Lifecycle of a house
27/01/2010 12:10:00 p.m.
Pippi, Coco, Duncan Sargent and Kim Young peruse the artifacts found in the walls of their home.
DUNCAN Sargent and Kim Young have hidden cans of food inside the wall of their house for future generations to find.
While renovating their Constable Street home in 2001, the front of which is Sargent’s furniture design business, the couple discovered cans of bananas and sausages, a French vocabulary book and an invoice book inside the wall.
“Someone didn’t want to do their French homework so they put it in the wall,” Young jokes.
These pieces of history date back to 1914 when the house was built and turned into an Irvines grocery. Young discovered this when Alan Irvine, a relative of the first owners, contacted them.
He had heard about Young and Sargent’s renovations of the house, had long memories of it, and was interested to see how it had changed.
Irvine stated that his grandparents and great uncle who had emigrated from the Shetland Islands in 1910 moved into their home in 1921, when Irvine’s father was seven.
Young, who works at the Museum of Wellington City and Sea, is very interested in these shared stories and letters.
Another Wellingtonian, Laurice Gilbert, sent Young and Sargent a poem she wrote while growing up there: “Night, and there is nothing outside my bedroom window... no aviary of zebra finches peeping into the kitchen window below...”
The words brought the house to life, for Young and Sargent who live there with their daughters Pippi and Coco and dog Hedge.
“Apparently one of the morning activities was getting on a baking tray and sliding down the stairs,” says Young retelling one of Gilbert’s tales of the house. “One morning they went skating into a box of bananas and a big hairy tarantula crawled out.”
Gilbert, in her letter to Young and Sargent, also talked about the grocer’s neon sign now at the bottom of their stairs. Gilbert said she would have liked to have bought the sign to brighten up her own home.
Young and Sargent recently received another letter revealing even more about the house’s former residents.
The Service Personnel and Veterans Agency in England are trying to trace a relative of Pilot Officer John George Irvine who died during WWII while serving with the Royal Air Force. An item of a personal nature has been found and they would like to return it to the family.
“It’s probably some soldier’s log or his watch,” says Young.
Young has since contacted Alan Irvine, who wrote the first letter in 2001, sent the latest news to him, and she is waiting with interest to hear what he has inherited.
The couple think it is great fun learning about their house’s history through correspondence with past residents.
“It’s like building a puzzle. We are living in a house with history. It’s the full lifecycle of a house.”
