Silence

 

I was rummaging for a beanie I’d packed thinking kiwis know a cold winter. Black ice had stopped the trains to make a liar of me.

The panel windows of the French doors held the frost at their edges, and the postage stamp backyard beyond was so quiet I stepped lightly as if not wanting to disturb.

Tall shrubs had hunkered down against the slatted fences, they hung so heavily that drained of all colour their branches seemed to disappear into the dusted lawn.

A flash of red crossed the space, and back again, flitted side to side so that the smallest of avalanches fell from the tallest hawthorn.

It was all those Christmas cards strung across the mantelpiece every year at home in one and I rushed about searching out the big camera used yesterday for shots of Big Ben and red phone boxes, in a time when you hoped the shot counter didn’t show you needed more film.

He was gone when I pushed the doors open and stepped out. The few hardy sparrows too.

I threw my head back and blew hard so that my disappointment streamed out to the colourless sky.

An eeriness made me think the neighbour’s cat might have been lurking somewhere near, drawn by the movement.

A gentle shadow ran away across the terrace roofs, a Pied Piper seeming to take the very last of the sound of the morning with it, and at last Concorde ghosted past, engines off. 

Camouflage

 

Parsley. Mum gets me to pick some when we have scrambled eggs for a Saturday treat.

With my cheek against the turned soil, the splayed fronds are huge and camouflage the Christmas soldiers, crouched behind the sods dad turned and watered last night. They advance towards the safety of tomato plants lined out towards the fence. Sometimes all hell breaks loose when the cat springs a surprise attack like Godzilla in a horror movie, but today it’s quiet.

Mrs Johnson’s vacuuming over the fence. She’s nice, never minds when I get my ball back. She and mum are friends and have a sneaky cigarette together sometimes, (don’t tell dad), and she goes home carefully cradling some tomatoes.

She hasn’t been over for a while and the tomatoes are always ready all at once. Mum puts some in a little wicker basket for me to take over. I knock and wait but she must be busy. I put the basked carefully next to the front step and run back to make sure the cat hasn’t been up to no good.

A lawn mower starts, and I see Mr Johnson moving back and forth through the gap where the middle slat of the fence has slipped a little. I’m glad he didn’t see me, sometimes I hear his voice. I don’t like loud voices; dad isn’t even that loud when the All Blacks score.

The soldiers are dug in now, they aim the cannon at the gap in the fence.

Awa

 

Masses of dark ringleted hair waving from the open window of the station wagon crawling away along Fairfield Road after school, trailing back to catch in the rusty roof racks, a final, slow farewell.

The same wagon where I found him, fast asleep stretched along the back seat, one Saturday morning when our school boy cricket was about to start. ‘Too many cousins in there’. Said it tossing his head toward the two-storey state house, tossing that hair. Took five wickets and hit a six.

He played hooker, me, lock, in high school rugby. Huge opponents would tear at me in every ruck, until voluptuous hair would cover me, shield me, blanket me, safe.

Hot summer, heat sat down in that town, refused to leave. He was at the river, the mighty Wai, jumping off the pier with the big boys. The strong flow caught the weed, reefed at it so that huge swathes of darkness rose and fell, rose and fell. His hair mimicking the swirl as he rose, gasping up into the sun. The small boy jumped, and didn’t rise, and he followed, down, down, down so long. Told me so much later of the hands, pulling, pulling so his hair was gone in clumps, pulling so he could feel each last, lost word.

Years later, a late-night petrol stop, passing through. Same smile, languid smile, behind the counter. Shaven head shining. ‘He was there, in the hair. Now, just the Awa, Awa, safe’.

Trestle tables

 

My kids were young when I separated from their mum.

 

I didn’t go very far away. That’s what adults would have said, ‘it’s only round the corner, they’ll hardly notice.’

It was a nice new townhouse with two bedrooms. They were still young enough to share a bedroom and it would be a few years before I had to think about the fact that they needed their own spaces. They were with me lots of the time because of my work, four days on, four off. I made the place as welcoming as I could as I moved in, a new bed each and their books and toys between the beds in their room.

I had a sofa a friend gave me, and a small table the tele could sit on for now.

I picked them up from school and we went and rode the bikes at the local park, just as we often did before. We got something each from the bakery on the way past towards the new home.

I had some bits and pieces in the kitchen and we had a drink and the pink buns or whatever we had chosen sitting on the couch.

After dinner and showers, they were on the couch watching Simpsons, and I sat down at the trestle table to do some of the paper work you always do with changing addresses. My daughter was always drawing. I would buy a pad of printer paper and she, and he, would go through it in a week. She had a big cook book on her lap on the couch and was doodling away while I filled in forms.

The next day I dropped them back to their mums after school, before I went to work for the night. I went back home to get a few things for the shift.

There was a picture sitting on my trestle dining table, placed neatly at the end where my folding chair was. It had a couple of highlighters on top to make sure it didn’t blow away with the open window behind.

It was a picture of me. Just me, sitting at a long table on my own with a pen in my hand and papers on the table. Nothing else. Except there was a little framed picture on the wall, just behind my head. There had been one picture hook in the wall when I moved in, you never know about such things with renting. I had taken a picture of the two of them at the park the week before, on their bikes, and had it printed with a few others. I had a frame or two in my things when I moved in, and put the picture up once I had moved the few pieces of furniture in.

I looked up at that little picture then with my dinner and a change of clothes in my hands. They were smiling, really smiling the way kids can. I looked at her simple picture, there hadn’t really been room for more than stick figures in the picture with the scale. Both stick kids had massive smiles on their faces, arcing around to touch the start of their ears.

