Speaking from experience...

Press, 29 January 1986, Page 12

Speaking from experience...

MARGARET BAKER

the writer of

this week’s Forum column recalls finding and setting up her first student flat.

My first flat doesn’t exist any more. That says quite a lot really. I think it was doomed from the start. To be replaced by Riccarton’s Windmill shopping centre doesn’t say a lot for your originality. Anyway, I remember getting up at 6 a.m. for about a week to find that flat — endlessly ringing the numbers of houses

advertised in the paper, only to find someone else had got up at 5.55 a.m. and beat me to it. There is little more depressing than the prospect of a day flat hunting with only a bike as transport, and a howling, November nor’west wind to battle against. Still, I got it in the end — quite a coup I thought, as my definition of Riccarton had strangely stretched to include Addington, and Bryndwr, and maybe just Hornby . . . Funny how you start with high ideals, and realise very quickly reality is just too much for you to fight.

Though little did I quite realise just how Riccarton this was — right on the corner of Riccarton Road and Clarence Street. Right outside Woolworths, where the trucks unloaded at 6 a.m. each morning, and where most of Christchurch’s working population seem to have to drive past every day, starting at 6.30 a.m. One of my flatmates took to wearing headphones to drown out all the noise which also included a gigantic kind of

air conditioning system stationed especially on our side of Woolworths. This made the most enormous and unexpected noises just as you were almost asleep. But it really was home, and far better than all those places dubiously described as “character” in the To Let columns. Or the ones I’d biked absolutely miles to and then couldn’t even face going in.

We had to do a bit of cleaning up before moving in though. There was (what I came to find was only to be expected) a bit of mould on the bathroom walls, and more than a bit of grime all over the kitchen.

We were keen though, and even mowed the lawns and preserved the fruit off the trees in the backyard. Though we’d been told not to plant vegetables because of the probable high lead con-

tent in the soil. Yes, well. I was lucky enough to have a mother with a great knack of acquiring all kinds of useful kitchen utensils at auctions — usually in large, anonymous boxes merely labelled “kitchen goods.” One contained some very fine silver spoons.

Our furniture was the standard couch and big armchairs, though I never did quite get to like the orange vinyl kitchen chairs that went with the table. They seemed very '6os, or something, and not exactly relaxing. There were, however, many advantages in living close to Woolworths, the best being the proximity to icecream after dinner. And fresh bread in the mornings when lectures didn’t start until the afternoon.

Being close to the University was also, of course, very handy,

though you risked your life every time you biked down Riccarton Road. If it wasn’t a bus, or the fact that the parked cars nearly met in the middle of the road and two lanes

of traffic tried to squeeze between, it was a motorist opening a door on you. I learned a lot about cooking that year. Mostly that I didn’t like the way one of my flatmates cooked — and that you can exist quite well on baked potatoes and cheese toasties. For all that, it was a good flat and my flatmates’ ears suffered no ill after effects, and I got used to the orange chairs. There’s just a piece of asphalt there now. The place didn’t even make it into a shop.

I still find it a bit disturbing to drive past — yes, I have a car at last — and see a blank hole where I once lived.

I could imagine myself screaming with laughter if I had ever thought at the time that I’d get the slightest bit nostalgic about the place. Funny that.