Dad

00:02 My name is Mary Pickering. I'm 54 years old. Today is Thursday, July 21, 2022, and I'm speaking with David Pickering, who is my father. We're recording this interview in Christchurch, New Zealand. Dad, would you just briefly introduce yourself?

00:21 I'm David Pickering, married to Karen and the father of Mary, as well as two sons. I've been a clergyman in the Anglican Church for most of my life, but initially my whole interest was in, shall we say, the mathematical parts of life, which included my first degree, which was engineering. So that's essentially me.

00:55 Thank you. So what I wanted to talk about today was your immigration experience. You immigrated to New Zealand from England in 1952. So why did. You were 15 years old, right. So why did Grandma and Grandad immigrate and how did you feel when they told you you were going to be moving to the bottom of the world?

01:27 I felt very excited at the thought of going to this place, New Zealand. And of course I looked it up as much as I could in books and magazines and things that people sent us. Basically, I thought I'd be riding to school on a horse and there would be a lot of Maori maidens amongst the ferns. This was not so. But that was all that we could really get on New Zealand.

01:59 And what was the impetus? You must have known other people that were immigrating. Were Grandma and Granddad just immigrating for a better life?

02:07 No, I knew nobody involved in that sort of thing. My father was employed by the world's largest glass company and he was sent out to open a glass toughening factory and that involved cars, cow windscreens and things like that. So we were really on our own and we knew nobody. When we got on the ship and arrived to New Zealand, dad had met the person who was the overall representative of the firm in New Zealand, but that was all we knew nobody then.

03:06 Wow, that's. That seems very scary. But go back to the ship journey. How long did that take?

03:14 That took a month.

03:15 A month.

03:16 And that was an eye opener and a great pleasure, actually. It was the cleanliness and the number of people there. There were. It would have been a little over a hundred people. It was a single class ship and that meant that nobody was in better, far better accommodation than others. And we all mixed up and swam and played games. There was a ballroom, there were all sorts of fun that was organized. There was also lots of ice cream you could have when you wanted it.

04:08 Did you ever get seasick? Was there any bad weather?

04:11 As sick as a dog.

04:12 Oh, is that the ice cream.

04:16 It's been my experience. I love the sea, but the sea doesn't love me. And I take two or maybe three days and then sea can throw up what it wants and I'm all right.

04:33 Did the ship stop in any ports on the way down? Where did it leave from?

04:38 It left from London. I can't remember which dock. And we stopped at Curacao, which was just before Panama, and went through the Panama Canal. That was a fascinating experience. Especially. What? Well, it was just the sheer size of the docks and all that sort of thing, plus the size of some of the American people that we saw there. Huge Americans.

05:24 Were they military or contractors?

05:26 No, they were. They were obviously employees of somebody or other. But no, that was a fascinating thing. We also hoped to alongside Pitcairn, and then the Pitcairn people came out in boats and we bought all sorts of their handicraft and so on. But essentially it was a learning experience of a different sort of life than living in the north of England with the concomitant weather and all that sort of thing.

06:15 Did you make any friends on that trip that stayed with you?

06:21 Yes, we did. And there was a man and his wife. He was coming out to work in the mines on the west coast at Greymouth, and he was to be the safety manager. He and his wife had a little girl, just a toddler. My father actually taught her to walk on this. On this ship, which is forever moving. She. They stayed in Grey Mouth, and times we went to see them and they came to see us, which was nice.

07:08 Was it Rams Bottoms? No.

07:12 Yes.

07:13 She was a ramsbottom. Because I made faux pas, didn't I?

07:18 You did a big faux pas. Their name was Cotton, actually.

07:25 Right.

07:25 But she had been a ramspot. However, just as a matter of interest, we did stay in touch, and we got more in touch when I was ordained, because they happened to be just by chance in the cathedral at the time of Nelson Cathedral, at the time of my ordination, and later I actually went over to conduct the wedding of that little girl.

07:57 Really?

07:57 Over in Greymouth? Yes.

07:59 Oh, how wonderful. I love that story. So coming out on a ship from England to New Zealand, you must have had to make some difficult decisions about what to bring and what to leave behind. How did you make those decisions?

08:21 There were various ways, because, for instance, my parents had a plan of the house that we were going to be in. We didn't understand what New Zealand houses were. Our houses were brick, built from the ground, but they realized it would be good to carpet the house. So they bought carpet in England. They didn't know whether you could get it in New Zealand or not. You certainly couldn't get the quality of carpet that this was. I had to leave behind a lot of my things, such as the Meccano set, my bicycle, my football and things like that. My parents left a lot of their. All their furniture, really, and so on. And the decision was made partly by the size of the cabin trunks and the trunks for stowing in the hold.

