Forest Hill, Auckland - March 2024.
From the doorstep of the neighbouring house, I see her. She is standing beneath her balcony, clad in three shades of blue. She smiles, bemused, and says, “I told you, it’s the house at the back!” It’s an unassuming two-storey brick building tucked at the end of a secluded driveway in Forest Hill. Next to the door is a framed bridal handkerchief intricately sewn into a floral pattern. A flea market find. It sits imperfectly against the glass, creased and sagging under its own weight. A three-dimensional object projecting from a two-dimensional plane. She has thought about sticking it down to make it flat, but thought better of it. That’s what makes it interesting, she tells me.
The staircase and hallways are lined with photographs, drawings, family heirlooms, and antique market finds. Among them is a sketch of three small cottages, side by side, against a muddled backdrop of flora. The house in the middle belonged to Fay’s paternal grandfather, Alexander Dick Lewis, who lived between his brother on one side and sister on the other. The Lewises are an “old city family” who owned land next to Myers Park behind the Town Hall. In 1907, Alexander, a Presbyterian, married Margaret Agnes Knox, an Irish Catholic who had immigrated to New Zealand from Scotland as a three-year-old. Unsurprisingly, their respective families disapproved. They married on the veranda of the house belonging to the minister of the St James Presbyterian Church on Wellington Street. When Alexander Jack Lewis—Fay’s father—was born, Margaret Agnes and Alexander Dick agreed their son would be christened an Anglican at St Matthew’s on Hobson Street. St Matthew’s was also where Fay’s parents married, where Fay was christened, and where she married her husband, Bruce Stanley Chapman, in 1948. St Matthew-in-the-City still stands majestically on the corner of Hobson St and Wellesley St West, but St James has long been demolished. As a child, Fay recalls her grandmother and great-aunt taking her to visit the colonists’ records at Auckland Public Library and finding Margaret Agnes Knox’s name recorded in one of the passenger logs from 1884. But mainly, she remembers the thrill of going up and down the library’s marble staircase, which was demolished when the building was converted into the Auckland Art Gallery.
On the other hand, Fay’s mother, Eileen Mary Lewis (née Yeo), was a second-generation immigrant. Sandringham holds a special place in the Yeo family. It’s where Fay’s grandparents settled after arriving from Kerang, Australia, at the beginning of the last century. Eileen was the third of six children. After her mother, Eliza Ann Yeo (née Hickox), passed away due to complications following the birth of twins, her maternal grandparents—Fay’s great-grandparents—moved to New Zealand to help raise the children. For more than sixty years, one Yeo or another occupied the family’s small transitional villa on Mars Avenue. Although Fay only lived in Sandringham briefly in the 1970s, she is familiar with Sandringham from an earlier time thanks to her mother’s childhood stories.
Edendale School opened in 1909, one year before Eileen was born, with 146 students. By the time she started school a few years later, the student body had rocketed to 508. “Molly”, as Eileen was called by her classmates, thoroughly enjoyed Edendale and loved Kōwhai even more. The “intermediate school” concept was still an experiment when Eileen attended between 1923 and 1925, but it proved highly successful. Kōwhai not only alleviated the strain on local primary schools (670 pupils arrived on opening day in 1922) but also “extended the educational opportunities for students aged from twelve to fifteen years” (Dunsford 91).
Among the stacks of papers Fay pulls out of an opaque plastic bag is a photograph of four generations of Yeos: Margaret Fay Lewis (Margaret is Fay’s first name), Eileen Mary Lewis, Fay’s grandfather John Charles Yeo, and great-grandmother Elizabeth Jane Yeo (née Gardner). There is also a hand-drawn family tree on some scrap paper and a pair of handmade black wedding shoes belonging to Margaret Agnes Knox, Fay’s paternal grandmother. All of this fits inside a plastic bag, which, however unassuming, protects over a century’s worth of lived experiences against the corrosive tides of history and our fallible memories. “I’ve always tried to write and find out about [my] family,” she tells me. “And, of course, I was always laughed at…but now they come and ask me—they want to see it too! It’s quite the collection.”
