This is the more difficult page for me to write and my relationship with my father was one of long-standing memories and very few of them all that good. As spoken about before, my father was born in Denmark, near Albany in Western Australia, on the 6^th September, 1931. He left Australia with the family when about 7 years old, as his parents ended up walking off the concession block they farmed and relocated back to New Zealand. His parents met in Denmark, WA, with my grandfather Ralph being one of the land clearers under a government scheme, where he met Molly and they married and I still have relatives there from my grandmothers’ brothers’ side with daughters Marj and Zdena still in Albany, along with Marj’s husband John, and their families. Frank grew up in Westport where Ralph father owned and operated a local pub called the Pig and Whistle Hotel in Utopia catering mainly to all the coal miners who worked the area. Ralph did the milk round as a young man when he couldn’t fulfill his dream of becoming an electrical engineer due to the great depression and then at the cement works in town. Frank was a rugby playing, motor bike riding, country singing young man, who had a chance at one stage of embarking on a singing career, but his father decided he head into a carpentry apprenticeship. I do not know how a Westport man met a Palmerston lass but he did meet our mother Barbara and they married in 1953 with us four kids coming along over the next seven years. There was time spent in Westport before heading to Tokoroa where he met with Barbara and her family who were living there at the time, and then Tauranga where he ended up building the family home in his spare time. After that it places like Te Atatu before we settled in Hamilton in 1964 when I was about 8 years old, at Peachgrove Road in Fairfield.

A good half acre piece of land with an older Spanish flat roofed house, four bedrooms only, so I got to share with my brother, mow the extensive lawns and then took over most of the gardening. We had an old chicken coop and that came down at one stage and Dad built in our own swimming pool which gave us and all the neighbourhood kids hours of fun. A large back shed, plenty of fruit trees, a large pine tree in front we could climb up and see the distant city beckoning and also a drive through carport, which is where I learnt to drive, going from the front section to the back in a figure 8 in our old Standard 9 my Mum had then. Dad had Zephyrs and other cars that we thought quite nifty at the time and one pleasant memory was sitting on his knee steering the car as we drove down the street! Tennis was another favourite of his and which ultimately led to the marriage breakdown over an affair of his with another tennis player! The other main memory is of social evenings with the local Glee Club, where Dad and others would come to the house, playing guitars and the piano in the lounge and singing away. He was always very musical minded like his mother and played his music mainly by ear, and not by music sheets, playing guitar, mouth organ and the piano or keyboards organ.

My father was more of the old school type, tough masculine guys, worked hard, played hard and one who always wanted to have a son, until I came along that is! Amazingly I could not play rugby, ride a motorbike or be a man immediately I was born into this world, so I was on the receiving end on what people today would call abuse, and very physical abuse. Rock solid muscled hands and arms knocking about my head and ears does not create warm memories, and as this carried through right into my teenage years, it left an impression I was never able to forgive. I may have called some of this onto me myself through my actions, but one result was I never wanted children of my own and then to repeat to them what my father did to me. I also had a temper with good strength once I got older! My brother and younger sister also have memories of rough treatment but that is their story, and both of them came to a peace and forgiveness with Dad, one that I could never do.