Matariki

 

The sand still just a tiny bit warm under my bum. The winds on-shore as always with the winter-cold night coming, running towards us almost silent, making the smallest shells skitter in front of the waves.

“The eyes of God,” Mum said quietly. I was day-dreaming about the fish in the waves, suddenly wishing I had those all-seeing eyes. She nudged me, “Remember the names?”

“Ururangi?”

“The winds; one day they’ll carry you all the way up there.”

“Hello Pohutukawa,” she said quietly. Pohutukawa down the bottom, for her Mum and Dad.

“Hiwa!”

“Good one. West. The new year; adventure. Like your brother in Japan now.

“Waipuna-a-Rangi, further again. Rains. Africa? Wildebeest and crocodiles.

“Tupuarangi up North, a little East, for food in the trees. Oranges? Those California ones you love to turn into mouthguards.

“Tupuanuku further South, food from the soil. South America? All those lovely roast potatoes.”

“Waita?”

“Yep, for the sea. A little closer, Australia? One day you’ll catch a barramundi.”

“I thought that Waihi was for the sea, our star?”

“It is, maybe snapper, and scallops.

“See how, no matter where you go, I can see you, and you can see me, ‘Nga-mata-o-te-Ariki’.”

--

Big Ben boomed a slow six. I was waiting on the 97 bus, coming slowly to sway me over the Thames.

I turned the bone amulet at my neck, read the inscription for the thousandth time.

“Ururangi, from Matariki, at Waihi, Aroha nui”.

Waihi, my Waiti. She would be sitting on the beach, waiting on a hug.

 

 

Gorse

Jasmine?

“Good try, it’s gorse.”

David, and Michael, and Bronwyn, threw themselves down and rolled around in the long grass, laughing so hard the sheep skittered away, bleating to join the chorus.

“Not everyone gets to grow up in the country to know things like that”, Grandma said, the words long and drawn out so they seemed to roll out over the laughter, pushing it down to the grass, softer, slower, silence.

“What’s the name of the Spanish footballer who scored the winning goal last night in the world cup?”

David looked at Michael and Michael looked at Bronwyn. “Colin Meads?”

“Colin Meads, the All Black? Colin Meads who played against the Springboks in 1956 and bought a field of hay bales from your grandfather that summer? That one?”

She looked over at me, smiling.

“Juanito!” I yelled it just as the commentator would have, ‘Wha-Neat-OH!’.

“How do you know stuff like that”, Bronwyn asked, standing up and slapping at the knees of her corduroy pants?

“I read it in Grandad’s paper.”

“He’s clever, that’s how he knows.” Grandma was walking again, heading up the hill towards the tractor idling at the gate. “We all know different things; we can all teach each other different things.”

“I know what kind of sheep grandad has”, David called, running to catch up. “Romney!”

“That’s right.”

“I know what kind of tractor grandad has”. Michael said, looking up the hill. “Massey-Ferguson.”

“Spot on.”

“I know what sort of trees those are, along the fence”, Bronwyn was pointing up the hill. “Totara!”

“You know all the trees, well done.”

Grandma turned back to look for me, without breaking stride, and held out her hand. I ran the few paces between us, feeling how heavy my feet were in the big gumboots I borrowed from the boot room every visit. Grabbed her warm hand.

“There are lots of things here which are just the same as at your home. She raised her chin towards the tractor and I followed with my eyes. Butterflies were spinning, spiralling up and down, following the warm air which rose from the spindly exhaust pipe out along the long nose of the tractor.

“Those are Monarchs.”

“Yes, they are. Just like at your house, they like the swan plants your dad grows, don’t they?”

The others began to run past us, sprinting the last of the steep hill and throwing themselves up onto the transport tray grandad lowered half way to the ground behind those huge black tyres.

Grandma threw her arm forward and let go of my hand, “Go on, you don’t want to miss the boat!”

The four of us sat on the timber planks of the tray, feet swinging, as grandma walked up and joined us, holding the rail she pulled herself up and grandad revved the engine, and away we went.

We stood up all together, clung onto the rail looking forward over grandad’s head, the wind blowing Bronwyn’s long hair back.

“Wah-nah-toe?”

“Juanito!”

Letters

When my grandma passed away, she had a small handbag with her. In it was a little purse with a couple of notes and some coins.

And a letter that I had written her, maybe ten years beforehand.

Grandma had five children and seventeen grandchildren, and she was part of a farming community where she knew everyone, and their kids, and their grandkids. And they knew her.

I loved my grandma to bits, the school holidays I got to spend with her on the farm are memories which come to me more strongly than just about anything else.

I knew gran loved me, always, but there were so many people in her life. I always thought I was just one of them.

The letter would have been something and nothing, written in June as a thank you for a birthday present she would have posted to arrive a couple of days before the 12th. I would have been not long home from spending the May school holiday with her, as I did every year by then. I hope that part of what made the letter special for her was that I had managed to tell her how much those weeks meant to me.

