AWL & SIMON
The final All Blacks win against Australia felt like a perversity. Thomas, sitting next to his son John, suffered a heart attack and was carried through the stands on a stretcher. Jeannette brought up their four kids on her modest teacher’s salary. Bob, her youngest, followed her into the profession. Aged 20 he moved to Auckland for teacher training and met Helen. They married in 1967, when Helen was still a teenager. Jeannette advised them to enjoy their freedom before having kids. But Bob was ill and the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s, followed by witnessing a friend’s death, confirmed that life was for getting on with. They moved into a cottage in the ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ town of Ngongotaha. The rent was cheap but not cheap enough to suppress Bob’s ambition to build their own home. 1976 saw the completion of their new house and the arrival of their new baby, Simon. Ongoing chemotherapy meant Bob was too weak to work so he took up an apprenticeship with a cabinet maker. This fascination with making things and the need to understand their construction had been in evidence when he was a boy mending his mum’s lawn mower. So Bob made things, he made stools and wooden letters for the kids and bread boards and the workbench heaved and the bank balance shrunk from the acquisition of tools. This awl was one of those tools, passed down to Simon when his dad died at the age of 36. Simon, an industrial designer, says it is his ‘most useful, best tool ever’.
Subscribe to RSS
Follow us on Twitter