After several months of living in Manurewa, David decided he wanted to live in one of Auckland’s inner-city suburbs. He began scouring the newspaper and eventually came across a small advertisement that read, “Lodgers wanted: Family home, all meals provided, and washing done. Three pounds per week.” The house was in Sandringham, and it seemed to David to be just what he was looking for.
The next day David knocked on the door of the house. A young woman opened the door. “Hello,” David began. “I’m David Bussau, and I’ve come about the room you have to rent.”
The woman introduced herself as Betty Jamieson and proceeded to tell David that she and her husband, Ron, had decided to take in three boarders to bring in a little extra income for the family. If David was prepared to share a room with one of the other boarders, he was welcome to move in. David accepted the offer, and by the end of the week he was living in the Jamieson house in Sandringham. It was a cozy fit. The house had only three bedrooms, and besides having three boarders, the Jamiesons had three children, who slept in the living room while a basement bedroom was being finished for them.
Despite the tight squeeze in the house, David enjoyed living with the Jamiesons. He got along well with Ron Jamieson, who, oddly enough, was also missing a finger. The two men also shared a love of soccer. David and Ron spent their Saturdays watching local soccer matches and working on projects around the house. David also liked spending time with Betty Jamieson. Betty was warm and outgoing, and David admired the way she handled her children. He wished his own mother had been a bit more like her.
Soon after arriving to live with the Jamiesons, David began looking around for another business in which to invest. He settled on the Busy Bee Bakery. The business was located in Newmarket, a suburb close to downtown Auckland. Newmarket was a mixture of office buildings and light industrial plants, a short commute from David’s new home in Sandringham. What was even better, the bakery had potential for growth and the current owner was eager to sell it. This meant that the owner was willing to let David make a down payment on the business and pay off the remaining balance in installments. The owner also offered to stay for the first month and show David all he needed to know to run the bakery successfully.
Once again David was working in the food industry. He had successfully learned how to manage and run a hamburger business in Timaru before doing the same with a fish-and-chips business. He did not think it would be too much of a stretch to run a bakery, but he soon discovered that it was a lot harder than he had anticipated. During the first month at the bakery, David huddled in the back with the owner while a salesgirl served customers in the front of the store. The owner showed David how to knead dough and make bread and how to bake sponge cakes, meringues, pavlovas, pies, and buns. He made it all look easy, but after the month was up and he had left the bakery entirely in David’s hands, things were not so easy for David.
Every item sold in the Busy Bee Bakery was baked fresh on the premises each day. David rose early each morning so that he could be at the bakery to start work at 4:00 am. By eight o’clock one Tuesday morning, shortly after he had taken over running the bakery, David had baked the bread and buns for the day and after two attempts had finally produced a batch of passable sponge cakes. Now he turned his attention to producing a dozen pavlovas—large, round, fluffy meringue-like cakes that New Zealanders slathered with fresh whipped cream and fruit and ate for dessert. He separated the whites of three dozen eggs and placed them in the bowl of the commercial mixer, added the other ingredients, and set the machine to mixing. When the machine had beaten the egg-white mixture to a stiff foam, David made twelve piles from the foam, place them on two large trays, and slid the trays into the oven.
When he came to take the trays out of the oven an hour later, David couldn’t believe his eyes. Instead of seeing twelve fluffy pavlovas on the trays, all he saw were twelve sticky egg-white pancakes. What had gone wrong? David had meticulously followed every step of the recipe. He dumped the two trays onto the counter and collapsed onto a sack of flour. Tears of frustration ran down his cheeks, and David began to have doubts about this new venture. Had he made the right decision by buying the bakery? Why was he having so much trouble with the baking? If he didn’t get the baking right, he risked losing the business and all the money he had invested in it. He felt exhausted and very alone.
Despite his frustration, David knew he had to keep going. He knew that the problem had a solution, and he would just keep searching until he found it. The solution to his baking woes came in two ways. First, David simply refused to give in to the temptation to give up. When some item he was baking did not turn out right, he set it aside and started over, trying to analyze what the problem might have been and adjusting for it. The second thing he did was talk to the sales representatives who came to the bakery to sell him the various dry goods used in the baking process. Not only did many of these representatives have experience in the baking industry, but also they regularly visited other bakeries and observed how things were done there. David found them more than willing to answer his questions and offer advice. Before long their advice and his hard work paid off. Soon David was pulling perfect sponge cakes and pavlovas from the oven each time.
Once he had mastered the art of baking, David began to diversify the business. He began making and selling sandwiches, and he branched out into some catering. The Newmarket School for the Deaf was located across the street from the Busy Bee Bakery, and David started by catering for various events there. Before long he was also catering for business and professional lunches throughout the area. Of course, all this extra business began to create a nice profit in the day-to-day operations of the bakery, and David could not have been happier.
