John | Matamata, Waikato

“My most challenging experience in Matamata has been gardening for a lady, that’s been quite good. I’ve got a little bit of pocket money for doing it, but it was hard on the body, at my age.

But she was very grateful, I had a hip pain, and a back pain, and she had a knee operation. So, that sort of folded, but it was pretty challenging keeping it up. I’ve had a lot of bereavements in my family, because I’ve had older brothers and sisters, and they were much older than me, and they passed away before I did. They’ve been passing away before I do and it’s really hard. It’s hard to take, because they’re not there anymore, but I’ve got a lot of good nieces and nephews in Auckland that look after me, and they’re a happy bunch. You’ve just got to get above it. Rise above it.

I’m still getting over it all. It’s hard to get over. I lost my sister and my family’s best friend. She went with sugar diabetes, and I don’t know what my older sister, Faye died of. Bone cancer, I think and in that same space of a week, my nephew went as well. He got hit and run. That’s my other sister’s boy, and it was a bit upsetting, the two of them are at the funeral, and then next minute they were gone, and then after that my brother was gone. He’d had my sister Faye’s ashes on top of his wardrobe in a shoebox. Next minute, he was gone. That’s a bit hard to deal with, but you rise above it, and they’re all up there on Waikumete Cemetery somewhere. Some of them are buried. Some of them are not.

It’s very hard to get over. You’ve just got to take your mind off it. Try and get on the happy fence. It’s a bit hard, though.

I grew up in a town called Glen Massey, and it was a farming community, mostly sheep farms. My step-dad worked at the Horotiu freezing works. My step-brothers worked there for a short time, and my blood brother Ivan, he worked there in the season, too. So I was basically looked after by my parents up until the time I was about 16. Then I moved down to my older sister Alison’s place in Auckland, and did a final year of school there, and then left school early after my second-year fifth-form attempt. I got a School Certificate. So, I just went from job to job, and I quite enjoyed it, flatting and stuff, staying at various boarding houses.  It was quite good, and I finally ended up at Mrs Goss’s place, a nice boarding house when I was working at Mt Roskill, and she loved the colour red. She used to get me to take all the payments down from the boarding house she was running, and bank it for her. So, she trusted me. She used to put on a good morning breakfast for us guys, and she looked after us. We were all working there and you could go and socialise with anybody you liked, and you could play pool, and get something in the cafeteria. It was really good.”