LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND

At work, 1997

When I came back to New Zealand I had a few temporary jobs and then ended up at Meremere Power Station for about six months. They supplied us with a house up on the hill but we found it too far from our family and it felt very isolated with the two boys. We used to come back to Papatoetoe most weekends to do our shopping. The Shopping Centre in Mercer was expensive, and so was the Four Square in Meremere. When I was shopping in Papatoetoe one weekend I met a friend I'd worked with at Davies Pumps for a short period who said they were looking for fitters at Davies Pumps in Station Road and I went back there. We moved back to Papatoetoe to live. We usually stopped with Wendy's Mum for a couple of weeks until we found digs each time we moved. I was in that job for twenty years, but with six different bosses over the years, though I did get a gold watch out of it in the end! We were about eight years at Station Road and then we were bought out by Masport and moved to their premises in Mt Wellington. Then we were sold to Skellerup, then Cable Price. The job itself didn't change much. My last job was working on vacuum pumps, and that business has now moved to China.

Most weekends in the summer we would go for a day trip to Rotorua, or Coromandel or Taupo. We'd all go in a group with Wendy's Mum and Dad and about four cars, we'd have a picnic and then drive home again. We also went camping at Pakiri when the boys were about eight or ten, and continued to do so on and off for about twenty-odd years after. We'd go with Peter Mellor and his wife Gabrielle, their son Colin and daughter Heidi for a week at a time. We had a great time walking across the sand dunes and swimming, and there was an inlet where the children could swim safely with their floaters. We always camped in a big tent and one year a huge storm blew up in the night and everyone was packing up ready to get away at first light. We were trying to get our tent down and Peter called to Wendy to hold her end down, but when he went round to see what was happening Wendy was hanging on to the tent and actually about a foot off the ground! We got the tent down eventually. The wind was that strong a single mattress was blown across the paddock as though it was a leaf.

Peter Mellor, Norm Crook and Frank, fishing, C1990 Frank after fishing, C1990

We've always had good holidays together. We took up swimming at Panmure Baths and went swimming there regularly. We would go to Rotorua, Taupo, and Hot Water Beach. I visited my sister in New Brighton to help her with her garden sometimes, and went to Fiji with Alan, Wendy's sister and friends. Alan will never forget having a hundred dollars pinched out of his back pocket while we were there.

I would take Mark and Alan and a friend swimming in the Panmure Baths where they learnt to swim. Later weekends were taken up with taking the boys out to their sports: hockey, soccer and a lot of gymnastics in the building at the back of Papatoetoe High School, though neither of them became really competitive. The boys attended school at School Corner, then Papatoetoe Intermediate and Papatoetoe High School. When we went back to Southampton for about eighteen months in 1973, fairly much on the spur of the moment, Mark loved it. He went back to my first school in Foundry Lane, and Alan was still a preschooler. I caught up with my family then, and used to go and play snooker on a Friday evening with my father and a couple of my brothers, whoever was off work and available, at the local Snooker Hall. I even left my cue behind, and it's probably still there. My mother and father came across to New Zealand in 1980 and we took them across to Napier to the Garden Camping site, and had a holiday with them, and we drove them sightseeing around Auckland. It had been their first flight and they were a bit nervous about the trip back. We drove them to Wellington to get the ferry to my sister in New Brighton, and then they came back to Auckland and flew home.

Rotorua, 1971

RETIREMENT

I retired in 1997 when I was 63 years old. I was on the graduated pension scheme when they were moving eligibility back from 60 to 65 years.

We've had a lot of holidays at Coromandel, and I did quite a bit of fishing with Alan there. Diana's family have baches at Smugglers' Cove and Alan's father-in-law has a boat that we use. Recently we went to Marroomba near Noosa. Wendy has a penfriend she's been writing to since she were nine and we visit her in New South Wales and she comes here. I've also been to see my brother in Perth.

We had bought our own house in 1976 in Papatoetoe and we've always had our own house since. We were there for nineteen years and then bought at 9 Eugena Rise where we could just walk through to the back of the Botanical Gardens. We were there about six years then had a place built in Stuart Gibson for three years but Wendy couldn't settle there and we moved to Senator Drive in Alfriston Heights. We weren't there long as they started to build a lot of housing around and we decided to move to Golflands last September, and that is when I became ill.

Wendy and I had been to Bangkok and on to Phuket for a couple of days in November- and were lucky that we just missed the Boxing Day tsunami. I thought I might have picked up a virus in Thailand, but it was worse than that. I was diagnosed as having mesothelioma (which may have come from working on the docks and power station in Southampton) and also with a cancer on the lung which the doctor thought they could operate on, but unfortunately when they opened me up they discovered that it had gone too far.

I had a good life before I got married and a good life after. Everything just went along smoothly, though we lost touch with a lot of friends through travel, and some I was close to have died.

We have four grandchildren. Karen and Mark have Oliver, Emily and Lucy, and Alan and Diana have Blake, with another child expected in May.

Oliver, Lucy, Frank, Emily and Blake; Frankie's birthday brunch, Botanical Gardens, Manurewa, Auckland. Saturday 4th February 2006	Frank and Wendy, 24th February 2006