The Shops inspired by nostalgia of Central Parade

BTG 17Dec16 - The Mount's Central Parade features in Steve Braunias' latest book, The Shops.PHOTO/CHRIS GORMAN, NEW ZEALAND HERALD The Shops, by Steve Braunias and Peter Black, $40 from Books Apl

There are travel writers who roam the edges of the world, explore jungles thick with mosquitoes and parrots, ride on rafts and camels and elephants, and they bring back tales from exotic lands.

All that effort! All that distance!

I'm tired even thinking about it. My latest book The Shops is a kind of travel book, and in it I trace the walk I used to take from my home in Valley Rd, Mount Maunganui, to the Central Parade shops around the corner.

The walk took about six or seven minutes and as the book makes very clear, nothing much ever happened. As such it's an accurate record of my childhood because I never did anything much when I grew up in the Mount.

I didn't like the beach. I didn't much like climbing the Mount.

School was all right but nothing much happened there, either. Mostly I lived inside my head, a fantasist, dreamy, solitary. My idea of a great adventure was to walk around the corner to the Central Parade shops.

I loved those shops. I loved everything about them.

They were always in shadow, beneath an awning that stretched the whole block; the darkness gave the shops a hint of mystery, in a town where broad, blazing sunlight dominated everything. There were maybe a dozen shops and there was so much range. There were doughnuts and lamingtons and sally luns and scones - yes, there was so much range at the bakery.

There was also a fruit shop, a grocer, a Post Office, a chemist. The star attraction, the grandest theatre in the Broadway of Central Parade, was a bookshop, owned and operated by Alan Bates, a charming man who wore cardigans with big wooden buttons over a shirt and tie. He is first among a small list of people who I've credited in the acknowledgments of my book.

It was a way of saying thanks.

I loved his shop. I didn't spend a lot of time in the library at school or in town; Bates Bookshop was my library. Every week, at the end of that not especially eventful walk along Valley Rd, up Dee St, past the Ranch Rd corner, and then along Maunganui Rd, I would head into the bookstore for my weekly subscriptions to comics and magazines.

They were the only literature I read until I was about 17, and I read every word, then re-read every word, over and over - the reason I write is because I love to read, and that began at Bates Bookstore in Central Parade.

BTG 17Dec16 - The Mount's Central Parade features in Steve Braunias' latest book, The Shops.PHOTO/CHRIS GORMAN, NEW ZEALAND HERALD The Shops, by Steve Braunias and Peter Black, $40 from Books Apl

But as much as I loved the front of the shops, I also loved the back of the shops. There was something very fetching and private and alluring about dusty McNaughton Lane, which ran behind Central Parade.

It was a zone of pallets and incinerators and washing lines and weeds, and chairs where the staff would sometimes sit with a cup of tea and a cigarette to enjoy a few minutes off from putting on a face for their customers. It was backstage. I lurked there, a kind of spy, but without any malicious intent. I just loved looking at the chokos that strangled the wire fences, the cardboard boxes by the back door, the whole sunlit messiness of the flip side of Central Parade.

I held onto that feeling in all the years since I left Mount Maunganui and in the end I decided to do something about it. The Shops isn't about Central Parade; rather, it's inspired by Central Parade.

Yours for $40, from Books Aplenty in Tauranga. It's a shame it isn't for sale in Central Parade but the charming Mr Bates passed away quite a few years ago. The book is words and photographs. I wrote a 6000-word essay which is mainly a memoir of growing up in the Mount and hanging out at Central Parade; it's maybe the most personal thing I've ever written. A clue: I've dedicated it to my mum, who also passed away quite a few years ago.

The book is also a collaboration with Wellington photographer Peter Black. I asked him what he thought about shops in small towns and he answered by sending photographs.
For nearly two years he sent in a series of beautiful photographs of ordinary things.

Shop signs, loading bays, carparks ... There are 44 of his colour images in the book, taken throughout the North and South Island. He didn't make it to the Mount. But just the other day I saw a photo of Central Parade, taken very much in Peter Black's style; it was first published in the Bay of Plenty Times, sometime in the 1960s, and kept in a newspaper clipping scrapbook by my sister Jenny.

She sent it to me in an email. It's a photo of Central Parade, looking towards Papamoa. The footpath is empty. There's a sign for a shoeshop and a chemist.

A woman is crossing the road. She looks a bit like my mum.