Old school days remembered

OLD BOY: Bryon Hills began at Castlecliff School in 1939. PICTURE / PAUL BROOKS

When Castlecliff School marked 125 years recently, former pupil Bryon Hills was there, remembering when he started at the school in July 1939.
The Hills clan had trekked across from Gisborne in the family Dodge. There was mum and dad, young Bryon, older sister Shirley and older brother Bob. "The night we arrived we moved into my grandmother's place on the corner of Manuka and Cornfoot streets," he says. "During the night there were all these hooters and whistles going. Dad came in to see if we were all right. When we asked what the noise was he said it was probably our welcoming committee."
The commotion was because the refrigerated cargo ship SS Port Bowen had run aground at Castlecliff, setting in motion a massive salvage operation. Bryon remembers the industry that was built around the foundered vessel, the railway lines that ran along the beach to assist with salvage efforts and the tourist attraction the Port Bowen became during the war.
"It was just after that I started at Castlecliff School." Bryon was nearly seven by then, having started his education at Gisborne Primary School. "I was put into primer three," he says. His father was a commercial fisherman, and with no work in Gisborne at the time, he moved to try his luck here.
"He got a job on the council." His job was driving a horse and dray, carrying metal from the quarry at Lundon Park to put on the roads. "The pit", as it was called, was a feature of the Castlecliff landscape until it was filled in and transformed into playing fields. Bryon's dad would return to commercial fishing, being the first in the area to bring in a 600-hook long line. His job required him to wear thigh-high gumboots. Once, when stepping from his boat to shore, he swore someone moved the wharf and he fell in the water, his boots quickly filling up and threatening to drag him down. He contracted pleurisy and double pneumonia and his fishing days were over.
At school, Bryon can remember his favourite teacher, Jimmy Ward.
"On fine days we had our lunch in an open shed and he would sit and talk with us. When war broke out he was one of the first to enlist and away he went." James Ward joined the air force, gaining a VC for climbing out on to the wing of his Wellington bomber to put out an engine fire. He died in 1941 during a bombing raid on Hamburg.
Bryon remembers when there was a fish pond in the school grounds. "The senior boys wanted to do something for the school so they got enough cement to build this fish pond." Many a new boy was tricked into falling in. The pond was filled in during the 1950s.
Bryon's memories evoke an age when trams rolled through the suburbs and out to the beach; when there were fewer houses and lots of space to play in; when Castlecliff wharf was thriving and big ships crossed the bar; days of hi-jinks and harmless fun.
Castlecliff School is holding a reunion in October this year to mark its 125th birthday.