By early 1962 David had been in Auckland for two years. The Busy Bee Bakery was thriving, and he was still enjoying living with the Jamiesons. Yet David was still missing something—friends his own age. Finally he decided to do something about it. He planned to go to St. Chad’s, the local Anglican church, the next Sunday and check out the youth group there.
Chapter 6
Someone Special
St. Chad’s Anglican Church was the first church David had attended since leaving Sedgley Boys’ Home in Masterton. Yet as he walked into the place for the first time, he felt at home. And to his delight, the church youth group was holding a planning meeting to discuss the upcoming year’s activities. Excited to be among a group of young people, twenty-two-year-old David jumped right in, making all sorts of suggestions about possible group activities.
As the discussion progressed, David particularly noticed one of the girls in the meeting. The girl was tall and slender, with grey eyes and short-cropped brown hair. What he liked most about her was the broad, open smile that spread across her face as she whispered to the girl sitting next to her. He would have liked to have gotten to learn a little more about her, but despite his brashness in offering the group ideas for possible activities, David was too shy to introduce himself to the girl and ask her some questions.
Still, David liked the experience of the planning meeting, and soon he was regularly attending church youth group meetings. About thirty young people came to the group, and they were a lively and interesting bunch. Sometimes the group went on outings together to the movies or to a dance. From time to time they held weekend retreats on Waiheke Island, an hour’s boat ride away in the mouth of Auckland’s harbor.
During the week David continued to put in long hours at the Busy Bee Bakery. His hard work there had paid off, and the business was booming. Some nights he was so tired at the end of a long day of work that he never made it back to his room at the Jamieson house. Instead he would slump down on a pile of flour sacks and sleep the night right there. But with all this hard work, David now had something to look forward to at the end of each week—youth group.
As he regularly attended St. Chad’s youth group, David got to know the other young people who came, among them the girl he had noticed at the first meeting. The girl was eighteen years old and an only child, and her name was Carol Crowder. She played piano and sang in the church choir. Carol was in her second year at Epsom Teachers’ College, where she was training to become an elementary school teacher. The more David talked to Carol, the more he liked her. Carol seemed conscientious and sincere and had a way of accepting other people as they were, a trait that David also possessed.
David was aware that he wasn’t the only person interested in Carol. Several other young men in the youth group also fancied her. Undeterred, David plunged on ahead getting to know Carol better. He learned that her father was the manager of the shoe production division of Farmer’s, a large department store in the heart of downtown Auckland. As a result of his position, Carol’s father had been able to get Carol and her best friend, Sherryl, a job working at the department store on Friday evenings when it stayed open until nine o’clock.
Finally, after several months of attending the youth group, David mustered up the courage to ask Carol out on a date. To his surprise, she accepted. Several nights later David picked Carol up in his blue Bedford van from the bakery and escorted her to the local cinema to see a movie. David enjoyed the experience, and he guessed that Carol must have as well, because soon they were going out together regularly. But they experienced some bumps along the way. On two occasions David failed to show up for scheduled dates. Exhausted from his day’s work at the bakery, he had gotten on his perch atop the flour sacks to rest for a short while before going to pick Carol up and failed to wake up. However frustrated Carol may have been about his failure to pick her up, she was gracious about the slipups and continued to go out with David, much to his relief and delight.
Another outcome of David’s involvement with the youth group was that after attending the group for about a year, he moved out of the Jamieson house and into a two-bedroom flat in Mt. Albert, a neighboring suburb of Sandringham. Two other young men from the youth group lived at the flat, and David shared a bedroom with one of them, Bruce Fuller. David enjoyed the new living arrangement. The boys would sit around for hours and talk about all sorts of things, though talk about girls and dating was never far from their minds. The flat was a place where people liked to gather. It wasn’t uncommon for David to come home from his day at the bakery and find it bursting at the seams with young people.
As David and Carol spent more time together, Carol began to open up to him about herself and her struggle with a nagging sickness. She explained to David that when she was fourteen years old, she had blacked out and collapsed while returning home from attending the Auckland Easter show with her parents. After a number of tests, the doctor diagnosed her condition as epilepsy and put her on heavy doses of medication to control the illness. Despite the medication, Carol continued to have seizures. She explained to David how embarrassed she was by the condition and that only a handful of people at church knew about it and covered for her if she had to leave an event early because of a seizure.
David listened attentively as Carol talked, though he didn’t understand much about epilepsy and how debilitating it could be. Despite the condition, as time went on, David found himself falling deeply in love with Carol, and he began spending more time with her.
David still kept in contact with the Bussaus, mostly through regular correspondence with Rocky. The Bussaus had moved from Timaru to Raglan, a beachside community about one hundred miles south of Auckland. Now that he was in love and had a steady girlfriend, David decided that he would like to take Carol to meet the Bussaus, as they represented the only thing that resembled parents and family in his life.
