FOR WALTER
On my first day in Primer Four at Caversham Primary School in Dunedin in late January 1950, after having moved south from Auckland in early December, I was seated alongside another newcomer. His name was Walter Powell but his move to Dunedin had entailed far less travel – he was from just over the other side of Mount Cargill at Waitati.
Walter and I were to remain friends until his early death from cancer in 1980.
His parents didn’t have a car, something that was not so unusual in 1950, while my father still had the huge 1935 British Wolseley limousine that had brought us south from Auckland – replaced shortly after by a 1949 Morris Oxford.
We were a family of picnickers – cold meat, white Vienna loaf, butter, orange cordial and one of those amazing inventions, a Thermette.
Because Walter was stuck at home, my parents invited him along on a
