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[A recent visit to Ferrymead Heritage Park brought memories of the 1950s flooding back: Ford Prefects, the Edmonds factory, dancing to the music of the times. But what was happening in Heathcote during this period? We asked long-term resident of Heathcote, Edna Brown, about her memories.]
Getting around...
When I went to work in Lane Walker Rudkins I had to catch a train into town. The station was on Station Road; you had to go down Martindales and up Station Road and it was opposite the shops. My dad used to go up Flinders Road, it was just a dirt track, then down the Ellis Track and straight across the maltworks.
Everybody caught the train. They would leave town for Heathcote on the hour, stopping at Linwood, Opawa, Woolston, Heathcote, and then Lyttelton at the railway station just past the British Hotel. It would leave Lyttleton at 23 minutes past and get back here in Heathcote at half past. In the mornings, for them to get to work on the waterfront it would leave Heathcote at twenty to eight and another one would be back here at eight from Lyttelton and the next one was at half past eight. They put them on for the workers.
 The station master would blow
his whistle, when it was all clear for the train to leave. The guard
would come along calling "tickets please" and he would clip your ticket
to make a hole in it to show you had paid.
[Lee Matthews remembers back to those times too...]
Life at home...
Polishing was often a Saturday morning job for the children, or if mum
was lucky she had a new polisher, which had two revolving discs that
spun when you plugged it into the wall. You used one set of pads for
putting on the polish then another for buffing up and polishing like
new.
The house was cleaned with new mops and dusted, floors were polished
with beeswax or Neapol. Each spring, the house got a full doing over
with the whole family joining in. We pulled down all the curtains and
washed them. The cupboards were all cleaned out, renewed paper lining
put back in. Everything was washed down, walls, lampshades, skirting
boards.
On Sunday, the roast could be smelt cooking with the baked potatoes and peas, fresh from the garden, which was eaten around midday, after Sunday church.
After the war when things settled down, everyone had a renewed
enthusiasm. Women became very house proud and new gadgets were created
to make life easier for the housewife. They baked sponges, sally luns,
butterfly cakes and biscuits.
Out shopping...
We used to buy soap for cloths washing in long cardboard boxes and we would sometimes have to cut it up into blocks for use. If you had a copper (which lots of families still did) you would grate it up and put it into the copper with the clothes. and boil the water and clothes together.
People used to get the milk delivered to their house or go to the farm to buy fresh. Bread was delivered to the grocer's store, fresh each day. It wasn't sliced and bagged in plastic like now, but made and sold in a whole loaf, or you could get a half loaf which was a whole loaf pulled apart in the middle.
You could buy most things by weight like sugar, flour, and grains like barley which you used for soup. All put into bags and tied with string mostly.
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