Turning 100 in a state house
‘‘You didn’t have anything in those days, just a bit of furniture youmight have had.’’
Len Cook
After 70 years living in a Lower Hutt state house, Len Cook has celebrated his 100th birthday in one.
But unlike his first state home, which was damp and cold, this new home is warm, secure and a huge step up for the centenarian, who says he ‘‘never earned enough’’ to buy his own home.
‘‘I get the good genes from my mother,’’ says Cook, who joined the centenarian club on March 22, with a card from the Queen to prove it.
Cook’s mum was well into her 90s when she died. Cook himself doesn’t seem his age, he could be a spry youth barely in his 80s.
He raised his two children in his first state home, in Naenae. Now he has five grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren – a living legacy he’s deeply proud of.
As a returned serviceman in the 40s, Cook and his late wife Doris lived in the transit camps – cabins on the old army grounds, where married enlisted men and their families could live while they waited to find more permanent homes.
Out in Lower Hutt, the Government was building a slew of new state houses and suburbs, such as Pomare, Taitā and Naenae, for them to move into and start their civilian lives.
The Cooks got their new, three-bed state home in 1949, in Naenae, and moved in with their baby daughter, Christine.
Sitting on quarter-acre sections, these homes were built for modern life, with large, central, family-sized kitchens, internal toilets and washhouses, and lots of storage. Popular opinion says they were built to last, but Cook reckons that wasn’t always the case.
‘‘It was sinking all the time.’’ Built from brick, Len reckons the house was too heavy for the boggy soil of that part of the valley. Despite that, Cook says it was ‘‘good to get a house’’, as it set him and his family up.
Completely empty when Len and Doris moved in, there were no carpets, curtains, or whiteware in state homes. They were just a bare shell the families could decorate as they saw fit.
‘‘You didn’t have anything in those days, just a bit of furniture you might have had,’’ says Cook.
‘‘I was lucky, I managed to get some Feltex [carpet] to put on the floor. But we never bought anything on time payment. If we couldn’t pay for it [then and there], we didn’t have it.’’
There was no heating in the home, except the fireplace in the living room – ‘‘You lit it, and all the heat went up the chimney’’ – but that wasn’t too bad. In those days, you only used the living room for visitors. Family life was lived in the kitchen, warmed by the perpetually burning stove.
Cook has seen the suburb go from dirt roads and market gardens to a bustling area.
‘‘We got a railway station. Before, the train used to just pull up, and you had to climb in. No platform, nothing. We saw the baths being built, too.’’
It was a good place to raise his family, but Cook was glad to move on when his housing manager offered to relocate him in 2015.
‘‘She came up and said ‘would you like a new house?’, and I said, ‘what?’. She said, ‘there’s one up in Taitā, if you’d like to go and have a look’. So we came up and [it was lovely]. It’s quiet.’’
Cook and second wife Edith
moved in in 2016. A mix of state housing and privately owned houses, the area is quiet, with almost no sound from the nearby busy roads. There’s outdoor space to enjoy, but not so much garden it’s overwhelming. It’s also warm and dry.
Edith brings out a huge stack of birthday cards celebrating Cook’s 100 years, including cards from the Queen, Governor General Cindy Kiro, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and mayor of Lower Hutt Campbell Barry.
When Cook fell ill in 2021, and ended up in hospital, getting a card from the Queen was ‘‘all he talked about for six months,’’ says daughter Christine Clark.
‘‘When he started coming right, he said, ‘Oh, well, I might be able to get the card from the Queen now’. And sure enough [he did].
‘‘I think the biggest change about him coming here, was that it was warm. You could never get that other place warm, and this is nice and cosy.’’
Cook agrees, the cosiness is the best thing about his new house.
But he still has a few fond memories of his first state home.
‘‘If I remember rightly, that Feltex that we had on the floor when we moved in is still up in the roof. I put it up in the loft.’’