Claire | Mornington, Otago

“I think New Zealand’s done rather well with the so-called pandemic. There’s two ways of looking at it, and I think it’s somewhere in the middle, really.

It’s awkward. I mean, if you look at all the figures, more people die from, even now, road accidents than have been in the Covid-19. Most of the ones that have gone have been from the various retirement villages, but when you actually look at the ladders on the graphs, the ones over 70 really haven’t figured that highly. It’s been more the ones in between. So, the ones in between have actually probably had it more, but they’ve survived it better. I think in some ways, we’ve done well with Covid-19, but we’ve got an advantage like Iceland and Indonesia, we’re an island. We’re a set of islands. So, consequently it’s easier to block everybody off. I mean, when you look at Europe, there have been people traipsing all over Europe for centuries, and no matter what sort of borders they are, they’re permeable. So, I think that’s why it sort of caught them more, and the initial thing in Wuhan, it’s sort of in the middle of China, and they actually managed to hold it quite well. But looking at the figures, I mean, more people die of heart disease and that sort of thing, than those that have been killed, but because we’re in this together, and as far as New Zealand is concerned, we’ve got our ideas, we’ve stuck to it, I mean, there are idiots around, but on the whole, people have been very good with what they’ve done. So, yes we can be proud of ourselves. 

How you cope all depends on how old you feel. I mean, I’m over 70, but apart from not having a chair in the library to sit on, I’m fine. It’s really hard on your back trying to sort of lean over and look at a computer.

I was born and bred in Dunedin, went to the oldest girls’ secondary school in the Southern Hemisphere, which is Otago Girls’. I did a couple of years at university. I’ve got four units, and then I just had a great disagreement with my father and decided I’d go into nursing. So, I enjoyed myself. I went up to Lower Hutt, because I’d done five years at secondary school, plus two years at university. The girls I grew up with were all registered nurses by then, and at that stage, it was very hierarchical. So, if they were a class above you, you stood up when they came into the room. I’ve been jumping up and down like nobody’s business, for friends, and so I went up to Lower Hutt, and had a great old time up in little Wellington. I qualified eventually, I worked for about six weeks at the Kaiapoi woollen mills in Petone, and found an ad in the Evening Post for a trainee proofreader. So, I spent five years at the Evening Post as a proofreader. I came back here. The Evening Star didn’t have any gaps at the time, and the Otago Daily didn’t have women on their proofreading staff, because they would have had to work at night, and of course, I put my foot in it and said, but the men do. So I went back to nursing, and started off at Parkside, which was a long-term thing. I think the youngest person we had was about 12, and the oldest was 90-something. When they shifted up to Waikiri in 1981, we didn’t really have the younger ones so much, but I stayed there for three years, and then a girl I was working with wanted to do mornings and not afternoons, and I liked doing afternoons, so we sort of did a, a job-share on the orthopaedic floor. So, I stayed there in between various changes and then I left and worked at Glamis, a place up the hill that’s been demolished more or less, and then went up, when we shifted up to Yvette Williams, and I stayed there till I retired, and in between times I used to go around the shows taking photos of all the horses. I had about 17 at one stage, but it was sort of taking photos of people jumping, doing dressage, just general showing, and I went from Invercargill to Auckland in various ways.

There’s no sort of thing I really want to do. I’d like to travel. Two friends and I do a Lotto thing and we put what money we get out of it into bonus bonds, and maybe we might just hit the jackpot and when this all clears up we might do a river cruise in Europe, but we’ve been doing it for four years and we still haven’t got it yet, but never mind.”