I was incredibly shy and quiet then. That didn’t phase gran at all, she just expected that you would be able to hold a decent conversation, answer a question or two politely and ask a couple in return.

She liked to spend a good deal of her time quiet too, listening to Geoff Robinson in the afternoons while she did the Herald crossword and fell asleep on the couch which caught the last of the sun, in the little enclosed porch at the back of her sprawling home.

I think she knew me about as well as anyone did back then.

I wish now that I had asked Gran a thousand questions and let her tell me about growing up, and getting married and everything else.

Her mother had died when Sophie was young, tragically, drowned in a river near their home.

Sophie remembered her father very fondly, but it must have been hard.

She told me about him in bits and pieces.

Once, there was something wrong with a piece of machinery in a pumphouse or some such on the farm. He went to fix it, and a pulley came loose and tore across his face doing terrible damage. She was there with her sister, still very young, and he simply got on his horse with blood streaming from the wound, told her to look after her sister and rode away to whatever hospital or surgery existed back then.

She matter-of-factly told me the only pain it caused her was that his good looks were gone after all the stitching and mending was complete. She was like that, incredibly practical. When I was a little boy she frightened me, I misinterpreted those things as coldness.

She was never cold; it was just that so many of the things which frightened other people didn’t even register for Sophie.

I had always loved my mum to bits. I slipped under the radar a fair bit because I ticked all the boxes of playing football and never minding all the bumps and bruises, but I was a sook. I loved time with mum.

She talked to me a lot, always has.  

I knew that there were things about growing up which my mum had found hard. She was the fourth of those five kids, with older brothers. And Sophie had had a hard time with my uncle who was not much older than mum, the third son. By the time mum came along there maybe hadn’t been the time and energy there had been once.

Some of mum’s strongest memories, the ones that she kept close for that feeling of total safety only parents can give you, are of her father.

There is a colourful picture in one of the bedrooms at mum’s place these days. I remembered it from grandma’s, it hung in the long hallway that ran away from the centre of the house and led to almost all the bedrooms.

Mum told me that Sophie had bought it on the Spanish border, maybe coming down from France. Sophie and Colin made a huge journey to Europe for the Rome Olympics, they had been to the Melbourne games in 1956, and by 1960 their kids were grown. Mum would have been in boarding school getting close to finishing.

Mum had made sure to stake a claim to the picture, when it came time to clean out cupboards and wardrobes, after grandma passed.

It was her father that she remembered, through that picture. When she called out in the night, as a young girl, it was her dad who came to get her. And he would put her up on his shoulder and walk her quietly down to the sitting room, where he would have been reading the paper or listening to the radio, with the fire going. She remembered the feeling of safety that picture gave her as he carried he up the hall, and down again when she was ready for sleep again.

Later, when mum was studying nursing in Hamilton, it was the trip back with her dad that she remembered from her weekends at home on the farm. That made her feel special, just driving across the silent country with her dad.

Mum and grandma made their peace in whatever way they needed, and it was good between them.

I think now though, that it must have been hard for mum. In a way I got a lot of the childhood she dreamed of having herself, with Sophie.

I think that it had taken time for mum to tell me about the handbag, and the letter. That sounds like something formed out of selfishness, or fear. I don’t mean it to. I got to have the very best of both of them. They never did, quite. Isn’t life just the hardest thing?

Yat

Yat.

I searched for Yat Wong online. I don’t know what made me think of Yat, fully 35 years after I last saw him.

I got the business listing, defunct since 1995, for the Golden Lotus restaurant in Hamilton. That was him, and his brother, ‘Jack’, and I washed dishes there in the early to mid-1980’s.

The business was incorporated a few months before I was born, coming into being in March 1969. I wonder what Hamilton was like then, for a young man who didn’t look anything like the burly farmers who made up most of the Waikato back then. What it was like for a young father and husband looking to make a living cooking Chinese foot in a town where most meals would have still involved meat and three veg.

I don’t think the building would have changed much in the 20 odd years before I worked there, it was a stand-alone single storey building set back from the main street of Hamilton, Victoria Street, which ran parallel to the river dissecting the city and suburbs, the Waikato. I wonder what the building had been, who used it and for what. It would have been quite new compared to the buildings around it when it became the Golden Lotus.

It sat between Resene paints on one side and something on the other, I have a feeling it was a private practice of lawyers or a conveyancing company. My father would know, or think he does. I can hear him going, ‘no, that was, oh you know, that stock agent, what was his name?’ It was that kind of town, a city by New Zealand standards, 100 thousand residents if everyone was home, and most of the buildings were tenanted by people whose name was the business.

There weren’t many restaurants in Hamilton at all. 

I have a vague memory of a birthday trip to a restaurant which wouldn’t have been out of place in a movie like American Graffiti, a long space with booths on either side. It was called the Red Rooster, long before Red Rooster franchises popped up in every suburb. I think I caused consternation because I wanted to order snapper, because I thought I was going to get one of the lobsters that was scrabbling about in the tank ranged along one side of the restaurant. Not that I had a clue what a lobster was.

