Lifelong Tuatapere resident 96-year-old Ngarita Dixon is likely to be the eldest surviving pupil of the original Tuatapere School, starting school there, aged six, at the height of The Great Depression.

“I got the strap every day for a week because I couldn’t spell properly,” Ngarita recalls.

Ngarita Dixon at Tuatapere School's 75th reunion in 1985. Photo: Central & Western Archive/Supplied

However, the boys in the class managed to escape punishment, their ink pen nibs thrown like darts and jammed in the ceiling above the classroom.

“We had ink wells in our desks, and they’d toss them up, their nibs getting stuck in the ceiling above, but they never got caught,” she chuckles.

The classroom was heated by a pot belly stove, teacher Jack Ford and the headmaster, George Higgins, nicknamed ‘Barney’, kept a billy of water boiling on the stove constantly to keep the room moist.

Mr Ford doubled as the girls’ basketball ref, running the sideline in his collar, tie and hat. Tennis was also big at Tuatapere School.

Ngarita biked home for lunch every day and grew up in the “mentality of The Depression years”.

“You don’t spend until you can pay for it.”

Her dad was the local baker and knew what it was like to have customers who couldn’t pay.

“He started at 2am every morning, the fresh bread in the van by 8am and he delivered it around town to every house."

"We had to be very quiet at night as Dad was in bed by 7pm,” she says.

Thursday was ‘sale day’, when local farmers sold their stock at the yards, Ngarita helping make sandwiches in her parents’ tearooms.

With no local high school education then and no boarding hostel at Invercargill’s Southland Girls’ High, Ngarita was sent to Waitaki Girls’ High for two years.

“It was wartime, and we were only allowed to travel from Oamaru to Dunedin, never home, not until the end of the three-month term,” she says.

“That was a big shock and very hard.”

Ngarita then trained as a dressmaker at Invercargill’s Hollywood School of Dressmaking.

“They had special rulers so that you could draft patterns.”

Ngarita worked as a dressmaker back in Tuatapere before marrying a local sawmiller, starting their family of two while based in mill houses at Dean Forest Settlement near Lake Hauroko before moving back to Tuatapere.

While she’s pleased the town is planning another school reunion, Ngarita’s not sure that she’ll make this one so isn’t busting out the sewing machine for a new dress yet.

“I’m the last one you know."

"I think I will be a bit too old to go this time.”