Waipuna (ePub)

I was born one year to the day after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. My father had emigrated with his family from the midlands in England not long before the First World War, with his mother and four brothers. His father had left England a year before to work the coal mines on the West Coast of South Island where the work was back breaking, but the good workers could earn big money. It was where my grandfather, George Woodward, saved up enough money in a year to pay for his wife and five boys to sail to New Zealand and join him on the other side of the world. It would a tale worth telling, as my Welsh grandmother must have been tested to the limit keeping five rambunctious boys, ranging from five to ten years old, ran riot on their ship for eight weeks, off on a huge adventure. In New Zealand, they rounded off the team with two more boys and moved north to warmer climes, where they bought an area of land which they cleared of bush and farmed.

My parents had produced three children when the Second World War erupted, and my father enlisted and was shipped across to Egypt, leaving my mother with three young children to look after and along with many other young mothers, dreading the postman’s visit each day with the feared news that hubby wouldn’t be coming home.

After the war, the surviving troops returned home and were encouraged to take up farming financed by the government, and so I was born into a period of plenty of food, no wars, practically no inflation, and no unemployment. I’m the youngest of four with two older sisters and an older brother. Growing up in the nineteen fifties and sixties which, looking back, I think we were blessed by growing up in two very privileged decades.

I left school at seventeen and completed a five-year carpentry and joinery apprenticeship. I spent four years exploring the big wide world. I worked in South Africa, Rhodesia, Scotland, and England. I married my wife Margie in Johannesburg at age twenty-six

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