My Account
Vivienne Callard is a remarkably youthful 90-year-old who lives in Algies Bay. She talks to Karyn Scherer about fruit, frocks and the importance of friendship.
I am the fourth of five sisters and most of us were born in Hawera, but we grew up in Wellington, where my father became a sharebroker. We had a lovely big home in Oriental Bay. But my father died quite suddenly of pneumonia when I was seven. It was a terrible shock because it was right at the time of the Depression, and he had put all of his money into shares. So my mother was left with five daughters, no money, no husband and no house, because it was very heavily mortgaged.
She was advised to put us somewhere and the only thing she could think of was the Catholic convent in Wellington. We were there for about two-and-a-half years. I was always in trouble and the nuns beat me quite ferociously at times. There was an MP who used to visit and forced us to sit on his knee, while the nuns waited outside. He gave us sweets, but we never got to eat them because the nuns took them away.
My mother discovered that my father had bought a small section of land intended for my grandmother. So she sold it and used the money to buy a small hairdressing salon in Auckland and we were able to come home. We lived in a wonderful big house in Mt Albert that was full of fleas and flies when we first moved in, but it had the most extraordinary gardens with plum trees. We had very little money or food, and on Friday nights my grandmother used to make stodgy meals to fill us up. I used to save my money and I would buy myself an orange and a banana every Friday night. I also used to gorge myself on plums. I think that desire for fruit has been the basis of my good health — plus good genes.
None of my sisters went to grammar school because my mother couldn’t afford the uniforms, but I really wanted to go so my grandmother saved her pension. I only had one gym frock and I used to have to scrub out the dirt every night so I could wear it again. At prizegiving I won a little bit of money and we were supposed to buy a book, but I bought a pair of black bloomers.
My first job was in a tobacconist, taking orders for the street photos which photographers took. One of the photographers asked me if I’d like to learn to take photographs and I eventually got a job as a photographer where he worked. My boss was an Australian and he told me he’d like to see more of New Zealand, but he couldn’t drive. So ‘cheeky me’ offered to drive him. My mother was horrified and reminded me that I didn’t know how to drive either. So I conned my sister’s boyfriend into teaching me to drive in two weeks. I got my licence and drove him all around the country. Sometime later I married him and we had three children.
One day we had a fight over something and one of my sisters told me that I needed a project of my own, so I didn’t have to ask him for everything. I replied: “What a brilliant idea – we’ll go into business.” So we opened this little shop in Hamilton that sold frocks. We started with 12 frocks and no money and no experience, but we made a success of it and we had it for 15 or 16 years. We called it Pandora and it was the first boutique in Hamilton. One day I was with a friend at a retail seminar in Melbourne, and we were going up the escalator in a department store. There was a man at the top of the escalator, who stepped forward with a little white paper bag in his hand, and asked if we’d like a peanut. He was gorgeous. All the time we were in Melbourne, he never left my side. We were both married but when we got back to NZ we knew that this was what we really wanted so we both told our families.
He was a trumpet player and we built a house in Algies Bay together. We came here because he was playing in Warkworth. I remembered that my eldest sister had stayed in Algies Bay once and came home raving about “the most beautiful place in the whole world”. So I enticed Peter to come and have a look, and we found a section and we sat on the sand and figured out how we would be able to buy it. We were together about 20 years and lived here until he died from a stroke. He was such a nice man. His granddaughter is Rachel Hunter. I keep in touch with Rachel’s mother, Janine, who I know very well. We have lovely conversations and she came to my 90th birthday.
I’ve taken every opportunity I can to travel and I’ve been everywhere you can think of. Once I was on a train from China to Moscow, going through Uzbekistan, when two officials tried to make me hand over all my money. So I stuck it under my bottom and told them I would report them and they eventually went away. I later found out they were police. I have done a lot of travelling with my niece, whose husband is Michael White, the assistant editor of The Guardian. When the Twin Towers were hit, we were halfway up a mountain in Pakistan. When she rang her husband he told us what had happened and said we’d better get out of there. We were the last ones over the border from Pakistan into China before the border was closed.
After Peter died, I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself. Then I read that there was a Bridge group, and someone was giving lessons. I’d always felt that I had to accomplish something new or something different whenever I could. I had never played Bridge before but I found that I enjoyed it. One day at Bridge a man came up behind me and ran his finger down my spine and said: “Are you huggable?” And I said something like: “If you’re quite happy to hug a great-grandmother.” And Geoffrey has been a very staunch and affectionate friend ever since. In March, we’re going off to England, France and Crete, through a local agency that runs Bridge holidays.
I used to know a lot of people in the area when we first came to live here. I only know one person now, so Bridge has become an important part of my life. I could very easily have slipped back into a lonely, solitary existence, but you have to make life what you can. There is nothing like having another pleasant human being in the house with you.
* Vivienne has written a book about her life, titled No Time For Crying. Enquiries to The Village Bookshop in Matakana.
