Sixty years ago

In 1954 I had a job at what was then called Whitcombe & Tombs, later. after joining Coulls Summerville and Wilkie to become Whitcoulls, a nationwide chain of much maligned bookshops. After starting in the New Zealand Books and Bibles department working with experienced bookmen, I was promoted, or demoted, but certainly moved up, to the upper floor, to the education department. It was not a bad job, I spent a lot of my time looking up books for customers in Whitakers, the giant catalogue of published books, not to be confused with Joe Whitaker, the profoundly deaf but very knowledgeable head of the department. Spending so much time following up the queries of customers and generally looking after customers was considered by some a great waste of time, but in the relaxed atmosphere of old Whitcombe & Tombs nobody cared. Many of these customers were school teachers, intelligent, stimulating, likeable people, and it reignited my ambition to be a teacher. What profession could be better than moulding young minds. I enrolled at Teachers' College, and as I looked back on it, I was, amazingly, accepted. How anyone could imagine that I would ever make a successful teacher, I don't know; an insecure young man still sorting out his identity, grappling with a language that was by then very familiar as a literary vehicle, but not quite as a medium of everyday colloquial communication. But accepted I was, and I was paid for being there. Teachers' College then was an institution that is now probably beyond the imagination of most, Its main objective was to turn simple semi-educated country people, mainly young women, into educated thinking well-rounded human beings, who then could become stimulating teachers, in many cases in schools that stifled their creativity. Having a few oddballs like me around was part of their education. The mid-1950s were interesting times. Stalin had just died, he was replaced by men who colluded with him but were not comfortable with his heritage. Khrushchev revealed the atrocities of Stalin's time, and with that undermined the faith of old time communists and fellow travellers. In New Zealand students cared about world affairs, strummed their guitars and sang ballads about the working man, wrote biting satires for the annual university extrav, shows that would fill the Opera House, and drank prodigious amounts of of beer. We watched sad, dark Italian, French and Russian movies, and I wrote stories for the Teachers' College student magazine, stories that are now mercifully lost. Idealism was in the air, we wanted to make the world a better place. We sneered at people who wanted to make money. We assumed that we would all live comfortable lives, didn't care about having more than we needed. We went tramping in the bush, some also went hunting, we had a wonderful world at our doorstep and didn't want more. I thought of all this having had a friend from those days over for coffee. It is not that those were happier time, a better world, it is just that it is was a time that is now hard to recapture. The world moved on, become noisier, more competitive, and the hope for a better world in the future is gone.