I had a big smile on my face in the picture, I don’t think I would have smiled once filling out dreary forms. I was looking straight ahead to where the couch would have been if the picture was a little wider, to where I would have met their eyes.

When I first saw that figure at the long, long table it was as if my heart had been torn away.

I looked at those smiles, and she had put it back again.

Foothills

 

 

 

We carried day packs with nothing more than a change of clothes, toothbrushes, and a ton of water. Up into the foothills above Pokhara.

Nepalese women cooed quietly at our heels, passed by smiling; huge loads of wood and canned goods held tightly against their backs. A tiny tot would peek around mum's waist and watch your laborious steps as she drew inexorably away.

Late afternoon coming into the summit village the light was languid honey with monsoon clouds hovering.

Shower? The answer passed slowly back along a line of teenagers crowding the guesthouse doorway.

Three stone walls no taller than my head, no roof, it clung to the valley wall at the back door. A plastic bucket floated half submerged in a 44-gallon drum.

Stripped to battered shorts I threw a first bucket over my head, and buckled in half at the cold. As I scooped a refill the lights went out, cloud suddenly so low and dark it seeped in at the open window in the outer wall. Lightning sheeted the valley, on and off, over and over, showing snapshots of the sudden waterfalls running white streamers down the bare hills and away to Pokhara.

The thunder would roar even before the lightning was done, so loud it would answer itself up and down the valley and hide the giggles of the children peeking around the corner at the skinny man with his head thrown back to the rain, no need for the bucket anymore.

Slow

 

For a while when I was young I was in awe of runners, especially those who ran over the middle distances. Part of the fascination was that New Zealand was good at running middle distance, always had been. We had the Olympic champion at 1500m in 1976 in John Walker, always a good chance for a bad pun. He followed Peter Snell and Jack Lovelock and others.

Part of the fascination like any other was that I wasn't very good at running. I was okay, but just when I thought maybe I was going well in the school sports the real runners would float by and my legs would turn to stone. 

I recognised running as a necessary evil for the football and cricket and tennis I longed to be good at, and in the last year at primary school I'd pounded pavements for months getting ready for the cross country at the end of the year. I was going well for the first half of the course and more, and I could see the perennial winner maybe 50m ahead, with the last few hundred metres to come. 

Things were pretty agricultural back then, we would have all been in bare feet. To finish the course we had to run along the school boundary and the turn sharp left at the last of a long line of trees shading the playing fields, and sprint home between the parents strung out the length of the 100m track recently marked on the grass. I sprinted as hard as I could to that last tree, and could have almost reached out and grabbed the tail of his flying t-shirt as we reached it. He turned left and accelerated so fast I think he beat me by the whole 100m.

I read that John Walker had the 'perfect' heart rate, barely reaching 30 beats a minute at rest. He trained by running over 100 miles a week. Some said he was mad, as if he was following a regime that would end in ruin with his legs flying off at the Montreal games. 100 miles blew my mind. In New Zealand it didn't really matter where you lived, if you ran 100 miles in a straight line you'd be 50 miles off the coast by the time you finished.

Later on in my life it turned out I had a pretty slow heart rate too, just some natural quirk. I only really found out because I had to have some surgery on my inner ear, and the surgeon talked me through the recovery process before the surgery began. He talked about the pain, the huge wad of padding and silly looking mummy like bandages I would have to put up with for a couple of nights. No real hardship. The only point he stressed was that I wasn't to sit up, I had to minimise movement that first night. He wrote all that on the charts they hang on the end of your bed. 

I think nurses have a natural tendency to want to touch their patients, get up close enough to see them face to face. And I have a memory of a woman taking my arm as I was just moving towards coming to, and next thing I was sitting bolt upright and there was quite a lot of noise and light and people coming into the room. I think my heart rate had been something like 26 and it scared the bejeesus out of her. 

Luckily the surgeon was still about. He came down and put everyone's mind at ease. He stood there looking down at me for a while, told me not to worry. I went back to sleep and woke up much later needing the toilet. The nurse came down and said that was fine, the surgeon had said I could walk that distance by then. I got up and went into the small bathroom, and saw myself in the mirror. 

He'd written 'DON'T PANIC, REALLY SLOW HEART'  on two post it notes and sellotaped them to the bandages across my forehead. I went back to bed and sat up watching a bit of TV, and I swear a couple of kids walked past the big open doors transfixed by the mummy with operating instructions.

I really admired John Walker for having such dedication to get to that level which made him an Olympic champion. Even he, though, saw himself as very much a normal man with a huge work ethic.

I read about Jack Lovelock, the kiwi who won the same event at the '36 Olympics. He was seen as having run the perfect race, and won effortlessly it seemed. His heart rate was taken after the race and had returned to his usual resting rate, as if nothing extraordinary had taken place. He would have been an exemplar to those who wanted to make those games about comparisons of strength and speed and skill. Only Lovelock was studious, almost obtuse and his win, to him, seemed to have nothing to do with asserting dominance over others. It was just something he could naturally do, perfectly.

I always wanted to believe Maradona was a better footballer than Pele, for some strange version of the same reason I had come up with in my head. I believed Pele had worked and worked and perfected his art, and Maradona simply walked onto the pitch and it was something he could do beyond the ability of anyone else, anytime, at the drop of a hat.

