Penwill Properties

Beginnings

My father was Harold Benjamin Hall. He was born in Auckland near the New North Rd and Dominion Road junction, but spent most of his childhood on a farm in the Waitakeres near Swanson (close to the present junction of the Scenic Drive and the road to Bethells Beach).

After his 21st birthday he went to work at the quarries supplying gravel for the Waitakere Reservoir Dam. He qualified with a certificate allowing him to use explosives, and found it very useful in later life. Later he went on a tour to the South Island as far as Dunedin were he obtained work as a labourer, helping to build a fertiliser works, and later making the fertiliser, where he was on the night shift. A very dusty and health destroying job.

My mother, Margaret Ruth Bush, was born in Fielding, but spent most of her early life in the South Island. Her father was a printer and bookbinder and after leaving school my mother worked for him or with him. She and dad met in Dunedin and were married in 1933. I arrived in 1934. Six weeks after I was born we moved to South Auckland to live, first at Puni with relatives, then to a rented house near Waiuku. 1935 my father bought a small farm in Waiuku, 16 acres of gorse and blackberry. Then the struggle for a living began. My parents lived there until 1958. I lived there until 1953.

Over the next 16 years they added 4 girls to the family Lola, Joyce, Alison, and Margaret. The farm grew over the years until he had 35 acres in Waiuku and a 60 acre run-off block at Te Toro on the Manukau Peninsular, where he kept dry stock and our milking cows during their dry period. Income was supplemented by raising pigs and cutting firewood. My father wanted me to become a farmer but I was not at all interested.

The house on the farm that we lived in was a very nice kauri villa, built about 1880-1890. It had a 10-foot stud and was board lined. On the walls the boarding was fixed as sarking, then lined with scrim (a coarse hessian type cloth). The wallpaper was glued to the scrim. Skirtings were 10×1 and heavily moulded. Architraves were 6×1, moulded. Windows were double hung with cords and weights to balance the sashes. Ceilings were 10×1 boards with 3×1 moulded cover battens over the joints and varnished or painted.

The roof was about a 40 degree pitch and it had been intended that the roof space be divided into bedrooms but it was never completed. When we first went there, there was an open tread staircase up from the kitchen, but it looked dangerous. Also the hole in the ceiling caused a lot of draught, so the stairs were taken out and the ceiling closed off. Upstairs was never used. So I was told, I never went up there.

In the centre of the house was a double chimney with an open fire on the sitting room side. The kitchen side had a coal range for cooking, and water heating. Originally an old black iron job, finally an enamelled steel stove. There were two bedrooms on the west side of the house and a lean-to roofed room at the rear, which was for the laundry, bathroom and storage. When we left, the bathroom had an enamelled bath on iron legs and a flush toilet.

The laundry had an old pumice clad copper and a pair of wooden tubs (kauri). There was lots of space, so there was room for an old washing machine (a 1927 Beattie). There were various cupboards and shelves as well. Projecting out of the back of the laundry was a meat safe; about 2 feet wide, 2 feet deep and 3 feet high, with a metal roof, and zinc gauze walls and floor. This kept out flies and provided a cool space for food. Access was via a small door from the laundry. This was used until the late 1940s when they acquired a refrigerator. Later we discovered a disused well under the floor. The original water storage, but when we lived there we had town water supplied.

In later years when a boys bedroom was required, Dad cut in a door opening from the sitting room on the eastern side of the house, then built a lean-to roofed room for about half of the end of the house. A lovely sunny room with casement windows all the way around. Some years later the other half of the house end was extended to make a new kitchen. A terrazzo sink bench was fixed to the internal end wall, a timber topped bench fixed under the windows of the outside wall, and at the back end wall there was an exterior door and beside that an electric stove. Access to the old kitchen was achieved by removing the original kitchen window, and enlarging the opening down to the floor, another sunny room.