In October 1981 I went to New Zealand for several months to visit my family and to work on an anthology of contemporary New Zealand poetry that I’d been contracted to compile for the New Zealand branch of Oxford University Press.
I needed to find somewhere to live, preferably a place where I could be alone and cater for myself without constantly expecting relatives to provide me with meals and entertainment. After my first few weeks of enjoying other people’s hospitality a solution presented itself: my father (Cyril John Adcock) and his second wife, Ngaire, had recently bought a fairly large house in Oriental Bay, their third address in the area. My father was greatly given to moving house and enjoyed the process of renovating old properties. He was also passionately fond of living beside the sea. He told me how as a little boy from Manchester he was taken to Colwyn Bay for a holiday, and loved it so much that his parents let him stay on and board for several more weeks with the family who ran the guesthouse. (He appears there on the 1911 census of Wales, aged six, with his mother, guests of a family called Jones.) Now he had his own bay.
A note from my journal for 21 November 1981, when I moved in, gives a brief description of 174 Oriental Parade: ‘This house dates back to the 1890s or so, according to the title deeds, and probably further than that, but no one can be sure. The land is valued at a vast sum. I hope it will stay in the family and not have a horrible concrete block built on it, like so many others around here.’ [That hope, alas, was a vain one; my father would eventually give in to pressure from one of the big construction companies that were buying up properties on the seafront.] ‘The front of the house, which directly abuts the street, faces Oriental Bay with its yachts and swimmers and the glittering hills across the harbour. It has a view on three sides and is strangely shaped to accommodate this. It is probably the second-oldest house on the bay, with curious panels and pilasters in the big sitting-room.’
It was in such a prominent position that postcards of Oriental Bay photographed from the other side of the harbour used to show it very clearly. Unfortunately, the view has now changed, but I’ll try to describe the layout, reconstructing it in retrospect:
174 Oriental Parade
[Credit: Wellington City Libraries, Charles Fearnley Collection, ref 50003-1051]
The house nestled into the hillside and was built to fit a section on a sharp corner, with large windows upstairs to take advantage of the light and sunshine. It was on two levels, with steps up from the pavement to the enclosed front porch and inside that a second front door. My sister Marilyn has reminded me of a feature I had forgotten: the shiny bronze plaque installed on the inside of the front door. It had a raised image of Paddy the Wanderer – an Airedale terrier who roamed Wellington wharves and Oriental Bay in the thirties. He had his yearly dog licence paid for by various cabbies and seamen, and by a number of Oriental Bay residents. Perhaps the previous owner of 174 had been one of them? The story can be found on Wikipedia.
The main bedroom was downstairs, together with several smaller rooms, all full of books, including the one on the eastern corner, looking out at the street and the sea, that my father used as a study. At the back was a utility room mostly devoted to laundry but with a sink, a cooker and an ancient fridge so that I was able to use it as a kitchen when I stayed there. A door gave access to the yard outside, with sheds and workshops plus a convenient lavatory. The garage was at the front, under the house. Every time my father backed his car out into the busy road he was at risk of instant death.
Upstairs was a large reception room facing the bay, with a wide expanse of windows sweeping around two sides and part of a third. This was a sitting room and dining room combined, the dining area being partially enclosed, and the whole floor was rather alarmingly carpeted in a very impractical pristine cream: Ngaire’s taste, I assume, but not a place to entertain visiting small grandchildren. There was a window seat running alongside the walls full of windows in this room, and there were also quantities of upright chairs; perhaps the space had been used for meetings. But where were the panels and pilasters that I mentioned in my journal? Could I have been referring to the partial wooden screen around the dining area? I try in vain to peel back the darkness that has descended over the image that must have existed in my mind 40 years ago.
I adopted the western corner of the window area as my workplace, where I sat reading through volumes of New Zealand poetry borrowed from the public library and picking out promising candidates for my anthology.
