Just "walkin' in the rain"...Definitely not "Singin'"

 Hi there

I belong to 'Friends of Te Papa'. Te Papa Tongarewa is the Museum of New Zealand, situated in Wellington.  Yes, Wellington.  Surprise, surprise, it's one iconic landmark that didn't get snapped up by Auckland....Hooray. 

Anyway, I'd booked to go on a Te Papa Friends archeological walk around Wellington a couple of weeks ago but because of projected bad weather it got postponed until yesterday (Sunday) when the weather was really-really bad.  

It rained the whole time I was on the walk and only about ten of us showed up, the other registered walkers had deferred until next weekend.

We walked along the wharf-front looking at the huge over-a-hundred-year-old Hikitia sea crane that is the oldest working one in the world.  It cant get out to sea by itself; it's lost that capability, however this old girl can get towed to deep water to pick up would-be archaeological treasures.   

I must have passed this crane hundreds of times and never thought much about it.  Who would have guessed that down in the crane's belly was a whole area devoted to the conservation work of maritime archaeological discoveries dredged up from the sea floor. But owing to the fact that the deck hatches are rather small, big artifacts like anchors can't be fed through them because those small hatches are the only entrance to the room underneath.  So... found anchors are dumped in a cluster nearby - word of advice from me: don't swim, dive, or drunken-fall to the right side of the crane.

We walked down Willis Street, learning about the archeological stuff that had been found after the remains of "Plimmer's Ark" had been excavated at the bank arcade site, at the corner of Willis Street and Lambton Quay.  If you visit here during shop hours, there are artefacts on the basement floor.  The ship had been salvaged way back in the 1800s, and turned into a shop by Mr Plimmer, The huge 18-something-or-other Wellington earthquake had raised the land, putting paid to the shop's business.

Then, our little group tootled over to Queen's wharf and found out about how that wharf came about.  We looked at maps depicting how the area had been before and after the earthquake.

It was interesting to learn that during the earthquake every piece of crockery and glassware in every pioneer house had been smashed.  Enterprising crockery-sellers from, for instance, the Taranaki area, rushed down to Wellington to sell their wares.  Because there was so many household breakages after the quake, the city council asked everybody to put stuff outside their houses for collection by wheel-barrows.  It was to be used as ground filler.  And such great finds for future archaeologists.

above: outside Te Papa.  Circa Theatre is behind me.  You can't see it but the crane is to the right of Circa Theatre

above: walking along the wharf.  In the rain. Docked Bluebridge inter-island ferry at back.

We ended up at Government Buildings, my old stomping work ground, where I was surprised to discover there was a curb at the south side of the structure on which a true chain length could be measured...

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 19,

Hi there

1     Typist-in-Charge, Education Department Head Office, First Floor Government Buildings, Wellington.  1974-1978

 

above: Government Buildings, Lambton Quay, Wellington

I had put in for a higher-graded typist-in-charge position, this time at Customs Head Office, and it may as well have been the moon for all I knew about what one did at Customs.  But it would be a break-through for typists, as opposed to the superior reign that shorthand-typists had in the in-charge typing area at this time.  Shorthand-typists-in-charge rarely did shorthand.  They supervised.  So it always felt unfair that only shorthanders could apply for higher jobs.  But imagine my surprise when I spotted an in-charge position in the Public Service Official Circular that didn't have the word 'shorthand' in front of it.  It was exactly one level up from my present grade. 

Right back when I was a teenager of about sixteen, terrible at typing, but with a kind caring mentor boss - Mrs Rowley - I was stationed in room 305 typing pool at Government Buildings   I'd been listening to Mrs Rowley and Miss McNeil who was the Supervising Typist of all education typists, talking about overseas trips.  I gestured to Miss McNeil and said enviously, "I want to be just like you."  I had meant travelling the world -

Mrs Rowley giggled, "She wants to be the Supervising Typist.  Hahaha..."

And everyone at that typing room morning tea giggled.

