Every detail is evocative. Through the door you can just see our grandparents’ kitchen table, big enough for two, maybe three at a pinch. Behind the window on the left is the little kitchen itself, and past that the toilet and bathroom. Behind the table is another window — into their bedroom, because that used to be the exterior wall. The kitchen and bathroom etc were added later — you can just see the corrugated iron lean-to roof at the top of the photo. Alongside the concrete path is the corrugated wall of a shed that contained the wash house, the copper, Grandpa’s garden stuff, tools and work bench, and the original outside toilet, which the night soil man used to empty before Hikurangi’s sewerage system was built.
You entered the dining room proper from behind the kitchen — open fire; coal bucket, shovel and poker; concrete hearth with easy chairs either side; couch under the window; dark stained wooden table and chairs in the centre of the room; china cabinet opposite the fire. There was a sitting room and second bedroom at the front of the house, either side of a central passage, but we rarely went there except to get to the verandah.
The front of the house was added later as well. The verandah had a fine view across the road to the Waro Limestone Rocks, underneath which Jack Baugh worked the coal seams with a bunch of other Lancashire miners. After long weekends we’d sit there and watch the busy traffic drive past on its way back to the city. Thinking life weren’t too bad.
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Jack and Annie were migrants like Dorothy’s parents, but a generation or two later and solidly working class. In 1923 they left Westhoughton, in Lancashire — more or less the epicentre of the industrial revolution — for Waro, the back of beyond.
Waro is a cluster of houses north of Hikurangi, which is a wee village north of Whangarei, which is a small town north of Auckland — which is the commercial centre of the last significant place on Earth settled by Europeans.
Contents
The best place to read about the Baughs is in The Coal Miner’s Son, my father Cliff’s stories about his experiences in the Great Depression and World War 2. They’re presented like a book — one continuous narrative — but the coal mining chapters tell a lot about the life his Mum and Dad lived in Hikurangi. Within that, the chapter From Westhoughton to Waro has a lot about the family back in Lancashire, and another has a tribute to his father, Jack.
Cliff had enormous respect for his father, and Jack and Annie are woven vividly throughout his stories.