomotive passed him. That was no matter for shame. A steam locomotive is surely the most fearsome creature of man’s devising. Even at rest, its sullen hiss is pure malevolence. He could still
FOR A DEAD CIVILISATION Page 3 SOSIAN feel its animal heat, smell its hot smell, hear the clang and scrape of the coal shovel, and the more muted clank of the feed pumps.
And soon they would be off with the landscape sliding backwards at increasing speed and after a few minutes, “Tickets please.” At that age, he had been fascinated by the telegraph wires beside the track. Up and down they went, falling when the train was on an embankment, rising when the entered a cutting. And each group of four wires rotated from one pole to the next. There were stops at every station and halt. People getting on, people getting off. The stop at Newmarket while the engine changed ends to take them down to Auckland Central. And then a whirring tramcar, with its reversable wooden seats, to whisk them along Beach Road and into Queen Street. Not to have ridden in a tramcar was not to have lived.
The last little girl to ride on the Ferris Wheel had now demanded an ice cream and her mother was dutifully complying with those demands. What did she want on it? Chocolate dip, hundreds and thousands, and anything else that was going apparently, expense no object. He could see that she would never eat it. It was far too big. What could her mother be thinking? There was a time when children had penny ice creams and were thankful to get them. And vanilla of course. There WAS no other flavour.
But having notionally arrived in Queen Street, what could he identify as genuine memories from, say, four and below? He had known the street intimately for many years afterward and though he probably did see brewer’s wagons at this time their use was continued into the war years. His mother using one of the phone boxes outside the Central Post Office and talking to an unseen someone somewhere else was definitely from this earlier period. It had been a source of wonder. He had not seen a telephone before. No-one they knew had one.
There was also the time that his Uncle Harold, a plumber, walking down Queen Street with a toilet pan on his shoulder had stopped to talk to his highly embarrassed mother. There were visits to the T&G Building Society, somewhere just off Queen Street, to make payments. The Auckland
FOR A DEAD CIVILISATION Page 4 SOSIAN Savings Bank with its glass ceiling had been another of their frequent stops. His mother had had a little Blue book-shaped box with a spring-toothed slot in which small change was saved. A teller would open it with a key and add the amount to her savings account.
And since it was the days of the department store, morning tea in John Courts’ tearoom was a must. One of his mother’s few treats. He tried to remember what the store was like but, apart from the tearoom, he could only remember the ladies’ toilet. His memories of Mackie Logans were just as sparse. He could remember only the lifts, fascinating to a child, with their diamond-lattice gates, the counterweights going up and down at the back of the lift shafts, the big brass control handles, the lift men calling the floors and their produce, and in particular the one-armed liftman.
“Why has that man only got one arm?” Said loudly, of course.
His memories of Smith and Caughey were less again but he could hardly forget the way that transactions were completed. The cash tendered and the docket placed in a container and sent winging down an overhead wire, whizzing around bends and obstacles, to disappear in the direction of the unseen accounts office. In another minute, the container would reappear flying back with the receipt and change. The complexity of the wire systems in the larger stores always fascinated him. His eyes would be constantly upward with the aerial traffic taking his total attention. Only his mother’s firm grip of guidance kept him from banging into people. The present-day electronic tills and EFTPOS were all very well in their way but sadly lacking in spectacle.
But The Farmers he could not forget! Up Wyndham Street in The Farmers free trolley bus. Up in the lift with mounting expectations to the pedal cars on the roof and the rush to head off equally- eager contestants for the first free car. Once in it, his mother would have to drag him out under protest. Sometimes, they had lunch in the roof-top cafeteria. The serve-yourself part not the waited-on. That cost more. They would filter down floor by floor with his mother looking at and handling everything but seldom buying. That was the boring part ‘Oh…carm…on…marm’ and anticlimactic after the cars. Worse still, there were no overhead wires just a pipe system that sucked
FOR A DEAD CIVILISATION Page 5 SOSIAN in bobbins at one pipe and spat them out at another. Then it would be the free tram up Pitt Street to Beresford Street and a short walk to Karangahape Road. But before K. Road there was the children’s outfitters with clothes hanging on hooks all over its outside. His mother often went there. It was very cheap.
Yet it was obvious that they had not always taken this route. The fairy-sewing-machine shop was halfway up the Queen Street rise to Karangahape Road. No pushchair! At three and at four he had walked the full length of Queen Street and more. But children today would think him naïve. The sewing machines that he had seen hitherto had been operated by treadles or hand cranks. The machine at the entrance to the fairy-sewing-machine shop turned over all by itself. He had known nothing of electric motors hence the fairies and magic. But the children of today know nothing of treadles and that is their loss. They will never get on their mother’s drop-head machine with the belt off and pedal up a storm.
He had been right about the ice cream. The little girl had eaten off the chocolate dip and the hundreds and thousands in an initial rush and then suddenly run out of enthusiasm. Each of her mother’s hurry-ups had resulted in a single sullen lick. With the concoction melting everywhere, the mother had already used up several tissues and had now capitulated and was finishing it herself.
Again, he could remember very little of Karangahape Road. The House of Flackson, Rendals, and George Courts definitely, and the smell of Rimmer’s Coffee Shop. Just the ghost of a lovely smell that always met them in passing. He had no memory of them ever going in.
They would catch a bus home from the top of Pitt Street getting out at their local shops which being across from the station were also two miles from home. But Grandma’s was halfway and there would be a lengthy stop to pick up his younger siblings, a lot of talk, something to eat and something to drink. Grandmas are like that. Then home with Cussy, tail wagging furiously, to greet them.
And that was a whole day gone possibly ocassioned by just one urgent errand. Compared to the
FOR A DEAD CIVILISATION Page 6 SOSIAN present it was an age of inconvenience but had they been any worse off he wondered? They had lacked almost all of today’s supposed necessities. They had had no piped hot water, an outside toilet with a tin under the seat, and a rubbish hole in the backyard. That had been true of most of their neighbours. Their only electrical appliances had been an immersion-heater and a small mantel radio. The ironing was done with Mrs Hobb’s irons heated on the wood range. Small amounts of hot water came from the tap of a bucket-filled tank in the top of the range. For baths, it was necessary to light the washhouse copper.
He tried to picture the radio, it’s position in the house, but could not. Yet it had definitely been there. He remembered the Children’s Request Session on Sunday mornings prior to their moving when he was four. ‘Peter Rabbit, naughty Peter Rabbit, strayed from Mother Rabbit’s side’ seems to have featured every week and ‘Tiddley Winks had eaten all the lovely flowers in the garden.’ That was the one that he had liked best. How did it go? But the words of the first verse were long gone from him. Only the middle strain and the end remained. ‘Ma’s lost her best hat and so has sister Sue.
Pa is raving too. Can’t find his shoe.
Tiddley Winks is only happy when he’s chasing round the houses.
Tiddley Winks don’t like the postman but he likes to chew his trousers.
He’s a funny little pup. Always making such a fuss.
Tiddley Winks we love him so and really think that he loves us.’
He suddenly realised that he had been singing those words aloud. A young couple, passing, looked at each other with raised eyebrows and shrugged. He didn’t mind although it was clear that he would never make a living as a busker.
They had been happy days and could it be said that children brought up in this present world of labour-saving devices and electronic wizardry were any happier than he was then? Perhaps he should ask himself ’ was he himself any happier for this surfeit of convenience?’