I liked the English footballer Paul Gascoigne for much the same reason. It was so obvious that he was hell bent on self destruction, and yet he could always walk onto a pitch and in a moment do something that no one else in the world would have even thought of, let alone been capable of. Sometimes it looked as if he had come straight from another unsuccessful rehab, and he might wander about aimlessly for 89 minutes. But he longed to give the people the moment they'd never forget, that would make cold wet nights at Vicarage Road or The Den something you would tell your kids about. And he did, over and over.

I'm much older now. Maradona is gone. Pele goes into hospital, comes out, goes in. I don't have any allegiances any more. 

In some ways I think one wouldn't exist without the other. Pele and Maradona. Walker and Lovelock. Gascoigne and anyone who makes a hundred covering tackles.

Processes

 

I hadn't been a fireman very long, maybe a couple of years. I had just got my Rescue qualification, and I'd been rostered to drive on a night shift with a Senior Firefighter who had been doing rescue so long I felt as if he didn't even need me along.

It was one of those funny things at the start. We had practiced and practiced so much, cut so many cars to tiny pieces that I knew I could do it. I wanted to do it for real though, just to make really sure. You wouldn't wish one of those wrecks on your worst enemies though, you sort of knew then, and would grow to really know.

Years later my mum would ring me sometimes and after some time ask how my work was going, how my shifts had been. Sometimes I got to say, 'we haven't been doing much at all'. And she would say 'well isn't that good for everyone', and I'd agree, and never feel bad, I wished I never had to do another one by then.

Part of knowing you could do the work was the repetition. I had set up the equipment so many times I knew distances and angles and where to stand, where not to.

Looking back now I can feel how much concentration that took, how my head would be full of all the things I needed to do next. Sometimes as the ambulance drove away other firemen would ask me about the people we had just released to the ambos and I wouldn't really have a clue, that's how feverish the effort was, for me. Just make sure you follow the sequence, keep going and get to the end.

That first night we had a job just like that. It was way up on the escarpment so our light truck got there fast, long before any of the lumbering pumps could catch us. 

The Senior went over to the car, and I began the process, started the generator, ran the lines, connected the tools, put the lights up, stabilised, on and on, ready and away we go. I made all the cuts just the way I should have. The ambos were right there in the car, with any number of lines into the woman driver and you could tell they were thinking, this is good, we'll be gone soon and she'll make it.

I made one more cut, and that was it, she died. There were so many ambos, and so many lines and machines. And in a moment she was gone, something to do with a terrible pressure injury. As we released the last part of twisted metal holding her down.

I couldn't remember anything about her, her hair colour, what she was wearing, nothing. That's how much of my thinking was taken up in the process of getting to that point. And it never bothered me that job.

Years later I did all those same things on automatic, so I could hear the things the ambos said, the cops, even people standing nearby straining for a view.

That's when everything started to bother me, I knew exactly what those people looked like, every time, I knew what sort of shoes they were wearing, recognised aftershaves and perfumes.

I couldn't fill my head up with details, so when the ambulance drove away I had known those people for twenty minutes, forty five, more. 

I couldn't help but know what was to come, what had come to an end.

Tony

 

I played rugby in Johnsonville with a huge cast of young men struggling to understand themselves and how they were ever going to fit into this world.

Tony was the toughest of them all, not the biggest, but the toughest. I thought he didn't have a care in the world. 

He came with me one Christmas, when I headed back home to see the beach, Waihi Beach, in the Bay of Plenty, to see my mum and dad, and my brother. I thought he just wanted to taste some of the world. He started early every morning, a pastry chef in the big city of Wellington, he was doing well and living at home and he had a Ford Laser sport. I was flatting and dead broke, he picked me up when I finished work, drove out of Wellington, up the coast about as far as Paremata, pulled over, said 'you drive', swapped seats and fell into a snore filled coma. I drove all the way, we stopped when I pulled into one of those huge truck stops along the desert road, and we wolfed down burgers or pies, or something served hot on polystyrene.

He woke up as I slowed into the streets leading to mum and dad's place in Hamilton, dark streets wet with warm summer rain. 'I wanted it to be just you and me', he said. 'Sledge, all those guys, they think we are inseparable, friends for life. And all they do is pick at me, pick, pick, laugh, pick some more. Not you.'

I sent a letter to an address Tony had given me in London. He worked on the formula 1 circuit by then, cooking for the drivers. Eddie Irvine loved his brioche. 6 months or more circuit to circuit and then back to London for the off season, drinking, fighting, going broke. He never replied.

I flew in in the early morning, had a minor disagreement with customs when they realised I was another free loader Kiwi claiming grandparent entry because my grandma lived in Glasgow for about a year from birth.

Walked out into the terminal looking for a taxi rank, and there was Tony.

A couple of years later they tried to kick Tony out of the UK as on overstayer on a tourist visa. We went out to Ireland because his mum had always talked about her mum being born near Dublin. We went into a village and had a pint, and the barman said, 'Hoare, that's your surname. Ah, there's a lot of them about round here, Hoares. You should see the priest. We wandered down to the church and had a cup of tea with the vicar, and he wrote a letter on letterhead saying Tony was probably the great great grandson of someone. We took it back to London and bobs your uncle Tony had grand parent entry.

That first day Tony grabbed my back pack and we walked out of the terminal, and caught the tube towards Swiss Cottage. I was trying to spot the flat I would be dossing at, but the street disappeared into the binding of the tattered London A-Z Tony had.