09:48 Do you still have things that you brought out with you?

09:52 Yes, I've got one or two things I'd have to think hard sort of thing to do, remember which they were. And in fact, one of the things was a little compass, a good usable one, which my godmother gave me when I was about 8 or 9 and I brought it out and only a couple of months ago I gave it to a friend for his grandson who was living in Wales and they were going to visit them. I said, oh, Theo might like this.

10:38 So it went back to Britain.

10:40 So it went back to Britain? Yes.

10:42 When you came out, did Grandma and Grandad or you have any expectations that you would ever go back to Britain? St Helens?

10:55 Correct. They had very definitely. And they knew that they. Their contract, they would go. Could go back as part of that contract. And they, in fact did go back. They went on the shore Saville liner and they went via South Africa, which fascinated them completely, very much. I was, at that time, I was at university in New Zealand. I never expected to go home. Particularly I wanted to enjoy New Zealand.

11:39 What were your first impressions of New Zealand? Where did you land?

11:45 We landed in Auckland.

11:46 Auckland.

11:47 It was amazing coming down the Auckland harbour and whatnot. Remember that? I was really very green, not with seasickness this stage, but socially green. Very socially green. And the first real shock was seeing the railway lines. We used to have a little, I was going to say a toy railway, one of those little railways around the foreshore in a place called Southport that we went along. We used to enjoy going on those. They were very tiny lines compared with the English ones. And foot. I thought that the width of the lines was akin to the toy place I just couldn't get over. So that was the first real shock that I remember. We traveled on the Limited, as it was called, on the way Auckland to Wellington, and it was perfectly comfortable. I had a sleeper and there was nothing. But that in itself was a new experience, Such a long trip. All I'd been in England the longest I'd been was from Liverpool to London.

13:20 When you were leaving?

13:22 No, before.

13:22 Oh, you headed London a few times?

13:25 Yes.

13:26 So you arrived in a harbour, Auckland harbor that had a volcano in the middle of it that must have been.

13:39 Yes, the island was very interesting but I didn't know anything about the volcanoes that Auckland is built on. I do remember Wellington. Arriving in Wellington we stayed. I can't remember whether it was Lambton Quay or Willis street, but there was a hotel known as the Occidental and we stayed there in a hotel and learning to order things for food, for a meal and so on was all new to me. And we traveled out to lower hut to see our new house. And the strangest thing that I remember there, apart from it being a wooden house and all that sort of thing, the strangest thing I remember there was the number of tubes or what looked like tubes in the front garden. They were actually the hut newspaper rolled up and delivered and nobody bothered to pick them because the house had been bought for what? I'll never forget that. And that was the thing. But the house was so comfortable. And there was a shower.

15:15 Did you not have a shower in?

15:17 Oh no, we had a bath in England in really what was a shed attached to the house. My father had built the shed and put the bath in and we used to ladle water from the. From the copper which had a fire under it to fill the bath and then jump in the bath. So New Zealand was so different.

15:52 You could turn the taps on and hot water would just come out of it in the shower.

15:57 Precisely.

15:58 Wow.

15:59 Except it had been without use for a while and therefore the water was a bit brown.

16:04 What time of the year did you arrive in Wellington?

16:08 I think it was April, round about that time.

16:13 Okay, so not the worst of the weather that Wellington can turn on the biggest.

16:21 Well, the two big shocks that I remember most of all were one that I had to go to a school where they wore shorts. I hadn't worn shorts for years. I'd been to a grammar school in England and this.

16:43 Richard, you had lily white legs, I'm sure.

16:47 Oh, you could say that. But I'd come out on a ship. The other factor was that this was a co ed school. Now that was a short. When we went to visit the headmaster, we stood outside his door and there were a whole lot of class of girls going past in the corridor to Jim and they were all wearing rompers. And I said I'm off and my mother grabbed me and said stop, no, no, no, no, you'll be all right.

17:27 What was it? About girls in rompers that scared you?

17:33 Well, I'd never seen girls in rompers. I'd seen girls in swimming togs and things like that in the baths. But the thought of girls at school, gee, took me a long time to get used to that.

17:51 When you started at school, were you ahead in some subjects, behind in others?

