My Father’s Dream by Lois Farrow

My father stood tall and danced a jig on his section. Was he thinking back to his Scottish heritage, or looking to the future as a new land owner at Pāpāmoa Beach?

Never mind the barren, desolate real estate stretching for miles around us, or the narrow country road. The beach was just across that road, breakers crashing to shore from the South Pacific Ocean, coastline stretching north past Mount Maunganui to the Coromandel, or curving east past Whakatāne to the East Cape.

At that time my father, the Postmaster of Te Puke, was ten years from retirement, and suddenly realised the need to plan for it. One day he would no longer be confined to his office, the little cream-painted wooden building on the main street with its red roof and red phone box by the door. He could live by the sea and be free.

Te Puke Post Office, 1965

Not that he minded his job; he enjoyed being in charge and having everyone under his control. But retirement was looming with the chance to dream of exciting new opportunities.

My father spent all his working life in the Post Office, progressing from cycling around the hills of his home town of Ōamaru delivering telegrams, to radio officer in Wellington throughout the war years, to supervisor at Kilbirnie Post Office.

His first postmaster’s position was in Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. It took seven days in 1956 to sail on a small motor vessel from Auckland to the Island. Mail from New Zealand came with the monthly steamer and was handed out through a small Post Office window to the waiting crowds. Telephone operators listened in on the calls they connected. For three years we enjoyed the relaxed lifestyle of the islands.

On return to New Zealand we lived in Leeston and Lyttelton, each move a promotion, and both near his mother in Christchurch. When she died Dad spread his wings again to be Postmaster, Te Puke, where we lived for two years, 1965-1966. My brothers by then were living elsewhere, and only my sister and I were still at home.

Dad tried hard to get us all into the Post Office. He failed only with my second brother, who pursued a life of travel, but my sister worked with him in the Post Office at Te Puke. I was still resisting the Post Office push and was a ledger machinist for Wright Stephenson’s on the main street, an easy walk from our Post Office house in Boucher Avenue by the volunteer Fire Station.

One day Dad had exciting news.

“They’re selling sections at Pāpāmoa Beach,” he said. “I think I might buy one.”

Our mouths dropped. He’d never owned property in his life; we’d always had state houses or post office accommodation.

“In a few years I’ll be retiring, and I can’t think of a better place. Wide open spaces, not built out, the sea just across the road. I can go fishing, I’ll get a little boat; I can just see it.”

We could see it too. His nervous energy needed an outlet and physical activity helped keep his diabetes in control. Mum didn’t quite share the vision of retirement so far from her Ōamaru family, but as always, she would cheerfully adapt.

We drove up and down Pāpāmoa Beach road, a scraggy area with a few scattered beach cottages, and started to share his excitement. My oldest brother visited, and suddenly, relieved of five hundred pounds each, we were property owners with three adjoining sections.  Mine was the middle one, with Dad and my brother on either side. What a feeling to own property, even if it was just an empty patch with criss-crossing power lines, long grass and an occasional tree.

Lois Farrow stands by the sign on her father’s section

Dad built a toilet on my section, a wooden seat straddling a hole in the ground enclosed in an old tin shed, so we could picnic on our land with all needs accounted for. We would park our old van on the grass, walk across the road for a swim, and return to relax and dream - Dad of retirement, my brother of who knows what, and me of rising values and untold riches.

Dad brought out the mower to tackle the long grass. He paced up and down to mark out his dream house. Should it be two-storey to view the sea over the dunes, or one-storey to shelter from the easterly wind? He would build a garage and an open shed to give shelter for the boat.

“Red,” he said.

“What?”

“My boat will be red, with a white stripe along the sides, and I’ll call it Retread.”

“Retread?”

“You know, re-tired,” he said. “A symbol of new energy for a new life.”

He had too much energy already, we thought.

“I’ll build a little cottage for you on your section,” he said to me, “and you’ll be there to look after me in my old age.”

“We’ll see,” I said, not sharing that part of his dream, and turning his favourite phrase back on him.

“We’ll see,” he would say to our teenage requests to go out, and when it was too late, “Well, it would have been all right, I suppose.”

In the meantime he peered through his glasses each evening to sketch out plans. The sections might not provide the dream yet, but they were an investment for the future.

Lois Farrow’s section with toilet

What’s more, Dad’s strong Christian faith never let him waste an opportunity and no one could tell him what to do or not to do on his own land. Up went a billboard so large that no passing driver could miss the warning that the wages of sin is death, but also the good news that the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

When not visiting our sections we explored other areas of the Bay of Plenty, steaming along in our painted Kombi van. What did motorists think as we approached proclaiming ‘PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD?’

With friends at Paeroa, Mount Maunganui and Ōhope Beach, we could head in any direction. We took visitors to Rotorua and enjoyed tramping up the bush walks behind Te Puke, where the waterfalls tumbled into creeks, and the bush gave shade and shelter from the wind. Dad liked to lead the way, his thin frame agile and quick, and we would scramble up behind.

My sister escaped to Wellington to do her nursing training. Dad got his next promotion to Gore, and I moved with my parents. Wright Stephenson’s had no position for me there, so at last I succumbed and joined the Post Office.

For the first time we had a big house, in which we rattled around in the cold rooms, and missed the warmth of the Bay of Plenty. Now that he had a plan, my father was impatient for retirement and the chance to move north again.

The Post Office in Gore was a big two-storey building on the main street. In July 1967 Dad presided over the changeover to decimal currency, and as a teller I quickly learned to handle the new money.

The following year we listened in horror to reports of the Wahine disaster. We’d sailed many times between Wellington and Lyttelton on the ferries, and felt very close to the situation.

Suddenly, a few months later, Dad died and was buried in Gore without seeing retirement. A heart attack and diabetes were a fatal combination.

We had six weeks to get out of our Post Office house, so Mum and I moved to the Hutt Valley to be near my oldest brother. Mum sold Dad’s empty section, as she needed the money. My brother had already sold his, for thirteen hundred dollars, only just covering his costs. I met and married my husband, and sold my section to put the money towards our first house in Stokes Valley.

Five years later we finally managed to have a holiday at Mount Maunganui.

“I want to show you where we used to own those sections,” I told my husband. We drove down an unrecognisable Pāpāmoa Beach Road. Wide open spaces with the occasional beach house had turned into a continuous row of mansions with nearly every section built on. It was impossible to tell where our sections had been. We found one empty section for sale and made enquiries. They were asking $45,000.

“I sold for peanuts,” I wailed. “Why didn’t I wait until now, till it was actually worth something?”

But what’s done is done, and there’s no going back, and it did help to pay for our first house.

We walked on the beautiful beach and I thought of the death of my father’s dream. He didn’t live to meet his sons-in-law, to take them out in his boat, to build sandcastles on the beach with his grandchildren. But we will for ever remember his love for this special place of Pāpāmoa Beach.

Illustrations:

Te Puke Post Office, 1965 [MLH_68A_Farrow]

Lois Farrow stands by the sign on her father’s section [MLH_68B_Farrow]

Lois Farrow’s section with toilet [MLH_68C_Farrow]