Lots of the birthdays in years afterward were spent at ‘The Woolshed’, which wasn’t that far from the Golden Lotus really. It had things like mushrooms on toast on the menu. As in button mushrooms on white bread.

The Golden Lotus was one block from where my dad spent the last decades of his working life, the Wrightsons building, which was on the same side of the wide road and further down towards the centre of the CBD.

I went to primary school with a boy whose parents had arrived from Malaysia as refugees. They set up a ‘Chinese’ restaurant at the shops not far from our home, and that was our families introduction to the food, I think, certainly it was mine. Dad would look at the menu for ages, and then almost always get Chicken Chow Mein, or combination Egg Foo Yong. We loved it, we barely ever had takeaway and it seemed so exotic. 

It was much later on I realised how dad’s chicken chow mein was the chicken and veges mum served, if you put it in a bag with some rice and spun it above your head.

I was always starving in the 80’s, no reflection on mum, that’s just the way it was. I remember one of the yoghurt brands had a slogan about enjoying the stuff any time, and I turned around from the fridge with one in my hand a little too late at night and she was standing there and said something like ‘I know they say anytime….’

One of the greatest treats of working for Yat was that I would get there about 4pm, do the dishes from the preparation work that was done before opening, cutting up lots and lots of veges etc, and then Yat would make me something to eat, a great big plate of all sorts. I would sit and eat it off the top of the huge chest freezer that ran along the back wall of the kitchen. I would have a juice out of the fridge to wash it down. 

Yat would be standing at his wok or woks not far away, Jack would be up the other end, getting his stuff ready. Jack always wore a light jersey, Yat varied. They were both very lean, and their trousers hung a little.

They would just ‘chew the fat’. They both made this noise which I have always thought equated to their version of saying ‘Aaaah, or Uuuum’, before you really know what you want to say. One would start making that noise and the other would just wait, and eventually they would be chatting back and forth.

I had been washing the dishes for more than a year when I got to realise that I was an important part of the busy life my uncle Quentin led out on the farm over August with all the lambs coming in. I am still proud of that above a lot of things.

I always thought Quentin was fantastic, he taught me all sorts of stuff out there every school holiday. I never really thought I was much of a help, and he seemed as if he could have done everything single handed standing on his head.

Mum came and got me at lunchtime one Tuesday, Quentin had dropped me back at Grandma’s place, which bordered onto his, after we docked a paddock of sheep in the morning. She drove me back to Hamilton, and then she dropped me off at the Golden Lotus.

Mr Wong dropped me off in the evening once we had closed up the restaurant. It was never very late because I think I worked Tuesdays, I had football practice Monday and Wednesday. When I walked up the long driveway Quentin was sitting in the lounge waiting for me, talking with mum and dad, and then we drove home across the pitch darkness of the New Zealand countryside.

My brother went out with Lisa Wong, Yat’s daughter. She was a fantastic woman for your brother to be going out with, she was lovely to me.

Years later I stayed with Lisa and her partner for a while when I first landed in London.

I don’t have any memory of talking to Mr Wong, but I really liked him. I hope he knew that.

At the end of every shift I would take the big metal rubbish bin from the kitchen and empty it into a skip which was down the back of the restaurant, down the stairs and across the gravelly carpark. When I had finished, I would wash the bin out and leave it upside down next to the stairs. And by then Mr Wong would have locked up, and he would come down the back stairs, and we would shove my ten-speed bike into the cavernous boot of the old Ford Falcon he had parked in the same spot every day.

We would drive home, largely in silence, I think. Yat smoked and he would roll down the window and puff slowly on a cigarette. He changed gears so slowly the car would almost stall in between each change, the Falcon had a stick on the column and he would put in the clutch and then it would be tick, tick, tick as he let his hand just rest there while he took a drag on his smoke with the other.

It summed him up, for me.

He never seemed concerned about anything. Who knows what Yat had seen, and coped with, over those years? I think he thought life was pretty good, which is great to know.

It was only a fifteen-minute drive, and Yat would pull into the driveway leading up to mum and dad’s and stop between the tall photinia bushes which stood sentry at the mailbox. I would say thank you Mr Wong, get out and pull my bike out of the boot, and he would reverse out and head for home over on Hukanui Road five minutes further away.

That was always a bone of contention with my family, that Mr Wong gave me a ride home.

I think it was part of the difference between me, and them, as a group. They often seemed to think similar things and I often seemed to see things slightly differently, and when there were three of them it was hard for them not to see the difference as me being obtuse, or difficult, or in this case, lazy.

