KEY POINTS:
The tennis club celebrated its 60th anniversary in that filthy weather a few weekends ago and something lovely happened. Two of the club's founders, now nearly 90, came, spoke and left us with some heritage.
George Coughlan and Ross Murray described how they raised funds to lay the
first courts by staging what they called a vaudeville show on the back of a truck and taking it around the districts of the North Shore, a decade before the Harbour Bridge.
They had preserved a photo album of themselves as lithe young fathers, fit from the war, dressed in frilly tu-tus for some items, Maori costume for others.
My mother's death meant I missed the occasion but George had told me the story earlier and I've seen the impression it made on those who heard it that night.
The past is indeed a different country. It would be impossible today to do what was commonplace then, not just because culture is taken more seriously now but because we don't do amateur entertainment these days. It stopped when television arrived.
Nobody born since 1960 - a majority of the population - can know the place that amateur theatrics had in ordinary life earlier. I have childhood memories of concerts in a country hall where we watched men and women of the district put on variety acts in costumes and make-up.
The hall was always packed, the laughter uproarious and afterwards the ladies-a-plate supper was awash with whipped cream.
The acting must have been execrable but I was too young to know and the audiences didn't care. People entertained each other in homes and community halls in those days and appreciated it.
It is moving to see the past come alive for people with no personal recollection of it. George Coughlan tell his stories in the matter of fact way of people who suppose that everyone remembers when post-war suburbs were farmland, the roads were unsealed and bays like ours that now boast million dollar beachfront palaces were lonely collections of cottages, a bus and ferry ride from Auckland.
It was in February 1947 that George and the Campbells Bay storekeeper approached their nearest council representative, for the Kumeu riding of Waitemata County, and asked for courts in the park of pines and scrub that had been dedicated to the nation's 1940 centenary.
"He advised us to get the support of a local body, the progressive association," George recalls. "A week or so later we paid its five shilling membership fee and solicited their support. Permission was granted about a month later."
It probably would not be granted today. Centennial Park is now a reserve of regenerating native bush vigorously nurtured by a society of surrounding residents. But let him continue:
"We then started to raise funds with the concerts, bring-and-buys, gambling nights, raffles. We auctioned a half-crown pound of butter and raised 10 shillings.
"On Sunday mornings the fathers calling into the shop to pick up the sports paper could buy a glass of beer for 6d from a 3gal keg. This was known as the "pram derby". It lasted until one of the mothers threatened to report Mr Robinson to the police.
"We helped Bruce Bousie plant his quarter acre block in pumpkins and the proceeds were halved between the progressive association and the tennis club.
"We had plenty of visitors, from as far away as Devonport and Orewa. During the polio epidemic, 1947-48, no swimming was allowed on the Auckland side and up to Milford. Castor Bay northward were "clean beaches".
"The concerts were run by Doug Scott, a professional photographer and comedian. The stage was Rex Lovett's truck which had a canopy. We took it to Takapuna Grammar, Bayswater, Browns Bay and Warkworth. It rained all the time but a crowd turned up."
A picture of the concert party was hung in the clubhouse last week. The stories heard that night have been recurring in our conversation.
The community is a prosperous one, quite settled but not in the way of most. Not much of the North Shore is older than anyone's parents. Most of us have migrated from other parts of the country and, more recently, from South Africa or Korea.
The recent migrants seem more interested in their new heritage than those who came from the heartland for Auckland's climate and life and have a lingering guilt about it. I have been here longer than anywhere but I should be in Southland.
The stories George Coughlan and Ross Murray told were the kind that can begin to nourish roots in the thinnest of soil.
They and their contemporaries gave us a facility in the most splendid of places but they may not know how much they have given us now.
