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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 6 (September 1, 1938)

One Year Old

One Year Old.

The Wellington Railway Station is one year old now, but the building holds a spirit that is mellowed with experience and continually expanding through all the new environmental facilities into a more satisfying pleasure in work.

Because I am a woman and not mechanically-minded I shall not try to give you the machinery of this great and constant endeavour, this co-ordination and co-operation between a thousand people of all degrees of qualification and culture; the mechanic and the cheerful waitress, the technicist, draftsman, the college man and the graduate of the old universities of other lands. But I shall attempt to pass on to you some—only a small part—of the subtle spirit of this place as it rose up to the mind of a woman in an hour's exploration.

And it is not alone by my own natural inclination that my thought begins at the nursery floor. My guide was a man, presumably less given to sentimentality. He began there.

It is hardly possible to show the preciousness of this little heaven. Watch this lad, pushing his tricycle among the castles of his fancy.

Little Camel, when you left your coat in the other room you forgot your name. They pinned on to you the sign of a camel (or was it an elephant, or a bear?) and now you are known as a little animal in this happy interlude. Perhaps you forget that you are anything at all, or you are a wizard manipulating trucks and trains from the shelves of toys, bright as all the colours in this room.

You are a king, to-day, with servants or starched bodyguard—that nurse and page 42 the kindergarten woman—and your very curtains wave with drum majors in the folds. The doors of the palace open on to a roof with the world below. And on the roof there are love birds with feathers marked like shells.

In a little kitchen of cream and green enamel someone is getting ready prune pulp for you—Plunket feeding, even in heaven. But there are also baked apples, and pumpkin, cabbage, potatoes, and fish in the oven. It's a jolly world.

The tiny kiddies and the babies sleep in their small cots in rooms as restful as green fields. Their little bodies are still bundles under coverlets fresh as the busy windmill patterns mothers love for babies' cots. Their bunny friends and the chickens, Donald Duck and an owl or two, a funny long-legged beetle and a white mouse are having a picnic in a low freize on the wall just on the level of the babies' eyes. The simple, kindly friends of bed-time stories will greet them again in the bliss of awakening.

It is all so warm and snug and safe here. No wonder children leave it very reluctantly. Yet as they go away they drop down in the lift past other little worlds, and these are worlds of toil and sociability like those they may themselves be heir to.