More pictures from Grace

Invercargill was an old fashioned place, containing old style wooden homes with a few brick and roughcast house here and there. After the war there was a building boom going on and couldn't get houses up fast enough. The flat we had, was the front half of a large wooden house; the owners lived in the back half. The rooms were spacious with high ceilings. Weather wise, the summers were warm but winters cold with heavy frosts and the occasional snow shower that didn't lie long. Skiing is popular in both Islands.

Within the first week we had a job in a department store, customers kept asking me how long I had been out from Holland. The Dutch women and I were similar, tall and fair and coupled with my accent the New Zealanders thought I was Dutch as well. We traveled to work on our new bicycles Alex bought us; they were very flash, only trouble was they had back peddling brakes. I always forgot about them and would be scrambling for them on my handlebars; by the time I remembered they were at my feet and I was on the ground. Friday was late shopping open till 9pm then everything closed till 9am Monday morning, other than a movie or a dance on Saturday evenings, the weekends were dead. Could have fired a canon along the main Street and nobody would have known as no one there. We made many new friends, a mix of Scots, English, Irish and New Zealanders but were left to our own devices regarding entertainment, usually a party.

The South Island is a beautiful part of the country with plenty of rivers to fish in for trout or salmon and the lakes and mountains are spectacular. A good rainfall makes the county side very green. Many Streets and rivers have Scottish names; Scottish societies and Pipe bands are through out New Zealand and Invercargill formed the first pipe band in the southern hemisphere. Only two and a half million of a population in New Zealand when we arrived and we had to travel long distances to get to the next city, Dunedin was the next one north of Invercargill about three and a half hours by car. We had an old Bedford post and telegraph pickup truck followed by an American Terraplane and thought ourselves lucky! To get a new vehicle, you had to go on a waiting list and could take up to three years to obtain and the car couldn't be sold for two years after purchase.

We were married on the 24 th of June, 1954 but happy as I was, I missed my family terribly, suffering many bouts of home sickness the first few years. By 1966, we had moved to Christchurch. We celebrated our golden anniversary in 2004 and looking back, we have had a wonderful life here in New Zealand but my heart still belongs in New Cumnock.