Years ago I realised that everyone in Britain learns to ride a bike. Most people in New Zealand in my childhood did but neither I nor my sister Margaret did. My other sister is a keen cyclist and says we did not learn because our mother was afraid of accidents. This is not how I remember it. Bicycles were expensive n NZ after the War and I thought that was the reason we never had them. Hastings was a completely flat town but when we moved to Wellington it was so hilly that there was no particular pressure to ride a bike. Some/most of my Wellington friends had acquired them at some point but there were really used for playing in back yards and not for serious cycling. The fact that neither Margaret nor I could ride one did not seem that strange but when I got to England I found absolutely everyone could ride one. I think the fact that people here could not afford cars but could afford bikes was one factor. Certainly it was in my husband's family. Having got one he was expected to ride it to secondary school even though it was on the other side of town. His grandfather even died from a heart attack while riding his bike.
The boy next door to us in Hastings had a bike but he was a year younger than me and I remember his mother told me I would break it so I was never allowed on it. I must have been about six then. I cannot even remember our having a tricycle. I think that as all these toys had to be imported from England they were considered too expensive. And I have no idea why my parents did not look for something secondhand.
In New Zealand I always thought that swimming was the equivalent of cycling as absolutely everyone could swim and most people had taken their Bronze Medal for lifesaving although not me. I was very late at learning to swim and have no memories of ever visiting a swimming pool in Hastings. We often went 'wild swimming' in rivers and the sea and we were taught to respect the water. I have vague memories of my grandfather encouraging us to swim but I do not think my parents were very keen. When I was about six I got 'glue ear' and had three abcesses in my ears over a period of a couple of years. I was therefore taught never to put my head under water and I think this is one reason why I was such a slow starter. I remember that our school in Hastings had a small pool but I think it was really for the boarders and I do not remember ever swimming in it. And of course, once we started going to Taupo, swimming became very important as there was no proper water supply in the house and you swam to get clean. My grandmother used to take a cake of soap down to the lake and wash herself as she was, we thought, too old to go swimming. (She must have been in her late sixties.)
So my memories of swimming lessons start at the age of nine. The Karori baths were just across the road from the school and we used to be taken there every week. I remember nearly sinking in the learners' pool. I know I was ten before I swam the width of the baths which was considered one milestone, and I must have been about twelve before I completed a length. By that age a lot of my classmates were already going to school at 8 am to train for their Bronze medallions. I never entered the swimming sports or learnt how to dive but as an adult I became quite a keen recreational swimmer as it was a fairly painless way of taking exercise.
I taught myself different strokes by reading books and I soon decided that I preferred breast stroke to front crawl. The crawl was the basic stroke in NZ. I also managed to learn backstroke but I would never say I was a strong swimmer. We had plenty of opportunities to observe swimmers as our route to school took us right past the baths. We had boarders at our school and we day girls thought they were very brazen as they used to strip right off in the changing rooms. As I remember it there were no showers at the 'baths' but it did not worry us because we had a bath every day.
I also have memories of some wild swimming incidents. We used to have House picnics at school. On one occasion we went to Butterfly Creek which was a river over the hills on the eastern side of Wellington Harbour. Although it was December it was almost raining. We all took our 'togs' but the boarders were told they could not swim by the matron. That did not deter one of my classmates who came armed with her swimsuit and got in the water. It was freezing cold, as was often the case with river swimming, and she was soon approached by the teacher in charge. Too late. She had no choice but to cower under the bank of the river, submerged.
When I picked tobacco the year I left school we used to go swimming in a water hole in the river when we had finished work. This was a potentially dangerous river so we took great care but there were one or two swimming 'holes' so it was great after a day working in the tobacco field. We used to float down the river reciting Ophelia's death speech from Hamlet which we had studied at school in the year that had just finished.
