Leaking pens and mischievous makeup
MR Johnstone was my sixthform geography teacher at Burnside High School in Christchurch. He was a lovely man, an encouraging teacher with a gentle manner, who could easily become sidetracked and end up many miles away from what he was meant to be sharing with us.
However, I mainly remember ‘‘Bulldog’’, as he was called for some reason unbeknownst to me, for one thing — the Leaking Pen Affair.
He used to sit on desks at the front of the classroom, swinging his legs as he explained some concept or fact. This particular morning, there was a pool of blue ink on his chosen desk. We could see it on one of his hands as he waved it around, then it was on the other, then on his legs (walk shorts) and clothes, and eventually smeared across his brow.
By the end of the 50minute period, there was ink spread across pretty much the whole room, including our notepads and bags. It would have made a fascinating forensic study to trace the ink’s progress.
A similar thing happened to me at the weekend. Without realising it, I knelt in my wife’s makeup in the dusky gloom as I pulled the curtains in our bedroom. Later I noticed big blobs of makeup on my trousers and thought, well, that’s wrecked them.
The makeup container had mysteriously disappeared and, not long after, we found streaks of the stuff all over the duvet and on piles of other clothes. Finally we found the nearlyempty box on the floor by the side of the bed and realised I must have elegantly carried it over there, squashed and held in suspension on my knee, before it fell off when I knelt to pull the other curtains. What a mess!
I’ve always been a fan of slapstick and think Laurel and Hardy would have been proud of my efforts.
Norman Kirk memories
Lyndall Hancock of Waverley has written to reiterate the plane carrying Norman Kirk’s body could not land in Timaru on September 5, 1974.
‘‘I was in Timaru at the time, waiting with crowds of others on the hill above Caroline Bay. Then a car with a loudspeaker came by, telling everyone that the plane had been cancelled because of the weather, and the coffin was already on its way by road.
‘‘The approximate arrival was given — I remember it was far less than the two hours Christchurch to Timaru as it was at the time, but then of course the police escort would have made the difference.
‘‘I wasn’t able to come back at the later time, but I was in Waimate the next day and visited the grave.’’
Alister Young also remembers the funeral procession.
‘‘I was at a hockey tournament in Napier when we heard of his death and remember our sadness at the loss of an exceptional man, knowing we would not see the likes of him again.
‘‘A few days later I was back home working at the insulator factory in Temuka. Norman’s funeral cortege was travelling down to Waimate by road.
‘‘All the businesses and factories stopped work and people came out and lined both sides of the main road through the town in silence to pay their respects. It was sombre, emotional, and a very moving moment.’’
Denise Harger also recalls the cortege.
‘‘I was a young married woman in Timaru with a baby and I was one of hundreds who lined the main street as the funeral procession went past. It was so moving and memorable.’’
ODT reporter Kay Sinclair, then at Radio 4XO in Dunedin, was working on the afternoon of the funeral:
‘‘I recall waiting for Tom Frewen to phone his funeral report from Waimate to the 4XO newsroom. Tom made a false start — he started his report, fluffed it part way through, cursed colourfully, then started again.
‘‘Deadline pressure meant I had to guess the right place to start the tape for the news report, live to air hoping I’d run the tape far enough to avoid the purple patch. A nervous few seconds!
‘‘Like most people I think we were still stunned by events but had to do our job as journos. And Tom had to contend with the delay and our looming news deadline. No pressure!’’
Cable cars
Kerry McAuley of Clyde sent a Dunedin cable car photo which appeared in the New Zealand Women’s Weekly of August 22, 1994 in the ‘‘Those were the Days’’ section.
‘‘This is the last trip taken by the Mornington cable car. The policeman in the centre at the front is my late fatherinlaw Kel McAuley.
‘‘My motherinlaw remembers that this photo was taken on March 2, 1957, as she was in the ‘home’ after the arrival of their first son David (my husband), and was wondering why Kel had not been to visit that day.
‘‘I guess it was a case of ‘every picture tells a story’’’.