It was the only time I felt sad about what my idol had said, and that everyone in room 305 thought I wanted to aspire to the dizzying heights of Miss McNeil's job.  To them all, I was so obviously scatty-Lorraine who loved rock'n'roll and movies, couldn't do maths, talked a lot, and was pretty crap at typing. According to the sniggers, there would be no way I could ever take on Miss McNeil's position.

Um...

Well...

First, I had got the Senior Typist job at the Curriculum Development Unit.  Then I got the Typist-in-Charge job at Health Regional Office.  This was followed by my present position as one of three typists-in-charge at Education Head Office...

But now...?  Now, I'd got the Customs Typist-in-Charge job!  Another grade closer to that supervising typist position at Education that I had set my sights on; I was so  determined to work my way through the ranks to get up to it, to prove I wasn't that highly hopeless typist everyone had once thought I was.

It was sad to leave Education.  I walked the long wide Government Buildings  corridors the day I left, memories bouncing around in my head:

There were two enclosed staircases, one at each end of the building, north and south.  I must have run up and down those stairs thousands of times, delivering work to officers on the various floors.  Maybe the staircases were enclosed because of a danger to stair-climbers falling over the bannisters?  

Sometimes I would take the easy way between levels and rattle around in the old 'cage' lift at the south end of the building.  I had once seen a gangster movie where the guys in a cage lift had been machine-gunned between the bars as the lift descended.  I never once rode this lift without thinking of that movie.

 Above: stock photo.  During a later building upgrade the staircases had been freed of their enclosures. You can now see the surroundings.

I walked into typing room 305 where I started out as a junior typist. Everyone now had electric typewriters, and some, the IBM golfball.  

 I remembered the day of the Wahine storm, 10 April 1968, when the winds reached a scary 230 km per hour as the ship Wahine sank in Wellington Harbour. We typists in room 305 had looked out the typing room windows to see a petrified business woman clinging for dear life to the wind-blown tree at the foot of the inside road leading up to Parliament Buildings.  

above:  Inter-island ferry, Wahine, sinking. Stock photo

I stood in Room 305, above the exact place we "girls" from the 1960s had stashed a time capsule.  The floor had been sloping so workmen had come in to install a new floor.  Before the new floor was added we tossed a plastic bag full of memorabilia in the gap under where the new boards would be fitted.  There was the day's newspaper, that year's coin, and a few words from each of us, listing our most interesting points.  I said "Lorraine loves Elvis", another typist said she was "Tall Pat", another "Frances is an indoor bowls fanatic"...

Room 305 still had the same mirror on the wall that I had used 15 years before.  I thought back to the time when one of our typists had found a foreign language on the back of the 30 or so hand-written pages she was working from. None of us could figure out the words...  until .... 

"Hey look - " Pam was holding a page up to the mirror.  

The words had been in mirror writing.  The writer had been using the backs of the papers for his long departmental draft. How the handwriting got to be in mirror vision we had no idea.  Perhaps the Gestetner duplicating machine was somehow responsible?

Holding page after page up to our mirror we saw that it was work-in-progress of a novel.  So, the guy in Buildings Division was a closet novelist?  A romantic-thriller one?  Who'd-a-thunk?  And... who'd also have thunk that he was having an affair with one of the typists.  Well, me.  I knew.  But I had been sworn to secrecy by the pair.

The same went for the typist who was having an affair with one of the married directors.  It was all supposed to be so super-secret-squirrel, though most of the typists knew about it.

And that reminded me of the time I was walking along the ground floor corridor and politely talking to a director as we made our way out of the building. Single-lady Marta, another typist, waved to us as she passed.

The director acknowledged Marta as she scurried away.  He turned to me.  "I can't understand why you aren't married?" he said.  "I mean.... you're pretty.  Marta is ugly."

Whaaaaaaaaat!!!!!????  

I never said anything.  Much to the regret of future-me.  Typists had definitely been tamed....

2     Typist-in-Charge, Customs Department Head Office, PSIS Building, Whitmore St, Wellington 1978

 

above photo, 2025:  PSIS (Public Service Investment Society) Building where I worked from 1978.  It now has a new name.