When we came up to street level at Swiss Cottage the sun was out and it was a beautiful day. We were standing there holding the A-Z at strange angles and a white van stopped in the street in front of us. 'Are you lost Beauchamp?'. It was a bloke I had played soccer with when I was about 13. He was delivering boxes of wine and the streets made sense to him, and he dropped us round the corner.

Air Tajikistan Flight 1 and only

 

I flew to Delhi in May 1995 with Air Tajikistan.

At least I think I did. The more the years pass, the more I wonder. 

1995 in London meant teletext was your internet, accessed through your cathode ray tube tv, I can't remember if you pushed a 'teletext' button or if you just scrolled down the channels until you passed BBC45 and Eurotrash. The text was live, it would bob up at the top of the screen in bold colours with a three digit number at the left edge. The colours meant something, sports headlines were different to entertainment gossip etc etc, and orange (maybe?) meant travel deals. The deals would always have exclamation marks all over the place, as in PARIS!99QUID!7DAYS!

You would enter the numbers, and a text page would open detailing the offer. Usually the PARIS!99QUID! offers meant you had to leave at 3am on a Wednesday from Gatwick, and hang on to the undercarriage.

The flight to Delhi was incredibly cheap, and it left on a Saturday, amazing. 

I was living in Elephant and Castle at the time, a literal stones throw from the Bakerloo line tube, so close the trains parked just over our high back stone wall when the line closed around midnight.

Who knows how I paid, but I did, and I had about three weeks to wait to leave.

The mail used to drop through the front door and sit on the mat until someone got home, I was often later than the others and would look to see if anything had been left on the little hallway table.

This is where we get to the first 'did that really happen' moment. I am pretty sure I had a letter saying I would receive my ticket forthwith, but Friday rolled around and nothing had forthwithed, so I rang Air Tajikistan. They were incredibly sanguine, 'no worries, you don't need the tickets until tomorrow, we'll get them to you'. Friday night I was in the pub on the corner with a line up of pints and no tickets.

I remember getting up on Saturday morning and having a coffee with one of my flatmates, he was very empathetic but his head hurt and he was soon off to bed. And then there was that metallic thwack of the mail slot opening and closing in the front door. It was Saturday. I don't think there was any Saturday mail delivery.

It was my tickets.

I got the long long tube to Heathrow, I think there were something like twenty seven stops.

The plane was enormous, yet slightly dishevelled. It dwarfed the 747's all around it, but it was as if a mammoth had been dropped into the middle of a herd of elephants in the dead of night and the elephants didn't quite know what to make of it.

There weren't many people on the plane. Each middle bank of seats seemed to be a group of about eight, and the few other passengers were dotted along the window seats so I put all the armrests up and went to sleep.

We landed in Dushanbe. I think one person got off, probably the president. I wandered down the aisle to see what Dushanbe looked like. There was a two storey terminal, with Dushanbe written in big simple neon letters along the top, red. I think all the letters were lit, although there was that look about the building that often the sign might have said 'Du...be' or 'ushanb'. I was standing next to a stewardess, and I thought, well, she's seen Dushanbe lots of times, I'm sure she won't mind me sneaking past her to the doorway  to have a better look.

I man stepped forward to meet me at the door, he was young, maybe younger than me, in a classic Soviet era uniform with lots of grey and flashes of red, and a hat with ears folded up. He said 'no photo' and touched the rifle slung across his chest. I looked at the terminal and thought American intelligence probably had a pretty good idea of what Dushanbe airport looked like, but I nodded and stepped back inside.

Delhi air control seemed to think Air Tajikistan flight one and only looked alright and we pulled up to the terminal. Of course soon after I was reading an English language paper which detailed how and an Air India flight had caught fire because a man didn't like the look of the inflight snacks and lit a gas ring in the toilets. Passengers rang the bell and pointed out smoke was billowing out of the locked cubicle but air crew told them that was absolutely normal. The plane landed with the tail fully alight and taxied in to park next to the refuelling trucks.

I think that Soviet era behemoth must have expired shortly after, because when it came time to fly back to London a few months later we were sheperded onto a 737. We had lots of stops on the way back, one in Latvia, I remember flying in decreasing circles over the unending forests stretching out from the runways, with a little white truck trundling unhurriedly along one of the straight, empty roads between the trees. It refuelled us, eventually, and we carried on.

We stopped somewhere I can't now remember and swapped planes, we just walked along the tarmac behind the pilots and they picked what looked like exactly the same plane out of a long line of 737's. Maybe it had a full tank.

When we eventually got back to Heathrow it was dark. And I swear we must have looked like the Air India plane with the tail on fire, because we touched down, and then as we began to taxi there was one of those funny moments where you lean the wrong way, thinking you are turning right and the pilot turns left so that you baulk and catch yourself. We turned away from the lights of the terminal, and seemed to taxi forever, until we finally came to a halt somewhere out the back of long term parking, and caught the shuttle back.

Water Hole

 

We had been in the national park for most of a fortnight, somewhere between Thames and the coastline. We jog trotted the single tracks all day numbering off from one to seventeen over and over so as to know no one had been left behind. The PTI's, the physical training instructors, would come and go amongst us, encouraging, admonishing, gesticulating, constantly pushing us on in a straight line which probably doubled back on the line we had followed the day before.

I was at the front, I spent most of the time up there as platoon leader. The voices were trailing away back to number seventeen again, some guys took the time to put on a silly voice, most just got it over and done with.

The PTI was suddenly there in front of me, coming fast back along the track so that I stepped short for a moment. He came right up and then eased by, passing along down the line with the thick bush straining against his thick legs, all the time he was saying 'just keep going, just keep going...'.

