Puhoi General Store
I recently received an email from a woman asking if I would send a copy of “The Secrets in the Soil / Ngā Kura Huna ā-Nuku” to her at the Puhoi General Store. I was immediately curious. When I went searching for Puhoi I found it north of Silverdale on the road to Warkworth. The website said: “for all your general grocery needs, plus great coffee and fish and chips visit the Village Store”. Reading about the Puhoi General Store took me down memory lane to another place at another time. Another General Store that definitely didn’t sell fish and chips.
Between the ages of four and seven years (over sixty years ago) I lived in Hinuera, a rural village at the foothills of the Kaimai Range. Our farm cattle-stop and gate opened onto the main road beside the railway line and locomotive steam engines regularly hissed and roared along the railway-line on the boundary of our farm on their way to and from Matamata and Hamilton. Looking east from our gate, toward the Kaimai Hills , you could see the Hinuera Dairy Factory, and over the railway line in the other direction, were the Church, the Hinuera Primary School and The General Store. The General Store was a large wooden building. The cool, dark, interior was full of mysterious objects and was both slightly thrilling and scary to me as a five-year-old. The building was full of the aroma of spices, leather, tea , rubber and hay. Stacked beside each other around the walls were large wooden chests of flour and sugar; tall sacks of wheat, rice and oats; large square tins of biscuits; bins of sweets; long rolls of fabric; oil-skin coats, gum-boots, garden tools and leather harnesses for horses. Strange objects dangled on huge iron hooks which hung from the rafters and there were cupboards and cabinets and shelves stacked full of saucepans, towels, sheets, blankets, rope, nappies, umbrellas, candles, books, boots, hats, underwear, skeins of wool, and a tall, glass-fronted, locked medicine cupboard held a fascinating array of bottles, tins and packets.
I remember following my mother up to the high wooden counter where she ordered her flour, sugar, tea, and other groceries. The Store Keeper weighed each item on huge metal scales, ladled them into strong brown paper bags and tied them with string. Other goods were parcelled up in brown paper also, and fastened with string . The string was cut, using enormous scissors, from a large spool hanging on the wall. My mother paid cash for the groceries and the Store Keeper took the notes and pressed the metal levers on the large Cash Register . The cash drawer sprang open. He put the notes under a lever in a drawer, found the change and counted it out as he handed it to her. The Store-keeper wore a long, white apron which reached the floor and he was very clever with his parcel wrapping and money-counting. There were a couple of cats asleep on the counter - their night-job was to keep the rats and mice from nibbling holes in the sacks of rice and wheat.
In one corner of the store was the Post Office where the Post Mistress sat behind a counter. She had the very important job of being in charge of letters and parcels being posted or picked up, toll calls being made, or telegrams being received from far-away places.
The General Store was a hub for the community. Mothers met and talked about who was sick, who was having a baby, who had died and who was on the flower roster for Sunday Service at the church. The fathers talked about the weather, their cows, bulls and hay-making, who had the latest tractor, and sometimes they muttered about the Government. Us children followed the adults around, uninvolved in the conversations, but hoping somebody would offer a boiled sweet if we were well-behaved. In today’s conversations about the duopoly of the Supermarkets, its good to know there are still General Stores and local mini-markets around the country which meet the ‘general grocery needs’ of their community, offer a place for folk to meet and yarn about those things that matter - and in some cases, even provide coffee and fish and chips.