Marriage, 85 years on. David Hill on his parents' history

David Hill's parents on their wedding day, 1935. Photo / Supplied

The photo is 85 years old. My parents are newly married and their lives are about to be transformed by a November election.

The 1930s' Depression is still grinding along and New Zealand's United/Coalition Government seem helpless to stop it. Then, on November 26 (Māori voters) and November 27 (general voters) in 1935, the Labour Party sweeps into power, winning 53 seats to the incumbents' 19.

It was the first of four successive Labour administrations. It was also entirely male – the party's and country's first woman MP, Lyttelton's Elizabeth McCombs, had died just before the election. My parents voted for Labour that November and for the rest of their lives.

Of course they did. Within a year, relief work schemes had been abolished and Dad was back at the Napier brickworks, picking up the trade he'd learned as a teenager.

State houses were being built at an almost frenzied pace. My parents never got one but it made them believe they'd someday have a place of their own. Healthcare expanded; by the time I was born in McHardy Home on Hospital Hill (now a trendy B&B), maternity services cost nothing. A hopeful new world seemed to be opening in front of them.

Let's go back to them and that photo. I've no idea where it was taken. Some studio, obviously. The wedding itself was in St Paul's Church, almost brand new then, built on the ruins of the first church, which the 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake had smashed down.

Just look at them. No way could my mother afford a bridal gown. I've no idea if she bought or borrowed her ankle-length dress and pointy shoes, or the hat she's so obviously unused to.

She wears virtually no makeup; never did. Her mouth is open: she'd had all her teeth pulled out before she was 20 - just like her new husband - and ill-fitting dentures kept her bottom jaw permanently thrust forward.

Beside her, my father sports the brutal short-back-and-sides haircut that was the only acceptable style for Kiwi blokes then – unless you were decadent or worked in the arts, which amounted to much the same thing.

His suit may well be his own. Even labourers owned one in those days. Yes, he was a labourer when they married, on one of those back-and-soul-breaking government relief schemes, digging ditches to drain lagoon land thrust upwards by the quake, four years before.

Every weekday after that November election gave him his job and self-esteem back, he walked 2km down Napier Hill to work and 2km back up the hill. No wonder he stayed the same shape most of his life.

When I was a Napier Boys' High Upper Sixth Former and we were allowed to wear suits to the prizegiving, Dad's one fitted my broom-handle teenage outline perfectly. It may even have been his wedding suit - I remember how the lapels reached nearly out to my shoulders.

The wedding party.

The wedding party photo: I've no idea who the two on the left are. Faint numbers are written above the figures but there are no details on the back.

Next to my mother stands her brother Adam. Seven years later, he was in the New Zealand artillery, fighting in the great desert battle of El Alamein. He came home with shrapnel in his back and demons in his mind.

My father didn't see active service. He'd been just too young for World War I; just too old (and married) for WWII. I believe he felt ashamed, inadequate almost, ever afterwards. He was in the Home Guard, however, that motley crew of the older or sicker, who trained at first with rabbit-shooting .22 rifles and duck-shooting shotguns.

If the Japanese invaded, they were supposed to retreat to the Kaimanawa Ranges, launch guerrilla strikes, get killed. My mother used to wheel my pram along to France House, the orphanage requisitioned by the Army next to Napier Central School, when Dad was on sentry duty, so he could pretend to challenge us.

On the very right of the photo, my maternal grandmother sits four-square, a dead animal's fur draped over her shoulders. Dad apparently called it The Escaped Skunk, which didn't go down too well with his bride's family.

He was 36 when they married, born in 1899. The date still seems improbable when I write it down. She was 11 years younger.

Names? She was Mary Dixon Marshall, known as Molly. Her family came to New Zealand from Scotland, settled on a farm just outside Napier. When the 1931 earthquake wrecked the farmhouse, she went to live and work in Dannevirke. After a while, this shy, skinny bloke began wheeling his pushbike home beside her.

He was Clive Walter Roland Hill, but everyone called him Bob, which was ... well, better than the alternatives. He'd left school at 14, just like his bride-to-be. Yet he loved books, stories, cadences, supported me unconditionally as I headed through high school towards a degree in English literature, mainly because I couldn't think what else to do.