I think Yat liked my company, saw bits and pieces he recognised. He was a pretty relaxed man, I can imagine him in a bustling part of Macau, where he grew up. He would be teenager, working hard at a job like washing up the dishes in a market stall, and the owner would be a man who worked hard all night over the roaring woks of food, had a well-earned smoke, and gave Yat a ride home on his puttering little motorbike when it was all done, them riding along in silence, enjoying it.

home

Five goals I scored. We scored eight in all. Five, just me. No one scored five in a game, in that league. We’d hardly scored five all season; suddenly we felt as if we could score a hundred more, score for fun.

He had grown up here, played here when he was very young. Gone on to great things, played for England, scored.

He became the manager of teams we could only ever dream of playing for, in hundred thousand seat stadiums, in front of a hundred thousand faces lit by towering floodlights in the beautiful cities of the world.

We weren’t a beautiful city. Coal city. Cold city.

He had learned Spanish to speak to the super players at his super club, to thank the clamouring fans and answer the throngs of journos who filled evening papers with his words.

They said he might come, come home. We never believed it. Why would he?

And there he was, in our changing room. He could let his broad, hometown voice know itself again.

He didn’t say much, or anything at all. ‘I’ve only been in a week’, he mumbled gently into the microphones of a Friday press conference, he was still taking stock.

Five goals I scored on the Saturday after; lunch time kick off. Eight we scored.

The streets rang; the chippies and the pubs heaved with the same men who had trudged in to St James, not daring to believe; even Sir Bobby couldn’t salvage such a wreck.

We were bottom of the heap, headed back where we belonged, they said; lower leagues with a Tuesday coach trip to Scunthorpe, not worthy of the Saturdays at Anfield, Old Trafford.

We won, and we won. And we scored, oh, we scored. We went to Europe, and played in hundred thousand seat stadiums, and saw faces glow in the light of the towering floodlights.

And we lost. Everyone has to lose. They teach you that when you play in bare feet and the coach is someone’s mum.

And when we got back, he was gone. To be replaced. To be thanked, sure enough. These days clubs live by success, they said.

The journos found him; he was quietly heading home.

He didn’t say much, he was still taking stock. “You fellas have a home to go to”, he said. “That’s more important than this.”

The season started, and he wasn’t anywhere, had no team. He’d always been in such demand, he’d been somewhere or somewhere new every year for so long, and lots to do.

‘I got to live the life, what a life’, he said. “Who gets that? The taxi driver, the man sitting next to you on the train?”

“But I was absent. I was always at the club. Now, I get to be home. Not absent. What a life. There’s always a silver lining.”

Calm

I woke up in the early hours of a morning recently. I never do that. There was that time at first when I wondered if there had been a sound which had woken me, and I lay still listening for it again.

Nothing.

I remembered a house which was much bigger than ours, that I loved visiting. We went sometimes, not very often but enough that I knew the people there, the Boltons, were an important part of my parent’s life.

Mr Bolton was a builder, and had done well. I don’t think he had built that house, but it was brand new and huge, to me, so many rooms, a huge lounge room looking out towards the sea. Their road was one long slope, with the house at the top corner and it seemed as if you could just start running downhill and eventually you would just run into the waves.

I was mad keen on rugby then and the All Blacks were overseas. I was mad keen on sport full stop and so much of it happened on the other side of the world.

My dad had been good at sport and I just assumed he was still as madly in love with sport as I was.

I remember shaking him awake for the FA Cup final when Arsenal beat Manchester United in 1979, I was so proud that I had managed to wake up in time, I think it was probably 2am ish. I sat in the lounge for a while as the teams got ready. I kept thinking dad would come through the lounge room door any minute, worried he’d missed some of the match.

Getting on for kick off I went and gave him a shake. I went back to the lounge and the game began, and a few minutes later I went and gave him another good shake because he really wouldn’t want to miss any more than he already had. I think he came out at half time looking like he wished football had never been invented, and headed for bed long before United managed to drag themselves back to two all and then throw it all away in the last minute.

It was later that year when we stayed at the Bolton’s place, and the All Blacks were due to play England at Twickenham.

I didn’t have a watch back then, or an alarm clock. I had some inbuilt clock though; I could always wake up just before any match was about to start at Wembley, or Murrayfield, or Cardiff Arms Park. We kids would have gone to bed ‘late’ and the adults almost always played on at cards as we were sent off to brush our teeth and get snuggled down.

I remember the house being cold, completely silent, with that moonlight emptiness. I found the kitchen and the big clock on the wall said something like ten minutes to three am. I went into the lounge thinking dad and Mr Bolton would be there, waiting on kick off, as excited as I was. Nothing. I waited for a while and I think eventually could hear my dad snoring from one of the other rooms. I was too timid back then to turn on someone else’s tv.

I haven’t thought of Mr Bolton in years, haven’t seen him in many more.

I sent my lockdown message to my mum in New Zealand the next day. Just the usual something and nothing. She replied quickly as she often does with it getting dark over there. She had her bits of news about the garden and the neighbours.

And that Mr Bolton had died overnight.

He was nothing like my dad.