I ran on, called 'one', and the voices came again in their slowly weakening train.

Maybe a couple of hundred metres on the path opened slightly, the ground under our feet carpeted in spindly grass which caught the sunlight as the canopy above opened. I was running straight up to a rocky edge, with a view of the river stretching out below. I must have hesitated for a moment and he was there at my shoulder, the PTI moving fast so that he came past me, looked back and said 'just keep going' as he opened his arm out towards the space beyond the edge.

I just kept going. We were wearing boots and carrying heavy backpacks. I remember hitting the water because it was the first time I had ever gone under and not started to rise, so that I had to really kick my legs to begin up towards the light. I came and saw him up there, his big hand on the chest of number two, holding back the train. He waved his arm again, get out of the way, so that I pushed myself towards the bank, and number two came down to explode against the dark green water.

Spaghetti from the can

 

We were all obsessed with our kit, we had to be, everything was based around the clothes you wore being immaculate, the clothes in your locker in the dorm being just as immaculate, next to the bunk with its perfectly folded bedding. If it wasn't you could expect to spend your day in the press up position with a boot in the middle of your back, while you were loudly told how pathetic most of the things that made up your being were.

Or worse, I remember looking out the tall windows of our dorm in the late afternoon, I was probably ironing or trying to sew my surname into a sock or some such, and one of the recruits from another platoon was coming up the long slope of the hill from Narrow Neck beach. It was a perfect afternoon, and his hair was wet and slicked back. In a different life he would have been home from work and jogged down the hill to leap into the warm water, soak up the beauty of late summer. He had a bunch of sodden clothing in his arms, pressed to his chest. White shirts, blue shorts belts and socks. One of the petty officers had decided his kit was rubbish, and made him gather it up, sprint down the hill and throw it into the water while bemused mums and businessmen with their shoes and socks off watched on. 

I was platoon leader, so my kit was supposed to be beyond immaculate. There were eight platoons, eight leaders, and we were the first to be inspected every morning head to toe, standing rigidly at attention while the instructors circled with their parade sticks flicking about menacingly.

There was one chief petty officer who outdid all the others for menace without even trying. He did it perfectly, always lurking back beyond the ones who ranted and waved their arms about, so that you began to wonder what unspeakable horror would unfold if he ever was to step forward. He was huge and muscular and wore his peaked cap low so that the eyes you dared not meet remained unseen.

I was as fit as I could be. Every morning I would get up earlier than most and have my kit just right before the morning run. We would line up for breakfast and the cooks while line up trays of bacon and eggs, baked beans and spaghetti. I had the cereal and fruit which was dumped at the far end of the long, long servery, maybe a boiled egg wolfed down and then I was gone, making sure the dorm was neat as a pin before morning parade. We used to hang our hats on pegs along the wall of the mess hall, as we were called to parade all the recruits would funnel down to that point, grab their hats and rush out onto the parade ground, the small parade ground, and await the beginnings of the day.

I let my guys go past me, making sure they looked okay, socks up high, cap tallies centered perfectly above their nose, put on my own with a quick look in the long mirror and went out to stand in front of them.

The parade began with the usual, there were always a few threats and admonishments, nothing major. 

We were probably getting ready to move away, race back to the dorms and head out to the classes of the day. 

The chief stepped between a couple of the petty officers standing in front of him, I'm sure I'm making it up but I can imagine all eyes furtively turning to the movement, as if a huge piece of an Antarctic glacier had come loose and slipped into the sea.

He came down unhurriedly and at last I realised he was standing somewhere near my left shoulder, quiet.

'You happy with your kit recruit?'

"Yes Chief."

He reached up and took my hat off, held it in front of my face. There was a tiny string of spaghetti stuck in the stitching along the edge, about where someone must have grabbed it as they rushed for the parade ground, turned it over to read the name in the lining and realised it wasn't theirs.

He didn't say anything else. He just put it back on my head, and slammed his hand down so hard that the front edge came down and split the skin along the bridge of my nose and blood poured down my blue drill shirt.

The parade commander dismissed us, we turned right, held for a moment, and made our way off the parade ground.

Tamaki

 

I joined the Navy in 1991, in the summer.

I remember it being a perfect day on the Auckland waterfront, in the early afternoon. I had caught the bus, the 'intercity coach' up from Hamilton, not very far really. There must have been other young men and women on the same bus, but we weren't Navy yet, still incognito in civvies and everyday haircuts.

The terminus caught everything, all the city buses, the trains, right down on the waterfront just beyond the point where Queen Street spilled down to the ferry wharves. As I took my turn to step down onto the tarmac people were everywhere, heading away to an afternoon business meeting, or back into their Auckland lives. 

I had really wanted to join up, do something that was alien and completely unknown, but as I picked up the small bag packed with the few things we were supposed to bring I thought for a long moment how wonderful it would be to just slip away, join the slow exodus out into the sunshine of the beautiful harbour afternoon, maybe have a couple of beers in one of the waterfront bars. 

A friend of mine joined the Navy here long before me and has almost the same memory, the subtle change from your life up to that moment and then bang, the reality when you really couldn't go back. His is hilarious, the navy even sent him some money for the trip to Melbourne and so he had a boozy farewell lunch with his mates before boarding the midday bus. He describes perfectly the 'hail fellow well met' moments of taking his bag from the intercity coach and finding the minibus that would take them to base, lots of smiling faces and banter amongst the young men. The trip wasn't very far, and then they turned onto the last small road leading into base, and as it passed between twin gates marking the entrance the Petty Officer, who had been sitting silent in the seats behind the driver leapt to his feet, filling the aisle, and let rip with a stream of expletives and threats of bodily harm if they all didn't shut up and realise what a world of pain they were entering.

