Piano boy

BY MICHAEL FALLOW

Somewhere in the crowds at the Rural Heritage Day festivities at Invercargill's Donovan Park today will be a children's author with vivid boyish recollections of the 1950s.

In his pitch-perfect little book Piano Rock: A 1950s Childhood, Gavin Bishop evokes an idyllic early childhood in Kingston.

During the summer holidays, I spent all day outside. My legs and face and arms turned browner than the hills.

"Go outside and play," Mum would say; I wasn't allowed back inside until teatime.

As soon as I had finished my toast in the morning I was off – across the paddocks through the bright summer air to the O'Donnell's place. Blackened seedpods on the broom bushes cracked open as I ran by. Down the hill, the lake flashed sunlit signals as a breeze raised a slight chop. When he heard my knock, Frankie Gibbs would come out and bound down the porch steps, wiping away his milk moustache with his sleeve.

"I know something you don't!" he would shout.

And I would say, "Betcha don't!"

"I do so!"

"Prove it then."

"I'll tell you later. Let's make a hut."

During the day, if I got hungry and wanted "a piece", I had to wait by the back door and Mum would bring it to me. Then would go off again, carefully juggling a couple of sandwiches: one for Frankie and one for me.

Nowadays, people reckon, it's so much different. We have the bubblewrap generation, cossetted by fearful parents and a nanny state.

It's tempting, though perhaps just a fashionable conceit, to conclude that CYFS would be on to that Mrs Bishop about her failure to exercise care and control of her child, letting him run loose like that.

"I think life in the 1950s was pretty safe," reflects Bishop, now an award-winning children's author and illustrator.

"It was also rather dull."

His evocative book is nothing if not vibrant, full of seize-the-moment life, but even in this open setting, there emerges a sense of constraints that needed to be resisted, often through youthful imaginings.

"We lived inside our heads the whole time. There was this parallel world that we made up and played in.

"I think kids are still capable of that. I went to a drama production of one of my books in Christchurch a few years ago.

"It had been cobbled together by a group of children and their teacher.

"It was taking place on a boat and they had a sheet on the wall and bits of cardboard. And the audience absolutely loved it.

"They were completely captivated. Their imagination filled in all the gaps."

A huge treat for the boyish Gavin Bishop used to be to come to Invercargill.

"Wow. That was like New York. There was so much to do.

"It had a beach ... and movies!"

How thrilling it was to catch even one or two of the cinematic serials that the townie children were able to see weekly, like Hopalong Cassidy and Flash Gordon.

"They were incredibly low-budget. In Flash Gordon walls shook when somebody walked past. They were marble walls, and they rippled!"

Later, at art school, he delighted in a horror films with creatures from black lagoons, and people marrying creatures from outer space.

"There was a triple feature one night, the movies all made by the same studio, and each monster was essentially the same costume with different attachments."

While a large part of Bishop's Piano Rock recollection is celebratory, he leaves it to his young readers to make their own judgements about what they're reading.

Consider this schoolroom story:

Later I began to read about Janet and John, two good children who were always neatly dressed and lived in a town that was as neat and tidy as they were. Their house had closely cut lawns and a freshly painted fence. Janet and John's parents were always sleekly groomed as if they were expecting a photographer from the Auckland Weekly News to call by. Flowers stood to attention by the front door, unlike the plants in our garden that struggled to grow among the stones. Sometimes John would go fishing with his father. Janet would ask to go to, but she had to stay home with Mother. She wasn't allowed to go because she was a girl.

Let's not pretend those Janet and John books were confined to that decade, either. They came out in the late 1950s and, as far as the education system was concerned, they had a long shelf-life.

"My own kids sometimes brought home old Janet and John books from school.

"This was in the late 1970s."

Is there one single aspect of the 1950s that Bishop would love us to have retained? The answer is unhesitating.

"The New Zealand railway system.

"It was a great tragedy that we lost it."

Just think, he says, what a fantastic experience it would be today for people to be able to get on a train in Invercargill, head up to Kingston, make an Earnslaw crossing of Wakatipu, then from Queenstown travel through Central Otago to Dunedin.

"It would be a fantastic trip."

Bishop recalls domestic life in terms that will resonate with many people's memories of their own parents and grandparents.

Like the seasons, the days of the week told us, especially my mother, what to do.

On Mondays, clothes were boiled up in a copper and scrubbed by hand with soap made from the fat saved up from Sunday roasts.

The clothes were ironed on Tuesdays and mended on Wednesdays. Every day there were beds to make, lino floors to be mopped or polished and meals to be cooked. There was always one afternoon a week set aside for baking. My mother considered it an embarrassment, if not a disgrace, if her tins were not full, just in case someone called in for a cup of tea. Afghans, melting moments, Anzac biscuits, caramel slice or a slab of Louise cake filled the tins each week.

Less often, a chocolate cake was made to a recipe from the New Zealand Women's Weekly But Mum was known for her Fielder's sponge cakes. When an occasion arose, whether it be a birthday party or a Sunday outing, Mum was expected to tun up with one of her famous two-tiered sponges filled with raspberry jam and whipped cream. To the loud acclaim when the sponge appeared, Mum would modestly say `You can thank the coal range for that. It bakes perfectly'.

The 1950s, folks, it just didn't do to be skitey.

»  Piano Rock: A 1950s Childhood, is published by Random House and retails for $34.99.

- © Fairfax NZ News