Somehow that showed me that there were things to my dad that I didn’t know or understand back then.

He had been dad’s best man. The photos looked like exactly the same man only more dapper than I ever saw him, because we really only saw the Boltons at the beach over Christmas.

Those were halcyon times for me, he had a section at Pauanui with nothing on it other than a little shed with a toilet and a washing machine. The Bolton’s had their caravan and we would go further down the section, towards the paddocks at the back, and set up in the camper-matic mum and dad had. We had our own outside toilet tent one year, very Out of Africa.

Sometimes a time and place are remembered as nothing much more than the first feeling they give you, for me anyway. Those years, I think there were three different summers, I feel as calm, peace. My dad was a different man when he was with Dennis. My mum loved Dennis because of that as much as for anything else.

I stayed with my parents a few years ago, for a month. I flew there from Australia, taking a break from being a firefighter. I knew I wasn’t really taking a break even then, that I was never really going to be able to go back to doing that work.

I had fallen down a big hole pretty quickly, I couldn’t cope with any more car wrecks. To some degree I’d spoken to my mum about that, and we had agreed time in the quiet of small-town New Zealand, with a beach just up over the dunes, might be the best thing just then.

It was okay. I love my parents for many things, but I think they found it difficult to cope with me wanting to talk about the reality of what I was feeling.

I only mention that because while I was there, they got a call from Mrs Bolton. Crazily enough her name was Glennys. Dennis and Glennys.

Dennis had been admitted to a nursing home near to where they lived. He had some quite severe signs of dementia, I think.

He had been struggling with a few things for a while. Gambling had become a bit of a problem, and drinking.

I remember asking mum when they would go up and see him. She said something like, ‘well you know, it’s hard to work out when would be best’.

I thought right then would be best.

Dad said something like ‘you don’t want to interfere’.

I thought no matter what Dennis would want to see you. Even if he didn’t remember anyone else, I think he would have found some connection to the past when he saw my dad’s face, a connection to something good.

I had a friend in Australia who every week got in the car and came to see me, miles and miles away. And every time he arrived, I remembered that I was worth the trip.

I wished my dad had done that for Dennis Bolton.

I remember you Mr Bolton, and for me you mean peace, calm.

Operation Overdue

I can remember watching TV with my brother when Angela D’Audney came onto the screen, interrupting Chips or whatever we would have been watching in the early evening of November 1979.

Dad was often on his way home from work in the evening, in those days; my brother was very trustworthy and I am sure I am right remembering that we were alone. It was after 7pm when the news of the loss of the Air New Zealand aircraft on Mount Erebus was released to the press.

Rogue Productions from New Zealand made a documentary about the police officers who were sent to Antarctica to deal with the aftermath, they named it ‘Operation Overdue’ and it is a superb testament to the men who went and did work which had to be done, but which changed them forever.

The documentary is shot in large part with the men simply speaking to camera, and to a man, when they begin to speak you can see how the things they attempt to describe are right there in front of them, as real for them now as they were in 1979.

Some of their words were hauntingly simple.

‘I packed some jerseys, some warm jerseys I had, and said goodbye to my kids’.

Woollen jerseys, every kiwi had a few of these in the wardrobe for the cold and wet of a long winter. These days the operation would be outfitted with the very latest gear made from fabrics with unpronounceable names created in Scandinavian think tanks. Back then he thought he had better keep warm the only way he had ever known, jerseys that he would have worn on the farm helping an uncle dock sheep, or put on when the sun started to slide behind the dunes at the beach after a family Sunday out.

And said goodbye to the kids. ‘See you kids, look after your mum’. All those amazing men struggled with their words, held themselves together for a moment before they began each of the sentences they spoke into the camera. That is the ‘service’ part of such work, giving up something of yourself even though you don’t really know what will be left for afterwards, for the kids.

‘The jet would have dwarfed the terminal, now all that remained was a cigarette smudge on the side of that stark white mountain’.

New Zealand is a long way from anywhere in itself, tiny in the vast Pacific. I remember going to Auckland airport as a schoolkid, raising money and flying up there from Hamilton just to the south, and how big the place seemed, how enormous the planes which could actually make it to Europe and America and all those places on the other side of the world had to be. For the DC-10 to be a cigarette smudge lost in a sea of unending whiteness gave you some idea of just how big Antarctica is, how unending and silent.

‘We built a snow toilet and found some perfume from the aircraft. Very effective.’

The nuts and bolts of life never change. They needed a toilet and it needed to be right there, so the work could continue.

And the myriad of pieces which had been the aircraft just before it crashed were strewn around them, including the duty-free perfume and aftershave the passengers might have been beginning to think of buying as the flight neared its half-way point.

The incongruousness of the perfume somehow emphasises the horror, taking things which make sense in one orderly world, and throwing them to the freezing emptiness of another.

‘Bodies were frozen solid. Whatever grotesque shape they landed in, that’s how they froze.’ 

