The Good Life On Te Muna Road by Deborah Coddington

Author:Deborah Coddington [Deborah Coddington]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775537809
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mum, like Scotty, had been born in Napier, in 1921. Her father, Arthur Parnell Spackman, was a pharmacist. Her mother, Edris Spackman, née Grubb, was an opera singer. Mum used to proudly declare that her mother was the first woman in Napier to own an automatic washing machine, but I’m pretty sure she meant an electric washing machine. Grandma Spackman, as we used to call Mum’s mother, loved the latest fashions, jewellery, sports cars and going overseas on cruises, and had poodles.

Mum was the complete opposite. She thought all that was frivolous nonsense and she never stopped telling me so. Before she married Herbert Edward Coddington she’d opened her own private kindergarten in Napier. She was a marching girl (Dad was the instructor), and when I was little I always wanted to be a marching girl, have pierced ears, and wear miniskirts with white boots, but Mum railed against all that, saying it was ‘cheap and common’.

She married Dad when she was eighteen. She always told me they married in a registry office; that her parents told her if she waited until he returned from the war they’d give her a big wedding in the Napier cathedral. After she died and I was sorting through her stuff I discovered a newspaper clipping which told a different story:

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