18:01 I was probably ahead in most in the subjects that I talk, except for one. I had to do history and it was New Zealand history. And I was put into the fifth form, which meant I had to do scourge. But when it came to Latin and maths and chemistry, I was well and truly in touch with that. There were some differences in English, the big difference being that my education to that stage had been essentially largely anyway, within English grammar to be able to express myself properly. New Zealand seemed to concentrate more on literature, which meant that I hadn't. I hadn't studied literature in any quantity. But things like short essays to read and answer comprehension tests, they were all okay, no problem with those.

19:20 Did you make friends easily?

19:23 No, I've always been a bit of a loner. But the difficulty was learning the social attitudes of New Zealand, which I absolutely love now and did eventually there in my first year. Well, it was really three quarters of a year during which I had learned enough New Zealand history to pass it, by the way. In my first year I started making some friends and we played tennis and went swimming in the sea and things like that. And that was good. But I didn't make any friends that I stayed with. I did make friends in the 6th and where they were both upper and lower 6th. I made friends that I've stayed with. In fact, there's one who's the same age who also did engineering with me. And we're still in regular contact, which is nice.

20:46 So what do you think that being in New Zealand has brought you that you couldn't have experienced if you had stayed in England?

20:57 I think it delivered me from a lot of experiences in England which wouldn't have been easy. As I read today about life at universities in England and the social life, I would have found that very difficult, especially seeing that we came from a working class area and many of the people at the university had a, shall we say, an upper class thing and the morality and so on of the time would have hit me like a thunderbolt. I would probably most of those of our grammar school who actually went to university tended to go to Oxford. And knowing now my ability, though I didn't understand how clever I was or whatever when I Was at school. I would have handled Oxford. Yes. But I was delivered from it, thank goodness.

22:20 Interesting.

22:21 Looking back, I think. And New Zealand was the place for so many opportunities to start with. I decided I would have liked to have been a doctor because I've always wanted to help people, you know, I decided without any advice, but I decided I wasn't clever enough. I've met a few doctors since and I know what the truth would have been. A vet, possibly. But somehow or other it was mathematics and engineering which captured me. And physics, of course.

23:08 Your face just lit up when you said that.

23:11 Well, it always does, because that's my favourite and I did well with my physics. It was all right.

23:19 So you didn't think of becoming a physicist like your son?

23:25 No, I tended always to be more practical. That may have been because of my father's practicality and he was very practical. He could handle so many different things. Yeah, that's why I became an engineer.

23:44 When you started your engineering training, did you know at that time that you eventually wanted to become a minister?

23:54 Not at all, not when I started. Essentially, I didn't think I would be good enough. I still don't think I'm good enough. But I got call to it during my engineering years at university. The call was quite distinct. I didn't hear any voices or see any blinding, anything. But as I sometimes say, Descartes said, the heart has reasons of which reason knows not. And I've been using that a lot lately.

24:36 You have?

24:37 Yeah.

24:38 Sorry, but it's useful, it's a good applicable.

24:42 But I knew I had to change and people said, don't be daft, you've done well at engineering, get on with that and make a living and so on. That wasn't tempting. The thing is, I'd been called and that was all I had to do.

25:02 How did you incorporate your engineering training into your ministry?

25:09 Oh, I'm still. There are many times when I've wished that I had a classics degree of some description. But I've always appreciated the training that engineering gave me because it's different from classical approach and it taught me to organize, it taught me to analyze quickly and reasonably efficiently. It also taught me to understand the quality of my ability which was in that area. So I never felt I had to prove myself to anybody, which I thought was very important. I never tried to prove myself that way. But the interesting thing is that whilst I'd got an honours degree in engineering, I did even better at theology. It's silly, but that's it. And I started to like words and enjoy words. How did else did it help me? It helped me to understand the social structures of people because I was always looking at structures. Why is this structure like that and how can we change it if it's necessary? It also helped too because in those days there's a lot of snobbery, not unkind snobbery, but there's a tendency to believe that a clergyman, that's all he can do, he wouldn't have, you know, wouldn't have this job if you could do anything else. Well, it broke that down because there weren't many engineering clergy in those days. It did break that down in a number of instances and it made me a lot of friends, people who had the same or similar sort of background.

27:44 So you had that commonality with people?

27:47 Yeah. Yes, that's right.

27:51 That's really interesting. So is there something about me that you've always wanted to know but have never asked?

28:03 No. I suppose in a way whether you feel that you, as you were being brought up, whether you felt that because we were in a vicarage and we didn't have much money and we didn't have a lot of excitement as far as traveling was concerned, whether you felt you missed out on a lot.

