How about those sandwiches made of thin white bread with spaghetti in tomato sauce we used to revel in in New Zealand forty years ago. It just occurred to me that they could have been spiced up beautifully with a dash of marmite. As a drink, you could follow up with one of those cans/tins of ready mixed coffee and milk that used to form a delicious yellow skin on the top as it cooled. As I remember, you got in the railway stations way back then. -- Is there anybody old enough to remember what I'm talking about?

My first real holiday job was working in the refreshment rooms at the Paekakariki railway station way back in nineteen hundred and mumble mumble. We made sandwiches by the hundreds and thousands through the summer heat. The holiday traffic on the railways was phenomenal then, every train was a really long one with each carriage jam packed. The "Special" put on for racegoers were even fuller with hardly even standing room.

We started at 4 a.m. and spread butter (from a forty pound block) onto the bread as fast as we could and piled it in great stacks, those further along the bench grabbed it and slapped wafer thin ham or corned beef or yes, pasted a layer of tinned spaghetti and tomato across the face of a slice, slapped another piece of bread on and passed them on down the line to where they were cut diagonally in half and placed on plates, covered with damp tea towels and sat awaiting delivery through to the tea rooms.

The tea was made in big metal pots holding 1 1/2 gallons, coffee came out of a big tin of Nestles Coffee & Milk, it was spooned generously into a teapot, boiling water was poured in and the gooey mix on the bottom of the pot was stirred vigorously with a wooden spoon to dissolve it. Only about 5% of customers wanted coffee in those days.

The best bit about the job was smoko time when we made our own sandwiches the adolescent members of our team were always ravenous and we made up huge thick ham sandwiches and chomped our way through them with gusto.

I was only a consumer and did most of my consuming at Palmerston (not Palmerston North, the real Palmerston) on my way between Dunedin where I lived and Oamaru where I went to school. My strongest memory was the rush to get to the food place -- masses of people struggling to get their spaghetti sandwiches and slab of fruit cake -- a mob rivalled only by the mob at six o'clock closing.

Smoko! That was the best part of any job.

Contributors

Noeline McCaughan
Brian Stewart