It was not very long before Edwin and I were to be disturbed in a profound and detrimental way. One morning at the breakfast table Father announced that he would be selling up our home and we would be going to an orphanage to live. Our parents had become influenced by Norman Hyde who had established a children's orphanage in Hunterville, It was decided to combine the orphanage and printing work. We were assured we would have plenty of children to play with but would not be allowed to have butter and jam together on our bread, just one or the other.

I am sure our parents thought that the next stage of their lives would be a forward move in their chosen path of serving God, but for Edwin and me it was a retrograde step. Later on I felt anger that, in their religious fervour, they were willing to subject their boys to an undignified and degrading orphanage experience. Of course their motives were honourable but I did not see it that way. It seemed to me that their first responsibility should have been to their children.

The orphanage buildings started as a large villa which later became a sprawling mass of structures. The original villa was occupied by the Hyde family. Kitchen, bake house, dining room, laundry, bathroom, girls' dormitory, boys' dormitory and rooms for the staff were all additions. The timetable started in the morning by rising to the bell. There were always two bells. The first warning bell was rung a few minutes before the second when everyone was expected to be on hand. Breakfast was followed by half an hour's religious devotions before we had to walk a kilometre to school. There was more group religion in the dining room after the evening meal when hymns were sung and prayers said. Of course- we were not allowed to play physical games on Sundays.

So the Manawaru property was sold and with the proceeds my father built a new and bigger printery on orphanage land and purchased a new hand fed flat-bed cylinder printing machine. He also paid for a small one room cottage with a verandah on its eastern side. A heavy green canvas turned the verandah into a bedroom for Edwin and me. I slept on the upper bunk and fell off one night, fortunately without damage, rolled up in my blankets. Washing our faces was done outside in the open. Needless to say, Edwin and I did very little face washing on frosty winter mornings. Our weekly bath occurred with several other boys together in a big concrete tub in the main building. The bath water was heated by a wood burning calefont. The water got progressively dirtier as other boys took their turn.

Life was very full indeed for our parents for the next seven years. Mother had taken over the responsibility of the pre-school orphanage children and still found time to help her husband with proof reading and in other ways. My father was printing all day, editing his publications, answering correspondence each evening and doing church work every weekend. With a few others, we would join him outside the local hotel on Saturday evenings. He would preach in the open air to all who cared to listen.

Mr. Salmon was a keen Christian we knew well. He had become stone deaf as a result of an explosion in a coal mine disaster. His daughter used to sit beside him in church services and quickly spelled out the address on her hands using the deaf and dumb alphabet. One evening Mr. Salmon was preaching outside the hotel when a young lout crept up behind him with the intention of giving him a fright. He yelled at the top of his voice. Of course Salmon did not hear a thing and the young man crept away thoroughly bewildered.

My brother and I had become part of the poverty, regimentation and stigma of the orphanage. However one may talk about it, we felt degraded. We hated the poor meals, the lack of dignity, the poor clothes, the lack of comfort, but most of all, 1 did not like Norman Hyde. To me he appeared to be an angry man who really disliked children, I thought he was unjust, inconsistent and evil tempered. I remember how he beat a child so severely for peeling the potatoes too thickly that the child could not go to school for several days. He seemed continually to be barely able to contain his anger. For a while he actually had a small shed turned into a solitary confinement prison where children would be punished for misbehaviour. I have had to take a meal out to the prisoner and pass the food through a small hole at the bottom of the door We were told that we were not to stand around the shed and talk to the poor lad.

On one occasion Edwin saw Hyde beating a boy and bravely shouted at him "stop beating him", Edwin feared that in turn he would be beaten but Hyde just walked away. Hyde was often away preaching or obtaining support for the orphanage. When he was away the place would become much more relaxed. When Hyde was about, the whisper would go around the orphanage as to whether he was in a good or bad mood. Mrs. Hyde was a kind and motherly person who generally did not seem to interfere with orphanage discipline. She concentrated on her own family and, except for meals, seemed to keep to herself a great deal of the time and have little influence on her husband-

My father had wisely included in his agreement with Norman Hyde that should either Edwin or I need to be punished he would attend to it himself. In fact, during those years at the orphanage I cannot remember my father hitting me once. We were thus protected from direct assault by Hyde, but we saw the result of his anger administered to others and suffered vicariously. I now realise that he was an emotionally sick man who should never have had the care of an orphanage,

Of course, swearing was totally outlawed. The Bible said "swear not at alt". My parents pulled me up for saying "gosh". They said it was a substitute for the word God. I must not use it. "Well what can I say, I've got to say something". "Say bust or bother". I repeated the words in a most disdainful voice. They were not expressive enough for me. I needed something more powerful to give vent to my feelings,

I knew a man who, if he hit his thumb, would recite "God bless the King, the Queen, the princes,.-,.....,". They could always tell how badly he had hurt himself by how far down the royal family he got. If he only got to the princes it was not worth worrying about. Swear words do have a function of releasing tension. All races use them. Some words are not socially acceptable but there are plenty which are. Our little three year old daughter went around saying "gugger" (bugger) and she knew when to use it too I started to exclaim "mother!" with considerable emphasis as a substitute swear word.