But not everything can be protected or retold from the safety of an opaque bag, especially grief. Fay’s father was killed during the Battle of Monte Cassino in March 1944. The four-month campaign between January and May proved to be one of the costliest battles involving New Zealand troops, who were tasked with destroying German defences atop Monte Cassino and gaining access to the Liri Valley. Several assaults on German defences, beginning in February, failed to secure the town. On 15 March, the third battle saw a three-hour bombardment of German positions, followed by New Zealand troops moving back into Cassino. However, they were repelled four days later by a German counterattack. It was then that Corporal Lewis, who manned a Bren gun merely 200 yards from the German line, was killed in the onslaught. By early April, the New Zealand Division retreated, having suffered 343 fatalities and more than 600 wounded.
I have no family, but I used to enjoy those quips and jokes, and I have been given some small idea of the happiness in your own home. May the memory of such happiness carry you through life and remain the inspiration to you and the girls, as his memory will remain to us
Alexander Jack Lewis had only been away from home for nine months when he was killed. During most of the war, he was an instructor at Trentham Military Camp and was not assigned to fight overseas. Fay recalls the day her father returned from work and told Eileen he had resigned from his job to fight.
“Why are you going away?” Fay had asked her father.
He replied, “I’ve been teaching these boys and showing these boys [how to fight]. I can’t stay here any more. It’s time I did something myself.”
Nine months later, Alexander’s last words were, “She’s alright, boys, she’s alright,” according to his platoon sergeant, A. T. “Paddy” Kelk. In his letter to Eileen, Kelk wrote, “Jack used to tell me of some of your daughter’s conundrums and anecdotes, and we used to yarn by the hour of our respective homes and families. I have no family, but I used to enjoy those quips and jokes, and I have been given some small idea of the happiness in your own home. May the memory of such happiness carry you through life and remain the inspiration to you and the girls, as his memory will remain to us.”
Cassino would not fall until May, following a fourth Allied attack led by British and Polish troops with New Zealand artillery support. The victory at Monte Cassino allowed the Allies to penetrate the German Gustav Line and capture Rome on 4 June 1944—two days before D-Day.
Fay was thirteen when her father was killed. Her sister, Jean, was nine. At the time, they lived with their mother in Ponsonby but caught a daily 30-minute tram ride to Kingsland to attend Kōwhai School. Because of her long commute, which required switching lines at Grafton Bridge, Fay was exempt from being late to class. Many roles once reserved for men—including tram operators—were given to women during the war, and Fay recalls one instance where a woman, due to her small size, was lifted into the air while trying to switch the trolley pole.
Fay was a prefect at Kōwhai during her final year, and she recalled that during some classes, “the girls were put into [pairs], and you had to be a housemaid or [do] cooking… We [also went to] Karitane Hospital and saw babies—[that] was the first time I’d ever seen twins.”
“We had two princesses at the school [during] one stage. They were from Tonga. I think they were just there for a short time [because] they went on to Diocesan [afterwards]… I was dying to ask them to play basketball… We had ballroom dancing [during] what they called ‘Free Time’. Once a week—the last hour or something—you went to whatever hobby classes.” The neighbouring family on Mars Ave was named Loe. The Yeo and Loe children would play tennis over their shared fence, attend the same schools, visit the shops in Sandringham Village together, and attend St Martin’s at St Chad’s—the Anglican Church near the intersection of Mt Albert and Sandringham Road. Many Yeos and Loes would celebrate a significant life event at St Chad’s; Fay was a flower girl when one of the Loes got married. They held their wedding reception at a hall on Sandringham Road.
The shops of Sandringham Village have changed drastically since Fay’s weekend visits to her grandfather as a child, even if the outline of the buildings has remained the same. Gone are the greengrocers and the haberdashery. The Mayfair Theatre, built one year before Fay was born and where she regularly attended the two o’clock Saturday matinées with her great-aunt, “Aunt Elsie”, was demolished in 1993.
Fay’s mother sold her home in Grey Lynn and moved back to Sandringham in the late 1960s, purchasing a flat on Eden View Road. Coincidentally, the five other women living in the complex were also widows. The address escapes her memory, but I pull up Street View on Google Earth, and we glide down Sandringham Road, past the Halal butchers, the playground, Paradise restaurant, St Chad’s… But, alas, none of the houses on Eden View Road match the image in her memory.
