Friday Journal - Journal Entry Three

I know, I know, I'm a little late, it's Thursday here and I am behind with this by nearly a week.

This week: What was your neighbourhood like growing up?

My best childhood memory of where I lived growing up would have to be when we moved to Onehunga, Auckland, with my Dad and my sisters and brother. Just us, no living with any other family members, we had our own house and it was the five of us. The house was not fancy by any means, in fact it would be true to say it was the worst house in the best street, but I loved it.

There were families in the street, families with children our age that we could play with. And play we certainly did. If the weather was fine, no matter if it was hot or cold, we all gathered after school and played until dinner time. Sometimes it was at someone's house, but mostly we all played out on the street.

Tennis was popular, two people would play and two would be look outs, one at each end of the street and yell if a car came along.
Hide and seek in each others yards, lots of laughing and yelling when someone was caught out.
Hop Scotch, drawing the outlines up and down the footpath, we probably had a Hop Scotch drawn out side of every house.
Stealing fruit from the grumpy neighbours trees. Peaches in the Summer and oranges in the Winter.The sweetest tasting fruit ever...

 We played until it was dark, and Dad would whistle from the back door of our house, when we heard that whistle we knew it was time to go home. I swear that whistle could be heard for blocks, and I still don't know how,  just by using his fingers, that he made it so loud.

One of the families had this huge house that had a swimming pool, the first time I had ever seen a swimming pool in someone's house, and they had a basement that had a table tennis table and a pool table...In my eyes they were the rich family on the street, but having said that they were also the kindest.
They would let us stay at their house until Dad came home from work, and quite often one of us was allowed to stay the night.

We all played together, all the kids in that street from primary school through to high school.
As we became teenagers we developed other interests and made other friends and didn't hang out together quite so much. But for me that street was the best, and I have such fond memories of those families and how much fun we had.

So "thank you" to the McCarthy's, the Corcoran's, the Lee's, the Harlick's, the Mansell's, the Hedges,
for those years.