I remember some of the reporting after the crash telling us how people had still been standing, looking out the windows. The plane had a lot of its seats removed, so that passengers could do exactly that. And there was no warning, the plane went straight into the mountain.

‘Our gloves became full of grease, human grease. Because the bodies were burned. We ate wearing the same gloves.’

More than any of the other comments this one gives a sense of how those men were never going to be the same people. They were immersed in the work, and the site of the crash. It imbued them in the way that the grease imbued their gloves.

‘Sea birds, they never shut up. They squawked the whole time, circling the site. They tormented me.’

Coping mechanisms. Those men were filthy, exhausted and each day got up and found more bodies and pieces of bodies. 

And the thing he remembered tormenting him were the sea birds, squawking overhead. Not the sheer, relentless hell of what he touched and smelled and saw. 

Was it the noise, the constant noise? Or the intrusiveness, and lack of respect of those birds looking down constantly? 

They were all so hell-bent on finding everyone, giving everyone the dignity of being returned home, at least. 

For me, he took all the anger and desperation and rolled it into the sound of those birds.

‘Of course, you always remember the last one. She was perfectly preserved.’

So many things making up such a simple sentence. 

Grief he could finally feel.Working knowing there were many more bodies to be found he could simply close off one task and move to the next. The last one, then you can think about what it is you have actually done. 

Shame, at the feeling of relief that he must have felt knowing there were no more. 

Relief, they would finally go home. 

Fear, who would he be, home? 

He would be able to describe her down to the finest detail, still.

‘We found champagne from the galley, intact. We drank it with our backs to the site, utterly spent.’

That same sense of unreality, the enormity of what had happened and what had followed transforming the world so that filthy men with grease covered gloves sit in the middle of Antarctica drinking French Champagne.

‘Each of those families who lost someone grieved for that person. I grieved for the whole lot.’

What can you possibly say? Imagine the weight of that grief, you can’t begin.

‘We didn’t have a debrief when we got back to New Zealand, and it seemed we just faded away.’

I love being a New Zealander, there are so many pieces of what makes a person a kiwi which are things to be proud of. The ability to deal with grief, to allow emotion and fear, desperation and desolation full voice, is not one of them. 

Stoicism is a curse which ran its strong hand the length of that country then and still does. 

They were men who should have been icons. And should have been allowed to fall to pieces in front of the country, and put back together with support and understanding.

I can imagine the quiet fear that would have greeted them instead, fear they would ever want to acknowledge and voice such grief.

‘Smells remind me, the ferry terminal. I smell diesel and I’m back there.’

I imagine the man who hated the seabirds having a wonderful day out, probably with grand-kids these days, and a seagull trying to bully its way to the front of the queue when his grandson is tossing away the last of his chips. And that man is back there on the mountain, just like that.

‘There are triggers. Hands. Older ladies as I pass them on the street. I look at their rings, and their painted fingernails, and I am back on the mountain’.

It might be the face of the last woman that he remembers, but they are all there with him, sometimes.

M'Aider

My wife asked me about may day yesterday, what it meant.

The international distress signal. Not the day of celebration around the world. 

I don’t know much about the ancient celebration. I do have a very vivid and personal memory of the meaning of the distress signal though.

May day.

I was sitting in one of the lecture rooms atop North Head with Auckland harbour spread out beneath the tall timber windows, the tide and the sun seeping away as the day wound down to the time the Navy bus would come up the circular road, pick us up and deliver us back to Tamaki base.

We were hopeless when we weren’t half asleep, according to the ‘Leaders’, the trainers who taught us how to be Navy communicators.

We were half asleep.

Leader had asked something about may day. The distress signal.

He got nothing in return.

He said something like ‘come on, think, it’s got something to do with the French’.

Waenga said, ‘did the French make it up?’

Leader said, ‘get out there idiot, and run around the hill.

Waenga ran round the hill. We sat stony silent, waiting his return.

He got back, puffed. Sat down. Said, ‘beau speaks French’.

They called me beau because it was half my surname and we were all just surnames.

Leader said, ‘oh yeah?’ What does it mean then, beau, may day?

I looked at him, looked at Waenga, I didn’t have a freaking clue what may day meant, despite my two years of high school French.

‘Well, mais, that’s but. And dais, that’s of the.’ I sat for a while in the silence.

‘So you reckon it’s but, of the, beau. That’s what you’re telling me. But, of the. Leader leaned forward on the little lecturn his enormous frame threatened to swallow every day.

Get out there idiot, run round the hill. And you put a rubbish bin on your head, and shout ‘But, of the’ as you go around. Mr, but, of the.

So I ran round in the beauty of that sun setting over North Head on a late Friday afternoon, just inside the high chain link fence, with all the north side dog walkers on the other side watching a body with a bin for a head shout ‘But, of the’.

Got back. Sat down. Silence.

M’aider. Help me. Leader wrote in big, deliberate letters across the blackboard.

Touring Lions

My mum’s dad was a hell of a rugby player. 