Fay and her husband lived with Eileen for a period in the mid-70s while building the house she and I are sitting in now. The couple had just returned from a two-year round-the-world tour between 1972 and 1974. Auckland to Fiji, Fiji to Hawaii, Hawaii to Vancouver, then down the US West Coast before heading east to Las Vegas and New York. One of her most vivid memories was arriving at a motel in Fresno operated by one of their friends. “[We] looked up and here on this huge big billboard and lights was, ‘Welcome to Fresno, Fay and Bruce Chapman!’ I was looking at it and said to my Bruce, ‘Hey, look! There’s somebody else with our names!’”
In Las Vegas, she stayed for seventy-five dollars for three nights at the Flamingo. Opened in 1946, it is the oldest continuously operating hotel on the Strip. At the time, Fay and Bruce marvelled at how cheap staying in Las Vegas was, thanks to the myriad of coupons that gave discounted access to almost everything. It was not until later that they learned of the Flamingo’s fraught history—its mob-financed construction, the murder of its first owner, and the running of a skimming operation under the eye of organised crime leader and casino gambling pioneer David Berman.
“We go to this [casino]… All I had ever seen were the slot machines—other things were going as well—[but that was the only one I knew], so Bruce put in his coins, and he didn’t get anything… The third one I put in, all hell broke loose! There [were] bells going, buzzers, lights. I felt as though I was on stage… Money was coming down, so much [money] that it was going over the edge of the till.”
The money Fay won helped pay for their trip, but the scarcity of the kind of good fortune they encountered was apparent and disconcerting. “We watched them… One woman was there with all her hair in curlers and rollers. The lady next to her was dressed beautifully in diamonds, but they were all doing the same thing [playing baccarat],” she said. “And there was a young boy; he was sweating. [At one stage], he left. I noticed he was minus his watch when he came back. They had a pawn shop in the hotel. Sad state of affairs; I wouldn’t have liked to live there.”
But such is the nature of travelling: one miserable sight is quickly replaced by the wonder and novelty of another. A few days later, Fay and Bruce found themselves in a Broadway theatre, watching Gene Kelly perform “Singin’ in the Rain”. It was quite a coincidence—they saw the advertisement on the street and stumbled in. “They gave everybody in the front row a plastic [sheet] to hold over them because as they are tap dancing, it’s splashing [water],” Fay recalled. By 1972, the famed American dancer, actor, and choreographer was nearly sixty, and his most iconic film, Singin’ in the Rain, had turned 20 in April of that year. A decade later, Kelly would be recognised with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Kennedy Centre Honours for transforming movie musicals and normalising male dancers on stage.
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It’s March 2025, nearly a year and a half since the Hamas-led attack on Israel sparked the region’s latest conflict. Arab-Israeli conflicts have occurred almost a dozen times since Israel’s inception in 1948, and were also at the front of mind in 1972 when Fay and Bruce attended the Munich Olympics. Munich 1972 was already shadowed by history; the previous Games, Mexico City 1968, had been marred by the Mexican government’s crackdowns on student protests, and 1972 would also be the first time the Olympics had been held in Germany since 1936. There were constant reminders of the atrocities that had been committed since the Berlin Games. Dachau concentration camp was only 20 kilometres away, and the 1972 Olympic Park stood on the former site of the Oberwiesenfeld airfield, where Neville Chamberlain had landed to negotiate the 1938 Munich Agreement.
Munich 1972 would come to be defined by the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes. On 5 September, eight members of the Palestinian Black September Organisation killed two athletes before taking nine hostages to demand the release of over 200 Arab prisoners held in Israel. A failed rescue mission led to the deaths of the nine athletes and a police officer. Five Black September members were also killed. Less than two months later, the three surviving members were released in a hostage exchange following the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615. While some athletes refused to compete following the deaths of their Israeli counterparts, the Munich Massacre, as it would be known, only paused the Games for twenty-four hours. The horrifying events of 5-6 September 1972 would overshadow the rest of the Munich Olympics.
While personal safety was of concern in Eastern Europe, Fay and Bruce remained undeterred as they travelled the continent solo in their Volkswagen camper van. The Iron Curtain was still seventeen years away from falling. As they crossed into East Germany, Fay recalls an instance where they encountered border patrol—people who used coupons for bread—who marvelled at the amount of food they carried. “They would open the boot, pull the drawer out, [and see all the] baked beans and spaghetti… They just looked at us and looked at the food and didn’t know what to do!”
