A Quirky Memoir of Growing Up in 1960s New Zealand”

Unable to abandon willy-nilly the measures that got many families through the Depression and war years, my mother ensured we had more food than we could possibly eat, just in case there was another war or a major earthquake.

Processed food, preservatives and additives were, for us, mostly still a thing of the future, but sometimes we had additives that added themselves.

“Ew, what’s that?”

“Shh, not so loud. Everybody will want one.”

Although this was her usual cavalier attitude to unwanted wildlife in our food, my mother was temporarily lost for words one morning at breakfast when I went to dip my knife into the big tin of honey.

“Ew, look!”

A very large tin, it had lost its lid early in life, and lying on its side embedded in the last inch of honey was a dead mouse with a sickly-sweet grin on its face. I stuck to jam for a long time after that. It stuck quite well to me too.

But it was useless complaining about all the third world conditions and deprivations I believed I was subjected to.

“You don’t know you’re born. Be thankful we live in a democracy,” my mother would remonstrate, citing as much worldwide wickedness as she could think of while elbow deep in a tank of glutinous gunk trying to retrieve a couple of preserved eggs, a left-over habit from WWII rationing. We should be grateful we had free speech, food aplenty, and a roof over our heads.

When it was in season, she bought fruit by the crateful and there was always something in the cupboard for a rainy day. Even tinned lamb’s tongues were almost appealing once I forgot they’d been sloshing around inside a little mouth full of baby teeth, coated in saliva, and half chewed grass.

Not so well-received were brains and tripe, both one-off, suck-it-and-see experiments my mother tried to pass off as food. Even the cat turned his nose up.

“I hate waste!” she would say, gritting her teeth with such force it was frightening. She was, however, immensely proud of her ability to juggle ten tasks at once.

Consequently, food burned, saucepans boiled over, vital ingredients were accidentally omitted and the cat made off with food she’d intended for us. She would often be heard muttering “oh darn it” as half our well-boiled dinner slithered into the sink with the water hurriedly tipped from the saucepan. My mother baked amazing cakes and biscuits, though.

Mealtimes were a logistical challenge for her limited budget, but it was a chance to gather together as a family, catch up with what had been happening that day, listen to, but not comment on my father’s all-important work debrief and to discover all over again how much I hated Brussel sprouts, string beans, swedes, and powdered custard. We didn’t starve, certainly, although there were occasions when it might’ve been preferable. (Actually, in hindsight, perhaps not).

Being presented with a plateful of not very cleverly disguised vital organs was one of those occasions. After failing miserably to convince us of the deliciousness of the aforementioned brains and tripe, the next experiment was cloaked in subterfuge. She stuffed and roasted an ox heart, casually omitting to mention it actually was an ox heart. But rather than becoming the third instalment in Ten Toothsome Ways with Gourmet Offal, our reaction to it was a major disappointment to her once again.

To say my father was disappointed doesn’t best describe it. He was practically speechless. He had sat down, his hands freshly washed but still tinged black with grease and, unaware of what the lump of meat on his plate really was, he had doused it liberally with salt and pepper.

His debrief that night showed promise when he began to relate the heavily edited story of Nobby Johnson who had somehow disgraced himself in front of the office girls. But when he tried to chew the first forkful the story came to an abrupt halt. He downed tools, shuddered, and spat it out.

“Yeurk! I’m not eating that!”

We all followed suit. Even though the ‘roast’ was as tough as an old boot my mother was reluctant to admit defeat. She chewed furiously and struggled to swallow, the sinews in her neck standing out like knotted string.

“Mmm … delicious.”

We didn’t believe a word of it and clearly neither did she. The cat, this time, wasn’t so fussy. After all, it was cat food.

My mother may have found the recipe for this delight in an old cookbook she had; a volume published in 1882 titled Handbook of Domestic Cookery — which she later gave to me. According to the author the average price of an ox heart at that time was two shillings and threepence. It would feed a family of six. Just like us.

You want gravy with that? Stew a couple of extra lobes and ‘the resulting gravy which when thickened and coloured will serve well for the roasted heart. The stewed meat will give dog or cat a good meal.’ Proof even the undiscerning Victorians were picky about how they cooked and ate pet food.

For some time after this unconscionable attempt to fool us, anything animal-related and not readily identifiable was viewed with serious misgivings. The suspect flesh was given a few tentative pokes with a fork and then interrogation of the cook began.

“What’s this?”

“Beef.”

“What sort of beef?”

“The delicious meaty sort.”

“Which part of the cow did it come from?”

“Don’t be so daft. The delicious meaty part. Eat up.”

“How much did it cost?”

“For goodness’ sake. Just eat it. And be grateful. Think of all the starving people in Africa.”

Our reaction to this stretching of the food budget further than was reasonable meant we avoided the trials of haggis, sheep’s trotters, stewed lettuce and many other mouth-watering recipes in that book. Sheepshead soup, too. For that delicious appetiser one must ‘boil a sheep’s head and pluck gently in a gallon of water with a teacupful of pearl barley.’