A few years later a new girls' dormitory was built with three rooms added on the end for the Cooper family. We had a living room with a fireplace, a bedroom for our parents and a bedroom for Edwin and me. Our old quarters were then altered to become isolation rooms.

A little Maori child of about two arrived at the orphanage. I thought he had a beautiful disposition and took a liking to him and he to me. I used to carry him around and spend time with him. I really loved that little kid. Then tragedy struck. There was an epidemic of dyphtheria which closed the schools in the district for a month or two. My little friend caught the disease and died. They brought him back from the hospital in a coffin and left it open for the children to see. It was my first experience of the death of a person I really cared about. As the weeks dragged on one after another, an attempt was made by the headmaster to give the older orphanage children some lessons. Not long after this there was a scarlet fever scare. One boy went to the hospital but was declared free of the disease and returned after a few days.

Hunterville was an earthquake zone- We were familiar with chimneys losing bricks and things falling from shelves. We became so used to the ground tremors that we only became nervous during severe shakes.

1 was nearly ten years old when i got 'saved'. I do not know if the tension of earthquakes had anything to do with it, I do remember that I had recently been subjected to heavy indoctrination about the second coming of Christ. The Bible said that Jesus would appear "as a thief in the night" and all those who were 'saved', like my mother and father, would be caught up into the air to be forever with the Lord, Those left behind would be damned. I woke up that night worrying about this and imagining the horror of being left alone in the world without my parents, I had been taught that those who were not "saved' were sinners. How else could they deserve to go to hell? I could not expect sinners to look after me and I did not want to look after myself.

To make sure the Lord had not already come, I crept to the door of my parent's bedroom. I could not hear any breathing so ! crept closer. My father heard me and asked what I wanted. "I want to be saved". So my father got out of his warm bed and read parts of the Bible to me and told me to believe in Jesus and I would be 'saved'. I believed and prayed asking Jesus to accept me as a follower. I was then told that I was now l saved'! Of course I had always believed whatever my parents told me about God and that heaven and hell were absolute reality.

Edwin was the source of a large proportion of my information about life. It is amazing the age advantage those few months can give the older brother. He told me that if I played with my wee wee it would grow bigger. Who wouldn't like a bigger wee wee just like the older boys? When T was in my early teens, my mother gave me a terrible book to read. It said that masturbation was one of the great sins of mankind. According to mother, the Bible said that it was defiling one's own body. This book said that mankind was the only creature who had arms long enough and hands which gave him the opportunity to engage in this sinful habit. Masturbation caused blindness, heart troubles and many other dreadful things. Of course 1 did not know then what utter ignorant and harmful rubbish that book was. The result was that it caused a great deal of guilt and a conflict between my desire for pleasure and the supposed sinful act.

Being one of the orphanage children for almost seven years cast a shadow over my life which was only eradicated years later by deep analysis. The influence of a tolerant and kindly father was sullied by a smouldering anger I did not fully understand. I am pleased to say that the orphanage has ceased to exist. Even the buildings have been removed. Years later I was asked to print a book by Ernie Edwards written to eulogise Norman Hyde. My first thought was to reject the offer then I decided to make some money out of it instead- The job really became an act of revenge on my part. Later I regretted that I had not followed my first impulse.

The School headmaster's name was Mr. Ironmonger. For decades he was always called Tinny behind his back. It was funny how automatically we children would switch to Mr Ironmonger when he appeared. He knew his nickname but he never caught the children using it. When I was first at school, we used grey slates, (similar to roof slates) and a softer slate pencil for all our writing. Its size was about 150 x 200 mm. and it had a wooden frame. Later, when we were in standard two, we used steel nibs and ink wells to write on paper.

The orphanage dinner was at midday which meant that the children had to run home, eat a two course meal and run back to school within the hour. Two kilometres to run during midday break was especially hard on the younger children. Meals were served on enamelled tin plates. I remember puddings of tapioca, sago and other deserts being dumped on to the dirty first course vegetable plate. The idea was to reduce the work of washing up which the adults would have to do as the children were at school. I never got used to that practice.

One morning I discovered something which looked like a slug in my porridge. So I left a large portion on my plate and went to school. When I returned for mv midday dinner, I discovered my porridge plate in front of me and was told that I could not have dinner until I had finished my porridge. My protest was disregarded. 1 returned to school hungry. At the evening meal my porridge plate was again put in front of me I burst out crying, I had had almost nothing to eat for twenty four hours but 1 was not going to eat grubs. This time my mother rescued me. She took me into the kitchen and asked me why 1 would not eat my porridge. I pointed to the spot and said "It's got grubs in it". She poked around in it, threw it into the rubbish and took me back to the table where I was offered bread and jam.