He played for Waikato in New Zealand in the 1920’s and 30’s and gained his blazer for number of appearances, no mean feat back then when games were few and far between. The badge from the jacket sat in a frame on top of the upright desk in his office, at home on the farm.

There was a little open sitting room next to the dining room, with armchairs and a small alcove where mum remembered her dad having his papers and bills, chequebook and what not. 

The walls of the room were lined with framed photographs of the teams he had been part of as a player, and then as a selector after he retired. 

I would marvel at the pictures whenever I visited, the men so big and powerful, and my grandad always somewhere near the middle of the middle row where the biggest of them all stood. 

I remember the ones where he would be in his suit and hat, somewhere off to the side, as the selector. He was there in one for the team which had played the British Lions, in 1959.

The Lions toured New Zealand again in 1977, it was the first time I had really payed attention to sport although I do remember being amazed by Henry Rono when dad let my brother and I watch a little bit of the Olympics coverage in 1976. 

Rono won some of the middle-distance running events at the Montreal games and I vaguely remember going to bed and falling asleep dreaming of running that fast.

The ’77 Lions were a decent team, they beat the hell out of almost all the provincial teams they met in between the four test matches, those were the days of tours which went on for months and I think they played something like thirty matches in all. 

I had a rugby ball dad had got me from his work, and I used to run around the park at the back of our house re-creating the matches move for move, always getting the final scores exactly right as the Lions beat Marlborough, Wanganui, Poverty Bay, on and on.

There was an old gentleman who owned the big sprawling place next to ours and backing onto the same park, he would potter about in the huge gardens he kept, weeding, pruning while I ran about. Hamilton got a lot of rain, and he had dug a shallow moat all the way along the outside edge of the fence at his boundary and I loved him for it because that seemed to mark the edge of the grand football fields I imagined myself running across. 

I kicked goals over the gate in our back fence, and I had to kick a lot of them because Phil Bennett and Andy Irvine were smashing them over from everywhere for the Lions. My feet would be red raw by the time I finished. 

The old boy told mum he had no idea how I hadn’t smashed the windows in the outside room just over the fence, but every time the ball somehow bounced off the window sill or the bricks of the wall, and I’d retrieve it and kick off again.

I only remember watching one game of rugby with my grandad, at the farm. I think it would have been the next year, 1978, not long before he grew ill and passed away. 

Grandad didn’t like the commentator, Keith Quinn, and we watched with the sound turned down and the radio on. Quinn was rubbish.

I have a feeling the match was a test between New Zealand and Australia. 

I loved the All Blacks winger, Bryan Williams, but he wasn’t having the best of matches. He dropped a pass or a high ball and Grandad said something like ‘that’s not good enough Williams’, and I was so torn between these two men I absolutely idolised.

Afterwards I remember Grandad letting me stand on one of the armchairs in the sitting room so I could see his rugby photos properly, and him describing some of the games, and pointing out certain men. 

He had played a game for North Island vs South Island in 1930. He pointed to George Nepia, and Herb Lilburne. Bert Cooke was sitting in the front row. 

Grandad said to me something like ‘those were some players’, and I had no idea who any of them were. 

He told me Bert Cooke wasn’t a very nice bloke. Cooke is seen as one of the very best All Blacks of all time. Lots of those men had been part of the Invincibles, who went to the UK in 1924 and came back undefeated.

The last time I saw Grandad, not too long after that, I knew he was going to die.

He’d always taught me that men stand up to shake hands. He was in hospital for chemotherapy, the same hospital my mum spent so much of her working life in. 

He was in bed, in his pyjamas and I had no idea what to say. I held out my hand, and he rolled very slowly onto his side and shook it, and I knew how very sick he must be.

He was 72 when he died.

Falling

I grew up in the New Zealand countryside, in a place by the name of Waitawheta. It doesn’t really count as growing up, just the very beginning, because we moved to the ‘city’ before I turned three.

Some people tell me they have strong memories of being young, things that they describe in vivid detail as if they see them in bright colours and solid lines.

I have two things which come to me now and then from those years and neither is very specific or defined.

One is a nightmare I had of a huge bird, something like a chicken with the face of an owl, attacking me in bed at night.

The other is of sitting on the fence at the top of the race leading away towards the cowshed, up on top of the big round strainer post. I looked up into the sun until it began to pulse and come closer, and I fell off.

I took mum and dad back to that farm recently, it is not far from where they live now. We stood in the same gateway with the rough gravel of the race still stretching away across the paddock even though the cowshed has gone.

We looked across the narrow road to the house we had lived in then, still largely as it had been, light coloured brick, iron roof, citrus trees on the front lawn.

I told mum about the memory of the nightmare. She looked bereft and held my hand, really held on as she does, running her hand over yours and back again, as if she can draw the pain down to your fingertips and away into the air, into her hands instead.

