Cavendish Heights (First Generation) [1959-1983]

Centadata reports for the current generation:

I lived at Cavendish Heights from 1975-1978 and don't remember seeing any sort of large-scale manual laundry operation, either out our flat's rear windows that overlooked HK, or while walking or riding up & down Perkins Road the hundreds of times I did-so.

  I know some of the Cavendish Heights buildings had different flat sizes/layouts.  I don't recall our building #, but I do recall it was 9 or 10 stories, overlooking the main/largest open parking lot plus having reserved car parking spaces on the ground level underneath the building.  Our address was 31 Perkins Rd -- maybe 31 designated our specific flat building...  We couldn't see the pool, but the pool area was located perhaps 200 meters directly across the main parking lot and on lower ground.

Anyway, many of us in the mid-1970s era had a Filipino housekeeper -- an "Ama" to do laundry right there in the flat, and our flat, which took-up the entire floor of the building, had living & working spaces for up to two Amas, including if I recall correctly, a washing space.

In retrospect, it's hard to believe that my family once had a full-time maid & even part-time driver for my dad (supplied by his work) -- we were just upper middle-class people, not used to such things, but it was a routine part of the Hong Kong culture for at-least American business executives & their families back then, with the housing/maid/driver expenses covered by the business.  Our Ama was a young woman, probably in her early 20s, named Cris.  I was 10-13 at the time and while I was always nice & respectful to her, I probably tried her nerves sometimes by not respecting that the far end of our flat, where her quarters & work area was (as well as a separate entrance with stairwell/elevator), was kind of her private space and not somewhere that I could just wander to any time I wanted.   I couldn't understand why that back area was an unpleasant bare tile and dimly lit, whereas when we moved into the main flat, we got to chose wall colors, and I believe the flooring was wood.

  It's been 45 years since I last saw her and I've always wondered how her life went...

Cavendish Heights was completed in 1959. My parents, David and Corrine Bottomley, were among the first to move in there in September of that year. I was born a few months later, the first baby born to a family living at Cavendish.  Originally there were just three blocks of ten flats, but a couple of years later a fourth block of ten flats was added, "The New Block".  About ten years after that (I'm not sure exactly what year), the bank on the left of the approach driveway to Cavendish was cleared, and more apartments were built, but these were of a different configuration, much smaller, and of poorer quality, and non-HK Electric families could live there. Our family moved out of Cavendish in September 1982, almost exactly 23 years after they had moved in. I believe it was demolished in 1983.