Grandpa’s cream stand story just takes the cake

Once common structures emblem of simpler times

Anyone who recalls noticing a slightly Port Royalish sort of tang to their pavlova in those

days can now be assured that they weren’t imagining things, but Grandpa’s

cream was always assessed as the “finest”,

so presumably at least the ash didn’t end up in

the bottle.

Robin Shepherd evoked all sorts of memories with his tribute to the humble cream stand last week. We had one, on North Rd, adjacent to Kaitaia Intermediate School, and if I say so myself it wasn’t a bad one.

Ours never doubled as a school bus stop/shelter. My sisters and I caught the bus at Des Brent’s shop, where Bell’s Produce is now, where the pre-school entertainment once featured the mother of one of my peers, especially reluctant to attend school on this particular day for reasons unknown, delivering her son in a wheelbarrow, having hogtied him to ensure he could not escape.

Parents would not be thwarted in those days.

But back to the cream stand.

For some years my father drove for the NCCA, picking up cream from over a large part of the county, so I have no doubt it was precisely the right height to make the job of heaving cans on to the truck as easy as possible, with a bobby calf pen below. And, like Robin, I suspect the once common structures could be cited as an emblem of what in hindsight were much simpler times.

Anyone who wants to build a cream stand now will no doubt need an engineer’s report, with detailed drawings to be approved by someone at the council. They will probably require fire-resistant walls, detailed evidence that the chance of those who load and unload the cans will face minimal danger of splinters, and if the chosen site is less than 1000m above sea level, a tsunami report.

An archaeologist’s report would be compulsory, obviously, and any suggestion of a colony of endangered snails anywhere within a 5km radius would be the kiss of death.

Obviously the stand would need to be earthquake resistant, and far enough off the road so as not to represent a traffic hazard. That would be up to Waka Kotahi, which would probably take only slightly longer to sign it off than it’s going to need to reopen the Mangamuka Gorge.

If it’s going to be built on road reserve, which it surely will be, it will no doubt need some sort of subdivision, or at least an easement, consent will be needed from the local iwi, Heritage NZ and neighbours for a couple of kilometres in every direction, and it will need to be aesthetically appropriate in terms of the surrounding environment.

Completing those initial steps should at least make obtaining a resource consent a relative doddle, but it would be wise to set aside about five years and $100,000.

If you think that’s a bit far-fetched, next time you’re talking to the mayor of Auckland, ask him how much he spent not restoring the old jetty outside the Mangonui Four Square, and how much he had achieved when his budget ran out.

The cream stand was just one part of the story though. My grandfather, Arnold Puckey, made his contribution to the history of this small part of agrarian folklore by putting his pipe on a small shelf above the cream can as it slowly filled from the separator. According to legend, said pipe fell, unnoticed, into the can on more than one occasion, not to be discovered until the can was emptied at the factory.

Someone there would stick it in an envelope and post it back to him, to be puffed on, and put on the shelf above the cream can, once again.

Anyone who recalls noticing a slightly Port Royalish sort of tang to their pavlova in those days can now be assured that they weren’t imagining things, but Grandpa’s cream was always assessed as the “finest”, so presumably at least the ash didn’t end up in the bottle.

Dad, and my older brother, who bought the farm from our parents in 1963, weren’t pipe smokers, but they did have a cowshed cat or two. My brother will tell me if I’ve got this wrong, but I clearly remember one such cat, not much more than a kitten, perching on the side of the can and patiently waiting for it to fill to the point where it could dip one paw in then lick it clean.

Again, I don’t remember Dad or Michael having trouble with their grades, even after the cat lost its grip and fell into the can. I’m not sure if that happened only once or on multiple occasions, but I do remember seeing a large lump bobbing and dog paddling around in the can until someone fished it out.

NB: No cats died or were seriously harmed in the making of this memory.

Anyway, by 1963 Michael was happily delivering his cream to the cream stand on a trailer towed by his Farmall Cub tractor, unwittingly destroying the planet in the process, but in the years after the war Dad had used a horse and sledge. The same sledge that he used to transport Mum to the road to meet a slightly faster mode of transport as she prepared to give birth to one of my sisters.

Dad, the horse and sledge arrived (at the cream stand) but Mum didn’t. She’d fallen off, apparently, a few yards into the half-mile journey, and by all accounts was not best pleased.

Having finally made it to the road, she might well have waited for the taxi or whatever had been summoned in the cream stand. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.