A house with bells and whistles

You can’t help but have sympathy for young couples today hoping to buy their first home. In our neck of the woods it must be difficult enough, but in Auckland and to a slightly lesser extent Christchurch, it must be nigh on impossible.

I looked up the Auckland real estate websites and found the most basic home will set you back $350,000. Using Sorted’s website calculator I discovered that a $350,000 mortgage, paying back the principal and interest over 25 years, will cost the borrower $519 a week.

I recalled my own situation 50 years ago. First home buyers went cap-in-hand to the State Advances Corporation; government-owned and although we mightn’t have appreciated it at the time, extremely generous. The corporation would lend you 2500 pounds to build your first home at either three or five percent interest. The interest rate was determined depending on your wage bracket. At 20 pounds a week I just missed out on the 3% option and had to pay 5%. You could build a modest 3 bedroom home for around that price back then, ours was a little more expensive, and the difference we made up from savings and help from our parents. As best as I can recall the repayments on the State Advances loan was three pounds a week and as a percentage of my wages this was readily affordable compared to what first home buyers have to come up with today.

Construction commenced on our first home before we were married and was completed while we were on honeymoon. Our greatest fear at the time was that our friends would dress the house up for our homecoming, a regular occurrence in those days. Returning honeymooners would tend to find their new dwellings wrapped in toilet paper, “Just Married” signs scrawled on the windows and plywood, cut-out storks, attached to the chimneys.

But we had a cunning plan. We claimed that we were going away for a three week honeymoon, but returned after just two weeks. To our delight the house appeared untouched. Our friends feigned disappointment that we had returned early and admitted that they had not had an opportunity to make adjustments to the dwelling.

They lied.

On the first night in our new home, at about 1 o’clock in the morning, we were woken abruptly by an incredible noise in our bedroom. It sounded like there was a roaring party taking place around us yet when we turned the light on, the room was starkly empty. The noise however did not abate. There was the sound of  revelry and singing, voices we recognised well,  remarks made that were obviously current, therefore precluding the possibility of a recording being played at us from somewhere, but not a soul in sight. It was surreal.

I concluded electricity was involved so I jumped out of bed and rushed to the switchboard in the porch and turned off the main. The sound of the party did not stop, but now also a very loud bell rang somewhere in the bowels of the house, more deafening than the cacophony of the party, so I immediately turned the power back on.

The party goers, wherever they were, suggested we get dressed as they would soon join us. We did as we were told, the sound soon stopped and within a few minutes our friends arrived with food and drink, insisting that we party with them until daylight.

So what had they done? Well they had conspired with the builder and the electrician and placed a large speaker in the rafters, directly above our bed, behind the plaster ceiling. Wiring from this speaker was run down inside the wall, then under the lawn to the edge of our section. We had built the house on a small farm our meat company owned and the wiring connection was exposed in an adjoining paddock. The revelers then gathered at a stable complex that was part of the farm, two paddocks away from our new home. They ran a cable across the fields to an amplifier in a storeroom adjacent to the stables. The amplifier had a microphone attached. The soiree got underway at midnight and when it was in full swing, at about one o’clock, they flicked the switch on the microphone and we got the full blast of the party from the speaker above our bed, hidden behind the ceiling.

It was a masterstroke in practical joking. Anticipating that I would turn off the power was clever, although it had no effect on the party noise; the power for the amplifier was on a totally separate power system at the stables. Highly illegal for a bell to ring after you’ve turned the power off of course; it meant the supplier, not the consumer, was paying for it.

My friends had used the same clever anticipation to assume that we would have only a two week honeymoon as opposed to the three week one we signaled.

My wife, who didn’t marry my friends, must have wondered at the wisdom of accepting my proposal of marriage some months earlier. To be fair, that’s nothing new; fifty years on, I suspect she is still questioning that decision.

“Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.” - Norman Douglas.