She remembered struggling to get my brother to sleep as a baby and a young boy, and when I came along two and half years later and sleep was easy it was such a relief.

They were sharemilkers, and didn’t have a lot of money. There was a tall single bed in the room I went to when I was too old for the basinet, so tall I couldn’t get in and out myself. It didn’t seem to matter when I slept so easily and so they would just put me down there each night, and I’d be there when dad got up to go to the cowshed, and mum sorted out breakfast soon afterwards.

She remembered me crying out that night, so unexpectedly, talking through sobs about a huge bird. I could feel in her hands how she had stored that hurt somewhere, never forgotten, how much she never stopped being my mum when she could still feel guilt about such a thing forty years later.

The memory of falling off fence sums up my parents for me. Mum would have had to help me to get up there in the first place and she would have known exactly what she was doing leaving me there as she slowly headed off towards the cowshed with my brother yakking his head off at her heels. The ground was always soft there, turned over by the cows as they milled around in the gateway dreaming of whatever cows dream of. I don’t really remember hitting the ground, but I know that she would have been there in an instant, patting the dust off my corduroy pants and saying ‘you’re alright, aren’t you?’. It is such a hard thing to let go, she always found a way to do it just enough, so that when you came up out of that long grass you were just that little bit different, just that little bit more ready.

Stable

My mum was a nurse for all of her working life, loved it.

Well, there was an enforced break when she married. She has a very formal letter congratulating her on becoming engaged to be married, thanking her for the service she had provided. And wishing her well in her new life, of not working, because now she should go away and be a good wife.

I had never even thought of such things, I knew that my parents had been together on the farm when my brother came along, followed by me a few years later. I had always thought that was just a choice they had made, that dad was the sharemilker and mum was my mum because it was a full-time thing being a mother and also helping him with all the tasks that make up farming life.

She eventually went back to work when we moved to the big smoke of Hamilton, New Zealand and it made a huge difference to our lives in lots of ways, good and bad. I remember, I think, that for a long time Thursday was mum’s week day off and she would take us to the huge local shopping centre when we got home from school, and we could often choose something small to take home and have amongst our things in the bedroom my brother and I shared.

A wooden mouse with a leather tail is one trinket I remember taking pride of place on the little shelf above my bed. Next to it was a huge white rabbit’s tail my friend Andrew Irvin gave me out of the blue one day at school. I was always a bit conflicted by that because I absolutely loved Watership Down, it was one of the first adult books I ever tried to read (unsuccessfully) and the movie with Art Garfunkel singing the title song was my favourite bar none in about 1977 or 8.

Growing into adulthood I began to collect first edition books. I found a hard cover of Watership Down at a fair in a community hall in the northern suburbs of Sydney, it wasn’t in very good condition but it had the beautiful, slightly sad, cover I remembered my paperback edition having. When I looked online all the copies for sale mentioned how they hadn’t aged very well, that the paper discoloured a great deal and the covers faded badly, as if it had been a bad year for bookbinding. It’s in amongst my most treasured still.

Thursday nights we would have a dinner mum could take some time over and often it was a roast chicken with tons of potatoes, followed by apple crumble. I think that would still be my death row meal.

Mum used to be very honest with us as we sat around the dining table, looking back I think that it was part of her coping, her therapy for the work she did. Sometimes I think Dad was pulling a bit of a face wondering if she should be quite so honest when we were maybe 11 and 8, but he has always trusted her implicitly with everything else so I guess he just carried on eating his chops and cabbage.

She spoke about how amazing she thought blood was, how it could take all the things we eat and drink and breath and turn them into energy.

Very early on I remember her telling me about how men sometimes loved men, and women loved women, and it was in their blood and asking them to change would be like asking them to drain the blood out of their body.

She told me about comas. Mum’s weakness was The Young and the Restless, she would often sit down and eat her lunch watching. In the holidays she would let us watch sometimes. I loved that characters had names like Snapper. There was always someone in a coma.

Mum told me how a coma was not a nice nap, how difficult a decision it was for doctors to place someone into an induced coma, knowing what came on the other side.

She worked in recovery often, most of the time back then I think. Many of the people she nursed didn’t survive, and she would tell us about the end and being there, with the people conscious sometimes and not others.

She would know what it was she was going back to, on the next shift the next evening. Patients would have been described as ‘stable’. She told me that wasn’t a very good word, that it was a long way from stable to good.

Now that I think about it, she must have so often driven back to work steeling herself to the news that the person she had nursed the night before as they came out of surgery was not going to be there, hadn’t moved on to the wards, had passed away. I was a firefighter for a lot of my working life and often thought how lucky I was that my work came in short bursts, you were never going to see the same people again. You could pretend that everything had turned out fine, if that was what you needed.

I thought of her when I first heard of Boris Johnson going into hospital, I hoped they would describe him as better than stable. And how most people would have heard the news, and the word stable, and thought, well that’s alright then. She would have read that word in the New Zealand Herald, and thought of the nurses in his ward.