Early on a Saturday morning, David and Carol climbed into the bakery van and headed south from Auckland. The drive through the rolling green New Zealand countryside was beautiful, and the trip was made all the better for David by having Carol at his side. Three hours after setting out, they drove into Raglan and found the Bussaus’ house. When they pulled the van into the driveway, Rocky bolted out the front door to greet them. She gave first David and then Carol an enthusiastic hug, and she talked so fast that David could hardly keep up with her. Although Rocky’s welcome was enthusiastic, Vera and Lyndsay Bussau’s welcome was tepid at best. David introduced Carol to them, but they did not seem at all interested in her, and talk between the four of them was strained.
After several hours in Raglan, David and Carol set out on the drive back to Auckland. As they drove, a deep sense of disappointment and frustration overcame David. More than anything he had wanted Vera and Lyndsay Bussau to like and accept Carol. He wanted them to see all the wonderful qualities that he saw in her. And he wanted to embrace their acceptance of her as an affirmation that he had chosen well. But none of that had happened. Vera and Lyndsay had all but ignored Carol. It was a bitter blow that left David feeling very much alone.
David soon got over the disappointment he felt about the uneasy visit to Raglan. He kept busy at the bakery, and in the evenings he liked to visit Carol at her house.
One Friday evening, David was to escort Carol to a ball. He arrived back at his flat from his day at the bakery, exhausted as usual, and flopped onto his bed to rest a few minutes before getting ready. At seven-thirty the phone awakened him from his sleep.
“David, where are you? It’s half past seven!” came Carol’s voice on the other end of the line.
“I’m so sorry,” David apologized. “I fell asleep. I’ll be over in a half hour to pick you up.”
David hung up the phone and sat groggily on the edge of the bed trying to shake off his sleepiness. But it didn’t work, and he promptly fell back to sleep. He awoke with a start half an hour later, still not dressed and ready to take Carol to the ball. He picked up the phone and called her to apologize for not picking her up yet and to tell her that he would be there in twenty minutes. This time when he hung up the phone, David resisted the urge to nod off to sleep again. He showered and got dressed in his suit, but when he looked at the clock it was already past the twenty minutes when he said he would be there to pick up Carol.
Once again David telephoned Carol and explained that he would be over to pick her up in just a few minutes. He could tell from the dejected tone of Carol’s voice on the other end of the line that she didn’t believe him.
David finished getting ready, jumped into his Bedford van, and sped off to pick up Carol. As late as he was, he made one stop on the way to buy some pink roses for Carol. Two hours late, David finally knocked on the Crowders’ door. When Carol opened the door, David was stunned at how beautiful she looked dressed in a flowing silk gown. He handed her the roses and apologized again for being so late.
Carol accepted David’s apology and the roses, but on the drive to the ball she confessed that she wondered whether David loved business more than he loved her. This was a rebuke that David took to heart. Maybe it was time to sell the bakery. In the time that he had owned the business, he’d built it up and expanded it to maximize potential. Now his time was spent working punishingly long hours to keep things running. He began to wonder whether it wasn’t time to sell and, as he had done in Timaru when he sold the hot dog stand, invest the money he made in another business that he could build up. Finally David decided that it was indeed time for a change. After owning the Busy Bee Bakery for nearly three years, he sold the business for thirty thousand pounds, six times what he had paid for it.
With the profit from the sale of the bakery, David began to look around for a new business to buy. Finally he found what he was looking for—Betta Pikelets and Pancakes. The business, located in the suburb of Onehunga, produced pancakes, crumpets, and pikelets—small pancakes that New Zealanders slathered with jam and fresh whipped cream for morning and afternoon tea. David could see a lot of potential for development.
Now instead of working the large oven at the Busy Bee Bakery, David was hunched over a ten-feet-long by three-feet-wide hot plate to cook his wares. He soon discovered that the work was painstaking. First he had to mix the pancake batter and pour it into a large bag. Then he took the bag and went along the hot plate, squeezing out dollops of batter onto it. After he had squeezed out the batter, he raced back to the other end of the hot plate and began to flip the pancakes and pikelets to cook the other side of them. When he had flipped them all, he once again raced back to the other end of the hot plate to remove the cooked items from the heat and arrange them on trays to cool. Once they had cooled, a number of the pancakes and pikelets were bagged for delivery to local supermarkets. The items not bagged were delivered loose to bakeries around the city to be sold alongside other baked goods.
It didn’t take David long to realize that there had to be a way to speed up and streamline the cooking process. He thought about it for a while and then approached Dudley Crowder, Carol’s uncle, who was an engineer. Together the two men designed and built a pikelet-making machine. The machine, which basically consisted of a large hopper into which the pancake batter was poured, worked flawlessly. The hopper moved along above the hot plate, depositing in a row the batter for six pikelets, and then moved on to the next row. Now all David had to do was follow along behind the hopper, flipping the pikelets. The hopper could be adjusted to deposit more batter on the hot plate for pancakes.
David was pleased with the new pikelet-making machine, and he patented the device. Before long he and Dudley were tinkering with their invention, trying to automate the cooking process even more. This time they made the hopper stationary, and instead a circular hot plate, onto which the hopper deposited the batter, rotated below it. But this time, instead of David having to come along and flip the pikelets by hand, when they were cooked on one side, an arm flipped them off the hot plate and onto another hot plate below to cook the other side. Now with minimal effort David could cook thousands of pikelets and pancakes at a time without running from one end of the room to the other. With so much output, he began to look around for more markets for his product.
