We were a day late reaching Wellington because the wharfies wouldn’t work on Labour Day.  Well, they didn’t that late October day in 1946, anyway.  So the New Zealand Shipping Company’s old Royal Mail Ship Rangitata, still fitted for her World War II troopship role, spent the extra day at sea giving us pallid English immigrants our first snowy Southern Alpine glimpse of this “Land of the Long White Cloud”, the Maori name for New Zealand, Aotearoa.

We berthed on a mild Tuesday morning and Mother, my young brother and I craned from the deck railing for a glimpse of Father, somewhere on the busy quay below.  We didn’t call them Mother and Father in those days.  They were “Mummy” and “Daddy”, then.  I had just reach double figures in years and we were ending our assisted passage from London’s Tilbury Docks, a huge adventure and six long weeks away.

Back then, I had watched the white cliffs of Dover slip past in a late Northern summer morning’s heat haze without a qualm.  We had palled-up with another little boy who took some of our Dinky Toys and lead soldiers.  My brother and I crept into his mother’s cabin to steal them back and we were inseparable after that.  Our mothers called us the Three Musketeers.

We had watched open-air movies in the silken Indian Ocean darkness and shrieked delightedly at the young men sporting in the ship’s Crossing the Line ceremony.  After a heavy tropical hailstorm smothered the ship in short-lived ice, we had pushed each other around the decks in a box, like we had done in snowbound Hampshire fields months before.

My brother and I slept in a dormitory deep in the ship, below the waterline and several decks away from the four-berth cabin Mother shared with other migrant wives.  We usually slept soundly, despite the throb of the ship’s screws just below our feet, but others were less comfortable.  In the tropics heat, the immigrant in the bunk below mine, a young Englishman just old enough to have been fighting in Europe the year before, went stir crazy.

The stir crazy Englishman

Mystifyingly one morning, he had asked me, a timid 10-year-old who never played with fire, if I had any matches.  Later he tried to set light to his foam mattress, put on his life jacket and jumped over board.  Someone threw a life buoy with a flare and the ship turned to find him floating on his back as if he was in the shallows on Brighton beach, unconcerned at the prospect of sharks or that the nearest landfall was beyond the horizon.

For the rest of the journey, he was kept apart.  We used to see him exercising on a remote deck under the eye of a crewman.  I thing he was put ashore at the following port of call, Melbourne – another sorry bundle of invisible war wounds hopefully cured by Australian sun and sangfroid

Father was already in New Zealand after demob.  He’d “discovered” the country and its unimaginably fertile Bay of Plenty orchards while on leave from service in the Pacific region.  After a career in the Royal Navy during two World Wars, he finally wanted to follow his father and get back to the soil, not in dour, rationed, battered Britain but in this clean, quiet, comfortable land flowing with unlimited butter and sunshine.

Mother had agreed despite ludicrous and firmly-believed English folk-tales that the distant Dominion swarmed with unruly, barefoot children all with soft, chalky teeth caused by neglect and “bad water”, whatever that meant.

Mother saw Father first and we all waved frantically, although I didn’t actually spot him until he was striding up the gangway to join us on board.  I was shocked at his white hair, made starker by his heavily tanned face, and was conscious of their awkwardness together after more than two years’ separation.  We had to wait what seemed an age for our huge, wood and brass-bound trunks to be cleared in the echoing Customs shed, but finally we were free to make our way to Wellington railway station and the Express train north.

The carriages seemed cramped and quaint – no corridors and compartments like the trains we had taken to blitzed London when Father worked there at the Admiralty or to Nottinghamshire to spend our Summer or Christmas holidays with Grandfather.  This one had a centre aisle and hard-upholstered seats with backs that could be swung over to face the other way.  Stranger still, the train and its magnificent, snorting steam engine  – at least that was familiar  – made interminable stops at long, wooden railway stations where everyone crowded into noisy cafes for mouth-scorching meat pies and tarry tea in heavy white cups emblazoned with mysterious “NZR” monograms.  It was bewildering and exciting.

Fizzy drink frustrations

New home, sweet home.

At one such stop, perhaps it was Taihape¹, or maybe Taumaranui², my brother persuaded Father, still fond with relief at our safe arrival, to buy him a crown-capped bottle of livid red fizzy drink, called “Raspberry” with great unkindness to that noble fruit.  Back in the train, Father could not get the cap off the bottle.  We didn’t yet know about the ubiquitous bottle openers fitted by a thoughtful New Zealand Railways on the compartment wall at the end of all the carriages.

Father was stumped and I suppose about to give up when salvation came.  Across the aisle, sat a big Maori chap who had been grinning cheerfully at us excited, chattering kids and our funny Pommie accents.  Seeing our difficulty, the kindly man leant across the aisle and took the bottle from Father saying he’d open it.  To Mother’s unimaginable horror and my admiring wonderment, he put the bottle to his mouth and flipped the top off in his teeth!  So much for soft and chalky!  We never heard more of that idea.

Oddly, my brother remembers nothing of this dramatic moment.  All he recalls of the journey is that the raspberryade made him sick!

Mother was right about one thing, though.  Once we settled in our tin-roofed cottage in No 3 Road, Te Puke, and Father began learning citrus farming, we realised that the kids indeed went barefooted everywhere except to school, and sometimes even there.  Very quickly, my brother and I followed suit and our feet grew wide, tanned and leather-soled in next to no time.  But Mother always made us put on shoes when we went to town, despite our protests.  There were not to be any poor, barefoot urchins in her family, God bless her!

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• Broadcast as “A Kiwi surprise” on Radio New Zealand’s National Radio programme “Sounds Historical”, hosted by oral-historian and broadcaster Jim Stevens, on Sunday, January 16, 2000, read by RNZ producer Steve Danby

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Footnotes

Tags: humour, New Zealand