While in Munich, Fay recalls an instance where Bruce, a retired naval officer-turned-school teacher who was “full of fun”, wanted to try German beer. At the bar, they ran into a young man who said in broken English, “My father won’t speak about [the war], but how do you feel about German people?” Bruce replied, “People are just people. If you meet them one-on-one…they’re okay.” Fay tells me about her maternal grandfather, John Charles—the original New Zealand Yeo—who had fought in the Boer War as a young man. And as an older man, he became friends with a South African whom he had fought against all those years before. “It was quite funny…[my grandfather and Mr Lewis (no relation)], they used to play cards together,” Fay recalled.
My husband never met him, but they would have gotten along so well. They have the same personalities.
Fay visited Monte Cassino for the first time in 1973. The town has two main war graves: the Polish Cemetery at Monte Cassino and the Cassino War Cemetery, where over 4000 Commonwealth servicemen are interred. Fay’s father is among them. “My husband never met him, but they would have gotten along so well,” Fay says. ��They have the same personalities.”
It was surprising to see references to New Zealand scattered overseas: flags, memorials, and familiar names that bring the impact of a small island nation thousands of miles away into focus. In Norway, Fay encountered a New Zealand flag flying on the shore of a remote fjord, commemorating four New Zealand airmen. In the final days of WWII, Jack Brightwell and Ed Foy, Royden Nugent and Graham Parkin, respectively, piloted two Bristol Beaufighters in a formation of 20 sent to attack German ships anchored in Jossingfjord. Although the attack had proceeded without incident, the two planes collided during ascent after the raid. Brightwell and Foy were killed on impact, while Nugent and Parkin managed to land on the water. However, they were never found. It is unclear if they were captured, escaped, or were cast to sea.
We often measure periods in history by lifetimes, but seismic shifts in millions of people’s lives occurred several times in the 94 years Fay has been alive. In Europe alone, Fay lived through the rise of Nazi Germany during her childhood, the Second World War in her adolescence, and the threat of nuclear conflict in adulthood. And now, she is witnessing a new ground war in Europe, and yet another conflict in the Middle East. Tragedies that were pledged never to happen again are forgotten and repeated.
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Fay has made egg sandwiches and cheese biscuits to accompany our tea and coffee, all set neatly on a wooden tray with shiny china and silver spoons. The teapot is wrapped in a knitted cover, as though wearing a colourful scarf. Next to the tea tray, there’s a small vase of flowers on the coffee table and a Kōwhai School 75th Jubilee commemorative glass from 1997. She tells me about one of the Kōwhai reunions she attended and how everyone at her dinner table happened to be deaf. Fay had a great time; they communicated through sign language and lip-reading, but when she spoke to one of the attendees from a neighbouring table afterwards, they said, “I didn’t think you were enjoying yourself—nobody said anything!”
Fay has two children, Linda and Kevin. In a funny twist of fate, Linda’s husband is named Kevin, and Kevin’s fiancée is named Linda. Both are in their early seventies and recently retired. A few months ago, Fay became a great-grandmother. In the photograph she showed me earlier, of four generations of Yeo, Fay was a twelfth-month-old sitting on her great-grandmother’s lap. That was 93 years ago. Now, she is the family matriarch. Soon, her great-grandson will discover the wonders hidden inside the opaque plastic bag: names he won’t know how to pronounce, places he has never been, wars and pandemics, the scale of which he cannot begin to comprehend.
When he walks through Sandringham Village, will he see his great-grandmother as a young girl, skipping down the road to his great-great-grandmother’s school, past the pōhutukawa trees and into the house his great-great-great-grandmother made into a home? Perhaps the house on Mars Ave will be gone by then, carried away by the tides, but their memories will remain.
When his children ask, Where did we come from?
He will say, Sandringham. Sandringham is where we began.
Credits:
Original text and photographs by Lize Deng. Archival photos used with permission from Alexander Turnbull Library and Auckland Library Heritage Collections. Thank you to Fay Chapman for sharing her story, and to the Sandringham Project in Community Empowerment (SPiCE) for supporting this project. This work is made possible by funding from the Albert-Eden Local Board.
Additional Sources:
- Deborah Dunsford, Mt Albert Then and Now: A history of Mt Albert, Morningside, Kingsland, St Lukes, Sandringham and Owairaka. Mount Albert Historical Society Incorporated, 2016.
- Adrian Gilbert, "Battle of Monte Cassino". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Jan. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Battle-of-Monte-Cassino.