Calling Oldies 2

Still remember milk being brought to the cheese factory by horse and cart and later on by tractors and trucks. My dad work in cheese factories around South Taranaki for years, starting at Kapuni dairy factory around 1950.

when I was a child living in Roseneath in Wellington we had milk delivered by horse and cart, the horses were great and knew the route so well they copuld be left to move and stop at will without the driver giving any signals. The trams in Wellington were great also, and used to love going to the winter show. Does any one remember the skeletons made of rubber you could pin on your jacket, they had a sqeezy bulb attached which made the arms and legs shoot out when you pressed on it.

Fish and chips would have been about the only take away, wrapped in newspaper in those days, pies would have been about the only other takeout. Eating out wasnt any to posh either, peas chips and a steak with perhaps a shrimp cocktail being the height of fashion

We never had Friday night fish and chips (or any other night for that matter) simply because we never had a chip shop. We only had a dairy, post office and a fire station. Use to love getting on the bus to go into "town" which took about an hour, and before we left to come home, Mum would let me get some fish and chips.

I loved the bluebell woods when we lived in Sheffield. We caught the tram as far as it would go and then it was a short walk into the woods - magic. Used to love the wild spring flowers coming up in the UK in the parks and odd borders and places too. Our neighbours did the local milk runn in Brooklyn in the days before it was proper roads. They had some stories to tell. It was sheep behind us and cows at the end of the cul de sac when we moved in in 1970.


Oh, the memories the milkman brings back My earliest memories of our milkman in Wellington's Miramar were of the horse's clip-clop, and the rattle of the bottles, at 4 in the morning. And our horse knew his route so that when the milkman reached a certain point, the horse would move the dray on to the next stop. The delivery time changed with the season, afternoon in winter, I seem to remember, and those early mornings in the summer - no daylight saving changes in those days. And we also had a local dairy farm that we used for a time. It lay in a spread behind Scots College, in Strathmore, and the Italian farmer, (Martelli?) would deliver from 10 gallon cans, staight into our s.steel billy. But during the war years, when cream was strictly rationed, we were back to the Municipal Milk Department, and we had to order ahead for Christmas, with a half pint limit on quantity. Of course, they needed the cream for butter-making, so cream was available only for special occasions, like Christmas

milk was always 4 pence a pint - put the bottle out with the pennies on top - they never fitted inside the bottle. We used to pour the cream off the top, and when we had enogh Mum would make a sponge and we'd have whipped cream...

any other ex wellingtonians remember the cry of the paper boys, eeevening oaaast used to ring out each evening and the old pubs with their 6 o'clock closing. Remember my mother sending me into the old Clye Quay Hotel (now very long gone) on Oriental Bay, I must have been about 3 at the time, to fetch my father out, recall being sat up on the bar and my skirt being filled with pennies.