My first day at Customs -  I was now in charge of 12 typists.  Wow.  As well as my two Trades Certification Board Typing certificates (A and B), I had arrived with my fully-recognised Trades Certification Board SHORTHAND-TYPING certificate grade I.  It had only been for taking down 80 words per minute but this didn't deflate me one iota.  I had taught myself over the past year, using old TCB shorthand exam papers and I had passed this bloody exam on my second attempt.  'Nuff said.  Now I could apply for every Shorthand-Typist-in-Charge job that came up.  Heck, I could even put in for an overseas embassy post.  I was in raptures.

Side-paragraph:  Within a few months of passing my shorthand exam, the tight hold of shorthanders in the government was loosened drastically.  Typists didnt want to learn shorthand anymore and the dictators of shorthand were (politely) informed  that they wouldn't be wasting two people's time if they dictated into a dictaphone.   Dozens (hundreds? millions?) of times officers had taken phone calls, made phone calls, greeted visitors, burrowed in a drawer, wrote memos, lost trains of thought, left for the loo ... whilst the poor shorthander sat patiently, writing pad on the corner of the desk, pencil poised, worrying about the urgent job she was in the middle of doing back in the pool.  And practically every time the boss did receive or make a phone call, that man  would grandly proclaim into the receiver, "I'm just dictating a ministerial to my shorthand-typist, you know...?". Or scrub the word 'shorthand-typist' and substitute 'girl'; the two were interchangeable .

I was led into the typing room at Customs by my Director Admin.  A dozen faces looked up at me.  I would be stationed in the room with them.  And wonder-of-wonders, at interview I had been told that I wouldn't be typing.  I would only be checking the typists' work when they finished it.  

Hooray, I was in seventh heaven...

... until my boss left the room.  Mavis turned to me.  "We don't want you," she said.  "We want Edith-"  She indicated a woman sitting to my side.

Huh?  

Edith, it turned out, had been understudying in the typist-in-charge job until I arrived.  She had been at Customs for five years.  She was three grades beneath me. She was a Senior Typist as opposed to my last two in-charge positions.   People in those days in the government never skipped grades.  By working upwards, an appointee had a good background behind her (or him).

"We understand you do have a background in the government," said Mavis, whilst Edith was silent, "but we know Edith, and she knows this department, and no hard feelings but we want you to go someplace else...."

*****

.

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Episode 17

 Hi there

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, Education Department Head Office, Ground Floor and 1st floor typing rooms, Government Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand, 1974-1978 

The 1st floor typing work was different to work we had completed for officers on the ground floor.  This time there was a lot of typing re overseas teachers coming to New Zealand.  My readers may remember that there were not enough teachers at Wellington East Girls' College the year I sat School Certificate so I couldn't sit the three subjects that I was good at, and I was given the choice of sitting Art, or not sitting at all.  Well, it was the same during my time in the 1st floor typing room: New Zealand teachers were thin on the ground so the department had a recruitment drive for overseas teachers, especially those from Britain. Applicants were offered free travel to NZ, and a job at most any school the govt felt like sending them to.  We typed a lot of contracts telling such teachers that if they skipped out on the job, their surety (usually mum and dad or, sometimes even grandma) would be forced by the government to pay all fees associated with the move.  Bankruptcy much, I often wondered.

above: my typewriter rubber (if you're American, it's an eraser).  In the 70s, Mrs Rowley allowed typists to use Snopake paint on some things (but still no corrections allowed on the typing of mail from the Minister of Education.

If the collation part of the department's sole Gestetner duplicating machine was out of action, or there was a queue to use it, a typing pool would get a call from an officer to help with urgent collating.  Lining both sides of every corridor in Government Buildings were white-painted cupboards about chest-high.  If an officer needed 100 copies of 15 sheets of already typed and duplicated pages, the pages were lined up in order of pages 1-15 on top of the corridor cabinets. We 'girls' would traverse down the row picking up each page in order.  At line end we would staple our 15 pages together, then go back to the beginning again and gather up another 15 pages.  And another 15.  And so on.  Well, it was a change from typing..

