Vic – Howick
“Quite honestly, the first thing I’d say was, as soon as you leave school move to New Zealand. I didn’t come here till I was 30 years old and I should have came here a lot sooner.
I got an engineering apprenticeship, became an engineer, and then one day I was reading the paper and there was an ad in the paper for a job for an engineer in New Zealand, so I wrote off to apply for the job, eventually got the job – took about a year to get out of here, and my wife and I were around about 30 years old. We had two young children. One day we got on a plane at Heathrow and came to New Zealand, and never looked back. The guy that employed me – they seemed to appreciate me a lot more than working in a big factory back in England where you were just a number.
The boss’s name is Wayne – if you talked to him, you called him Wayne, and so you had that connection between you, rather than having to call him Sir, or Mr so n so.
One of the things I really liked about New Zealand when we got here – we had two young children who were going to school, and the local community were really involved in the school and they had working bees, they had bottle drives, and you felt that you were part of the community, and the community – the people wanted to work to make the community better, and get help with anything that they needed – gym equipment or you’d go down and paint the swimming pool at the start of the season – mow the grass, and you felt that you were in a community that cared about the local place that you lived in which is quite a bit different from being in Britain where everything was run pretty much by the state.
The problem with a lot of cities is that nobody knows anybody else that lives around them. They don’t have that investment in that particular community and so they don’t care if they drop litter or their place doesn’t look tidy. But when you feel you’re part of the community, you want to keep the place looking nice; you don’t drop litter, you don’t make the place where you’re living messy.
If you know all your neighbours, then if there’s something happening in – in your local area, you can go to them people and talk to them about it but if you don’t talk to your neighbours, then nobody knows what anybody else is thinking, and you’re all isolated. So you need to talk to local people.
You need to get involved in the local clubs – and the local community, and then you get to know people. It’s nice to walk down the street in main street in Howick and say hello to people, even though some of them you do know, and some of them you don’t, but it’s still nice to just be able to walk past somebody and say, good morning – hello. And then you have a connection then. You’re just not anonymous people walking past each other.”