At the back of this upper floor, across the stairs from my bedroom, was the main kitchen, a rather large room with a small dining area for everyday use. From this kitchen there was a door out to the second level of the garden, with a washing line and space for garden furniture, while above this were two more ascending terraces where my father grew his tomatoes and vegetables. He had a tame blackbird that used to visit him while he was gardening. Higher still, snuggled into the hillside, was an elderly shed or bach, furnished with a dusty rug, shelves of books and an old chair or two, and often bathed in sunshine.
Not long after I moved in, a student-age resident of the house next door, number 172, called at the side gate asking whether ‘the Prof’ was in. At that moment he wasn't, but when he came home he revealed that he owned that building, too, and was responsible for its maintenance and upkeep (he was an expert handyman). The two houses were part of a small empire he called ‘City Investments’. For a man with such fervent socialist principles my father had turned out to be surprisingly hard to distinguish from a capitalist.
His wife Ngaire, who like him was on the staff of the psychology department at Victoria, shared his enthusiasm for the bay. It’s very difficult to establish the chronology of their various moves, after so many years, as the stationery they used for their correspondence had the address of the university printed on it so that they needn’t insert their home address. They were at 7 Oriental Terrace in late 1962, when I remember visiting my grandmother there not long before I left for England, although my father and Ngaire were already abroad on sabbatical at that time. The last evidence I have of them at that address is on a letter dated April 1967. The next clue shows them at 210 Oriental Parade in September 1968, and they were still there in March 1979. They must have bought 174 between then and 1981 These three successive addresses represent a gradual descent to sea level, a location that was nevertheless at the height of desirability.
Oriental Terrace is not so much a terrace as a typical Wellington zigzag pathway, part of it consisting of steps and inaccessible to vehicles; it lies on the pedestrian route from Oriental Bay up to St Gerard’s Monastery and the streets of Mount Victoria, where my mother and later my sister lived. I never set foot inside number 7 after that visit with Marilyn to our grandmother, as I was settled in England, but I have vivid memories of Grandma’s nervousness about being in the house alone; she was convinced that there was a man lurking inside the locked room where valuable items were stored. After all, she was then 87.
Before the next change of address she moved, or was persuaded to move, to a residential home for the elderly at Titahi Bay. Her son and daughter-in-law then shifted to 210 Oriental Parade, a house reached by a number of steps up from street level, with a garden in front and room for my father to indulge another of his enthusiasms. He built a small rowing boat, which he could drag down to the seafront and paddle around in the shallow waters of the bay. Ngaire, I think, was less keen on the boat, but they were both regular swimmers.
They were still at 210 in May 1970 when my father retired from the university, although Ngaire, who was younger, worked there until after his death. He was never less than busy, however; with his writing and the lectures he continued to give to other organisations such as the WEA, nursing organisations and the like, as well as his private practice as a psychological advisor and his supervision of various, often ramshackle, properties around Wellington that he would renovate before letting them to students. He was a workaholic, and a constantly active man. We were always afraid he would fall off some roof he was mending, and he could be seen cycling around Oriental Bay on his bicycle until he broke his leg (I’m not sure of the details – as usual, I was in England at the time – but he made a good recovery). Buying and renovating number 174 was just the sort of challenge he enjoyed.
My last visit to New Zealand in his lifetime was in early 1986. By then he had given up the attempt to live peaceably in Oriental Parade, and sold 174 to the developers. After something like five years in the house and a total of perhaps 23 years at Oriental Bay he and Ngaire had moved to a quite different area of Wellington, Karori, to a house in Hatton Street with a swimming pool. I assume the pool was the attraction, but Marilyn tells me it had maintenance problems, and that his efforts to keep it leak-proof were a severe strain on his health – not that he would ever have admitted to such a thing. Both she and I were out of the country (Marilyn in the USA, on a writing fellowship, and I back in my house in London) when he died unexpectedly of a heart condition in June 1987, a short time before his 83rd birthday.
But Oriental Bay is addictive. After his death Ngaire sold the Karori house and moved back there to a flat high up in Wharenui Apartments, 274 Oriental Parade, from where she could once again watch the passing scene below her and the changing weather coming across the sea.
— Fleur Adcock, Bay View newsletter 81, May 2023