School Publications Division was finally ordered to move into Government Buildings, much to the distress of the School Pubs workers.   They took up residence in the annex.  Prior to their arrival , they'd been a very free-wheeling crowd, not caring much about departmental rules (see an earlier TIC blog).  They brought their own typists with them.

NZ Playwright Roger Hall worked in School Pubs.  Rumour had it that the room number of the Stores Division in his most famous comedic play "Glide Time" (about a govt dept stores division) was the same as Stores Division's room number at Govt Bldgs;  I never did get around to checking up on that.

One morning in 1977, we were all working hard in the pool.

The door was flung open.  A man stood there in a rather theatrical pose.  Think of Doc Brown in the "Back to the Future" movies and you'll have a pretty good idea who this guy looked and acted like. 

All typing stopped.  We stared open-mouthed at the entrance.

"Which one of you delightful ladies is Lorraine?"  He waved the department's most recent staff newsletter in a grandiose gesture to the front of him, as if conducting an orchestra.

"Um...  Me?"  Why was I indecisive about my own name?

It turned out that he was the senior editor of the New Zealand School Journal, working out of School Publications.

He tapped at the newsletter.  "You write plays?   It says here that you wrote a 6-part radio sitcom series for Radio New Zealand?"

I nodded.

"Well, I want you to write for us.  Read some School Journals, familiarise yourself with the style of writing and here's my card - send me something.  It's good pay."

And  ... he left the room in a swirl, and a slam of the door.

We typists just sat there, staring at each other.

"What - What just happened...?"  I couldn't get my head around this guy and his request for me to write for something as great as the School Journal.  The School Journal went to every child at every school, in every class, in the whole country.  Each Journal contained stories, plays, non-fiction, and poems.  There were many journals per year, catering for different age groups.

No-nonsense Maureen said, "You'll take up the offer of course...."

"Well, I will have to try and write something.  And study the market.  And -  And -"

Newbie Helen squealed.  Oooh, you can do it!"  She sounded positive.  I wished I were as positive.

But...  Somehow I did write something.  That night, actually.  In 25 minutes .  And my first play for The New Zealand School Journal, "Elephant in the Garden", saw print in 1977.

l

above:  "Elephant in the Garden" (open above) was my first printed work for the School Journal. It was published in 1977.  And my last SJ writing - "Nothing Ever Happens", a poem printed in 2013 - is on the right.  You can see from the pile of School Journals that, wow, after "Elephant in the Garden" I had many Journal acceptances.  I was so blessed.

TYPIST IN CHARGE, episode 3

Hi there

Here's episode 3 of 'Typist in Charge', my typing years' bio that I'm supposed to write for you once a month but seem to be a bit neglectful over the timeline -

***

Mrs Parr sloshed into Typing Room 305, Education Department Head Office, Government Buildings, Wellington.  She looked like a drowned rat.  Her linen coat and once-smart figure-hugging dress clung around her like a bunch of wet washing.  Her peepy-toe shoes leaked droplets of water.  Her rainhat - one of those finger-length strips of plastic that miraculously unfolded into a bonnet that did up in a bow under the chin - was draped wetly across her forehead, dyed blonde curls snaked in the wet down to her nose.  She clutched a short tightly-rolled umbrella, the fold-up style that had only recently hit the market;  yes, the early 1960's was such a 'with-it' era.

"I hate-hate-hate fold-up umbrellas!"  Mrs Parr, near to retirement and this icon of well-known stability, actually stamped her feet.  Mrs Rowley, our Typist-in-Charge, tsk-tsked heavily as she noted the muddy footprints on the lino. Thank goodness footprints would wipe off, unlike the threepenny-piece sized gouges everywhere on the floor where the typists had walked in stiletto heels.