28:38 I'm sorry if you thought that because. No, not at all. I think one of the things that is true of all children, what they grow up with, is what they think is normal. And I never looked at anybody else and thought that what they did was something that I want, that I aspired to or envy. And certainly looking back, something that I've told a lot of people over the years, is a vicarage was a great place to be brought up for all sorts of reasons. I mean, there was the obvious sort of built in community of all of the parishioners, a lot of whom seem to want to take care of me. I laugh because I thought that they were all old men and women, they were probably my age, but. So there was that built in community. But more than anything, I had a father who was available at almost any time except 9am on a Sunday. You literally worked either next door or in the house. And so you were available for morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, to run me to places, to pick me up from things, to answer questions. And again, I didn't know anything different. But I, I look back on people whose fathers had traditional out of the house jobs and those fathers missed out on, you know, seeing their children raised in a very direct hands on way and it's just been such a gift and to me, even though I don't have children, when I have thought about, met people who are fathers, their involvement in their children's lives is a measure of their worth as a person, in my opinion.

31:17 Well, that's nice that you felt that, that. But did you suffer in any particular way, socially? I'm thinking, did you suffer because you're.

31:30 A child of the well, Again, I don't know any other. Anything different. What I will say, you and Mum always made it very clear that our privacy was paramount and that you never gossiped with anybody about us. It was only your very, very best friends that you would talk with about any issues. And, you know, with three kids, I'm sure there were a lot of issues and you didn't engage in, you know, putting us in any kind of very public position. You know, these were. I always felt, and this may be because I was the third, I could choose my level of engagement. And, yes, I was always very aware that my parents were in the public eye. I don't think it made any difference to how I behaved, either good or bad. I know I got into trouble and it wasn't, you know, I wasn't horrified because of your position. It was just what I did as a. As a rotten kid, you know.

32:46 Yeah, well, I asked the question because, as you know, there are others, lots of children of vicarages, and some do suffer very badly by. Because of unkindness among the popular school population.

33:10 I never. I always had individual relationships with my friends of, you know, some of them were people I knew from church, some of them were people I knew from netball or other things, Brownies, things that I. That I did. So, no, I didn't feel that good. I think I had a good raising.

33:37 I'm very pleased. So that's nice.

33:41 Is there anything that you've never told me but you want to tell me now? No.

33:48 No. There are things and reasons. We've done things in the past. We've always tried to follow God's leading, knowing that he would take care of you better than we can. But that's not been easy for all our children and it's harder. Been harder for some, so we leave it at that. But there's nothing there that I've not.

34:31 Hidden anything from you except your fear of girls and rompers. I didn't know about that.

34:40 You didn't know that? Well, you can laugh at me, but yes. The person who's actually my oldest friend is still a girl from England. I used to sit behind her in primary school and when she had Plaits. Occasionally those plaits found their way into the inkwell.

35:07 But you got a devil.

35:09 But in those days, just as a youngster, but having been at a boys school for so many years and stiff upper lip playing cricket and what have you trying to be taught the Queen's English or the King's English as it was initially I always treated girls with a slight distance. Strange creatures unknown to me.

35:47 That's far back that we are dad.

35:50 I'm not being nasty about that.

35:52 I didn't understand. I understand. And I went to an all girls school so I had probably the opposite, the opposite experience. I just wanted to say that I think that I have gotten a love of the intellectual and just reasoning debate. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's not good, but it's there and pretty core to who and what I am. And I've really appreciated having grown up in a family that took independent thinking and you know, and valued it and research and you know, looking for answers and, and debating things and arguing and I always tell people that somebody in my family could say the sky is blue and another person would say well actually, but you know, I've really appreciated that and I've always thought that I have a half engineering brain and a couple of few years ago, know, 10 years ago or something when I was here one time and you and I worked on some plumbing and I felt so comfortable working with you because we thought the same way, we problem solved the same way. And that was a real revelation and it's not something that I've had a lot of opportunity to do because I've lived away so far away for 30 years. But. But yeah, I really appreciate that.

37:50 We've been staggered at the things you've done in your houses.

37:56 I don't think that you would approve of some of the things I've done. I've left a lot of things undone and not been nearly as tidy and careful as you would have been. But there's so many times over the last ever since we've owned a home. So in the last 23 years that I've thought gosh, I wish dad was here, he would be able to solve this problem for me.

38:23 Well, you solved them for yourself eventually.

38:26 Would have been a heck of a lot quicker if you had been there. Yeah, well, thank you Dad. I really appreciate the conversation.

38:34 Okay. Thank you for asking and thank you for saying what you you said. I still don't like doing this sort of thing.

38:45 You did good.