No doubt my brother Colin would’ve been first to yell “I bags the eyeballs!” but thankfully he was never given the chance.

The book also gives useful advice on how best to keep up the “polishing” in houses where servants are few. Servants were very few in our house due to our knack of disappearing at the right moment, although I do remember polishing the old cutlery with Silvo about once a year. My hands turned black but the forks and spoons came up a treat.

With a view to getting some reasonably-priced proper meat we acquired the necessary ingredients from my mother’s brother-in-law, a sheep farmer in North Canterbury. Cute and curly, Sonny the lamb was an unusual sight on our suburban front lawn. At first, we bottle-fed him using a home-made teat which had started life as the finger on a rubber glove. He soon graduated to grass, alleviating the need for any human-driven lawn mower, giving my father more precious shed time. (Our backyard shed was his second home).

Our new woolly muncher was tethered by a rope just long enough to prevent him eating the flower garden, and he added his own fertiliser at the same time. He didn’t complain when he did double-duty as a miniature pony. It was a win-win situation. That is, until it was time to turn him into chops and other edible body parts.

One day when I got home from school the front lawn was empty. No warning. I’d not even had the chance to say goodbye.

The shed — a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of wondrous and mysterious objects — was where my mechanical engineer father spent his leisure hours. Designing, creating.

Propped up precariously on piles of bricks at the back where the sand sloped down, it was dark, gloomy, and grotto-like, natural daylight barely able to penetrate the thick layers of dust and cobwebs on the windows, wilfully neglected since the Queen’s visit in 1954. (We weren’t actually on Her Majesty’s itinerary but she wasn’t far away.)

In summer the leafy grapevine hugged the eaves outside the west window, casting an eerie green glow over the lathe. When the metal shavings piled up too high and started to stick to my father’s socks, he was more or less forced to do a bit of housekeeping.

He knew where everything was, but it was a jumble in there. WWII paraphernalia rubbed shoulders with broken clocks, radios, mysterious machinery. Across the cobweb-draped landscape half-empty paint tins jostled for space with boxes of ball-bearings, nails, nuts, bolts and rifle ammunition. Sharp edges. Poisonous substances. No unsupervised children allowed.

Behind the door a ramshackle bookcase sagged under the weight of dusty crime novels, paperback westerns, old books on physics, and electrical theory. Almost asphyxiated between disintegrating copies of Popular Mechanics and Radio Hobbies was a discreet concealment. Evidence of something my father used to be, long ago. Watched over from every nook and cranny by malevolent black spiders, it was all kept securely under lock and key while he was away at work.

My mother seldom went in there. Her time and energy were consumed by the labour-intensive chores euphemistically labelled Women’s Work — otherwise known as Working Her Fingers to the Bone. Naturally my father, being a man, kept well out of it.

But the call to dinner was the only way to get him out of the shed. Broadcast loudly all over the neighbourhood, my mother’s voice pierced the air like a bullet through butter. Magpies stopped mid-chortle. Dogs yapped hysterically. This unseemly disturbance became the catalyst for a minor revolution in the communications department.

More for his own peace of mind than anything, my father installed an intercom between the kitchen and the shed. A woody, varnished, antiquated contraption, it was a cast-off from a medical practice he’d unearthed from his collection of useful stuff. All it needed was de-spidering and dusting off.

The rubbery levers, still with the doctors’ names handwritten neatly underneath, caused a low flatulent buzz to bounce off the shiny kitchen walls. It was a wonderfully rude sound, curiously similar to the one a quiz show contestant might hear after giving the wrong answer.

“What was Gandhi’s first name?”

 “Goosey Goosey?”

 BRRRZZZZZZZZZ!!

The prospect of summoning my father with just the press of a lever gave my mother a sense of empowerment she’d not felt before. No more time wasted standing on the back steps shrieking across the yard like a sergeant major in extra-tight underpants. The new system would be far more efficient and dignified. And the neighbourhood would be forever grateful.

Preparing for the first official announcement she cleared her throat and smoothed her hair. As she glanced up at the green Bakelite clock high on the kitchen wall it silently confirmed what she already knew. Six o’clock on the dot.

BRRRZZZZZZZZZ!!

 “Yoo hoo. Come for your tea.”

“Coming,” my father promised drily, too preoccupied with something black and oily to immediately down tools. With the urgency level dropping from high-pitched public address all the way down to quietly confidential, he was in shed-heaven.

6.05 pm.

BRRRZZZZZZZZZ!!

 “What are you doing? It’s getting cold.”

“Coming…”

6.09 pm.

BRRRZZZZZZZZZ!!

“For crying out LOUD!”

My mother wasn’t impressed with the new communication system. My father thought it was the best thing he’d done all year. He could turn down the volume too.

While the food cooled on the recently-glued Formica table my mother fidgeted and paced around the kitchen, grinding her teeth, bemoaning the fact she loathed cold dinner — or tea, as it was known in our house. By the time the object of her ire finally loped in she was in no mood for levity.

“What’s all the panic?” he grinned, as the last waft of steam left the mashed potatoes.