It does not have to be said, but I will say it anyway.

My earliest memory is about hearing air raid sirens in WWII and getting ready to leave the house for the bomb shelters across our street.

It was night time and I was too young to be afraid. We got dressed and someone was tying my shoelaces. There were sandwiches and drinks to carry.

That’s about all I can say about the war.

Later on, when we went to school we carried our gas masks in a cardboard box slung around our shoulder.

The masks had Mickey Mouse ears attached to them so that we would feel less scared of their weird appearance. If you spoke whilst wearing one the voice came out sounding like the Daleks from Doctor Who.

“All humans must die!”

We should have been traumatised for life but I don’t think we were. Or so I believe.

As far as I know none of us bought into the Bates Motel franchise.

So much for that.

I retired from paid work at Christmas 2017 a few months after my eightieth birthday. It was possible for me to stay on but I could no longer stomach the toxic nature of my workplace. What have we become?

My working life has been almost entirely enjoyable with occasional bumps along the way. At one time for about twenty or so years I had what I thought was the best job in the world. So good that if I could have done so, I would have worked for free. No kidding.

When I left school at fifteen, somehow I managed to get myself into the cinema business. The first step in my quest to avoid manual labour at all costs. Mostly because I was useless with my hands and I hated the cold in winter.

My woodwork and metalcraft teachers used to give me the strap BEFORE class because in their opinion I was so incompetent that I was bound to stuff up something before lunchtime. And they were right, I did create things that were misshapen and out of proportion. Sort of gargoyles of industrial design. When I finished a project it was usually about two thirds of the intended size as a result of me having to start over and over again with the materials supplied. In my “sweaty haste” to get things done much waste went into the scrap bin. Oh, the joy of schooldays. The teachers used to say “McKirdy, you will never get a job in the shipyards.” Promises, promises. Please make it be true. And so it came to pass that I went into the film world starting at rock bottom selling ice cream from a tray slung around my neck. Ah! Bliss.

Eventually I moved up to ‘The Box’ (Projection booth) served an apprenticeship and some years later moved to Aotearoa/New Zealand under a category which NZ was short of. Namely, PROJECTIONISTS.

Oh, Lucky Man. It helped that I had a sister who had lived here for some years. She and her husband sponsored us and the rest was easy. NZ was the hardest country to get into at that time. That’s because it was the best in every way. Everyone wanted to be here.

It still is the best but given the mostly rather unpleasant rest of the world we presently occupy, the cachet is not so hard to achieve. Hence, our present social problems?

‘Tis very strange but I have already written the next part but when I opened the phone this morning all that text had disappeared from the page. Is their a way to save work?

Can’t see any obvious way to do so.

So what I had said in the lost bit was that the NZ world which we once knew had almost entirely gone. Let me tell about my first day in NZ for that day encapsulates all the great values which we associate with being a New Zealander. In a few simple exchanges with complete strangers I realised the enormity of the changes which I was about to experience.

My wife Teresa, our three boys,

Tony, Chris snd Daniel and myself sailed on the SS Oronsay (P&O Line) from London to NZ early in 1963.

We travelled through the Mediterranean, down the Suez Canal, on down the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean to Malaysia headed south through the Straits of Sumatra

to Freemantle in WA across the Great Australian Bight to Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney and finally sailed into Auckland Harbour six weeks after we had left London.

Our children were all infants.

Tony was 2 and a half, Christopher about 15 months and Daniel who was about nine weeks old when we started out had reached the grand age of 15 weeks. Phew.

We lived in luxury in the ship.

Originally we had been scheduled to Sail on The Oriana (a much larger vessel) but because our youngest child was such a small baby and we had been enduring the worst winter in Britain at that time we had received from New Zealand House in London a letter noting the age of Daniel and offering a delay in our passage until the weather became more benign.

We had been worried about travelling from Scotland to London in the savage weather presently covering the whole country. Daniel had also been very ill with influenza and we had been nursing him night and day for about two weeks.

He kept drinking his formula from the bottle. Boy did he chug away at that milk. Never missed a feed. That’s what saved him we reckon. Desire to survive and warm milk plus a room kept at a constant temperature.

I had thought about asking for a delay to our sailing but did not want to seem like a ‘whingeing pom’ before we even got here. So you can imagine our joy and complete amazement when we received that unsolicited letter from the NZ authorities. Who was that official who made that humane decision? Can you imagine any other Government acting in such a spontaneous manner? That told me all I had to know about NZ.

When we arrived in Auckland the immigration people set up trestle tables for processing passengers. We had no passports just a document of identity for the whole family.

Problem was that I had put that document in our big trunk which apparently was somewhere down in the bottom hold and not accessible. The Ship Purser told me not to worry. “It’s New Zealand” he said. “ They do things differently here”.

I was not convinced. We artived at the immigration table and I rather nervously told my sad story. The guy dealing with us laughed and said “Don’t worry about it,

You’re here aren’t you, Welcome to New Zealand.”

Off down the gangway we went to the customs tables on the quayside. The customs guy looked at us and the children and just waved us through.

No identity check. No customs check. What wondrous place had we come to.

Off we travelled down the North Island in the old ‘Limited Express’. It was an overnight journey. I loved the train it was a real Petticoat Junction jobbie. Our destination was Marton where my brother in law was picking us up in his old Series E Ford.

He was the Civil Aviation radar guy at Ohakea Air Base and we were heading to Bulls where he lived to stay with him and family at their home.

It was about 6am when we set out and there was some pre-dawn light around. I marvelled at the peace and serenity which surrounded us as we drove through the Rangitikei. Occasional farmhouses in the flattish distance showed lights and everywhere there seemed to be tall poplars nodding away.

A wondrous day indeed. It has been my reference point ever since when I look around and see us now.

That’s it for now. In future posts I will continue the theme from above as I attempt to unravel in my mind how we became a materialistic propery loving nation obsessed by the accumulation of wealth and the correspondingly massive gap between the haves and have nots. I will not be able to muster the panache and creative skills of David Slack who is in my opinion a writer in the George Orwell mould.

But I am determined to have a go. Thanks for listening and Welcome to Parking the Shark.