Cottage organ, $10; memories it made, priceless

The cottage organ has left the building.

After a long life at my side, it was carried out of the house into a big truck last Tuesday morning.

I bought it as a teenager at the old Alex Harris auction rooms.

Twelve dollars, a reasonable sum of money for a teenager in the 1960s.

It became the centrepiece of my bedroom at home, where I would pound away, invariably using the stop that produced an extra octave in the bass.

But physically, it was hard yakker.

I soon realised I couldn't sit there pedalling furiously because each stab at the pedals moved the chair six inches further back from the organ, until I reached a point when I was straining to actually touch anything, like an exhausted swimmer reaching for the end of the pool when they should have taken another stroke.

I soon broke the right pedal, so this enabled me to stand and just pump on the left.

It looked pretty strange from behind, and as the door to the bedroom was behind, this was the only view anyone ever got, bottom-wobbling hip-thrusting little boy on one leg sucking emphasemic wheeze from an organ which could perhaps be, if you tore your imagination to breaking point, A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum.

Then the left pedal went as well.

I was devastated.

Just to get me back in action for that day, I replaced the rotten canvas with my favourite leather belt, a huge hippie design with a buckle the size of a CD case.

That belt was still holding firm when the cottage organ left the house last Tuesday.

If Te Papa saw it, they would hand me a blank cheque.

The organ moved next to the Terrace Houses in Stuart St, where I set up Records Records, and then to Malvern St, an old villa in one of the coldest parts of Dunedin which we later sold to Pete Hodgson, then a vet.

We didn't have much room at Malvern St, so it sat obstructively in the hall like a sleeping drunk dinner guest you wanted to ship out of the house, only none of the taxi drivers would take him.

It then moved to much more salubrious surroundings in Cargill St, two spacious storeys of grandeur, where it sat proudly opposite a Schiedmayer piano, in a room we tried to call the library because of all the books, but which inevitably became called The Pool Room because of the pool table.

I started playing the organ again then.

Had I tried to play it in the hall at Malvern St I would have finished up wedged against the wall like a sausage in a bottle.

We sold the piano to local artist/musician Alastair Galbraith when we moved to our current house, but kept the organ.

It was such a nice piece of furniture.

But the books kept piling up under tables, beside beds and falling out of bookcases, so we were forced to take the only possible extra bookcase space left, the back hall.

This is where the cottage organ had been living a neglected hospice life, rarely played, and really only used for two things - somewhere to store the fuse wire for the powerboard above it, and something to provide stub for the toe when rushing frantically to the toilet in the night.

I was realistic about its worth on TradeMe, suggesting a starting price of $10, which was also the reserve.

There were no takers.

So I offered it to all 15 watchers for the same price, and one of them said by hokey yes, that's for me.

Ten dollars.

It was 100 years old, a Dominion, made in Canada by the Bowmanville Organ Company in Ontario, Canada.

Part of more than two-thirds of my life.

Only the top F didn't work.

Those people who say things are so much more expensive these days are wrong.

• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.

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