David worked out an arrangement with Tip Top and Fielders, two of New Zealand’s largest bakers, to package his pikelets and pancakes and sell them under the their brand names. Soon David was busier than ever producing pikelets and pancakes overnight, packaging them, and delivering them to supermarkets throughout the city. He soon found that he was as busy as he had been at the Busy Bee Bakery and just as exhausted. In fact, early one Wednesday morning his exhaustion caught up with him.
As David guided the Betta Pikelets and Pancakes van along a two-lane city street, headed for a local Four Square supermarket to make a delivery, his eyelids began to close. He tried to fight off the extreme drowsiness, but he just couldn’t do it. Moments later he was asleep at the wheel. Suddenly the van bounced up and then came to a stop with a loud bang. David awoke with a start as fresh pancakes and pikelets piled forward from the racks in the back of the van and landed on top of him in the driver’s seat. He looked around and saw that the van had jumped the curb and careened into the center of a roundabout, coming to a stop when it collided head-on with a power pole in the middle of the roundabout. Miraculously, David was unharmed.
David clambered out of the van to inspect the damage, which turned out to be mostly superficial. The van’s grill and hood were dented, but the vehicle still ran and was drivable. However, things inside the van were not quite so good. Pancakes and pikelets were everywhere. Those that were bagged were easily rearranged back on the racks. But the loose ones that David was to deliver to local bakeries took more effort. David had to painstakingly flatten out each pancake or pikelet and restack it on the racks. Finally, an hour after crashing, he was able to continue with his delivery route, driving as fast as he could to make up for lost time while being diligent not to fall asleep again at the wheel. More than one baker gave David a strange look that morning as he delivered the disheveled piles of pancakes and pikelets.
Despite David’s exhausting work schedule, his relationship with Carol continued to blossom and grow. Finally he became confident that Carol Crowder was the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He decided to ask her to marry him, and the perfect opportunity to pop the question, he decided, would be on an upcoming weekend trip they were planning to Mt. Maunganui, a beach community on New Zealand’s east coast about two hundred miles from Auckland.
It was February 22, 1964, and a bright sun shined overhead as David and Carol followed the track up the side of the extinct volcano that gave the beach its name. About halfway up the track, they stopped to take in the view. On their left the deep blue water of the Pacific Ocean rolled ashore in an endless cascade of white crested breakers, and to their right small boats dotted around on the sheltered water of Tauranga Harbor. David decided it was now or never. He opened his mouth and said to Carol, “I suppose we should get married or something.” The words weren’t quite as eloquent as he would have liked them to be, but nonetheless, he had asked the question. David noted that Carol seemed to be taken a little by surprise at his question, and it seemed like an eternity to him before she replied. Finally she said, “I’d love to.”
David was elated, and it was almost as if his feet did not touch the ground as he and Carol made their way to the top of the mountain. At the top they talked some more about life together and arranging a wedding, and David agreed that as a matter of formality he would ask Carol’s father, Norm Crowder, for permission to marry his daughter.
Three days later, back in Auckland, David strode into the Crowder house in Sandringham. Norm Crowder sat at the kitchen table sipping a drink. “Norm, I’d like to marry your daughter,” David announced.
Norm set his glass on the kitchen table, stood up slowly, and looked David in the eye. “Not in your life,” he said as he spun around and headed out the kitchen door and into the garden to tend his rhubarb plants.
This was not the response David had expected from Carol’s father, and he stood with his mouth open.
Carol’s mother, Phyllis, or Phyl, as everyone called her, came over and tried to soothe David. “Give him ten minutes,” she said. “He’ll be back. It’s the way he deals with change.”
Sure enough, ten minutes later Norm appeared again in the kitchen. “So what was that you said? You want to marry Carol. Do you really mean it?”
David nodded.
“Well, let me think about it,” Norm added.
He didn’t have to think long and soon gave his approval.
David and Carol were delighted, as was Carol’s mom, and they began to turn their attention to planning a wedding.
David looked forward to being a married man. One thing he promised himself was that when he and Carol were married and had children, he would be the most loving and attentive father a child could possibly have.
Wedding preparations had not gone too far, however, when a dark cloud descended over David and Carol’s relationship.
Chapter 7
Change of Location
A nervous breakdown? Is that really what’s wrong with you?” David asked Carol.
Carol nodded, tears streaming down her face. “That’s what the doctor said.”
David scrambled to think of anything he knew about nervous breakdowns, but nothing came to mind. He’d never known anyone who’d had one. But now he was faced with the fact that his fiancée was in crisis. Carol had told David about the strange experience she’d had at her part-time job at Farmer’s Department Store the previous Friday evening. She had felt herself mysteriously pulled toward the top of the ten-story stairwell in the middle of the store and experienced an overwhelming desire to throw herself down the stairs and fly to the bottom. Although she had resisted the powerful urge to do so, David could tell, as she recounted the incident to him, that it had shaken Carol’s confidence to the core, so much so that several days later she went soundly to sleep and did not wake up for two days. When she did wake up, she was a different person—groggy, confused, and unable to cope with her regular life.