I don't really remember the short trip to Tamaki, although it was familiar to me because Dad's parents and brother lived in Takapuna, and as we rose up over the harbour bridge and down again I looked out to the restaurant nestled right in under the bridge on the north side, you could always just see the hexagon of its roof. Mum and Dad went there with Dad's sisters and their husbands for New Years Eve some years when we were little boys. It all seemed so exotic to me sitting on the couch at Grandma's Takapuna townhouse, Grandad in his chair watching something like Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales. We would wake up to breakfast with presents of the little cocktail umbrellas and things from their night.

There was a sense of finality as we turned into the broad driveway leading up to the guardhouse of Tamaki base, thankfully none of the screaming and abuse though, kiwis are a bit more reserved I guess. It was such a beautiful late afternoon the quiet beach below the base was filled with mums and little kids dancing about in the quiet water stretching away towards Rangitoto. It was hard not to join them, just rip your shirt off and dive in.

We were allowed to do our own thing until dinner in the huge mess hall. I remember standing on the small parade ground near the guard house, watching recruits who lived in Auckland walk up the driveway with their bags. One young guy arrived on the back of trail bike, in filthy overalls and muddy gumboots. When he took off his helmet and gave it to the rider a huge afro exploded out in all directions. I think a lot of us wondered if a Sargeant Major wouldn't beam down and just end him right there on the tarmac.

I trained with that guy, we were communicators. I vividly remember about a month later, we all looked the same, rock hard fit to the point of being pinched and thin, buzz cut down to the quick so that our necks and ears were burned from the hours on parade. It was in the evening, after dinner, and we were in the dorms doing our kit as we always did. He was giving me tips on how to iron the collars we wore over our square neck shirts. How the shot of steam was crucial, not too much, just enough.

I looked at him and thought I bet your mum always wished you might come in the front door in a crisply ironed shirt, instead of those filthy overalls stuffed in your bag in storage.

Mince pies

 

We used to think it was so hot: December in Hamilton. Funny to think of now, here in Sydney: it was probably only ever 28 or 29 degrees. One thing which remains is the stillness, there air never moved, so that the heat sat down on the town and stayed all day. Cloud seemed to sit just over the roofs of the houses across the park and never move, and when we caught the bus into town for Christmas shopping even the river seemed to have gone to sleep in the shadows under Whitiora bridge.

I recreated the cricket test matches of the summer on the long rectangle of the back lawn. We had a big solid timber bench seat and I would stand it on its side at one end, butting up against the stand of tall shrubs and conifers which marked the divide between our place and the neighbours. The middle timber of the bench was middle stump and I would aim for a spot a couple of inches to the left, just like Hadlee, drawing the imaginary batsmen forward so that when the ball flicked off the top edge of the bench one of the tall shrubs took a perfect catch at about second slip, and I could imagine the batsmen taking off his gloves and heading for the grandstand.

Dad's big vege garden marked the other end of the pitch, the bowling crease was an imaginary line from the fence to the clothesline half way across the lawn.

I bowled from all different angles, being Hadlee or Lance Cairns, sometimes off a few paces if I was John Bracewell the spinner. If I was Michael Holding the amazing West Indian quick I had to go down the side of the vege garden and scream in, dodging a couple of shrubs at the last minute to send another bouncer down.

Every year our Christmas followed the same quiet routine. About a week after school finished there would be the trip into town, to buy presents for each other. Then there was tree day, bringing it home in Dad's ute, hunting out the decorations, uncoiling the old lights.

You knew the big day wasn't that far off when mum came home with the ingredients for Christmas mince pies. 

I would have been outside on the pitch, the windows from the kitchen opened to a spot in line the bowling crease, sometimes mum would even call out to get an update on how the test was going, if Hadlee had managed to get Greenidge out at last. She would call out that it was time, time I washed my hands in the laundry and came in to help with the mince pies.

My brother would be there already, he was much better than me at learning the things mum did every day, I set the table, dried the dishes and got the hell out of the way most days.

The radio would be on with a quiet mix of carols and the occasional Leo Sayer or Doctor Hook. I always got lots of jobs it was impossible to stuff up and eventually there would be trays of beautiful small pies everywhere, ready for the oven, in the oven, cooling along the bench.

The phone rang. I never answered the phone. Dad worked with farmers and they rang up all the time and in gruff indecipherable voices ordered huge arrays of unknown things, cattle drenches and chainsaw parts, and it was all a bit much for me.

Mum would have had a tea towel over her shoulder and wiped her hands as she moved to the phone, nestled in the little alcove in amongst the cupboards leading to the dining room.

Mum's sister lived in another part of Hamilton, not too far. Her husband had bashed her, badly, the police were there.

Mum could deal with anything, she dealt with everything with the same equal helping of care and practicality.

The wards she worked in at the hospital meant that she got to see the real highs and the real lows, the deaths and the days that patients got to go home after so much pain.

Every year there would be seemingly hundreds of little presents under the tree, we would look at the tags and ask her who the people were, names we had never heard. There would be nurses who had done an extra shift on her ward on a bad night, orderlies who had helped her find the family at the worst time, sisters and aunties and boyfriends she had come to know over the time she nursed men and women to their leaving day. She never forgot anyone, no one was ever alone.

