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.

How do you ever get big?

Drowsy, late afternoon sun. The seed heads of the long grass baked, so they rattled, castanet like, catching a slow breeze which came in bursts from the gravel road and skittered away across the broad waterhole.

Grandad was eight feet tall, at least. 

He jogged down the hill and went straight in, the ink black water a steeple behind his dive. 

I could see him diving for the try-line with huge crowds of men in hats jumping to their feet from wooden benches, roaring approval, icon of the Waikato. I always saw him in sepia.

The swoosh of her shooting stick parting the grass announced Grandma. 

She sat just behind us, making the most of the slow-moving shade.  “You should swim out to meet him”. 

She was looking over my head so the words seemed to push me gently out towards grandad. He had turned to face us, just his head above the water, silent.

Standing at last I ran to the water, threw my arms out and disappeared in a whimper of a splash. Instantly frozen, I sank.

The hands were huge, rock-hard, gentle and warm all at once. I was up on his shoulders before I ever thought to take a breath.

--

Grandad’s ancient tractor roared with the effort of the last long rise to the home paddock. 

The growling rose through my tiny gumboots and if it hadn’t been for his huge legs locking me in place would surely have shaken me to tiny pieces.

The sun was already just a ribbon running along the ranges as cloud bore down, laden with heavy rain coming soon.

How could you ever be big enough for such a world?

--

I was on the couch in the sun-porch when the rain came. 

I had my favourite book, with the tractor with the happy face and lots of quiet friends. I closed it, put it behind the cushion, wondering suddenly what grandad would ever make of such a thing.

The warmth and sweetness crept down the hallway from the kitchen and filled the room, and I was instantly hungry, praying that Grandma would call my name.

Grandad came through the doorway. 

He was wearing an apron, and he bent down, proffering the small tray he held in one hand. I Ioved lemon cake more than anything in the world.

He pointed to the biggest piece, I looked at him and he nodded. 

His smile said I had earned it, and I gobbled it down so fast I barely needed the side plate he balanced on my knees.

When we had washed up, he and I, he spread his paper across the huge kitchen table, and placed some paper to one side. 

“Come and do me a painting, I love your paintings. You’re clever with all those colours, pigments and shades, how do you do that? I can’t paint for peanuts.”

I began, and the tractor took slow shape. The tractor I couldn’t wait for in the early morning.