It can be a small world in Police, as Alanna Green and Yvette Turner of the Northern Communications Centre recently learned.
Alanna has 20 years of Police service as a dispatcher with North Comms, and Yvette has been a calltaker and dispatcher for the past seven years.
They have worked together for the past 18 months on the same section, unaware they were heirs to a friendship which had lasted generations.
They were carpooling home together after a busy late shift when they realised that Alanna’s dad Steve Green and Yvette’s parents John E Turner and the late Edina Coulston were all in Police.
Steve graduated from Trentham in 1962 and John and Edina graduated in different wings in 1964. They were all posted to Auckland.
As their graduations were quite close together, Alanna and Yvette decided to ask their dads if they knew each other. They didn’t expect much and were shocked when both were able to recite the same memories.
It transpires that Alanna’s dad used to flat with Yvette’s dad in lodgings above the old Auckland Central Police station on Princes Street, now the Maths department of the University of Auckland.
Not only that… Steve and two other Police flatmates - Dave Roberts and Rob Criglington - were all Groomsmen at John and Edina’s wedding in Kaikohe in February 1966.
Steve remembered Edina well. John remembered Steve scaling the fire escape of a boarding house in Carlton Gore Road to visit Cecily, Alanna’s Mum.
Steve finished off his phone call to Alana by mentioning JET – John E Turner’s nickname to the present day.
Who would have thought that 53 years later, two of the children of these three former colleagues would not only be working together for Police but would be in the same team and, while carpooling home one night, would stumble upon this longstanding connection?
Plans for a reunion are already under way for next time they are all together in Auckland.