 She never left the house without a quick gargle of mouthwash, grabbed a coat, just in case.

She held both my hands and looked straight at me, said 'It'll be alright, it will'. 

The keys were where they always were, on top of the fridge, and she was gone, reversing down the long drive.

Hot Cross buns

 

I always fell asleep in moments at home. Mum had her secret mum ways of convincing you of the magic of the cold night outside, with you so warm and snug under the blankets and counterpane. I would strain to hear the trains announce themselves at the dark level crossings down past Claudlands showgrounds, and almost never succeed, gone already.

At the bach it was different. In part, in those first few years, I think it was because I still couldn't believe the little fibro house right there up against the sand dunes was actually ours. 

I would turn to the wall in the small bedroom we shared, close my eyes and the constant rumble of the unseen waves would bring images of us catching huge fish, scaling dark swells  in wooden fishing boats, finding treasure washed up by storms, on and on.

Weather then, there, seemed unspoken, clockwork. The torrential rains of the winter field days, the still heat of December waiting for Christmas and the escape to the beach. 

And Easter was storms. 

I would wake to the chill, turn over and realise your bed against the far wall was empty, unmade, so it must be early.

Wind would be roaring, so loud I had to concentrate to know the rumble which had finally lulled me to sleep was still there. Rain would clatter the roof and flash in under the eaves to be thrown sideways across the windows, always heading for the dark hills nestling the long swathe of the beach.

The louvred windows of the kitchen would catch little pieces of the wind and shriek, fall silent, shriek again, on and on.

A beautiful warmth and that scent would meet me as I came through the narrow doorway, into the kitchen with the wind shrieking for attention again.

You would be in front of the old upright oven, tea towel in hand. The yellowed light through the oven door giving a glimpse of the small buns so nearly ready.

Some time in the afternoon we would convince ourselves there was a break in the weather, the cloud not quite so pressing, the wind dropping to a growl.

We would put on old jumpers and jackets and head over the dunes. There would be broken pieces of kina shells and huge horse mussels, the deep crimson of half scallop shells loosed by the anger of the night and flung across the dark sand wrapped in tendrils of weed from the harbour. 

The sea would be so rough, the water opaque with waves running at crazy angles, assaulting each other and throwing up curtains of spray which would hiss away in the constant squall.

We would make it back to warm clothes and the radio, and another round of hot cross buns with the butter melting. 

Heaven.

Play the game

 

Winter in the Waikato meant rain. I loved growing up there, but in the winter we spent a lot of time running home from school in squelching shoes with a chill down the back of our necks where the rain got in under sodden coats.

I would go to bed on a Friday night praying that the thrum of rain on the tiles overhead didn't get any louder, and wake up doing the same. Sometimes I knew straight away football would be cancelled, the rain would push against the windows and I didn't have to wipe the frosted glass to know the clouds would be sitting dark and low over the apple trees leading to the park out the back. They could stay all day sometimes.

Our toilet was out the back door and across a small porch, through the laundry. I would move quietly down the hallway and out the door, the lawn and all dad's shrubs would be glistening, heavy. But if the rain was over and water didn't pool around the clothesline there was a fair chance football was on, we played on some decent mud piles. Sometimes if the trees looked heavier than ever I would duck down the concrete steps leading from the porch and stick my finger into the lawn, convincing myself that it hadn't gone in far at all.

When I came out of my room with my gear on and tracksuit jacket over the top Dad would be up, probably throwing some old bread out to the birds. The radio would be on and I would sit down at the breakfast table. After the news at the top of the hour there was always a moment of dread, the morning DJ would come back on, say something like 'now, sports cancellations today' and pause, shuffling unseen papers. 'Nothing today' or perhaps the really little guys, the under-6's and 7's might be given the day off. I could breathe again, I could see myself out on the pitch already.

I loved football more than anything, was absolutely mad for it.

I knew Dad didn't. But Saturday breakfast there would be crumpets, instead of the usual toast. Or he would have opened a can of sardines. Special, just enough to make it so much more than the week just gone.

We would drive to the game in his work ute, the one he drove every day for miles and miles and back again. The radio would be on and the talk would be of all the sport to come, Waikato rugby first division, maybe a Ranfurly Shield defence or even an All Black test.

He wasn't one of those dads who had lots of ideas about how you could play, should play. He just expected you would do what the coaches told you, do your best. Some of the other dads had a lot of ideas, every week. We would just drive along in a nice silence, listening to the ex footballers talk. It was never far in a small town.

By the time I was about 13 or 14 I was pretty good at football, and I got into teams that were pretty darn good. That year we had won maybe 8 or 9 games in a row, against good teams. Every week the game would be close and then in the second half we would just find a way, be that little bit better.

That Saturday the game started as always and we did the things we always did. Except we didn't, passes would come up a bit short, go too far, and the more we tried the more it just wouldn't seem to come right. Some of the parents starting shouting things, just encouragement I guess but encouragement sounds just like admonishment at times like that. Not dad though, never.

A pass went a bit far, and one of our players said something to another. Not criticising, just encouraging I guess, but they came seem one and the same.

A pass came up short and we went a goal behind. One of our players said something to another, and he replied. 

I said something.

'Play the game Tramway'. The words came across the field as if there was nothing in the world except them, not loud, not angry, somehow all encompassing.