It was a marriage that lasted for 27 years, until my mother's too-early death.

A good one? I believe so. They had explosive arguments, nearly always begun by her when his mildness, his pliability enraged her. He hadn't pushed for time-and-a-half payment if he worked on Saturday mornings, or he'd agreed too easily to a neighbour cutting a branch from our apricot tree.

Their rows lasted an almost ritual half-hour (I usually escaped to my only-child's bedroom), then voices lowered, a pot of tea was made, normal service was resumed.

They were physically at ease with each other; kissed goodbye when he left for work; went on Sunday afternoon walks with her hand tucked inside his elbow.

Once, when I came home early from a friend's 10th birthday party, I found them in bed at 4pm, startled faces peering over the covers at me. "Just having a rest, sonny," my mother said. "Why don't you get yourself a chocolate biscuit?" As I headed for the kitchen, I heard the door close behind me; heard my mother giggle.

They were tactile with me, too: unusually so. Dad ruffled my hair, patted my shoulder. Mum kissed me goodnight every evening, hugged me for all sorts of reasons. I was always fearful she might do so when a friend came to stay.

The touching sometimes took different forms. They hit me if I misbehaved or lied about something. Open hands only: hard slaps on the leg that left red marks. It was standard parenting for the time.

Mum did it mostly; she was the disciplinarian. If my father ever had to smack me, he'd go away and dig in the garden for an hour afterwards.

They were typical of their time in other ways, too. Michael Joseph Savage's new government set them on an upward path and, like just about every working family, they voted Labour for the rest of their lives.

As I say, that November 1935 election sealed their political views. My dad rebuked me when I grumbled about having to join a Trade Union during holiday jobs in a timber yard or at Watties Cannery. There was the (in)famous occasion when they accepted a lift to the polling booth in a car provided by the National Party, then voted for the other side.

They'd have been thrilled by this year's results, totally gobsmacked by a woman leader, totally bewildered by gay MPs. Yes, products of their time.

Both had good Māori friends at work, but joked about "Māori Time ... Māori PT". When I was saving my sixpence per week pocket money towards a model racing car with its lethal lead-based paint, Dad joked that I was "as tight as an old Jew". Current political correctness has its points.

Their ways of life helped kill them. My father ate meals of red meat, fat and starch; piled sugar into his tea; died in his early 70s from cardiac arrest. Both he and my mother smoked continuously. The ceiling above their chairs in the kitchen-cum-dining room where we spent nearly all our evenings was patched brown with tar and nicotine.

For the half-dozen years Mum worked at Rothmans Tobacco Factory (long after the Depression, she felt she had to apologise for taking what might have been a man's job), they got free cigarettes as a Christmas bonus. Tobacco companies already knew how lethal their product was, knew also how to hide the truth. Emphysema killed her when she was just 52.

And like so many of their era, they yearned and saved for that Place of Their Own. During the first 15 years of my life, we lived in a shabby rental cottage on Napier Hill, a house of dark, dank rooms, a cold-water bathroom, one power point.

We stayed mostly in the kitchen-dining room; listened every night to the valve radio – serials like Dossier on Demetrius; Selwyn Toogood hosting It's in the Bag: "Good evening, Ōamaru! Hello, Dargaville!"; the Nine O'Clock News ("This is the BBC ...").

Finally, they got their own house, a stucco box just outside Napier. By then, they had a car to reach it: an Austin A30 that made a VW Beetle look huge. No air-conditioning. No radio or heater or seat belts or indicators. Top speed 85km/h with a following wind. We thought it was wonderful.

My mother thought their house was wonderful, too. She wandered from ordinary room to ordinary room, touching window sills and kitchen bench, smiling at Dad. She had only four years to enjoy it before she died.

My father lived another decade as a widower, saw me happily married, doted on his baby grandson: "Isn't he a great little bloke!"

He's in some of our wedding photos. Taken almost exactly 30 years after his, they show Beth looking just terrific in a classic white gown. I'm awkward in dinner jacket and black bow tie. I'd recently come out of National Service and my hair is cut almost as short as his was.

We're young and healthy and thrilled with each other. If my parents could somehow have foreseen that in those months of late 1935, I reckon they'd have felt pretty satisfied.