My Letters to New Zealand from San Francisco – 1968,69

In 1968 I arrived in San Francisco to nanny for an influential and affluent American family; they had ten children. I was to be in charge of the six youngest. They had a Japanese cook, a cleaner and a driver so I was pretty much the caregiver for the children ; driving them to and from school when required , shopping for their clothes at   ” I Magnin’s Department Store”, dressing them for dinner party appearances etc. The older children were away at boarding school. The home was three-storied with two sets of stairs in the beautiful Nob Hill area. In fact the street was made famous in the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt . It was filmed in and around San Francisco in late April 1968. It featured a tremendous amount of on-location filming. Best remembered for the car-chase. One of the film’s scenic location shots (there are many) is of a house at 2700 Vallejo Street, at the corner of Vallejo and Divisadero in the Pacific Heights section of the city.

Letters to my parents – 1968

In February 1968 I traveled to Australia as a young Karitane Nurse. Recently the letters I wrote home were discovered, my Mother had kept them all and some of the snippets, I think, are worth repeating here. Remembering  I was raised on a farm in Central Otago and then I had been to boarding school so I had a rather sheltered up bringing!!  My letter writing was prolific, 3-4 pages hand written most weeks. Postage was 7c Airmail to New Zealand.