I played so hard that day, never saying a word. I scored the winner late in the second half, probably the best goal I ever scored, running onto a perfect pass just over halfway and sprinting for goal with a defender right there at my hip all the way trying just as hard as I was, until the keeper had to come out to narrow the angle and kept coming and kept coming and then I rolled the ball just beyond his left hand into the corner of the net.

We drove home in the same lovely silence, the radio on with the hubbub of the crowd in the background at a rugby ground somewhere close by.

Tracking not included

 

A friend of ours lost her parents recently, tragically.

Covid times meant the funeral was a very closed affair attended by just about no one. Tough when they came from a small rural town, the type of place where everyone's lives interconnect all over the place.

We walked up to the corner where our street arcs around to meet theirs, where the hearses would stop for a couple of moments before heading on to the cemetery. There were already cars parked along both sides of the quiet road, stretching away up the hill the cars would climb soon enough.

People stood in small groups, most between the parked cars, a few clustered at the bottom of the driveway.

A few cars came and went at the intersection, and then the ubiquitous white van. 

Our streets are no different to all the others of Sydney, quiet mostly, quieter than usual with so many people working from home, not working. More often than not the only vehicles we see are delivery vans, jam packed with parcels threatening to burst out from behind every window. 

The Australia Post van trundled to a slow stop in the driveway next up the hill, the driver hopped out and there was that familiar beep as he scanned the barcode of a small box and headed up the drive. A young woman jogged after him, the neighbour, she had been standing on the front lawn socially distanced from her grieving friend.

The driver got back in his van, did a slow u-turn, mindful of so many people about, and turned up our road. He stopped about three houses down, hopped out, beep, parcel at the door and back to the van.

I used to think often at the car accidents we attended that the scene filled the world when you arrived, mess everywhere, people everywhere. Bit by bit we would put everything back as it should be until the last of the glass and metal were swept away. And then the traffic would start to flow again, tyres rolling over the same piece of tarmac. Often it would rain, and even the smells would disappear, so that you could almost believe such a thing had never happened.

Life just goes on, regardless of everything else. Tragedy, unspeakable pain and loss. And a parcel at the neighbours, and another tomorrow. Life goes on.

Money for Jam

 

                                                                

A good friend sent me a link to a story last night about Chis Cairns, the New Zealander cricketer, being on life support in hospital in Canberra.

That man could play cricket. His dad, Lance, was legendary when I was a boy, in a strangely unique New Zealand kind of way. He played as if he had never been coached, bowled off the wrong foot and hit the ball so hard his scorecard was almost always made up of sixes and dot balls.

New Zealand cricketers didn't swagger back in Lance's day. They toiled and ground out results. That's not to say that they didn't have success, they even managed to beat the unbeatable West Indians in a test series in 1981. The West Indians were so gobsmacked they walked off the pitch in protest in one of the tests and charged into the umpire in another.

Richard Hadlee was coming into his pomp then but he had a different kind of swagger, very measured and understated even though he was probably vying with Dennis Lillee for the title of the best bowler in the world for a lot of the '80's.

Chris Cairns was a natural at the game, and unlike his dad his bowling and batting were perfect, he could have been used as a coaching manual.

And he had swagger. He was part of a generation that for the first time seemed to go into games expecting to win, even if they were playing Australia, India, or the English.

I was in New Zealand visiting my parents in 1999 when the cricketers were readying for a tour of England. Ever since Hadlee and Martin Crowe had retired the New Zealand public had defaulted back to imagining their test cricketers would put up a good fight but come home empty handed.

I was spending an afternoon wandering around a little town named Thames and walked past the betting agency, the TAB. In the window was a big promotional poster with odds for the coming test series. England to win the four test series were unbackable, something like $1.25. England to win the series four-nil was about two to one. I thought that was pretty dismissive of the kiwis considering the weather usually wins at least one test in an English series.

I looked at the names listed below, for most runs or wickets in the series. Reading down the names I thought to myself 'why the heck are the English favourites?' New Zealand had Nash and Fleming, MacMillan and Doull. England had no superstars that year. 

And New Zealand had Cairns. I could see him walking past a TAB somewhere, seeing those odds and thinking, I''ll show you who should be $1.25 favourite.

I was visiting from Australia and I only had some pocket money my mum had shoved into my hand when I set out from their home for the day, she would have said something like 'you'll need some lunch, and a coffee.'

I didn't know how to mark the tickets so I asked the man behind the perspex screens, it was too early for the horse racing to have started and there were only a couple of old boys in there, checking the form for Ruakaka and the Cambridge trots.

He asked what bets I wanted to put on. I looked at the notes in my hand and had about $20. I asked if he could give me $10 for New Zealand to win the series two tests to one, and $10 for them to win the series 3-1. He said something like 'let's hope they do', looking at me thinking there's $20 you'll never get back.

The first test went to script, New Zealand collapsed in their second innings and England knocked off the required runs easily.

 New Zealand won the second and fourth tests. They should have won the third but that was the one the weather came out on top in.

I left the tickets with mum and forgot about them. As the team was flying back into Auckland mum would have taken the tickets out of the envelope she put them into neatly, tucked away in the roll top desk for safe keeping. And when she and dad went shopping next she would have gone into the TAB, and politely asked the man behind the perspex to check if they were winners.

She sent me what she would have described as a 'wee note' soon after, with $160 in crisp $20 bills hidden neatly between the sheets of folded writing paper. They would have been the exact notes the man counted out for her that day.

I thought of Chris Cairns then. He had swagger. He would have said something like 'well, that was money for jam'.

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?