Elspeth and Evaline nodded solemnly, obviously glad they hadn't gone to town in the rain for their lunch.  Francie rushed to help Mrs Parr pull off her soaked-through coat.

Mariana, our whiz at anything mechanical, muttered that these new-style umbrellas were hopeless as nobody could open them.

"Except Lorraine..."  Mrs Rowley acknowledged me.  And trying my best to look humble I gave a demonstration on the proper and efficient way to open a folding umbrella without a half-closed canopy collapsing on one's head.  Or, as seemed to be the case with Mrs Parr,  how to work the catch to even open the darn contraption.  Trumphantly, I ended my demo without ripping my finger.  I was heartily applauded.

Yes, we 'girls' helped each other in many ways. I helped them in jobs like opening umbrellas, and the other typists helped me when I couldn't understand an officer's bad writing, spelling, or adding up.  As well, they enlightened me in The Ways of The World.  One evening about half a dozen of us younger typists went out for a meal.  The typists who were enlightened in The Ways of The World started talking about the four letter word.

Amy, a new typist, and she was a Salvation Army girl to boot, looked across at me in puzzlement.  I shrugged.  "What's a four letter word?" I asked.  I was 16 and prior to this conversation had truly thought I was conversant with The Ways of The World.

"Mmmm..."  Mariana's forehead creased as she was thinking.  Finally:  "It rhymes with 'duck'."

Nope.  Neither Amy nor I had a clue.  (...and back to the present for a moment:  in the supermarket the other day, I heard an under five-year-old spouting the word that, indeed, rhymes with 'duck'.  No-one batted an eyelid.)

One thing that the typists couldn't help me with was my typing.  I wasn't very good at it.  I just didn't have the patience to check my work.  If there was a long job, maybe twenty or more foolscap pages, I  could ask another typist to silently scan my finished typing whilst I read out loud to her from the writer's manuscript.  And yet, still, Mrs Rowley insisted that I hand all my finished typing to her for re-checking.  Much of it came back for retypes.  How did the woman put up with me?  Beats me.

***

Below: an exact google image of a 1960's rainhat

below.  A google image of an Imperial 66 typewriter from my era.

Wahine Disaster (Happy Wahine day, Lorraine)

Hi there

Yesterday, 10 April, was my birthday (happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me).  Every year I wake up on my birthday, bleary-eyed, turn on my radio and immediately hear the announcers going on about "today is one of the saddest, most tragic days in New Zealand's history".  A bit of a let-down for a birthday girl.

All through the day on radio and television there is talk again of what a tragic day it is.  Listeners ring up Talkback, television has retrospective looks, memories are dug out, newspapers print special pages....  It's all too depressing, really.

It's the anniversary when the New Zealand inter-island passenger ferry, Wahine, sank in Wellington Harbour - 10 April 1968.  With loss of lives.

http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media_gallery/tid/1709

The terrible thing about the whole episode was that the ship was so close to shore.   Wellingtonians could only watch and not do anything.  It was the worst storm Wellington has ever had, two big storms clashing together over the city.    Hundreds of roofs were blown off, trees blown down, roads blocked.  The ship was so close to berthing and it still couldnt combat the fierce waves, wind, rain, and the rocks of Barrett's reef.  I can remember my father telling me about so-called "Wanganella weather".  In 1947, the inter-island ferry, Wanganella got stuck on Barrett's Reef as it entered Wellington Harbour.  Passengers were rescued but salvagers needed at least 18 fine days - without any sort of bad weather - to get the ship off the rocks.   And they got those fine days, henceforth any good period of weather became known as 'Wanganella Weather'.

I was a junior typist at the time of the Wahine disaster, working in Government Buildings, (the largest wooden structure in the southern hemisphere), at the bottom of Lambton Quay.  From my third floor front window, I could see the devastation all around.  Anything that wasnt tied tightly down was blowing madly down the streets in the gale-force winds.  There is a big wide tree beside Parliament Buildings gates.  I can remember a woman with her chest tight to the tree, arms out-stretched clinging tightly to the tree-trunk, lest she be blown away.