Dunedin by Christine Johnston

Author:Christine Johnston [Christine Johnston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781927147382
Publisher: Exisle Publishing
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mushrooms, Blackhead and Baxter

Alf had been working in the bike shop, but the money was poor – £8 10 shillings a week – so in 1948 he got a job driving night shift for Dunedin Taxis. Six nights on and one off, for £15 a week. We didn’t see much of him as his day off was usually Monday.

He often drove a Dodge for the taxi company, an impressive vehicle. All American cars were impressive, in the sense of ostentatious. Both Alf and Deed thought American cars were unnecessarily large – they may have felt differently if they’d been wealthy. He and my father spoke of ‘a surprising amount of leg room’; of driving positions and shockies. Deed worked the clutch and went through the gears, his hand over the top of the knob on the gear lever, his fingers bent around it like claws. Alf did it differently. He held his hand on edge, the way you do when about to rabbit chop, and palmed the lever through ‘the gates’. So he changed gears with a bit of a flourish, lifting his hand off the lever with a gesture like a musical conductor.

Corstorphine – or Corsty as we knew it – was reputed to be a rough area. Further up the hill, on the corner of Corstorphine and Middleton Roads, was a two-storeyed house occupied by people called Savage. The spot was known as Savage’s Corner. As a taxi driver, my father knew it well. There was talk of fights on the lawn, all-night parties, women of ill repute arriving in scores, coal kept in the bath, and so on. It was even said that someone living there had cut holes in the walls so that model trains could run from room to room. My father said he’d seen stupefied bodies lying on the lawn, bottles beside them glinting like discarded weaponry. There must have been some truth in it all because, for years afterwards, whenever we drove past the place, my father laughed and relished the chance to say, ‘Savage’s Corner’.

We passed Savage’s every time we drove towards Blackhead, the headland at the northern end of the beach that stretched south as far as Ocean View and Brighton about five miles down the coast. In between home and Blackhead were paddocks where, from February through until April we gathered bags and baskets of mushrooms. Sometimes we went in the mornings, the sunlight sharp on dewy grass, moist dung smearing our gumboots. You could hear the Pacific Ocean, see the startling white surf and the equally white sand on the southward-curving beach – and across the Kaikorai Estuary the land rose in crimply folds towards the top of Saddle Hill.

Mushrooms were mysterious, emerged in the dark and glistened. The best paddocks were those without long, lank grass, paddocks that were lightly stocked with sheep not cattle. So while mornings were exciting – would we get in before others arrived? – just as often we went in the evenings when the light was softer, the air milder.

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