Spare Room Be our guest…

Dunedin Teachers College Ball 1960 (Chris Reid fourth from left)

A thread in Sideswipe about troublesome flatmates prompted Chris Reid from Parnell to reflect on his early flatting days, long before flatting was the done thing – even before James K Baxter’s ‘An Ode on Mixed flatting’ from 1967

In 1958, as a humble 17-year-old Dunedin office boy, I was vetted as a potential flatmate by some poverty stricken students; I was earning £5.6.08 per week so, on the face of it, I was eligible.

Invited for the evening meal I took a cabbage from the Chinese greengrocer. The entire meal comprised cabbage; they were convinced and I moved in.

One flatmate had “given” his “life to Christ” at a recent Billy Graham campaign.

The minister from a local church dropped by one freezing Dunedin winter evening to follow-up on our flatmate’s conversion. We invited him in to the communal pit where we were carefully rationing bits and pieces of the landlord’s furniture on an open fire.

Unfortunately the newly converted one was in another room in bed with his student girlfriend endeavouring to keep warm under the newspaper we had sandwiched between threadbare army blankets and unwashed mouldy sheets.

The reverend gentleman sat on an old stuffed leather pad while the remaining furniture/wood went on the wretched fire and we sat about the floor talking loudly to camouflage the compromising noises from the bedroom and simultaneously endeavouring to obscure the cheap and nasty home brew outfit in the corner. The minister never returned.

The converted one even sober would dance naked on the wobbly kitchen table till it or he collapsed all over the floor among the second hand crockery and food scraps. That is not so remarkable except the dancer’s buttocks and private parts were uniquely piebald, like a Holstein cow, and utterly eye-catching.

Rats moved in to the midden beside the kitchen sink so we “borrowed” a couple of moth eaten 180 lb wheat sacks from the local flour mill, stuffed them full of stinking student kitchen waste and in the dead of night scuttled down the road to heave them high over a brick fence into someone else’s back yard. Rubbish gone; problem solved.

One of our flatmates thunderously each evening rode his clapped out 1937 Velocette motorcycle up two flights of carpeted stairs to his room. Fortunately the machine was in its twilight years and disintegrated in the course of time.

A Yank from “Operation Deep Freeze” dropped a half full flagon of beer on the toilet and smashed not only the flagon (horrors) but, more particularly, broke a large piece out of the toilet bowl. We managed to fix the toilet bowl more or less with glue and sticky tape; till the occupants of the flat below complained bitterly of leaks through the ceiling. Then we moved on.

My flatmates from hell became businessmen, teachers, lawyers and doctors. When I see the survivors today nothing has changed and as far as I know none of us wound up in jail. They were great days. I loved those guys; they gave you ideas.